Bank Robbers Read online

  The reasons for that were obvious, at least to him. Number one: why go through the fuss and muss of having to blow through a vault door when someone, or several someones, had the key? And number two: there would be a set number of people you had to deal with, namely the bank employees.

  It was pretty mathematical, once you knew how many employees there’d be.

  Arthur always started with the idea he had roughly an hour and a half from the time the first person arrived till opening time. He always added thirty minutes just for screw-ups.

  Most banks were opened by a guard or two around 7 A.M.

  He would stake out the bank, sometimes for weeks, and would watch what time the guard got there, and any habits he had.

  Habits again. That was the most important element in his success as a bank robber.

  Did the guy, for example, have a cup of coffee in one hand and a paper in the other, so reaching for his gun in a split second would be impossible? Did the guard always arrive at the same time? How observant was he? Was he half asleep, and more interested in his bagel and coffee and reading the sports section of his paper? How easy would it be to slip behind him as he opened the door and take his gun?

  Usually it was a piece of cake.

  So, once inside, the clock began ticking. Each bank job had its own timing. Some would take forty-five minutes to rob, some over an hour, if they were big.

  The calculation for the time it would take was based on the linear footage. For example, if the vault was located down a flight of stairs, he would add seven to ten minutes. Then he would add, say, three minutes for the arrival of each employee, since they would have to be escorted into a predesignated holding area. If there were ten employees, a half-hour could be spent just shuffling them about. And he could gauge by his watch how the robbery was going—if he was behind schedule and had to step up the pace or if he could linger a little longer in the vault.

  So first they would escort the guard into the holding area, usually an executive office. Arthur and a partner would rip the phone line out while a third man would keep a gun trained on the guard. Then Arthur, who would oftentimes disguise himself as a guard, would take the keys and wait by the door for the rest of the employees to arrive.

  As each employee arrived they would be walked back to the holding area and politely referred to by name, Mr. So-and-So or Mrs. Somebody, and he would carefully explain what was going to happen and how long it was going to take and that everyone would be just fine if they cooperated.

  He found that explaining to people what was going to happen calmed them. Being respectful to human beings reinforced the impression that they were not dealing with a psychopath who would just shoot wild. And most underlings were hardly going to stick their necks out for some bank executive. No, in Arthur’s experience, the American bank employee was content to be a passive victim of a well-organized crime, just so long as they weren’t going to be physically harmed or held accountable for it.

  Once everyone had arrived, the person who could open the vault was separated from the others. It would take about ten minutes to put a good-enough scare into him—or her—to get him to open the vault.

  Then he and his two partners—he’d never figured out how to get it below that number—would separate, with two of them keeping an eye on the employees in the holding area while Arthur would clean out the vault.

  Once his bags were filled with as much money as time permitted, he’d walk back to the holding area, pretending he hadn’t started yet, and announce that he needed help cleaning out the vault. His two partners would make it clear that no one should move and they’d all be back in a minute. Then the three of them would be out the door, with the keys, locking it from behind, and into a nice, clean, untraceable car.

  Never once had Arthur been caught in the act.

  He was turned in when one partner or another would do something stupid or conspicuous and was picked up.

  Then they would immediately roll over on him.

  There is no honor among thieves. That is a myth.

  Anyway, he thought as he looked around the bank, this one would be out as a possibility.

  In addition to being the wrong size, it was also under construction. And that meant just so many more people you had to account for besides the employees. Plus there was all that construction outside, making it impossible to park the getaway car at the curb in front of the doors. Not that crossing the street would blow it if all had gone well, but …

  Arthur was by this time the next one in line, and he watched the teller finish with the customer and was just about to walk up when all the lights went off. He took the opportunity to slide off the line, and walk right past Dottie.

  He waited and watched the emergency lights go on. He watched her walk over to the next available teller.

  Dottie had decided to take out the rest of her money—two hundred and twenty dollars—and close the account. She wouldn’t need money after today.

  She was going back to the thrift shop to buy herself another outfit to go see Arthur in.

  And maybe a bottle of wine or something, so she could have a farewell drink. She would toast the jail at the Sixth Precinct. She hoped and prayed that the sentencing would be swift once she pled out.

  She stepped up to the teller’s window and pushed the withdrawal ticket through.

  “That’s your entire balance,” the teller said loudly, and out of the corner of her eye she saw the fat old man who’d been on the line ahead of her limp by.

  “I’m closing my account,” she answered back.

  The teller shrugged and gave her the money.

  She turned, stuffed it into her purse, and walked out toward the doors that opened onto Sheridan Square.

  Arthur lagged a good block behind at this point, since she’d already seen him in the bank. Whether it had consciously registered or not, if she kept seeing the same stranger, sooner or later it would ring a bell that she was being followed.

  She had closed her account.

  This was getting uglier and uglier.

  He followed her across Sheridan Square and up Seventh Avenue. He stood and watched her walk into St. Vincent’s hospital.

  * * *

  TERESA was angry. She’d been stomping around her apartment since she’d dragged herself out of bed at noon. Those bastards at Metropolitan Hospital, they were somehow responsible for this. And this talk about cutting off her breast. No. That was not going to happen. She’d told them hell could freeze over.

  And then someone said something about an experimental thing that might save her breast after they biopsied—but she had to get Medicaid to approve the procedure.

  And that, Teresa knew, was not going to happen. It seemed almost cruel to wave a medical procedure in front of someone who had no medical insurance except for Medicaid. It made her angry.

  She was staring out the window at the street below. She watched a group of teenagers, who ought to be in school, spray-painting graffiti on an abandoned building. God, she hated what this neighborhood had become.

  It had been so nice and clean when she was growing up. All little brownstones with yards and trees, and opera playing from record players in open windows. And then the 1972 organized-crime busts came, and everyone went to jail or moved to Howard’s Beach or the Bronx or Fort Lee, New Jersey. And then there were the race riots, and they burned the neighborhood down. Never made sense to Teresa. If you’re angry about being prejudiced against, why the hell would you set fire to your own building? The place you had to live in? Naw, her people would have set fire to the building of the guy who wronged them. Now that made sense.

  She felt another wave of fear go through her and she replaced it with anger.

  What was she going to do? Tell her kids? That would put her in a weak bargaining position for their meeting next week.

  She had the weekend to tell the hospital when she was going in for the biopsy, unless she could find the money for the experimental thing.

  There had to
be another option.

  * * *

  “WELL, WELL, Mrs. Weist,” a corpulent nurse with a heavy Caribbean accent said, as she helped Dottie up on the table. “You looking well. You taking your medication?”

  “Yes.”

  “All the medication, woman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, good. The doctor he be right in, and he gonna explain what this machine here does.”

  She nodded and the nurse left the room. She lay very still on her back, shivering slightly in the open-backed gown. She stared at the huge grayish-pink cylinder at the base of her feet, and she could already tell that she was going to be somehow slid inside the chamber, which was going to do God-knows-what to her.

  How much was this going to cost?

  And how much was it going to hurt?

  These were the two thoughts she always had as she sat for an interminable amount of time each visit. Her appointment was for one, but Dottie knew from experience that she wouldn’t even get called to see anyone until at least two-thirty. It wasn’t bad enough it broke her financially, but these medical tests also caused physical pain as well. Didn’t seem worth it.

  And then she felt an odd rush of relief, realizing that after tomorrow she would never have to come back to this hospital again. And they could send her all the threatening mail and threatening phone calls they wanted.

  Gin.

  Maybe she would buy a bottle of gin and a bottle of vermouth, and some cocktail onions, and make herself a Gibson. She hadn’t had a Gibson in years, and dammit, if she was tough enough to rob a bank, she was tough enough to drink one. She winced at that.

  A farewell drink.

  She felt her eyes begin to fill as she again focused on that crack by Arthur—that he needed to turn the light off like she was so old and ugly that he couldn’t countenance her.

  And that wasn’t even the worst of having seen him last night.

  Robbing banks was not the only thing he’d become expert at.

  He’d robbed her of her memories of him.

  And as she was lying in this cold, dark, morgue-like room she began to feel so alone, and wondered, why me? Why?

  Maybe she was being punished for not giving herself to Arthur, because deep down she knew she’d never loved anyone the way she loved him, and that was part of what was ripping her up inside. His coldness and cruelty.

  Maybe she was responsible for that too. Maybe he’d been really crushed by her insistence that he choose between her and the one thing he loved to do on this planet. Even though robbing banks was pretty bad, it was still the only thing that excited him. It was like breathing to him. And she had denied them both a whole life. Maybe she was the one who’d been cold and cruel.

  Her mind skipped a beat.

  Wait a second, wait a second, she thought, pulling herself together.

  She’d asked him to give up armed robbery, not brain surgery.

  God, she’d only spent ten minutes with the man, and look how he’d already turned her morals upside down.

  That was why Arthur was so dangerous. She lost all perspective in his presence. He could somehow turn anything one hundred and eighty degrees, and make bad things seem good and the good things seem bad, till her mind spun around trying to figure out why his arguments for doing the wrong thing seemed so … right.

  Look at how long it had taken him to get her to sleep with him again, all those years ago. She was a married woman with a child, he’d just done twenty-four months in jail, and had no rights to her.

  Took him one hour. And there she was, in a room in the Ambassador Hotel, sweating and hanging all over him.

  It was crazy. Where had her morals been?

  Morals. That was a joke, she thought, and even now found herself cringing over her behavior with this man. The way she’d run to his room after work and wait for Arthur to make love to her, without benefit of ceremony or ring or anything.

  As old-fashioned as it seemed these days, Dottie’d been brought up as a strict Catholic. There was only one activity Dottie and her mother did together, and that was going to church. Her mother proudly enrolled her in parochial school, even though it meant everyone had to work doubly hard to afford the tuition. She went out of her way to make sure Dottie spent as much time as she could learning from the nuns and the priests. Lord, the months the woman spent hand-stitching lace on her confirmation dress, saving money out of a barely adequate household allowance for a corsage. How proud she was at the ceremony. And when they went back to their apartment, there was a party with cake and lemonade, and her mother had smiled for days.

  Unmarried sex was simply out of the question. And certainly adultery was just unthinkable. Both sins Dottie had managed to commit. And she felt sincerely bad about this. She was ashamed of the fact that she enjoyed it immensely, Arthur’s touching her and loving her. She couldn’t stop herself from what she considered was utter perversion.

  She chuckled to herself.

  These days Dottie would turn on the television and see people talking about all sorts of truly perverted things right out loud, and it always struck her as funny that she’d been so ashamed of what now seemed like a healthy relationship. But then, no, she couldn’t cross the boundaries and run away with him.

  A doctor appeared, and in a heavy Portuguese accent explained that they were going to put her inside the machine so they could get a clearer picture of whether her bones had improved over the past months.

  She lay on the table as the thing whirred around her, and began to shake with absolute fear. She felt a small current running through her, as if she were on the verge of being electrocuted.

  Maybe she was just reacting to the sound.

  She was in the thing a good ten minutes before she was slid out again, and told to dress and wait in the waiting room.

  She looked at all the damaged young people and all the old people who were just sick from living.

  “Mrs. Weist?” the nurse said, and she got up and dutifully followed her into the office.

  There it was, the black-and-white of her bones.

  “Ah, Mrs. Weist, you having very good news. Your bones are much, much stronger,” the doctor said.

  She nodded.

  “Not I’m saying you go ice-skating next winter, but there is much more bone mass. You have been lifting the weights?”

  She nodded.

  “And using the ankle weights?”

  She nodded.

  “We are going to add swimming to your routine. Do you have access to a pool?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Good. Excellent. I want you to swim twice a week, if you can.”

  “All right.”

  For some reason he felt the need to write that down, as if her memory were faulty. He handed it to her.

  She hated being patronized.

  “See you in a month,” he yelled after her as she left.

  In your dreams, she thought.

  In one month she was going to be sitting in a nice infirmary.

  And yes, if there was a pool, she would swim in it.

  It was three-thirty when she left the hospital.

  Arthur was sitting against a parked car reading the sports section of the News when she came out of the same door she’d gone in through.

  Creatures of habit.

  He lagged back as she walked along Eleventh Street toward Sixth Avenue. She crossed diagonally to the downtown side of the street. And kept walking.

  She didn’t like the fact that this fat guy from the bank was behind her.

  With her luck he was some kind of creep.

  She continued down Sixth Avenue, stopping every so often to pretend to look in windows, and glance back at this guy, who she was now sure was following her.

  Arthur hung back very far.

  He’d been made.

  He could tell from the way she was acting. All the way over to the bank that morning she hadn’t stopped to look in one window. Now she was suddenly interested in window shopping?
r />   He had to give her more leeway.

  He watched her turn on Third Street and he slowed and looked over a table of used magazines a street guy was selling in front of a video store. By the time he’d gotten to the street she was gone. He crossed over to a McDonald’s and looked inside. His stomach began to growl. He was hungry.

  She wasn’t in there. It was beginning to become clear to him that Dottie either never ate or didn’t have the money.

  His bet was that she didn’t have the money.

  He was walking along Third toward Washington Square Park when something caught his eye, and he stopped in front of a thrift-shop window. He exhaled hard as he watched her.

  Inside the shop was Dottie, staring at herself in a full-length mirror. She was in a beige-and-white polka-dotted silk dress with a matching belt.

  The dress fit so nicely, and made her look tiny and trim, the way she had last night. Jeez, she looked good, he thought. A pang went through him as it sank in that this store was probably where the outfit from last night had been bought.

  He began to feel his temper go on him again.

  This time it was directed at Nathan. Hadn’t he had any brains? Hadn’t he put aside anything so if this woman was left alone she would not have to live buying guns in the Bronx and used dresses in thrift stores?

  He would’ve taken so much better care of her. And the life they could have had …

  All right, it wasn’t as if he’d lived the life of a monk, he’d had women, plenty of them. But seeing her last night, and now following her around—it was making him a little crazy. No other woman had ever been allowed to get as near to him as Dottie O’Malley.

  He turned away from the shop window and crossed the street and went into some kind of furniture store. He could observe her leaving from this vantage point and not be seen.

  Oh, he was married to Moe’s mother, but very briefly, and really didn’t even live with her. In fact, her pregnancy was the only reason he married her at all. He’d come back from the Midwest to find her out to here. What could he do?

  He was a bank robber, not a louse.

  But other than the connection of a child, they were two people from different worlds.