The Town: A Novel (40 page)

T
HERE WERE SOME EXCEPTIONALLY
handsome front doors in Charlestown, but Claire Keesey’s was not one of them. Around Monument Square and the nearby John Harvard Mall, the European-style entrances compared favorably to those in Beacon Hill and the lower Back Bay, but hers was entirely ordinary: no brass, no stained glass, no bold color, just a drab brown door, the weathered varnish flaking off the grain.

She opened it wearing gray gym shorts and a ribbed, black tank shirt, braless and barefoot, her hair wet but combed out, falling straight. Surprise in her eyes when she recognized him behind the sunglasses—though Frawley noted disappointment as well.

“Hi,” she said, as in
What are you doing here?

“This a bad time? Were you expecting someone else?”

“No. No—come in.”

He moved past her across the white-tile threshold, down the short hallway into the living room. Against the widest wall, a wire shelving unit and a bamboo hutch were paired off in a feng shui tug-of-war. The leather sofa was a plump, safe tan straight out of Jennifer Convertibles. There were other staples—the rattan CD tower from Pier One, the Pottery Barn slab rug—as well as some out-of-place wall prints left over since college. It was all mishmash, the product of a decade of gradual accumulation.

The coffee table was cluttered with clothing catalogs and issues of
Shape
and
Marie Claire
. He peeked into her bedroom, the comforter rumpled, the bed unmade, then cut back to the kitchen, looking out the window to the buildings across the alley.

“You want to blow-dry, I can wait.”

“No,” she said, put off by his wandering around. “That’s okay.”

He looked at her a long moment. He carried MacRay’s mug shots in a manila envelope tucked under his arm. “So you quit the bank.”

A tiny bloom of panic in her eyes. “Yes, it just—it got to be too much.”

He had tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. To view her as an unsuspecting pawn, as the victim of an ex-con’s con. Along with needing to determine how much she knew about MacRay, Frawley had gone there that morning in the hope of working up some sympathy for her.

But any chance of that went away when he saw the flat-shell jewelry case on her kitchenette table, classic Tiffany & Company blue. He laid the manila envelope down on the table and opened the hinged case, lifting out a thread-thin necklace, dangling it between his hands, the solitaire quivering like a tiny crystal eye.

“Lovely,” he said.

“That—it was a gift.”

“Not from the piano mover?”

She did not answer. Frawley kept himself in check. He was holding a chunk of MacRay’s movie money in his hand. The crook was buying her jewelry with it. “May I see it on you?”

Her hand went protectively to her neck. “I’m not really dressed for…”

He was already bringing it to her, undoing the delicate clasp and waiting for her to turn. She did so, reluctantly, sweeping the hair off the back of her neck, and Frawley clasped the necklace beneath her darker roots, waiting for her to turn back around.

She kept her eyes low, self-conscious, trying not to be. The diamond winked
above the scoop neck of her tank top, her breasts pressing against the black fabric. Her nipples were erect and she crossed her arms guiltily.

Frawley said, “Did you hear about that movie theater in Braintree?”

She blinked at this abrupt change of subject. “Yes, sure, the holdup.”

Frawley nodded, backing away. “The same guys. We’re pretty certain.”

“The same?” Her surprise was authentic.

“It was an armored-car pickup. We also now know they’re all Charlestown guys.”

Again, her shock. “For sure?”

“In fact we’re watching a couple of jokers now. Getting close.”

She looked down, nodding like she was trying to figure out something. Maybe some ghostly concern that had been tugging at the edge of her consciousness for a while. Frawley talked to keep her off-balance.

“These Townie guys, they love armoreds. Banks and armoreds, that’s always been their thing. Rite-of-passage stuff, them getting dusted and pulling stickups. Boston cops used to respond to bank alarms by shutting down the Charlestown Bridge and waiting for the dopes to try to cross back over with their loot. Especially in winter—they love the snow, the havoc it wreaks, pulling on ski masks and going robbing. But some of these kids, a select few, after bouncing around the system a little—something kicks in and they start getting smart. Those are the ones who grow into professionals. The ones for whom robbing banks becomes a career, a vocation, their life’s work. See, the prison theory, that’s always seemed a little too pat to me.”

She shook her head, trying to follow him. “Prison theory?”

“The community college, under the highway? Used to be
the
prison in Boston. Sacco and Vanzetti, Malcolm X. Theory goes that the inmates’ families settled here to be near them, breeding successive generations of crooks and bandits. But I think it’s simpler than that. My own theory is that bank robbing is just a trade here, the way villages in old America and Europe used to be known for a particular craft. Like glassblowing or bootmaking or silversmithing. Here it’s bank robbing and armored-car heists. Techniques developed and refined over time, talents passed down through generations. You know, father to son.”

Claire looked pale now, staring into the middle distance, reaching for the sofa corner with one hand and absently touching her necklace with the other.

“And then there’s this Revolutionary War mentality,” Frawley went on. “They’ve taken that mythology and perverted it. The fuck-the-invaders tradition—appropriated it for their own criminal means. The bank robber as folk hero, all that nonsense. Like I’m the enemy here, right? The law is the bad guy.” He picked up a CD from the top of her stereo, turned to her. “Huh.
AM Gold
. Any good?”

She didn’t hear him. She was somewhere else now.

Frawley replaced the case and moved on. “But, no, don’t worry. These guys always find a way to screw up, even the smart ones. Things like talking too much about banks. Or asking too many questions of people, trying to learn things about the FBI. Or flashing lots of cash around. These are things people notice.”

Claire’s hand came away from her necklace.

“And on top of all that,” said Frawley, returning to the table to pick up his manila envelope, “on top of all that, we’ve got ourselves a partial handprint.”

This roused her from her trance. “I thought you weren’t able to talk about things like that.”

“Well…” He showed her a big smile and a shrug. “Who are you going to tell, right?”

She nodded without meeting his eye. The necklace was starting to choke her now, and Frawley found that he could pity her ignorance, but not her fate: she had invited aboard this shipwreck of her life the very pirate who had scuttled and looted it in the first place. Frawley could have protected her if she had let him. He could have spared her all this. But now she was his advantage over MacRay, and as such, a thing to exploit. He tucked the sealed envelope back under his arm. Catching bank robbers was his job, not rescuing branch managers from themselves.

“Sure you’re okay?” he said.

She crossed her arms again, nodding, standing almost on one leg. She could see dark clouds massing on the horizon, but refused to acknowledge the storm they forecast.

“Yeah,” said Frawley. She was waiting for him to leave now, and he let her wait. “Yeah,” he said again. “Well.” Then he fit his sunglasses back on his face and started for the door, stopping next to her, again struck by the necklace. He pressed the tip of his forefinger lightly against the pocket of flesh between her clavicles, touching the starry little pill, absorbing her discomfort, her distress. “Okay,” he said, and left.

F
OUR GUYS IN KNEE-LENGTH
denim shorts and T-shirts, black skates over heavy cotton socks pushed down under meaty calves, eating lunch on the indoor ice in the middle of June. They had the rink to themselves, refrigerator fans rattle-roaring like truck engines outside the boards as they circled around two Papa Gino’s pizza cartons set upon milk-crate pedestals.

“So,” Jem said, swigging a Heineken, calling the summit to order. “Somebody fucked up somewhere.”

Doug dropped his crust into the open box, curling effortlessly around Jem’s back and plucking his bottle of Dew off the ice floor, gliding backward.

“And we still don’t know how,” said Jem. “I don’t even know yet who the fuck to dock.”

Dez drifted away from the pizza without meaning to, better on Rollerblades than he was on ice.

Jem said, “That ride better have burned.”

Gloansy finished a Heineken and stooped to return the bottle to the six-pack carton, saying, “Fuck you, you were there.”

Doug looked up at the rafters. He remembered the cheering and the bleacher-stomping and the way his last name rhymed with
Hurray!
and also how it always seemed that a win for the home team was never enough—how it seemed that nothing short of the entire building going up in a ball of flame would satisfy the bloodlust of that crowd.

He could still see the Bruins scout, the guy in the Bear Bryant hat and fingerless wool gloves sitting in the last spot on the fifth riser, center ice, making frantic marks in his spiral notebook as the Martin sisters next to him kept screaming Doug’s name. His summary report, showed to Doug after the draft, described MacRay as “a thug player with a touch of class,” a high-scoring, high-potential defenseman blending the goon tradition of the seventies with the new eighties finesse.

But it was all just echoes now. He found himself touching his split eyebrow and pulled his hand away, angry. This was why he didn’t like being out on this ice anymore.

“There were no obvious problems on the job,” Jem continued, “least none nobody admits to. So how come we each spent half our morning making sure we were clean of the G, getting here? How come all of a sudden we’re earning so much heat?”

No cops were waiting for Doug when he carried his tea out of Lori-Ann’s that morning—yet everything seemed changed. It was like a protective seal on the Town had been broken, and now there could be cops waiting for him anywhere: his car, his home, his mother’s house.

“Simple,” said Doug, coming back around for another slice, spraying some shavings against the stacked crates with a sharp stop. “They were onto us from before. And we went ahead and rushed it anyway.”

“Rushed, nothing,” said Jem. “But we didn’t sit around neither, let ’em shut us down.”

“No,” said Doug. “No, that would have been foolhardy.”

“Aha, a little attitude from the mastermind here. Okay, genius. Tell us, then. Where and when did all this shit go wrong?”

“For that I’d have to take us all back to a bitter-cold day in early December 1963.”

Jem frowned off the reference to his birthday. He turned to Dez, the only one of them who hadn’t been at the movie theater. “Duggy’s pissed ’cause I went and had a little fun.”

“That what that was?” said Doug. “That was fun?”

Jem smiled his angry smile. “That job was the driest fucking job. It was
nothing
.”

“Nothing,” said Doug.

“Truth be told, Douglas—it was pansy-ass. It was pussy. Hadda be said.”

Doug slowed and drifted back toward the crates. “So let me get this straight. The job went
too
smooth for you. Not enough fucking up, far as you’re concerned, your usual quotient.”

“It wasn’t no heist. It was a friggin’ lemonade stand we knocked over. We could of been three
girls
in there, pulling that off.”

“It was a sweet score, and it fell like a feather.”

“Awright, assholes, enough,” said Gloansy, looking to douse the flames.

But Jem wasn’t interested. “It’s not the paycheck, kid,” he said, gliding away from the pizza podium to engage Doug. “It’s how you bring it home.”

“It’s
that
you bring it home—
period,
” said Doug. “You’re too old to die young, Jemmer. That time is passed.”

“Fuckin’ Johnny Philosopher here. What’ve you got to lose all of a sudden?”

The leer in Jem’s face was for Claire Keesey, but Doug was in no mood. “This is about being a pro and acting like one. About doing it good and right.
That’s the thing.”

“No, Duggy, see, that’s
your
thing.
You
plan it, no one else. And then what—I gotta follow your rules and regulations? I’m your employee here?” Jem’s slow trajectory brought him closer to Doug, his hands resting on his hips. “See, my thing is getting into it on the job, mixing it up. ’Cause I’m a motherfucking
out-law
.”

Doug let Jem drift past, the smell of beer trailing him like a cloud of flies.

Dez and Gloansy had stopped chewing, waiting on opposite sides of the pizza pedestal like kids watching their parents fight. Doug said to them, “You guys on board with that? You want me keeping you
out
of danger, or putting you
in
some?”

Jem circled back, speedy but measured, lifting skate over skate. “And what is this with playing it safe? We are
bank robbers,
man. Stickup men, we go in packing, balls to the wall. It’s a gun in our hand, not a fuckin’ briefcase. There is nothing
safe
about this.” He spun around so he could face them all, gliding backward. “The hell happened to you, Duggy?”