One Endless Hour (16 page)

    I made my hotcakes and coffee last another twenty minutes while I clocked additional customer arrivals at the bank's front entrance. I had already seen that in the first five minutes nine people went inside. This was only slightly fewer than those who entered in the next twenty minutes. The heavy initial traffic gave me additional pause.

    We could hardly expect to force Barton and Mace to open the vault, clean it out, and make our getaway in less than eight to ten minutes. And in addition to the regular bank personnel, we couldn't hope to cope with the flow of bank customers I'd seen in the first few moments the front doors were open. We'd have to keep the customers out of the bank somehow. There were ways. It would come down to the question of selecting the best way.

    "More coffee?" the waitress's voice said in my ear.

    "Thanks." I held up my cup. Looking at the girl, my glance went beyond her, and I got a shock. Two uniformed young cops were seated at counter stools, looking in my direction. It took me an instant to realize that they were looking at the waitress, whose uniform nestled a bit snugly about her derriere. The cops laughed and said something to each other, then said something to the girl when she returned to the counter. She joined in the laughter, and I released a breath I'd been holding.

    When the cops left, I left too. I spent the balance of the morning passing out a few more of my Yellow Pages flyers. I planned on making only half a dozen calls a day. I had to make the business section last until we pulled the job. None of the storekeepers wanted to take the time to talk to me. Two passed me on to their assistants, both of whom were women. The women wanted to talk about it, which was all right with me. I was in no hurry.

    A couple of businessmen gave me a fast brushoff. "I'm already in the book," one said grumpily. "And with you in town coaxing my competition into it, you're cutting my throat." There wasn't much I could have said to that argument even if I'd been legitimate.

    I toured the area on foot most of the morning, memorizing street patterns and traffic lights. There's nothing more anonymous than a salesman making a one-time call. In between stops I drank coffee to kill time until my kidneys were awash. By the time I made my last call the proprietor knew who I was supposed to be before I even began my pitch. That's a small town for you. It was why I'd gone to the trouble of setting up the gimmick to give me a reason for spending time in the area. My cover was established.

    I drove back to the Carousel and checked my firsthand information acquired about the bank that morning against the Schemer's files. He was right on the button in every respect. That was his reputation, of course.

    For the balance of the week I ate breakfast each morning in the lunchroom across the street from the bank. It helped my digestion when I discovered that the two young cops stopped in every morning because one of them was giving the waitress a big rush.

    Barton and Mace never varied their pattern, unfortunately. They were consistently late in then arrival at the bank parking lot. I reluctantly came to the conclusion that once again the Schemer was right and we'd have to take them in their homes rather than in the bank itself. The third morning the bank had eleven customers who were either waiting for its doors to open or who arrived within the first two minutes. It confirmed my thinking that the customers somehow had to be excluded.

    When I was back at the Carousel again, I looked up the section of the Schemer's report dealing with the bank's opening time. True to form, he had pinpointed the early influx of customers as a problem. Moreover, he proposed a solution. Have a card printed and place it in the bank door, his report suggested. Have the card say BANK EXAMINERS HERE. DOORS OPEN AT 10:00 A.M. TODAY.

    It wasn't a bad idea. It might even work. That's why the Schemer was worth his ten percent. Twelve and a half percent, I reminded myself.

    On Wednesday I made two trips to Thornton from my motel. I checked out the employees' arrival times in the morning as usual. In the afternoon I returned to watch the arrival of the armored truck making the delivery in which we were interested. The delivery was perfectly routine. On Thursday morning I made particular note that there was nothing unusual-at least nothing that was visible from across the street-in the bank's personnel or routine in dealing with the extra volume of cash.

    So eventually it came down to the fact that there were no insuperable problems if we could find a way to control the families of Barton and Mace in their homes during the time we were taking the pair to the bank to open the vault. I stayed away from the homes. Time enough to check up on the Schemer's detailed reports on the home routines when three men paired up differently could operate less conspicuously than a single man. It could wait until Harris and Dahl arrived in town.

    If they arrived.

    It was time I heard from them.

    

    

    Dahl called me at the Carousel on Friday night. "How's it look, cousin?" he asked in his usual breezy manner.

    "We can do it," I told him. "Be here Sunday night and we'll go to work the following Thursday morning."

    "Sounds great," he said heartily. "Sounds like you really been behind the plow, too. You know that all work an' no play makes Drake a dull boy. I'll be in around ten Sunday night, an' I'm gonna bring along with me a few feet of film that'll tickle the risability in your staff of life."

    "We won't have time for anything like-"

    "Relax," he urged me. "This'll do you good. See you Sunday."

    And the connection was broken.

    

    

    The phone call from Harris came at three A.M. Sunday morning. It roused me from sleep. I had been about to give up on him and call the Schemer for a replacement. "How about it, Drake?" he asked in his flat, Midwestern accent.

    "We can do it." I repeated what I had said to Dahl. "I had this coming Thursday earmarked if you can make it here by tonight."

    "It'll be late," he said. "Right now I've got to get some sleep. I've just come from twenty-two hours at the table." From the tone of his voice I didn't need to ask him which way it had gone. "I've looked up connections. There's a feeder plane that'll get me into Philly around midnight."

    "One of us will pick you up at the airport."

    "That means Dahl's still aboard?"

    "He's still aboard."

    There was a momentary silence. "I hope we can keep the damn fool under wraps this time," Harris said finally.

    And the connection was broken.

    

    

    I thought it over afterward.

    I didn't need to go ahead with it. I didn't need to take on a job with two partners neither of whom I would have selected myself if the circumstances had been different.

    There were at least two men in the country to whom I could have gone, identified myself, asked them to throw in with me, and had never a qualm about their performance.

    But if I did that, I had to give away the secret of my new face and my totally new identity.

    Was it worth it?

    I finally decided that it wasn't. I'd stay with the program.

    It's not only in the marriage contract that the phrase "for better or worse" occurs.

    

    

    Dick Dahl called me from the airport on Sunday night two hours earlier than I'd expected. He balked at first when I told him I'd meet him behind the first lane of cars in the parking lot. "Don't be so damn lazy," I said. "There's absolutely no point at all in our being seen together in the terminal." He gave in reluctantly.

    He was waiting when I parked and walked to the rendezvous point. "Got away sooner'n I thought," he said, his good humor restored. "What about Preacher?"

    "He won't be in until after midnight."

    "No sense hangin' around," Dahl said. "We might as well go to your motel."

    Since this agreed with my own thinking, I led the way to my car. Dahl had the ever-present movie camera slung around his neck. The man really traveled light. The first time I'd seen him he carried a briefcase. This time he had a suitcase, lightweight airplane luggage. From the way he leaned away from it, though, it was heavy.

    The airport parking lot was well lighted. As we approached my car, a woman was getting out of another car in the next row. The man with her locked the car doors while the woman walked toward us, her high heels click-clicking on the macadam. She wasn't pretty, but she carried herself well. "Hurry up or we'll miss them," she called over her shoulder. When she passed us, the thin sheath of her dress made it readily apparent that her hips measured twelve inches more than her waist.

    Dahl dropped his suitcase with a thump. He bent over it, snapped the catches, grabbed up a powerful-looking light, and clamped it onto his camera. The bright beam of the light shot out, enveloping the undulating tick-tock movement of the woman's haunches while the camera whirred. At the sudden glare of light, the woman looked back at us in surprise.

    The man strode toward Dahl and seized him by the arm. "What the hell you think you're doin', Jack?" he growled belligerently. He was two inches shorter than Dahl, but broader. He had an inch-and-a-quarter cigar butt between his teeth and a two-day growth of beard.

    Dahl shook off the hand and turned to me, ignoring the man. "The assistant district attorney is at the exit," he said to me.

    "Assistant district attor-" The heavyset man paused. "What you
talkin'
about, mister?"

    Dahl turned back to him. "Just tell the truth and everything will be all right." He removed the light from his camera and restored it to the suitcase.

    The belligerence had departed from the stocky man's attitude. "Truth?" he said uneasily. "Truth about what?"

    "You can call your lawyer later," Dahl said, bending over his suitcase again to snap its catches.

    The man spun on his heel and hurried after the woman. He took her by the arm and hustled her along while she protested. They veered from the parking lot exit toward which the woman had been headed and went toward another some distance away. "Works every time," Dahl said to me with a broad grin as we got into my VW. "Sometimes I think everyone in the world has secrets, sexual and otherwise, that he doesn't want to talk to assistant district attorneys about."

    "You'll pull that on a bishop someday and wind up in court for invasion of privacy," I said.

    "Not a chance. A bishop would have run. You wouldn't believe their sex habits."

    "You're an authority on the sex habits of bishops?"

    "I'm an authority on sex habits, period," Dahl said calmly. "You got anything to drink at the motel?"

    "No."

    "Stop somewhere and I'll pick up a bottle of Scotch."

    "This is Sunday, remember? In Philadelphia."

    "Oh, yeah. Stop at a hotel, then, an' I'll scrounge a jug from a bellboy."

    Twenty-five minutes later we arrived at the Carousel, the fifth of Scotch firmly in Dahl's hand. -He splashed two liberal drinks into water tumblers and handed me one. Then he opened his suitcase on the bed-I could see only a spare shirt in it in addition to all his movie equipment- and removed a projector. "Got somethin' to show you, cousin." He sounded pleased with himself. He fitted a small reel of film into the maze of sprockets and gears on the projector, then aimed the lens at the expanse of white wall at the end of the room.

    The last thing I wanted to do was view home movies. "We should be going over-"

    "Only take a minute," Dahl said smoothly. He flicked a switch, and a blurred image appeared on the wall. Dahl adjusted the focus, and a brilliantly clear color shot showed a girl in a bikini sitting beside a swimming pool. The camera lingered on her until she glanced up and reached self-consciously for a towel to place between herself and the camera.

    It was only when the scene cut suddenly to two women unlocking a motel room door that I remembered the movies Dahl had taken at the Marriott during the occasion of our first meeting. Before I could say anything, the scene changed again. Clearly in focus were a group of women in what appeared to be an institutionalized setting I didn't recognize. Backs to the camera, two of the women were in the process of lifting their dresses and slips up around their shoulders, and I realized with a sense of shock that these were the movies that Dahl had taken inside the Washington bank.

    Three women were facing the camera, obviously arguing, but in seconds they turned and emulated the first pair, who now had a girdle in one case and panties in the other down to the backs of their knees. Up went more dresses and slips as the first bare-bottomed duo dropped to the floor and stretched out. Another variety of underwear dropped and two more bare behinds popped into view, and then as the camera drew back slightly, three more.

    All five plumped out attractively as their owners doubled up awkwardly and joined the first pair on the floor. The camera swept back and forth lingeringly over what appeared to be a field of nude buttocks of all shapes and sizes, the entire homogeneous fleshy expanse broken only by the intrusion of two garter belts and one angry-looking red pimple.

    "You'll notice that although there's two good-lookin' young heads in the crowd the best-lookin' ass belongs to that woman on the left, who must be forty-five if she's a nickel," Dahl said. "You'd be surprised how often it turns out that way."

    I had been so intent upon the image upon the wall that Dahl's voice irritated me. It was an intrusion upon my concentration. In another instant the picture flickered slightly and then the wall went dark. I forced myself back in my chair, in which I had been crouched forward tensely.