Bank Robbers

by C. Clark Criscuolo

  “Tape,” the first woman demanded and felt a bottle in her hand. She paused and looked at it.

  “Bactine?”

  “It’s an antiseptic,” the second woman retorted.

  “It’s for minor cuts and abrasions.”

  “So?”

  “You call a gunshot wound a minor cut or abrasion?”

  “It’ll help sterilize it.”

  “Is anyone here a nurse or doctor?” the first woman asked.

  “My cousin’s a dentist,” a man offered and everyone glared at him. There was always one of those during every job, Arthur thought. The kind of jerk all the employees secretly wished would get caught in the crossfire.

  Everyone else shook their heads.

  The woman looked down at the man. “What do you think?”

  “I, I,” he gurgled and drooled.

  The first woman shrugged, opened the bottle and poured some onto the wound. Arthur winced deeply, and felt the seven people huddled around him all shudder at the same time.

  The guard turned a bright shade of green, whispered “Oh no” and promptly passed out. The poor bastard probably was better off, Arthur thought.

  “Tape,” the first woman ordered, and the second one peeled off the masking tape and handed the piece to her.

  At this point Dottie had filled the bag and ordered the teller out from behind the counter. She joined the others, and Dottie walked toward the door to Seventh Avenue.

  It was three minutes after three.

  She stepped over the guard and looked down.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to him, and then looked at all the people huddled in the corner.

  She stood there and for what seemed like an eternity everyone was quiet inside the building. All of a sudden the lights flicked on, and the whir from the computers began.

  And Dottie waited.

  And she waited.

  And Arthur felt like screaming out to her, “What are you waiting for? Get the hell away!” But he contained himself.

  And there was not a sound. No sirens, no screaming police barging in the door, and everybody looked very puzzled.

  “Thank you for your cooperation,” Dottie said finally.

  She dropped the guard’s gun into the tote bag and walked out the door. On the corner, maybe two feet in front of her, was a cab about to cross Seventh Avenue. In a second, her hand lifted. The cab screeched his brakes, stopped, and she got inside.

  “Where to?” a voice said.

  “Sullivan Street.” she mumbled.

  The cab lurched forward and turned down onto Seventh Avenue, and Dottie stared out the window, stunned.

  She’d done it.

  She’d gotten away with it—so far. Her eyes went up to the rearview, looking for police. There was nothing but buses and taxis, and cars on their way to the Lincoln Tunnel.

  She couldn’t figure it out for the life of her. She’d made every mistake in the book, she’d actually stood there waiting, and no one had shown up. And worse, she’d shot that poor man. She still couldn’t believe it. She’d aimed right at the ceiling, she’d had no intention of hurting someone. It was an accident.

  Her mind tripped through the last day and that television show came into her head and she suddenly felt oddly admiring of Arthur’s prowess as a bank robber.

  Thirty years and he’d never shot anyone.

  Dottie felt this odd wave go through her. It began as nausea, and then became the oddest sensation.

  It was almost a tingle, like … she felt like giggling.

  Dottie felt light-headed. It was too absurd.

  The cab came to a stop in front of her building. She dug into the shopping bag and mindlessly put a bill in the fare box of the divider. She slid out and realized her legs felt wobbly. She walked to the front door of the building, and heard the driver behind her.

  “Lady, you gave me a hundred.”

  “Keep the change.” Dottie’s voice floated back to him and she let herself inside. She climbed the stairs and opened the door to the apartment. It was odd. It was as if she were someplace else and had been for the last hour, and she had simply been watching her body go through the motions, while her mind had hovered above it somewhere.

  She put the shopping bag down on the table and mindlessly turned on the television.

  Now what was she going to do?

  * * *

  “WHAT HAPPENED to the alarm system, goddammit!” the man in the good suit screamed at the teller, who began shaking.

  “I pressed the button, Mr. Branington! I pressed it! Maybe the construction men disconnected it again. Nothing happened. There was no electricity again,” the woman was shrieking back.

  “You moron! You helped her!”

  “She had a gun. She shot him!” one of the customers yelled.

  Arthur stared at the man, who he figured was a bank executive. The man was berating everyone in sight for not getting between this “stupid old woman” and his money.

  And you, he thought, staring at the man in the expensive suit, are the reason I got away with this for so long. Just to see jerks like you sweat.

  They watched the branch president run out the door and onto West Fourth Street. And slowly, Arthur walked to the other door and slipped out of the building and onto Seventh Avenue. He looked around.

  She was gone.

  Silently, he walked across Sheridan Square and over and down three steps to a bar.

  There were five men at the bar watching the play-offs. Arthur sat down and stared, almost as if in a trance, at the dark wood.

  “What’ll you have?”

  “Bourbon shot,” he said slowly.

  The youngish bartender poured and placed it in front of him. Arthur downed it in one gulp.

  Behind him he could hear the sound of sirens, and he braced himself and motioned to the bartender to refill the shot glass.

  He sipped the second one slowly.

  Well, she’d done it. And where, he wondered, was she now? On her way out to the airport? Maybe the bus station or Grand Central, he thought.

  Footsteps ran down the steps to the bar, and a man’s voice yelled, “Hey, did ya hear? Some woman just held up the Chemical Bank across the square.”

  There was a chorus of “what?” and the sounds of barstools being pushed back against the wooden floor, a rush of bodies and footsteps running up the stairs. Arthur looked around and realized that the entire bar had emptied out. He stared at the bartender, who was leaning on the bar shaking his head.

  “They’re a nosy lot in this neighborhood, eh?” he asked.

  The man smiled and shook his head. “Naw, they’re press. Not often they have a story drop in their laps.”

  “Ah,” Arthur said and stood up. “Do you have a phone?” he asked and the bartender pointed to a pay phone on the wall.

  He walked over and tossed in a coin. He dialed and waited for the pickup.

  Dottie’s voice came loud and clear across the line and he hung up. Yup, just as he suspected, she’d gone right back to her apartment and was sitting there like a pigeon. Well, all he had to do was find a way to get her out of the city, and it being rush hour on Friday, that shouldn’t be too difficult, he imagined. His car was parked up in Rye, he’d taken a car service down.

  He frowned at the phone, hesitating to make the call he knew he was going to have to make; he certainly wasn’t going to risk renting a car. Oh, no. He might not have committed the crime, but Arthur MacGregor was not going to have his name pop out of a computer showing he was anywhere near the vicinity of a bank robbery.

  No, he was going to have to swallow his pride and make the call.

  He picked the phone up and dialed again.

  “MacGregor Pawn and Repair,” Moe’s voice came across the wire.

  “Hello, Moe, this is your father,” he said stiffly.

  “Pop! Pop! Where are you? What’s going on? I come back from lunch and you’re gone, and Nyles said you didn’t tell him where the hell you were going—” />
  “It was none of Nyles’s business,” Arthur started, and then realized he didn’t have time for this.

  “Well, it would have been nice if you could have told me—”

  “Moe, shut up and listen to me!” he said sharply and he heard his son quiet down. “Now, I need you to get into your car and come pick me up. I got a little sidetracked, and I’m without my car.”

  “A little sidetracked; what are you talking about?”

  “… I have a date. She’s going to spend the weekend with me and I need someone to drive us up there.”

  “So rent a car.”

  “I forgot my credit cards.”

  “So—aw, Jeez, Pop. I have a dinner to go to tonight, and—”

  “This won’t take any time at all, and I promise, I’ll pay for your sitter. Just close the store now and come get me.” There was an exhale on the other end.

  “All right; where are you?”

  “I’m on Sullivan Street, 156 Sullivan Street.”

  “Sullivan, where’s that?”

  “Greenwich Village.”

  “Aw, Pop! I figured maybe you were in Scarsdale or something.”

  “See you in about an hour,” Arthur said and hung up before he got another lecture.

  He stared over at the bartender, and walked back to the bar. He finished his drink and threw some money on the bar.

  “Are there any clothing stores around here?”

  * * *

  TERESA was sitting in the kitchen of her apartment.

  She was thinking of calling Dottie up and volunteering to help her rob the bank. Or at least see when she was going to do this crazy thing.

  Actually, Teresa didn’t give a damn about the bank, or not much. Right now she needed to be entertained, after the day she’d had. And there was only one person on the planet she could get that level of entertainment out of.

  Dottie Weist, the would-be bank robber.

  Just as Teresa’d gotten up to go get Fred’s address book, the phone rang. She reached across the kitchen table and picked it up.

  “Mother?” Tracy’s voice nearly shrieked across the wire.

  “What?”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “About what? About the breast cancer, that’s what.”

  Teresa felt her mouth drop open.

  “Who told you I had breast cancer?”

  “I called your doctor to see what all these tests are that you’ve been going in for. Jesus, Mother! Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “They’re not sure, and besides, what is there to say?”

  “I don’t know, but Jesus! There should be something you have to say about this.”

  “Well, there isn’t.”

  “Now will you stop smoking those things? Now will you?” Tracy’s voice was screechingly high.

  “What’s the point?” Teresa said tersely.

  “God, I could just kill you! Listen, I called Fred and he’s flying in tomorrow afternoon. He says that there’s a good hospital right near him, where they know how to take care of women your age who have this sort of thing—”

  “I got other plans,” Teresa said through clenched teeth and hung up immediately.

  Oh Christ, she thought, they’re circling the wagons! Tracy’d gotten the whole posse together to force her to go live in Florida now. She couldn’t do it. No, she was not going to live there, didn’t any of them understand that? She had to call Dottie. As she passed the television set she flicked it on, thinking that it must almost be time for the news.

  She walked into the bedroom and searched through the top dresser drawer for the address book. Just as she was taking it out of the drawer she heard a voice on the set announce that there was a “Special Report.”

  Teresa quickly grabbed the book and sat down obediently in front of the set. She had done this every time since Kennedy had been shot, whenever they had one of those “Special Reports.” An anchor came on, and Teresa braced herself.

  “Word has just come in that a guard was shot during the robbery of a bank in Greenwich Village. He is in stable condition at St. Vincent’s hospital at this hour. The robber has been described as a white woman possibly between the ages of fifty and seventy. She was last seen wearing a pink wool suit, a black wide-brimmed straw hat with a heavy veil over it. She is between five feet four and five six, and weighs between 110 and 120 pounds. She is armed and dangerous. Anyone with information should contact police.”

  Teresa sat stunned, as the anchorman held his hand up to an ear and paused, listening to something over the headsets.

  “Do we have the tape?” he said to no one. And Teresa leaned forward. “Yes, we have the surveillance tape, hang on, all right.”

  A fuzzy black-and-white videotape snapped onto the screen and Teresa held her breath. Suddenly she watched Dottie walk into the frame.

  Teresa gave a scream and stood up.

  It was Dottie all right. In a nice suit and a silly hat. Teresa couldn’t believe Goody Two-shoes had actually had the guts to do it. Never in her wildest dreams did Teresa think she was serious.

  She stared and stared at the tape, almost as if she were memorizing the moves. A commercial came on, and Teresa sat very still.

  Well, she thought, tossing the phone book aside, there goes that idea.

  * * *

  ARTHUR walked through the store and picked out a pair of blue jeans and a shirt. He tipped his cap to the man at the desk, who he noticed was wearing earrings, and slipped into the dressing room.

  Within five minutes he had stripped off his disguise and gotten into the jeans and shirt. He walked up to the cashier and watched him do a double-take.

  “I’ll wear these out, please. And put these in a bag,” Arthur said and handed the man the pile of clothing and a credit card, then thought better of it and took out cash. He handed it to the man, who gave him an odd smile.

  As he left, the man winked at him.

  Well, Arthur thought, every man’s entitled to his own way of thinking. And as this was Greenwich Village, he knew people didn’t generally go poking their noses into other people’s business. That was one of the reasons he knew he could get away with stripping out of his clothes without raising more than an eyebrow. Now that, he ventured, was something he’d hardly have gotten away with on the Upper East Side. He found himself whistling as he walked down the street. His chest naturally leaned just a bit forward when he walked and he always walked powerfully, in strides like a lion.

  Well, he thought, in twenty minutes his son would be pulling up in front of Dottie’s building and he’d trot up the stairs, and finally, after two days of this silly posturing, he’d take her back home where he definitely decided she belonged.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  DOTTIE had been sitting on the couch in front of the television, legs folded under her, rocking back and forth and holding herself around the chest with her arms.

  The commercial faded off and there it was again, the fuzzy video of her behind the tellers’ windows. She began biting her thumbnail and held herself across the chest with her other arm.

  This was unbelievable! She got off the couch and started pacing.

  She could not believe she’d gotten away with it.

  So far she’d been featured on the news at four, five, and now six, and on Channels two, four, five, seven, and eleven.

  Channel nine was preoccupied with the play-offs.

  And now she sat watching an overly handsome middle-aged anchor again explain what she’d done and give a description.

  Channel seven had the staff doctor do an entire insulting segment on how age can affect your brain.

  Affect her brain! Her brain was fine. Maybe it was an act of desperation, but she knew exactly what she was doing.

  So, while half the channels were busy excusing her behavior because of senility, the other half was busy telling the world in a tongue-in-cheek way that she was armed and dangerous—and then dubbing her the �
��the Geriatric Ma Barker.”

  How dare they! Maybe she had intended to get caught, but she’d accomplished a major crime, and—this thought really turned her stomach—she bet if she had been some young black kid, everyone would have taken it very seriously. But here she was, the laughingstock of the six-o’clock news. Was there no end to the humiliation? Dottie had never even imagined anyone in the press would take any interest in it. All she thought of was the way the judge would react.

  Those bastards.

  The only good it was doing, watching the television, was that she found out about the guard. He’d been already been released from St. Vincent’s. Her eyes looked over to the clock in the kitchen. It was almost five-fifteen.

  The worst part was now she had an option.

  Since it hadn’t occurred to her that she might get away with it, she had been prepared to go to jail. She really had. But about the time they started showing the video of her, and laughing at her, Dottie began thinking seriously of getting out of town.

  She could keep the money and go live in Florida or California.

  On the other hand, then she’d be nothing but a thief.

  Just like Arthur MacGregor.

  God, why hadn’t he done something? No, that wasn’t it either. It was that he didn’t care enough to do something. She had to stop thinking of this. She had gone to Arthur to buy a gun. Period. And he’d sold it to her, just as she’d asked.

  The creep.

  An ad for an airline came on the television.

  She stared at the rosy picture of the plane flying off to the Caribbean and she found herself imagining drifting off into the sunset on the plane. The news came on again, and she watched the weatherman make a joke about the bank robbery.

  That cut it.

  She was going to keep the money. She stomped into the bedroom and changed into the baggy dress she had been wearing that morning. She was going to get on a plane and go to Florida.

  Or maybe she should go by train … or bus. God, she didn’t know how criminals did all this planning.

  She was going to buy herself a little apartment on the beach. She dragged a dusty suitcase out of the closet and put it on the bed.

  She began packing, first quickly, then slowing, and tears began to run down her face uncontrollably. She was scared to death of what she’d done. She was going to get lost in some little town in Florida. She would keep to herself, and just stay alone. She wiped her cheeks, shook her head, and sniffled, trying to regain control of the tears.