Prince of Thieves

by Chuck Hogan

  Hitting the sidewalk outside the Foxy Lady was like quitting PlayStation, gravity reclaiming Doug, the night air a chilly hand cupping the back of his neck. Laughter gave way to honking snores at the Massachusetts border, the Monte reeking of spicy Drakkar Noir and stripper sweat as Doug sped back toward Dodge, his orphan mind once again returning to the image of Claire Keesey sitting blindfolded in the van. He crossed the bridge back into Town, turning toward Packard Street for a quick detour-- just one look, her door, her dark windows-- before shuttling his slumbering Townies back home.

  5

  Interview

  "IN A WAY," said Claire Keesey, shrugging, "nothing since that morning's really seemed real to me."

  She was curled up on the maroon cushions of a college rocking chair, the Boston College seal emblazoned over her head like a small sun. Her father's home office took up half of the living room, a desk-and-shelf unit of austere mahogany behind brass-handled French doors. Claire's mother-- tight smile, anxious hands-- had tucked a quilted paper towel beneath the tin BC coaster supporting Frawley's glass of water, as an extra layer of protection. Her father-- gull-white hair over a rare-meat complexion-- had taken the early Friday train to be there to answer the door and eyeball this agent of the FBI.

  Frawley glanced at his Olympus Pearlcorder on the bookshelf near the head of the rocker. The handheld tape recorder had been a gift from his mother on the day of his graduation from Quantico, and every Christmas since, along with the sweater or turtleneck or pants from L.L. Bean-- one year she mailed him bongo drums-- she included a four-pack of Panasonic MC-60 blank microcassettes, For your stocking!

  It clicked over, the tiny spools reversing, thirty minutes gone by. Claire sat with her legs tucked beneath her, arms folded, hands lost inside the cuffs. Her eggshell sweatpants announced BOSTON COLLEGE in a maroon and gold banner down one leg, her loose, green sweatshirt whispering BayBanks over her breast. It looked like a sick-day outfit, though her hair was brushed and smelled faintly of vanilla, and her face was scrubbed.

  "My mother doesn't want me to work at the bank anymore. She doesn't want me to leave the house anymore. Last night, after three or so vodka tonics, she informed me that she had always known something bad was going to happen to me. Oh, and my father? He wants me to get a gun permit. Says a cop friend told him pepper spray is useless, only good on scrambled eggs. It's like, I'm watching them take care of me. Like the thirty-year-old me has gone back in time but is still a child in their eyes. And the scary thing? Sometimes I like it. Sometimes, God help me, I want it." She shuddered. "By the way, they don't believe me either."

  "Don't believe what? Who either?"

  "About nothing happening to me out there. My mother treats me like the ghost of her daughter, back from the dead. And my father's all 'Brrrhrrrhrrr, business as usual, let's rent a movie...' "

  Frawley's first impulse always was to counsel. He reminded himself that he wasn't there to help or to heal, he was there to learn. "Why do you think I don't believe you?"

  "Everyone handling me like I'm porcelain. If people want me to be fragile, watch out, because I can be very fragile, no problemo." She threw up her handless cuffs in surrender. "So stupid, getting into that van. Right? Like a six-year-old on a pink bike, pulled into a van, and not even screaming or kicking. Such a victim."

  "I thought you had no choice."

  "I could have struggled," she argued. "I could have let them, I don't know, shoot me instead."

  "Or ended up like your assistant manager."

  She shook her head, wanting to relax but emotionally unable.

  Frawley said, "I went out to visit Mr. Bearns. He said you haven't been by yet."

  She nodded at the floor. "I know. I need to go."

  "What's holding you up?"

  She shrugged hard inside the baglike sweatshirt, avoiding the answer. "We're trained to help robbers," she said. "You know that, right? To actually help the criminals, and not to resist. Even to repeat their commands back to them, so they know that we're following their orders to the letter."

  "To put the bandit at ease. To get him out of the bank more quickly, away from customers, away from yourself."

  "Fine, okay, but-- helping the thief? Like, rolling over for him? You don't think that's a little whacked?"

  "The vast majority of bank theft is drug addicts looking to score. Their desperation, their fear of being sick, makes them unpredictable."

  "But everything is like, Do what the robber says. Like-- Don't give him dye packs if he tells you not to. Hello? So why do we have them? And-- Be courteous. What other business do they say that in? 'Thank you, bank robber, have a nice day.' "

  Through the side window, Frawley watched two boys tossing around a tennis ball a few backyards away, making showtime catches on a late Friday afternoon. "Speaking of training," he said. "It's written policy at BayBanks for the openers to enter one at a time, the first one confirming that the bank is secure, then safe-signaling to the second."

  She nodded contritely. "Right. I know."

  "And yet this was not your usual practice."

  "Nope."

  "Why not?"

  Shrug. "Laziness? Complacency? We had an all-clear for the tellers."

  "Right, the window shades. But the tellers don't arrive until a half hour after you two. And setting off the silent alarm-- you're trained to wait until it is safe to do so."

  "Again-- what is the point of sounding an alarm after a robbery? Can you tell me that? What is the point?"

  "Mr. Bearns put you both at risk."

  "But you couldn't know that while it was going on," she said, angry suddenly, tearing into him with her eyes. "They were inside the bank, waiting for us when we walked in-- outnumbering us, scaring the shit out of us. I didn't think I was ever walking out of that bank again."

  "I'm not placing blame, I'm only trying to get at-- "

  "So why haven't I gone to visit Davis? Because I couldn't stand to let myself fall to pieces on him. Me, little suburban me, not a scratch on her, safe and fine and hiding out-- at her parents?" She pushed hair off her forehead where there was no hair and looked away. "Why, he asked about me?"

  "He did."

  Her shoulders drooped. "The hospital won't tell me anything over the phone."

  "He's going to lose most of the sight out of one eye."

  Her handless sleeve went to her face. She turned to the window, toward the boys playing catch. He pushed it here, needing to be sure.

  "Broken jaw. Busted teeth. And, unfortunately for me, no memory of that day. Not even of getting out of bed that morning."

  She kept her face hidden. "I'm the only one?"

  "The only witness, yes. That's why I'm sort of counting on you here."

  She watched outside for a while, without actually watching anything.

  "The rest of your staff," Frawley went on. "Anyone there you might consider disgruntled, or whom you could imagine providing someone else with inside information about bank practices, vault procedures-- "

  Already shaking her head.

  "Even unwittingly? Someone who likes to talk. Someone with low self-esteem, who has a need to be liked, or to please others."

  Still shaking no.

  "What about someone who could have been blackmailed or otherwise coerced into providing information?"

  Her face came away from her sleeve-- sad but tearless, squinting at him. "Are you asking me about Davis?"

  "I'm asking about everyone."

  "Davis thinks that being gay-- he's crazy, but he thinks it will hold him back. I told him, look around, half the men in banking live in the South End. This Valentine's Day, he asked what I was doing, and I said, you know, renting Dying Young and watching it alone, what else? And he had no one, so we went out together instead, for Cosmos at The Good Life, had a great time. We've only been real friends that long."

  "Was there anyone new in Mr. Bearns's life? Maybe a relationship gone bad?"

  "I wouldn't know. I never met his fri
ends. He didn't talk about that with me. He was just fun. It was nice having a guy around who noticed when I got my hair cut."

  "So you don't know if he was promiscuous?"

  "Look... they beat him, remember? He's innocent."

  He absorbed her disappointment in him, wondering if there wasn't something behind her flash of anger. The way Bearns was innocent. "So he was ambitious, he was looking to move up?"

  "He was going to business school nights." Defensive now, firmly in Bearns's corner.

  "Not you, though."

  "Me? Nooo."

  "Why not?"

  "Business school?" she said, like he was crazy.

  "Why not? Promotions. Advancement. Four other assistant managers you trained have leapfrogged over you to corporate. Why stay on the customer end?"

  "It's been offered." A little pinch of pride here. "The Leadership and Management Development program."

  "And?"

  Claire shrugged.

  Frawley said, "You can't tell me you love being a branch manager."

  "Most weeks I hate it."

  "Well?"

  She was bewildered. "It's a job. It pays well, really well, more than any of my friends make. No nights, no Sundays. Nothing to take home. My father-- he's a banker. I'm not a banker. I never saw banking as my career. I just-- my career was being young. Young and uncomplicated."

  "And that's over now?"

  She sank a little in the chair. "Like my friends, right? They were supposed to be taking me out that night. My birthday, the big three-oh, whoo-hoo. They rented a limo-- cheesy, right? So I wind up bailing because I'm still in shock from this, and I tell them, you already got the limo, go ahead without me. So they call the next day, going on and on about dinner and the cute waiter with tattooed knuckles and the guys who bought them drinks, and driving up Tremont Street singing Alanis Morissette out of the roof, and Gretchen making out with an off-duty cop outside the Mercury Bar-- and I'm like, my God. Is this who I am? Is that who I was?"

  Frawley smiled to himself. He found her vulnerability attractive, this confused girl with her soul laid bare, struggling with newfound introspection. But he resolved to keep his pursuit pure. He was after these Brown Bag Bandits, not a date with Claire Keesey.

  "I should feel worse, shouldn't I," she said. "People I tell, they give me these looks like, Oh my God. Like I should be in intensive therapy or something."

  He stood and snapped off his tape recorder. It felt like they were done. "It was a robbery. You were an unwilling participant. Don't search for any meaning beyond that."

  She sat up, anxious now that he was preparing to leave. "So weird, my life suddenly. FBI agents showing up at my door. Do you know, I barely recognized you when you walked in today? I only mean that-- I was so out of it when I talked to you last time. It's all a blur."

  "I told you, it's normal. Robbery hangover. Sleep okay?"

  "Except for these dreams, my God. My grandmother, she died three years ago? Sitting on the edge of my bed with a gun in her lap, crying."

  Frawley said, "That's the caffeine. I told you, leave it alone."

  "So you haven't made any arrests yet?"

  He stopped by the doors. Was she stalling him because she wanted information? Or was she interested in him? Or was it simply that she didn't want to be left alone with her folks? "No arrests yet."

  "Any leads?"

  "Nothing I can really talk about at this time."

  "I read about the burning van."

  Frawley nodded. "We did impound a torched van, yes."

  "No money inside?"

  "Sorry-- I really can't say."

  She smiled and nodded, giving up. "I just-- I want answers, you know? I want to know why. But there is no why, is there?"

  "Money. That's the why. Pure and simple. Nothing to do with you." He tucked his kit under his arm. "You staying here a few more days?"

  "Are you kidding me? It's like, if I don't get out of here now, I never will."

  "You're going back to Charlestown?"

  "Tonight. I'm counting the minutes."

  Frawley wanted to remark on the irony of her moving back to bank bandit central, but decided that would only spook her.

  * * *

  FRAWLEY STEERED HIS BUREAU car, a dull red Chevy Cavalier, past mini-mansions with landscaped lawns swollen like proud chests, looking for a road out of Round Table Estates.

  "Everything about her says squeaky-clean," Frawley said into his car phone. "Except for the fact that she's lying about something."

  "Uh-huh," said Dino. "That the only reason you're buzzing around her?"

  "I'm not buzzing," said Frawley, thinking back to her stalling him.

  "Then what are you doing out there, Friday after six?"

  "Canton is on my way home."

  "Every single town on the South Shore of Massachusetts is on your way home, Frawl. You waste three hours a day driving back and forth between Charlestown and Lakeville. I like your devotion to living among the bandits, but this is getting to be an addiction. Frawl."

  "Yeah, Dean?"

  "Spring is in bloom. Know what that means?"

  "A young man's fancy turns to...?"

  "Bank robbing. And buzzing around pretty flowers. You've got approximately sixty hours off ahead of you. That's your weekend, federally mandated and enforced. Take off the tie and get yourself laid. No more running ten miles, stopping to yawn, running ten more. For my sake."

  Frawley hung a left at the end of Excalibur Street. "Copy that. Over and out."

  6

  The Sponsor

  THEY HUDDLED AT THE back of Sacred Heart like father and confessor: the middle-aged man sitting relaxed, his left hand gripping the pew in front of him, gold band glowing brassy in the candlelight; and the younger man, half-turned in the row before him, watching bodies rise from the basement like ghosts wearing the raincoats they died in. The coffeepot downstairs had been emptied and rinsed, all the munchkins eaten, the stirrers and sugars boxed away, the trash bagged and pulled.

  "Good meeting," said Frank G., the middle-aged man, fingers drumming the dark wood. "Crowded tonight."

  "Weekends," agreed Doug M., as he was known here.

  Frank G. was a Malden firefighter, father of two young boys, on his second marriage. In three years, that was the sum total of personal information Doug's sponsor had let slip. Nine years dry, Frank G. was devoted to the program, especially the Anonymous part, even though-- or maybe because-- Sacred Heart was apparently his neighborhood parish. Doug drove fifteen minutes north from Charlestown for every meeting, specifically to avoid having to pour out his soul to familiar faces, which seemed to him very much like taking a nightly dump out on his own front porch.

  "So what's the word here, studly, how's things going?"

  Doug nodded. "Going good."

  "You spoke well down there. Always do."

  Doug shrugged it off. "Got a lot to talk about, I guess."

  "You have a tale to tell," agreed Frank G. "Don't we all."

  "Every time, I say to myself-- just stand up, speak your piece, two or three sentences, sit right down again. And I always end up doing five minutes. I think the problem is, meeting's one of the few places where I make sense to myself."

  Frank G. nodded in his way, meaning I agree, and I've been there, as well as It's all been said before, and at times, Go on. He had the sort of dour, everyman face you find on the can't-sleep guy in a cold-remedy commercial, or the beleaguered car-pool dad suffering from occasional acid indigestion. "It's a gift, having a place like this to go. To sort it all out, keep focused. Some people, it's addictive. Too generous a gift."

  "You noticed," said Doug.

  "Sad-eyed Billy T. Getting off on the shame like that. It's opening night every night with him, rising to sing his song and spill his tears until they drop that curtain. That's his drunk now."

  "Gotta feel that shame, though. Someone like me-- I got nobody to let down, except myself. Nobody at home keeping me honest. Back i
n the Town"-- in meeting, Frank G. had once mentioned growing up in Charlestown, though with Doug he never acknowledged their common background-- "I don't feel it."

  "The stigma."

  "I talk about going to prison for beating someone up in a bar, there it's like, 'Hey, it happens. Some guy needed fine-tuning, but you did your time, you got out'-- like something I hadda endure. Like I been in the army two years. People downstairs here? I mention prison and their eyes bug out, they pull their purses closer. And this is Malden, not some soft suburb-- but it reminds me I'm not always living in the real world, where I am."