One Endless Hour (15 page)

    "No brains, no feeling," Harris snorted, but he subsided. "Let me out at the next cab stand," he said a minute later. "I'll take a cab to the airport."

    "Take one to Fourteenth Street and then another to the airport," I advised him. "The police are sure to check cab sheets from this area for riders to Union Station and National Airport."

    "Yeah, good idea," he admitted.

    "Here we are," I said, easing in behind a two-cab stand. We weren't more than five blocks from the bank we'd taken. "The next one will be a piece of cake too, and we'll all get well on the proceeds. Don't forget to call the Schemer."

    Harris's smile was wan as he got out of my car. As I drove off I had the feeling that whether he called the Schemer or not depended very much upon how his luck ran at Vegas's dice and card tables for the next two weeks.

    I headed over to Bladensburg Road in northeast Washington and had lunch. Then I went to a neighborhood movie where I watched the Redskins lose again. When I came out of the theater, the 4:30 P.M. homeward traffic was just starting to thicken up. I joined it, moved along to New York Avenue, and-eventually-to the Washington-Baltimore Expressway.

    There were no roadblocks or car inspections barring exit from the District of Columbia.

    If there had been earlier, the police had decided that the hit-and-run bank robbers were long gone.

    I settled down for the drive to Philadelphia.

    

    

    When I had a chance to count it, my end of the District bank job came to sixty-four hundred dollars.

    It wasn't worth the risk, but it had been a long time since I needed sixty-four hundred so badly. I felt reprieved. It eased the money pressure, which had led me to take on the helter-skelter operation just completed. Professionally, I could hardly approve of the job, some elements of which had been almost farcical, but the important thing was that it had worked.

    I fully intended that tapping the bank in Thornton, Pa. would be a far different story. With time enough to prepare properly, it should indeed be the piece of cake that I had promised Harris. A useful bonus from the hasty job just done was that I felt I knew Harris and Dahl now. Harris was colorless, Dahl flamboyant, but both had performed. With two weeks to work up a detailed plan, it shouldn't be too difficult to arrange Dahl's contribution so his kookiness didn't jeopardize the whole show.

    I had already selected a motel near Philadelphia where I had stayed before to serve as a base of operations. En route to it, I detoured slightly to the northwest to drive through the suburb of Thornton. It was a residential community, generally known in real estate jargon as a "bedroom" community. Row after row of well kept up, better-priced homes on neat-looking streets bespoke a maximum of financial security. No air of quiet desperation existed in Thornton. Male Thorntonites might commute to the city daily to scuffle for the elusive buck at their places of business, but when they returned home evenings it was to an oasis of tranquillity.

    Ordinarily I would have set myself up in the area as a tree surgeon, a gunsmith, or a locksmith, occupations in which I could cut the mustard. With only two weeks, there wasn't time. I had to have a cover story, though. Nothing is so conspicuous to local police as an unfamiliar face or automobile seen repeatedly, and I would have to spend some time in Thornton.

    Before leaving town, I crisscrossed the town's business section twice. It looked prosperous. The absence of empty stores indicated few worms in the local economic apple. There was industry nearby, but not within the city limits. I drove south to Media, a few miles from Philadelphia, and put up at the Carousel, a middle-class motel.

    After looking Thornton over, I decided to pass as a survey taker, an individual who walked into places of business and checked off answers to a list of prepared questions. It had worked for me a couple of times before. I didn't plan on being just any ordinary survey taker, either. Over the years I'd learned that big names open doors wider. Names like U.S. Steel, General Electric, and IBM.

    The name I chose this time was Bell Telephone. The only disadvantage in claiming to work for a large company was that one might occasionally run into a supposed fellow employee, but this could actually be turned into an advantage. A man working for a giant corporation, no matter how far up the ladder, could hardly be expected to know what all the other departments of his company were doing.

    Back in my room after a late dinner, I picked up the telephone directory for the Philadelphia area and turned to the Yellow Pages section. I tore out the familiar Yellow Pages logotype from the first page, then trimmed it neatly with a penknife, leaving a half-inch margin all around it.

    I read Bell Telephone's own plug for its Yellow Pages advertising in the back of the phone book, then armed myself with a sheet of motel stationery and a ballpoint pen. Rewriting as I went, I drew up a list of ten possible questions. I boiled this down to six, and finally to four. I didn't want to burden my "prospects" with more than two and a half or three minutes reading time.

    I wound up with the following,

    
1. Are you listed in the Yellow Pages?

    
2. If not, do you realize that advertising placed in the Yellow Pages is never lost, misplaced, or forgotten?

    
3. If not, do you know that advertising campaigns in support of the Yellow Pages encompass all major media from television, newspaper, car cards, and radio through magazines, billboards, and direct mail, and that this advertising is your advertising if you are listed?

    
4. Would you like to have a space salesman call upon you with additional facts and figures?

    When I was satisfied with the wording of the questionnaire, I slipped it into my jacket pocket and prepared for bed. The last thing I did before turning out the light was to phone the Schemer. "We had a little trouble getting our schedules together," I told him, making no mention of the District job, in which he had no part anyway. "But we're set for two weeks from now. When the boys call you, tell them I'm at the Carousel Motel in Media near Philadelphia."

    "Will do," Frenz replied. "Have you looked over the layout yet yourself?"

    "In a preliminary way."

    "You'll find it's a winner."

    "I can use a winner. Goodnight."

    "Goodnight," he echoed.

    I went to bed and dreamed repeatedly of bare-bottomed girl bank robbers sliding on their tummies across the slick tile floor of the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York City.

    

    

    In the morning I drove to Philadelphia with my list of questions and my Yellow Pages logotype. I cruised back streets and side streets until I spotted a dingy-looking basement printing shop. I parked the VW and descended narrow iron steps until I found myself ankle-deep in discarded paper and cardboard in a dimly-lit interior that obviously hadn't been swept out in months. From the look of the place, if the payment were spot cash the proprietor would be unlikely to question my motive even if I wanted a five-dollar bill printed on one side of a 2 1/2
x 6 sized piece of paper with a verse from the Bible backed up on the other.

    There was no one in sight, but I could hear an offset press rattling out in back. "Anyone home?" I called.

    The press noise stopped, and a sour-faced man with a limp Pancho Villa moustache came out into the front of the shop. "Yeah?" he said ungraciously.

    I showed him the logotype and questions. "I ran out of flyers," I explained. "How much for five hundred of these on fairly good six-by-nine stock?"

    "I got no time to wait for you big companies to get around to payin' your bills," he whined. "I got to pay cash for my supplies."

    "Cash it is if I can have them tomorrow."

    He fingered the logotype. "It'll have to be offset."

    "I don't care what it is."

    "Eleven A.M., then," he said, and did some figuring with a pencil stub. "Sixteen eighty for five hundred." I handed him a twenty-dollar bill. He made no move to take it. "I got no change here this early in the mornin'."

    I found I had seventeen dollars in fives and ones. "No sob story tomorrow," I warned him as I gave him the bills. "I've got to have this material right away."

    He grunted something unintelligible as the bills disappeared beneath his ink-smudged apron. He was already on his way to the rear of the shop before I began to climb the iron steps.

    I spent the afternoon at the Philadelphia Public Library. In the reading room I went through the past year's issues of the magazine
Banking, The Journal of the American Banking Association.
I hoped to find some reference to the Thornton Bank that would contain some indication of recent changes in floor plan or equipment. The Schemer had a detailed floor plan of the bank in his kit, but I had to be sure that it was up-to-date.

    In the past I had acquired helpful information from a column "The Country Banker" in
Banking.
It was a chatty affair that mentioned bank remodeling, new vaults, new cashiers' cages, and the like. I found nothing on the Thornton bank, however. I'd still have to check it out, but there was a reasonable chance that nothing had changed there recently.

    On my way back to Media I saw a theater marquee advertising
Around the World in 80 Days.
In the ten years since it was made I'd seen it four times, but I stopped in to see it again. It says something about the economy of this country that the admission charge has been higher each time I saw it. It's a remarkable movie, though. A bench mark in the industry. I enjoy professionalism wherever I see it.

    

    

    The next afternoon I picked up my Yellow Page flyers. They were ready, somewhat to my surprise. The general atmosphere of the print shop hadn't been such as to induce confidence in promised performance. The flyers looked fine. Sharp black print on good quality paper carries its own authority. I stopped at a drugstore and picked up a clipboard to add an official touch to my survey sham. It assured my professional status.

    I arrived in Thornton again at eight thirty A.M. the following morning. My first stop was a lunchroom across the street from the bank. I gave the girl at the cash register one of my flyers at the same time I bought a morning paper from her. "I'll show it to the boss after his breakfast rush dies down," she said after a glance at it. "He's the chef."

    "No hurry," I said. "I'm having breakfast myself, and I'll be around town for a few days."

    I took a seat at a table for two near a window that commanded a view of the bank's side entrance, which was used only by employees-a fact made known to me by the Schemer's fact-gathering. I spread my paper out in a manner that would discourage anyone from taking the seat across the table from me even if the place became crowded, then hitched my chair around slightly so I could see the bank parking lot without turning my head. At this hour the cars pulling onto the lot would contain employees only. Right now I was interested in their arrival times.

    I ordered hotcakes and coffee when the waitress arrived at my table. Mentally I reviewed the descriptions of the bank manager and assistant manager contained in the Schemer's voluminous dossiers. Thomas Barton, the manager, was forty, five feet ten and a soft two hundred pounds, dark-complexioned, and had a quick, nervous way of walking. The Schemer had him down as a Casper Milquetoast type with a pushy, clubwoman type wife whose kids tended to run loose.

    George Mace, the assistant manager, was fifty. He was thin, balding, bespectacled, and invariably wore a cardigan sweater to work, changing to a linen duster inside the bank. The Schemer's file on Mace said that the man had worked in the bank for twenty-one years and had refused several offers of a branch bank managership for himself because he didn't want to leave town.

    My interest in these two men was elementary: between them they had the combination to the bank vault. I was hoping that if they got to work early enough in the mornings, as bank men often did, that it might be possible to intercept them at the bank's rear entrance and force them to let us enter with them, risky though it might be. It would eliminate the aspect of the Schemer's plan that I liked least, the necessity for manipulating the families if we had to pick up the two men at their homes and take them to the bank with us.

    The first morning I saw enough to convince me that the Schemer had the right of it and that my hope was in vain. When my watch showed 8:58 and I hadn't seen either Barton or Mace, I was beginning to think I had missed their arrival. Then a man who was unmistakably Barton from the Schemer's description hurried toward the bank's side entrance from a parked car.

    But it was 9:17 before a man in a fuzzy gray sweater who was just as unmistakably Mace alighted from a mud-stained Rambler. He was thin, stooped, and ailing-looking, and he shuffled toward the entrance with a kind of patient weariness. I wondered if the tellers kept cash locked in drawers so they could operate for a few moments in the morning without the vault being opened. If they didn't, there must be some disgruntled bank customers standing around waiting for Mace to contribute his half of the vault combination to the opening of the vault so the day's banking business could get started.

    The late arrival convinced me of something else. We were going to have to pick up Barton and Mace and take them to the bank with us. Even at 8:58, when Barton arrived, the majority of the employees were already inside the bank. That was no good as far as we were concerned. We had to be inside first to assure ourselves that we could herd the clerks, cashiers, janitors, and guards where we wanted them to go as fast as they entered. It looked as though the only way we could be sure that Barton and Mace would be there early enough for us to do the job right would be to take them there ourselves. I'd watch them further, of course, but this first viewing was hardly encouraging to my wishful thinking that we might not have to get involved with the families.