“If I got that fat,” she remarked, pointing to a photo of a comedy actress from the eighties who seemed to like to overeat, “I think I would kill myself. You know?”
Even though I hated Lola, it would have been anti-feminist to point out the way her thighs strained against the tight jeans she insisted on wearing. I can point it out to you now, though, since she’s dead.
“I found the Falcon, Natalie,” she said.
“Yes, you got lucky, accepting a box full of books from a widow who didn’t know what she had. Forgive me, your Highness.” I fumbled with the vacuum, which, like everything else in this place, was ancient, and, as I used the hoses, I fantasized that my hands were around Lola’s neck. It was a surprisingly vivid fantasy; hard to shake. It was unusual that we found a first edition so unattended yet so pristine, but I could just as easily have accepted the box, if I hadn’t been wrangling stock in the back while Lola practiced simpering in all the chandeliers.
I didn’t know why I even cared; my worst nightmare would be developing a talent for this sort of thing, but it was hard to walk past the Falcon every day (even without the helpful lecture about the rare Falcon imprints on the back cover, specific to the 1930 edition) without seeing a pile of greenbacks arranged in a case. It was the down payment on a house, or maybe my creative-writing masters... More to the point, it could get me the hell out of the store, if I could hold out till something else shiny distracted the collectible-crazed masses and eBay it out of state. It could be the perfect crime, if, once I got it out of the store, I could somehow manage to turn my untidy office into something resembling a bank vault. Even too much sunlight coming through the windows could render all my sneaking around almost moot, as perfect condition was paramount. It amused me to think of a Communist bruiser like Hammett coming down to Earth to find his most famous creation, written about the fears of working men, being coveted by nerdy people who gardened and had special cotton book-fancying gloves to protect the murder and mayhem from the acidic oils in their hands. I don’t really know if Dash would need a drink to cope with that, but there were times when I did, and I found myself emptying Chardonnay bottles with alarming frequency as I bided my time and told myself I’d get up early and write. Tomorrow.
Put more crudely, my fantasies about the first edition filled me with the deepest lust I’d ever felt in my life. I craved that book, and woke from dreams feeling its binding under my fingers... I’d stop short of saying that it made my panties wet, but I did occasionally fantasize about filling my apartment with its mint value, all in fives, and rolling around in it naked. I thought I finally caught a break when I was asked to close the store following “Glendale Glitters,” the holiday street festival that kept all the stores downtown open late. Dad liked for two people to be there at night, so Lola pursed her lips in a pout she’d been taught someone found fetching. I swallowed my gorge behind a team-player smile. “I can handle it myself... don’t worry about it. Lola, you just go and enjoy your Friday night.”
I was a little too hearty about the last part, so suspicion fought it out with relief. “You sure? Because I don’t mind staying...” But her eyes flicked to the door as if in anticipation a day in advance.
“Yeah, sure,” I said, “And if it gets slow, I’ve got some poems I could work on.” I thought this was a nice sop to the old man, the image of his eldest girl plugging away in a dusty store like the forbidden love child of Abe Lincoln and Emily Dickinson, but I wondered if I’d oversold it. He looked satisfied, though, as if in that one moment we’d come to understand each other.
Sometimes I still feel guilty about that. That night, though, I practiced feeling nothing. Unlike movie cons, however, I couldn’t get a break. Five minutes before ten, some European tourists came in, and I couldn’t make them understand “We’re closing soon” in my broken German, but they bought a lot, without even looking twice at my black book-robbing outfit. I was just about to take my literary spoils and disarm the alarm (Dad’s birthday, 8-25-51, which he only changed from 1-2-3-4 at my pre-criminal insistence. I was grateful for his predictable habits of mind) when the lock rattled again and Lola came in, vastly overdressed for a shift of work and showing copious cleavage. “What are you wearing?” she asked. “That goth thing is so over. And you suck at it anyways... Goths always wear skulls and dangly shit. Just black is a more emo, check-out-my-pain kind of trip.”
“I could ask you the same question. But for right now, I have to deal with the fact that you interrupted me during my cutting ritual... I may have to do both wrists now.”
She looked at me with distaste. I don’t think she cared that I was joking. My plan ruined, I watched as the shadows lengthened and removed the tiny bit of charm from our town square.
We both froze as the lock rattled again. Maybe my father had forgotten something. It took everything I had not to go over to the case with the Falcon in it and stare moonily at its dust jacket. I was about to invent one last task to enable this, when an unfamiliar voice cut through the silence.
“Hello, ladies.” The figure before us was slight, five-nine at the absolute tops, with a twangy accent. “I’m going to need the contents of your safe, if you don’t mind.”
It was the Gentleman Bandit, named by police and local news for his courtly and polite robberies of west-side minimarts and car washes. The local press loved how this guy had made area businesses part with so much coin without cursing once. The suggestion that some of the clerks he had robbed had seen a gun was much less gentlemanly. “If you could lie on the floor for me, that would be fantastic. Thank you.” Something in his waistband clicked, and I hit the dusty floor, all the while wondering if I’d been taken in by a water gun, but not enough to stand my ground. “Do let me know if this is uncomfortably tight, won’t you?” he almost purred as he tied us back to back with the bungee cords we usually used to tie furniture to the tops of people’s cars.
“Is it true that you can get everything in twenty minutes?” Lola asked, as languid as if she’d just woken up in his passion-tossed bed. I couldn’t believe she was flirting with him as he robbed us, but Lola flirted with everything. In the darkness, my cheeks burned.
“This looks a little light,” he remarked of his haul.
“Business is down... times are hard all over. The owner” (nothing would induce me to say “my dad” at work again) “tries to make it up on eBay, but, you know...” I made a sweeping yet helpless gesture that I hoped conveyed the vast economic machinery that kept me in the store and stuck on page 100 in Paul Krugman’s book.
“Shut the hell up.” I made a sceptical sound and he added, “Please.”
I had to smile. In the YouTube era, everyone was worried about his press.
The bandit licked his lips, which I had been trained by thousands of third-rate crime thrillers to view as the behavior of a drug-crazed psychopath, and my heart seemed to skip a beat.
“There’s water in the fridge in the back.” I don’t know why I said it. Maybe I just wanted one thing I could control, or maybe I was beginning to relate to the stranger who broke into this dust-scented stillness. He just wanted to get something out of being here, too. For a moment, I almost asked him his secret and offered to put him up in Mexico. A flicker of headlights made us all tense up. He was methodical as he searched the place for the glitter of gold and the sheen of silver and cleaned us out.