Lars opened the back door and peered out into the disinterested parking lot.
"It's safe now, Chuck. And then we go to your place and see how much we got?"
"No, we go back to the coffee shop and wait for one of the twits to notice that customers are going into the shop. They'll be so eager to grab their petty commissions that they'll all rush over. Notice how we both wear gloves? They don't and sooner or later, someone will discover the safe is open. Think of all the fun then. When that happens, I have some wonderful ideas."
As they staggered through the parking lot under the load of precious metals, Lars said, "I don't think anyone saw us. You really want to go back?"
"Why not? We're clean, dad, and if we don't go back, Marvin the Snitch will tell everyone we must have robbed the place. I think I will turn the tables on him. And don't cross in the middle of the street. We don't want to get snatched for jaywalking. Let's be law-abiding, shall we?"
"How much do we have here, Chuck? I think I strained my back."
"We can get a Chinese massage expert to jump up and down on it for you, Lars."
"I hope you mean a woman, Chuck. I don't want some man jumping on my back."
"Listen, I'll go out and get two nice ten year olds to give you a rubdown. Does that make you happy?"
"Why do you have to make fun of me all the time?"
"I'm sadistic. Here's the car and let's load it up and then we can return to the scene of the crime."
The restaurant, called "The Anxious Salamander", was run by a retired Eurasian prostitute named Snowflower Wong and specialized in bad sandwiches, worse coffee and warm soft drinks in the front and cocaine and amphetamines in the back. It was the favorite gathering place for the Winrod's employees because the food was cheap but none of them could have afforded a single snort of any kind of coke.
Chuck was absolutely right. When the frantic staff saw several customers going into the store, they arose as a body and stampeded down the sidewalk, Chuck well in the rear and Lars left behind, peering into the window of a book store, gazing at a selection of junior tots aerobic manuals.
No one knew who opened the store but assumed that either Art or Estelle had returned. They were the only ones with keys and none of the employees, saving one, knew how to turn off the burglar alarm.
Chuck waited on a number of customers while Lars busied himself in his cubicle, working on a backlog of watches needing repair.
At 1 p.m., both of them took their regular lunch break.
"What now, Chuck?" said Lars as they went into the coffee shop. He took a small cell phone from his pocket, a phone he had bought as a paid-up item that could not be traced to him.
“I'm going to make a phone call."
And the phone call was to the Brentwood police, announcing that Iranian terrorists had taken over the shop and were demanding two million dollars not to blow it and all the contents up into the air.
Thirty minutes later, while the pair were eating cold, rubbery croissants Ms Wong had purchased from the two-day old charity bakery goods shop and sipping bad coffee, the street suddenly filled with sound and motion with the arrival of many police cars, vans, armored vehicles and even more television trucks and camera crews while above everything were a fleet of hovering helicopters.
The redecorators enjoyed the activity as the police fired tear gas into the building, shattering the windows and causing the terrified occupants to begin a loud chorus of choking screeches that were drowned out by booming, unintelligible shouts through the police bullhorns.
"The first day back to work is always depressing, Lars, but I would say that doesn't really apply to us."
"Look, Chuck, they have fat Debbie on the sidewalk and Marvin has a really bloody nose!"
"Probably because he looks like a rag head. And don't worry about Debbie on the sidewalk. She spends so much of her time flat on her back I'm sure she's used to it. Maybe if she's lucky, a nice policeman will take off his pants and poke his nightstick into her cave of love. Unless you want more coffee, I suggest we take advantage of the distractions and make a quiet exit."
This was not easily accomplished because the entire neighborhood jammed the sidewalks, staring with lip-licking pleasure at the violence that was even more entertaining than the usual television fare. When everyone had been removed from the vicinity by one means or another, the FBI was still on the scene, taking pictures and dusting the parked cars along the street for fingerprints.
Lying on the sidewalk in splendid isolation were a pair of false teeth that a terrified customer had lost while having a grand mal seizure at the curb.
"You see, Osvald," Chuck said as they drove along the freeway towards the Valley, "when someone finds out that the store was looted, they won't know whom to blame. The police, as usual, will be the prime suspects and they will blame the staff. I'll bet fat Debbie could shove the safe into her joy box and still have enough room for two cops, a helicopter, Art's desk and a double-wide trailer. Oh, they won't sort that one out for a long time but when the others get tighter sphincters, they will remember us at the restaurant and not in the store. Or at least I hope so. Now, shall we go to my apartment, which I had the foresight to rent under the name of my dead cousin, and see exactly how much we got away with?"
Just before they took the freeway off ramp, they were passed at some speed by two cars whose occupants were shooting at each other. The lead car, lowered to less than a foot from the pavement, was filled with Mexicans wearing red bandannas and firing to the rear as they went, like the hunter in "Peter and the Wolf" while the day-glo red Cadillac behind them was packed with equally festive blacks all adorned in purple knit caps and strange clothing, spraying everything ahead of them with Chinese-made machine guns like a drunk with a garden hose.
This is what the nightly news liked to refer to as "Gang Related Activity” and while it tended to create havoc on the freeways of Los Angeles County, it was becoming so common that neither Chuck or Lars paid any attention to it. The use of flamethrowers or rocket projectors might have elicited a different response, but mere broadsides of automatic weapons fire in public places was something the inhabitants of the City of Angels had grown used to.
They drove past dozens of fading strip malls and through a neighborhood with mangy palm trees and dead lawns. Los Angeles was enduring one of its increasing bouts with lengthy drought and water could not be used for landscaping. Ten minutes from the freeway shooting gallery, they drove into the parking lot of Chuck's apartment house.
4.
"The Valley Gardens" was a huge, sprawling apartment complex that catered to unmarried whites who were gainfully employed as secretaries, very junior account executives, wealthy students who did not enjoy the collegiate beer parties, politically correct free condoms, unisex lavatories and politically incorrect gang rapes in college dormitories and a large number of fat and desperate singles of both sexes who banked on fallouts from the weekend drinking parties that resulted in half-dressed people passing out in the landscape, under cars and behind hedges. Very often, the comatose could be partially revived and dragged into apartments for various moments of truth. Occasionally, drunken tenants or their guests fell into one of the two pools and drowned but as long as the bodies were removed before noon the next day, there was no lack of swimmers.
Occasionally, the victims settled to the bottoms of the pools and were generally ignored or eventually reported to the manager and removed later in the day when the aquatic sports had ended.
Chuck had rented an apartment there because the frenetic activity around him lent him a protective anonymity saving for the occasions when Jello-thighed women tried to grope him in the laundry room or attempted to lure him into their apartments to revive dead parakeets. There was no point in attempting to avoid them by pretending to be gay because then he would have been the target of a large gay contingent that were either into extensive body building or wearing women's clothing and garish wigs. None of the latter looked much like women and were
generally despised by the tanned and muscular weight freaks who spent most of their time strutting around the pool, well-oiled and wearing minuscule swimming briefs stuffed with potatoes or small ears of corn.
As they carried the best part of the Winrod stock through a broken metal gate and into one of the pool-graced courtyards, a very overweight girl that looked like a beached whale waved at them.
"Hi Tim! Are you moving in or out?"
"In," said Chuck as he increased his pace towards the second floor deck.
"Oh. Tammi is going to have a party tonight. We're celebrating Olga's divorce from Randy. Do you want to come? I've baked some brownies."
Without answering, Chuck thrust his key into the lock and shoved the door open. It was peeling and bore the boot marks of the previous tenant who had been locked out by his girlfriend while she was practicing the mattress polka with a pre-med student.
The brownie baker had turned her attention to a computer programmer who managed to get into his car before he could be pinned against something.
Chuck's apartment was furnished, badly, and the air-conditioning was only marginally keeping up with the valley heat.
"Who is Tim?" said Lars as he carefully lowered his treasures on a rickety coffee table.
"That's me. Or rather my late cousin. Timothy O'Rourke to be really exact. A useless dope addict from South Bend who managed to die out in the desert after being thrown out of a car when he stiffed a dealer. I have his ID and he looks like me. I mean he used to look like me. He looks like a Halloween mask these days. I had to claim the remains, as they called the maggot receptacle, and I tried to make a few bucks by selling him to medical science but in his condition, medical science didn't want him. Maybe a dog food place could have taken him but I didn't have time so I left him for the county to worry about. I did get his papers, however and that's why Bloato calls me 'Tim.' She's been trying to fellate me for three months now. As fat as she is, that's about all she can do. You know, Lars, I wonder how fat people make babies."
"With one of those things my Grandma used to baste turkeys with?"
"Probably. How much fun can that be? Never mind, I stopped thinking about things like that a long time ago. Now, shall we have a nice inventory?"
Wearing a pair of white cotton gloves, Chuck made small heaps of rings, watches, bracelets, gold coins, pendants and money clips on the worn mauve living room carpet.
As all of the cases had the Winrod logo stamped in gold on the inside of the lid, he made a separate pile of these.
A small calculator was brought into use.
"Very nice, Lars, very nice. A really good day's work for us. I calculate we have a retail value of $450,000 here with a wholesale price of about $200 thousand plus. That ought to hold us for a few weeks but I see it as seed money, not something to live off of."
Eric or Lars was transfixed.
"I had no idea, Chuck, they made such a markup. What are we going to do now?"
"Well, you can go downstairs and let Laura munch on your crank for a while or we can decide where we want to go. I mean you are aware that the Winrod game is over, aren't you? Their house is a mess and we took all their nice pieces. Of course the insurance companies will have to pay but somehow I doubt if either Art or Estelle will have the heart to stay in business."
Lars picked up a diamond-studded Rolex and tried it on.
"Hey, hey, don't do that. If you want a watch, get a cheaper one. If the cops see that one, they'll find drugs in your pocket and keep the watch."
"You don't think the store will open again?"
"Not likely you jar head. Now, as I see it, we wait for a few days and then take off for some other area. We hang around just to make sure we aren't wanted and then off we go to sell the stuff. I am planning to throw them off by leaving the empty cases where they'll do the most good. Do you want a beer? I have some cold cuts and potato salad in the fridge if you want any."
And they munched on stale sandwiches while watching an old copy of Andy Warhol's 'Bad' on the VCR. When they came to the part where a woman threw her crying baby out of a high-rise apartment window, Lars began to squeak with laughter.
"Sick, sick, Lars. I told you you'd love it."
"But the women are so old, Chuck. You don't have..."
"No I don't and it's a felony to have tapes like you desire. Have another beer and we can discuss the future. Do you want to go home tonight? If you want, you can sleep on the couch."
The nightly news was filled with the police raid on the Winrod establishment but, as usual, there was no mention of the mobile shooting gallery on the freeway. There were many shots of the newly-boarded up windows and comments from scarcely literate fellow businessmen and finally, on the eleven o'clock news, the pair learned that Art was in intensive care as a result of a massive heart attack suffered when he opened his front door. Nothing was said about his wife or the dog but Chuck wondered if a mini-tidal wave had swept them into the storm drains instead of Art.
Lars snored heavily and Chuck had to stick toilet paper in his ears to drown out the noise.
Chuck was accustomed to rising early and propelling himself into the boredom of the day by consuming three cups of strong coffee. Today, because there was no job to go to, he slept in an extra hour and had only one cup of coffee.
Picking up the daily 'Times' from in front of his apartment door, he sat in a sagging armchair and turned on the television.
The newspapers gave a badly garbled version of the Brentwood incident, stating that the police and FBI were still searching for the Iranian terrorists who had been seen by at least a dozen reliable witnesses, fleeing the scene in a black sedan.
Since Chuck's car was a dull maroon, he paid no attention to the news accounts, which he put down to the usual seeking after inaccurate sensationalism. There was also solemn talk about at least six Iranians who were believed to be hiding somewhere in Los Angeles along with a huge accumulation of stolen jewelry. There was speculation by a retired State Department specialist that the robbery was to finance some explosive outrage in the United States and a feeble-minded Congressman got up on the floor of the House to demand that all Iranians be expelled to Mexico, which was then experiencing a smoldering revolution that was not conducive to the tourist trade.
The printed news was cold coffee compared with the latest development blaring over the television set. He was so entertained that he woke up the sleeping watch repairman.
"Why...what...?"
"No, Lars, watch the boob tube! My God, how funny!"
What he found funny was the breathless, well-filmed report, showing a house in a lower middle class neighborhood belching flame and thick columns of black smoke.
"Look at that Lars! The cops have located the Arabs and are now barbecuing them. Well-done for Achmed and medium-rare for Ali. Look at that, will you? There must be five hundred police cars in the street!."
They watched for a few minutes as the roof finally fell in with a great shower of glowing sparks. This was followed by a photomontage of six black-haired, swarthy Mediterranean types with thick eyebrows and thicker mustaches. These were identified as members of some obscure Middle Eastern Arab group known to be in the Los Angeles area and positively identified by witnesses as the men who had robbed the Winrod shop.
Since the real thieves were basically white Wasps, they found this extremely entertaining.
The next segment of the doomsday reportage was a lengthy story about the desecration of the Winrod home complete with extensive footage of the sodden shambles of the house interior. Both Chuck and the erstwhile Lars-cum-Eric took especial interest in viewing the scene of their rampage after the passage of several weeks and many thousands of gallons of heavily chlorinated water.
There was an added bonus when a view of a local hospital accompanied the sad news that Art had expired the night before in the intensive care ward as the result of a massive heart attack. What happened to Estelle was not discussed other than to comment that she was indisposed
and not available for comment. In fact, Estelle was heavily sedated in the same hospital but before descending into beneficial oblivion had claimed that she believed that it certainly was Arab terrorists who had robbed her and ruined their lives because, although she and Art were not Jewish, they did have a shop in Brentwood which was almost exclusively Jewish and no doubt the Arabs felt that they were carrying their jihad to America. And as an added bonus, she positively identified two of the suspect's photographs as suspicious characters who had come into her shop just days before she had gone on vacation and asked about purchasing gold necklaces.
As the surrounding police units and the belatedly-arrived fire department (which the police initially neglected to call in order to allow the building to burn completely down, disposing of the occupants and thereby saving the county the expense of long, political trials) moved amongst the smoking ruins, the television program began a new story about a house in the South Central Latino ghetto that had exploded when the very late Mrs. Gomez set off ten bug aerosol bombs in her kitchen to kill the roaches that swarmed over every surface. This intended Holocaust had been interrupted when the highly volatile fumes came into contact with the open flame of the water heater pilot light and, very quickly and dramatically sent the cockroach assassin to visit with Baby Jesus in a number of pieces.
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