Bank Robbers

by C. Clark Criscuolo

  Dottie’s legs took off under her, and she was running and running, and to her horror she looked down and realized she was leaving a trail of money.

  “Hey! Wait a minute. Dottie! Moe, go after her,” she heard Arthur shout, and almost immediately there was the heavy weight of a hand on her shoulder and she was pulled back by Moe.

  “Let me go.”

  “Wait,” Moe said.

  “No, no, you’re right and he’s wrong. I can’t stay around him.”

  “Wait.”

  “Let me go, won’t you? He’ll just talk me into coming back, and you’re right, I don’t want him to have to do any more jail time.”

  “Dottie—” She heard Arthur behind her.

  “But Arthur, he’s right. You shouldn’t be in jeopardy because I want to go to jail.”

  “You want to go to jail?” Moe asked.

  “Dottie, be quiet.”

  “Great, so she’s senile and crazy. I told you,” Moe tossed off, and Dottie suddenly turned and gaped at him.

  She felt herself begin to breathe hotly. There was a tightness in her chest, and the thought “How dare you!” was shrieking through her head.

  “Senile? That’s what you think? I’m senile! You listen to me. I’m a not some crazy old woman like they said on television. I am angry.” Dottie took a step toward him, and felt his anger explode. “I finally got sick and tired of settling for nothing because that’s what they told me I had to do. And I did it. I settled for nothing, the way I have every day for thirty lousy years. Your father was one of those things I settled myself out of. I have wasted my own life. And if I had to think back on all the things in life I’ve cheated myself out of and been cheated out of, I wouldn’t have robbed a bank. I’d have taken a machine gun and let her rip in the middle of Times Square! Do you hear me, child? So I settled for robbing a bank. And do you know what? I did a good job. I got away with it. And the hell with them all for the tongue-in-cheek remarks and laughing at me because I’m not some kid. I took something back. I took back my dignity, and I did it alone. I’m not crazy, I’m fed up!”

  “Dottie,” Arthur whispered, and he pulled her into him and gave her a long deep kiss.

  When Arthur finally let go of her she stared up at him and then at his lips and a small smile spread across her lips, and her eyes had that same serious thoughtful expression that they’d had the night before.

  “Arthur MacGregor, will you run away with me?”

  “Oh, my God,” she heard Moe mutter behind her.

  “Dottie O’Malley, I will run wherever you want to go.”

  She turned and the three of them silently walked up the brick path.

  Moe slammed the door. “Just great, just goddamn great.”

  “The first thing I have to do is get dressed,” Arthur was saying and Dottie began to go up the stairs.

  “Are you kidding? You can’t be serious,” Moe began. They both stopped on the stairs and turned with raised eyebrows. “This is not going to work,” Moe said, his hands on his hips.

  “Nobody can see her face in those photos. The only reason you figured it out was the shopping bag, and that you picked her up in the village on Friday.”

  “You can’t just leave—”

  “Why? You can’t run that god-awful business by yourself? Now, you are going to go back and sit in your house and not say a word about this to anybody, do you hear me, Moe?” Arthur cut him off and took a step down, toward him.

  Moe crossed his arms over his chest. “No, I won’t just go back and sit in my house.”

  “What are you going to do? Turn me in? If you are, it’s me alone,” Dottie said, and took a step down as well.

  They both stood in silence, staring at Moe, waiting.

  “I know you never liked me, Pop. I know we’re different people and I could never live up to the great Arthur MacGregor.”

  “Aw, Christ, here it comes, another lecture. For God’s sake, be a man. Be a human being.”

  “I’m trying to, if you’d let me finish.” Moe stared evenly at them.

  They stood silently again.

  “You can’t just leave … without money.”

  “We have money.” Arthur began.

  “Where are you going?”

  “The airport.”

  “How are you going to take that bag of cash on an airplane? You can’t carry it on. It has to go through the metal detector.”

  “Well…” Arthur began to explain it and then stopped himself, and looked curiously at his son.

  “You trust enough to send it through with the luggage? Not to mention the fact that your name will appear in their computers. How would that look? There’s a robbery and Arthur MacGregor and some woman who matches the description leaves town?” Moe asked and looked at them both. “We’ll put the tickets on my card. Nobody’s looking for Moe MacGregor.”

  Dottie looked down at him, and nodded. “Thank you.” She turned and walked up the stairs. She took one step toward the bedroom and then stopped, turned around and leaned on the railing just to the right above the stairs, and listened.

  They both watched her go, and Arthur turned back to Moe, and for the first time in a long time, looked at his son with a bit of admiration.

  “I couldn’t live the way you chose to, but that doesn’t make me nothing, Pop.”

  “I never said it did. I never wanted you to be in trouble like me. Hell, if I had, I wouldn’t have sent your mother money every month, I wouldn’t have footed the bills for college.”

  “But you were never around.”

  He stared straight into his son’s eyes, incredulous. “What? Do you think being on the run from the FBI is a leisurely activity? They were watching your mother for years. I wasn’t around because we, your mother and I, agreed that you shouldn’t go through life with little men in unmarked cars all around you. Now, I’m not saying I’m a shining example of fatherhood by any stretch of the imagination, but I never lied to you, I never beat you, I never let you starve, and that’s a damn sight better than a lot of so-called fathers who are around all the time. Are you the perfect father and husband?”

  “I try,” Moe said uneasily.

  “Well, isn’t that all we can do? We’re only human, as little as that counts in this day and age when we’re all supposed to march around like kindergarteners in naive perfection. Well, I’m not a child, I’m an adult, and we sometimes screw up.”

  “Did you cheat with her on my mother?”

  “I hadn’t seen Dottie in years when I was with your mother and, no. I never cheated on your mother. I just robbed banks … Dottie and I were very young and we were going to get married, and I went to jail. When I got out I went to find her, because I believed that even though she’d gotten married she would leave her husband. And she didn’t. Maybe it was the best choice she could have made and maybe it wasn’t.”

  Moe’s eyes lowered. “She was the one, wasn’t she?”

  “The one?”

  “Mom … sometimes late at night used to talk about a woman. She used to tell me that no one was ever going to have you, because you belonged to someone else. She was the one, wasn’t she?”

  Arthur kept his eyes on him until Moe raised them. He nodded slowly.

  “You make choices in your life, and sometimes they’re worth it, and sometimes they’re not. The trick is not regretting any of it. And, with the exception of her, I don’t.”

  Dottie clasped her hands together and straightened up. That was all she wanted to hear.

  Moe nodded, and gave a slight smile. Arthur watched him walk into the living room and return with his coat. He put it on, and wrapped a muffler around himself. His hat fell down over his eyes, and he winced and pulled it off.

  “God, I hate these things she knits.” He shook his head, and Arthur found himself nodding in agreement.

  “I’ll be back in an hour, then let me drive you to the airport.”

  * * *

  TERESA opened the old cedar trunk that had sat at t
he foot of the bed in her bedroom since she’d been married. She could hear Tracy’s husband moving about in the kitchen, and the clink of metal utensils as he emptied the silverware into a box.

  They had wasted no time packing up her things; her apartment looked like the inside of a moving van. Brown cardboard boxes covered the bed, pictures had been stripped off the walls; the whole place was a mess. And now, as Teresa gingerly pulled a large old garment bag out of the trunk, she could hear Tracy on the phone.

  “She finally came to her senses about Florida … Yeah, I know, it’s such a relief…”

  Teresa laid the gray garment bag out on the bed and unzipped it slowly, so as not to make much noise. She took out Fred’s tuxedo, then thumbed through several layers of dresses and suits, until she got to the black one.

  Carefully she laid the Chanel suit across the bed. She picked up the jacket and looked at it carefully. It looked brand-new. The skirt was a little worn at the top, but with a blouse no one would even look at it. She opened the closet door and took out a white blouse that looked like the one Dottie had worn for the robbery. She pulled off her housedress and put on the blouse, carefully buttoning it. She inhaled deeply and looked at the skirt.

  This was the real test, D-Day.

  As she unzipped the skirt, the tag displaying the size eight became visible. As she carefully stepped into the skirt and slid it up to her hips she automatically inhaled, sucked in her stomach and did not exhale. She zipped up the back.

  Only then did she exhale. Sharply and gratefully she let the breath out. This was the outfit. The very expensive outfit that she’d worn maybe three times, before she got pregnant. Afterward, she could never fit back into it. Every woman, Teresa thought, has one of these. What she called the too-expensive-to-throw-out outfit. She’d always kept it in the hope that she would lose enough weight to get back into it one day.

  This was the day.

  Teresa quickly pulled the jacket over the blouse, opened up the closet door, and stared at herself in the mirror.

  She always felt like Jackie Kennedy when she wore this outfit. All she needed was a pillbox hat, some white gloves and a handbag. She pushed her feet into her pumps and stared again at herself in the mirror.

  Jeez, she thought, maybe I should scrap my plans and find someone to date.

  She gave an odd chuckle. She wasn’t interested in dating. Christ, the very thought made her skin crawl. She’d had Fred. He’d been the match for her, the right man. And once you found that perfect person, nobody else is ever gonna come close. Naw. She didn’t need a man, she needed to do what she was about to do. She grabbed her handbag and slowly and silently walked out of the bedroom.

  Tracy was still on the phone as Teresa passed without looking at her.

  “And so I said—Ma! Ma, look at you. What’re you all dressed up for?”

  Teresa opened the front door to the apartment and stared at Tracy. Behind her she could hear Fred, Jr., stop moving about.

  “Church,” she snapped.

  “You ain’t been to a Sunday church service since we were kids,” Tracy said suspiciously.

  “Well, I think I better go say good-bye to Father Dominick, then,” Teresa said.

  For just one second she thought Tracy was going to give her a hard time or, worse, offer to go with her. But she watched Tracy shrug after a moment, and place the phone back up to her ear.

  “Have a good time,” Teresa heard her say as she descended the stairs.

  Yeah, she thought, I’m gonna have a hell of a time where I’m going.

  * * *

  DOTTIE stared out the car window. The sun was low in the sky. She heard the continual sounds of planes taking off, and watched them rise in the smoggy air, as the car got off the ramp at Kennedy Airport. The sky was yellow and the sunset had a layer of blue-red, and reminded her, grotesquely of the center of a raw piece of meat.

  She stared at the back of Moe’s head as he drove, and listened to Arthur go over the business accounts—bills due, the taxes, et cetera—and she thought about sitting in the kitchen of Arthur’s house and looking back over the garden. She wondered what it would be like in the peak of summer. And for a brief moment she had a vision of a warm afternoon, and kneeling in a vegetable patch, and listening to Arthur’s grandchildren run under a sprinkler on the lawn. And she’d look up at him sitting on the porch reading the Sunday papers, and drinking iced tea … and the thing was, it was a vision she’d had a long long time ago.

  Her eyes refocused on the terminal signs for Kennedy Airport. Well, there weren’t going to be any vegetable gardens or lazy afternoons with grandchildren. And she wondered, would anyone care for the garden? And the house. It was a wonderful house. Such a waste. She looked at Arthur. To her it was a waste to leave such a lovely house. To him it didn’t seem to matter in the least.

  They had driven to the Bronx, first to the pawnshop and then to a bank, where she watched Arthur and Moe deposit a bagful of money in the special business deposit box, and then they had driven out here.

  The car stopped in front of the terminal and Moe and Arthur got out. She followed slowly. She stood very still and watched Arthur and Moe unload the suitcases on a cart.

  No, she did not want to go to jail.

  No, she did not want to go to court.

  No, she didn’t want to leave Arthur.

  And this was the only answer. Arthur was right. No one was going to find out. They couldn’t tell from the tapes it was Dottie. Sid wasn’t going to tell them. And Moe was going to feed them money as soon as they wired from Hawaii.

  So here they were. On their way, to begin the long flight to Los Angeles and then on to Hawaii. And everything Arthur had said was true.

  But …

  Arthur came up and took her arm and together they walked into the terminal, and all the time she was conscious of the bulges in his coat from the money he was carrying.

  They stood on a very short line and in almost no time Moe stood in front of the ticket counter, buying the tickets.

  It was odd, but she almost felt that it was some kind of movie she was watching. She went through the paces all right. Filling out their names on the luggage tags, watching them get placed on the conveyor belt.

  And she let Arthur lead her back by the arm through the terminal to the metal detector. Moe handed Arthur a small carry-on bag, and he began to button his coat.

  “And don’t let Rob tell you it’s okay to underpay the quarterlies—”

  “I know, Pop, we been over it—”

  “I know there’s things I’m forgetting—”

  “It’ll be okay. I know the business, and it’s not like I’m never going to talk to you again.”

  “My will. It’s in the deposit box, along with a small green book. Inside the book are all the banks I have safety-deposit boxes in. Close them all and put every cent into your account, otherwise the bastards in the government will take it all—”

  “You’re not going to die, Pop, you’re going to Hawaii.”

  “Yes, yes…” Arthur said and looked as if he was pondering exactly what else he needed to say.

  Moe leaned down and gave Dottie a peck on the cheek.

  “Take care of him,” he said.

  “I just wish I’d made a list…” Arthur murmured as Moe led him to the metal detector.

  “Call me tomorrow and tell me where you are,” he said, and stopped.

  Arthur stared at him and suddenly threw his arms around him, and gave him a hefty quick hug, then let go.

  “I love you, Pop.”

  “Come see us,” Arthur said, and nodded. He turned and walked through the metal detector.

  Dottie followed and they waved back at Moe.

  “Take Doreen out for a nice dinner somewhere,” Arthur yelled after him, and then took Dottie’s arm.

  They walked silently toward their gate.

  She sat staring numbly through a large plate-glass window at their plane being readied for takeoff. And it was odd. It was
as if there was a deadness covering a deep sense of doom.

  Arthur sat down next to her and smiled and handed her a hot dog.

  “To Hawaii.” He winked and took a large bite.

  She stared at him and nodded. She looked down at the hot dog. She didn’t feel like eating. She didn’t feel like anything.

  She felt … ashamed of herself. And stupid. Very, very stupid. And afraid again.

  “Are you all right?” he asked and she saw a look of concern cross his face.

  “I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I need to find a bathroom.”

  They both stood up and walked over to the information booth.

  Arthur hooked his arm through hers, and they walked slowly.

  “Think about a nice warm beach all year, and palm trees, and warm water,” he whispered to her.

  She looked up at him, at his smile, and thought about wrapping herself around him, and slowly the fear began to ebb.

  What was wrong with her? She was going to Hawaii.

  She’d once been to Atlantic City, but that was the only place outside of New York City she’d ever seen. Hawaii. It was farther than she’d ever been in her whole life. She was with a man she’d dreamed about being with her whole life, and she was going to enjoy it.

  She slowly slid her arms around him and looked up. “Arthur,” she began and then stopped when something behind him caught her eyes.

  A small television set attached to the arm of a chair in the terminal had been swiveled around so it did not face the chair back but faced Dottie.

  It was the face of someone she recognized. Dottie dropped her arms and Arthur instantly turned around and looked at the set. He followed her over and they both stood in front of the small screen. A reporter came on and behind him were the words: “Special Report.”

  “We have word at this time that the woman who robbed the bank in Greenwich Village has surrendered to authorities at the Sixth Precinct.”

  “WHAT!” Dottie’s voice echoed through the terminal.

  “Who…” Arthur began quickly.

  She watched the reporter in front of the Sixth Precinct police station. “The woman has just been transferred into the custody of the FBI. There has been no official statement, and we do not have word yet on the identity of the woman who surrendered. To recap: The woman who robbed the Chemical Bank in Greenwich Village on Friday has surrendered to authorities.”