Dog Day Afternoon

by Patrick Mann

  Moretti knelt on one knee beside the lengthy sprawl of limb that Lana was displaying. Her lashes had been working up and down now for some time, and she had, with a certain finicky distaste, removed the cool, wet cloth from her brow.

  Behind Moretti, the glass façade of the bank was in darkness. It was impossible to know if anyone was inside or not. Baker had pulled the power, shut it off completely about fifteen minutes before, as the doctor was ministering to Lana. It had been a good choice of timing, because Littlejoe had failed to react, in his anguish over Lana. So had Sam. Or at least, Moretti surmised, Joe had been able to control Sam in this one instance.

  Heavy-duty searchlights were even now being wheeled into place, both the normal kind and a pair of immense klieg lights of the sort used at supermarket openings.

  Once the full candlepower of all these lights was concentrated on the front of the bank, Moretti hoped, it would establish a certain psychological supremacy, as Baker had promised. God knows, they could use every little bit of leverage they had, real or imaginary.

  This one, now, this number sprawled on the hot pavement. She wasn’t exactly the miracle he’d thought she’d be. But, on the other hand, miracles often needed a little help. She felt better. Now was the time to start shaping her up into as much of a miracle as possible.

  “Mrs. Littlejoe,” Moretti began in an undertone.

  From the crowd the huge, tearing sound of someone sucking, mouth pressed against his curled-up fingers to amplify the noise, echoed like a trombone blast.

  Lana glanced at the detective. “I am not into that whole entire insane scene, Lieutenant,” she murmured. “I am not Mrs. Littlejoe or Mrs. Anybody.”

  “You are Lana Lee?”

  She sighed heavily and made her over-rouged mouth into a petulant pout. “Is this going on my record?” she asked.

  “No. You’re not under arrest.” Moretti tried to keep his voice low and reassuring without sounding as if he were trying to make her. It wasn’t that easy.

  “But, I mean, you’re going to have to find out,” Lana went on. “It’s a little confused. I mean, we did go through a form of, like, unreal marriage. But there was a priest and all. So, I guess you could say I was Mrs. Nowicki.” She giggled helplessly for a moment, and her breasts heaved.

  “Bite ’em, Sarge!” someone in the crowd shouted.

  “Fag-got, fag-got, fag-got!”

  “I don’t have to know your legal name,” Moretti said.

  “It’s Albert R—”

  “I don’t have to know,” Moretti insisted. “You’re not being booked for anything. Just tell me you’ll cooperate with us. You’ll talk to that husband of yours. You’ll talk some sense into him.”

  “Is that why you fellows brought me here?” Lana simpered.

  Moretti shook his head. “Littlejoe asked for you.”

  “Me? Like, insane.”

  “You are part of the deal he’s demanding,” Moretti told her. “If he gets you, and a million in cash, and a safe conduct to JFK airport and a jet across the Atlantic, he’ll vacate the premises and give us our hostages unharmed.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  They eyed each other for a long moment. Then Moretti took her hand and helped her to her feet. “Let’s talk about this inside, where it’s cooler. The doctor thinks you may have a mild heatstroke.”

  As he escorted her back to the insurance office, the crowd began to hoot again. “Be gentle, Sarge!” one voice called.

  “Faaa-guht!”

  He ushered her inside and put her in a chair out of range of the crowd but where Littlejoe could see her. Baker, watching, said nothing at first, but it was clear to Moretti that the FBI man was starting to bubble over like an unwatched percolator.

  “I told you,” Baker said then, in a dead undertone. He seemed to have the knack of ventriloquism. It was as if one of the walls had spoken, not he. “Lowest form of animal life,” a chair told Moretti as Baker walked away.

  Lana made a kissing face at Baker’s retreating back. Then, to Moretti: “You don’t have to worry about Littlejoe. He won’t kill anybody. He takes out his entire insane hostility on me, baby. Nobody but yours fucking truly.”

  “He’s got Sam in there with him.”

  Lana’s heavily mascaraed eyes widened, the fake eyelashes flipping far up for a moment. “Ugh. Unreal. No way.”

  “Huh?”

  “I hate, abhor, and detest that little Sam vonce,” she told him. “He’s so screwed-up it isn’t funny. Him . . . him I would worry about. He could kill anybody if he thought he was facing prison again.”

  Moretti nodded calmly, but her statement had plunged him into despair. Mustn’t let it show. He didn’t care if this freak saw how badly he took the news about Sam. But Baker couldn’t know. If it was true, and Moretti knew it was, then they had no way out except total capitulation to Littlejoe’s demands. Or one other way.

  That was why having Lana in custody was so important. She might make the difference, might convince Littlejoe he had to betray Sam.

  That was what it had come down to. Sam was the stumbling block. Only Littlejoe could betray him. And only by betraying Sam could they get the hostages out alive.

  Moretti walked to the window and put his back to it so that if Littlejoe was watching—he had to be!—what went on now would be hidden from him. “How close are the two of you,” Moretti began.

  “Sam and me. Like rat poison, honey. I mean—”

  “You and Joe.”

  “Oh. Unreal. Nowhere.”

  “Come on. He calls you his wife. He obviously wants you with him when he takes off with the million in cash.”

  “No way. Insane.”

  “Come on, Lana, level with me.”

  She splayed her long fingers way out, flashing her dark red nails. “Not that I’m turning down a million,” she went on conversationally, “but all I asked him for was three grand. That’s all it costs.”

  Moretti nodded sympathetically. “What costs?”

  “The operation. It’s a month in Baltimore or Stockholm, but if you go to Casablanca, it’s only two weeks.”

  Moretti closed his eyes. Something he’d read was coming back to him. “The sex-change operation,” he said then, still in his underplayed, sympathetic voice.

  “Of course,” Lana said, as if nothing else could have been meant.

  Moretti’s eyes opened. “You’re saying he robbed a bank to pay for your sex-change operation?” He could almost read the Daily News headlines now.

  “He loathes and detests the idea. He wants me as I am.” Her glance lowered seductively. “But I can’t be the person he wants. He doesn’t own me. I want to be the person I want. A woman.”

  Moretti nodded again, as if this made the greatest sense in the world. “Of course you do,” he said reassuringly. “But once you’re a woman, what’s wrong with the million he’s going to have.”

  “Half a million,” she reminded him. “That vicious little Sam gets his cut.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  Moretti walked over to the door, opened it, and looked out. He had no reason to, but simply wanted Lana to think over the sudden possibility that it wasn’t Sam and Littlejoe against the world, but Lana and Littlejoe against Sam.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Lana demanded after a moment.

  “You look like an intelligent wo—person,” Moretti began, correcting himself in mid-word. “I don’t have to tell you that if Sam starts shooting, the whole thing goes up in smoke. There’s a man back there from the FBI who thinks all of them are garbage. He thinks you don’t deal with garbage, you just burn it. If Sam starts shooting, that’s what’ll happen. We have the firepower concentrated on that bank now to burn Sam and Joe into cinders. Unfortunately, four innocent people will die with them. And, more than that, there’s no ransom, no safe conduct, no jet to Casablanca.”

  Lana’s wondrous eyelashes flickered up and down like hummingbird wings. “A jet to Casablanca?”

&nb
sp; “There is one thing you have to do,” Moretti said. “It’s not hard and it’s not dangerous. Nothing bad can happen to you whether it works or doesn’t work. Even if it fails completely, you’ll still look good in the newspapers and on TV. But if it works, you’ll be a hero.” He started to correct it to “heroine,” but decided it was too late to be that accurate.

  Lana’s glance grew calculating. She did this by wrinkling the skin between her eyebrows. “You mean it’s no skin off my ass either way?”

  “Right. But if it works, you score big.”

  The furrow between her brows deepened. “What do I have to do?”

  21

  “I’m suffocating,” Marge complained.

  “When they turned off the lights,” Joe explained, “they turned off the air conditioning.”

  “Just the news I needed,” Marge retorted.

  “What a mouth.” Littlejoe peered through the darkened lobby at the lighted window of the insurance office across the street, where Moretti was now handing a paper cup to Lana. She drank greedily from it.

  She looked better now. By rights, Littlejoe thought, I should be with her. But he couldn’t bring himself to face the shouting on the street yet. That word. That ugly label. Those ugly people with their sick need to label everything.

  “Littlejoe,” Sam said then, his voice seemingly far away as it came out of the darkness at the rear of the lobby. “You know, in this dark, it ain’t as easy to keep track of these people.”

  “They’ll behave,” Littlejoe assured him.

  “They better.”

  “Stop terrorizing the girls,” Boyle said. He was seated behind his desk, his chin propped on the palms of his hands. “Just stop it. There’s a limit to how much of this abuse we can take.”

  “Yeah?” Joe asked. “If I really started abusing you, Boyle, baby, you’d feel it for a week.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Boyle retorted.

  “You know,” Marge murmured. “He’s talking dirty.”

  “Tell him, Marge,” Joe teased. “Tell him if he isn’t careful, he’ll have to turn tail and play nice little girlie.”

  “Stop that,” Boyle snapped.

  “I need a cigarette,” Marge moaned.

  “Here.” Boyle handed her his pack.

  She shook one loose and put it in her mouth. “Got a light?”

  “Hey,” Sam interrupted. “I thought you never smoked before.”

  “I never did.”

  “Don’t start,” he begged her. “You’re clean. Stay that way.”

  “What?”

  “I mean it, Marge,” Sam pleaded with her. “Once you start, you’re hooked. But you’ve stayed pure all these years. Just hold on. Just hang in there and stay pure.”

  “All what years?” Marge snapped back. “I’m not that old. And as for pure . . .”

  “It’d be a real crime if you started smoking now,” Sam insisted.

  “I don’t believe what I’m hearing,” Marge announced to the darkened room. “It’s okay to rob a bank but it’s not okay to smoke?”

  “I’m serious,” Sam said.

  She stared into the darkness in the direction of his voice. Then, to Joe: “Got a light?”

  Boyle snapped his lighter for her. “Here, Marge. One time can’t kill you.”

  “What do I do?” she asked. “Just pull in smoke?”

  “Till it’s lit.”

  “Marge.” Sam’s voice sounded terribly down.

  “You’re not my father,” Marge called to him.

  The telephone began to ring. Joe picked it up. “What?”

  “Kill them all,” the same peculiar voice whispered.

  He slammed down the telephone. “Every creep in New York is on the phone,” he muttered. “This is their night. This is all for them, what we’re going through, so they can get their jollies. Sam, you realize what we’ll be in a few hours?”

  “Free?”

  “Men without a country. We’ll never be able to go back to the U.S. after this.”

  “ ’S all right with me, Littlejoe.”

  “You’re taking it awful easy. It’s a lot to give up,” Littlejoe mused. “I fought for this country. I might’ve died for it.” He tried to see what was happening with Lana across the street. “I was born here,” he maundered on. “There’s a lot wrong with it, but there’s no better place, is there?”

  “Tell ’em, Littlejoe,” Marge mused. “You’re quite a patriot.”

  At that moment, as if a box of flashbulbs had exploded all at once, the street outside flared brilliant white, and intense glare struck into the depths of the lobby.

  “Searchlights!” Sam yelped, as if in pain.

  “Cool it,” Littlejoe said. “It’s a trick.”

  “To do what?” Boyle asked.

  “To psych us out.”

  As if the searchlights weren’t sharply enough focused, the cops began to move the beams of light this way and that. Abruptly the door of the insurance office opened. Moretti came out, holding Lana by her arm to help her teeter across the pavement on her high platform shoes.

  Several of the searchlight beams zeroed in on the two of them as they started across the street, moving slowly, as if down an aisle to an altar. With her spun-floss hair and sleek figure, Lana looked dressed for some festivity, but perhaps not this one.

  Littlejoe watched them come toward him with mixed feelings. He wanted to talk to Lana, but not in front of the whole world.

  “Sucky-suck-suck!” someone yelled at the top of his lungs.

  “Faaa-guht!”

  Joe went to the door of the bank, which had remained unlocked for some time now. He swung it wide and propped open the heavy Herculite glass with a massive floor-type cigarette receptacle. The outside air was cooler than inside. But there was no breeze to waft it into the bank. Moretti and Lana were halfway across the combat zone now, passing over the center line.

  Joe glanced back into the lobby and saw that Sam had singled out Ellen as a kind of superhostage. He had her sitting straight up in a chair while he stood behind her. With his left hand he cradled her face. His other hand held the .45 automatic against her right eye. She had stopped crying or saying anything some time ago.

  Joe took a stride out into the street.

  “Fag-got, fag-got, fag-got!”

  “Joe sucks!”

  “Burn, faggot, burn!”

  He stood there blinking in the hot lights, one hand shading his eyes, the other holding the .38. His appearance now, for some reason, stirred the dozens of police around him to renewed attention. They seemed to remember him suddenly, and raised their various weapons to draw a bead. He could see muzzles of every caliber pointed at him like so many hungry snouts sniffing the wind for blood. Maybe the searchlights hadn’t had any luck psyching him out, Joe thought, but they seemed to rouse the hunter in the cops again.

  “Look at this street,” he called to Moretti. “Wall-to-wall pig.”

  “That word.”

  “I haven’t heard you toning down the crowd’s language.”

  Moretti paused and removed his hand from Lana’s arm. “Here,” he said then, “this is the first part of your demands. Paid and delivered.”

  Lana gave Moretti a haughty look and then turned the same look on Joe. He felt his heart constrict slightly. The strange animal that lived under his heart seemed to stir in its sleep. She could do that to him. Worse yet, she knew it.

  “Well,” Lana said then.

  “Hi, baby.”

  “What an unreal, insane mess that Sam has dragged you into.”

  “Huh?”

  “I thought you were smarter than to let a little shit like that use you,” Lana went on.

  “Christ,” Joe agonized, “keep your voice down. If he hears you—”

  “Let him. Nasty little animal.”

  “That’s what he calls you,” Joe said then. He had started to get very jumpy, with Lana coming on as salty as she was. She had never bad-named Sam before,
and now was exactly the wrong time to start. “Just cool it, bitch. Sam isn’t using me. I’m u—” He stopped himself. Wrong approach.

  Lana closed the gap between them so that her breasts touched him. The crowd hooted so deafeningly that individual shouts were drowned out. “He’s using you to settle a grudge against the world, baby.”

  Joe’s hand clamped down on her slender arm, halfway between wrist and elbow. He knew from past experience that if he squeezed hard enough he’d leave her with a bruise. She knew it too, so she stopped talking.

  “What kind of shit did Moretti pump into you?” Joe demanded, his glance swerving for a moment to the detective. “He’s standing there right now like a fucking peeping tom, getting off his rocks watching you do his dirty work for him.”

  “That’s so much shit,” Lana said. “The sooner you cut loose from Sam, the b—”

  He stopped her simply by clamping harder on her arm. “You stir up Sam,” he said grimly, “and the first slug is for you, bitch. You got a nerve. The only reason I’m in this mess is because of that crazy operation you have to have.”

  “The operation you don’t want me to have,” Lana retorted. Her last word was spoken in a gasp as Joe tightened his grip. “You’re deliberately doing that,” she moaned. “It’ll be all purple tomorrow morning.”

  “In the morgue,” Joe asked, “who cares?”

  “You’re not shooting anybody,” she said in a low voice. “It’s Sam who wants to kill people. But you’ll end up dead because of him.”

  The obvious truth of this stopped Joe from saying anything further. He glanced past Lana at Moretti, trying to pull his head together. “She does a great job for you, copper. You really programmed her, huh?”

  “She’s got your best interests at heart, Littlejoe.”

  “And that’s bullshit too,” Joe responded.

  He felt better trading insults with Moretti. It was easier than trying to find answers for Lana. She was right: If he ended up dead, it would be because of Sam.

  But he couldn’t betray the kid. He’d talked him into the job to begin with. He’d conned him into it with his horseshit about Mafia coverage and all that crap. Now he couldn’t abandon him, not the way Sam felt about going back into stir. Worse than that, he couldn’t even let Sam suspect he was thinking of such things, because the kid would start shooting.