Bank Robbers (12 page)

Maybe it was superstition.

Maybe he was a victim of habit—it wasn't the kind of habit normal people had, but it was habit all the same.

Or maybe it was that heightened sense of excitement he got when he dressed in these outfits.

Whatever it was, it was giving him the tingles, staring at his reflection.

It was as if he were pulling one last job.

That had to be it. The rush, and the anticipation of the danger, and the chase. Once he was in disguise it was as if a signal went off in his brain that got his juices flowing. And he secretly felt that people had come to expect it of him and looked forward to it.

Toward the end, he'd once dressed up as an Indian—the kind from Calcutta, not the Midwest—and got applause in a bank in Weehawken.

He closed the armoire door. He picked up the brown paper bag he'd swiped from the kitchen at about three in the morning, and stuffed a change of clothes in it, the way he'd done over two hundred and seventy times.

This whole incident with Dottie had gotten him pacing and out of bed for two hours that night.

With the change of clothes in the bag he walked out into the hallway. He peered down the stairs, and silently descended.

He quickly walked to the front door, seeing no need to alarm Eva by facing her in this getup.

“Going to work, Eva,” he yelled over his shoulder.

“Have goot day, Mr. MacGregor,” Eva, in her heavy accent, yelled back out of the kitchen to him.

He slipped outside and walked down the mossy green brick path, and around to the garage.

The air had that nice autumnal snap to it, and he found himself whistling as he trotted down to the garage. He always looked on fall as the beginning of a new year for some reason.

He opened the garage door and walked inside. He threw the bag with the clothes next to him as he slid in behind the wheel of his car. He started up the Ford, backed it out and onto the street.

He exhaled and felt flush. He hadn't realized how long it had been since he'd spent a weekday anywhere but the back of the pawnshop. He adjusted the rearview and then noticed the ear-to-ear smile going across his face.

Hell, this was the first morning in years he couldn't wait to get out of bed.

His eyes looked down at his watch. Seven-thirty.

Christ, he was going to be late, he thought, and drove to the corner.

He hoped Dottie had not turned into an early riser.

*   *   *

T
ERESA
rolled over onto her side of the bed. Where the hell was Fred? Why had he left her here all alone? They were talking about cutting her up. She felt her body contract into the same fetal position she'd been in all night.

Fred.

She'd been fighting the memory of the first time she'd seen him for hours now because she was already scared, and she didn't think grieving on top of it was going to make her feel any better. Teresa closed her eyes and again tried to think of what her options were. Fear bolted through her.

Fred. Where the hell are you? She closed her eyes.

The first time she'd laid eyes on him she knew.

He was the one.

Whose wedding was it? It was a big one, with ten bridesmaids all wearing heavy blue brocade dresses with petticoats so stiff, the outside of the skirts brushed both sides of the door when they entered the reception. They had spiked heels, dyed to match the dresses, white gloves, and little pillbox hats with sheer blue netting. The men all wore tuxedos with thin lapels of black shiny material, and their hair was slicked back. A tenor sang “Ave Maria” in church during the ceremony, and the aisles were overflowing with flowers—white lilies and baby's breath.

She'd been sitting about midway down on the aisle with her girlfriend Rosie when she watched Fred pass. There was a buzz as he walked down the aisle. And people up and down pointed as he passed. Teresa couldn't take her eyes off him, with all the whispering and pointing. She remembered leaning into Rosie and asking her what the deal was. She didn't know, so Teresa was left with her imagination. She sat back up and just watched him, every move he made.

He was trim and tall, and had on a gray sharkskin suit, a silk shirt and pencil-thin tie. His red hair was slicked up into almost a pompadour, and he was the sharpest-looking guy in the whole place. He waded through to the center of the second pew, and bent down to speak to a woman in a large hat. As he bent down, his eyes fell on Teresa, and she could see his lips stop moving. His face went lax and his eyes kept staring at her and staring at her, and for one moment they both seemed to stop breathing. Something jolted him back and he looked forward and sat down.

She waited patiently through the full service, her eyes pinned to the back of his head. Once or twice during the ceremony he turned to sneak a peek at her, and their eyes met again. She held his stare. And then everyone got into cars and drove out to Brooklyn to one of those big wedding places for the reception.

She'd just been handed a glass of champagne when he walked through the door. People were crossing over to shake his hand. Teresa watched his eyes wander about the room as he shook hand after hand. Just as she was about to turn away, he spotted her, and to her amazement he slowly began to walk across the floor to her, not taking his eyes off hers.

Some idiot dropped a sugar cube into her glass as he approached. She didn't even realize the champagne had foamed up and over the side of the rim, until he stood in front of her. His eyes never left her face.

“Your champagne's spilling,” he said, and she blinked, as if he'd spoken another language.

“Your glass is overflowing” he said, and she suddenly snapped to and looked at the mess. It had run down her arm and onto her bag. Someone handed her a napkin and she wiped her bag, barely looking down.

“Fred Newhouse, I'd like you to meet Teresa DeNunzio,” someone said, and then she felt an awed voice whisper, “His father was Dutch Schultz's right-hand man.”

She never took her eyes off Fred, he never lowered his eyes from hers. She knew by the way he was looking at her that he was waiting to see a reaction, and then waiting to gauge that reaction.

She drew a proud smile across her face and narrowed her eyes slightly, just so he wouldn't think she was impressed by this information. Slowly she extended her hand to him.

“My great-aunt was Al Capone's mistress. Pleased to meet you, Mr. Newhouse.”

Teresa exhaled with a sigh, took in another deep breath, and clasped her two hands together and tightened them into her stomach.

And for all their famous family lineage, they'd never been more than marginal—that had been the only letdown for Teresa. That she'd somehow been gypped out of the fame this match had promised.

She reached up and turned off the light and stared at the green glow of the clock dial on her nightstand.

Of course, never having gotten to be famous was now the least of her worries, she thought, as she stared at the sunlight coming in the window. She pulled the covers over her head and just shook.

*   *   *

T
HAT CRACK
about turning the lights back off really hurt, Dottie thought as she sipped her coffee. She waited for the toaster to throw her toast on the counter, the way the damn thing had done since she'd gotten it in the late seventies.

And the crap about the bullets.

It was Thursday morning. That meant she couldn't get the bullets till that evening, which meant she couldn't rob a bank until Friday.

It was the waiting until nightfall that would be the hard part. She had an appointment at the clinic at St. Vincent's that day and had hoped to be in jail instead because they were going to test her bones, which probably involved some sort of pain.

Dottie stared at the two three-pound dumbbells she'd used that morning for her exercises—every other day she was supposed to do so many repetitions, lifting the weights to improve her bone density. She picked up the weights and placed them carefully in the corner, alongside the ankle weights she used for leg presses. She took out the bottle of Tums and meted out her morning ration of calcium. She stood at the sink and chomped on the pills.

And she had to go pay Teresa the rest of the money, now that she actually had the gun.

She looked at the gun on the counter.

God, he'd been so cold and mean …

All right, she thought he'd be less than cordial in the beginning, but somehow, with the newly done hair and the nice outfit …

She'd really deluded herself, she thought angrily.

She mechanically held out a saucer, just to the side of the toaster. The toast shot up, hitting the bottom of the cabinet, and fell onto the center of the plate she mindlessly held out.

There had been this fleeting moment, as he'd pressed up against her, when she thought he was going to grab her and kiss her and tell her it was all right. And she'd tell him what she was going to do.

And he'd stop her.

And he'd help her because it mattered.

But he was just mean. A mean
old
man, he'd become. She couldn't emphasize the word “old” too much in her brain. All her effort to impress him. Some old, old man. Well, Arthur MacGregor didn't look so great himself.

For starters, he'd lost a lot of hair. She glowered smugly.

And he was shorter.

And when he'd brushed up against her, his body had been so … so … a tingle went through her. Whom was she kidding?

He even looked good without hair, the bastard.

And now she was going to have to go back up there, and let him be nasty and insulting again. After the way he'd acted, even if he was nice this time, she would not now tell him anything.

And then it struck her that it was going to cost her even more money! She didn't have anything to wear. No, it wasn't vanity, it was that she wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of knowing she was needy. She was not going to humiliate herself. Even if it cost her every last cent.

She spread some margarine over the toast and bit into it.

All right, so he hated her … The worst part was that, deep down, maybe he was right for hating her.

She
had
promised to wait for him. Maybe he was right, he might have been something else if he'd had her to come home to at night.

She laughed out loud.

Arthur MacGregor was born and bred a career criminal, and some woman cooking stew in an apartment was not going to change that, no matter what he said or what he promised.

She looked over at the clock. It was almost ten and her doctor's appointment was at one.

All right, if she was going to rob a bank tomorrow, and have to spend an entire weekend in a jail, she'd better find a precinct she liked. That thought had occurred to her in between crying and anger bouts at four that morning. She could rob any bank in any neighborhood, so long as the precinct house they took her to was clean and neat and the food was hot. She'd have to devise a way to see the inside of the precincts. She was looking for something like … the jail on “The Andy Griffith Show.”

A clean little jail, with meals cooked by someone's Aunt Bea.

She could walk into station houses on her way to St. Vincent's for her tests.

She walked into her bedroom and over to her closet. She pulled out a dress and put it on. She hadn't had a pair of pants on for ages—none of her jeans fit anymore, and they were too expensive to replace. She took out a dress and pulled it over her head. She belted the baggy thing. After wearing an outfit that fit, it was depressing to have to go back to these sacks.

She looked at her face in the mirror. How could she have deluded herself into believing Arthur was going to turn into some knight-errant and come riding in and save her from all this?

“I liked it better the other way.” Snap, he'd turned off the lights, then leaned against her. She could feel how warm he was, and it had been so long since she'd felt anyone against her. It welled up inside her, this hunger, just simply to feel the touch of another human being, warm flesh.

He broke her heart, is what he did.

Cold-hearted bastard.

Well, she was going to pull herself together. She was going to find a police station she wanted to spend the weekend in and would case the inside of a nearby bank.

She stared at the pictures on her dresser. She stared a long, hard time at her son. He'd looked exactly like Nathan. When he was little she'd look into his face, hoping to see more of herself in him, but it never happened; he resembled Nathan.

She looked at the last photo he'd had taken when he was alive. He was in an army uniform, and looked so reedy. Maybe it was his Adam's apple, jutting out just above where his tie was knotted at the collar, which gave him such a gaunt look. His brown hair was chopped shorter than he'd ever worn it, and his head seemed so small under the big visored hat of the uniform.

He seemed like a child playing dress-up in a man's clothing.

He'd be over thirty now if he'd lived. Maybe she would've been a grandmother. Maybe she would've spent her afternoons wheeling a stroller around, and wiping little noses and digging in the sand.

God, what a waste. Dying on an island most people couldn't find on a map, in a battle no one remembered, for a reason no one could explain so it made sense.

If he were alive, maybe he would be close in age to Arthur's son.

That thought didn't give her any satisfaction, and in fact made a small lump form in her throat, as it seemed very unfair that she, who had been honest and straightforward, should be in this position, while Arthur, who'd been totally, unabashedly criminal, should have a fine son and a business, and live well in his old age.

A cold-hearted selfish bastard was all Arthur MacGregor was.

Sometimes God made no sense to her.

She walked carefully back into the kitchen and over to the sink. She filled a glass with water and began counting out the pills, two of these, one of those, half of the blue one, another one that looked like Contac. She swallowed them and picked up her purse. Again she looked at the gun. She walked over, picked it up and looked around the kitchen. Dottie opened the utensils drawer and put it inside.