Project Sweet Life (4 page)

“Just water,” I said. Yesterday’s Coke had pretty much broken the bank for me.

“Water,” Victor said.

But Curtis announced to the waitress, “I’ll have a Coke.
And
a side order of fries.” In other words, he was so confident we’d catch this bank robber that he was willing to spend another four dollars of his—
our
—money.

The waitress just smiled, as if to say,
Whoa, big spender
.

Over in the bank, everything looked pretty much the same as the day before. Gladys Kravitz and Happy Pants were both working quietly at their desks.

It turns out that banks have a lunch-hour rush, so things were very busy for an hour or so. Then business slowed down, which was when the bank employees started to take
their
lunches, in shifts.

The coffee shop, however,
didn’t
have a lunch-hour rush. That answered my question about who still ate in a greasy spoon like this: not many people. But all this thinking about food reminded me how hungry I was.
Curtis’s French fries were long gone, and even burned split pea soup smells good when you’ve barely eaten since breakfast. But even Curtis’s self-confidence had its limit, so we just sat there sipping our ice water. After a while, the waitress stopped asking us if we wanted anything else. To her credit, she never stopped refilling our waters.

“This is embarrassing,” I said as the afternoon wore on and the waitress had filled our glasses for the hundredth time. “We can’t sit at this table forever.”

“They’ll forgive us once we finger Happy Pants!” Curtis said, still staring at the bank. “We can come back here later and drop some serious cash.”

“Curtis,” Victor said quietly. “Dave is right. It’s not just the embarrassment factor. We’ve been here for over four hours. This is
boring
.”

“But what about what we saw yesterday?”

“We didn’t see
anything
yesterday. We saw a woman using her cell phone.”

Curtis clutched the tabletop like a desperate drunk being told he had to leave the bar. “Let’s just stay till the bank closes at five. Can we at least do that?”

Victor and I looked at each other. We both knew that
if we didn’t let Curtis get his way, we’d never hear the end of it.

“Okay,” I said.

Curtis turned back to the window again, as if the sheer power of his scowl could force the occupants of the bank to do something incriminating.

As the minutes wore on, Curtis kept glaring at the bank, though Victor and I spent more time watching the clock on the wall of the coffee shop. The seats in our booth were padded, but they’d long since stopped feeling soft (though they were still just as sticky).

By five minutes to five, the diner was deserted except for Curtis, Victor, me, and a little old lady primly eating a BLT with a knife and fork.

I arched my back and stretched my arms.

“No,” Curtis said firmly, without even looking at me. “Not yet.”

“Curtis,” Victor said. “Give it up.”

“But what about the hundred-thousand-dollar
reward
? We have to catch those
robbers
!”

At the sound of Curtis’s outburst, the old lady looked over at us. I grinned apologetically at her, and she returned to her BLT.

“Curtis?” I said patiently. “It’s over.”

“Wait,” he said. “Wait! Something’s happening!”

But Curtis had already cried wolf so many times that day that I didn’t even turn.

“Please!” he implored. “Just
look
!”

So I looked. And Curtis was right: Something
was
happening inside the bank.

There was a woman who seemed to be asking about her safe-deposit box. All afternoon, people had been visiting their safe-deposit boxes, going in and out of the bank vault. But something about this woman was different. She didn’t just look rich; she looked like she wanted people to
know
she was rich. She wore an all-white pantsuit and was as skinny as a department-store mannequin, and she posed like one too. With the exception of her actual face, anywhere she had bare skin—ears, neck, wrists, ankles—she wore shimmering gold jewelry.

When watching people through a window, you obviously don’t know what they’re saying to each other. But after a while, you start to think you do.

But it’s not five o’clock yet!
Golden Girl seemed to be saying to the bank teller.

Five o’clock is the time the bank closes,
the bank teller seemed to reply.
That means all transactions need to be finished by then.

I
will
be finished!
Golden Girl said.
This will only take a second!

I’m sorry, ma’am!
the bank teller responded.
We stop access to the safe-deposit boxes at four forty-five.

“Fascinating,” Victor said sarcastically. “Curtis, what exactly does it say that
this
is the highlight of our afternoon?”

“Wait!” he said. “
Look!
”

He pointed over to the other end of the bank, to where Happy Pants had her desk.

She’d stopped what she was doing and was intently watching the interaction between Golden Girl and the bank teller.

“Curtis,” I said, “if I worked there, I’d be watching that, too.”

Suddenly Happy Pants twitched.

I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t want to encourage Curtis. But it looked like a nervous twitch.

Naturally Curtis saw it too. “There!” he said. “Did you see that? She’s nervous about something!”

Happy Pants looked away from the interaction with Golden Girl, through the window of the bank to the street outside. What was she looking at? It wasn’t us, like in that movie
Rear Window
, where the killer looks over and sees Jimmy Stewart spying on him through the window.

I looked back into the bank, at the vault where Golden Girl was still arguing with the teller. Knowing what I knew about rich people, I had a good idea what would happen. And sure enough, the clerk finally did relent, nodding and grudgingly letting Golden Girl in through the little swinging door that led back to the vault.

Happy Pants stood up from her desk and crossed toward the front doors.

“
Now
what is Happy Pants doing?” Curtis said.

I had to admit, this was interesting. Or did Curtis just have me jumping to conclusions now too?

As Golden Girl disappeared into the vault, Happy Pants slipped outside the bank to the little concrete plaza between the building and the parking lot.

Victor adjusted his glasses. “Where is she going?”

“We’ll see in a minute!” Curtis said. “Now shhhhh!”

“What ‘shhhhh’? We’re across a busy street and inside
another building. How could she hear us?”

Right then, Happy Pants looked over, right at us, just like in
Rear Window
. We all flinched at exactly the same time.

“She’s not looking at us,” Curtis hurried to say. “There’s a glare on these windows. She can’t even see us.”

I wasn’t sure if this was true or not—after all, we’d been able to see
them
all afternoon. In any event, Happy Pants didn’t keep looking at us. Instead, she hurried across the little plaza to the curb in front of the bank where a vendor was selling flowers out of a bucket.

They exchanged a few quick words, and she nodded to a particular bouquet. He handed her the flowers, and she palmed him some money.

“Get you boys anything more?” the waitress said suddenly.

We all jumped in surprise.

We’d been so caught up in the events across the street that we hadn’t noticed her.

“What?” Curtis said. “No! Nothing, thanks!”

The waitress sighed loudly before disappearing again.
I wasn’t sure what had finally gotten her so bent out of shape.

We turned back to the bank where Happy Pants was now hurrying inside with her flowers.

“That’s it!” Curtis said. “That’s the signal! Now the flower vendor is going to follow the woman in the white pantsuit so he can rob her of whatever she takes out of her safe-deposit box.”

“But why bother with the flowers?” I said. “Why not just call him on her cell phone?”

“Because of all the security cameras in the bank,” Curtis said. “If she used her cell phone, it might be obvious when they investigate that she was in on the crime. I bet they change their signal every time they rob someone new!”

“What do we do now?” I said. “Call the police?”

“We could use my cell phone,” Victor said. “But oh, wait! I sold it at our pointless garage sale!”

“Would you
let it go
!” Curtis hissed at Victor. “We’re about to capture a bunch of bank robbers. When we get that hundred-thousand-dollar reward, you’ll be able to buy a hundred cell phones.”

“But we need to call the police!” I said, lurching up from the table.

“Wait! Something else is happening,” Curtis said.

I looked back at the bank. Golden Girl had slinked out of the building and was sashaying across the little plaza. Whatever she had taken from her safe-deposit box was small enough to fit inside her purse.

Meanwhile, there was a bustle of activity inside the bank. All of the tellers had left their Plexiglas cages and one of them was locking up the front doors. The loan officers had emerged from their cubicles too. It was five o’clock, but it didn’t seem like anyone was leaving. It was more like they were lingering, waiting for something to happen.

It seemed like Gladys Kravitz was somehow the center of attention, even if she didn’t know it exactly.

Then one of the tellers emerged from a door in the back of the bank carrying a white cake with candles.

A cake?

People were smiling. Gladys Kravitz caught sight of the cake and looked surprised, then embarrassed, then grateful.

“Wait,” I said, confused. “What’s going on?”

We kept watching. People were laughing now, including Gladys Kravitz. At some point, Happy Pants had transferred the flowers into a vase, which she now presented to Gladys Kravitz.

A party. That’s what was going on. Maybe it was a birthday party, or maybe Gladys Kravitz was leaving the bank, and the others were giving her a little bon voyage. That was the reason the teller hadn’t wanted to let Golden Girl into her safe-deposit box—and why Happy Pants had been watching them so closely: They didn’t want to delay the party. The flowers were just flowers, and if that cell phone call a day earlier had been anything at all, it had probably just been her ordering a cake.

Boy, did I feel stupid.

Victor and Curtis didn’t say anything, but I could tell they felt just as stupid. We had
all
jumped to conclusions.

“Curtis,” I said. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t a bad idea. Honestly.” After a disappointment like that, there was no way I was going to dump on him.

Even Victor wasn’t rubbing it in. “I bet those robberies really
were
an inside job,” he said.

Curtis looked almost catatonic. “We should go,” he
whispered. “We’ve wasted enough time here already.”

“Yeah,” I said. But then I stopped. “Wait. No.” I
really
had to pee. I’d been sitting at that table drinking ice water all day. “I’ll be right back,” I said.

I made my way down the hallway toward the restrooms in the back of the coffee shop. Suddenly I overheard voices from the kitchen.

“Well, they’re up to
something
,” a guy said. “They’ve been sitting there all afternoon. Can’t you just tell them to leave?”

“Sure, I
could
,” said a woman—the waitress. “But it’s better if they go on their own. They’re just about to leave, I think.”

“Relax, Jerome,” a third voice said. “They’re harmless. They’re—what? Fourteen years old?”

Fifteen!
I wanted to shout. Was this person
blind
?

I didn’t want the people in the kitchen to know I was eavesdropping, but on the other hand, I still had to pee. As I crept down the hallway toward the restrooms, I saw over a swinging door into the kitchen. The waitress was talking to two men, a younger, skinny cook dressed in food-spattered white and a burly older guy with a leather jacket and a shaved head. The two men had their backs
to me, and the waitress was standing in profile. Behind them, back between a set of shelves and the stainless steel refrigerator, a pair of binoculars hung on the wall.

“They’re
probably
harmless,” the waitress was saying. “But they are watching the bank.”

“So?” said the guy with the shaved head, solid and unflinching. “So are we. That’s the whole reason we’re here.”

“That’s the
point
, Eddy,” said the cook, as twitchy as the other guy was cool. “Do we really want anyone else knowing what a great place this is to watch the bank? What if someone puts two and two together?”

It took me a second, but then I got it.

These guys are the bank robbers!

I immediately ducked back into the hallway, away from the swinging door.

Curtis had been wrong when he’d thought the robberies were inside jobs; they didn’t involve anyone from inside the bank. But they
did
involve the people from the coffee shop just across the street!

Talk about a robbery in plain sight! It was all so obvious. It also explained why it didn’t matter that so few people ate in the restaurant. It was a setup to spy on the
bank. In fact, fewer customers were probably
better
for them. They probably used those binoculars to peer into the bank’s open vault.