Keeplock: A Novel of Crime (12 page)

D
ESPITE WHAT I TOLD
Rico and Condon, I spent the next day working. I had to invent a kidnap/bank robbery convincing enough to fool two veteran New York cops. Cops are dumb, but they’re not stupid. Just like the robbers, they don’t believe in trust. They assume that everyone lies to them, sometimes for no reason at all. Which is why I took the subway down to Battery Park and the ferry out to Staten Island on Monday morning.

I needed a large bank with a branch manager (or a small bank with a vice president) who lived in a private home, not an apartment. It’s much harder to get into an apartment than a private home, and the whole trick in a kidnap/bank robbery is to get inside without being seen by a nosy neighbor. The Borough of Staten Island, though technically part of New York City, has always been considered foreign territory, the place where civil servants go to die. Except for a small section near the ferry, the island is covered with single-family homes.

It could have gone badly. Lacking a driver’s license, I had no access to a rental car, which limited the number of banks I could visit. Still, I plodded along, riding the buses down Hylan Boulevard, stopping each time I saw a bank. My plan was simple enough. I’d go up to a teller and exchange a twenty for two rolls of quarters while I noted the name of a branch manager or a vice president. At the next bank, I’d change the quarters back into a twenty.

By two o’clock, an hour before the banks closed for the day, I had a list of ten names. Time to make a decision. I found a Staten Island telephone book in a small coffee shop on Guyon Avenue and began to run through the names on my list. The first four either lived somewhere else, had unlisted numbers, or names so common I found multiple listings. But the fifth came up roses. There was only one Daniel Jashyn in the phone book. His address—1915 Buttonwood Road—was a few miles from where I stood. Two hours later, when he arrived at his Todt Hill home, I was waiting. I watched him greet his wife and daughter, noted the high fence surrounding his home, the sliding glass doors on his patio.

The setup was perfect. As vice president of the tiny Grant City Savings Bank, Daniel Jashyn would know exactly when the vaults opened, exactly what they contained. His relatively isolated home would be easy to penetrate, while his young daughter—she couldn’t have been more than ten years old—would make the perfect hostage.

An hour later I was standing on the corner of Broadway and State Street in lower Manhattan, watching a river of human beings pour out of the office buildings and into the subways. It was raining pretty hard and I had my new umbrella up. Apparently the office workers, seduced by the perfect weekend, had forgotten to take their rain gear. They were trying to run, but there were so many of them, they jammed up at the subway entrances. By the time they got down in the hole, they were soaked to the skin.

I found a phone and called Eddie. I told him I was ready to go and we agreed to meet at Mario’s.

“I’m glad you decided to come in with us, cuz,” he announced. “Because I need ya.”

“We shake hands after I hear the details. If it doesn’t sound right, you can forget about me. I just finished ten years in Cortlandt and I’m not jumpin’ over any cliffs.”

“After I lay it out, you won’t have no doubts. You’ll be countin’ money in your dreams.”

There was no sense in pursuing it. “Look,” I said, “I can get up to Mario’s in about a half hour. I’m downtown. Is a half hour too soon for you?”

He must have wondered what I was doing downtown in the rain, but he didn’t disrespect me by asking questions. “I’m out in Queens, cuz. I don’t know if I can make it that fast. What I’ll do is call Mario and tell him you’re comin’. If you get there first, have a beer on me.”

“No problem, Eddie. I’ll see you when later. And, by the way, give my regards to John Parker.”

It caught him off-guard. “You was always a smart guy, cuz. You was always the smartest.”

Too smart. He didn’t say it, but his tone made it clear. Maybe annoying him wouldn’t pay off in the short run, but I had to establish the same independence with Eddie that I was trying to establish with Condon and Rico. There would come a time when I’d need room to maneuver and I wouldn’t get it if I began by playing the part of the obedient soldier.

“I’ll see you in a little while, Eddie.”

I didn’t destroy my mood by trying to find a cab in the rain. That pass was too difficult, even for a high roller like me. I went down in the subway with the rest of the schmucks, breathing in the anger of the soaked commuters along with the stink of wet wool. Fifteen minutes later I got off at Penn Station.

Eddie must have put some punch into his phone call, because Mario greeted me like I was his brother come back from the war. He pumped my hand, stared into my eyes, led me through a mostly empty restaurant to a completely empty private room. This time there was only one table.

“Can I get you a drink?”

I ordered a Heineken, drank it while I thought about John Parker. I didn’t dwell on the fact that it was the first drug I’d put into my system since that night with Terrentini. I didn’t want to think about Terrentini at all.

Making John Parker for one of Conte’s crew was proof that I was dealing with my problems in a constructive manner. Parker was not a criminal. He was a poor schmuck of a computer scientist who’d caught his wife in bed with another man and responded by hitting the man twenty or thirty times with a table lamp. His wife, or so he told me, had been next in line, but she’d deserted her lover and run naked down the road, screaming at the top of her lungs.

The gung-ho assistant district attorney assigned to the case had wanted to go for murder by depraved indifference, but the D.A. was afraid the jury would come back with a medal instead of a conviction. Mild-mannered John Parker looked too much like a victim. He was tall and skinny, with a bobbing Adam’s apple and a permanent hangdog expression. You looked at him and you wanted to mug him. The District Attorney told his A.D.A. to find a plea that Parker and his lawyer would accept, and all had eventually settled on second-degree manslaughter with a five-year max.

The sentencing judge took one look at pitiful John Parker and directed the Department of Corrections to place him in protective custody, which at that time meant H Block in Cortlandt. Parker didn’t care for the company in H Block. His fellow inmates were mostly snitches and homosexuals with a few high-profile killers like David Berkowitz thrown in for seasoning. After a few months, Parker formally requested a transfer to population, but the administration, instead of shipping him out to a medium-security institution (which is where he would have gone if he’d never been put into protective custody in the first place), walked him across the yard to B Block.

John Parker would not have survived if it hadn’t been for Eddie Conte. Parker entered B Block dead broke, wearing that same “hurt me” expression on his face. It was only a matter of time (and not
much
time) until someone discovered that he couldn’t fight back and transformed him into a permanent victim.

Eddie not only protected John Parker, he took Parker up to the courts and made him part of our crew, which meant that we were obliged to protect him, too. Eddie also toughened Parker up, patiently explaining the realities of survival in the institution. He introduced Parker to the weight box, taught him how to make and carry a shank, recited the prisoner’s code: Death Before Dishonor, What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Stronger, Don’t Trust Anyone.

The softer virtues, the
feminine
virtues, are almost unknown in the Institution. Pity? Compassion? Mercy? These are signs of weakness and weakness is a crime punishable by shankings and beatings and extortion and rape. So why did Eddie Conte save John Parker?

I don’t remember spending much time thinking about it. Unlike Tony Morasso, Parker was no threat to our crew. As he toughened, he began to show a talent for jailing. He had an infinite supply of jokes and an equally infinite hatred for the Institution. He willingly participated in whatever scam we happened to be running and he refused to back down when challenged. He became, all in all, a model prisoner.

I took a basic computer course while I was getting my degree in Cortlandt and John Parker had helped me with the homework. He loved computers. If they’d given him a computer while he was in protective custody, he would have done the whole five years without leaving his cell. That was why Eddie had recruited him in the first place. What I had taken for a moment of weakness had been cold calculation.

As I already said, Eddie’s big job, like all armored car robberies, had one gigantic flaw. He had to know where the car would be and what it would carry. The penalty for heisting an armored car, especially considering Eddie’s prior record, would be severe, twenty or thirty years, even if the car turned out to be empty. But Eddie had assured me that he’d already solved that problem and his air of confidence had left no room for doubt. He was much too sharp to have settled for some half-assed scheme.

Eddie Conte was going to get his information from the horse’s mouth. He was going to use John Parker to break into the company computer. I didn’t know how Parker would do it, because Parker had always insisted that without inside knowledge, it’s virtually impossible to get access to computer information, despite the prevailing myth that any fifteen-year-old with an IBM can steal all the secrets in the Pentagon. But he
would
do it. Eddie was nobody’s fool, and if he hadn’t believed that Parker would come through, he would have tossed him back to the wolves.

E
DDIE MUST HAVE LOST
his resentment somewhere on the Long Island Expressway. He greeted me with a smile, shaking his head affectionately.

“Ya some piece of work, cuz. Some piece of work. How’d you figure it out?”

I searched his face carefully, looking for any trace of anger, but his eyes were twinkling. He seemed as happy as a pedophile in an orphanage.

“I always wondered about Tony Morasso,” I explained. “Why would you bring an M.O. onto the courts? That wasn’t your style, Eddie. You were always low profile, a smart con. For a while, after Morasso showed up, I lost confidence in you altogether.”

“But you stayed. Why? Seein’ as how you didn’t trust me?”

“Because they were
my
courts, too. I wasn’t gonna let you chase me off.”

“Don’t get hot, cuz.” He put his hands out in mock defense. “You always had a short fuse.”

He was laughing now and like good leaders everywhere, his mood was infectious. I dropped the question of who owned the courts and began to recite my lessons.

“When you told me that Tony Morasso was in on this job and what you needed him for, it all came clear. While the rest of us were putting away mugs of prison rotgut, you were putting this heist together. You were one step ahead of us. As usual.”

He leaned forward and took a modest bow. “What’d I always say? There’s easy time and hard time. You wanna do easy time, you gotta plan things out.”

I nodded agreement. “So, the question I asked myself, last night before I went to sleep, was why did you bring John Parker onto the courts? He had nothing to offer. Were you doing the Mother Teresa bit? That wasn’t like you, but at least Parker wouldn’t start any wars, so I forgot about it. Now Parker makes sense. He found an untraceable way to get the information you need to do this job. The cops’ll investigate every company employee, looking for the leak. It’ll be months before they figure it out, if they
ever
figure it out.”

After a polite knock, Mario appeared in the doorway with a plate of stuffed mushrooms and a bottle of red wine. He filled two glasses, dropped a couple of plates in front of us, then backed out.

“Mario treats you like you’re the Godfather.”

Eddie shrugged it away. “I helped him out with a shylock once and natrally he’s grateful. So what else did you figure out?”

“I don’t think there’s anything else to figure. Two guards outside the truck and one inside … the three of us should be able to handle it.”

He shoveled a forkful of mushroom into his mouth and chewed it slowly and thoroughly, washing it down with half a glass of wine. “You told me you wouldn’t come in until ya heard the details, but it seems like you know the details already.” A trace of annoyance slipped back into his speech, but I didn’t respond and he kept going. “So tell me what ya think, cuz. We gonna make it?”

“If you know where the truck’ll be and what’s inside it, the only way it goes bad is if the cops happen to show up while we’re doin’ the job. But you still haven’t told me where and when.”

“The when is April 30. The where I couldn’t tell you because the schedules for that week haven’t been made up yet.”

“Why April 30?”

“I take it you ain’t partial to religion.” He was teasing me.

“C’mon, Eddie. Don’t string it out.”

“No room for style, cuz? I’m tryin’ to put a little drama into my pitch. I mean, seein’ as how you figured everything out already, you gotta let me play with the few surprises I got left.”

He was rebuking me. It was gentle, but unmistakably there. Just as I had placed limits on my own personal level of submission, he was reminding me that he was the boss.

“You got a pretty good temper, yourself,” I said, smiling. “I’m not trying to take your play away, but if you want someone who can’t think for himself, you should find another boy. There’s fifty guys out there who’d spread their cheeks for a score like this.”

He mulled it over for a moment. “No, that ain’t what I want. I gotta have one guy who’s smart enough to keep his head if we run into problems. Morasso’s already causin’ trouble. You’re gonna have to be a fuckin’ psychiatrist to keep him in line until we finish this.”

“What kind of trouble, Eddie?” As if I couldn’t guess.

He put down the fork and shook his head. “He’s makin’ Parker for soft. Thinks he can break Parker’s balls and get away with it. The problem is that Parker’s not gonna take it much longer and he’s not stupid enough to fight Tony with his hands. You could figure the rest out for yourself.”