The Town: A Novel (9 page)

“No,” Gloansy corrected him. “
Horny
losers.”

The munching sound next to Doug was Jem eating the food bill.

D
OUG RECEIVED A BEAUTIFUL
lap dance from a long-haired Portuguese girl with teardrop-shaped breasts. He succumbed to the hypnotizing power of cleavage, the pendulousness of femininity, as she ran her small hands over the muscles of his shoulders and leaned boldly into his face. When she turned and ground herself into his lap, waist and hips undulating, the swelling in Doug’s jeans reminded him that he was already four months in to going 0-for-1996.

Afterward, as she dressed in the seat next to him, Doug felt shitty and alone. Even a guy without a girlfriend had to admit that patronizing a strip club was like cheating on womankind in general, and with this vague sense of guilt came a philandering husband’s determination to repair and repent. She relieved him of his $20 wad with a wink and a smile, then paused, giving his face a pursed-lipped look of concern. She reached out and explored, gently, the sliver of skin where Doug’s left eyebrow was split, planting a soft kiss on the old scar there before walking off in search of her next dance.

The free kiss threw him. Twenty doughnuts for tits and friction, and then a gratis moment of actual intimacy? She could have saved the dance and charged him twenty just for the compassion.

Hitting the sidewalk outside the Foxy Lady was like quitting PlayStation, gravity reclaiming Doug, the night air a chilly hand cupping the back of his neck. Laughter gave way to honking snores at the Massachusetts border, the Monte reeking of spicy Drakkar Noir and stripper sweat as Doug sped back toward Dodge, his orphan mind once again returning to the image of Claire Keesey sitting blindfolded in the van. He crossed the bridge back into Town, turning toward Packard Street for a quick detour—just one look, her door, her dark windows—before shuttling his slumbering Townies back home.

I
N A WAY
,” said Claire Keesey, shrugging, “nothing since that morning’s really seemed real to me.”

She was curled up on the maroon cushions of a college rocking chair, the Boston College seal emblazoned over her head like a small sun. Her father’s home office took up half of the living room, a desk-and-shelf unit of austere mahogany behind brass-handled French doors. Claire’s mother—tight smile, anxious hands—had tucked a quilted paper towel beneath the tin BC coaster supporting Frawley’s glass of water, as an extra layer of protection. Her father—gull-white hair over a rare-meat complexion—had taken the early Friday train to be there to answer the door and eyeball this agent of the FBI.

Frawley glanced at his Olympus Pearlcorder on the bookshelf near the head of the rocker. The handheld tape recorder had been a gift from his mother on the day of his graduation from Quantico, and every Christmas since, along with the sweater or turtleneck or pants from L.L. Bean—one year she mailed him bongo drums—she included a four-pack of Panasonic MC-60 blank microcassettes,
For your stocking!

It clicked over, the tiny spools reversing, thirty minutes gone by. Claire sat with her legs tucked beneath her, arms folded, hands lost inside the cuffs. Her eggshell sweatpants announced
BOSTON COLLEGE
in a maroon and gold banner down one leg, her loose, green sweatshirt whispering
BayBanks
over her breast. It looked like a sick-day outfit, though her hair was brushed and smelled faintly of vanilla, and her face was scrubbed.

“My mother doesn’t want me to work at the bank anymore. She doesn’t want me to leave the
house
anymore. Last night, after three or so vodka tonics, she informed me that she had always known something bad was going to happen to me. Oh, and my father? He wants me to get a gun permit. Says a cop friend told him pepper spray is useless, only good on scrambled eggs. It’s like, I’m
watching
them take care of me. Like the thirty-year-old me has gone back in time but is still a child in their eyes. And the scary thing? Sometimes I like it. Sometimes, God help me, I
want
it.” She shuddered. “By the way, they don’t believe me either.”

“Don’t believe what?
Who
either?”

“About nothing happening to me out there. My mother treats me like the ghost of her daughter, back from the dead. And my father’s all ‘
Brrrhrrrhrrr,
business as usual, let’s rent a movie…’”

Frawley’s first impulse always was to counsel. He reminded himself that he wasn’t there to help or to heal, he was there to learn. “Why do you think I don’t believe you?”

“Everyone handling me like I’m porcelain. If people want me to be fragile, watch out, because I can be
very
fragile, no problemo.” She threw up her handless cuffs in surrender. “So stupid, getting into that van. Right? Like a six-year-old on a pink bike, pulled into a van, and not even screaming or kicking. Such a
victim
.”

“I thought you had no choice.”

“I could have struggled,” she argued. “I could have let them, I don’t know,
shoot
me instead.”

“Or ended up like your assistant manager.”

She shook her head, wanting to relax but emotionally unable.

Frawley said, “I went out to visit Mr. Bearns. He said you haven’t been by yet.”

She nodded at the floor. “I know. I need to go.”

“What’s holding you up?”

She shrugged hard inside the baglike sweatshirt, avoiding the answer. “We’re trained to help robbers,” she said. “You know that, right? To actually
help
the criminals, and not to resist. Even to repeat their commands back to them, so they know that we’re following their orders
to the letter
.”

“To put the bandit at ease. To get him out of the bank more quickly, away from customers, away from yourself.”

“Fine, okay, but—
helping
the thief? Like, rolling over for him? You don’t think that’s a little whacked?”

“The vast majority of bank theft is drug addicts looking to score. Their desperation, their fear of being sick, makes them unpredictable.”

“But everything is like,
Do what the robber says
. Like—
Don’t give him dye packs if he tells you not to
. Hello? So why do we have them? And—
Be courteous.
What other business do they say that in? ‘Thank you, bank robber, have a nice day.’”

Through the side window, Frawley watched two boys tossing around a tennis ball a few backyards away, making showtime catches on a late Friday afternoon. “Speaking of training,” he said. “It’s written policy at BayBanks for the openers to enter one at a time, the first one confirming that the bank is secure, then safe-signaling to the second.”

She nodded contritely. “Right. I know.”

“And yet this was not your usual practice.”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

Shrug. “Laziness? Complacency? We had an all-clear for the tellers.”

“Right, the window shades. But the tellers don’t arrive until a half hour after you two. And setting off the silent alarm—you’re trained to wait until it is safe to do so.”

“Again—what is the point of sounding an alarm
after
a robbery? Can you tell me that? What is the
point
?”

“Mr. Bearns put you both at risk.”

“But you couldn’t
know
that while it was going on,” she said, angry suddenly, tearing into him with her eyes. “They were inside the bank,
waiting
for us when we walked in—outnumbering us, scaring the
shit
out of us. I didn’t think I was ever walking out of that bank again.”

“I’m not placing blame, I’m only trying to get at—”

“So why haven’t I gone to visit Davis? Because I couldn’t stand to let myself fall to pieces on him.
Me,
little suburban
me,
not a scratch on her, safe and fine and hiding out—at her
parents
?” She pushed hair off her forehead where there was no hair and looked away. “Why, he asked about me?”

“He did.”

Her shoulders drooped. “The hospital won’t tell me anything over the phone.”

“He’s going to lose most of the sight out of one eye.”

Her handless sleeve went to her face. She turned to the window, toward the boys playing catch. He pushed it here, needing to be sure.

“Broken jaw. Busted teeth. And, unfortunately for me, no memory of that day. Not even of getting out of bed that morning.”

She kept her face hidden. “I’m the only one?”

“The only witness, yes. That’s why I’m sort of counting on you here.”

She watched outside for a while, without actually watching anything.

“The rest of your staff,” Frawley went on. “Anyone there you might consider disgruntled, or whom you could imagine providing someone else with inside information about bank practices, vault procedures—”

Already shaking her head.

“Even unwittingly? Someone who likes to talk. Someone with low self-esteem, who has a need to be liked, or to please others.”

Still shaking
no.

“What about someone who could have been blackmailed or otherwise coerced into providing information?”

Her face came away from her sleeve—sad but tearless, squinting at him. “Are you asking me about Davis?”

“I’m asking about everyone.”

“Davis thinks that being gay—he’s crazy, but he thinks it will hold him back. I told him, look around, half the men in banking live in the South End. This Valentine’s Day, he asked what I was doing, and I said, you know, renting
Dying Young
and watching it alone, what else? And he had no one, so we went out together instead, for Cosmos at The Good Life, had a great time. We’ve only been real friends that long.”

“Was there anyone new in Mr. Bearns’s life? Maybe a relationship gone bad?”

“I wouldn’t know. I never met his friends. He didn’t talk about that with me. He was just fun. It was nice having a guy around who noticed when I got my hair cut.”

“So you don’t know if he was promiscuous?”

“Look… they
beat
him, remember? He’s
innocent
.”

He absorbed her disappointment in him, wondering if there wasn’t something behind her flash of anger. The way Bearns was
innocent
. “So he was ambitious, he was looking to move up?”

“He was going to business school nights.” Defensive now, firmly in Bearns’s corner.

“Not you, though.”

“Me? Nooo.”

“Why not?”

“Business school?” she said, like he was crazy.

“Why not? Promotions. Advancement. Four other assistant managers you trained have leapfrogged over you to corporate. Why stay on the customer end?”

“It’s been offered.” A little pinch of pride here. “The Leadership and Management Development program.”

“And?”

Claire shrugged.

Frawley said, “You can’t tell me you love being a branch manager.”

“Most weeks I hate it.”

“Well?”

She was bewildered. “It’s a
job
. It pays well, really well, more than any of my friends make. No nights, no Sundays. Nothing to take home. My father—
he’s
a banker. I’m not a banker. I never saw banking as my career. I just—my career was being young. Young and uncomplicated.”

“And that’s over now?”

She sank a little in the chair. “Like my friends, right? They were supposed to be taking me out that night. My birthday, the big three-oh, whoo-hoo. They
rented a limo—cheesy, right? So I wind up bailing because I’m still in shock from this, and I tell them, you already got the limo, go ahead without me. So they call the next day, going on and on about dinner and the cute waiter with tattooed knuckles and the guys who bought them drinks, and driving up Tremont Street singing Alanis Morissette out of the roof, and Gretchen making out with an off-duty cop outside the Mercury Bar—and I’m like, my God. Is this who I am? Is that who I
was
?”

Frawley smiled to himself. He found her vulnerability attractive, this confused girl with her soul laid bare, struggling with newfound introspection. But he resolved to keep his pursuit pure. He was after these Brown Bag Bandits, not a date with Claire Keesey.

“I should feel worse, shouldn’t I,” she said. “People I tell, they give me these looks like,
Oh my God
. Like I should be in intensive therapy or something.”

He stood and snapped off his tape recorder. It felt like they were done. “It was a robbery. You were an unwilling participant. Don’t search for any meaning beyond that.”

She sat up, anxious now that he was preparing to leave. “So weird, my life suddenly. FBI agents showing up at my door. Do you know, I barely recognized you when you walked in today? I only mean that—I was so out of it when I talked to you last time. It’s all a blur.”

“I told you, it’s normal. Robbery hangover. Sleep okay?”

“Except for these dreams, my God. My grandmother, she died three years ago? Sitting on the edge of my bed with a gun in her lap, crying.”

Frawley said, “That’s the caffeine. I told you, leave it alone.”

“So you haven’t made any arrests yet?”

He stopped by the doors. Was she stalling him because she wanted information? Or was she interested in him? Or was it simply that she didn’t want to be left alone with her folks? “No arrests yet.”