At this point, a shiver ran down Mary Lou’s spine. In the instant since Carter inhaled for breath, she saw what was happening. Carter was planning on robbing the bank instead of Frank and the crew. And it sounded as if Frank Senior was putting him up to it. Holy fuck!
“So I’ll take the money, leave some for Rita, and then we skip the state and never look back!”
Carter was getting excited now. And Mary Lou’s head was spinning, trying to work out what the hell was going on and how the hell she could keep on top of it all.
“Dear, I don’t know what to say,” she said after a couple of seconds of silence. She leaned into him, kissed him squarely on the lips and pushed her hands under his pants. And squeezed.
◆◆◆
So it was the following weekend, she sat on the sofa with Carter in their apartment, listening to his plans to rob a bank. And as she heard what he was planning to do, a couple of thoughts ran through her head. First of all, she admired him for wanting to get himself out from under his situation. Secondly, she couldn’t believe he was going to rob their bank and steal from Frank Senior. That took more balls than she knew he had. And besides, he’d managed to hide from her the fact he had gambling debts so big the only place he could get a loan was from Frank Senior.
What made her judder was that he was setting Carter up to take the money before the gang got a chance. Sneaky motherfucker.
The implications of that were still seeping into her brain and she knew she had to do something. So she took her mind off the problem the only way she could think of and grabbed his dick under his pants and shorts. She stroked and squeezed it until he was hard, undid his pants and pulled down his shorts. Then she licked and sucked until he came in her mouth. Exhilarated and exhausted, he stumbled off to bed, drunk with euphoria, red wine and ecstasy. Mary Lou sure knew how to blow a guy off.
She sat on the floor facing the sofa, head on her hands, leaning on the seat, desperately trying to make sense of it all. Carter called down to her; she hadn’t tired him out enough.
“I’ll be up in a minute darling!” she shouted. Then did nothing but think. If he succeeded in stealing from both Frank and Frank Senior, they’d be on the run for the rest of their lives. Neither man would rest until they got their money back and the two of them were dead. If he failed, Carter’d be dead or penniless or both. The crazy thing was she was beginning to feel a certain affection for the stooge. He seemed to care about her. As her, as an individual and that was something that Frank never seemed to do. Carter might actually be a good provider - for her and their children. Mary Lou laughed at herself: “Children. Do me a favor,” she thought. “What right do I have to think about children?”
But the thought didn’t leave her either. Both Carter and Frank were strong men, who could provide for her and make her happy, in their own different ways. How in hell’s name was she going to figure this one out?
* * *
Mary Lou walked upstairs and into the bedroom of their duplex. Carter lay in bed wearing nothing but an erection and a smile. Mary Lou slipped off her miniskirt and panties in one downward dragging motion, undid her blouse and bra before she got into bed on top of him. With only a few thrusts she started to come and climaxed with a gurgling sound of pleasure shortly afterwards. Then they both fell asleep, dreaming of what might be. And a pile of stolen money.
Two days later, Mary Lou entered the First Bank of Baltimore for the umpteenth time, nodded at old Grimble and walked to Carter’s desk. He looked up and smiled a knowing smile. By now, old Joe Grimble was used to seeing Mary Lou visiting, although he didn’t approve of what was going on before his eyes. Joe thought Carter should not mix his personal life so tightly with a customer - even if that customer had a body like Mary Lou’s. He also thought that married people shouldn’t play the field and Carter was pretty blatantly not just helping Mary Lou with her portfolio. She was here far too often for that and they were far too familiar with one another when she was here. Dirty bastard.
“Why doesn’t he care what people think? And why is he treating his lovely wife with so much disrespect?” thought Grimble. The truth was Grimble had never even met Rita. To him, she was just a photo in a black frame on Carter’s desk. But Grimble was not alone asking those questions.
In particular, JH was singularly unimpressed with the behavior of his senior financial advisor, albeit his only financial advisor. JH would be damned to eternal hell’s fire if he gave that bigamist-in-all-but-name a promotion with a harlot paramour on his arm. No sir, that would not happen under his watch.
Mary Lou asked Carter if it was okay to use the staff bathrooms and, as ever, he nodded it was. As she brushed past him, he caught the taste of her perfume in his breath. She pushed to open the door marked ‘Staff Only’ and Mrs. Pieck buzzed her in. The door itself was flimsy at best and the security lock was clearly more for show than protection because Mary Lou reckoned she could kick it down even with flats on.
Mary Lou smiled back at Mrs. Pieck and mouthed “Thank you” even though she knew the woman did not approve of guests crossing the line into the staff sanctuary. Again, Mary Lou looked up at the ceiling, ever so briefly, to check the security cameras were still as she remembered them. Their little red lights were still failing to blink. She alone had noticed, because the first time she had come back here she had seen them working, but not since and no-one appeared to have done anything about it.
◆◆◆
She walked down the corridor to the restrooms and popped inside, but her real aim was to get down to the basement. So she trotted off away from the cash tellers and headed for the door at the far end of the corridor, near the exit. You could tell this was not a purpose built place because you’d want the vault entrance further from the back door, if you had any sense. But Carter had explained to her how it was only a satellite office that acted as a hub for the other branches south of Baltimore. Cash from here would be distributed across ten or more sub-branches, so they were really the most important rep office the First Bank had, even though it looked like quite a small affair.
Mary Lou slowly turned the door handle and scurried through and down the stairs just the other side; it was like the basement she’d had when she was a girl.
At the bottom of the stairs were a set of bars with two locks and beyond it the open vault although the bars themselves were locked. She peered into the vault to see how many shelves it had and, therefore, how much cash there was in the safe. Tuesday was the day when it was at its most full, according to Carter. Monday was the day when head office delivered notes for distribution to the sub-branches and Wednesday was when the distribution occurred. The safe was ripe on Tuesday. Besides, there were around thirty, maybe forty, safe deposit boxes lined up on the right-hand side of the vault. And they’d be crammed with bonds, jewelry and the like. A quick count of the racks alone showed Mary Lou there was more than a million dollars sat a few feet away from her. She drew in a massive breath of excitement and fear. Composing herself, she scuttled back up the stairs, closing the door quietly behind her. As she pulled down her dress, which had ridden up a couple of inches when she went up the vault stairs, she walked back to the staff room door, unlocked it using the buzzer on the left door jamb and aimed straight back to Carter.
At this point she knew exactly what she’d do: whichever man had the money is where she’d be. And if that meant going off with Carter then that meant Frank would need to die.
◆◆◆
The following Thursday, Frank decided to check up on Mary Lou Belle. A couple of minutes after she left for the bank to pay a fleeting visit to Carter and check whether the security cameras had been fixed, Frank too left the apartment, locked up and exited the block and walked in the direction of the bus stop. He could see Mary Lou getting on the bus, so he skipped to his battered old Ford, hopped in and headed straight for a parking lot at the public library, near the bank and cemetery. He popped into the graveyard and pretended to pay his respects to some long gone corpse an
d walked past the bank to see Mary Lou touch Carter’s shoulder and head for the back of the bank. Just as she said she would do: checking out the security.
Frank reckoned if his face was visible now and again in the area it would pass for normal if he was seen on the morning of the job walking through Lansdowne. He was absolutely right in that regard, but he didn’t take account of the fact this same act would make things much easier for those trying to recall his face if the police took eye witness interviews.
Friday, Frank popped back to the cemetery for another sign of respect to the dead man, but this time to follow Carter and see what he was up to. The clerk drove out of the back lot and headed west. Frank scampered to his vehicle with barely enough time to fire up the engine, turn right and get to within two hundred yards of Carter’s Dodge before he took a right northbound. Soon enough, Carter pulled into a driveway near the corner of Hazel and Baltimore Avenue, got out of the car and walked inside.
Frank kept on driving and parked around the corner. He waited a quarter of an hour and sallied back to Carter’s white-fenced house. There was a big, leafy tree in the front yard. It had clearly been growing there for years and Frank shimmied up its thick trunk to see what he could see. Nothing much as the front rooms were either cloaked in darkness or had their curtains shut. He waited.
Nothing. So he slid down and made his way to the back of the property. Here the lights were on and the curtains were still open. In what looked like a sitting room on the first floor Carter sat swirling a whiskey around in a glass. A woman, his wife thought Frank, was in the kitchen getting their dinner ready.
Frank squatted in a bush by the sitting-room window until the woman called out: “Dinner’s ready!”
“Coming, Rita,” responded the clerk.
Frank stayed there the entire evening, but all that happened was they ate, watched TV for a while together and then Rita went upstairs to knit in the upstairs sitting room and Carter drank whiskey until the TV went blank and he stumbled upstairs to bed, where Rita was already lying asleep.
Frank came home in the small hours and lay next to Mary Lou, out cold. After he’d warmed up a bit under the covers, Frank reached a conclusion. He might not know whether he could trust Mary Lou right now, but he sure as fuck knew he’d kill Carter before this job was over.
MARCH
17
Over the next three months, Frank kept a watchful eye on Rita and Carter, mainly Rita. He popped over to their house a couple of times a week, during the day when he knew Carter would be out at work and Rita would be on her own.
At the back of his mind, he probably thought that peeping at Rita counted as some sort of revenge on Carter, but it obviously wasn’t, because Frank did nothing to Rita, apart from look at her from the other side of a pane of glass, and Carter was totally unaware it was going on. So no-one was particularly suffering at the hands of this revenge.
Most of the time, he’d hide in the tree in their backyard and stare in at Rita as she cooked herself some lunch, watched the color TV or went into the back small bedroom to do some knitting, which Frank had mistaken for a sitting room. But Frank still came back to the house, despite himself.
One afternoon Frank was perched in the tree when Rita broke the pattern of her behavior: instead of heading to her knitting needles, she went to her bedroom. She sat on the bed and dialed some number on the phone. As soon as she had finished dialing, she rotated her body and lay down on the bed, on top of the covers. After about six or seven rings, the other party on the call picked up and Rita started chatting away, twisting and curling her hair around one of her fingers. She nestled down, her head pushing deeper into the pillow as the conversation continued. And then the most strange thing happened that almost knocked Frank off his perch.
Rita’s free hand stopped playing with her hair and moved to her upper body; she started rubbing and massaging one of her breasts. Then, a couple of minutes later, the hand moved down her body and slid under her pants. Frank could see the hand, moving rhythmically beneath the material. He was shocked, even though he wasn’t quite sure what precisely was going on, but he was certain it was something dirty. And he was transfixed.
Ten minutes later, Frank had a much better idea what Rita was up to because, by that point, she had pushed her pants down below her knees. Her legs were bent and her hand was clearly under her panties. She was massaging herself. Frank had heard of such things but hadn’t believed he would see it with his own eyes. He wondered if Mary Lou got up to such things when his back was turned. Wondered if Mary Lou was up to such a thing while he was staring at Rita’s panties.
The one question Frank left to the end, although his eyes remained locked on Rita’s hand, was: who was she talking to? That was a fella with a mighty powerful tongue. One thing was sure: Rita was not the faithful little woman Frank had assumed she was.
“Carter sure will be in for one hell of a shock when he comes home one day,” thought Frank to himself with a wry smile on his face. While all these things were true, they didn’t really have much impact on the job or on anything that Frank was actually going to be doing about either Carter or Mary Lou.
◆◆◆
Originally, Frank had thought that, somehow, he would discover a way to threaten Carter, but he also knew he needed Carter to be reasonably stable so he’d deliver what they needed of him for the job. So although Frank wanted to use what he’d found out about Rita, he knew it would have too great an impact on Carter. Once they had the money, he would happily mess with Carter’s head - or put a bullet through it. Just not now.
The important thing was to keep his eye on the prize: the cash in that vault needed to be in his possession and then he could spend it on his big dreams.
In the meantime, Carter must wait and Frank realized there wasn’t much point in watching Rita in bed with herself any more.
Frank turned his attention back to Carter for a moment. Now they knew what the inside of the bank looked like to a high degree of detail: the tellers, the security guard, the vault with safe and deposit boxes, was there any need for Mary Lou to continue to turn up there, risk any kind of discovery and still spend time in his apartment? The job didn’t demand it any more and it would make him happier knowing Carter was a part of her past. Then he’d know he had her to himself and that way, he’d know he could count on her for his future dreams and not be put in the annoying position of having to kill her later on. Because while he couldn’t say he loved her, he did feel a certain affection for her. And, he reckoned, she must feel a certain affection for him, otherwise why did she stick by him while he was in the joint? She was a good-looking girl and fabulous lay. The thought never occurred to Frank that Mary Lou might actually love him and she felt a strong loyalty to the man in her heart. But the same thought hadn’t crossed Mary Lou’s mind either.
He pulled himself out of his reverie and noticed he was still in the middle of a tree, so he shinned down, walked at a straight pace back to his car and drove home to the Halethorpe apartment and waited for the warmth of Mary Lou’s body and the comfort of her linguini.
◆◆◆
The next time he met up with his uncle, Frank had just eaten a salami-on-rye from a diner in Lansdowne a couple of blocks away from the cemetery. They hooked up by the same gravestone as the first time they discussed the job.
Things had moved on quite a bit for both of them and the plan was taking very good shape.
“How’s it going, my boy?” asked the old money lender, investor, business partner and relative.
“Good, Uncle.”
“And what exactly does that entail? How is it good?”
“We’ve got a good picture of what the inside of the bank looks like, thanks to Mary Lou.”
“Great ass, that girl,” interrupted Lagotti.
“And the crew is in good shape too. I’ve kept them separate in the main. I don’t want us to be seen hanging together in case we’re spotted on the day, but Andrew and Brian are together so the core of th
e team is okay. And Pete’s a loner anyway so I wouldn’t expect him to be a social butterfly.”
“He’s one crazy fucker, for sure.”
“Well, he’s certainly the least stable of all of us, but I respect your recommendation. From what I hear, Pete the Wheels is the best driver not in the can by a wide margin.”
Frank waited for a second to let that thought hang in the air.
“But some think he has, um, homicidal tendencies. There’s talk that Martin, who was my first choice to ride shotgun, was killed by him three months ago. I didn’t do anything out of respect for you.”
“Thank you. Pete does have a history, for sure. I know nothing of this Martin situation but it wouldn’t be the first time that Pete has spilled blood.”
Frank was silent for a second or two, mulling over Lagotti’s words and the implication he had a psychopath in his gang.
“I’ll keep on eye on him then. The good news is his only task is to drive away from the bank fast and get us out of town.”
“Yeah and not kill anyone along the way.”
Frank turned to his uncle to see how much he was joking, but Frankie was playing a straight game.
“And then we get the money over to you.”
“Indeed,” noted monotone Lagotti, waiting to find out what was going on inside Frank’s head.
“So Uncle, what’s the deal with laundering the money?”
“Well, young man, I’m glad you’ve asked that question. As I said a while ago, I’ve wanted you to focus on the job at hand, but now is the time for us to talk business.”
“So what’s the deal, Uncle?”
“What do you think it should be?” asked Lagotti, knowing he didn’t want to be the first to name his price.
“Well,” smiled Frank, “ten cents on the dollar as there’s going to be a lot of our sweat and blood going into this job.”
The Heist Page 8