Thigh High (18 page)

Mac's cell rang. He checked the caller ID.

Gabriel.

And Nessa had left the bank in a fury.

Opening the phone, he snapped, “MacNaught.”

“They're robbing the Iberville Street bank.” Gabriel's voice was cool.

Mac's voice was cooler. “After receiving disappointing information about her promotion, Nessa Dahl has left the premises.”

“You don't know where she is?”

“Perhaps at the Iberville Street Bank.”

“Perhaps.” Gabriel waited a beat. “Bad news about security. My guy is locked in the john.”

Mac's frustration level rose a notch. “Tell him to shoot his way out.”

“He can't shoot his weapon. He doesn't know who's on the other side of the door, and no matter what you think now, you do not want a customer killed.” Gabriel's voice was prosaic. “Anyway, he thinks there's a chair under the handle.”

Mac made the connection at once. “He was in the john when those sonsabitches hit?”

“Yes, the thieves were watching for the right moment to strike.”

“Whoever placed the chair should be on the tape.”

“Whoever placed the chair is going to be in disguise, but we can do a lot with the high-def videos.” Gabriel sounded satisfied about that, at least.

“What about the other security guard? The one I placed?”

Gabriel's voice turned cautious. “My guy's been trying to raise him on the cell phone. He finally got him, but the guy kept screaming—”

“They shot him?” Not that Mac wanted anyone hurt, but a little violence would finally get these cases the attention they deserved.

“Not exactly. The guy kept screaming, ‘Mice!'”

“Mice?”
Mac's gaze fell on the computer mouse on his desk. Naw, that didn't make sense. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I dunno, but we'll find out. The NOPD has one officer responding from a block away. She should be there by now.”

“I'm going.”

“I knew you would.” Gabriel hung up.

By the time Mac got a cab, he'd received a call from Chief Cutter telling him an officer was on scene, and another telling him no shots had been fired and the robbers had gotten away with an unspecified amount of cash.

Mac walked into the chaos of the bank lobby to find two patrolmen at the door, three officers inside interviewing the witnesses, Gabriel's man on the phone, and his own security guard, a burly, 260-pound former LSU offensive tackle, standing on a desk.

In fact, four women were sitting on desks, one with her hand over her eyes while she sobbed.

The bank manager, Dave Bowling, hurried over. “Mr. Mac, we're trapping as many as we can, but I've got an exterminator on the way.”

“Great.” The shock had unhinged Bowling's mind.

Then Mac saw a small fluff of gray fur whisk across the floor.

Two of the women screamed. So did his security guard.

“Oh.
Mice.
” Mac understood now. The thieves had brought in a cage full of mice and let them loose.

Brilliant. Just brilliant.

Georgia sat in a chair, an ice pack on her elbow, her eyes narrowed and furious as she listened to the police chief give her hell.

Another cop, a white guy with a lived-in face, stood behind her, massaging her shoulders.

Mac placed his hand on Georgia's arm. “You okay?”

“Just peachy,” she snapped. “Sorry, man, I thought I had them.”

“Shit happens.”

“You don't know the half of it,” she muttered.

“She got here before anyone else.” The guy with the lived-in face offered his hand. “Antoine Valteau.”

His accent was almost unintelligible to Mac, but Mac understood one thing—Antoine wanted Georgia out of the hot seat, and it was Mac's job to handle it. “I'm grateful to Officer Georgia Able for her service on the behalf of my banks and the people who work in them.” Mac formally shook Georgia's hand.

Georgia looked up, her eyes suddenly full of tears. “She didn't realize she would knock me down—”

Mac went on alert. “Who? Who knocked you down?”

Chief Cutter thrust himself between them. “I suppose you want to know what went wrong?”

“No. I want to see it.”

“Mr. Mac, I apologize.” Prescott's security man walked up looking chagrinned and angry. “I had an itchy feeling that today was the day. I shouldn't have gone to the bathroom.”

“When you gotta pee, you gotta pee.” Mac looked around. There was nothing to be done here. “Send the file to Mr. Prescott, and tell him to send it on to me.”

“Look, I need to review those tapes—” Chief Cutter began.

“And release them to the chief,” Mac added.

The chief opened his mouth to argue.

Mac fixed him with a cold stare. “You are not bargaining from a position of power.”

Chief Cutter shut his mouth.

Mac walked out the door.

 

Russell Whipple was in his bedroom, getting dressed for work, when the TV channel broke into
Days of Our Lives
with a bulletin.

The Beaded Bandits had robbed the Iberville Street bank.

He grinned.

Showtime.

The sunlight flickered through the leaves of the great live oaks. The temperature hovered at a lovely seventy-two degrees. The rocking chair creaked as Nessa rocked back and forth, waiting on a porch of the Dahl House.

She didn't wait long.

A cab pulled up. Her great-aunts, the bank robbers, slid out. They wore their usual clothes: pants with elastic around the waist, flowered tops, sensible shoes. Their makeup was nothing special: some foundation, a little blush, a light lipstick.

They were giggling.

Hestia spotted her as they strolled up the walk, and nudged Calista.

Calista nudged her back, then, typically, tried a bluff. “Nessa, darling! What are you doing home at this hour? Are you sick?”

With great deliberation, Nessa rose to her feet. “You saw me. You know exactly why I'm here.”

“We may have an idea, but why don't you tell us for sure?” Hestia was cautious.

“Do you know what I thought when I ran into that bank and saw you two? And realized that my great-aunts were the Mardi Gras bandits? My respectable, old-fashioned, kind…” Nessa couldn't find the words to express her horror.

The two women climbed the steps.

“We were hoping you didn't recognize us,” Hestia said.

Nessa paced across the porch toward them. “…Waving guns!”

Calista turned to her sister. “I told you she did. Why else would she have knocked Georgia down?”

“In platform heels! Frightening people!” Nessa interjected.

“She could have tripped.” Hestia sank down on one end of the porch swing.

“She's not usually clumsy.” Calista sat on a chair opposite.

“Robbing…robbing the bank I work for!” Nessa raged.

Both of the aunts focused on Nessa.

“That was the point, wasn't it, dear?” Calista asked kindly.

Nessa's tirade came to an abrupt halt. “What do you mean, that was the point?”

“That bank has been unfair to you!” Hestia said.

“What has that to do with anything?” In the back of her mind, Nessa had been afraid of this. Afraid that they were robbing Premier Central banks out of misplaced loyalty to her.

“That made them the logical bank to rob.” Calista managed to make it sound like a sensible choice.

“Why rob a bank at all?” Nessa asked.

“Because of Daniel's breasts, of course,” Hestia said.

“Daniel's breasts?” Nessa's voice rose.

From behind the screen on the front door, Maddy said, “Hush, Miss Nessa, you don't want to tell the whole neighborhood.”

Nessa whipped around. “Don't tell me you're in on this?”

“Don't yell at Maddy,” Calista chided. “She has had nothing to do with our little capers.”

Nessa whipped back around. “Your little
capers
?” She couldn't believe their insouciance. “Your little capers are federal offenses.”

“Yes, but the Feds aren't worried about us. Capturing bandits who steal such small amounts won't win them any fame,” Hestia assured her.

“Although Chief Cutter is getting irked with us,” Calista reminded her sister.

“I know. He's worrisome,” Hestia conceded. “We're having to get more and more inventive every year. But since we have a whole year to plan, we use the time to work out the details.”

Calista beamed. “The mice were my idea.”

“And a good idea, too!” Hestia high-fived her. “But wait until you see what I've cooked up for next year.”

“No. No next year! No! And…why?” Nessa spread her hands out, palms up. “Why? Why?”

“I tried to tell you, honey,” Hestia said. “Because of Daniel's breasts.”

“But that was only the first year, sister.”

Nessa whimpered in frustration.

“Let me explain.” Hestia patted the spot beside her.

“I can't sit.” Nessa stood stock-still, her fists clenched at her side. “I'm too anxious.”

“It's all right, honey.” Calista took the other end of the swing and patted the same spot.

Stiffly, Nessa lowered herself to sit between them.

Lifting her voice, Hestia called, “Maddy, you might as well come out, too.”

Maddy opened the screen. In slow motion, as if today she were truly old, she walked to a wobbly old rocker, her own rocker, the only thing saved from Katrina, and sat. “Nessa, child, you want me to fix you a hurricane?”

Nessa knew good and well Maddy made her hurricanes with six different kinds of liquor. “It's not even noon.”

“Sometimes, where your aunts are concerned, a good, strong drink is the only way to go,” Maddy advised.

“We could open the champagne early!” Calista said.

“Champagne?” Nessa looked between the two of them.

“After a successful heist, we always celebrate with champagne.” Calista's eyes sparkled.

“Not really champagne. It's sparkling wine,” Hestia assured Nessa—as if that mattered. “But we have a reasonably priced brand dear Jacque Quinane recommended, which—”

“I don't care.” Nessa held up her hand. “I don't care. I don't care.”

“Honey, we don't want you to think we're stealing the money for ourselves!” Hestia said.

Nessa half laughed, but not in amusement. “Honestly, that never occurred to me. But right now, all I know is that it has something to do with Daniel's breasts.”

“Exactly. That first year, I was walking down the hall upstairs and I heard the most dreadful muffled sobs coming from inside Daniel's room.” Calista's lip quivered in remembered sympathy. “He had had an operation to give him breast implants. A backstreet doctor…honestly, I don't know what he was thinking.”

“A backstreet doctor? One of those guys who isn't really licensed to practice medicine?” Nessa asked.

“That is just what we mean,” Calista confirmed. “He'd paid most of it up front—“

Hestia poked Nessa with her bony elbow. “Up front. Get it?”

Nessa did not smile.

Hestia subsided with a sigh.

Calista continued, “Then he had a series of financial setbacks—remember when his father was institutionalized with Alzheimer's and his son got accepted to Stanford, all in the same week? Well, he couldn't pay the rest of the bill, and that horrible doctor turned him over to a collection agency. You know the kind I mean—like in
Rocky,
where they threaten to break your fingers if you don't pay.”

“I understand.” Nessa did understand. The picture was becoming only too clear.

“So those awful collection people were threatening to take his breasts back,” Hestia said.

“Take them back?” Nessa was startled. “I thought you said they were implants.”

“They were!”

“Oh.”
Horrible.

“So of course I told him we'd lend him the money.”

“You didn't have the money.”

“No.”

“And you don't believe in borrowing.” The only money the aunts had ever borrowed was to put Nessa through college, and they were still paying that back.

“For dear, sweet Daniel, we were willing to put aside our scruples,” Calista said. “So we tried to get a loan.”

“A loan? From whom?”

Calista's face set in grim lines. “Your bank.”

“Premier Central?” Nessa heard her voice hit a new high. “Who did you talk to?”

“To That Woman.”

“Stephanie Decker?”

Sitting straight and thin as a rail, Hestia took up the tale. “First, she asked why we wanted the money. When we told her it was a private matter, she asked all kinds of personal questions. Insulting questions. She made us fill out forms and—”

“And what happened then?”

“Then she looked at us and laughed—” Calista quivered with indignation.

“In our faces!” Hestia interrupted.

Calista continued, “And said the bank wasn't in the habit of throwing their money away on bad risks, and we should be grateful that Mr. MacNaught agreed to keep our niece on after she messed up so badly, that you were a sort of charity case for him, but of course it was impossible for you ever to expect to get much of a raise since you could never advance, so we might as well resign ourselves to being objects of pity throughout New Orleans for the rest of our lives.”

“That bitch,” Nessa said softly.

“Exactly what I said.” Hestia nodded emphatically.

“We knew then you would have to leave the bank, but that didn't solve our problem of the money for Daniel,” Calista said.

“We tried another bank, but while they were very polite, they wouldn't lend us the money, either,” Hestia said.

“So we were watching
To Catch a Thief—
” Calista said.

“With darling Cary Grant. Marvelous man!” Hestia smiled.

“And I said—” Calista said.

“No, it was me,” Hestia said.

“No, it wasn't, because remember? There was the scene with the fireworks, then the part where he was on the roof, then I said—”

“No, you forgot the part—”

Nessa interrupted. “One of you said, ‘Let's rob Nessa's bank!'”

“That's right.” Calista clapped her hands in pleasure. “We knew you'd understand.”

The aunts started to get to their feet.

Catching them by their arms, Nessa brought them back down. “I don't understand, and you can't do this anymore.”

“We're careful,” Hestia assured her.

Ruthlessly, Nessa reminded them, “If I hadn't been there today, my best friend would have shot one of my aunts, maybe both of them.”

That was the first Maddy knew of the details, and her hands trembled like leaves. “Miss Calista! Miss Hestia! I told you you'd stretched this stealin' to its limit!”

Very patiently, Calista said, “It's like that movie says, ‘It'll all come out in the end.'”

“
To Catch a Thief
says, ‘It'll all come out in the end'?” Hestia's brow knit.

“No, sister,
Shakespeare in Love
.”

“That's right, I forgot.” Hestia started to stand again.

“No! Sit down! This is not a joke!” Nessa's voice rose again. “This is serious. You scared me half to death, and look at Maddy! She's afraid for you! Maybe you can think you were justified the first year, but what about the next year? And all the years after?”

“Oh.” Hestia settled herself again. “We gave Daniel the money, and his whole face lit up, and it made us feel so good.”

“But we weren't going to do it again until the next year, the very day of our party, poor, dear Meghan Brownly came to the door with her grandmother's canapés, the ones the Brownlys have been guarding the secret recipe for three generations like it was the gold at Fort Knox.” Calista was getting wound up. “And after all the years we've been friends—”

Hestia patted Calista's knee. “Hush, dear, Nessa's getting impatient again.”

Calista subsided.

“Anyway, the reason Beth Brownly couldn't come was because she broke her top plate and she wouldn't be seen in public without her teeth, which I so sympathize with, even though I have all my teeth—”

This time, Calista patted Hestia's knee.

“Oh. Right.” Hestia took a breath. “Poor Beth didn't have the money to pay the dentist, even though he was giving her a fifty-percent discount.”

“It's that nice boy Grey Linney,” Calista told Nessa. “He's always good to his elderly patients.”

Hestia continued, “That same night, That Woman—”

“Stephanie?” Nessa clarified.

“Yes, Stephanie. She came to our party and she treated you like dirt,” Hestia said. “At that moment we realized—God wanted us to rob the bank.”

“God wanted you to rob the bank!” Nessa shouted. “Of all the absurd—”

“Hush, Miss Nessa. Hush, child.” Maddy leaned way forward to pat Nessa's hand. “The neighbors'll hear.”

“Have you been in on this the whole time?” Nessa demanded. “Because I expect more sense from you, Maddy!”

“Don't you sass her, Nessa!” Calista said sternly. “She didn't know anything until we gave her the cash to get her favorite chair fixed.”

Nessa took in Maddy, rocking in the one chair that had been saved from the flood.

“She needed to have something of her own,” Hestia said gently.

Like so much about Nessa's great-aunts, the whole explanation made horrible sense. And yet—“You have to stop.”

“We're not hurting anyone,” Calista said.

“We're helping dear people who need help,” Hestia said.

“And besides, what are you going to do about it? Tell the police?” Calista shook her head in polite disbelief.

Of course, they had her. Nessa wasn't going to tell anybody.

This time, when the aunts stood up, Nessa didn't stop them. They went into the house while she sat limply, staring at Maddy, her eyes filling with tears.

Maddy dug in her apron pocket and handed her a soft, worn handkerchief. “I know, child. When I realized what they were doing, I cried, too.”

“They could have been killed. When I saw Georgia aiming at them, and Hestia aimed back, all I could imagine was the two of them in their coffins….”

“I said that to those two girls. I said they would likely get shot if they didn't stop. And Hestia said, ‘Miss Maddy, you're old, too. Would you really care if someone shot you dead today and ended all the aches and miseries?' And child, she had a point. Gettin' dead would sure beat this slow decline where I got to get up four times a night to pee and my belly growls like it's hungry, but I can only take three bites, and my knee swells in the summer, and every time I look in the mirror, I wonder who that old woman can be. It's lousy, I tell you, Nessa. When I lost my home, I thought I'd die. Not a thing left, barely a memory of my husband or my boy…” Maddy shook her head in sorrow. “When they gave me my chair back, my squeaky old chair, better than new, I know it's silly, but I felt like I could live the years the good Lord had assigned me.”