“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
After finding Osborne, I’d gone back to read more copies of the school paper, that weren’t available online. I read them on microfilm at the Public Library, hoping I wouldn’t run into Osborne thus possibly destroying his last refuge. Osborne wound up joining the anti-war group, and was a participant in a bombing of the on-campus recruitment center. The bomb went off at night. The group said they didn’t intend to hurt anyone. Unfortunately, the night custodian was polishing the floors and was blown to bits.
“Osborne let on that he’d done some horrible things, and he wasn’t just talking about Vietnam. I knew there was something else and when I researched him I found that when he got back from the war he joined an extreme anti-war movement, one that was violent in nature. He was involved in a bombing at a university where your father was a custodian at the recruitment center. He was killed and Osborne became a fugitive. And even though there’s no proof that Osborne planted the actual bomb, that’s what you believe happened. You hired me to find him and it doesn’t take much imagination on my part to figure out why.”
“I don’t have a father because of him.”
“That may be true, Karyn, but believe me he’s paid for it over the years. You wouldn’t want to be him. You wouldn’t want to be leading the life he’s led. He’s suffered enough, more than if you did anything to him. Trust me, you’ve had your revenge. Just by knowing one of the men who died at his hands had a daughter, is enough to make his life even more miserable. I don’t know what you had in mind but my advice is, drop it, let it go. Move on.”
She dropped her head for a moment. When she raised it again I could see tears forming in her eyes.
“I lost my father because of him.”
“I know. And you can’t get him back by taking revenge on Osborne. You’ll only be allowing him to ruin your life more than he already has. Believe me, you’re better off than he is.”
“I want to see for myself.”
“I can’t stop you, but I don’t think you should, and I won’t help you by telling you how to find him.”
“I can hire someone else.”
“Sure you can, but you won’t because you know I’m right.” I took out my wallet and pulled out the check she’d given me the day before. I stared at it a moment, then handed it back to her.
“I could take your money and I should. I did what you paid me to do. But I won’t. And believe me, this is not the kind of thing I usually do, and I know I’ll hate myself in the morning for doing it. But I’m making a point here. I’m giving you a chance to start all over again, to erase yesterday from record. Take the money, Karyn, and forget about Donald Osborne.”
I got up and walked away. Away from Karyn Shaw, away from a grand that should have been mine. I might regret it in the morning but right now I was feeling pretty good about myself.
I knew it wouldn’t last long, but for now it was worth it.
Fat Lip’s Revenge – by Ron Fortier
SO, YOU WANT TO HEAR about my experiences working as a cop at the Grand Central Terminal? You’re putting together a documentary on the old girl and want to know if I know any really good stories. Brother, do I have stories. But, yeah, there is one that stands out above all the others. Unique, you know what I mean. A gem of a tale that I do love telling folks.
Okay, then, I’m Michael Muldoon and I’ve been a Transit Authority cop for going on eight years now. But this story I’m going to tell you started long ago, back some thirty or so years and is about a character named Rawley “Fat Lip” Crawford. He’s a black dude who was born and raised in Harlem, pretty much on the wrong side of tracks in more ways than one. His old man had been killed in Vietnam leaving Fat Lip’s mother to raise him and his two older sisters. I guess that was the problem as Mrs. Crawford did okay with the girls but bringing up a rambunctious boy on the streets of Harlem by herself was just too much for her. As much as she wanted to prevent it, Fat Lip was going to get himself into trouble no matter what she did.
Now he got the nickname “Fat Lip” because of all the street brawling he did early on, and it seemed like every other day he’d come home with his bottom lip swollen, cut and bleeding. After seeing him like this half a dozen times, the other kids on the block started calling him “Fat Lip” and it stuck.
By the time he was sixteen, he got into the fighting game and boxed for a few years as a light featherweight. I mean he was always a tall and lanky kid with very little meat on his bones. He never did finish high school and after dropping out he thought boxing could be his meal ticket to a brighter future. Of course, that was a pipe dream and his now famous bottom lip really took a pounding until it got so mangled, its shape remained pretty much twice the size of his upper lip.
Two years was pretty much all he could take, never stringing enough wins to make him appealing to any of the regular fight club managers in town. When he stopped being able to get bouts, his boxing career was over. It was soon after this that his one uncle, Max Crawford, took pity on him and gave him a job as a mechanic in his garage shop over in East Harlem. Lo and behold, it turns out Fat Lip had a way with car engines and everything Max taught the kid, he drank up like a sponge. He even let him move in to the small two-room apartment over the station. Fat Lip got to loving cars, both fixing them and driving them.
Now the latter is how he came to the attention of a two-bit crook Brooklyn crook named Charlie Atwater. Atwater was thirty at the time and a career criminal with an ever-growing rap sheet as long as your arm. He’d done a few years in stir mostly for armed robbery of liquor and Mom and Pop stores.
Again, this was all about thirty years ago, and most of the tale I got straight from Fat Lip. Up until that summer afternoon that Atwater and his pal, Butch Levins, walked into his uncle’s garage to find him, Fat Lip had never set eyes on the two. Atwater told the kid he had a proposition for him and they should meet later to discuss it. Fat Lip says that took place at a diner down the street that night after he got done working.
Basically what Atwater and Levins had planned was to rob a downtown jewelry story and were looking for a wheelman, someone to drive their getaway car. Someone who was good with cars and could get them out of Manhattan before the cops knew what hit them. They had asked around and been told Fat Lip Crawford was the man to see. Now Fat Lip was no saint, remember, but he was still cautious. Having two men, both complete strangers, come up and ask him to help them pull a heist wasn’t an everyday occurrence. At first he was hesitant to go along with their offer until Atwater said they would split the take three ways. All Fat Lip had to do was drive them to the target, stay in the car, and then get them the hell out of Dodge when the job was done and for that he’d get one third of the haul. Naturally Atwater had no problems exaggerating his claims that they’d most likely each end up with thousands of dollars each.
Again, keep in mind I’m talking the 1980s here. And for a guy who never had much all his life, what Atwater was saying had its desired affect. The temptation was too great for Fat Lip to pass up and in the end he signed on to be their wheelman.
Now keep in mind, most of the story I got from Fat Lip himself long after it all went down. On my own, out of natural curiosity as a cop, I did some digging through the precinct files and was able to piece together how it all went down. Atwater was a smart cookie with balls. Pulling a daylight heist in the middle of Manhattan would be tricky enough, but he had a rather unusual gimmick on his side: the weather. You see, after casing the jewelry store, he then began watching the long-range weather forecast on the evening news. His idea was to pull the job during a rainy day so that visibility would be poor for both witnesses and the police attempting to chase them down.