The Town: A Novel

by Chuck Hogan

  “Don’t believe what? Who either?”

  “About nothing happening to me out there. My mother treats me like the ghost of her daughter, back from the dead. And my father’s all ‘Brrrhrrrhrrr, business as usual, let’s rent a movie…’”

  Frawley’s first impulse always was to counsel. He reminded himself that he wasn’t there to help or to heal, he was there to learn. “Why do you think I don’t believe you?”

  “Everyone handling me like I’m porcelain. If people want me to be fragile, watch out, because I can be very fragile, no problemo.” She threw up her handless cuffs in surrender. “So stupid, getting into that van. Right? Like a six-year-old on a pink bike, pulled into a van, and not even screaming or kicking. Such a victim.”

  “I thought you had no choice.”

  “I could have struggled,” she argued. “I could have let them, I don’t know, shoot me instead.”

  “Or ended up like your assistant manager.”

  She shook her head, wanting to relax but emotionally unable.

  Frawley said, “I went out to visit Mr. Bearns. He said you haven’t been by yet.”

  She nodded at the floor. “I know. I need to go.”

  “What’s holding you up?”

  She shrugged hard inside the baglike sweatshirt, avoiding the answer. “We’re trained to help robbers,” she said. “You know that, right? To actually help the criminals, and not to resist. Even to repeat their commands back to them, so they know that we’re following their orders to the letter.”

  “To put the bandit at ease. To get him out of the bank more quickly, away from customers, away from yourself.”

  “Fine, okay, but—helping the thief? Like, rolling over for him? You don’t think that’s a little whacked?”

  “The vast majority of bank theft is drug addicts looking to score. Their desperation, their fear of being sick, makes them unpredictable.”

  “But everything is like, Do what the robber says. Like—Don’t give him dye packs if he tells you not to. Hello? So why do we have them? And—Be courteous. What other business do they say that in? ‘Thank you, bank robber, have a nice day.’”

  Through the side window, Frawley watched two boys tossing around a tennis ball a few backyards away, making showtime catches on a late Friday afternoon. “Speaking of training,” he said. “It’s written policy at BayBanks for the openers to enter one at a time, the first one confirming that the bank is secure, then safe-signaling to the second.”

  She nodded contritely. “Right. I know.”

  “And yet this was not your usual practice.”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  Shrug. “Laziness? Complacency? We had an all-clear for the tellers.”

  “Right, the window shades. But the tellers don’t arrive until a half hour after you two. And setting off the silent alarm—you’re trained to wait until it is safe to do so.”

  “Again—what is the point of sounding an alarm after a robbery? Can you tell me that? What is the point?”

  “Mr. Bearns put you both at risk.”

  “But you couldn’t know that while it was going on,” she said, angry suddenly, tearing into him with her eyes. “They were inside the bank, waiting for us when we walked in—outnumbering us, scaring the shit out of us. I didn’t think I was ever walking out of that bank again.”

  “I’m not placing blame, I’m only trying to get at—”

  “So why haven’t I gone to visit Davis? Because I couldn’t stand to let myself fall to pieces on him. Me, little suburban me, not a scratch on her, safe and fine and hiding out—at her parents?” She pushed hair off her forehead where there was no hair and looked away. “Why, he asked about me?”

  “He did.”

  Her shoulders drooped. “The hospital won’t tell me anything over the phone.”

  “He’s going to lose most of the sight out of one eye.”

  Her handless sleeve went to her face. She turned to the window, toward the boys playing catch. He pushed it here, needing to be sure.

  “Broken jaw. Busted teeth. And, unfortunately for me, no memory of that day. Not even of getting out of bed that morning.”

  She kept her face hidden. “I’m the only one?”

  “The only witness, yes. That’s why I’m sort of counting on you here.”

  She watched outside for a while, without actually watching anything.

  “The rest of your staff,” Frawley went on. “Anyone there you might consider disgruntled, or whom you could imagine providing someone else with inside information about bank practices, vault procedures—”

  Already shaking her head.

  “Even unwittingly? Someone who likes to talk. Someone with low self-esteem, who has a need to be liked, or to please others.”

  Still shaking no.

  “What about someone who could have been blackmailed or otherwise coerced into providing information?”

  Her face came away from her sleeve—sad but tearless, squinting at him. “Are you asking me about Davis?”

  “I’m asking about everyone.”

  “Davis thinks that being gay—he’s crazy, but he thinks it will hold him back. I told him, look around, half the men in banking live in the South End. This Valentine’s Day, he asked what I was doing, and I said, you know, renting Dying Young and watching it alone, what else? And he had no one, so we went out together instead, for Cosmos at The Good Life, had a great time. We’ve only been real friends that long.”

  “Was there anyone new in Mr. Bearns’s life? Maybe a relationship gone bad?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I never met his friends. He didn’t talk about that with me. He was just fun. It was nice having a guy around who noticed when I got my hair cut.”

  “So you don’t know if he was promiscuous?”

  “Look… they beat him, remember? He’s innocent.”

  He absorbed her disappointment in him, wondering if there wasn’t something behind her flash of anger. The way Bearns was innocent. “So he was ambitious, he was looking to move up?”

  “He was going to business school nights.” Defensive now, firmly in Bearns’s corner.

  “Not you, though.”

  “Me? Nooo.”

  “Why not?”

  “Business school?” she said, like he was crazy.

  “Why not? Promotions. Advancement. Four other assistant managers you trained have leapfrogged over you to corporate. Why stay on the customer end?”

  “It’s been offered.” A little pinch of pride here. “The Leadership and Management Development program.”

  “And?”

  Claire shrugged.

  Frawley said, “You can’t tell me you love being a branch manager.”

  “Most weeks I hate it.”

  “Well?”

  She was bewildered. “It’s a job. It pays well, really well, more than any of my friends make. No nights, no Sundays. Nothing to take home. My father—he’s a banker. I’m not a banker. I never saw banking as my career. I just—my career was being young. Young and uncomplicated.”

  “And that’s over now?”

  She sank a little in the chair. “Like my friends, right? They were supposed to be taking me out that night. My birthday, the big three-oh, whoo-hoo. They rented a limo—cheesy, right? So I wind up bailing because I’m still in shock from this, and I tell them, you already got the limo, go ahead without me. So they call the next day, going on and on about dinner and the cute waiter with tattooed knuckles and the guys who bought them drinks, and driving up Tremont Street singing Alanis Morissette out of the roof, and Gretchen making out with an off-duty cop outside the Mercury Bar—and I’m like, my God. Is this who I am? Is that who I was?”

  Frawley smiled to himself. He found her vulnerability attractive, this confused girl with her soul laid bare, struggling with newfound introspection. But he resolved to keep his pursuit pure. He was after these Brown Bag Bandits, not a date with Claire Keesey.

  “I should feel worse, shou
ldn’t I,” she said. “People I tell, they give me these looks like, Oh my God. Like I should be in intensive therapy or something.”

  He stood and snapped off his tape recorder. It felt like they were done. “It was a robbery. You were an unwilling participant. Don’t search for any meaning beyond that.”

  She sat up, anxious now that he was preparing to leave. “So weird, my life suddenly. FBI agents showing up at my door. Do you know, I barely recognized you when you walked in today? I only mean that—I was so out of it when I talked to you last time. It’s all a blur.”

  “I told you, it’s normal. Robbery hangover. Sleep okay?”

  “Except for these dreams, my God. My grandmother, she died three years ago? Sitting on the edge of my bed with a gun in her lap, crying.”

  Frawley said, “That’s the caffeine. I told you, leave it alone.”

  “So you haven’t made any arrests yet?”

  He stopped by the doors. Was she stalling him because she wanted information? Or was she interested in him? Or was it simply that she didn’t want to be left alone with her folks? “No arrests yet.”

  “Any leads?”

  “Nothing I can really talk about at this time.”

  “I read about the burning van.”

  Frawley nodded. “We did impound a torched van, yes.”

  “No money inside?”

  “Sorry—I really can’t say.”

  She smiled and nodded, giving up. “I just—I want answers, you know? I want to know why. But there is no why, is there?”

  “Money. That’s the why. Pure and simple. Nothing to do with you.” He tucked his kit under his arm. “You staying here a few more days?”

  “Are you kidding me? It’s like, if I don’t get out of here now, I never will.”

  “You’re going back to Charlestown?”

  “Tonight. I’m counting the minutes.”

  Frawley wanted to remark on the irony of her moving back to bank bandit central, but decided that would only spook her.

  FRAWLEY STEERED HIS BUREAU car, a dull red Chevy Cavalier, past mini-mansions with landscaped lawns swollen like proud chests, looking for a road out of Round Table Estates.

  “Everything about her says squeaky-clean,” Frawley said into his car phone. “Except for the fact that she’s lying about something.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Dino. “That the only reason you’re buzzing around her?”

  “I’m not buzzing,” said Frawley, thinking back to her stalling him.

  “Then what are you doing out there, Friday after six?”

  “Canton is on my way home.”

  “Every single town on the South Shore of Massachusetts is on your way home, Frawl. You waste three hours a day driving back and forth between Charlestown and Lakeville. I like your devotion to living among the bandits, but this is getting to be an addiction. Frawl.”

  “Yeah, Dean?”

  “Spring is in bloom. Know what that means?”

  “A young man’s fancy turns to… ?”

  “Bank robbing. And buzzing around pretty flowers. You’ve got approximately sixty hours off ahead of you. That’s your weekend, federally mandated and enforced. Take off the tie and get yourself laid. No more running ten miles, stopping to yawn, running ten more. For my sake.”

  Frawley hung a left at the end of Excalibur Street. “Copy that. Over and out.”

  6

  THE SPONSOR

  THEY HUDDLED AT THE back of Sacred Heart like father and confessor: the middle-aged man sitting relaxed, his left hand gripping the pew in front of him, gold band glowing brassy in the candlelight; and the younger man, half-turned in the row before him, watching bodies rise from the basement like ghosts wearing the raincoats they died in. The coffeepot downstairs had been emptied and rinsed, all the munchkins eaten, the stirrers and sugars boxed away, the trash bagged and pulled.

  “Good meeting,” said Frank G., the middle-aged man, fingers drumming the dark wood. “Crowded tonight.”

  “Weekends,” agreed Doug M., as he was known here.

  Frank G. was a Malden firefighter, father of two young boys, on his second marriage. In three years, that was the sum total of personal information Doug’s sponsor had let slip. Nine years dry, Frank G. was devoted to the program, especially the Anonymous part, even though—or maybe because—Sacred Heart was apparently his neighborhood parish. Doug drove fifteen minutes north from Charlestown for every meeting, specifically to avoid having to pour out his soul to familiar faces, which seemed to him very much like taking a nightly dump out on his own front porch.

  “So what’s the word here, studly, how’s things going?”

  Doug nodded. “Going good.”

  “You spoke well down there. Always do.”

  Doug shrugged it off. “Got a lot to talk about, I guess.”

  “You have a tale to tell,” agreed Frank G. “Don’t we all.”

  “Every time, I say to myself—just stand up, speak your piece, two or three sentences, sit right down again. And I always end up doing five minutes. I think the problem is, meeting’s one of the few places where I make sense to myself.”

  Frank G. nodded in his way, meaning I agree, and I’ve been there, as well as It’s all been said before, and at times, Go on. He had the sort of dour, everyman face you find on the can’t-sleep guy in a cold-remedy commercial, or the beleaguered car-pool dad suffering from occasional acid indigestion. “It’s a gift, having a place like this to go. To sort it all out, keep focused. Some people, it’s addictive. Too generous a gift.”

  “You noticed,” said Doug.

  “Sad-eyed Billy T. Getting off on the shame like that. It’s opening night every night with him, rising to sing his song and spill his tears until they drop that curtain. That’s his drunk now.”

  “Gotta feel that shame, though. Someone like me—I got nobody to let down, except myself. Nobody at home keeping me honest. Back in the Town”—in meeting, Frank G. had once mentioned growing up in Charlestown, though with Doug he never acknowledged their common background—“I don’t feel it.”

  “The stigma.”

  “I talk about going to prison for beating someone up in a bar, there it’s like, ‘Hey, it happens. Some guy needed fine-tuning, but you did your time, you got out’—like something I hadda endure. Like I been in the army two years. People downstairs here? I mention prison and their eyes bug out, they pull their purses closer. And this is Malden, not some soft suburb—but it reminds me I’m not always living in the real world, where I am.”

  “Nobody’s here looking for friends,” said Frank G. “This here, you and I, this isn’t friends. This is a partnership. What we have is a pact. That said, I don’t know what all this is exactly about your being out there on your own.”

  “Okay. You’re right.”

  “I’m your wife in this. Me, I’m your kids. I’m your parents and I’m your priest. You let yourself down, you let us all down, the whole system crumbles. And as to the others listening to you—hey, so they’re not asking you for a ride back to the T. They respect the work. You’re doing it. Coming up on two years? That’s getting it done. I’d take respect over back pats, any day.”

  An old man came shuffling up the center aisle, shrugging on his raincoat, saluting them before hitting the door. “Billy T.,” said Frank G., waving goodbye, watching the church door close. “Wonder what he goes home to, huh? If he’s got anybody but himself to answer to.” He shook his head at the character of the guy, then shook him all the way off. “But one thing I don’t get about you, and it’s a big one. Why you’re still doing your two the hard way. After all you learned here—why you don’t know you can’t be around people who drink.”

  Doug made an impatient noise, knowing Frank G. was right and also knowing Doug wasn’t about to change. “You choose your friends, right? But not your family? Well, my friends—they are my family. I’m stuck with them, they’re stuck with me.”

  “People grow up and leave their families, guy. They mov
e on.”

  “Yeah, but the thing with that is—they actually keep me sober. That’s how this works. By their example. Seeing them fuck up over and over—that works for me.”

  “Okay. So hanging around with knuckleheads makes you feel smarter.”

  “It’s like lifting weights. Resistance training. The temptation is to give in, to skip that last rep, short the weight, arms burning. I ignore all that, finish out my set. Being with them reminds me that I’m strong. Reminds me I’m doing this. Without that, I could get lazy.”

  “Okay, Doug. And I hear you, right? And I still think you’re packed full of crap. This uncle of mine, right? His wife died, he’s getting ready to go to a nursing home, and I’m helping get him set up there. Decent attitude, all things considered. Month or so ago, we’re sitting in Friendly’s over grilled cheeses. All-around good guy, telling me how now he looks back over his life and thinks, Hey, if only I knew then what I know now. Not regrets necessarily, just his perspective now, you know? That whole, Youth is wasted on the young thing. And I was polite and all, sucking my Fribble through a straw. But I’m looking at him, this uncle of mine, struggling to get that flat yellow sandwich into his mouth, and I’m thinking—no way. He’d do things exactly the same way he did them before, even knowing what he knows now. Drop him back into his life at twenty-one, twenty-five? He’d slip right back into the moment, make all those same mistakes. Because that’s who he is.” Frank G. leaned closer to the back of Doug’s pew, resting his forearms on the top and lacing his fingers. “So who are you?”

  “Me?”

  “What makes Doug M. think he’s different from everyone else.”

  “I guess—only because I am different from everyone else.”

  “Fine, good. We got a problem here, let’s address it.” Frank G.’s hands grappled with the air. “You don’t seem to realize that you are your friends. That’s who you are—the people you attract, who you keep around you. Now, I’m a part of you, right? Just a little taste, maybe—lucky dog, you. A bigger part is this goddamn cancer tumor part, I’m talking about your knucklehead friends. Seeing them tonight?”