Dog Day Afternoon

by Patrick Mann

  “I have a deal with this Don,” Littlejoe went on, choosing his words carefully so that, while he wasn’t telling the truth, he wasn’t saying anything that he couldn’t defend later as being similar to a version of the truth.

  “This Don has promised me the most important thing in the world,” he said. He watched Sam’s eyes move slowly to look at him. He’d finally gotten the little guy’s attention. “He promised to finger a small neighborhood bank where on a particular day they make up a big cash payroll. You dig?”

  Sam nodded. “I dig.”

  “That way, instead of the five, six grand the bank usually would have in the till, it’s got, maybe, forty or fifty grand, maybe more, maybe even a hundred thousand. I mean, is that the most important detail or not?”

  “The most important,” Sam said in a low voice that Littlejoe had to strain to hear, “is not getting caught.” His solemn face turned to face Joe fully, as if to impress him with this wisdom.

  “Right. And the secret of success is speed.”

  “How d’you figure speed?”

  “In and out. Bing, bang. No time for chitchat. No time for somebody to do a make on your face. Just slam in there at closing time, the last customers in the place. Make the guard lock up. No more visitors, right? Now it’s hand over the cash, lock everybody in the vault, out the back door and home free.”

  Sam’s eyes, so dark and grave, had been following this action-packed adventure yarn with little up-and-down jumps, as if viewing it on a small-screen television set. Now his eyes swung up to glance into Joe’s. “What makes you think it’ll go that smooth?”

  “Because I know banks. Christ, I did time in plenty of them. I know the routine. I know where the warning buzzers are. I know what to do about the fucking overhead cameras. I know about the marked bills they always try to hand you for loot. I know the little signals like pulling a shade or not pulling a shade. I know the whole routine, baby. You’re dealing with a real pro.”

  “Good. Then you don’t need no amateur like me lousing you up.” Sam took a long swallow of beer, as if he had clinched the fact that he was out of the deal.

  “I need a hotshot with a cannon,” Littlejoe bounced back at him. “I need somebody behind my back I can trust, somebody to ride herd on the people while I clean up the loot. There is nobody I know on this earth I can trust the way I know I can trust you, Sam.”

  Neither spoke for a long moment. The tune on the jukebox changed from a strident, shouting soul number to a Latin beat. In the relative quiet, the woman who had been trying to talk to Sam let out a shriek of laughter from across the taproom as she talked to a man in flared white ducks and a horizontally striped French sailor’s shirt. Whether she had told him about Littlejoe or not, both of them turned to eye Joe and Sam.

  Joe wondered if this was the kind of place where he could take the schmuck in white ducks apart and still make a clear escape, the way he had in Mick’s leather bar. Probably not. The place didn’t have a Maf look. The customers seemed to be here only for booze and food, not for the something special only a Maf joint could buy the protection to offer.

  He had a sudden inspiration. “Suppose I tell you,” he said to Sam, gently touching his chest with the tip of his finger, “that this entire caper is backed up by Mick’s boys?”

  “Huh?”

  “Suppose I guarantee total Maf cover for the whole job?”

  Sam’s eyes shifted this way and that, a sure sign, Joe knew, that he had begun to consider the proposition seriously. “What kind of cover?”

  “Like taking care of the cops up front. Before we even make our move.”

  “Mick can promise that?”

  “The Maf can.”

  “Why should they?” Sam asked.

  Littlejoe answered quickly, as if speaking the prearranged truth. “For a cut of the action, what else? A cut of my share,” he added immediately.

  Sam’s black eyes narrowed. “What’s your share?”

  “Well, we got three on the job, you, me, and somebody to drive the car. We got to take care of Don, too,” Joe continued, fantasizing smoothly. “So that’s four. Don’s part isn’t risky, so he gets ten percent. That leaves ninety for three guys. I take fifty. You take thirty. The driver gets ten, like Don.”

  Sam’s lips moved slowly, adding up the numbers. “Tell it to me in dollars.”

  “Right. If we score big, say a hundred grand, ten grand goes to Don, ten to the driver, fifty to me, and thirty grand to you.”

  Sam blinked. “That much?”

  Littlejoe said nothing. Instead of explaining again that it all depended on how much was in the till, he decided to let Sam mull it over on the basis of thirty thousand dollars for his own pocket. He expected that the next thing Sam’s mind would balk at would be the largeness of Joe’s percentage, but he was wrong.

  “How much do you have to give the Maf?”

  “Twenty grand.”

  “So that leaves you with thirty, same as me. It ain’t fair, Littlejoe.”

  “Who’s to say? With Maf cover, everything is possible.”

  “But you deserve more, you’re dreaming up the whole gig.”

  Joe nodded philosophically. “That’s life, baby. Without the Maf, we wouldn’t move. With it, we’ll all be rich.” He wondered if he ought to gild the fantasy with an equally imaginary cut for Mick, then decided the ins and outs of Mafia percentages would only confuse Sam.

  In truth, if he asked Mick to arrange for Maf cover, the boys would take a flat 50-percent cut, for which they might or might not deliver real protection, depending on whether they had the cops in that particular neighborhood on their pad or not. Some precincts were captained by honesty freaks, who transferred payoff cops somewhere else. In such precincts the Maf couldn’t protect anybody, even itself. It simply didn’t operate in such neighborhoods. Fortunately, there weren’t that many honest areas in town.

  He glanced at Sam, who had finished his beer. He wondered how convinced the kid was and whether he ought to come up with some other story to bolster the ones he’d already told. “Whadya say, Sam?”

  The corners of Sam’s beautifully chiseled mouth turned down in a gesture of resignation. “When do we move?”

  “A day or two.”

  “You got some heat?”

  “I can get a few from a relative upstate,” Joe promised.

  Again Littlejoe found it hard to read Sam’s face. Was he in or out? “Those are details I take care of,” he promised.

  “Um, yeah. Listen.”

  “What, baby?”

  “See if he can get me a forty-five Colt automatic, one of those sidearms the shore patrols carry. They’re government issue. No problems with ammo, either.”

  Littlejoe felt a wave of relief. “You got it, baby,” he said and gave Sam a slap on the back, but gently.

  7

  A week passed, in which Littlejoe learned a lot about people he thought he knew everything about.

  Take his upstate relative, the one who was supposed to supply guns. He ran a sporting-goods shop outside Buffalo, and a beverage-distribution company, and a small truck line, and the minute you asked him for a favor he got instant deafness. It was like a door slammed, but secretly, because in public nobody was supposed to stiff a member of the family the way Vinnie had stiffed his niece’s boy, Littlejoe. Phony guinea bastard.

  Anyway, Joe thought now, sitting in the quiet of the Queens bar and sipping his third Rheingold of the afternoon, he’d promised Sam that he would be in charge of such details, and he was. Cousin Mick had come up with a GI carbine with three five-round clips of .30-30 slugs, hollow-nosed for more stopping power. That was good, but awkward to have around in Gino’s car.

  That simple-minded father-in-law of his hadn’t yet tumbled to the fact that Tina’s husband had swiped the Mustang for good. A permanent heist. And, since Joe had been careful not to go anywhere near Tina or the kids or his mother, there was no way Gino could ask for the car back, unless he wanted to go to the
cops, which he didn’t. How would it look, fingering your own son-in-law?

  So the carbine, wrapped in a green-and-blue beach towel, had been shoved under the carpeting on the floor of the Mustang’s trunk, where only Sam knew about it.

  As for the .45 automatic, Littlejoe had had even more of a hassle. Mick’s source wanted five cees for such a gun. It seemed to be a popular item, because a lot of guys who had been in the service were familiar with it and had qualified on it at target practice. In addition to stopping power, the tumbling .45 slugs—which chopped through a man like a hammer blow—were fairly accurate at close range.

  Finally, just last night, Joe had gone for drinks with a guy he knew around the Village, a political type, young hustler eager for votes and just breaking in with Tammany. He’d taken him for drinks to his club on Thompson Street, one of those Old Country joints with a wop name which meant it was used for private target practice, down in concrete ranges beneath the basement, where the noise didn’t alarm the neighborhood.

  They’d had a few blasts of booze while the pol sized up Joe about his off-and-on connection with one of the bigger groups that demonstrated for the rights of gays. He was trying to figure out, Joe knew, whether there was a solid block of votes available to him if he took the risk and supported laws protecting gays against cop harassment.

  He’d left Joe in the bar to make some telephone calls and Joe had wandered back into the locker room to take a leak. The amazing thing was that none of the lockers was locked, not one. The members trusted each other—typical Old Country idiocy.

  In the third locker Joe opened he found two matched Colts in Marine Corps black leather holsters. He removed the magazine from one .45 and took it with the other gun, also loaded, slipping them into his belt behind his back, where his jacket would hide them. When he left the politico later on, he went immediately to his East Tenth Street pad and carefully wrapped the gun, with its two magazines—eighteen shots in all—in a dish towel of tan Irish linen. When the street grew quiet, about two A.M., he drove downtown to a deserted side street off the financial district near the entrance to the Brooklyn Battery tunnel, where he hid the wrapped gun next to the carbine in the trunk of the car.

  The last person in the world he had expected to let him down was Don, who had chickened badly when faced with a real demand for information. Littlejoe had met him three times in the past week without getting a line on a likely bank. Finally he had had to threaten blackmail.

  “Give me the goods,” he’d told Don, “or I tell your boss at Chase about your private life.”

  It wasn’t much of a threat, because, like most big-city banks, Chase was happy to get any kind of worker at all, let alone one with a square, steady background. If he’d told some boss that Don was secretly gay, he’d probably only have confirmed what everyone already had suspected. Maybe his boss was that way too. So as a threat it really didn’t have much leverage.

  Oddly enough, however, it worked. Joe had counted on panicking Don with the threat so that he didn’t have the time to think about the situation but was stampeded into coughing up information. He did.

  The bank stood diagonally across the boulevard from the tavern in which Joe was now sitting. His information was that on Thursday the bank always held at least fifty grand for a Friday-morning payroll from a nearby bakery, whose yeasty smell perfumed the air of the whole neighborhood.

  Watching the façade of the bank now, sipping his beer and thinking about nothing much in particular, Joe saw that they were in for another heat wave, even worse than last week’s. Waves of heat from the pavement and the truck traffic made the air shimmer, gave the image of the bank a ghostly look, as if it wasn’t really there.

  The bar was a particularly good place from which to case the bank because, unlike a lot of small neighborhood bars in Queens, it wasn’t empty during the business day. Evidently the bakery worked in a series of shifts. At any daylight hour, Joe soon found out, there were a dozen people, mostly men, arguing over shots of Seagram’s Seven-Crown with a Seven-Up chaser, or watching soap operas on the color TV set, or trying to make out with some of the biddies they worked with who accompanied them to the bar for a quick one.

  Joe could never quite figure if they had gone off shift and were on their way home or were going on shift and had paused before work for a snort or two. It didn’t really matter. He didn’t want to be the lone customer in the tavern, and he wasn’t.

  “. . . say the President is still the President and if we ain’t got the President we’re shit without no president,” one of them was shouting.

  “That’s just what we are,” somebody yelled back at him, “up shit creek without no president.”

  “Every president is a thief. Every prime minister and king is a crook.”

  “Shit they’re crooks. Jack Kennedy wasn’t no crook, Harry Truman wasn’t no crook. FDR wasn’t no crook. Ike Eisenhower wasn’t no crook. The fucking foreigners are laughing up their fucking sleeves at us. They hate us anyway, and now they got us marked down for a bunch of feebleminded slobs.”

  “Who are you to go against the rest of the country, something special? We elected him President. So he’s a thief president. But, shit, he’s our thief.”

  “You can say that again. The whole fucking country’s full of thieves cheating on their taxes, stealing from supermarkets, robbing the fucking insurance companies blind on hospitalization and auto damage, cheating on their husbands and wives, lying about expense money, cheating on overtime pay.”

  “Listen to who I gotta be sorry for now, the insurance companies? The biggest thieves in the whole world?”

  “Next to the telephone company.”

  “Please, don’t get me started.”

  Joe turned away to hide a smile. He glanced at the clock over the bar and saw the time was three o’clock. But his wristwatch, which he set every morning by the radio time check, showed that it was two fifty-eight. He watched a woman pushing a baby stroller rush up to the bank. A black guard let her in. He held the door open for a moment, glancing at his own wristwatch, then closed and locked the door.

  Littlejoe continued to look. What happened next was instructive. Another customer hurried up. He rapped on the window, and the guard waved him away. Instead of leaving, the man stayed there, evidently spotting a customer inside the bank who would have to be let out. A moment later the guard allowed the mother with the stroller to leave, but he still refused to let the man inside. Time: three five.

  Good to know the guard obeyed the clock no matter what. As a customer, Joe hated guards who were slaves to the clock. But he liked knowing this one could be counted on to keep out anybody who arrived after three sharp.

  The routine of the branch bank wasn’t that complicated. A few days of watching had uncovered it for Joe. He’d used three different places from which to do his spotting, this tavern being the most recent.

  He knew the bank’s morning opening procedures and he knew its closing routine, down to the fact that at three ten the guard lowered a Venetian blind on the southeast corner of the building so that, when the prowl car drove by at some time between then and three twenty, it kept right on going. This elementary security routine was what Joe had wanted to know. Each bank had its own, usually involving the raising or lowering of a blind, the placement of a window sign, the turning off or on of a light.

  Tomorrow was Thursday. Littlejoe was looking forward to casing the job one more day, to see how the cash was delivered, whether by bank truck or Brink’s or what, and when the delivery was made. Then he’d have a whole week to check out the routine one more time and make sure there were no slipups. That was the way he’d worked it out with Don, who had been cooperative once he’d been forced to help. As he sat there nursing his beer, Joe couldn’t help thinking that Don had been almost too cooperative.

  Was it possible he was planning to blow the whistle? There were a lot of ways of doing it, including the good old American-as-apple-pie anonymous telephone call. But Littlejoe f
elt that, if he were in Don’s shoes—passed over for fifteen years, never promoted—if given the chance to play hero, he’d want all the credit for tripping up the heist. It was a clear shot at a promotion. In fact, looking back over the whole thing as he sat there in the tavern, Joe began to wonder if he hadn’t been set up for this just to make a hero out of Don.

  Stranger things had happened. You didn’t get to be a hip legend in your own time by believing everything that was laid in front of you. Or, if Don wasn’t that clever, you didn’t pull off daring daylight heists on information squeezed reluctantly out of a frightened closet queen who might have second thoughts and turn in your ass out of sheer fear.

  It dawned on Joe as he finished his beer that he had worked himself into a tight spot. Sooner or later the big-shot creep whose .45 he had stolen would miss the gun and start making inquiries. Sooner or later Don’s nerve would give and he’d figure a way of turning a minus into a plus for himself. Sooner or later his cousin Mick would wonder what the carbine was for and the Maf would muscle in on the whole caper. Sooner or later Tina and her father would get fed up and put the Mustang on the police stolen list. Sooner or later Lana would leave him for somebody who could pay for her operation. Sooner or later his upstate relative would start to ask questions. Sooner or later Sam would have second thoughts, remember how bad jail had been, and crap out of the whole deal. Sooner or later . . .

  There were too many loose ends, too many leftovers. Too much hanging over his head. But one thing could solve all his problems.

  Joe got to his feet with such a violent movement that his elbow knocked over the empty beer glass. The bartender glanced questioningly at him. Joe shook his head. He went to the door and hesitated before opening it, before going out into the thick, damp heat of another dog day afternoon.

  “. . . and it’s thieves like you who want a thief in the White House. Otherwise his ass would’ve been out of there so fast it’d make your head spin.”

  “You better believe it, buster. Thieves like me and fifty million others. Why should we elect some honest square to front for us? We want somebody just like us, and boy, have we got him.”