During the day, these same books were being looked at by the employees and guards of the stock brokerage that had been robbed. So far, according to Vigano’s information, they hadn’t come up with anything.
Neither had Vigano. The faces all began to blend together after a while, all those eyebrows, hairlines, noses. Vigano was tired and irritable, his eyes were burning, and what he really wanted to do was kick these goddam books across the room.
If only Marty hadn’t lost the son of a bitch the night he was here. Afterwards, it was easy to see the thing had been a set-up, the cop at the head of the stairs in Penn Station had to have been the first guy’s partner, but at the time there hadn’t been any way for Marty to guess that. He hadn’t been present for the conversation, he hadn’t known there was a possibility the guy he was following was a cop, nor that he’d spoken about having a partner. Later on, when they’d compared notes back here at the house, it had been easy to see what had been done.
It had been simple and clever, like the robbery. Whether the two of them were really cops or not, they were fast and shrewd, and they shouldn’t be underestimated.
Whether they were cops or not. That was the worst of looking through these lousy books, there was still a good chance the guy wasn’t really a cop at all. At what point was he disguised as a cop and at what point was he a real cop? He and his partner had been disguised in police uniforms when they’d pulled off the robbery; had his claiming to be a police officer while he was here in this house been simply the same disguise?
All the faces in the books looked alike. Vigano knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere, but he believed in being thorough. He would look through all the books, every one. And so would Marty, and so would the others. It wouldn’t do any good, but they’d do it.
One way and another, Vigano was determined to find those two. Cops or no cops.
Tom
Sometimes on the night shift Ed and I go out and do a turn around the precinct in our Ford, rather than sit in the Detective Division squadroom and wait for the calls to come in. The night shift is when you get most of your street crime, and it sometimes helps to be out there and in movement; often, when a squeal comes in, we’re already in the neighborhood, and can get to it faster with instructions from the dispatcher than if we’d actually taken the phone call from the complainant ourselves.
So that’s what Ed and I were doing that night, around one in the morning. This was nearly a week after the robbery. Joe and I hadn’t talked about the robbery at all since the morning after in the car, and I hadn’t yet made my phone call to Vigano. I hadn’t worked out in my own head any reasons for not calling Vigano, I just hadn’t seemed to get around to it.
The robbery itself had stayed hot news for three or four days. It was linked up with some department-store holdups in Detroit from a couple of years ago that had also involved guys wearing police uniforms, but that seemed to be about the only lead the authorities had. An interdepartmental memo had come through, asking everybody to think back to the day of the robbery and try to remember anything unusual they might have noticed in connection with any patrol car on that day, or with any other member of the force. That was about the extent of the investigation within the Police Department, but even that was too much for the PBA. The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, which I must admit is very rarely benevolent about much of anything, raised such a stink about that memo, and the implication it contained that police officers might actually have been involved in the crime, that the Commissioner himself called a press conference to apologize and say the memo had been “ill-judged.” And that had been about the last newsworthy item in connection with the robbery; for the last day or two, there’d been nothing about it on television at all.
It was beginning to look as though we hadn’t made any mistakes in planning the job or pulling it off. Now all we had to do was not make any of the normal post-crime mistakes, such as getting drunk in public and talking about what a sharp operator you are, or hiding the loot some place where it could be found by the wrong person, or spending the money right away in a big spree, or quitting our jobs and taking off to live a completely different life. We knew all the mistakes, we’d seen them all from the other side. So far, we seemed to have done all right for ourselves.
Before the robbery, I’d thought it would be very tough to come back to work after it, that I’d have a hard time going through the regular grind knowing I had a million dollars salted away. But the fact was, I seemed to enjoy the job more than I had in years. The robbery had been like a vacation. It was true I didn’t actually have Vigano’s million dollars yet, but I took it for granted I was going to get it, and I didn’t care. Except for that morning with the hangover, I’d been actually happy to go to work every day I’d had duty since the robbery.
Partly I suppose it was the vacation idea; committing the robbery had been such a total break in the routine that it gave the routine a kind of fresh lease on life. But also, for the first time in my life I could look forward to an end of the routine. I mean, an end other than death or retirement, neither of which prospect had ever cheered me very much. But now the routine was going to end at a time when I’d still be young enough to enjoy it. And rich enough to enjoy it, too; a hell of a lot richer than I’d ever thought I was going to be.
Who wouldn’t be happy working six months for a salary of one million dollars?
Then there was another thing. Weather affects crime, believe it or not. If it’s too hot or too cold, too rainy or too snowy, a lot of crimes just don’t get committed; the people who would have committed them stay at home and watch television. This last week had been very hot, and my tours had been quiet and peaceable. I’d caught up with a lot of my back paperwork, I’d relaxed, I’d taken it easy. Even if I weren’t being paid a million dollars for it, I wouldn’t have minded very much working this last week.
Which changed, all of a sudden. And it was a very small thing that made it change, small and stupid. I never really entirely understood why it made such a big difference inside my head.
It was the night Ed and I were on the night shift, and out driving around in the Ford. Things had been quiet for about an hour until a little after one o’clock a call came in that somebody had been attacked over in Central Park. We were pretty close to the park at the time, so Ed, who was driving, said, “Shall we head on over there?”
The squeal hadn’t been directed to us, though we’d heard it on the radio. “Sure,” I said. “Let’s see what’s going on.”
“Fine,” he said.
There was no urgency, since we weren’t the primary team responding to the squeal, so we drove over without siren or red light, and stopped near the park entrance at West 87th Street. We got out of the car, unlimbered the pistols in our hip holsters, left the guns holstered, and walked into the park.
We could see the group ahead of us, down the black-top path and under one of the old-fashioned street lights they have in there. One guy was sitting on the black-top, and three others were standing around him. One of the standing men was in uniform, all the others were in civvies.
When we got a little closer, I could make out the faces. I didn’t know the patrolman, but the other two standing men were detectives from my precinct; one was named Bert and the other Walter. They were talking to the guy sitting on the ground.