Graves' Retreat

by Ed Gorman

  “It seems I should ask you a question,” Byron said.

  “Which would be?”

  “Which would be-do you love your father?”

  She thought a long moment. “Yes; yes I do. And I also understand him. I understand that because of his background he does not feel secure in the company of people he considers his betters-you, for instance.”

  “Me?”

  “Of course you. You and your family.”

  “But he’s the richest man in town.”

  “He didn’t even finish high school.”

  Byron sighed. “I know you’re right, Susan. About his feeling insecure. You can see it in his eyes whenever we have a board meeting. Here are these pompous lawyers and factory owners sitting around and at the head of the table is your father, and unless he’s yelling at them he seems-unsure of himself.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So I wouldn’t judge him too harshly. We all have faults.”

  “You’re afraid of him, aren't you?”

  Byron sighed again and averted his eyes. “I suppose I am. A little.”

  “I need to say something, Byron.”

  “What?”

  Now it was her turn to lean closer. “If you don’t stand up to my father, you’ll lose me.”

  “But, Susan-”

  “I want to be married to a man who has enough pride in himself to defend himself.”

  “Please, Susan, please don’t talk like that. About me-losing you.”

  “It’s true, Byron.”

  “But-”

  “I’ve lived with my father’s tyranny all my life. I want my own home to be very different from the one I grew up in. I don’t want it controlled by my father’s rages and whims.”

  He set down his chicken sandwich and looked glumly at his plate. “The article was right.”

  “What article?”

  “The one I tried to tell you about in Harper's Weekly. It said you should never try to eat when you’re upset. It says it makes good digestion impossible.” He touched his stomach. “I know this is an impolite thing to say, Susan, but I’m afraid our whole conversation has given me gas.”

  “Oh, God, Byron,” Susan said, laughing. “Sometimes you really are my little boy, aren’t you?” Then a frown claimed her mouth and she said, "But I’m serious, Byron. You either stand up to him or-”

  Byron’s face showed the panic he felt. “Don’t say it, Susan. Don’t say it ever again. I-” He touched his heart. “I’ve never felt the way I’m feeling right now. Never.”

  There were tears in his voice.

  The beauty of the day was lost suddenly on both of them.

  ***

  Around three o’clock that afternoon a priest walked into the bank where Les Graves worked and stood for a considerable time at the desk where you made out deposit slips.

  To anybody who was paying attention to the priest, it was easy to see that the man only occasionally wrote anything on his slip. Instead his hard blue eyes surveyed the bank and how it was laid out.

  Neely had learned long ago that, as with any uniform, what people remembered was the uniform itself and not the man.

  So he took his time.

  The plan he’d laid out to Les last night was one he’d heard about in Ohio, when he’d done a three-week stint for drunk and disorderly.

  The plan, when you thought about it, was about the most foolproof way there was of taking money from a bank without anybody being the wiser for at least twelve hours.

  The trick was that one of the robbers had to be a bank employee.

  It was even better, Neely smiled to himself, when one of the robbers was related to a bank employee. But to ensure Les’s cooperation he had to unsettle him. Which was why Neely was here.

  For the next ten minutes he kept up the ruse of making out a deposit ticket, looking very officious while he was at it.

  He saw the teller stations and the offices on the facing wall. The offices interested him. For a closer inspection he had to go up to one of the stations and ask for information.

  “Good afternoon, Father,” said the plump woman behind the barred window.

  “Good afternoon. I was wondering if you could tell me-I must be getting forgetful in my old age-I was wondering if you could tell me what the date is.”

  “You’re hardly getting old, Father,” the woman said, and laughed. “At least I hope not. I forget the date all the time and I’m barely twenty-five. Now, does that make me old?”

  “It certainly does not,” the priest laughed back, doing his best to keep his eyes from her wonderful breasts. Ogling her would hardly be the priestly thing to do.

  And anyway, he had other things to look at.

  Neely had selected the last of the teller stations so he could look into the glassed-in offices and see how they were laid out.

  It took him less than half a minute to see that none of them would be of much use.

  “July 2 is the date, Father.”

  “Oh, yes, how could I forget, with the Fourth coming up.”

  “The Fourth and our big baseball game against Des Moines.”

  “That’s right,” the priest smiled. “That’s right.”

  He continued to talk to the woman so he could keep surveying the bank.

  Then he saw a man with a green eyeshade and a red arm garter carrying a stack of ledgers come around a comer at the far end of the offices.

  Neely had not considered the possibility that there was another area to the bank he had not seen.

  Quickly, he decided to take a chance. “Could you direct me to a men’s facility?”

  “Why, of course, Father. You go down to the end of the offices and take a right.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “You’re quite welcome, Father.”

  Neely nodded to the woman and moved away from the station, careful that his thick eyeglasses had not slipped too far down his nose.

  As he passed the offices, he glanced in at each. He liked to memorize a place in advance so there were no surprises when the time came to rob it.

  Then he came to the final office and went right. There was a narrow hallway that led eventually to a back door that was barred and locked. But before reaching the back door you passed a large open office where several bookkeepers worked and then another smaller office that appeared to be a kind of lounge for employees.

  Near the back door were two smaller doors marked, respectively, men and ladies but it was the door between them that interested him.

  He paused here, careful to see that nobody was watching.

  He moved quickly.

  He had just put a hand on the middle door when a voice said, “I think you have the wrong door, Father.”

  Neely spun around as if somebody had shot him.

  There stood a handsome but somewhat pompous-looking young man who said, “I’m Byron Fuller, vice president of the bank, Father.”

  He put out a hand.

  Neely shook it.

  “I assume you wanted the men’s.”

  “I did indeed.” Then he pulled back his head and squinted. “I seem to be lost-”

  “That’s a storage closet there, Father. You want the door next to it.”

  Neely smiled. “The good Lord has granted me many things, but good eyesight, alas, is not one of them.”

  Byron Fuller smiled. “Quite all right, Father. Quite all right. Good day.”

  Then Byron went back into the accounting department.

  Now Neely had to move extremely quickly.

  He put his hand on the door of the storage closet and eased the knob open.

  From the darkness inside came smells of sweet floor polish and the dust collected on mops.

  He stuck his head inside, eyes quickly adjusting to the gloom. From what he could see, the closet was at least six feet deep.

  About the size of a cell-

  He shook his head, ridding himself of the thought, and then quickly closed the door again.

  He we
nt back up to the front of the bank. He had decided to have some fun, the sort of teasing fun that he enjoyed.

  He filled out a deposit ticket and then went over to a teller station.

  The bank was busy again with red-faced farmers and housewives in bustled dresses and sun-scorched day workers who were putting up telephone poles.

  So Neely had to wait in a line that was four deep before he got the satisfaction and slid the deposit ticket through the opening in the teller cage.

  Les Graves had been working very quickly. Hardly noticing the customers he waited on.

  But now his head jerked up and his eyes sought the face of the priest with the small eyeglasses.

  And then a terrible recognition dawned in Les’s eyes.

  And Neely smiled.

  He glanced down at the note he had just handed Les.

  It read: this is going to be an easy place to rob.

  Then Neely left, a pale and shaken Les standing behind at his teller station.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The man had been asking questions since just before noon, a few minutes after he stepped down from the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy line at 11:07 a.m.

  The man had three questions and he asked them of several shopkeepers along Third Avenue, and then, not getting any satisfaction, he went over to First Avenue and started asking questions there.

  He was a fat man in a three-piece brown suit that was wool and too hot for the eighty-degree temperature. If you looked closely, on his lapels you could see faint traces of cigar ash. The man loved stogies. His face did not seem to belong to his body, solemn and angular. Given its gauntness, it belonged on the face of a thin man. His hair, which was thinning, was pressed wetly with sweat to his scalp, which was almost a rust color. The man was an Indian. Then there was the rest of him. He had short arms that made his huge girth seem even more comic. His hands, however, were anything but comic. Even the untutored eye could see where his knuckles had been broken many times. They were brutal hands, broad and flat and strong.

  He stood now and said to a merchant, “His name is Les Graves.”

  “Les Graves?” the merchant said. He ran what was called a stationery store and it sold just about everything you could want in pens and pencils and writing paper, plus it had a whole wall of bright-colored books, including a new one by Robert Louis Stevenson called Treasure Island. “Why, heck yes, I know Les Graves.” The man laughed. “Best pitcher this town ever had.”

  The man did not permit himself to show excitement. “Pitcher?”

  “Sure. On our municipal baseball team. Big showdown with Sterling on the Fourth.”

  “So you know where I could find him then?”

  “Sure do.”

  The fat man smiled. “And where would that be?” He said it a little breathlessly. It could have been because of his repressed excitement or it could have been because his weight always made him sound a little breathless.

  “Why, just around the comer. At the bank.”

  The fat man’s eyes got very bright. “I’d certainly like to thank you, sir.”

  For the first time, the merchant seemed a bit suspicious. “You, uh, looking for Les for any particular reason?”

  “Oh, no,” the fat man said equitably enough. “No real particular reason you might say.” He paused and smiled. “Just a friend of his. From the old days.”

  The merchant seemed relieved. “Well, just go right over to the bank and say hello to him then. And I hope you get to stick around for the game day after tomorrow.”

  “Yes,” the fat man said, “yes, I’ve got a feeling I’ll be doing just that.”

  Then he tipped his bowler and went back outside into the steaming heat of the afternoon.

  ***

  Two hours later, Les got suited up in one of the bank's back rooms and then walked over to the ballpark for practice.

  The stands were filled again. It was as if the game itself were only moments away.

  Harding, the manager, came over and said, “I want you to take it easy today.”

  “I will.”

  "Don’t throw no fancy stuff, either. Save that for Thursday.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  As they stood there, Les became aware of how closely Harding was watching him. “You didn’t get any sleep last night, either, did you?”

  “Not much.”

  “You look bad, Les. Tired.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Hell, Les. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I thought we were friends.”

  “We are.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “There’s nothing to tell,” Les said. “I’m fine.”

  Harding spat tobacco juice from a lump in his left cheek and said, "Get out there and play ball.”

  Les nodded and ran out on the field. By the time he’d reached the mound, the stands had gone wild applauding him.

  When he turned around, his eyes naturally fell on the three people sitting in the box seats behind the home plate-Clinton Edmonds, his daughter Susan and Byron Fuller.

  The catcher was putting the rubber in his mouth-some catchers wore a rubber protector the way boxers did-and then he tossed a clean white ball out to Les.

  Of the first three pitches, two went wild to the side and one went up so high, the catcher had to leap in the air to bring it down.

  All Les could think of was what had happened a few years back when he’d tried out for Chicago.

  “You’ll be all right,” the catcher called out to him. "You just got to concentrate the way Harding always tells us.”

  That was Harding’s favorite word.

  Concentrate.

  So Les took the ball and did the best he could on concentrating.

  It wasn’t easy-not when images of his brother hanging from a gallows filled his head.

  No, sir, it wasn’t easy at all.

  ***

  Many people noted the fat man’s passage to the bleacher way at the top. He moved with the difficulty of a boat in troubled waters.

  By the time he reached the top, his cupid’s face ran with sweat and his celluloid collar was yellow with sweat.

  For the first few minutes he took off his hat and fanned himself. A plump black crow swooped down and sat next to the man, watching him. The man, annoyed with the bird, struck him with his hat. The crow flew away.

  Finally, finished fanning himself, the man turned his attention to the field below.

  He did not like games. They bored him. Still, there was something exciting about the sight of nine men in clean white uniforms in the field and a park full of rooters cheering them on. The few times he’d gone to see the Chicago White Stockings, boys had passed among the spectators, with the boxes filled with various kinds of food for sale- sort of like a traveling cornucopia. The boy who worked his way up the aisle seemed to be selling only one thing. Some kind of semilemonade concoction. The fat man bought two of them.

  Then he went back to looking at the field.

  Even from here, even without the help of field glasses, he could see the resemblance between the man he sought and the man on the pitcher’s mound.

  The pitcher was not so good-looking as the brother-the brother being almost pretty-but the resemblance was indeed unmistakable.

  The pitcher was not having a good day and this led the fat man to wonder why so many of the townspeople made such a fuss over his pitching.

  Thus far the fat man had watched him face three batters. Two of them he’d walked and one of them had gotten a single. The crowd did not seem disappointed so much as confused, as if they didn’t quite know what to make of what they were seeing.

  A luxurious breeze came and dried the rest of the sweat on the fat man’s face. He could smell the nearby river and newly mown grass and the sweet smell of cigar smoke lazing up from the bleachers below.

  In all, nine batters came to the plate before the top half of the sixth inning was over. Two runs had been scored. The pitc
her looked disgusted and faintly embarrassed as he left the field. By now the fat man had figured out that the pitcher was playing against his own second team and the second team’s pitcher looked better than he did.

  The kid with the cold drinks came by again and the fat man bought two more.

  ***

  There were three more innings and the way young Graves was pitching, they promised to be long ones.

  In the reserved box seats below, Clinton Edmonds, red-faced and angry, waved the manager Harding over.

  Harding came running. He wore the face of the eternal supplicant, the gladiator prostrating himself before the emperor.

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Edmonds?”

  “I’d like to know exactly what in hell is going on here.”

  “Sir?”

  “With Graves.”

  “He’s just having kind of an off day.”

  “Need I remind you that we play Sterling the day after tomorrow?”

  “No, sir, you certainly don’t need to remind me.”

  “And need I remind you that I have a great deal of influence on who will and who will not be the manager of this baseball team?”

  At this point, both Susan and Byron cast their eyes down and sat in rigid embarrassment as Clinton Edmonds got louder and angrier and as everyone within earshot began hearing him.

  “No, sir, I guess you don’t need to remind me. No, sir, you surely don’t.”

  “Then you go talk to Graves and tell him I want to see at least five strikeouts in the next two innings.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And by God, I hope you’re taking me seriously."

  Harding gulped, nodded and then trotted back to his team.

  Clinton Edmonds said, “I am surrounded by incompetents. Surrounded by them.” He glared at Byron Fuller. “Aren’t I right, Byron? Aren’t I surrounded by incompetents?”