The Town: A Novel (14 page)

Frawley was a doodler and a good one. As the suit from the Federal Reserve Bank outlined concerns regarding the Big Dig—the Central Artery reconstruction project that included, as part of its ten-year overhaul of the city’s crumbling highways and fallen arches, a major tunnel within a few dozen yards of his institution’s gold bullion vaults—Frawley added hash-mark scarring to the egg-eyed hockey masks lining the margins of his schedule memo. He did them mug-shot style, full-face and profile: two small bean holes for the nostrils, a flat, expressionless slot for the mouth, and the twin tribal triangles at the pits of the cheeks. Tracing the masks was a dead end: a visit to a Chinatown costume store showed him dozens of easily adaptable
Friday the 13th
party masks staring down from the walls.

Hunting a disciplined crew was most difficult because it eliminated Frawley’s two greatest advantages over bank robbers: their stupidity, and their greed. He could not rely on their compulsion to pull reckless jobs, leaving him fewer opportunities to capture them.

He wandered back to the raided vault in his mind. The yawning cabinet, the plundered cash drawers: he tried to let that feeling of violation wash over him again. He remembered the bait bills and dye packs left behind, untouched. Pro bank bandits, like practitioners of any arcane craft, were a superstitious bunch. Frawley hadn’t touched them either, being superstitious in his own way, himself the student of a dying art. He was the last in the long line of bank detectives. The bloodline traced directly from the first stagecoach Pinkertons to himself. If he couldn’t be there at the beginning, he figured the second-best place to be was right where he was, at the tail end. Credit cards, debit cards, smart cards, the Internet: the dawn of the cashless society meant the twilight of the modern bank bandit, and the coming of a new breed. Identity theft and electronic embezzlement were the future of financial crime. The next Adam Frawley would be a pale, deskbound Net-head hunting cyber-thieves with a mouse and a keyboard instead of an Olympus Pearlcorder and a blue Form FD-430. Adam Frawley would soon become obsolete. The techniques, the tradecraft, everything he knew about banks and vaults and the men who robbed them, and all he had yet to learn—it would die with him, the last bank robbery agent.

Below the cartoon masks, he sketched the handset of a telephone and connected the two by a coiled wire. This wire was his only tangible lead now. It was the phone company tech the Brown Bag Bandits exhibited, in the Kenmore Square job as well as the others the task force now suspected them of: credit unions in Winchester and Dedham; the Milk Street Pawn cut-in; ATM jobs in
Cambridge and Burlington; a co-op in Watertown; two banks just over the New Hampshire border; last September’s weekend spree of three Providence storage facilities, for which they had disabled the ADT Security System network across most of eastern Rhode Island; and the nontech armored-car heists Frawley hunched them for, in Melrose, Weymouth, and Braintree. All three-and four-man crew jobs, all of them spread out over the past thirty months.

Frawley had found fresh wounds running up a telephone pole around the corner from the BayBanks, left there by a lineman’s spikes. A Nynex crew in a cherry picker worked for three hours to diagnose and repair the junction-box reroute.

No one Frawley had talked to inside the Monopoly game that was the booming telecom industry could satisfactorily explain how a thief could locate the particular cellular antenna—disabled one and a half miles away, on the roof of a Veterans Administration Hospital on Roxbury’s Mission Hill—responsible for bouncing the bank’s backup alarm signal to the Area D-4 police station.

He sketched a cell tower with suturelike antennas, then fleshed out the tower, letting it grow into the Bunker Hill Monument.

The bleached crime scene, stolen surveillance tapes, and torched work van left them with no physical evidence at all. Frawley’s only hope now was that the subpoena would prove out, this one seeking not just Nynex service logs but employee records and home addresses. He would run down any leads involving phone company employees residing in the Town—possibly opening up the case to a “Charlestown witch hunt” defense at trial, but right now it was all he had.

On top of all this was the phone call he had received just prior to the start of this meeting, informing him that Claire Keesey had yet again failed to return to work.

His felt pen moved incessantly, all these things playing inside his head, finding expression here and there in automatic writing: gloved hands aiming BANG! cartoon guns; fat moonshine jugs labeled BLEACH; dollar signs hashmarked with stitching scars.

He willed himself not to check his wristwatch again as an enormously pregnant DEA agent outlined the positive impact that falling heroin prices might have on note-passers. Apparently a price-and-purity war was raging between the Colombian cartels and the traditional Asian heroin producers, the Colombians gaining East Coast market share by wooing needle-wary smokers and snorters. At $5 per thumbnail-sized bag, street H was now stronger than coke and cheaper than beer.

Heroin use was also rising in Charlestown, but along with the institutional anachronism of the neighborhood, Townie drug addicts retained their affinity for the bad-boy drug of the late 1970s, angel dust. Dust came sold in small
packets, or “tea bags,” the powder acting as an anesthetic, a stimulant, a depressant, and a hallucinogen—all at the same time. Its status as the outlaw drug of all drugs surely accounted for its special appeal within the Town.

But his mind was wandering again. He focused on the tablecloths, their bright coral pinkness reflected in the water glasses like floating lilies. Outside the right-hand wall of windows, the dreary street was drawn in charcoal pencil, smudged by the all-morning drizzle.

Frawley’s and Dino’s pagers went off at the same time. Frawley sat back to read the display on his hip, showing the Lakeville office phone number, followed by the code 91A. The FBI offense code for bank robbery was 091.
A
was shorthand for “armed.”

Dino had his phone, Frawley rising with him, both of them in suits for the meeting, moving away from the tables. Dino held his phone elbow high, as though cell-phone use required a more formal technique than regular telephones.

“Ginny,” he said. “Dean Drysler.… Uh-huh.… Okay. When was that?” He stepped to the wall, looking out the weeping windows to the western end of Beacon. “Got it.” He hung up, turned to Frawley. “Note-passer. Just happened. Claimed gun but didn’t show.”

“Okay.” Hardly anything to shake them out of a meeting for. “So?”

“Coolidge Corner BayBanks, intersection of Beacon and Harvard.” He pointed out the window. “Two blocks that way, across the street.”

Frawley tensed, then looked for the door to the lobby. “I’m gonna run.”

Frawley was out of the room fast, new-shoe-running over a slippery carpet into the lobby, blowing past the doorman in his silly vest and out into the gray mist. Down a steep, turnaround driveway, across busy Beacon against the light, then following a low fence along the trolley tracks until he could cross the slick inbound lane of Beacon ahead of onrushing traffic, up the rising sidewalk past a Kinko’s and a post office and a whole-foods market.

He covered the quarter-mile in no time, arriving outside the corner bank with his hand on his shoulder piece. The sight of a dapper man dancing back and forth there with keys in his hand, searching hooded faces, told Frawley the thief was already gone. Frawley drew his creds out of his jacket, flapped it open.

“My
God,
you got here fast,” said the branch manager, silver eyeglasses perched ornamentally on his face.

“How long?” said Frawley.

“One, two minutes. I came almost right out after him.”

Frawley scanned in all four directions, the intersection calm in the rain, no one reacting to a man running, no cars tearing out of handicapped parking spaces. “You don’t see him?”

The manager craned his neck until the rain specks on his glasses made him draw back under the overhang. “Nowhere.”

“What’d he have, a hat? Sunglasses?”

“Yes. Scarf around his neck, tucked into his jacket, to his chin. A caramel brown chenille.”

“Gloves?”

“I don’t know. Can we go back inside?”

Frawley saw blue cruiser lights about a half mile up the inbound lane, cars pulling over for them. “After you,” said Frawley.

It was a handsome old bank, well-appointed, underlit. Customer service was corralled in the center by a low, wood-railed office gate with a thigh-high swinging door. Green-shade banker lamps illuminated boxy computer monitors. The teller booths and a currency-exchange window lined the rear.

The customers and service reps stopped their buzzing, all eyes turning to the manager and the overdressed FBI agent. In back, the tellers had left their windows to huddle with their co-worker in the rightmost window.

“Make the announcement,” said Frawley.

“Yes,” said the manager. “Umm—everyone? I’m sorry to say that there’s been a robbery here just now, and—”

A collective gasp.

“Yes, I’m afraid so, and we’re going to have to suspend our transactions for at least an hour”—a confirming glance at Frawley—“or two, perhaps even just a bit more, so please, if you would, bear with us for a few minutes, and we’ll have you on your way.”

Frawley’s call for a show of hands of anyone who’d seen the bandit leave the bank got him nowhere. Customers are usually never aware that a note job is going down until afterward when the manager locks the front door.

Dino arrived at the same time the police did, shaking their hands and generally keeping them out of the way while the manager let Frawley in back with the tellers.

“CCTV or stills?”

“What?” said the manager.

“Close circuit cameras or—” Frawley looked up and answered his own question. The video cameras were placed too high on the wall. “Those aren’t even going to get under his hat brim,” Frawley said, pointing. “Seven and a half feet high, max—make sure those get lowered. Do they slow to sixty frames after the alarm is punched?”

“I—I don’t know.”

The others remained huddled around the rightmost teller, hands of support on her shoulders and back. She was an Asian woman in her midthirties, Vietnamese
perhaps, tears dripping off her round chin and spotting her salmon silk shirt, her nude nylon knees chunky and trembling.

Her top drawer was open, its slots still full of cash. “How much did he get?” asked Frawley.

A woman wearing a long hair braid of gray and silver answered, “Nothing.”

“Nothing?” said Frawley.

“She froze. She’s a trainee, this is her second day. I saw she was in trouble, and I saw the note. I hit my hand alarm.”

The note lay just inside the window slot, scribbled on a white paper napkin, wrinkled like a love letter held too long in a sweaty hand. “Did you touch this?”

“No,” said the Vietnamese teller. “Yes—when he first pass it to me.”

“Was he wearing gloves?”

The head teller answered for her. “No.”

“Anybody see the gun?”

The Vietnamese teller shook her head. “He said bomb.”

“Bomb?” said Frawley.

“Bomb,” said the head teller. “He was carrying a satchel on his shoulder.”

The note read, in a shaky, frightened slant, “I have a
BOMB!
Put ALL MONEY in bag.” Then, larger, bolder: “PLEASE NO ALARMS OR ELSE!!!”

The word
please
jumped out at Frawley. “A satchel?”

The head teller said, “Like half a backpack. Not businessy. Gray.”

Frawley lifted out his capped felt pen and used it to flip the note. On the back was the familiar pink and orange Dunkin’ Donuts logo. Dino appeared on the other side of the teller window like a customer. “Still smell the coffee,” said Dino. “There’s one across the street here—right, ladies? And you can see the bank from the window, correct?”

Yes, mm-hmm,
they all nodded.

Frawley said, “He sat there and wrote out the note, crossed the street with it in his hand inside his pocket.…”

“Impulse, maybe,” said Dino.

“Not a hypo.” “Not a bomber either.” Frawley turned back to the Vietnamese teller. “The note mentions a bag. The same bag the bomb was in?”

She was sniffling now. “No, a white bag, trash bag. He took with him.”

“And just left? Walked right out?”

She turned to the head teller then. “I need the lady room now.”

The head teller said to Frawley, “He got nervous. I think it was me noticing him. He turned right on his heels.”

Frawley looked back at Dino. “Guy needs money, like now.”

Dino nodded. “Trolley’s free outbound from here.”

Frawley said to the head teller, “What’s the next bank down the line?”

“A… another BayBanks branch. Washington Square.”

Dino said, “Ladies, I need their telephone number, pronto.”

Frawley was moving past the head teller toward the opened security door. “Hat? Jacket?” he said over his shoulder.

“Bucket hat,” she answered. “Some kind of golf thing on the crest. Jacket was short, tight. Heavy for spring, but not cheap. Hunter green—he dressed nice.”

“Dino?” said Frawley, moving fast.

Dino waved him on, picking up a phone, “Go, go.”

Frawley stopped on the wet curb outside. Dino’s Taurus was pulled up there, his grille blues and headlamps flashing. Double-parked cruisers had jammed up traffic in all four directions.

A trolley came clanging up the rise, the only thing moving. Frawley crossed the street and ran to intercept it, darting inside the opened doors. “I need you to go straight through to Washington Square,” he told the toothpick-chewing conductor.

The guy squinted doubtfully at Frawley’s creds. “Small badge.”

“It’s real enough.” This was Frawley’s first commandeered vehicle. “Let’s go.”

The driver thought a moment, then shrugged and closed the doors. “Fine by me.”

The trolley nosed through the honking cars, gaining speed past the intersection, passing boutiques, a high-end pastry shop, a RadioShack, apartment houses.

“So what kinda money you people make?” the driver asked.