Women's Wiles

by Joyce Harrington

  “What’d you do? You didn’t hurt her, did you?”

  “I had to give her a shove on my way out and she fell down, but she wasn’t hurt bad. I could hear her screaming at me all the way down the block.”

  In the morning paper Carol read that the elderly woman had suffered a broken hip in the fall, and for a moment she felt sick. That evening she confronted Tony.

  “It wouldn’t have happened if I’d had a lookout to honk the horn when the old lady came back. I didn’t want to hurt her!”

  She believed him, and calmed down a little. “A lookout?”

  “How about it, babe? You could do it.”

  “Me?”

  “Why not?”

  “No, thanks! I’m not going to end up in prison with you! I like my freedom too much.”

  She was cool to him the rest of the evening, and he said no more about it.

  When he phoned the following evening, she told him she was sick and refused to see him. She spent a long time thinking about the old woman with the broken hip and even considered sending flowers to the hospital. But in the end she did nothing, and a few days later she saw Tony Loder again. Nothing more was said about the old woman or his need for a lookout, and he no longer told her his detailed stories of the day’s activities. She was almost afraid to hear them now.

  Around the end of October, half the girls on her production line were laid off, including Carol. Standing in line at the unemployment office, she thought about the bleak Christmas season ahead, and about Tony’s offer. It meant money, and more than that, it meant excitement. It meant being with Tony, and sharing in a kind of excitement she’d dreamed of, but never really experienced.

  That night she asked him, “Do you still want a partner?”

  The first few times were easy.

  She sat in the car across the street from the house he was hitting, waiting to tap the horn if anyone approached.

  No one did, and for doing nothing he gave her a quarter of his take. It amounted to $595 the first week—more than she’d earned in a month on the production line.

  Once during the second week, Carol honked the horn when a homeowner returned unexpectedly from a shopping trip. Then she circled the block and picked Tony up. He was out of breath, but smiling. “Got some jewelry that looks good,” he told her. “A good haul.”

  “Sometime I want to go in with you, Tony. Into the house with you.”

  “Huh?”

  “I mean it! I get bored sitting in the car.”

  He thought about that. “Maybe we’ll try it sometime.”

  His voice lacked conviction, but that night she pestered him until he agreed. The following morning they tried an apartment house together, going back to his old crowbar routine. She worked well at his side, but the haul was far less than in private homes.

  “Let me try one on my own,” she said that night.

  “It’s too dangerous. You’re not ready.”

  “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. Were you ready the first time you went into a house alone?”

  “That was different.”

  “Why? Because you’re a man and I’m a woman?”

  He had no answer to that.

  The next morning, they cruised the suburbs until they found a corner house with a woman in the front yard raking leaves.

  “Pull into the side street and drop me off,” Carol said. “She’ll have the door unlocked and her purse just sitting around somewhere.”

  “What if someone’s home?”

  She shook her head. “Her husband’s at work and the kids are at school. Wait down the block for me till I signal you.”

  “All right, but just take cash. No credit cards. That way if you’re grabbed coming out it’s your word against hers.”

  She got out of the car halfway down the block and walked back toward the corner house, feeling the bright November sunshine on her face. She was wearing slacks and a sweater, and her hands were empty. The money, if she found any, would go into her panties.

  The woman was still in the front yard raking leaves, with the corner of the house shielding Carol’s approach. The side door was unlocked as she’d expected, and she entered quietly. It was even easier than she expected—a big black purse sat in plain view on the kitchen table. She crossed quickly to it and removed the wallet inside, sliding out the bills and returning the wallet to the purse. She moved to the living room doorway to check on the woman through the front window, and had an unexpected bit of luck. There was a man’s worn wallet on top of the television set. She pulled the bills from it and added them to the others.

  Only then did she realize the wallet meant there was probably a man in the house.

  She started back through the kitchen and was just going out the door when an attractive red-haired man appeared, coming up the steps from the basement. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

  She fought down the urge to panic and run. He could easily overtake her, or get the license number of Tony’s car. “Is this the place that’s giving away the free kittens?” she asked calmly.

  “Kittens? We don’t have any kittens here.”

  She edged toward the door. “I know it’s one of these houses.”

  “There are no new kittens in the neighborhood. How come you opened the door?”

  Carol ignored his question. “Is that your wife raking leaves? Maybe she knows about them.” She hurried outside and down the steps, walking purposefully toward the front yard.

  The woman was still raking and she didn’t even look in their direction as Tony pulled up and Carol jumped into the car. “My God, there was a man in the house! Let’s get out of here!”

  “Is he after you?”

  “He will be as soon as he checks his wallet. I told him I was looking for free kittens.”

  Tony chuckled and patted her knee. “You’re learning fast.” He turned the car down another side street to make certain they weren’t being followed. “How much did you get?”

  She thumbed quickly through the bills. “Forty-five from her purse and fifty-three from his wallet. Not bad for a few minutes’ work.”

  “From now on you get half of everything,” he decided. “You’re a full partner.”

  His words made her feel good, made her feel that maybe she’d found her place in life at last.

  With the coming of winter, they moved their operations downtown to the office buildings. “I don’t like leaving footprints in the snow,” Tony said.

  Large offices occupying whole floors were the best, because Carol could walk through them during lunch hours virtually unnoticed. Mostly she looked for cash in purses or desk drawers. If anyone questioned her, she always said she was there for a job interview. Once Tony dressed as a repairman and walked off with an IBM typewriter, but both agreed that was too risky to try again. “We’ve got to stick to cash,” he decided. “Typewriters are too clumsy if someone starts chasing you.”

  But after a few weeks of it Carol said, “I’m tired of going through desk drawers for dimes and quarters. Let’s go south for the winter, where there isn’t any snow to show footprints.”

  They didn’t go far south, but they did go to New York. They found an apartment in the West Village and contacted some friends of Tony. “You’ll like Sam and Basil,” he assured Carol. “They’re brothers. I met them in prison.”

  Somehow the words stunned Carol. “You never told me you were in prison.”

  “You never asked. It’s no big secret.”

  “What were you in for?”

  “Breaking and entering. I only served seven months.”

  “Here in New York?”

  “Yeah. Three years ago. And I haven’t been arrested since, in case you’re wondering. That was just bad luck.”

  She said no more about it, but after meeting Sam and Basil Briggs in a Second Avenue bar she was filled with further misgivings. Sam was the older of the brothers, a burly blond-haired man of about Tony’s age. Both he and the slim, dark-haired Basil seemed hyped up,
full of unnatural energy.

  “Are they on heroin?” she asked Tony when they were alone for a moment.

  “No, of course not! Maybe they took a little speed or something.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Just stay cool.”

  Basil went off to make a phone call and Sam Briggs returned to the table alone. He ran his eyes over the turtleneck sweater Carol was wearing and asked Tony, “How about it? Want to make some money?”

  “Sure. Doing what?”

  “A little work in midtown.”

  “Not the park.”

  “No, no—what do you take us for? Hell, I’d be afraid to go in the park at night myself! I was thinking of Madison Avenue. The classy area.”

  Tony glanced at Carol. “We’ve been working as a team.”

  “You can still work as a team. She can finger our targets.”

  “What is all this?” Carol asked. The bar had grown suddenly noisy, and they had to lean their heads together to be heard.

  “Most guys get hit when they’re all alone, on some side street at two in the morning,” Sam explained, eyeing her sweater again as he spoke. “But I got a spot picked out right on Madison. We hit middle-aged guys walking with their wives earlier in the evening—nine, ten o’clock.”

  “Hit them?” Carol asked.

  “Roll them, take their wallets. And their wives’ purses. We’re gone before they know what happened!”

  “Aren’t there a lot of people on Madison Avenue at that time of night?”

  “Not as many as you’d think. I got a perfect corner picked out—there’s an empty restaurant there, and when the offices close down it’s fairly dim.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “Go halfway down the block, pretending to window-shop or wait for a date, and watch for a likely prospect. If a couple come by talking, listen to what they’re saying. If they sound right, just point your finger and we do the rest.”

  Carol was silent for a moment. “There won’t be knives or anything, will there?”

  “Hell, no! What do you take us for?”

  She turned to Tony. “Do you want me to?”

  “We’ve got to live on something.”

  “All right,” she decided. “Let’s do it.”

  Two nights later, on an evening when the weather had turned unusually mild, Carol and Tony met the Briggs brothers at the corner of Madison and 59th. Carol was wearing a knit cap to hide her hair and a matching scarf to conceal the lower part of her face.

  “It’s just after nine,” Sam Briggs told her. “Look for couples with shopping bags, maybe coming from Bloomingdale’s, tourists heading back to their hotels. It’s easiest for us if the man has both hands full.”

  The three men hovered near the corner, glancing into the empty restaurant as if surprised to find it closed. Carol walked up the block toward Park Avenue, letting one man pass who was carrying only a newspaper. She’d been strolling back and forth about five minutes when she spotted a couple crossing Park in her direction. The man, stocky and middle-aged, carried a shopping bag in his left hand and a briefcase in his right. The woman, obviously his wife, carried a tote bag along with her purse.

  Carol followed discreetly along behind them, listening to their conversation until she was certain they weren’t police decoys. About fifty feet from the corner, she signaled a finger at them. When the couple reached Tony and the Briggs brothers at the corner, Sam Briggs walked up to the man and asked for a match. Before the man and woman realized what was happening, Sam punched the man in the face, knocking him backward into Basil’s arms. Tony grabbed the woman as she started to scream and yanked the purse from her hand. Basil had pinned the man’s arms while Sam went for his wallet.

  Then, throwing the man to the sidewalk, they scattered in opposite directions. Carol, walking quickly back to Park Avenue, ducked into the lobby of a hotel and pretended to use the pay phone near the door.

  The whole thing had taken less than a minute.

  They tried it again three nights later, in almost the same location. This time the man tried to fight back, and Sam Briggs gave him a vicious punch in the stomach. The first time they’d gotten $214 plus some credit cards they’d promptly discarded. The second time they realized less—only $67 from the man and $16 from the woman.

  “Everybody carries credit cards now,” Sam Briggs complained later over drinks in his Village apartment. “What good are credit cards to us? By the next day the computer knows they’re stolen.”

  “Let’s go after something big,” his younger brother suggested.

  “Like what—a bank?”

  “Count me out,” Carol said, afraid they might be serious. “I’m having nothing to do with guns.”

  She went to the kitchen to make some coffee and she could hear Tony speaking, in a low tone while she was gone. Later back at their own place, he started in on her. “You got this thing about guns and knives, but sometimes they can actually prevent violence.”

  “Oh yeah? How?”

  “Remember that first time you went into a house alone? Remember how the man came up from the basement and surprised you? Suppose he hadn’t believed your story about the kittens. Suppose he’d grabbed you, and you’d picked up a kitchen knife to defend yourself. You might have killed him. But if you’d been carrying a weapon he wouldn’t have grabbed you in the first place.”

  “I don’t buy that sort of logic, Tony.”

  “Look, you saw Sam Briggs punch that guy tonight. You’re part of it! Suppose there’s some internal bleeding and the guy dies. The simple act of carrying a gun or knife isn’t all that much worse than what we’re doing already.”

  “It’s worse in the eyes of the law.”

  He sighed and tried again. “Look, Carol, Sam and Basil have an idea that can make us a lot of money all at once. We won’t have to go around mugging people on street corners. The thing is foolproof, but we need you to hold a gun on two people for about ten minutes.”

  “In a bank?”

  “No, not in a bank. This is far safer than a bank.”

  “Why can’t you do it without me?”

  “We need a woman to get in the place before they’re suspicious.”

  “Where?”

  “I want Sam to tell you. It’s his plan.”

  “I don’t like that man, Tony. I don’t like the way he looks at me.”

  “Oh, Sam’s all right. He’s a little rough at times.”

  “He’s a criminal!”

  “We’re all criminals, Carol,” Tony reminded her.

  She took a deep breath. “I’ve never thought of myself as one,” she admitted. “Maybe because I’ve never been arrested.”

  “How about it? One big job, and we can live like normal people for a change.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to live like a normal person, Tony. I guess I’ve always been bored by normal people. I was married to one once, and it bored the hell out of me.”

  He put his arms around her. “How about it? One big job? I promise it won’t be boring. You’ll never be bored with me.”

  “One big job…” She remembered them saying that in the movies, and they always walked into a police trap. But this wasn’t the movies, and she knew she’d go along with whatever they wanted of her. She’d go along with it because Tony Loder had made her feel like a real person and not just a cog in some insensitive machine.

  The plan was simple.

  Sir Herbert Miles, the wealthy and successful British actor, maintained a luxury apartment with his wife on Central Park South. They were going to rob him of cash and jewelry, using Carol to penetrate the elaborate security precautions in the building’s lobby.

  “You see,” Sam Briggs explained, sketching a rough diagram on a sheet of paper, “they have a guard at a desk just inside the door. He monitors the elevators and hallways with a bank of closed-circuit TV screens. And nobody gets by him unless they’re a resident or a guest who’s expected.”

  “Then how do I ge
t by?”

  “There’s a night elevator operator as added security, and from eleven o’clock on he sells the following morning’s newspapers. All you do is walk through the revolving doors about eleven-fifteen and ask the man on the desk if you can buy a copy of The Times. He’ll say sure and send you back to the elevator operator. That’s when you take out your gun and cover them both. Make them lie on the floor. We come through the door, take the elevator up to the penthouse, and rob Miles and his wife. In ten minutes we’re back downstairs. You stay in the lobby the whole time.”

  “Why can’t we just tie up the two guards and leave them?”

  “Because another resident might come in and find them while we’re all upstairs. This way if anyone else arrives, you cover them with the gun too.”

  “I couldn’t bring myself to shoot anyone.”

  “You don’t have to shoot anyone. Just hold the gun and they’ll behave. Nobody wants to get shot.”

  Sam gave her a .38 revolver of the sort detectives carried on television. It held five bullets and he showed her how to load and fire it. “That’s all you need,” he said.

  “Will you all have guns too?”

  “Sure, but nobody’ll need to use them.”

  That night, in bed with Tony, she started to tremble and he held her tight. “It’s going to be all right,” he whispered reassuringly.

  She was a long way from the assembly line at Revco.

  The uniformed guard glanced up from his newspaper as she entered. Behind him a half-dozen TV screens flickered their closed-circuit images. “Can I help you, Ma’am?”

  “Someone said you sold tomorrow’s Times here.”

  He nodded and motioned around the corner. “The elevator man has some.”

  She walked down two steps and saw the second uniformed man already folding a paper to hand it to her. The gun came out of her purse. “Not a sound!” she warned.

  The man behind the desk turned toward her and she shifted the pistol to bring him into range. “You too—get down here and lie on the floor! Quickly!”