Later, after I had gotten into my pajamas and then into bed, my mother came to say good-night. “That was a lovely evening. I’ve become quite a fan of your friend, Jonah.”
“He’s a good guy.”
“And you’re a brave one. I’m sorry the sutures hurt.”
“Well, they’re out now. Just a little tender. I’ll be okay.”
“You will be okay,” she agreed. “You always will be.”
“Your first day off, can we go somewhere in the station wagon?”
“That would be Monday. Where do you want to go?”
“Somewhere really cool.”
She smiled. “It’ll be so cool, your breath will fog up.” She leaned down and kissed my forehead. “Sweet dreams.”
After she left, I switched off the lamp. Lying in the dark, I took the penlight from under my pillow.
Malcolm had found it at a five-and-dime. He’d not been willing to tell me how much it cost. “Maybe I shoplifted it. How do you know? If you’re going to switch it on after your mom says lights out and then write symphonies when you should be sleeping, don’t tell her where you got it.”
Maybe the dream about being trapped somewhere with a dead woman would come true, and maybe it wouldn’t. But if I woke up in pitch blackness with rushing-water sounds all around, I would not want to be without a source of light.
When I tried the penlight, the narrow beam didn’t travel far, but farther than I had expected. It painted a pale ring of light on the ceiling, the center darker than the periphery. Kind of like an eye staring down at me.
92
Joe Tortelli spent a week in Vegas, living in a complimentary suite at a major hotel, where he was a valued “whale,” a high-roller. It happened to be the week of the First National bombing. After Las Vegas, he took a showgirl to San Francisco and later south to a resort in Newport Beach, a honeymoon without benefit of marriage. During this period, he had no interest in the news.
He returned to our city, sans showgirl, on the afternoon of the day that I had my sutures removed. His trusted right-hand man, Tony Urqell, had known better than to disturb Tortelli when he was engaged in such a romantic adventure. But upon his boss’s return, Urqell informed him that a manager of various Tortelli properties believed he might have rented a building to one of the men wanted for the bank bombing and the Colt-Thompson heist.
Joe Tortelli owned a great deal of real estate in our city: apartment buildings, office buildings, parking garages, and more. Among the things he owned were several large, rusting, and mostly unrented Quonset huts in an old manufacturing district slated for redevelopment. One of these Quonsets was the building in question, which had been rented out for six months, supposedly to supply the lessee with much-needed temporary storage.
Urqell had not acted on the manage
r’s suspicion because it was Joe Tortelli’s policy to regard the police as an enemy and to avoid giving them a reason to become suspicious of any of his enterprises, even though most of them were, these days, legit. With Tortelli back on home base, Urqell informed him of the manager’s report and wanted to know what he should do.
“Go have a look,” Tortelli said. “Take some guys with you. If these bomb-throwin’ cowboys used the place, they won’t be there now, but we’ve got to get out in front of the story.”
Urqell and the three guys who went with him found the armored truck, the van painted to look like a Colt-Thompson support vehicle, and the very ripe body of the third guard, missing for fifteen days.
By Wednesday morning, the bombing-heist saga, which had faded somewhat from the news, was once more the top story.
93
Three hundred miles from the city, in a neighboring state, Lucas Drackman, Smaller, and Tilton were holed up in a comfortable house on a 210-acre farm, long fallow, that he had bought years previously in case he ever needed it for this purpose.
If their original plan had unfolded as intended, they would never have left the city. The authorities would have had no clue as to the identities of the perpetrators. As soon as Smaller had opened the armored door with a cutting torch and they had gotten their hands on the 1.6 million in cash, they could have gone directly back to the house overlooking Riverside Commons.
The Japanese swish on the park bench should have suggested to Drackman that their scheme might not unfold precisely as designed. But by then, they were on the cusp of action, and he believed that victory never favored the hesitant.
After the heist, in the Quonset hut, they had a police-band radio, an ordinary radio, and a TV to monitor the breaking news. Smaller hadn’t quite breached the thick door when Fiona called their attention to the TV. A reporter stood outside First National, talking to a disheveled woman with bits of debris in her hair, a bank teller who had been at work when the bombs went off.
“A little boy, a little Negro boy,” she said. “He shouted there was a bomb, we should get out. I thought it was a prank, then I knew it wasn’t. He saved my life. I dropped to the floor behind my window, the teller’s window, so I was protected.”
“A boy?” the reporter pressed. “Is he here now, do you see him now, this boy?”
She shook her head, and her voice quaked with emotion. “No. He was hurt bad. I thought he was dead. Like the girl. The girl … she was dead, it was horrible. This other boy was kneeling beside him. I tried to take him out of there with me, the white boy, I mean, but he said his friend was still alive, he couldn’t leave him.”