Detective Hal Willis knew for damn sure that the night man at the laundromat on Tenth and Culver was as pure and as innocent as the driven snow so far as the true identity of Eileen Burke was concerned. The night man did not know she was a cop, nor did he know that Willis himself, angle-parked in an unmarked green Toronado in front of the bar next door to the laundromat, was also a cop. In fact, the night man did not have the faintest inkling that the Eight-Seven had chosen his nice little establishment for a stakeout on the assumption that the Dirty Panties Bandit would hit it next. The assumption seemed a good educated guess. The man had been working his way straight down Culver Avenue for the past three weeks, hitting laundromats on alternate sides of the avenue, inexorably moving farther and farther downtown. The place he’d hit three nights ago had been on the south side of the avenue. The laundromat they were staking out tonight was eight blocks farther downtown, on the north side of the avenue.
The Dirty Panties Bandit was no small-time thief, oh, no. In the two months during which he’d operated unchecked along Culver Avenue, first in the bordering precinct farther uptown, and then moving lower into the Eight-Seven’s territory, he had netted — or so the police had estimated from what the victimized women had told them — six hundred dollars in cash, twelve gold wedding bands, four gold lockets, a gold engagement ring with a one-carat diamond, and a total of twenty-two pairs of panties. These panties had not been lifted from the victims’ laundry baskets. Instead, the Dirty Panties Bandit — and hence his name — had asked all those hapless laundromat ladies to please remove their panties for him, which they had all readily agreed to do since they were looking into the rather large barrel of a .357 Magnum. No one had been raped — yet. No one had been harmed — yet. And whereas there was something darkly humorous, after all, about an armed robber taking home his victims’ panties, there was nothing at all humorous about the potential of a .357 Magnum. Sitting in the parked car outside the bar, Willis was very much aware of the caliber of the gun the laundromat robber carried. Sitting inside the laundromat, flanked by a Puerto Rican woman on her left and a black woman on her right, Eileen was even more aware of the devastating power of that gun.
She looked up at the wall clock.
It was only ten-fifteen, and the place wouldn’t be closing till midnight.
She was having a splendid time watching her laundry go round and round. The night man thought she was a little crazy, but then again everybody in this town was a little crazy. She had put the same batch of laundry through the machine five times already. Each time, she sat watching the laundry spinning in the machine. The night man didn’t notice that she alternately watched the front door of the place or looked through the plate-glass window each time a car pulled in. The neon fixture splashed orange and green on the floor of the laundromat: Lavenderia… Laundromat… Lavenderia… Laundromat. The laundry in the machines went round and round.
A woman with a baby strapped to her back was at one of the machines, putting in another load. Eileen guessed she was no older than nineteen or twenty, a slender attractive blue-eyed blond who directed a nonstop flow of soft chatter over her shoulder to her near-dozing infant. Another woman was sitting on the yellow plastic chair next to Eileen’s, reading a magazine. She was a stout black woman, in her late thirties or early forties, Eileen guessed, wearing a bulky knit sweater over blue jeans and galoshes. Every now and then, she flipped a page of the magazine, looked up at the washing machines, and then flipped another page. A third woman came into the store, looked around frantically for a moment, seemed relieved to discover there were plenty of free machines, dashed out of the store, and returned a moment later with what appeared to be the week’s laundry for an entire Russian regiment. She asked the manager to change a five-dollar bill for her. He changed it from a coin dispenser attached to his belt, thumbing and clicking out the coins like a streetcar conductor. Eileen watched as he walked to a safe bolted to the floor and dropped the bill into a slot on its top, just as though he were making a night deposit at a bank. A sign on the wall advised any prospective holdup man: “Manager does not have combination to safe. Manager cannot change bills larger than five dollars.” Idly, Eileen wondered what the manager did when he ran out of coins. Did he run into the bar next door to ask the bartender for change? Did the bartender next door have a little coin dispenser attached to his belt? Idly, Eileen wondered why she wondered such things. And then she wondered if she’d ever meet a man who wondered the same things she wondered. That was when the Dirty Panties Bandit came into the store.
Eileen recognized him at once from the police-artist composites Willis had shown her back at the squadroom. He was a short slender while man wearing a navy pea coat and watch cap over dark brown, wide-wale corduroy trousers and tan suede desert boots. He had darling brown eyes and a very thin nose with a narrow mustache under it. There was a scar in his right eyebrow. The bell over the door tinkled as he came into the store. As he reached behind him with his left hand to close the door, Eileen’s hand went into the bag on her lap. She was closing her fingers around the butt of the .38 when the man’s right hand came out of his coat pocket. The Magnum would have looked enormous in any event. But because the man was so small and so thin, it looked like an artillery piece. The man’s hand was shaking. The gun in it flailed the room.
Eileen looked at the Magnum, looked at the man’s eyes, and felt the butt of her own pistol under her closing fingers. If she pulled the gun out now, she had maybe a thirty/seventy chance of bringing him down before he sprayed the room with bullets that could tear a man’s head off his body. In addition to herself and the robber, there were five other people in the store, three of them women, one of them an infant. Her hand froze motionless around the butt of the gun.
“All right, all right,” the man said in a thin, almost girlish voice, “nobody moves, nobody gets hurt.” His eyes darted. His hand was still shaking. Suddenly, he giggled. The giggle scared Eileen more than the gun in his hand did. The giggle was high and nervous and just enough off center to send a shiver racing up her spine. Her hand on the butt of the .38 suddenly began sweating.
“All I want is your money, all your money,” the man said. “And your—”
“I don’t have the combination to the safe,” the manager said.
“Who asked you for anything?” the man said, turning to him. “You just shut up, you hear me?”
“Yes, sir,” the manager said.