Bank Shot

22

“A bank doesn’t just disappear,” Captain Deemer said.

“Yes, sir,” said Lieutenant Hepplewhite.

Captain Deemer extended his arms out at the sides as though he would do calisthenics and wiggled his hands. “It doesn’t just fly away,” he said.

“No, sir,” said Lieutenant Hepplewhite.

“So we have to be able to find it, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir.”

They were alone in the captain’s office, a small and deceptively quiet life raft in a sea of chaos — the eye of the storm, as it were. Beyond that door, men were running back and forth, scribbling messages, slamming doors, making phone calls, developing heartburn and acid indigestion. Beyond that window, a massive bank hunt was already under way, with every available car and man from both the Nassau County police and the Suffolk County police. The New York City police in both Queens and Brooklyn had been alerted, and every street and road and highway crossing the twelve-mile long border into the city was being watched. There was no land exit from Long Island except through New York City, no bridges or tunnels to any other part of the world. The ferries to Connecticut from Port Jefferson and Orient Point didn’t run at this time of night and would be watched from the time they opened for business in the morning. The local police and harbor authorities at every spot on the Island with facilities big enough to handle a ship that could load an entire mobile home on it had also been alerted and were ready. Macarthur Airport was being watched.

“We have them bottled up,” Captain Deemer said grimly, bringing his hands slowly together as though to strangle somebody.

“Yes, sir,” said Lieutenant Hepplewhite.

“Now all we have to do is tighten the net!” And Captain Deemer squeezed his hands shut and twisted them together, as though snapping the neck off a chicken.

Lieutenant Hepplewhite winced. “Yes, sir,” he said.

“And get those sons of bitches,” Captain Deemer said, shaking his head from side to side, “that woke me up out of bed.”

“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Hepplewhite said and flashed a sickly grin.

Because it had been Lieutenant Hepplewhite who had awakened Captain Deemer out of his bed. It had been the only thing to do, the proper thing to do, and the lieutenant knew the captain didn’t blame him personally for it, but nevertheless the act had made Lieutenant Hepplewhite very nervous, and nothing that had happened since had served to calm him down.

The lieutenant and the captain were different in almost every respect — the lieutenant young, slender, hesitant, quiet and a reader, the captain fiftyish, heavyset, bullheaded, loud and illiterate — but they did have one trait they shared in common: Neither of them liked trouble. It was the one area in which they even used the same language: “I want things quiet, men,” the captain would tell his men at the morning shape-up, and at the night shape-up the lieutenant would say, “Let’s keep things quiet, men, so I don’t have to wake the captain.” They were both death on police corruption, because it might tend to endanger the quiet.

If they’d wanted noise, after all, New York City was right next door, and its police force was always looking for recruits.

But it was noise they had tonight, whether they liked it or not. Captain Deemer turned away from the lieutenant, muttering, “It’s just a goddam good thing I was home,” and went over to brood at the map of the Island on the side wall.

“Sir?”

“Never mind, Lieutenant,” said the captain.

“Yes, sir.”

The phone rang.

“Get that, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir.”

Hepplewhite spoke briefly into the phone — he stood beside the desk, not wanting to sit at it in the captain’s presence — and then put the caller on hold and said, “Captain, the people from the bank are here.”

“Have ’em come in.” The captain kept brooding at the map, and his lips moved without sound. “Tighten the net,” he seemed to be saying.

The three men who entered the office looked like some sort of statistical sampling, a cross-section of America perhaps; the mind boggled at the attempt to see them as a group connected with one another.

The first in was portly, distinguished, with iron-gray hair and black suit and conservative narrow tie. He carried a black attaché case, and fat cigar tips protruded from his breast pocket. He looked to be about fifty-five, prosperous, and used to giving orders.

The second was stocky, short, wearing a tan sports jacket, dark-brown slacks and a bow tie. He had crewcut sandy hair, horn-rimmed glasses, leather patches on the elbows of his jacket, and carried a brown briefcase. He was about forty and looked thoughtful and competent in some specialty.

The third was very tall and very thin, with shoulder-length hair, deep sideburns and Western-sheriff mustache. He was no more than twenty-five and wore a yellow pullover polo shirt, tie-dye blue jeans and white basketball sneakers. He carried a gray cloth bag of the kind plumbers use, which clanked when he put it down on a chair. He grinned all the time and did a lot of bobbing in place, as though listening to music.

The portly man looked around with a tentative smile. “Captain Deemer?”

The captain remained by the map but looked over with brooding eyes and said, “That’s me.”

“I am George Gelding, of C and L.”

The captain gave an irritated frown. “Seeing-eye?”

“Capitalists’ and Immigrants’ Trust,” said Gelding. “The bank you lost.”

The captain grunted, as though he’d been hit in the chest with an arrow, and lowered his head like a bull deciding to get mad.

Gelding gestured to the man with the bow tie and leather elbow patches. “This is Mr. Albert Docent,” he said, “of the company which provided the safe employed in that particular branch of our bank.”

Deemer and Docent nodded at each other, the captain sourly, the safe man with a thoughtful smile.

“And this,” Gelding said, gesturing to the young man with the hair, “is Mr. Gary Wallah, of Roamerica Corporation, the company which provided the trailer in which the bank has recently been housed.”

“Mobile home,” Wallah said. He grinned and nodded and bounced.

“Mobile, at any rate,” Gelding said and turned back to the captain, saying, “We are here to offer you whatever information and expertise may be of help to you.”

“Thank you.”

“And to ask if there have been any further developments.”

“We have them bottled up,” the captain said grimly.

“Have you really?” said Gelding, smiling broadly and taking a step forward, “Where?”

“Here,” the captain said and thumped the map with the back of one meaty hand. “It’s only a question of time.”

“You mean you still don’t know exactly where they are.”

“They’re on the Island.”

“But you don’t know where.”

“It’s only a question of time!”

“It is approximately one hundred miles,” Gelding said, with no attempt to soften his tone, “from the New York City line across Long Island to Montauk Point. In spots, the island is twenty miles wide. In land area, it is larger than Rhode Island. This is the area in which you have them bottled up?”

In moments of stress, the captain’s left eye tended to close, and then open again, and then slowly close again, then pop open once more, and so on. It made him look as though he were winking, and in his youth he had inadvertently picked up more than one young lady that way; in fact, it still did pretty well for him.

But there were no young ladies here now. “The point,” the captain told the banker, “is that they can’t get off the Island. It’s a big place, but sooner or later we’ll cover it.”

“What are you doing so far?”

“Until morning,” the captain said, “the only thing we can do is patrol the streets, hope to find them before they get the thing under cover.”

“It is almost three in the morning, well over an hour since the bank was stolen. Surely they’re under cover by now.”

“Maybe. At first light, we spread out more. Before we’re done, we’ll look inside every old barn, every abandoned factory, every empty building of any kind on the whole Island. We’ll check all dead-end roads, we’ll look into every bit of woods.”

“You’re talking, Captain, about an operation that will take a month.”

“No, Mr. Gelding, I’m not. By morning, we’ll have the assistance of Boy Scout troops, volunteer fire departments and other local organizations all over the Island to help in the search. We’ll use the same groups and the same techniques as when we’re looking for a lost child.”

“The bank,” Gelding said frostily, “is somewhat larger than a lost child.”

“That can only help,” Captain Deemer said. “We’ll also have assistance from the Civil Air Patrol in scanning from the skies.”

“Scanning from the skies?” The phrase seemed to take Gelding aback.

“I say we have them bottled up,” Captain Deemer said, his voice rising and his left eyelid lowering, “and I say it’s only a question of time till we tighten the net!” And he did that chicken-killing gesture again, making Lieutenant Hepplewhite in his unobserved corner wince once more.

“All right,” Gelding said grudgingly. “Under the circumstances, I must admit you seem to be doing everything possible.”

“Everything,” agreed the captain and turned his attention to Gary Wallah, the young man from the mobile home company. The strain of having to deal as allies with somebody who looked like Gary Wallah caused the captain’s head to lower into his neck again and his left eyelid to flutter like an awning in an on-shore breeze. “Tell me about this trailer,” he said, and despite his best intentions the sentence came growling out as though instead he’d said, “Up against the wall, kid.” (He didn’t use bad language in uniform.)

“It’s a mobile home,” Wallah said. “It isn’t a trailer. A trailer is a little thing with wheels that you rent from U-Haul when you want to move a refrigerator. What we’re talking about is a mobile home.”

“I don’t care if you call it a Boeing 747, boy,” said the captain, no longer even caring about the growl in his voice, “just so you describe it to me.”

Wallah didn’t say anything for a few seconds, just glanced around the room with a little smile on his face. Finally he nodded and said, “Right on. I’m here this time to cooperate, that’s what I’ll do.”

Captain Deemer closed his mouth firmly over the several things it occurred to him to say. He reminded himself that he really didn’t want to fight with everybody on his own team, and he waited in controlled impatience for this goddam draft-dodging useless hippie pot-smoking disrespectful radical son of a bitch bastard to say whatever it was he was going to say.

In a neutral tone, Wallah said, “What Roamerica leased to the bank was a modified version of our Remuda model. It’s fifty feet long and twelve feet wide and is usually made up as a two- or three-bedroom home in a variety of styles, but mostly either Colonial or Western. But in this case it was turned over to the bank with no interior partitions and without the usual kitchen appliances. The normal bathroom was put in; that is, the fixtures only, no walls or decor. The modifications done at the factory consisted mostly of installing a full burglar alarm system in the walls, floor and roof of the unit and strengthening the floor at the rear portion. This what you want, Cap?”

Instead of answering directly, Captain Deemer looked over at Lieutenant Hepplewhite to see if he was taking all this down the way he was supposed to; he was taking it down, but not the way he was supposed to. That is, instead of sitting at the desk like a normal human being he was standing beside it, bent over, pencil flying across paper. “Goddamit, Lieutenant,” the captain shouted, “sit down before you get a humpback!”

“Yes, sir.” The lieutenant zipped into the chair, then looked attentively toward Wallah.

The captain said, “You got all that so far?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Go ahead, buh —”

Wallah raised an eyebrow and one side of his mustache. “Hello?”

“Nothing,” the captain said grumpily. “Go ahead.”

“Not much more to tell. It has the usual wiring in it, to be attached to regular commercial power company lines. It has baseboard electric heating. The bathroom fixtures feed out through the bottom of the unit and are adaptable to local plumbing codes. Roamerica delivered the unit to the site, connected up all power lines, water lines, sewage lines, burglar alarm lines, removed the wheels, leveled the —”

“Removed the wheels?” The captain’s left eye was completely shut now, maybe for good.

“Sure,” Wallah said. “It’s standard procedure if you’re going to —”

“Are you telling me that goddam trailer didn’t have any wheels?”

“Mobile home. And natu —”

“Trailer!” the captain yelled. “Trailer, trailer goddam trailer! And if it didn’t have any goddam wheels, how did they get it away from there?”

Nobody answered. The captain stood panting in the middle of the room, head hulked down between his shoulders, like the bull after the matador’s assistants have finished with him. His left eye was still closed, perhaps permanently, and his right eyelid was beginning to flutter.

Lieutenant Hepplewhite cleared his throat. Everybody jumped, as though a hand grenade had gone off, and they all stared at him. In a small voice he said. “Helicopter?”

They continued to look at him. Several slow seconds went by, and then the captain said, “Repeat that, Hepplewhite.”

“Helicopter, sir,” Lieutenant Hepplewhite said in the same small voice. And then, hesitant but hurrying, added, “I just thought maybe they had a helicopter and they might have come down and put ropes around it and —”

The captain glowered with his one good eye. “And take it off the Island,” he finished.

“Too heavy,” Wallah said. He opened his gray cloth plumber’s bag and took out a toy mobile home. “Here’s a scale model of the Remuda model,” he said. “Remember now, it’s fifty feet long. This one is pink and white; the stolen one is blue and white.”

“I see the color,” the captain growled. “You’re sure it’s too heavy?”

“No question.”

“I’ve got a question,” the captain said. Somehow he seemed to be holding the toy. Shifting it back and forth from hand to hand in some irritation, he said to Lieutenant Hepplewhite, “Phone the Army base. Find out if a helicopter could do the job.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And get in touch with some of the men on the scene. Have them wake neighbors, find out if anybody heard a helicopter around there tonight.”

“Definitely too heavy,” Wallah said. “And too long and awkward. They just couldn’t do it.”

“We’ll find out,” the captain said. “Here, take this damn thing.”

Wallah took back the toy. “I thought you’d be interested,” he said.

“It’s the real one I’m interested in.”

“Exactly,” said the banker, Gelding.

Lieutenant Hepplewhite was murmuring on the phone. The captain said, “Now, if they didn’t take it by helicopter, the question is how did they take it? What about these wheels you took off, where would they be now?”

“Stored in our assembly plant in Brooklyn,” Wallah said.

“You’re sure they’re still there?”

“Nope.”

The captain gave him the full voltage of his one good eye. “You’re not sure they’re still there?”

“I haven’t checked. But those aren’t the only wheels in the world; they could have gotten wheels anywhere.”

Lieutenant Hepplewhite said, “Excuse me, Mr. Wallah.”

Wallah looked at him in amused surprise — probably at being called mister.

“The Army sergeant would like to talk to you.”

“Sure,” said Wallah. He took the phone from Hepplewhite, and they all watched him lift it to his face and say, “What’s happening, man?”

The captain turned resolutely away from the conversation, and while the lieutenant answered the other phone, which had suddenly started to ring, he said to Gelding, “Don’t you worry. It doesn’t matter how they did it, we’ll catch up with them. You can’t steal a whole bank and expect to get away with it.”

“I certainly hope not.”

“Sir?”

The captain turned a mistrustful eye on the lieutenant. “What now?”

“Sir, the bank had been resting on a foundation of concrete blocks. The officers on the scene have found tub caulking on top of the blocks.”

“Tub caulking on top of the blocks.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And they decided to report that.”

The lieutenant blinked. He was still holding the phone. Next to him, Gary Wallah was in conversation on the other phone with the Army sergeant. “Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said.

The captain nodded. He took a deep breath. “Tell them thank you,” he said in a soft voice and turned to Albert Docent, the safe-company man, who hadn’t as yet contributed anything. “Well, what good news do you have for me?” he said.

“They’ll have a hell of a time with that safe,” Docent said. Above the bow tie, his expression was clean-cut, dutiful and intelligent.

The captain’s left eye fluttered slightly, as though it might open. He nearly smiled. “Will they?” he said.

Gary Wallah said, “The sergeant wants to talk to one of you people.” He was offering the phone indiscriminately to both Captain Deemer and Lieutenant Hepplewhite.

“You take it, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir.”

Once again, they all watched and listened as Hepplewhite spoke with the sergeant. His part of the conversation was mostly “Uh huh” and “Is that right?” but his audience kept watching and listening anyway. Finally he finished and hung up and said, “It couldn’t be done by helicopter.”

The captain said, “They’re sure? Positive?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good,” said the captain. “Then they’re still on the Island, just like I said.” He turned back to Docent, the safe man. “You were saying?”

“I was saying,” Docent said, “that they’ll find that safe a tough nut to crack. It’s one of the most modern safes we make, with the latest advances in heat-resistant and shock-resistant metals. These are advances that come from research connected with the Vietnam war. It’s one of the ironic benefits of that unhappy —”

“Oh, wow,” said Gary Wallah.

Docent turned to him, firm but fair. “All I’m saying,” he said, “is that research has been stimulated into some —”

“Oh, wow. I mean, wow.”

“I’ve heard all your arguments, and I can’t say I entirely disagree with —”

“Wow, man.”

“At this time,” George Gelding said, standing at attention and looking very red-faced, “when some person or persons unknown have stolen a branch of the Capitalists’ and Immigrants’ Trust, and our brave boys are dying on far-flung battlefields to protect the rights of likes of you who —”

“Oh, wow.”

“Now, there’s much to be said on both sides, but the point —”

“I see those flaaaaag draped coffins, I hear the loved ones in their cottages and on the farms of America —”

“Like, really, wow.”

Captain Deemer glowered at them all through the remaining slit of his right eye. A bellowed shut up might attract their attention — all three were talking at the same time now — but did he want them to shut up? If they stopped arguing with one another, they’d just start talking to the captain again, and he wasn’t sure he wanted that.

In the middle of the melee the phone rang. Captain Deemer was aware of Lieutenant Hepplewhite answering it, but that didn’t have much interest for him, either. More tub caulking, he supposed, this time in the ears of his officers.

But then Hepplewhite shouted, “Somebody saw it!” and the argument stopped as though somebody had switched off a radio. Everybody — even the captain — stared at Hepplewhite, sitting there at the desk with the phone in his hand, grinning at them with happy excitement.

Gelding said, “Well? Well?”

“A bartender,” Hepplewhite said, “closing up for the night. He saw it go by, about quarter to two. Said it was going like hell. Said there was a cab off a big tractor-trailer rig pulling it.”

“Quarter to two?” the captain said. “Why the hell didn’t he report it till now?”

“Didn’t think anything of it. He lives in Queens, and they stopped him at a roadblock going through. That’s when he found out what happened and told them he’d seen it.”

“Where was this?”

“On Union Turnpike. They’ve got a roadblock set up there, and —”

“No,” Captain Deemer said. Patiently he said, “Where did he see the bank?”

“Oh. Up by Cold Spring.”

“Cold Spring, Cold Spring.” The captain hurried to the map, looked at it, found Cold Spring. “Right on the county line,” he said. “They’re not trying to get off the Island at all. Heading the other way, up toward Huntington.” He spun around. “Get that out to all units right away, Lieutenant. Last seen at one forty-five in the vicinity of Cold Spring.”

“Yes, sir.” Hepplewhite spoke briefly into the phone, broke the connection, dialed the dispatcher’s room.

Gelding said, “You seem pleased, Captain. This is a good sign, eh?”

“The best so far. Now if we can only get to them before they open the safe and abandon the bank —”

“I don’t think you have to worry too much about that, Captain,” Albert Docent said. In the heat of the argument his bow tie had become twisted, but now he was calm again, and straightening it.

Captain Deemer looked at him. “Why not?”

“I was telling you about the advances that have been made in safe construction,” Docent said. He glanced at Wallah, who said nothing, and looked at the captain again to say, “Given any force that will open that safe without destroying the contents, whether nitroglycerine, acid, laser, diamond-tip drill, any of the safe cracker’s arsenal of equipment, it will take those thieves a minimum of twenty-four hours to break it open.”

Captain Deemer broke into a broad smile.

“Captain,” said the lieutenant. He was excited again.

Captain Deemer turned the broad smile on him. “Yes, Hepplewhite?”

“They found the seven guards.”

“Did they! Where?”

“Asleep on Woodbury Road.”

The captain was already turning toward his map, but he stopped and frowned at the lieutenant. “Asleep?”

“Yes, sir. On Woodbury Road. In a ditch beside the road.”

Captain Deemer looked at Albert Docent. “We’re going to need twenty-four hours,” he said.