Dog Day Afternoon (21 page)

Joe’s dossier was sketchy because he’d never been brought to trial for any of his offenses. They ranged from hubcap stealing as a kid in Corona to uttering menaces, a complaint of one of his neighbors in Rego Park. Charges had never been made. His file indicated he had a hair-trigger temper, nothing more.

But Sam’s record was disheartening. He’d obviously had such a bad time in prison that he might not want to be taken alive if they closed in on the bank.

It was always a touchy business with hostages. Moretti was never one for meeting it head-on, the way Baker might, charging in like a bull and trampling whatever got in the way. Moretti liked a bit of the old soft shoe. He liked to tiptoe into the thing, size up all the factors and try to guess what would happen if he did this, or that.

Often enough, when the showdown came, Moretti had had felons surrender peacefully rather than spill a hostage’s blood and their own. It could well be that way with Joe, if no one got that blow-top temper of his riled. But the chances of Sam giving up quietly were nil.

That meant they’d get their million bucks, and all the rest, too.

He’d already said as much to Mulvey, and been chewed out unmercifully. “Where the hell does the Department get that kind of loot? Out of your budget, Moretti? They’ll remember you as the guy who cost them a million bucks. And they won’t be in any hurry to promote you for a thing like that.”

“Commissioner,” Moretti had responded, holding on to his temper as well as he could, “does that go for the plane charter, too? Am I going to get this kind of magnificent cooperation all down the line?”

“Easy, Tony. Watch the mouth.”

“Am I?”

“You’ll get,” Mulvey said, “what you’ll get. My crystal ball is no better than yours.”

Reviewing the problem now, as he watched the light begin to fade out of the sky and grow rosy-orange in the west, Moretti reminded himself that Baker would not be having such money problems. The FBI simply never had money problems. But if Moretti held his breath waiting for Baker to offer a helping hand on the budget, he would strangle to death.

He was dying, as it was, unless saved by a miracle. The crowds were now huge. The TV and radio, the newspapers, the wire services, some of the news magazines, even publications like
New York
and
Playboy,
already had in-depth reporters nosing around, asking for permission to do such lovely things as go inside the bank and tape a confidential interview.

As if this thing had been staged for them. That was one thing Littlejoe had right. Once these things started rolling, they were for everybody else, never for the hardcore of it like Moretti and Joe and, God help him, Boyle across the street.

“. . . telling you Al, you should send another two trucks at least,” a voice behind Moretti was saying.

The detective turned to watch one of his own uniformed patrolmen on the telephone to his brother-in-law, the
gonif
who owned the ice-cream and pizza wagons that had flocked to the scene in record time.

Moretti had heard him make two previous calls, both of them for more wagons. Of course the cop shouldn’t be using the phone. Of course there was a conflict of interest. Of course his brother-in-law slipped the cop a few bills for spotting and reporting such concentrations of gawkers. But Moretti had better things to worry about now than the usual penny-ante cop grafting.

“. . . yeah, but not hot pretzels. Cool stuff, Al. Another wagon of them Eye-talian ices would go good.”

“See if he has any Fudgsicles,” Moretti growled.

The cop’s eyes shifted sideways. “Uh, Al, you got any Fudgsicles?”

Moretti shook his head sadly and walked out on the street. Baker had been standing there for the past fifteen minutes, steely blue eyes fixed on the bank, where, inside, both hostages and culprits had just finished the last of their pizzas.

“Give you a warm feeling, Moretti?” Baker asked. “The world is getting to be quite a place when you can stick up a bank, take hostages, and for your reward you get three kinds of pizza, a million dollars, and a trip to the moon.”

“Don’t forget having your wife hand-delivered to the scene,” Moretti added. “Has anybody heard what’s keeping them with her?”

“She’s on the way,” Baker said. “Maybe she can talk some sense into him.”

“Not Nowicki. He doesn’t listen to anybody. He’s what they call inner-directed.”

Baker’s eyebrows went up. “Fancy talk for a pint-sized Polack punk.”

Moretti waved a finger from side to side. “Careful, Baker, his mother’s Italian.”

The two men eyed each other. Baker assayed a tight smile that barely disturbed the steely set of his lips. Man of iron, Moretti noted. Able Baker, Stainless Man of Steel.

“Let’s . . . have . . .” a voice from the crowd howled, the words spaced out as if shouting them were agonizing, “. . . some . . . action . . . coppers!”

Baker inclined the top of his close-cropped gray head in the direction of the yelp. “The animals are restless.”

Moretti nodded. “I wish the boys across the street were getting itchy. Maybe I could talk a deal with them.”

“With animals like that?” Baker’s cold eyes lidded halfway. “You can’t talk to garbage. You can’t make deals with filth.”

Moretti nodded again. “Let me ask you something, Baker,” he said then. “If that’s the way you feel about the crowd
and
the crooks, what are you in this business for? Why stay in it?”

Baker snorted. “It’s a career, Moretti, same as yours. You do the best you can, you get more authority. I don’t have to tell you how the game is played.”

“Yeah, but why a career keeping crooks from creaming the crowd, if one is garbage and the other a bunch of animals?”

Baker started to answer, then thought better of it. “I’m no sociologist.”

“It’s just that I can’t figure out why a bright person spends his life trying to protect the public from the criminals it spawns. If you believe they’re not worth it.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Okay, I picked up too fast.” Moretti removed his hat and mopped the top of his head. “I misunderstood. Let it go at that.”

“Fine.” Baker thought for a moment. “There are some fine people in the world,” he said then. “But you don’t find them gawking around a police stakeout, do you?”

“Depends what you mean by fine. I said let it go.
Zeit gezundt.”

“No, I want to straighten you out,” Baker insisted. “I don’t hate these people. Get that straight. I may feel sorry for them. I may think they need straightening out. But I don’t hate them. How could you? Most people are children, anyway.”

“Um.” Moretti turned and went back inside the insurance office. He picked up the telephone and got his precinct house. “Dave, what’s holding up the car with the wife?”

“Any second now, Sarge. They tracked her down in Manhattan. She’s not in good health, apparently. I don’t know the whole story. But they’re in Queens now. It’s a matter of minutes.”

Moretti hung up. He watched Baker through the window. Even inside the air-conditioned office Moretti was still damp and uncomfortable. Outside, in the heat of the evening, Baker didn’t even look rumpled. But, what the hell, the FBI didn’t hire anybody with sweat glands. Moretti made a face.

He had to stop blaming everything on Baker. Baker wasn’t the enemy. He was just another guy pretending to be a machine. The country was full of them, dehumanized people programmed to “do a job,” to “handle the situation,” real “take-charge guys” who would “walk over their grandmother” if ordered to because they were “hard-nosed, can-do guys” who “played to win,” even if it meant “acceptable losses.” The first loss was themselves.

The detective grinned lopsidedly. Imagine Gaetano Moretti walking over his grandmother. She’d hit him with a broom, old and tiny as she was.

Maybe dealing with crime did that to people like Baker. Moretti had seen his own morality sink over the past twenty years, not just the deals Mulvey demanded from him, but smaller things, slippages of morality that were justified by the need to “get along” so as not to “rock the boat” or “let down the team,” compromises in the name of “the way it is” in a “cold, cruel world” where “nice guys finish last” and if you didn’t do it “they’d find someone else.”

Slowly, you sank to the level of the people with whom you spent most of your life, criminals. Slowly you began to share not only a common jargon but a common view of life and a common morality, based on “taking care of Number One.”

All those crummy, second-hand slogans borrowed from high-school athletic teams.

Moretti supposed now that it was this that accounted for the high divorce rate among non-Catholic cops. It wasn’t the late hours or the irregular duty. It wasn’t the new wife trembling at home for the safety of her bridegroom among the uncaged street animals. It was the fact that after two, three years, the boy she had married was gone. A stranger had taken his place, who acted and spoke and thought like a hood.

He watched Baker coming in. “I think the wife’s here,” he said. “Listen, before you go out there, give a thought to what I suggested before.”

“What, the tear gas?”

“No, just pull the switch on their power across the street. In the excitement, while you deliver the wife, we just cut the power. There’s a terrific psychological edge when they’re sitting in the dark like rats in a hole, sweating in the heat with searchlights blinding them. It works, Moretti. You know it does.”

Moretti stuck his head out the door. In the distance a phalanx of four burly cops was making a route through the crowd for a tall, sleek woman, made even taller by her platform shoes with six-inch heels. Even at this distance, her platinum hair looked unreal.

“Here she comes,” Moretti hummed, “Miss America.” He turned back to Baker. “I don’t like the idea of shutting off power, but I haven’t got anything better to suggest.”

“I’ll handle it,” Baker assured him.

Moretti advanced into the combat zone, walking to the center stripe of the roadway. The cops had cleared a way for Joe’s wife and were escorting her toward Moretti. From the crowd behind them came a few whistles.

“Joe!” Moretti called. “We have your wife.”

He watched Joe drop an unfinished wedge of pizza and come to the door. As the woman advanced toward Moretti, her walk became looser. Her hips swayed with the effort of walking on the platform shoes. The crowd began to yip and hoot.

“Oh, Joe!” someone called.

“Oh, Joey, oh, Joey!”

“Hey, doll, I’d rob a bank for you any day.”

The comments were drowned in rhythmic clapping in time to the woman’s saunter. Finally, when she got within a few yards of Moretti, he saw the runny mascara as thick as cake frosting, and the wide-rouged mouth. He saw the immense false lashes. He also spotted the stubbly cheeks and chin.

“What is this?” he asked one of the escorting officers.

The man produced a wide grin. “You tell us, Sarge.”

“This is the one he asked for, Lana Lee?”

“Little wifie-poo in the flesh,” another cop said.

“Christ,” Moretti said as Joe walked out into the street. “Faggots!”

“Hey,” Joe said weakly, “Moretti, what about all that mutual respect you were asking for?”

Moretti’s head was shaking. “Faggots,” he repeated softly, as if to himself.

Whether they had just heard it or had just realized what Lana was, people in the crowd quickly got the idea.

“Faggot!” one man cried out.

“Faggot drag queen!” somebody else shouted.

The air was suddenly choked with hooting and booing and the sound of wet kissing and sucking noises.

“Suck this, Joe!”

“Douse ’em with gasoline!”

“Burn the faggots!”

Abruptly, Lana moaned, a harsh sound, like some exotic bird of prey. Moretti turned to her. He saw her dropping. She went down in a sexy tangle of long bare legs, fainting dead away on the hot pavement. Her tight miniskirt slid up over her legs almost to her crotch.

Moretti’s glance went up her legs, a conditioned reflex of discovery, the constant search for a quick, snickering peek at what lay at the juncture of a woman’s legs. Then the detective grinned shamefacedly at himself. What a reflex it was, how powerful. Knowing this was a transvestite, knowing he had the same thing between his legs as Moretti, and yet still programmed by a lifetime to snatch a peek. Moretti shook his head at his own stupidity.

Nevertheless, he thought, drag queen or not, this red-hot cutie could be the miracle I need.

19

T
he silence inside the bank was profound. No one spoke as Joe came back through the heavy glass door. No one said anything as he stood just behind the small picture window and watched the scene outside on the street. Not even Sam had a comment to make when Lana went down in a dead faint.

Littlejoe watched Moretti trying to bring Lana back to consciousness. Joe knew her “faints.” She was as strong as an ox, but she was tripping on so many uppers and downers that she hardly knew whether to shit or wind her watch.

He’d seen her pull faints before, once even on him, who knew her better. She always asked herself, “What would a lady do in a situation like this?” and if the answer was to faint, she flopped.