Sandy stole quite often. I have been with her in Saks or Bonwit’s when she’s ripped off some really impressive items without blinking an eyelash, and each time I was so excited I nearly wet my pants. As we walked up the main street of this bustling cosmopolitan center, rain pelting us, silent cowboys striding leanly past, I found myself growing an erection of enormous proportions, and I knew it had only to do with anticipation of the caper Sandy was about to pull. David, walking on the other side of Sandy, looked extremely thoughtful and a little nervous. I wondered suddenly what the violinist, violist, and cellist in his quartet would say if they knew their flute player was at this very moment about to become an accomplice in a spectacular heist. I began to giggle.
“Shut up, Peter,” Sandy said.
The crime of the century, as it evolved, was brilliant and daring. Sandy’s earlier escapades had all been variations on the hit-and-run technique; you don’t mess around with store detectives in Bloomingdale’s or Bergdorf’s. But I sensed (and it turned out that I was correct) that in a one-horse town like this, simply stuffing a parka into her bloomers would be tantamount to taking candy from a baby. Sandy had to do this job with Dash and Swagger (those well-known tap dancers) or not at all. She was wearing a blue woolen hat soaked with rain, and her blue parka was similarly drenched. Blue jeans and a blue turtleneck completed her outfit. The impression was one of total blueness, and it must have occurred to her that a quick look would convey this same impression whether she was wearing her parka or not. The first thing she had to do (and I doped this out as the Great Parka Robbery unfolded, second-guessing her along the way) was get rid of her own parka before we arrived at the scene of the crime. The department store she’d chosen to honor was midway between the garage and the diner and she searched now for a suitable spot to dump the wet blue parka, finally coming upon an alley alongside a package store. The alley was narrow and dank, a water spout sloshing away near a collection of garbage cans and empty whiskey cartons. Taking off her parka, Sandy folded it neatly, packed it inside the top carton in a stack of four, and gently closed the cardboard flaps over it. Stripped for action, she moved swiftly through the rain, David and I following, toward the department store up the street.
The store was larger on the inside than it had appeared from out front. Two long open counters, flanking a center aisle, ran the length of the building to the shoe department at the rear. A dozen or so shoppers wandered between and around these counters, picking over the merchandise, a dazzling display of jeans, shirts, underwear, socks, buttons, sweaters, ties, and sundries. The aisle on the left, near the cash register, was equipped with a rack holding women’s skirts, slacks, and dresses, men’s suits, pants, and sports jackets. Along the left-hand wall was a rack loaded with overcoats, topcoats, car coats, mackinaws and (lo and behold!) ski parkas. Sandy walked directly to that rack, immediately found the parkas in her size, picked out a blue one and took it off its hanger. She tore off the sales tags, stuffed them into the pocket of her jeans, and then put on the parka and zipped it up. Taking the wet woolen hat from her head, she wiped it over the front and shoulders of the parka to give it at least a slightly wet look. Then, putting on the hat again, she walked immediately toward the cash register and said, “May I see a salesman, please?”
It was not until she reached the other side of the room that I realized the entire operation had been witnessed by a girl standing at the end of the aisle.
The girl looked very much like Rhoda.
She was not Rhoda, of course, not unless Rhoda had dyed her hair red since that summer five years ago. But she was about Rhoda’s size, with the same chunky figure in green ski pants and parka, the same freckle-spattered face, the same somehow middle-aged stance, though she could not have been older than twenty-two or — three. Our eyes met across the long length of the aisle. She said nothing. It was too late to warn Sandy. Her plan was in motion, and if this girl decided to blow the whistle, there was nothing we could do about it. I nudged David. He looked up from his nervous examination of a black parka on the rack, saw the girl standing there motionless, staring at us, and immediately turned his back to her. Sandy was returning with a salesman, blithely rattling on about a darling parka she’d seen on the rack, which she was certain would match perfectly a pair of bell-bottomed ski pants she’d bought in New York. The salesman, a tall, loping cowboy-type wearing a gray flannel suit, a string tie, brown high-topped boots, and a prissy mustache, asked Sandy if she had the pants with her, and she said no, but she was pretty sure of the color, all she was worried about was the size, and into the valley of death rode the six hundred.
Eyes prying through the portages of the head like brass cannons, so to speak, the girl in green watched with a tight little smile on her mouth, hands on her hips — Christ, if she didn’t look like Rhoda. Unaware of her presence, totally oblivious to the artillery across the straits there, the gun muzzles lowering to zero in on the range and bearing, Sandy pointed out the parka she liked while David and I hunched our shoulders and drew in our heads, expecting an imminent explosion. The salesman took a slick yellow parka from the rack, commented that it was the new Wet Look, and then said, “Would you take off your own parka, please?” Sandy’s own parka, of course, was the one she’d swiped from the rack not five minutes before, such was the daring of her scheme. I certainly appreciated her sang-froid and panache, but I was afraid my admiration would not be shared by the green-garbed minion of law and order watching from the end of the aisle as Phase II of the heist went into effect. David’s lip was beginning to tremble; his embouchure would never be the same again. Sandy took off the stolen blue parka (Would the salesman notice that her turtleneck was wet after our run through the rain?) and handed it to me. I glanced toward the girl in green. She was still there.
Putting on the yellow parka, Sandy asked, “What size is it?”
“That’s a small, miss.”
“I think I need a medium,” she said.
“Oh no, it fits you beautifully,” the salesman said. “Don’t you think it fits her beautifully?” he asked me.
“No,” I said. “It’s a little tight.”
“That’s what I thought,” Sandy said, and unzipped the parka. “Would you have it in the next size?”
“Not in that color, no.”
“That’s the color I need,” Sandy said. “To match the pants.”
“I really do think it fits you,” the salesman said.
“No, it’s a little tight,” Sandy answered, taking it off and handing it back to him. She removed the blue parka from my hands, noticed for the first time the panic-stricken look on my face, smiled graciously at the salesman, and said, “Thank you very much.”
“Try us again,” the salesman said.
Sandy was zipping up the blue parka. She was facing the end of the aisle at which stood the green sentinel of justice, and she must have seen the girl, but her face revealed nothing. “Thank you,” she said again to the salesman, and the three of us started for the front door.
Behind us, I heard the girl in green say, “Sir?”
My step quickened. Sandy, sensing something was in the wind, or probably in the air over our heads already, not realizing the something was a 155-mm howitzer shell about to explode in flying pieces of shrapnel, began walking more swiftly. We had reached the door when the girl in green said, “Do you have this in my size, sir?”
In the town’s sole saloon, where we’d gone to call for a taxi after picking up Sandy’s old parka, we drank beer and wondered aloud why the girl hadn’t ratted.