Bank Robbers Read online

  Dottie fooled everybody, except for her, Teresa.

  She was a goddamned chorus girl, like the rest of ’em. Out there showing off her legs.

  And Nathan, when he first brought her around … she’d gotten Teresa’s best friend Margie kicked off the line, and Margie’d been with Nathan plenty. Poor little victim Margie hadn’t even seen her coming.

  And, wham, suddenly Dottie and Nathan are married?

  No. Teresa shook her head.

  And then she’d made Nathan miserable. “Get rid of her, Nat,” Fred had always told him. “What you do for a living ain’t good enough for her? Get rid of her. Have Teres’ set you up with someone nice.”

  But Nathan, who was basically an okay guy, stuck it out with her. Jeez, Nathan Weist not good enough? If Teresa hadn’t already been married to Fred, she’d have gone for Nathan herself. She’d have been as proud of him as if he’d been president.

  Not that she hadn’t loved Fred. Oh no, she had, and she’d have never given him up for nobody. Her eyes began to dribble tears again the way they had for five solid weeks, and Teresa wiped them with the back of her hand and then squashed out her cigarette in the tray.

  Oh, God, Fred, she thought and then shook her head. She lit another cigarette to calm herself down. She sniffed and then tried to think of the things that had annoyed her about Fred. It made her feel better. If she thought about all the goodness in the man she’d go crazy from grief, so she’d surrounded herself with all the things he’d done that drove her nuts.

  Teresa took a sip on her coffee and grimaced. It was cold.

  Fred had been good to her, yes, but he had a lazy streak in him Nathan never had. Nathan would be at that club, cookin’ in the back room with Ben Zimmerman at all hours of the day and night. But Fred, well, every day on the dot of two-thirty, she’d have to throw him out of the house. Two-thirty was her cutoff, because the kids would be in from parochial school and they had agreed that he should always be gone when they got in.

  She’d brought her kids up right; it wasn’t good for children to see their father lying around the house like a bum all day, that was the way Teresa had always felt.

  And periodically she’d have to put Fred straight and she’d say, “I don’t care what it takes, we got a three-hundred-dollar grocery bill. You bring it home tonight so I don’t gotta go to Murphy’s on a Hun’-two, where the produce looks like crap.”

  And out Fred would go, maybe do a little hustlin’ or hijackin’ or crack a safe, but he’d be back into the house at six the next the morning with the money.

  Now there was a right guy, just like Nathan.

  But did Dottie ever appreciate him? Naw.

  This was not a right woman.

  And now she was coming all the way up here to gloat over her widowhood.

  That was just low.

  Teresa felt her eyes fill again with tears.

  * * *

  TERESA still lived on 106th Street. Although it had been over twenty years since Dottie’d been to Teresa’s, for some reason she remembered exactly which train to take.

  The neighborhood that met Dottie’s eyes when she left the station was frightening. Groups of dangerous-looking teenagers hung out along First Avenue, blasting music and screaming at one another with foul mouths. And the filth of the avenue, and the burned-out buildings—it looked like a war zone. Dottie couldn’t think of anyone Teresa’s age having to make her way through this destruction, and for a second Dottie felt that maybe she didn’t have it that bad on Sullivan Street.

  She kept glancing over her shoulder as she stood in the small hallway waiting for Teresa to let her inside. The buzzer rang and Dottie quickly opened the inside door and shut it, making sure it was locked behind her.

  Dottie slowly climbed up the first flight of stairs in the tenement building. She stopped and took in a deep breath, resting on the second-floor landing.

  She still couldn’t believe she was fifty-eight. Deep down, Dottie was still twenty-four, that was the way she felt. When she looked in the mirror, it was like looking at herself with a mask on.

  It amazed her that climbing stairs had begun to tire her quickly. Not only stairs, any physical activity at all. Dottie stared up at the next set of white stone stairs. Even the exercises they’d given her to do for her bones didn’t help with some things, although she felt a lot better and was a lot more agile now than when she’d first begun them.

  Dottie took another deep breath and started walking again.

  Lord, not only was the outside terrible, she thought, but who could walk up all these flights each day? Especially someone of Teresa’s weight. It must take her hours, she thought, as she continued up the steep steps.

  “Dottie?” she heard Teresa’s screechy voice echo down to her. “Dottie, you get in okay?”

  “Yeah.” Dottie exhaled as loudly as she could.

  “It’s the top floor,” Teresa called down to her.

  Dottie leaned on the banister breathing hard.

  “What floor,” she panted, “is that?”

  “Sixth.”

  “Aw, God Almighty,” Dottie muttered under what little breath she could catch.

  By the time she reached the top floor, her throat was dry and she was gasping. Her hip was aching slightly. She slammed against the door and pushed it open with the entire weight of her body.

  “What’d you do? Run up here?” Teresa asked, apparently stunned to see her so soon.

  Dottie shook her head, just trying to get some breath to stay in her lungs. She shook her head, tried to speak, and staggered over to a chair and looked at Teresa, motioning for some water.

  Teresa turned to the sink, took a glass out of the drainer and filled it with water. She handed it to Dottie.

  She drank slowly, finally getting her breathing back to normal.

  “How do you do that each day?”

  “I don’t. My daughter and her husband bring me up groceries twice a week. Way the neighborhood is now, I don’t go out unless I gotta,” she said. “You want some coffee or something?”

  “Sure.” Dottie said, and watched Teresa turn around. She heard herself gasp, as she really looked at the woman for the first time.

  Teresa had lost an entire person of weight.

  They were the same height, and now Teresa seemed to be almost exactly Dottie’s size. Teresa turned back, looking at her suspiciously.

  “Teresa, you’re skinny.”

  “Yeah. I lost a lotta weight this past year, what with Fred being so sick and everything.”

  “Well, here we are, both skinny again. Like when we first met.”

  “Yeah,” Teresa muttered softly and they both silently thought to themselves, ‘and nobody’s here to see it.’

  Teresa moved over to the stove and lit a fire under a dented old teapot. She took out a small jar, and two cups.

  “All I got in the house is instant,” she said.

  “That’s fine.”

  “So, Roberta called from California and said you was in the hospital. You better now?”

  “As well as I can expect.”

  “What do you have again?”

  “Osteoporosis.” Dottie watched Teresa shrug, unknowing. “It’s a debilitating bone disease. Your bones get so weak they break easily.”

  She watched Teresa shudder.

  “But you’re okay now,” she said, her back to her.

  “No. It’s wiped me out financially, and Medicaid won’t pay for this new procedure that would slow it down.”

  Teresa let out a bitter cackle.

  “Those bastards, they don’t pay for nothin’. Jeez, I had to go in there beggin’ for chemo for my Fred.”

  “Yes, and I’m tired of it. And I’m going to do something about it. Do you know they actually escorted me out of their offices, like I was some kind of common criminal? Well, from now on, the government is going to pay for everything.”

  “Yeah?” Teresa chortled.

  “I have a plan, and I need your he
lp.”

  “Me? I can’t do nothin’ for nobody,” she said after a moment, turning around to look at her. Teresa peered down at her, her eyes narrowed. “What’d you want Fred for?”

  Dottie looked her straight in the eyes. “I need the number of a fence.”

  Teresa’s eyes grew round, and she looked quite stunned.

  “You lookin’ for an appliance?”

  “A gun.”

  Teresa’s face went neutral, the way Fred’s always had when he was discussing business, but she didn’t take her eyes off Dottie. Her hand shot out and grabbed a pack of cigarettes on the counter. She pulled one out and lit it with a lighter. She exhaled hard.

  “Gimme that again?”

  “I need a gun.”

  “What, you gonna go shoot everyone at Medicaid?”

  “No. I’m going to rob a bank.”

  Teresa’s eyes stayed fixed on Dottie and she sat down at the table.

  “Like the guy in the News?”

  “The guy in Minnesota?”

  “There was a nut in Minnesota too? Naw, the old guy from—hold on, I’ll get the paper, it was just in it.”

  She watched Teresa open the closet door. Inside was a waist-deep stack of yellowing papers.

  “I hate that stupid law they put in about recycling, I never know when to put the stuff out, what you tie it with…” Teresa was muttering as she sifted through the top of the pile, which was mainly comprised of gossip sheets, and magazines that followed celebrities.

  Dottie shook her head at all of them.

  “How can you read all that garbage?”

  Teresa looked up, a bit surprised.

  “What?”

  “All those gossip rags? None of it is true.”

  “It’s all true,” Teresa informed her, holding up a copy of the Star.

  “Yeah? What’s that headline say?” Dottie asked, and Teresa looked at it.

  “IS YOUR DOG A SPACE ALIEN?” Teresa read aloud.

  “There, you see?”

  “What? I took that test.” Teresa said seriously.

  “You—you don’t even have a dog.”

  “So? My daughter’s got a dog. You think I want some alien around my grandchildren? This test come out of a university. Besides, even if it is silly, it’s got all the good dirt on all them celebrities.”

  “Who cares about some celebrity?” Dottie sniffed.

  “I do.” Teresa looked confused. “I always read about everyone. I had someone famous in my family once,” she said casually.

  “Who?” Dottie asked, leaning forward.

  “My great-aunt, for whom I was named. Teresa Salinotta.”

  “I never heard of her.”

  “Yeah, that’s ’cause you don’t read nothing important.” Teresa sniffed, and they both let it drop.

  “Here it is, here it is, McAlary’s column: WHEN GRANDDAD ROBS A BANK,” Teresa read out loud and tossed the paper down in front of Dottie.

  “I don’t usually follow these stories, but this one … He was twenty in the hole, and he got his grandson’s toy gun and robbed a bank way the hell out in Nassau County.”

  “Yeah? Did they catch him?”

  “You kiddin’? The cops were all over him before he even left the building. And then the guy got so scared he began to have a heart attack, so all these cops sat there feedin’ the stunadze heart pills, and doin’ CPR on him till the ambulance showed. It was a big embarrassing mess. See? Looks like his wife’s about to smack him in the photo,” Teresa said, holding it up for Dottie to look at.

  “What kind of time did they give him?” Dottie asked, leaning forward.

  “It just happened. But they’re talkin’ eight to ten.”

  “Eight to ten, that’s good.”

  Teresa frowned at her. “Yeah, well, maybe you should rethink the bank thing. I mean, some guy our age can’t get away with it, you ain’t.”

  “I don’t want to get away with it. I want them to catch me. I want them to send me to jail.”

  Behind them the teapot began to whistle.

  “You wanna go to jail?” Teresa got up, turned off the fire under the teapot, and poured the water into the cups. She felt herself grimace.

  “Yes.”

  Teresa was silent. Dottie listened to her stirring the coffee powder into the hot water.

  “You sure they said debilitating bone disease, not maybe debilitating brain disease, Dottie?”

  “I’m not crazy!” she snapped indignantly, and Teresa looked around at her. “I’m not so stupid as to think I could actually get away with robbing a bank. Of course not, I’m not crazy,” she repeated.

  “Yeah, well, you ain’t talkin’ too normal neither.”

  “Listen, Medicaid wiped out every cent I had before they would pay for any of the hospital expenses. Then they humiliated me and refused to pay for treatments I need. Why the hell should I go begging for medical care, when they took the money?”

  “’Cause that’s the way it works.”

  “Not with me, it doesn’t.”

  “So this guy—from where?”

  “Minnesota.”

  “Don’t it snow all the time up there?”

  “Yeah…”

  “Ah, well, that’s it, the guy just went nuts ’cause he couldn’t get out of the house,” Teresa joked and set the coffee down in front of Dottie.

  “He didn’t go nuts because of snow, he went nuts because he had leukemia and like me, had no insurance. And because he’d worked his whole life honestly, and they refused to pay. They told him he had to use up all his own money—sell his house, empty his bank account—before they’d cover anything. But that would’ve wiped him out and, what was he going to do if they ‘cured’ him? Live in a home on welfare? It’s crazy. He’d have no way of supporting himself, and besides, he wanted to leave something to his kids.”

  She watched Teresa’s head rise and a flash of pain cross her face. Then she nodded very gently in recognition.

  “So, he held up a gas station,” Dottie said.

  “They caught him?” Teresa held her cup, as she leaned against the counter, sipping at it, and stared at Dottie.

  “Of course. And do you know where they sent him?”

  “Jail?” Teresa asked sneeringly.

  “Not just jail. Minimum security. I saw it on television. He was sitting in a nice clean infirmary. They were just handing him all the medication he needed, he was undergoing chemo—there were no triplicate forms to fill out, there was no begging. I mean, the man had clean clothes, was being fed hot meals. Do you know what I’ve been living on for the last four months? Bouillon cubes and toast. And at this facility there was a garden and a swimming pool and the second Tuesday of every month they have entertainers come, just like at Grossinger’s in the Catskills.”

  “So it was a scam?” Teresa said.

  “No, it wasn’t a scam.” Dottie said testily. “Look, they took the money out of his paycheck each month the same way they took it out of mine. It’s just getting back what they owe me. No crap, no snotty clerks talking back to you, no guards escorting you out of buildings like some criminal. And that’s why I need the gun.”

  Teresa frowned and sat down. “Ye-e-e-ah,” she began and her eyes squinted as she went over it in her brain. “So let me get this straight: they send this nut in Minnesota to some country club, and pay all his expenses. But you ain’t some guy. And this ain’t some hick state. This is New York.”

  “No, but it’s going to be even easier for me.”

  “How?”

  “I’m a widow, my son was a war hero who died for his country. I’ve never been in trouble with the law in my life.” Dottie counted them off on her fingers.

  She watched Teresa purse her lips and nod up and down at her, and she then began to shake her head back and forth.

  “You’re like one of them crazy smart people, right?” she said, smacking the word “smart.” “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

  “No, it’s
not! It’s a good plan. Hell, it is a great plan. Do you know where they sent Leona Helmsley? They had a health spa there. And that’s where I’m going. And if they don’t send me there, I’ll do an interview on the six-o’clock news that would have the Pope himself writing the mayor.” A hard smile went across Dottie’s face.

  “You and Leona Helmsley, huh?” Teresa shrugged. “Well, I could see some serious problems…”

  “What?” Dottie demanded.

  “For one thing, you ain’t no bank robber. If I was a guard in New York City, seen some old woman with a gun, I’d just shoot you. And you ain’t no Leona Helmsley neither. Sure, they send her to some fancy place, ’cause for her that’s a big step down.”

  “It would be a big step down for me too,” Dottie defended herself.

  “Not the way you talkin’ about it. You talkin’ like you gonna win the lottery.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re right, what might be a big step down for Leona Helmsley is a big step up for Dottie O’Malley Weist … All right, there is one tiny drawback.” Dottie began to sneer. “They would put on my record that I’m a convicted felon. Oh, the stigma! I’m fifty-eight. It’s not like I’m going to be in line for some fancy job where they would check my background. And on the up side, if I was a convicted felon, I wouldn’t have to pull jury duty anymore.”

  “You show up for jury duty?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  Teresa rolled her eyes. “So this is your big plan,” she said quietly.

  “Yes. Now I need a gun. Teresa, do you have any of Fred’s old numbers on you? I’ll do all the calling.”

  “Yeah, damn right you do the calling. I don’t deal with them people.”

  “Fine. You’ll never need to know about any of this.”

  “I already know too much.” Teresa shook her head.

  Teresa didn’t move. Dottie leaned forward and looked at her pleadingly.

  “You gonna get yourself killed and then it’ll be my fault,” Teresa said.

  “No. I swear.”

  Teresa looked at her again, and shook her head.

  “You need a man,” Teresa suggested.

  “I don’t need a man, I need a gun that can shoot,” Dottie said tensely.

  “They could both shoot,” Teresa offered. “Maybe the sound’s a bit different when they’re goin’ off,” Teresa said and threw her head back into a bellowing gale of hoarse cigarette laughter.