Dog Day Afternoon (22 page)

Sighing bitterly, Joe turned away from the window. He saw that everyone, even Sam, was watching the long-legged figure sprawled on the asphalt outside, a small knot of cops around her.

“She’s getting better at it all the time,” he called to Sam.

The boy’s dark eyes blinked. “Lana Lovely. What a phony.”

Slowly, almost unwillingly, the glances of the bank employees broke away from the scene on the street as the significance of what was happening began to sink in: Marge was the first to pull her head together, Joe noticed.

“Hey,” she said then. “Listen, Joe.”

“Yeah, doll?”

“Joe, is that . . .” Her voice died away. Then she started up again after refraining her thought: “I can hear what the crowd is shouting out there.”

“Yeah?”

Marge’s eyes shot sideways to Boyle, as if looking for support. His glance was fixed on the top of his desk, as if unwilling to look up at any more crude reality. “I mean, that girl is your wife?” Marge persisted.

“Yeah.”

“But she’s not—uh . . . she’s really . . .” Marge stopped. “I mean, she’s a fella, is that it?”

“Yeah.”

“But . . .” Marge’s mouth worked for a second, framing words and letting them die unsaid. “But that’s why the crowd is shouting ‘faggot’ then.”

“Yeah.”

“At her. Him.”

“Yeah.”

“And at you?” She’d finally spit it out, Littlejoe saw. It was like a big hunk of phlegm stuck in her throat and she couldn’t swallow it or cough it up, but, by God, she was going to try. And succeed.

Having hawked it out on the floor for everybody to look at, Marge now fell silent. Joe watched her for a moment, then turned to Boyle, suddenly, savagely. “Let’s hear from you, Mr. Family Man. Any shouts of ‘faggot’ from you?”

Boyle’s chubby face looked drawn. His eyes refused to rise, but shifted sideways to examine something completely fascinating at the edge of his desk that he had never before noticed in his entire life.

“I’m talking to you, Boyle,” Joe bored in. “Now you know who heisted your precious little corner of Chase’s precious little world. Two asshole bandits. Two fatherfuckers. And it’s killing your Irish soul, isn’t it.”

“Hey,” Boyle said in a weak voice.

“The language,” Marge chimed in. “I got young gir—”

“Fuck the young girls,” Littlejoe cut in. “And I’ve fucked my share. You too, huh, Boyle, and some of the older ones too, right? Zoftig titties and all, Mr. Guardian of Catholic Morality?”

Boyle’s eyes finally lifted to look at Joe directly. “Hey, listen,” he said then. “Listen.”

“I want to hear. I’m listening. Speak.”

“Joe,” Boyle said at last, his voice so quiet that it hardly reached across the lobby. “I’m out of words, Joe. This has been quite a shock.”

“You’d have plenty of them if I wasn’t holding a gun.”

“Don’t say that.”

“You’d be quick with the judgments, Mr. Holy Name Society.”

“Take it easy, Joe.”

“But I don’t only hold the gun, I hold the cards, the whole fucking deck, Boyle. I’m like Superman. I can see through steel. I can see your little scummy office love affair, and that gives me more power than this thirty eight. I can tell Sam to wipe you out in the next five seconds and that would be it. But that’s only life-and-death power. I also have the power to bad-name you till the end of time. I can hang a sign on your tombstone that will keep your wife and kids and mother and sisters and priest in tears forever. Adulterer. Christ, it’s almost too good. What if that crowd out there wasn’t yelling ‘faggot’ at the top of their lungs? What if they were yelling ‘adulterer’ at a good Catholic husband and father like you?”

Boyle’s baldish head had started to shake from side to side. Marge touched his arm. “Take it easy on him, Joe,” she said. “You made your point.”

“No, I didn’t,” Littlejoe said in a lower voice. “Because you know what? Nobody’d yell anything like that at him. ‘Adulterer’ isn’t a curse word. Only ‘faggot’ is.”

“But you’re not really . . . ?” Marge’s voice died away again.

“What?”

“I mean, back there in the vault before?”

“I copped a feel?” Joe found himself grinning suddenly. “And that somehow is too wild for your brain, huh?”

Marge watched him for a long moment. Then her lips twisted slightly in an answering grin, “I’ll be damned,” she said then. “You’re really something, Joe. You . . . you want to get the best of both worlds, is that it?”

Neither of them spoke for a moment, because Boyle had started to come out of his trance. He moved around his desk and walked toward Joe. “Let me get this straight,” he began, his voice higher than normal. “What went on there in the vault?”

“You mean,” Joe said, “the vault where Eddie is lying in a pool of blood now?”

“I asked you something, mister.”

“You mean where you’re going to be lying on top of Eddie in a double pool pretty soon?”

Boyle stood still. He had stopped about a yard from the tip of the .38 revolver Littlejoe was holding. Now his puffy face started to wrinkle. His eyes squeezed shut. He covered his face with his hands and turned away, sobbing. “Jesus,” he mumbled. “Jesus, what’s happening?”

“Go back and sit down,” Joe ordered. He watched the manager turn and stumble back to his desk. Boyle buried his face in his arms, as if to shut out everything, sight, and sound as well. Marge bent over him warily, then began stroking the hair at the back of his head. Boyle shook his head impatiently, and she stopped.

“Love is funny, or it’s sad,” Littlejoe crooned softly. “It’s a good thing, or it’s bad.” He started to laugh softly and looked up at Sam. “Some day when this is all over, Sam, and we’re lying on some beach far away from here and remembering the good old days, remind me to send Boyle a wire and ask him to write me all those thousands of bad words he would have laid on me. Right now he’s got them all corked up inside him, huh?”

“Bad to keep that stuff inside,” Sam agreed.

Littlejoe’s eyes, watching Sam, began to unfocus slightly. The scene grew fuzzy for a moment. The two of them on a beach? Some day? Did he really want to spend the rest of his life with a guy who liked to kill? Had to kill?

20

B
y the time Moretti had gotten things quieted down in the block-long corridor of hell he was supposed to be controlling, the time was past eight and the sky was really beginning to darken.

Through his shoulders, feeling it like a jungle cat, Moretti could tell that the crowd was doing two contradictory things at the same time: settling in for a long wait and losing patience. He could stand on the center stripe, as he was doing now, his gaze on the glass façade of the bank, and feel the mob’s mood through his arm muscles, or his guts. He’d been a New York cop too long to ignore such feelings. They meant he had a whole new problem. In addition to settling the standoff with Littlejoe, he now had to keep the mob in line as well.

A doctor had done several things to Lana as she sprawled rather artistically on the pavement. He had propped up her head on a rolled coat. He had snapped an ampule of amyl nitrite under her nose, and he had laid a handkerchief, wrung out in cold water, over her forehead. He had also injected 5 c.c.s of glucose-saline solution, on the not altogether sound hunch that the faint was from heatstroke.

Littlejoe had retreated into the bank in the face of howls of “fag-got, fag-got, fag-got” from the crowd, which now, finally, had a universal slogan to chant.

Until this moment, Moretti knew, the mob had been of two minds, for and against Joe. Now they could no longer afford to support any of his actions, for fear of being considered as gay as he.

Moretti knelt on one knee beside the lengthy sprawl of limb that Lana was displaying. Her lashes had been working up and down now for some time, and she had, with a certain finicky distaste, removed the cool, wet cloth from her brow.

Behind Moretti, the glass façade of the bank was in darkness. It was impossible to know if anyone was inside or not. Baker had pulled the power, shut it off completely about fifteen minutes before, as the doctor was ministering to Lana. It had been a good choice of timing, because Littlejoe had failed to react, in his anguish over Lana. So had Sam. Or at least, Moretti surmised, Joe had been able to control Sam in this one instance.

Heavy-duty searchlights were even now being wheeled into place, both the normal kind and a pair of immense klieg lights of the sort used at supermarket openings.

Once the full candlepower of all these lights was concentrated on the front of the bank, Moretti hoped, it would establish a certain psychological supremacy, as Baker had promised. God knows, they could use every little bit of leverage they had, real or imaginary.

This one, now, this number sprawled on the hot pavement. She wasn’t exactly the miracle he’d thought she’d be. But, on the other hand, miracles often needed a little help. She felt better. Now was the time to start shaping her up into as much of a miracle as possible.

“Mrs. Littlejoe,” Moretti began in an undertone.

From the crowd the huge, tearing sound of someone sucking, mouth pressed against his curled-up fingers to amplify the noise, echoed like a trombone blast.

Lana glanced at the detective. “I am not into that whole entire insane scene, Lieutenant,” she murmured. “I am not Mrs. Littlejoe or Mrs. Anybody.”

“You are Lana Lee?”

She sighed heavily and made her over-rouged mouth into a petulant pout. “Is this going on my record?” she asked.

“No. You’re not under arrest.” Moretti tried to keep his voice low and reassuring without sounding as if he were trying to make her. It wasn’t that easy.

“But, I mean, you’re going to have to find out,” Lana went on. “It’s a little confused. I mean, we did go through a form of, like, unreal marriage. But there was a priest and all. So, I guess you could say I was Mrs. Nowicki.” She giggled helplessly for a moment, and her breasts heaved.

“Bite ’em, Sarge!” someone in the crowd shouted.

“Fag-got, fag-got, fag-got!”

“I don’t have to know your legal name,” Moretti said.

“It’s Albert R—”

“I don’t have to know,” Moretti insisted. “You’re not being booked for anything. Just tell me you’ll cooperate with us. You’ll talk to that husband of yours. You’ll talk some sense into him.”

“Is that why you fellows brought me here?” Lana simpered.

Moretti shook his head. “Littlejoe asked for you.”

“Me? Like, insane.”

“You are part of the deal he’s demanding,” Moretti told her. “If he gets you, and a million in cash, and a safe conduct to JFK airport and a jet across the Atlantic, he’ll vacate the premises and give us our hostages unharmed.”

“Oh, my God.”

They eyed each other for a long moment. Then Moretti took her hand and helped her to her feet. “Let’s talk about this inside, where it’s cooler. The doctor thinks you may have a mild heatstroke.”

As he escorted her back to the insurance office, the crowd began to hoot again. “Be gentle, Sarge!” one voice called.

“Faaa-guht!”

He ushered her inside and put her in a chair out of range of the crowd but where Littlejoe could see her. Baker, watching, said nothing at first, but it was clear to Moretti that the FBI man was starting to bubble over like an unwatched percolator.

“I told you,” Baker said then, in a dead undertone. He seemed to have the knack of ventriloquism. It was as if one of the walls had spoken, not he. “Lowest form of animal life,” a chair told Moretti as Baker walked away.

Lana made a kissing face at Baker’s retreating back. Then, to Moretti: “You don’t have to worry about Littlejoe. He won’t kill anybody. He takes out his entire insane hostility on me, baby. Nobody but yours fucking truly.”

“He’s got Sam in there with him.”

Lana’s heavily mascaraed eyes widened, the fake eyelashes flipping far up for a moment. “Ugh. Unreal. No way.”

“Huh?”

“I hate, abhor, and detest that little Sam vonce,” she told him. “He’s so screwed-up it isn’t funny. Him . . .
him
I would worry about. He could kill anybody if he thought he was facing prison again.”

Moretti nodded calmly, but her statement had plunged him into despair. Mustn’t let it show. He didn’t care if this freak saw how badly he took the news about Sam. But Baker couldn’t know. If it was true, and Moretti knew it was, then they had no way out except total capitulation to Littlejoe’s demands. Or one other way.

That was why having Lana in custody was so important. She might make the difference, might convince Littlejoe he had to betray Sam.

That was what it had come down to. Sam was the stumbling block. Only Littlejoe could betray him. And only by betraying Sam could they get the hostages out alive.

Moretti walked to the window and put his back to it so that if Littlejoe was watching—he had to be!—what went on now would be hidden from him. “How close are the two of you,” Moretti began.

“Sam and me. Like rat poison, honey. I mean—”

“You and Joe.”

“Oh. Unreal. Nowhere.”

“Come on. He calls you his wife. He obviously wants you with him when he takes off with the million in cash.”

“No way. Insane.”