Bank Robbers (6 page)

He'd made sure he kept his eyes on hers, so when she'd try to look away from him, he'd move his face again, so she'd have to look at him. That face … those deep eyes, with lids that drooped slightly at the outer edges, those heavy eyebrows … His nose sloped down razor-sharp and then gently formed two pillows of flesh at the nostrils. His jaw was square, leading into a strong chin which, at the center, was formed into two small mounds of flesh echoing his nose in perfect symmetry. His cheeks were separated from his mouth by two slashes of skin that turned into dimples under the cheekbones when he smiled.

Pleading with her.

Oh, God. She stopped thinking. After all this time Arthur MacGregor still took her breath away.

But after a month of seeing him behind Nathan's back she had had an attack of the Morals.

And that night she'd found the strength to push him away, and tell him that she was not going to see him anymore.

Or talk to him, or touch him.

“Don't turn me away, Dottie. You don't mean it. You can't do what we do to each other and not mean it. Oh, how I love you. I'm going to take care of you.” His voice was whisper-low and he'd pulled her back against him.

They began to talk to one another at the same time, in pleading whispers, for and against running away together.

But she won in the end.

Won, she thought, and it struck her that it was an odd way to look at it. Yeah, she'd
won.

She now had a son. And she couldn't just up and leave her own child, and she couldn't take him—no matter what Arthur said—and she couldn't go around thinking that seeing Arthur on the sly would be all right.

She grimaced to herself.

That wasn't the reason she hadn't run away with Arthur, and she knew it. And she was too old to lie to herself about it.

The truth was that deep down she knew she'd never be able to trust him. She'd have been a nervous wreck every time he left the apartment, worrying about what he was up to, when he was coming back, or
if
he was coming back, or how many years he'd be in jail this time.

She remembered Arthur laughing at her.

“You're never going to be able to keep it up. Dottie, you're never going to be Donna Reed. Nathan might be safer, but he's just not that smart—”

“Oh, and you're so smart? This, coming from a man who just did twenty-four months in jail?” she'd snapped.

“What does that have to do with anything? Either you're smart or you're not, but I'm the one you should be with and you know it. I swear, I have something honest I can do—”

“Like what?” she cut him off.

He was silent, and, teasing, gave her a ponderous look.

“Well?” she said, her eyebrows raised.

“Well what? You can't expect me to answer right off the bat, can you, woman?” he said in that half-Scottish, half–New York accent of his.

“Right off the bat? Right off the bat! You've had twenty-four months to think about it, for Christ's sake!”

His eyes had grown wide and twinkled at her, and his mouth, when she got angry with him, turned up into an amused grin, like a small child watching some wonderful and mysterious thing.

“—Maybe I could go into forgery.” His eyes danced.

“There, you see!” she bellowed and actually reached up and hit him on the shoulder.

“Come on, Dottie, you have to give me a chance…”

She'd looked away from him, stepped back, and crossed her arms in front of her so he couldn't touch her.

“I can't do this anymore. I am married—”

“To Nathan Weist?” He chuckled incredulously.

“Yes.”

“It'll never last—”

“Oh, yes, it will, he's a good man—”

“He's twenty years older—”

“No.”

“How much older is he then?”

“… Eighteen,” she lied.

“Oh, well, I can see where those two years would make a whole hell of a lot of difference—”

“It doesn't matter what age he is, Arthur, he's steady—”

“He's a gambler, for Christ's sake, Dottie.”

She could tell by the grin on his face that he wasn't taking this seriously, and that made her blood boil.

“He's a nightclub owner—”

“He won it in a poker game.”

“So? He works at it. He's there every night—”

“And how many hours is he in that backroom with Ben Zimmerman?”

That had given her pause.

“How do you know all this?”

“Ben's brother's doing five in Sing Sing. Come on, Dottie, I don't believe you're any more in love with this man than—”

“I have a child with this man.”

His face had hardened in a flash at the mention of the child. And he'd looked harsh and impatient and angry.

“I don't believe this man can do to you what I do,” he said low, in a whisper.

She looked away, knowing exactly what he meant. “He does.”

They were both silent, and she glanced at him.

“You're a liar, Dorothy O'Malley.” His voice was hard.

She remembered spreading a sneer across her face, and inside going cold.

“You better think about what you're saying,” he said, “because some people never have what we have, and you don't throw it away because someone made
one
mistake.”

He turned his back on her, took a step away, and for one moment she knew he was absolutely sure of himself.

“I'll be at the Ambassador Hotel at three tomorrow,” he said matter-of-factly.

He took another step away from her, and stood. She could tell he was just waiting for her to reach out to him and say it was all right, that she'd be there with her son and her suitcases.

“I won't be there, Arthur,” she said as strong as she could and she watched him stop. He never did turn around.

“Well, I will. And…” His voice had begun strong and then faltered, and she knew he was suffering and taking short breaths that were making his wide shoulders go up and down, almost as if he were shaking. “If you need more time, you can … you can just be sure”—his voice was harsh, and then it broke—“I'll wait.”

She watched him walk down to the corner and disappear.

The following afternoon she went to see a two forty-five showing of the movie
Can-Can
and wept through the entire show. A man across the aisle kept glancing at her, then up to the screen puzzled, as if asking, “Are we watching the same film?”

She wept through several weeks, stunned to realize that Nathan didn't seem to notice. No. That wasn't true. He'd noticed. After a week or two he even said something.

“You upset about something?”

“Just … I don't know,” she'd muttered as she scrambled eggs over the stove.

And that was it.

Although, now that she thought about it, she realized that Nathan began to stay out of the house more and more, until he barely seemed to come in at all.

She spent three months in this half-crying, half-furious state, and finally decided that she couldn't live like this anymore.

Okay, he'd lied to her once, but she would, against her better judgment, give Arthur MacGregor another chance. Because it was human nature to err, and no one should be thrown away because of one mistake, and because she couldn't bear the thought that she'd never have him again. He had insisted that he was going to find something honest to do, and even though she read every report of every robbery in the newspapers, she'd find some way of trusting him. The fact that his name hadn't come up in any of the news media she took as a sign that maybe he was back at work as a locksmith.

She would track him down and tell him straight out that yes, he had her, and her son, but that if he ever pulled another stunt like that, she'd kill him. And she was not kidding.

So she hired a baby-sitter for the following afternoon, when she knew Nathan would be out of the house anyway, and decided to start on Rivington Street, at the hotel where he had a room …

She lay in bed all that night thinking about it and thinking about it, only pretending to be asleep when Nathan got in around five. She was surprised at how much she ached to have Arthur again.

And at one the next day Nathan was sitting at the table reading the paper and she turned around with a plate of breakfast and dropped it on the floor.

There was Arthur MacGregor's face staring back at her. The headline in the
Daily News
read:
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN
?

And his ensuing robbery spree confirmed that she had been absolutely right not to go with him. She felt for the flash of a moment that she had made the right decision and she was victorious.

And then it broke her insides.

And she hated it that Arthur'd forced her to face the fact that she didn't love Nathan, and she hated even more that, as it turned out, he had been right about him.

After those first couple of years the gambling did get worse, or maybe she just focused in on it more, but whatever, they were in a constant state of poverty, until at last he lost his share of the club and wound up as a waiter in a steak house on Fourteenth Street. Dottie got a job working as a secretary for a small company in Brooklyn that supplied parts for typewriters. And that was all right; the money was at least steady, and there was enough from his paycheck even after he paid his weekly into the shylock for them to get by.

So she'd kept everything to herself over the years, and often she would think back on it. Toward the end of Nathan's life four years ago, she'd begun to surround herself with memories of those hot afternoons with Arthur, even though she knew she'd never see him again, or maybe he wasn't even still alive.

And now, of all the fences Teresa knew, this was the number Dottie had to be given?

Was God trying to drive her crazy?

She turned off the light and walked back over to the couch.

Well, hell could freeze over before she'd call Arthur MacGregor for anything.

CHAPTER TWO

“A
HEM
.” Dottie cleared her throat.

The kid sitting next to her on the park bench still didn't take any notice. She looked over at the small dots of black foam covering his ears. The music on his Walkman was turned up so loud it sounded like bees buzzing through the earphones.

She suddenly nudged him. “Ahem,” she said louder.

His eyes popped opened and he looked at her, startled.

“I'm looking for something,” she said coolly, looking the other way, at several old men sitting near her on the bench. Out of the corner of her eye she watched the kid take off the headset and stare, frowning, at her.

“What?” he asked, and moved his neck back so his chin became double.

“I'm looking for … a piece,” she said as roughly as she could, and watched his expression turn to confusion.

“Of what?” He looked scared.

“You know,” she said uneasily.

She watched his eyes dart around, and look back at her.

“You looking for
sex?
” he shouted at her.

The old men sitting next to her stopped talking. Dottie went pale and for a split second it seemed as though everyone within earshot had frozen and was gaping at her.

“
What?
What!” Dottie barked at him.

“Look, lady, what is it that you want from me?” the kid asked, staring at her.

“A gun,” she said through clenched teeth.

“A gun,” he said almost in relief. Then his lip turned up in an insulted sneer and exposed a set of stunningly straight and stunningly white teeth. His eyes stared at her, angrily.

“I am a
law student!
” he barked. “Je-e-e-sus!”

She watched him jump off the bench shaking his head, and he began walking away quickly.

Dottie stiffly rose, trying to hold back tears. She stared straight ahead, trying not to look at anyone directly, and gritted her teeth. She began rigidly walking out of the park. She stared ahead of her, down the main walk in Washington Square, at a group of black men huddled around.

They were probably medical students.

She began to move faster and faster. She just wanted to run away. God, yelling out loud that she was searching the park for sex, that was just so humiliating. Not to mention it was the second time in twenty-four hours someone had insulted her like that, first Teresa and now that rude kid.

Did she look desperate? Did she look that lonely? God, she could bear anything but that, to be some woman people felt sorry for. And even if she did look that way, where the hell was human decency? Where the hell was the human compassion not to make some demeaning crack about it—as if being alone were a crime! And even if she was lonely, what the hell was she supposed to do about it? As if she was going to find someone to date? It was just cruel.

She needed a gun.

She looked back to the park. Maybe she should try another park? She felt herself begin to waffle about doing this again. A shot of anger went through her. No, she was going to go through with this, and Arthur, like it or not, was the fastest way to get this done with. So what was she going to do? Was she going to call him and actually speak to him this time? Would he sell her a gun? No questions asked? Like his regular clients?

That would give him a laugh, she thought bitterly. She could see him … and then another thought occurred to her. She stopped walking and stood still in the middle of the sidewalk.

What if Arthur looked terrible?

Like the man who had the physical-therapy session right before hers when she was in St. Vincent's. The man had had a complexion the color of old newspapers, and liver spots dotted his face and hands. The skin on his hands was so tissue-paper thin that Dottie could see his veins pulse. He had no hair or teeth, his eyes were all watery. They would lower the man into a wheelchair as she arrived and then they would cover him with blankets or, sometimes, more disturbingly, tether him to the chair—as a safety precaution, they told her. She would watch them wheel him off.