McNally's Caper

by Lawrence Sanders

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Every morning. At 9:00. They spend about thirty to forty-five minutes in there. The manager unlocks the door to let them in, then locks it again after they leave.’

  ‘Every morning?’ Donohue asked.

  ‘Every morning,’ I told him again. ‘Like clockwork. I watched.’

  ‘Good,’ he said with a satisfied grin. ‘That’s what I figured. The key is this: That truck is from the Bonomo Cleaning Service. It doubleparks right outside the store. On both mornings I watched, the manager was waiting inside the door. When he saw the truck pull up, he unlocked the door. Get it? All he’s looking for is the truck, he doesn’t even wait to see if the guys getting out are his regular cleaning crew or a gang of pirates. He sees the truck; he unlocks the door.’

  ‘Hijack the truck!’ Fleming burst out.

  ‘Right!’ Donohue said, looking at Dick with new respect. ‘Now we’ve got our second vehicle. And that cleaning van can hold a football team. And if we work fast enough, we can pile through that unlocked door before the manager realizes it’s not his usual cleaning crew. Four, or six, or even a dozen guys inside, and the door locked, the shutters down, one hour before the store opens for business. My God, in an hour, with enough outlaws, we can take the paper off the walls!’

  I had an objection. ‘What if the manager doesn’t unlock until he makes sure it’s his regular cleaning crew?’

  ‘That’s what he should do,’ Donohue said, ‘but it’s not what he does. He’s waiting for the cleaning truck, he sees it park in front of the store, he unlocks the door. If he looks at the guys on the sidewalk, all he sees are the uniforms they wear. I’ll bet ten to one on it. A guy in a uniform or any kind of unusual clothes, you don’t look at his face, you look at what he’s wearing.’

  ‘So then?’ I said, beginning to get excited by his idea.

  ‘So then the moment that door is open, the guys in the front of the van rush it, and the guys in back push in right after them. I don’t mean it can be a stampede, but they don’t mosey either. Listen, it’ll be 9:00 in the morning; a lot of people on the streets. But all they’ll see is guys in uniform -you know, those coveralls they wear - piling out of a truck and hurrying into a store to clean it up before it opens for business. Who’s going to figure a heist is coming down? If it’s timed right, there won’t be a squeal. And cleaning guys always take tools and bags along with them - right? So we go inside with everything we need to take the place apart. We’ve got a whole hour and enough guys to make sure none of the clerks makes like a hero. When we’ve got what we came for, we leave everyone tied and gagged. We split the loot. Half the guys and half the take go in the cleaning van. You take the rest, Bea. We go by different routes. We meet later for the split. How does that sound?’

  Fleming and I stared at each other again.

  ‘What do you think, Dick?’ I asked him.

  ‘How do we get the truck?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘Easy,’ Donohue said. ‘It’s from the Bonomo Cleaning

  Service. Sign painted on the side.But it’s also got a number painted on the cab door. It’s a truck number 14. So we find out where this Bonomo Cleaning Service is located. We stake the place, find out when the trucks start on their rounds. We follow truck number 14. We learn its routine. It’ll take time, but it can be done. Then, on the day we decide to hit, we hijack Bonomo truck number 14 just before it gets to Brandenberg.’

  ‘What about the driver?’ I asked. ‘And his helper? They’ll find their truck gone, they’re going to scream to the cops. Then there’s a bulletin out and we’re sitting ducks.’

  Donohue snapped his fingers. ‘Right,’ he said briskly. ‘You’re thinking smart, Bea. So we take the truck and the crew. We tie ‘em, gag ‘em, and toss ‘em in the back of the van. When we’re finished, we ditch the van and cut the guys loose.’

  ‘One thing still bothers me,’ I said. ‘Are you sure the manager is going to open that door as soon as the truck pulls up? Before he inspects the cleaning crew to make certain they’re his regulars?’

  ‘Sure, I’m sure,’ Black Jack said. ‘He did it both mornings I watched.’

  ‘Two mornings,’ I said. ‘Not enough to bet everything on a habit pattern.’

  ‘All right,’ Donohue said, frowning at me. ‘Suppose he does look through the glass door before he unlocks it. So he sees two cleaning guys he’s never seen before. What’s he going to do - ask them through a locked door what they’re doing there and where are his regular cleaners? No, he’s going to unlock that door to talk to them. After all, the regular truck is there, and these guys are wearing Bonomo coveralls and carrying mops. He’s not going to be so suspicious that he’ll keep the door locked while he calls Bonomo to find out what’s going on.’

  ‘Maybe he will,’ I said, ‘and maybe he won’t. But I don’t want this whole job to hinge on that - how the manager will react if he spots two strange cleaning men. Too chancy.’

  The three of us sat staring at the worn linoleum.

  ‘Look, Jack,’ I said finally, ‘we’re planning this for a week or two before Christmas, so we’ve got some time to get it right. Let’s do this: Next week Dick and I will cover

  Brandenberg and Sons every morning at 9:00. We’ll watch the exact sequence: when the cleaning truck pulls up, when the crew gets out, when the manager unlocks the door. If it happens the way you say it does - he unlocks the door the moment the truck appears - then we’ll go with it the way you said. If he inspects the crew before he unlocks the door, then we’ll have to think of something else. Okay?’

  ‘Jesus,’ Donohue said disgustedly. ‘You’re acting like an old woman. We’ve got to take some chances.’

  ‘We’re taking plenty,’ I assured him. ‘I just don’t want to take any unnecessary ones.’

  ‘All right.’ He sighed. ‘You check it out. And what will I be doing meanwhile?’

  ‘You can locate the Bonomo Cleaning Service,’ I told him. ‘Find out when their trucks start going out. Try to get the schedule for truck number 14. Also, maybe you can ask around about fences. Guys big enough to handle a haul like this. You know this town better than I do; you’ll know where and who to ask. Can you do that?’

  ‘Sure.’ Donohue said promptly, mollified. ‘No problem …. You want to work through fences rather than the insurance company?’

  ‘Depends,’ I said. ‘On what we get and what we’re offered. But we’ve got to start somewhere, so we better have some names when the stuff is in our hands. Now what about those two heavies you said you could recruit?’

  ‘I can get them,’ he promised. ‘I asked them, casual-like you understand, without telling them exactly what it was, and they’re ready for a fight or a frolic. Look, these guys are mutts. Great brains, they’re not. But they’ll do what they’re told and not cry.’

  ‘We’ll need more,’ Fleming said, ‘if we go along with the cleaning truck gimmick. Another driver there. Another two or three to go inside.’

  ‘Not to worry,’ Black Jack said. ‘This town is crawling with out-of-work bentnoses. We’ll have our pick. How we’ll pay them - flat fee or a split - is something we’ll have to decide after we get the ball rolling.’

  He rose, poured us more vodka. We raised our glasses to one another.

  ‘Success,’ Dick Fleming said.

  ‘Luck,’ Jack Donohue said.

  I didn’t say anything. Donohue too fell silent, looking pointedly at Fleming. Dick got to his feet, muttered something about having to see someone, and left us. But not without a reproachful glance at me. I was certain he knew how my evening would end.

  ‘He’s okay,’ Donohue said, moving about, mixing us fresh drinks. ‘Not a bad asshole after you get to know him. And he’s no dummy. He knew right away about hijacking the cleaning truck. Not the kind of man I’d want for a close friend, but I can work with him. I just hope he’s a stand-up guy if things get rough.’

  ‘He will be,’ I said. ‘I trust him.’

  ‘I hope you�
�re right. Bea. You want to go to bed now?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  I did everything for him. Guilt racked me.

  THE PLOT THICKENS

  So, for five days I spent my early mornings on East 55th Street, watching closely as the Bonomo Cleaning Service van arrived in front of Brandenberg & Sons. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I was Beatrice Flanders. On Tuesday and Thursday, I was Jannie Shean. Schizophrenia, where is thy sting?

  I watched from the luncheonette across the street, from the rented Ford, and from my own XKE. I even took notes, marking down the precise times of the arrival of the cleaning van, the unlocking of the front door of the jewelry store, the entrance of the cleaning crew, and their departure.

  This is what I found:

  On the first four mornings of the week, things went just as Donohue had reported: The truck doubleparked in front of Brandenberg, and almost immediately the door was unlocked and opened. Obviously Noel Jarvis had been awaiting its arrival.

  But on Friday morning, something different and disconcerting happened. The truck parked, the crew got out carrying their mops and vacuum cleaner. They crossed the sidewalk. But the door of Brandenberg & Sons remained closed and locked. The cleaners banged on the door. It was almost a minute before Jarvis appeared to let them in. Maybe he’d been busy in the back room, maybe he’d been in the can. Who knows? But meanwhile the Bonomo cleaning crew cooled their heels outside.

  I know it sounds like a ridiculously small detail, but our whole scheme of barreling into the store from the cleaning truck was based on the door being unlocked and open. On such tiny details the entire Big Caper depended. A good lesson for me. I had never realized that a major crime must be as precisely timed as a military operation.

  I made copious notes, and included everything in the Project X manuscript. I also found time to call Sol Faber -remember him? my agent - and reported that the new book was coming along famously. I hoped to have the ms. in his hands by late January.

  He was delighted.

  ‘Jannie, doll,’ he said anxiously, ‘is it realistic, like Aldo Binder wants?’

  ‘Completely realistic,’ I assured him.

  ‘And it’s got a real ending? 1 mean, it doesn’t just stop? Everything gets tied up neat and tidy?’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe,’ I told him.

  On Friday night, Donohue, Fleming, and 1 met again. This time in the back room of Fangio’s. Dick and I had dined at Tommy Yu’s. I don’t know where Jack Donohue ate his dinner, but he was waiting alone in a booth when we arrived. He looked tired. And not too happy.

  ‘Been up every night since Sunday,’ he grumbled, after our vodka-rocks were served. ‘From like midnight to ten. I try to sleep during the day. I’m dead.’

  ‘So?’ I asked coldly. ‘How did you make out?’

  ‘I found the Bonomo Cleaning Service garage. It’s on Eleventh near 54th. Most of the trucks go out at one in the morning when a new shift of cleaners comes on. That outfit have fifty trucks. Took me two nights to spot truck number 14. I mean, suddenly they all come pouring out of the garage, and at that hour it’s tough to spot the numbers.’

  ‘You followed it?’ Dick asked.

  Black Jack sighed. ‘That’s where it gets screwy. You’d think they’d have a regular schedule of places to clean, a regular route to follow. But they don’t. On each of those three nights I tailed truck 14, they went to different places. All over Manhattan. They always ended up on East 55th Street, but there was no way of knowing where they’d be before that or where we could be certain of hitting them.’

  Depressing news. The three of us sat hunched over our drinks, trying to figure it out.

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ I said. ‘The cleaning service has

  X-number of customers. You’d think each truck would be assigned to the same places every night.’

  ‘You’d think so,’ Donohue said mournfully, ‘but that ain’t the way it is.’

  It was Dick Fleming who came up with the answer. He raised his head and looked at Jack and me, back and forth.

  ‘Sure they work a regular route,’ he said, smiling. ‘But on the same days each week. Get it? Brandenberg is an expensive shop. It’s got to be spotless. So it gets cleaned every morning. But the other places truck 14 goes to, maybe they get cleaned three times a week, or twice, or only once a week. So each morning’s route would be different. But I imagine if you followed truck 14 for a month, you’d find their route on Monday is the same every Monday, and every Tuesday is the same, and so on.’

  Black Jack reached across the table and patted Dick’s cheek. ‘Brains,’ he said. ‘The kid’s got brains. I’ll lay five to three he’s exactly right. Now why the hell didn’t think of that?’font>

  ‘So all we have to do,’ I said, ‘is decide what day of the week we want to hit, and chart the route of truck number 14 for that morning.’

  ‘Let’s make it a Friday,’ Donohue said. ‘Fridays have always been lucky for me.’

  ‘Friday is good,’ Fleming said. ‘Around Christmas time most New York stores stay open on Saturdays. That means that on Friday morning Brandenberg and Sons will probably have a big stock on hand for Friday and Saturday.’

  ‘Beautiful,’ I said. ‘I’ll drink to that. Friday it is. We’ll decide the exact date later.’

  We ordered another round. After it was brought, I gave Donohue the bad news of how, that morning, the cleaning crew had to wait at least a minute on the sidewalk before the manager unlocked the door.

  ‘Dick and I came up with the answer,’ I said. ‘See what you think of it. We hijack the truck and cleaning crews as planned. But only one of them, the helper, gets tied up and tossed in the back of the van. The other guy, the driver, keeps his coveralls on, and he really does the driving, with a gun in his ribs. The guy holding the gun is wearing the helper’s coveralls. They pull up outside Brandenberg and

  Sons. The driver gets out because he knows that piece is pressed into his spine. He collects a few mops and buckets and walks up to the door. Our guy is right behind him, prodding him with—’

  ‘I get it, I get it!’ Donohue said excitedly. ‘If the manager has already unlocked the door, all well and good. The rest of the guys pile out and in. But if they have to wait, or the manager looks through the door before he unlocks it, he sees his regular cleaning man with a new helper. Naturally he’s going to unlock.’

  ‘You think it’ll work?’ Fleming asked.

  ‘Money in the bank,’ Black Jack assured him. ‘Can’t miss. I got to hand it to you two; you come up with the answers. Jesus. All right, now I can tell you. Our two heavies are waiting at the bar, right over there. I wasn’t going to say anything to them until I was sure we had a workable plan. Now I think we better bring them in. We got a lot to do. Should I call them over?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, craning toward the bar area up front. ‘Which two are they?’

  ‘See there in the middle? Near the beer taps? The big guy is Hymie Gore. All muscle. Even between the ears. But he moves fast. The thin, twitchy guy they call the Holy Ghost. Nobody knows his real name. Just the Holy Ghost. He’s a shadow; now you see him, now you don’t. Both of them have sheets, but nothing recent. I’ll go get ‘em.’

  He slid out of the booth, headed toward the bar.

  ‘Hymie Gore and the Holy Ghost,’ Dick Fleming said. ‘Enough realism for you, Jannie?’

  ‘I’d never use it in a book,’ I said. ‘Who’d believe it?’

  Donohue brought the two men back to our booth. They were both carrying their beers. The Holy Ghost slid in next to Black Jack. Hymie Gore pulled up a chair and sat at the end of the table. He slopped over the seat. No introductions were made. We all smiled at one another and made polite small talk: the weather, the crime rate in New York, where to get a really decent plate of ribs. The waitress came over and Donohue ordered vodkas for all of us. I knew who’d bounce for the drinks.

  Hymie Gore - a name so improbable that even Brick Wall would neve
r use it - was a tell-me-about-the-rabbits-George type of guy: big, hulking, with a forehead so low that his bristly hair seemed to end in eyebrows. When his drink came, he folded his fist around the glass and it disappeared. He had a surprisingly high-pitched, wispy voice, like a tuppenny whistle, and he belched continually - little rumbling burps after which he’d tap his lips with a huge, broken knuckle and say. “Scuse.’

  The Holy Ghost grinned, grinned, grinned. Either he was growing a beard or he hadn’t shaved in three days. His face looked like those fuzzy photographs you see with the captions ‘Is this the true shroud of Christ?’ He couldn’t keep his hands or feet still: always tapping, tapping. I thought he was on something. He was, but I didn’t find out until later what it was. Relatively innocent - he drank about twenty cups of black coffee a day.

  Donohue waited until the waitress was out of earshot. Then he said to the two men:

  ‘What we got here is a jewelry store. Very fancy. Mucho dinero. We got it worked out how to get it before it opens. Like nine in the morning. No B and E. Legit. No customers. The manager, three salesmen, two guys who do repairs. Maybe a porter, an old geezer.’

  ‘Silent alarms?’ the Holy Ghost asked in his hoarse voice. He was half Hymie Gore’s heft, and had a voice twice as low.

  ‘Sure,’ Donohue said. ‘What else? But no armed guard, no TV cameras. We go in when the shutters are still down. Dig? The place hasn’t opened for business yet? So what cop is going to look in? The stones are up front in showcases and in a back room where the safe is. A piece of cake.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Hymie Gore squeaked. ‘The last piece of cake I went for cost me three-to-five.’

  ‘I’m telling you,’ Donohue said. ‘Can’t miss.’

  ‘The five of us?’ the Holy Ghost wanted to know.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Two more. Maybe three. But not right away. Pick up help when we’re ready to hit. But we got a lot to do, and a month to do it in.’

  ‘What’s the split?’ the Holy Ghost rasped.

  ‘To be negotiated,’ Donohue said, ‘if you decide to come in.’