by Chuck Hogan
“It’s sort of sudden, though, isn’t it?”
“I guess. Why?”
“I’m just thinking about the police. A few weeks after the robbery… and now you’re quitting the bank.”
Her hand went to her open mouth. “Oh.”
“I mean, maybe they won’t…”
“That never even occurred to me. You don’t think…”
He did. This was sure to bring renewed attention from the FBI. And if they started watching her, how could he keep seeing her and stay out of their crosshairs? And then, if they ever put him and Claire together…
That made him think. “You still talk to that FBI agent?”
Her hand came away from her mouth. “You think he’ll be talking to me again?”
Doug felt icy suddenly. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of this before. “What’s he look like? Anything like on TV?”
They were moving again, through the Copley Mall toward the escalators, the Tiffany & Company bag dangling in Claire’s hand. “He said he’s a bank robbery agent, that’s all he does.”
“What’s he like, a haircut in a suit?”
“Not hardly. He actually lives in the navy yard somewhere.”
“The yard, huh?”
“Like my height, maybe an inch taller. Thick brown hair, kind of wavy-curly, all over the place. In fact—it’s probably gone now, but he had this reddish sort of stain on his skin from this guy he was chasing, a bank robber who got a dye pack. Do you know what a dye pack is?”
They were on an elevator going down, which was lucky, because Doug could barely move.
Too convoluted, the whole thing. Too massive, he couldn’t break it down. Had he fucked up? Had this bank sleuth somehow been feeding off him through Claire?
He watched her at the revolving doors, pausing in her story about the bank robbery agent getting stained in order to eye her necklace again in the reflective chrome.
She knew nothing. Maybe the sleuth knew nothing either. Maybe.
Outside, they crossed a brick-and-stone plaza, commuters flooding the street from the Back Bay station, jumping curbs and chasing down taxis. Claire took his hand. “Delayed sticker shock?”
“No,” he said, coming back around. “What are you going to do now?”
“Right now? I don’t—”
“No, I mean—now that you’re out of a job.”
“Oh. I’ve got some money saved, I have a cushion. What do I want to do?” She looked up at the tops of the skyscrapers. “Stay out of banking, that’s for sure. My parents are going to freak out. I thought about teaching, but—what I do with the kids at the Boys and Girls Club, that’s not really teaching. It’s not social work either. It’s nothing you can make a living at. Though I did talk to the director over there, in case a paid position opens up.”
Thoughts came to him as fast as the commuters swarming around them. “What would you think,” said Doug, “if I quit my job too?”
She laughed a little. “I guess then I’d have company. But why?”
“I got some money saved too. My own cushion. Hell, I got a whole sofa stashed away.”
They walked a few more steps against the crowd, then she looked up at him, remembering the necklace. “A whole sofa, huh?”
“Matching love seat, even.”
Everything seemed threatened now, everything converging. Like his old life had suddenly been condemned, explosive charges being laid on all the loadbearing beams, a crew of badass demo hard hats advancing on it with crowbars and sledges.
“You know how everybody’s always got that place they want to go—their if-only place? You know, If only I had the money, or, If only I had the chance.”
Claire nodded. “Sure.”
“I never had a place like that. I bet you do.”
“Only about half a dozen.”
“The problem is—no one ever goes to their if-only place.”
“No, they never do.”
“Well, why not? Why couldn’t we be the first?”
She smiled, finding a different angle on his face, discovering something there. “Know what, Doug? You’re a romantic. I think I knew it all along, only you hide it so well.”
“Things are changing for me, Claire. Changing fast, like hour to hour.”
“There’s one small problem I foresee with your if-only plan.”
“What’s that?”
She smiled. “There’s no Charlestown anywhere else in the world.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that is a snag.”
And he left it floating there like that: mere talk. Twenty-six years ago his mother had walked away from the Town. Maybe now it was his time to follow.
31
KEYED
CLARK MAYORS WAS A locksmith with a small key-making shop on Brom-field Street, one of the narrow lanes off the cobblestone boulevard of Downtown Crossing. The night-duty agent had given Frawley Clark’s pager number, the Boston FO being without a good lockpick and contracting the sixty-year-old keymaker for side gigs, both on and off paper. Clark was a careful, square-faced, solidly built black man with a pleasant, home-cooked smell and half-glasses over snowy cheek stubble. His no-questions fee of a hundred an hour was coming straight out of Frawley’s own linty pocket.
Just a few hours before, Frawley had been sitting in the backseat of his new Bureau car, a banged-up, navy blue Ford Tempo, trying to stay awake half a block down from Claire Keesey’s door. The muscular growl of a Corvette engine roused him in time to see the two of them nuzzling in the front seat, then her getting out and going into her place alone. Frawley put off his plan to drop in on her then, instead rolling out after MacRay.
The bold green sports car seemed headed for the interstate, in which case Frawley wouldn’t bother trying to keep up, but then MacRay cut sharply toward the Schrafft’s tower at the last moment, crossing the Mystic north into Everett. He turned off Main Street down a dim residential road, Frawley thinking MacRay had made him, only to see the Corvette’s round brake lights turn into a driveway. Frawley backed off and waited, parked up on Main trying to figure out his next move, when just in time he recognized MacRay’s second car, the dumpy white Caprice Classic, parked right in front of him. Frawley took off and made a slow loop past a funeral home, and by the time he returned, the Caprice was gone.
Frawley’s adrenaline had hardly subsided from then until now, watching Clark work on the side door of a broad garage. The only light source was a pale blue spritz coming off the next-door neighbor’s backyard Madonna.
Clark first snaked a worm scope under the door, previewing the interior bolts and checking for alarms. His handheld, gray-and-white monitor showed no booby traps, nothing tricky. Then he hiked up his pants and knelt before the padlock, a folded rag under his knee, an old black curtain draped over his shoulders and head to swallow his working light. Frawley kept an eye on the street—the neighborhood struck him as one likely to mete out swift street justice to housebreakers—listening to Clark’s patient click-scratches.
The cloak was whisked away and Clark straightened with a soft grunt, lifting his Klein Tools bag off the ground and nodding to Frawley. Frawley gripped the knob with his break-in gloves and it turned easily, no creaks or whines to worry the night. Clark followed him inside, Frawley quickly shutting the door.
Clark turned his flashlight back on—a white spray off a wire hooked to his half-glasses—and found a wall switch screwed to an unfinished beam by the door. He gave the exposed box the once-over, fingering each electrical connection, and then with the aid of Frawley’s stronger Maglite, followed the stapled wires up to the ceiling rafters and the lamps clamped overhead.
Clark hit the switch and the lamps came on loud, the halogens blazing up the old garage. The muscle car glowed dead center, emerald against cement, a long, low, lustrous jewel resting on five-spoke, star-rimmed wheels.
Against the near wall was a red tool cart on casters and a built-in workbench under particleboard shelves of small parts, accessories, and
tools ancient and new.
“Pretty thing,” said Clark, snapping off his spy light.
Frawley walked to the car and rested his gloved hand on the glass-smooth hood, expecting a pulse. It must have had half a dozen coats of paint. He slipped his fingers underneath the handle of the driver’s-side door and opened it wide.
The interior was black leather, still smelling like a new baseball glove. He lowered himself into the driver’s seat, the upholstery moaning but not protesting. He reached for the stick and toed the pedals, touching the leather-wrapped wheel. He would have needed to inch the seat forward to operate it comfortably.
“Dope dealer, huh?” said Clark, eyeing the finish, tool bag in hand.
Armor All slicked the dash. Frawley reached across the passenger seat for the glove compartment, and suddenly smelled Claire Keesey there, that butterscotch hair product she used. The car was registered to Kristina Coughlin of Pearl Street, Charlestown, Massachusetts. Underneath the registration card was a CD jewel case labeled AM Gold.
Frawley climbed out, shut the door. He moved to the workbench, sliding open each drawer of the tool cart, then checked the minifridge, pulling out a one-liter bottle of Mountain Dew. He cracked the cap and drank down half of it at a gulp. He peered into a cardboard-box trash can, but it was just empty Dew bottles and shop rags.
In the rear of the garage, the cement floor ended over the old wood framing, dropping down four feet or so to packed dirt. Frawley trained his flashlight on the yard tools rotting there, the bicycles and sleds, a limp tetherball game. The soil looked hard and unlikely to preserve his shoe tread, so he hopped down, exciting dust in his flashlight beam. Decades of oxidation gave the dark trench a metallic tang. He looked around but it was all just junk, and Frawley wondered what the homeowner’s relationship was to MacRay, making a mental note to run the address in the morning.
He was on his way back up when his beam found a head-sized stone loose from the rocky subfoundation. Its shadow moved when he did, betraying a hollow inside. Frawley shoved an ancient snowblower out of the way and crouched down before the stone and the scooped-smooth hole, like an eyeball tumbled out of its socket. The cavity was empty but for a few silica-gel packets, the Do Not Eat kind packed inside sneaker boxes to absorb moisture. Frawley put his face to the opening. The smell he got was the unmistakable old-linen odor of stored cash.
He stood, downing more Mountain Dew. MacRay had just recently moved his stash. If only he knew how close on his heels Frawley was.
Clark yawned up top, reminding Frawley that the meter was running. He climbed back to the cement floor, the Corvette gleaming proud. He tried to envision it torched. “You can lock it back up again from the outside?” asked Frawley. “Make it look like no one’s been in here?”
Clark nodded, his voice rug-soft and shag-smooth. “No time at all.”
“Go ahead and kill the light then, get set up outside. I’ll be right there.”
Clark switched off the rafter lamps and exited, leaving Frawley with his Maglite beam and the car. Frawley dug out his ring of keys, comparing them in the heat of his flashlight, the new Tempo key having the sharpest teeth. He walked to the long front fender of the Corvette and dug the key into the soft finish, gouging it across the driver’s-side door and all the way to the rear, then stepped back to admire his work.
THERE WERE SOME EXCEPTIONALLY handsome front doors in Charlestown, but Claire Keesey’s was not one of them. Around Monument Square and the nearby John Harvard Mall, the European-style entrances compared favorably to those in Beacon Hill and the lower Back Bay, but hers was entirely ordinary: no brass, no stained glass, no bold color, just a drab brown door, the weathered varnish flaking off the grain.
She opened it wearing gray gym shorts and a ribbed, black tank shirt, braless and barefoot, her hair wet but combed out, falling straight. Surprise in her eyes when she recognized him behind the sunglasses—though Frawley noted disappointment as well.
“Hi,” she said, as in What are you doing here?
“This a bad time? Were you expecting someone else?”
“No. No—come in.”
He moved past her across the white-tile threshold, down the short hallway into the living room. Against the widest wall, a wire shelving unit and a bamboo hutch were paired off in a feng shui tug-of-war. The leather sofa was a plump, safe tan straight out of Jennifer Convertibles. There were other staples—the rattan CD tower from Pier One, the Pottery Barn slab rug—as well as some out-of-place wall prints left over since college. It was all mishmash, the product of a decade of gradual accumulation.
The coffee table was cluttered with clothing catalogs and issues of Shape and Marie Claire. He peeked into her bedroom, the comforter rumpled, the bed unmade, then cut back to the kitchen, looking out the window to the buildings across the alley.
“You want to blow-dry, I can wait.”
“No,” she said, put off by his wandering around. “That’s okay.”
He looked at her a long moment. He carried MacRay’s mug shots in a manila envelope tucked under his arm. “So you quit the bank.”
A tiny bloom of panic in her eyes. “Yes, it just—it got to be too much.”
He had tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. To view her as an unsuspecting pawn, as the victim of an ex-con’s con. Along with needing to determine how much she knew about MacRay, Frawley had gone there that morning in the hope of working up some sympathy for her.
But any chance of that went away when he saw the flat-shell jewelry case on her kitchenette table, classic Tiffany & Company blue. He laid the manila envelope down on the table and opened the hinged case, lifting out a thread-thin necklace, dangling it between his hands, the solitaire quivering like a tiny crystal eye.
“Lovely,” he said.
“That—it was a gift.”
“Not from the piano mover?”
She did not answer. Frawley kept himself in check. He was holding a chunk of MacRay’s movie money in his hand. The crook was buying her jewelry with it. “May I see it on you?”
Her hand went protectively to her neck. “I’m not really dressed for…”
He was already bringing it to her, undoing the delicate clasp and waiting for her to turn. She did so, reluctantly, sweeping the hair off the back of her neck, and Frawley clasped the necklace beneath her darker roots, waiting for her to turn back around.
She kept her eyes low, self-conscious, trying not to be. The diamond winked above the scoop neck of her tank top, her breasts pressing against the black fabric. Her nipples were erect and she crossed her arms guiltily.
Frawley said, “Did you hear about that movie theater in Braintree?”
She blinked at this abrupt change of subject. “Yes, sure, the holdup.”
Frawley nodded, backing away. “The same guys. We’re pretty certain.”
“The same?” Her surprise was authentic.
“It was an armored-car pickup. We also now know they’re all Charlestown guys.”
Again, her shock. “For sure?”
“In fact we’re watching a couple of jokers now. Getting close.”
She looked down, nodding like she was trying to figure out something. Maybe some ghostly concern that had been tugging at the edge of her consciousness for a while. Frawley talked to keep her off-balance.
“These Townie guys, they love armoreds. Banks and armoreds, that’s always been their thing. Rite-of-passage stuff, them getting dusted and pulling stickups. Boston cops used to respond to bank alarms by shutting down the Charlestown Bridge and waiting for the dopes to try to cross back over with their loot. Especially in winter—they love the snow, the havoc it wreaks, pulling on ski masks and going robbing. But some of these kids, a select few, after bouncing around the system a little—something kicks in and they start getting smart. Those are the ones who grow into professionals. The ones for whom robbing banks becomes a career, a vocation, their life’s work. See, the prison theory, that’s always seemed a little too pat to me.”<
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She shook her head, trying to follow him. “Prison theory?”
“The community college, under the highway? Used to be the prison in Boston. Sacco and Vanzetti, Malcolm X. Theory goes that the inmates’ families settled here to be near them, breeding successive generations of crooks and bandits. But I think it’s simpler than that. My own theory is that bank robbing is just a trade here, the way villages in old America and Europe used to be known for a particular craft. Like glassblowing or bootmaking or silversmithing. Here it’s bank robbing and armored-car heists. Techniques developed and refined over time, talents passed down through generations. You know, father to son.”
Claire looked pale now, staring into the middle distance, reaching for the sofa corner with one hand and absently touching her necklace with the other.
“And then there’s this Revolutionary War mentality,” Frawley went on. “They’ve taken that mythology and perverted it. The fuck-the-invaders tradition—appropriated it for their own criminal means. The bank robber as folk hero, all that nonsense. Like I’m the enemy here, right? The law is the bad guy.” He picked up a CD from the top of her stereo, turned to her. “Huh. AM Gold. Any good?”
She didn’t hear him. She was somewhere else now.
Frawley replaced the case and moved on. “But, no, don’t worry. These guys always find a way to screw up, even the smart ones. Things like talking too much about banks. Or asking too many questions of people, trying to learn things about the FBI. Or flashing lots of cash around. These are things people notice.”
Claire’s hand came away from her necklace.
“And on top of all that,” said Frawley, returning to the table to pick up his manila envelope, “on top of all that, we’ve got ourselves a partial handprint.”
This roused her from her trance. “I thought you weren’t able to talk about things like that.”