Dog Day Afternoon

by Patrick Mann

  “. . . yeah, but not hot pretzels. Cool stuff, Al. Another wagon of them Eye-talian ices would go good.”

  “See if he has any Fudgsicles,” Moretti growled.

  The cop’s eyes shifted sideways. “Uh, Al, you got any Fudgsicles?”

  Moretti shook his head sadly and walked out on the street. Baker had been standing there for the past fifteen minutes, steely blue eyes fixed on the bank, where, inside, both hostages and culprits had just finished the last of their pizzas.

  “Give you a warm feeling, Moretti?” Baker asked. “The world is getting to be quite a place when you can stick up a bank, take hostages, and for your reward you get three kinds of pizza, a million dollars, and a trip to the moon.”

  “Don’t forget having your wife hand-delivered to the scene,” Moretti added. “Has anybody heard what’s keeping them with her?”

  “She’s on the way,” Baker said. “Maybe she can talk some sense into him.”

  “Not Nowicki. He doesn’t listen to anybody. He’s what they call inner-directed.”

  Baker’s eyebrows went up. “Fancy talk for a pint-sized Polack punk.”

  Moretti waved a finger from side to side. “Careful, Baker, his mother’s Italian.”

  The two men eyed each other. Baker assayed a tight smile that barely disturbed the steely set of his lips. Man of iron, Moretti noted. Able Baker, Stainless Man of Steel.

  “Let’s . . . have . . .” a voice from the crowd howled, the words spaced out as if shouting them were agonizing, “. . . some . . . action . . . coppers!”

  Baker inclined the top of his close-cropped gray head in the direction of the yelp. “The animals are restless.”

  Moretti nodded. “I wish the boys across the street were getting itchy. Maybe I could talk a deal with them.”

  “With animals like that?” Baker’s cold eyes lidded halfway. “You can’t talk to garbage. You can’t make deals with filth.”

  Moretti nodded again. “Let me ask you something, Baker,” he said then. “If that’s the way you feel about the crowd and the crooks, what are you in this business for? Why stay in it?”

  Baker snorted. “It’s a career, Moretti, same as yours. You do the best you can, you get more authority. I don’t have to tell you how the game is played.”

  “Yeah, but why a career keeping crooks from creaming the crowd, if one is garbage and the other a bunch of animals?”

  Baker started to answer, then thought better of it. “I’m no sociologist.”

  “It’s just that I can’t figure out why a bright person spends his life trying to protect the public from the criminals it spawns. If you believe they’re not worth it.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Okay, I picked up too fast.” Moretti removed his hat and mopped the top of his head. “I misunderstood. Let it go at that.”

  “Fine.” Baker thought for a moment. “There are some fine people in the world,” he said then. “But you don’t find them gawking around a police stakeout, do you?”

  “Depends what you mean by fine. I said let it go. Zeit gezundt.”

  “No, I want to straighten you out,” Baker insisted. “I don’t hate these people. Get that straight. I may feel sorry for them. I may think they need straightening out. But I don’t hate them. How could you? Most people are children, anyway.”

  “Um.” Moretti turned and went back inside the insurance office. He picked up the telephone and got his precinct house. “Dave, what’s holding up the car with the wife?”

  “Any second now, Sarge. They tracked her down in Manhattan. She’s not in good health, apparently. I don’t know the whole story. But they’re in Queens now. It’s a matter of minutes.”

  Moretti hung up. He watched Baker through the window. Even inside the air-conditioned office Moretti was still damp and uncomfortable. Outside, in the heat of the evening, Baker didn’t even look rumpled. But, what the hell, the FBI didn’t hire anybody with sweat glands. Moretti made a face.

  He had to stop blaming everything on Baker. Baker wasn’t the enemy. He was just another guy pretending to be a machine. The country was full of them, dehumanized people programmed to “do a job,” to “handle the situation,” real “take-charge guys” who would “walk over their grandmother” if ordered to because they were “hard-nosed, can-do guys” who “played to win,” even if it meant “acceptable losses.” The first loss was themselves.

  The detective grinned lopsidedly. Imagine Gaetano Moretti walking over his grandmother. She’d hit him with a broom, old and tiny as she was.

  Maybe dealing with crime did that to people like Baker. Moretti had seen his own morality sink over the past twenty years, not just the deals Mulvey demanded from him, but smaller things, slippages of morality that were justified by the need to “get along” so as not to “rock the boat” or “let down the team,” compromises in the name of “the way it is” in a “cold, cruel world” where “nice guys finish last” and if you didn’t do it “they’d find someone else.”

  Slowly, you sank to the level of the people with whom you spent most of your life, criminals. Slowly you began to share not only a common jargon but a common view of life and a common morality, based on “taking care of Number One.”

  All those crummy, second-hand slogans borrowed from high-school athletic teams.

  Moretti supposed now that it was this that accounted for the high divorce rate among non-Catholic cops. It wasn’t the late hours or the irregular duty. It wasn’t the new wife trembling at home for the safety of her bridegroom among the uncaged street animals. It was the fact that after two, three years, the boy she had married was gone. A stranger had taken his place, who acted and spoke and thought like a hood.

  He watched Baker coming in. “I think the wife’s here,” he said. “Listen, before you go out there, give a thought to what I suggested before.”

  “What, the tear gas?”

  “No, just pull the switch on their power across the street. In the excitement, while you deliver the wife, we just cut the power. There’s a terrific psychological edge when they’re sitting in the dark like rats in a hole, sweating in the heat with searchlights blinding them. It works, Moretti. You know it does.”

  Moretti stuck his head out the door. In the distance a phalanx of four burly cops was making a route through the crowd for a tall, sleek woman, made even taller by her platform shoes with six-inch heels. Even at this distance, her platinum hair looked unreal.

  “Here she comes,” Moretti hummed, “Miss America.” He turned back to Baker. “I don’t like the idea of shutting off power, but I haven’t got anything better to suggest.”

  “I’ll handle it,” Baker assured him.

  Moretti advanced into the combat zone, walking to the center stripe of the roadway. The cops had cleared a way for Joe’s wife and were escorting her toward Moretti. From the crowd behind them came a few whistles.

  “Joe!” Moretti called. “We have your wife.”

  He watched Joe drop an unfinished wedge of pizza and come to the door. As the woman advanced toward Moretti, her walk became looser. Her hips swayed with the effort of walking on the platform shoes. The crowd began to yip and hoot.

  “Oh, Joe!” someone called.

  “Oh, Joey, oh, Joey!”

  “Hey, doll, I’d rob a bank for you any day.”

  The comments were drowned in rhythmic clapping in time to the woman’s saunter. Finally, when she got within a few yards of Moretti, he saw the runny mascara as thick as cake frosting, and the wide-rouged mouth. He saw the immense false lashes. He also spotted the stubbly cheeks and chin.

  “What is this?” he asked one of the escorting officers.

  The man produced a wide grin. “You tell us, Sarge.”

  “This is the one he asked for, Lana Lee?”

  “Little wifie-poo in the flesh,” another cop said.

  “Christ,” Moretti said as Joe walked out into the street. “Faggots!”

  “Hey,” Joe said weakly, “Mo
retti, what about all that mutual respect you were asking for?”

  Moretti’s head was shaking. “Faggots,” he repeated softly, as if to himself.

  Whether they had just heard it or had just realized what Lana was, people in the crowd quickly got the idea.

  “Faggot!” one man cried out.

  “Faggot drag queen!” somebody else shouted.

  The air was suddenly choked with hooting and booing and the sound of wet kissing and sucking noises.

  “Suck this, Joe!”

  “Douse ’em with gasoline!”

  “Burn the faggots!”

  Abruptly, Lana moaned, a harsh sound, like some exotic bird of prey. Moretti turned to her. He saw her dropping. She went down in a sexy tangle of long bare legs, fainting dead away on the hot pavement. Her tight miniskirt slid up over her legs almost to her crotch.

  Moretti’s glance went up her legs, a conditioned reflex of discovery, the constant search for a quick, snickering peek at what lay at the juncture of a woman’s legs. Then the detective grinned shamefacedly at himself. What a reflex it was, how powerful. Knowing this was a transvestite, knowing he had the same thing between his legs as Moretti, and yet still programmed by a lifetime to snatch a peek. Moretti shook his head at his own stupidity.

  Nevertheless, he thought, drag queen or not, this red-hot cutie could be the miracle I need.

  19

  The silence inside the bank was profound. No one spoke as Joe came back through the heavy glass door. No one said anything as he stood just behind the small picture window and watched the scene outside on the street. Not even Sam had a comment to make when Lana went down in a dead faint.

  Littlejoe watched Moretti trying to bring Lana back to consciousness. Joe knew her “faints.” She was as strong as an ox, but she was tripping on so many uppers and downers that she hardly knew whether to shit or wind her watch.

  He’d seen her pull faints before, once even on him, who knew her better. She always asked herself, “What would a lady do in a situation like this?” and if the answer was to faint, she flopped.

  Sighing bitterly, Joe turned away from the window. He saw that everyone, even Sam, was watching the long-legged figure sprawled on the asphalt outside, a small knot of cops around her.

  “She’s getting better at it all the time,” he called to Sam.

  The boy’s dark eyes blinked. “Lana Lovely. What a phony.”

  Slowly, almost unwillingly, the glances of the bank employees broke away from the scene on the street as the significance of what was happening began to sink in: Marge was the first to pull her head together, Joe noticed.

  “Hey,” she said then. “Listen, Joe.”

  “Yeah, doll?”

  “Joe, is that . . .” Her voice died away. Then she started up again after refraining her thought: “I can hear what the crowd is shouting out there.”

  “Yeah?”

  Marge’s eyes shot sideways to Boyle, as if looking for support. His glance was fixed on the top of his desk, as if unwilling to look up at any more crude reality. “I mean, that girl is your wife?” Marge persisted.

  “Yeah.”

  “But she’s not—uh . . . she’s really . . .” Marge stopped. “I mean, she’s a fella, is that it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But . . .” Marge’s mouth worked for a second, framing words and letting them die unsaid. “But that’s why the crowd is shouting ‘faggot’ then.”

  “Yeah.”

  “At her. Him.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And at you?” She’d finally spit it out, Littlejoe saw. It was like a big hunk of phlegm stuck in her throat and she couldn’t swallow it or cough it up, but, by God, she was going to try. And succeed.

  Having hawked it out on the floor for everybody to look at, Marge now fell silent. Joe watched her for a moment, then turned to Boyle, suddenly, savagely. “Let’s hear from you, Mr. Family Man. Any shouts of ‘faggot’ from you?”

  Boyle’s chubby face looked drawn. His eyes refused to rise, but shifted sideways to examine something completely fascinating at the edge of his desk that he had never before noticed in his entire life.

  “I’m talking to you, Boyle,” Joe bored in. “Now you know who heisted your precious little corner of Chase’s precious little world. Two asshole bandits. Two fatherfuckers. And it’s killing your Irish soul, isn’t it.”

  “Hey,” Boyle said in a weak voice.

  “The language,” Marge chimed in. “I got young gir—”

  “Fuck the young girls,” Littlejoe cut in. “And I’ve fucked my share. You too, huh, Boyle, and some of the older ones too, right? Zoftig titties and all, Mr. Guardian of Catholic Morality?”

  Boyle’s eyes finally lifted to look at Joe directly. “Hey, listen,” he said then. “Listen.”

  “I want to hear. I’m listening. Speak.”

  “Joe,” Boyle said at last, his voice so quiet that it hardly reached across the lobby. “I’m out of words, Joe. This has been quite a shock.”

  “You’d have plenty of them if I wasn’t holding a gun.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “You’d be quick with the judgments, Mr. Holy Name Society.”

  “Take it easy, Joe.”

  “But I don’t only hold the gun, I hold the cards, the whole fucking deck, Boyle. I’m like Superman. I can see through steel. I can see your little scummy office love affair, and that gives me more power than this thirty eight. I can tell Sam to wipe you out in the next five seconds and that would be it. But that’s only life-and-death power. I also have the power to bad-name you till the end of time. I can hang a sign on your tombstone that will keep your wife and kids and mother and sisters and priest in tears forever. Adulterer. Christ, it’s almost too good. What if that crowd out there wasn’t yelling ‘faggot’ at the top of their lungs? What if they were yelling ‘adulterer’ at a good Catholic husband and father like you?”

  Boyle’s baldish head had started to shake from side to side. Marge touched his arm. “Take it easy on him, Joe,” she said. “You made your point.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Littlejoe said in a lower voice. “Because you know what? Nobody’d yell anything like that at him. ‘Adulterer’ isn’t a curse word. Only ‘faggot’ is.”

  “But you’re not really . . . ?” Marge’s voice died away again.

  “What?”

  “I mean, back there in the vault before?”

  “I copped a feel?” Joe found himself grinning suddenly. “And that somehow is too wild for your brain, huh?”

  Marge watched him for a long moment. Then her lips twisted slightly in an answering grin, “I’ll be damned,” she said then. “You’re really something, Joe. You . . . you want to get the best of both worlds, is that it?”

  Neither of them spoke for a moment, because Boyle had started to come out of his trance. He moved around his desk and walked toward Joe. “Let me get this straight,” he began, his voice higher than normal. “What went on there in the vault?”

  “You mean,” Joe said, “the vault where Eddie is lying in a pool of blood now?”

  “I asked you something, mister.”

  “You mean where you’re going to be lying on top of Eddie in a double pool pretty soon?”

  Boyle stood still. He had stopped about a yard from the tip of the .38 revolver Littlejoe was holding. Now his puffy face started to wrinkle. His eyes squeezed shut. He covered his face with his hands and turned away, sobbing. “Jesus,” he mumbled. “Jesus, what’s happening?”

  “Go back and sit down,” Joe ordered. He watched the manager turn and stumble back to his desk. Boyle buried his face in his arms, as if to shut out everything, sight, and sound as well. Marge bent over him warily, then began stroking the hair at the back of his head. Boyle shook his head impatiently, and she stopped.

  “Love is funny, or it’s sad,” Littlejoe crooned softly. “It’s a good thing, or it’s bad.” He started to laugh softly and looked up at Sam. “Some day when th
is is all over, Sam, and we’re lying on some beach far away from here and remembering the good old days, remind me to send Boyle a wire and ask him to write me all those thousands of bad words he would have laid on me. Right now he’s got them all corked up inside him, huh?”

  “Bad to keep that stuff inside,” Sam agreed.

  Littlejoe’s eyes, watching Sam, began to unfocus slightly. The scene grew fuzzy for a moment. The two of them on a beach? Some day? Did he really want to spend the rest of his life with a guy who liked to kill? Had to kill?

  20

  By the time Moretti had gotten things quieted down in the block-long corridor of hell he was supposed to be controlling, the time was past eight and the sky was really beginning to darken.

  Through his shoulders, feeling it like a jungle cat, Moretti could tell that the crowd was doing two contradictory things at the same time: settling in for a long wait and losing patience. He could stand on the center stripe, as he was doing now, his gaze on the glass façade of the bank, and feel the mob’s mood through his arm muscles, or his guts. He’d been a New York cop too long to ignore such feelings. They meant he had a whole new problem. In addition to settling the standoff with Littlejoe, he now had to keep the mob in line as well.

  A doctor had done several things to Lana as she sprawled rather artistically on the pavement. He had propped up her head on a rolled coat. He had snapped an ampule of amyl nitrite under her nose, and he had laid a handkerchief, wrung out in cold water, over her forehead. He had also injected 5 c.c.s of glucose-saline solution, on the not altogether sound hunch that the faint was from heatstroke.

  Littlejoe had retreated into the bank in the face of howls of “fag-got, fag-got, fag-got” from the crowd, which now, finally, had a universal slogan to chant.

  Until this moment, Moretti knew, the mob had been of two minds, for and against Joe. Now they could no longer afford to support any of his actions, for fear of being considered as gay as he.