McNally's caper

THE PLOT THICKENS

So, for five days I spent my early mornings on East 55th Street, watching closely as the Bonomo Cleaning Service van arrived in front of Brandenberg amp; Sons. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I was Beatrice Flanders. On Tuesday and Thursday, I was Jannie Shean. Schizophrenia, where is thy sting?

I watched from the luncheonette across the street, from the rented Ford, and from my own XKE. I even took notes, marking down the precise times of the arrival of the cleaning van, the unlocking of the front door of the jewelry store, the entrance of the cleaning crew, and their departure.

This is what I found:

On the first four mornings of the week, things went just as Donohue had reported: The truck doubleparked in front of Brandenberg, and almost immediately the door was unlocked and opened. Obviously Noel Jarvis had been awaiting its arrival.

But on Friday morning, something different and disconcerting happened. The truck parked, the crew got out carrying their mops and vacuum cleaner. They crossed the sidewalk. But the door of Brandenberg amp; Sons remained closed and locked. The cleaners banged on the door. It was almost a minute before Jarvis appeared to let them in. Maybe he’d been busy in the back room, maybe he’d been in the can. Who knows? But meanwhile the Bonomo cleaning crew cooled their heels outside.

I know it sounds like a ridiculously small detail, but our whole scheme of barreling into the store from the cleaning truck was based on the door being unlocked and open. On such tiny details the entire Big Caper depended. A good lesson for me. I had never realized that a major crime must be as precisely timed as a military operation.

I made copious notes, and included everything in the Project X manuscript. I also found time to call Sol Faber — remember him? my agent — and reported that the new book was coming along famously. I hoped to have the ms. in his hands by late January.

He was delighted.

‘Jannie, doll,’ he said anxiously, ‘is it realistic, like Aldo Binder wants?’

‘Completely realistic,’ I assured him.

‘And it’s got a real ending? 1 mean, it doesn’t just stop? Everything gets tied up neat and tidy?’

‘You wouldn’t believe,’ I told him.

On Friday night, Donohue, Fleming, and 1 met again. This time in the back room of Fangio’s. Dick and I had dined at Tommy Yu’s. I don’t know where Jack Donohue ate his dinner, but he was waiting alone in a booth when we arrived. He looked tired. And not too happy.

‘Been up every night since Sunday,’ he grumbled, after our vodka-rocks were served. ‘From like midnight to ten. I try to sleep during the day. I’m dead.’

‘So?’ I asked coldly. ‘How did you make out?’

‘I found the Bonomo Cleaning Service garage. It’s on Eleventh near 54th. Most of the trucks go out at one in the morning when a new shift of cleaners comes on. That outfit have fifty trucks. Took me two nights to spot truck number 14. I mean, suddenly they all come pouring out of the garage, and at that hour it’s tough to spot the numbers.’

‘You followed it?’ Dick asked.

Black Jack sighed. ‘That’s where it gets screwy. You’d think they’d have a regular schedule of places to clean, a regular route to follow. But they don’t. On each of those three nights I tailed truck 14, they went to different places. All over Manhattan. They always ended up on East 55th Street, but there was no way of knowing where they’d be before that or where we could be certain of hitting them.’

Depressing news. The three of us sat hunched over our drinks, trying to figure it out.

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ I said. ‘The cleaning service has

X-number of customers. You’d think each truck would be assigned to the same places every night.’

‘You’d think so,’ Donohue said mournfully, ‘but that ain’t the way it is.’

It was Dick Fleming who came up with the answer. He raised his head and looked at Jack and me, back and forth.

‘Sure they work a regular route,’ he said, smiling. ‘But on the same days each week. Get it? Brandenberg is an expensive shop. It’s got to be spotless. So it gets cleaned every morning. But the other places truck 14 goes to, maybe they get cleaned three times a week, or twice, or only once a week. So each morning’s route would be different. But I imagine if you followed truck 14 for a month, you’d find their route on Monday is the same every Monday, and every Tuesday is the same, and so on.’

Black Jack reached across the table and patted Dick’s cheek. ‘Brains,’ he said. ‘The kid’s got brains. I’ll lay five to three he’s exactly right. Now why the hell didn’t think of that?’font>

‘So all we have to do,’ I said, ‘is decide what day of the week we want to hit, and chart the route of truck number 14 for that morning.’

‘Let’s make it a Friday,’ Donohue said. ‘Fridays have always been lucky for me.’

‘Friday is good,’ Fleming said. ‘Around Christmas time most New York stores stay open on Saturdays. That means that on Friday morning Brandenberg and Sons will probably have a big stock on hand for Friday and Saturday.’

‘Beautiful,’ I said. ‘I’ll drink to that. Friday it is. We’ll decide the exact date later.’

We ordered another round. After it was brought, I gave Donohue the bad news of how, that morning, the cleaning crew had to wait at least a minute on the sidewalk before the manager unlocked the door.

‘Dick and I came up with the answer,’ I said. ‘See what you think of it. We hijack the truck and cleaning crews as planned. But only one of them, the helper, gets tied up and tossed in the back of the van. The other guy, the driver, keeps his coveralls on, and he really does the driving, with a gun in his ribs. The guy holding the gun is wearing the helper’s coveralls. They pull up outside Brandenberg and

Sons. The driver gets out because he knows that piece is pressed into his spine. He collects a few mops and buckets and walks up to the door. Our guy is right behind him, prodding him with-’

‘I get it, I get it!’ Donohue said excitedly. ‘If the manager has already unlocked the door, all well and good. The rest of the guys pile out and in. But if they have to wait, or the manager looks through the door before he unlocks it, he sees his regular cleaning man with a new helper. Naturally he’s going to unlock.’

‘You think it’ll work?’ Fleming asked.

‘Money in the bank,’ Black Jack assured him. ‘Can’t miss. I got to hand it to you two; you come up with the answers. Jesus. All right, now I can tell you. Our two heavies are waiting at the bar, right over there. I wasn’t going to say anything to them until I was sure we had a workable plan. Now I think we better bring them in. We got a lot to do. Should I call them over?’

‘Sure,’ I said, craning toward the bar area up front. ‘Which two are they?’

‘See there in the middle? Near the beer taps? The big guy is Hymie Gore. All muscle. Even between the ears. But he moves fast. The thin, twitchy guy they call the Holy Ghost. Nobody knows his real name. Just the Holy Ghost. He’s a shadow; now you see him, now you don’t. Both of them have sheets, but nothing recent. I’ll go get ‘em.’

He slid out of the booth, headed toward the bar.

‘Hymie Gore and the Holy Ghost,’ Dick Fleming said. ‘Enough realism for you, Jannie?’

‘I’d never use it in a book,’ I said. ‘Who’d believe it?’

Donohue brought the two men back to our booth. They were both carrying their beers. The Holy Ghost slid in next to Black Jack. Hymie Gore pulled up a chair and sat at the end of the table. He slopped over the seat. No introductions were made. We all smiled at one another and made polite small talk: the weather, the crime rate in New York, where to get a really decent plate of ribs. The waitress came over and Donohue ordered vodkas for all of us. I knew who’d bounce for the drinks.

Hymie Gore — a name so improbable that even Brick Wall would never use it — was a tell-me-about-the-rabbits-George type of guy: big, hulking, with a forehead so low that his bristly hair seemed to end in eyebrows. When his drink came, he folded his fist around the glass and it disappeared. He had a surprisingly high-pitched, wispy voice, like a tuppenny whistle, and he belched continually — little rumbling burps after which he’d tap his lips with a huge, broken knuckle and say. “Scuse.’

The Holy Ghost grinned, grinned, grinned. Either he was growing a beard or he hadn’t shaved in three days. His face looked like those fuzzy photographs you see with the captions ‘Is this the true shroud of Christ?’ He couldn’t keep his hands or feet still: always tapping, tapping. I thought he was on something. He was, but I didn’t find out until later what it was. Relatively innocent — he drank about twenty cups of black coffee a day.

Donohue waited until the waitress was out of earshot. Then he said to the two men:

‘What we got here is a jewelry store. Very fancy. Mucho dinero. We got it worked out how to get it before it opens. Like nine in the morning. No B and E. Legit. No customers. The manager, three salesmen, two guys who do repairs. Maybe a porter, an old geezer.’

‘Silent alarms?’ the Holy Ghost asked in his hoarse voice. He was half Hymie Gore’s heft, and had a voice twice as low.

‘Sure,’ Donohue said. ‘What else? But no armed guard, no TV cameras. We go in when the shutters are still down. Dig? The place hasn’t opened for business yet? So what cop is going to look in? The stones are up front in showcases and in a back room where the safe is. A piece of cake.’

‘Yeah,’ Hymie Gore squeaked. ‘The last piece of cake I went for cost me three-to-five.’

‘I’m telling you,’ Donohue said. ‘Can’t miss.’

‘The five of us?’ the Holy Ghost wanted to know.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Two more. Maybe three. But not right away. Pick up help when we’re ready to hit. But we got a lot to do, and a month to do it in.’

‘What’s the split?’ the Holy Ghost rasped.

‘To be negotiated,’ Donohue said, ‘if you decide to come in.’

‘Negotiated,’ Hymie Gore said wonderingly.’What does that mean?’

‘I want ten,’ the Holy Ghost said.

‘Ten what?’ Fleming said.

‘Percent — of the take.’

I looked at Donohue. He gave me a brief nod.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Ten percent. For each of you. But off the net. Expenses come off the top.’

‘That’s fair,’ Donohue said.

‘Yeah,’ the Holy Ghost said hoarsely. ‘Who’s running the show?’

‘I am,’ I said.

‘You? A lady?’

‘That’s right.’

‘She’s okay,’ Donohue told the heavies. ‘I’m with her.’

‘Want to think it over?’ Fleming asked them.

‘I already did,’ the Holy Ghost said. ‘It’s before Christmas?’

‘About two weeks before,’ Fleming said.

‘Good. I got a lot of gifts to buy. I’m in. You, Hymie?’

‘What?’ the big man said dazedly. ‘Oh. Yeah. Sure. We should carry things?’

‘Of course,’ Donohue said. ‘You got one?’

The giant considered carefully.

‘I can get,’ he said finally.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Now here’s what we’ve got….’

‘I like it,’ the Ghost said after I finished. ‘Especially the cleaning truck angle. That’s cute.’

‘Yeah,’ Gore said. ‘That’s cute.’

‘Like Bea said,’ Donohue told them, ‘we’ll need maybe two, three more guys, so keep your eyes peeled for some hard cases. Maybe we’ll pick up a car the night before we hit. Nothing flashy. We’ll ditch it right after the take. It should be a four-door with some power under the hood. Also, we’ll need a place we can go to later. A garage would be best. Where we can pull in, unload, switch cars. We’ll leave the stolen heap and the van there. We can end up at the Harding. You could waltz into that place carrying the White House and no one would say “Boo.” Also, we got to figure how to get coveralls for all of us from the cleaning service. I got an idea on that. Also, we should think of maybe like a diversion. Something happening, say, five blocks away the time we hit. Maybe a call to the cops that a

bomb’s been planted. Or maybe a real smoke bomb. Hell, we could blow up a mailbox. Some such shit. Just to keep the local blues busy.’

I looked at him in admiration. I hadn’t even thought of a diversion.

‘Also,’ I said, trying to prove I really was the boss lady, ‘we’ll need masks or stockings. Something to hide our faces. Tape, rope, gags for the cleaning helper and the people inside the store.’

‘A peteman?’ the Holy Ghost said. ‘In case that safe is locked?’

Donohue looked at me.

‘No,’ I said definitely. ‘If it’s locked we won’t have time to blow it. Or drill. And we don’t want the noise and can’t carry the equipment it’d take. There’s plenty in those showcases. All we need is a hammer and a bag.’

‘That’s lovely,’ the Holy Ghost said, tapping away frantically with fingers and feet. ‘A hammer and a bag. I love that.’

‘Yeah,’ Hymie Gore said. ‘Lovely.’

‘Will you take your share in rocks?’ Donohue asked them.

‘What?’ Fleming said quickly, i don’t follow.’

‘We’ll have to fence the stuff,’ Donohue explained. ‘Or make a deal with the insurance company. That’ll take time. Weeks probably. Maybe longer. And the boys want the cash for Christmas. Will you guys take some of the ice as your cut? Fence it yourselves? Faster bucks. You take, say, a couple of nice rings, a necklace. Whatever. Then you don’t have to wait until the whole shmear is sold. You got your split right away.’

‘Yeah,’ the Holy Ghost croaked. ‘That sounds good. I’ll take some of the rocks.’

‘Yeah,’ Hymie Gore said, nodding violently. ‘That sounds good. Me too.’

‘Fine,’ Black Jack said. ‘This is going to be a big one. Glad you boys will be with us. I’ll be in touch.’

As if he had given them a command, they drained their glasses, rose to their feet and, nodding to me, shambled out of Fangio’s. We watched them go.

‘What do you think?’ Donohue asked.

‘They’ll do,’ Dick Fleming said in what I now recognized as his Big Caper voice.

‘Jack,’ I said, ‘what was that business of paying them off with part of the loot? With actual stones?’

He stared at me.

‘Don’t you get it?’ he said. ‘I told you these guys were mutts. Pay them off in stolen property, and before you know it they’ll be trying to hock it or peddling the stuff in every bar on Broadway, including right here in Fangio’s. No self-respecting fence would touch them. They’re wingdings. So they peddle the stuff, and right away the blues pick them up. The rocks are identified as part of the Brandenberg heist, and the fuzz get big headlines about how they broke the case so quick. You think they’re going to look for anyone else? No way! File closed. And we’re home free.’

‘Hey, wait a minute,’ Dick Fleming said. ‘Won’t they talk if they’re picked up? Identify us? Cop a plea?’

‘Oh sure,’ Donohue said cheerfully. ‘They’ll sing their little hearts out. What do you expect? But I’ll be long gone by then. Won’t you?’

‘Of course,’ I said hastily. ‘Long gone.’

‘Naturally,’ Black Jack said. ‘The survival of the fittest. Wow, we’re really rolling now! Let’s have another round. This one is on me.’

So we had one more drink. Then Donohue said he was going back to the Hotel Harding and get to bed early.

I said I was going to drive Dick Fleming home, down to the Village. So we all shook hands and parted. I paid the check, including that last drink Donohue had grandly offered.