The girl was looking at Jon’s T-shirt, which had some underground comic character on it (a guy with a pointed head and five o’clock shadow in a clown suit, labeled “Zippy the Pinhead”) and she seemed almost on the verge of a smile. And suddenly she was speaking. Saying to Jon, “I like it. Your shirt. It’s really cute.”
“Yeah, well, thanks,” Jon said.
“I wouldn’t mind having one myself.”
“Well,” Jon said, looking at her breasts with a cheerfully awestruck expression, “I’m not sure if they come in your size.”
And the girl smiled. Even showed some teeth. She was proud of those big boobs of hers, and Jon had said just the thing to win her over. A more obvious off-color sort of remark might have soured her, especially had it come from Nolan; but Jon’s boyish, almost naive manner put it over perfectly. Nolan nodded his approval at the lad, who then proceeded to nearly undo the good he’d just done by blurting, “Couldn’t somebody turn on some lights? I’m going fuckin’ blind in here.”
Rigley looked puzzled for half a second, then embarrassed, as evidently he was the one who’d thought dimming the lights would provide the appropriate atmosphere for crime and conspiracy.
Nolan looked at Jon and Jon looked away, and Nolan said to the girl, “Maybe if you could turn on that light behind the bar, there,” and the girl did.
The awkward moment passed, and Rigley went back to what he was doing, which was distributing Manhattans to each of the four seats at the table.
Nolan told everybody to have a seat.
He waited for everybody to get settled and was about to begin when Rigley got up quickly, saying, “Oh, I almost forgot,” and brought back a manila folder, identical to the one he’d shown Nolan Thursday night. The one chock-full of blackmail material. And there was almost another awkward moment, as Nolan felt himself getting mad all over again.
This time, thankfully, the folder contained material of a more agreeable nature: the photographs of the interior and exterior of the bank that Nolan had requested of Rigley, as well as a listing of employees and a timetable of their work activities, plus a floor plan prepared for the occasion by Rigley, which indicated where each person worked and where each alarm button was located, and a wealth of other pertinent information. Rigley had done a good job, and Nolan told him so.
“And I have to admit,” Nolan continued, “your basic plan for the robbery is a good one. Some refinements would be necessary, of course, and I’d need to go over these photographs and plans and such you brought me first, but otherwise I see no reason why your scenario wouldn’t be followed very close. Almost to the letter.”
All of that was true — it was a good plan — but the point of all the compliments was to put Rigley at ease. And it did. Rigley’s tic, his overall nervousness, seemed to have disappeared. He was smiling, sipping his Manhattan.
“However,” Nolan said, “I’m afraid all of your work maybe was for nothing.”
“What do you mean?” Rigley said, brows knitted.
The girl was silent, but her expression asked the same question.
“Now, I don’t want anyone to misunderstand my motives,” Nolan said, “but I think it would be best all around, for all concerned, if we called it off.”
“What?” Rigley said. Almost shouted. “Call it off? Call off the robbery? Why, for Christ’s sake?”
Nolan shrugged. “The only way I can explain it is by saying I’ve reached fifty years of age and never spent a day of it in jail, even though for the better part of the last twenty I was robbing banks like yours, Rigley. And do you know how I managed that? Managed to stay alive and not behind bars? By being careful. By having certain rules. By demanding certain conditions... ideal conditions... for any heist I was part of.”
“What in hell could be more ideal than this?” Rigley demanded. “What in hell more could you ask in a bank robbery than the help of the president of the bank? I mean, I’ve heard of inside tracks, but this is ridiculous.”
“You’re right,” Nolan said, nodding. “But I’m not talking about the job itself.”
The girl, who had the painfully skeptical expression of a doctor listening to a patient explain how he caught clap off a toilet seat, leaned forward and said, “Then just what are you talking about?”
And Nolan told them about the break-in Friday. He told them of two men (neither of whom Jon got a look at) who came in, rummaged through the entire antique shop, including opening a safe, apparently but not necessarily looking for money, and were interrupted by Jon, whom they promptly conked on the head before getting the hell out.
Before Rigley and the girl could begin expressing their obvious disbelief, Jon leaned forward, parted his hair, and showed them the bump. Then he sat back and said, “And that ain’t special effects, boys and girls. I’m too much of a coward to let myself be conked on the head just to back up a phony story.”
“All right,” the girl said, taking over (as Rigley seemed too confused at the moment to actually talk), “suppose it’s true. What exactly does any of that have to do with anything? Two people break into your shop and try to rob you. So what?”
“First let me tell you about something else,” Nolan said. “Something that happened to a friend of mine. A guy who set up a robbery Jon and I were on not long ago, and who worked with me on a lot of things over the years. Real pro. Thursday night he was murdered. For the contents of a cash register, amounting to maybe fifty bucks. He ran a bar, you see, and after closing, somebody came in and blew my friend’s head all over the wall.”
Nolan paused for dramatic effect, but the girl was not impressed. She said, “I still see no relationship to what we’re doing here.”
“Maybe there isn’t any relationship. I’d go so far as to say there probably isn’t. But I don’t like coincidences. A thief, a friend of mine, is killed for nickels and dimes. Call it cute, or ironic, or anything you want. Only the next day, two guys break into where I live, and Jon interrupts them before much damage is done, but anyway they’re apparently trying to rob us. Again, ironic, cute, robber gets robbed. Big laugh. But suppose something’s going on. Some old friends or enemies of mine are in the neighborhood with something in mind.”
“Isn’t that rather far-fetched?” Rigley said, finally regaining his faculty of speech.
“Isn’t it rather far-fetched that within twenty-four hours, a few hundred miles apart, two professional thieves who did a lot of work together are the object of two robberies themselves? One of them killed, head blown off by a shotgun like the one you were waving around the other night, sweetheart.”
“Wait one fucking minute, now,” the girl said. “You aren’t accusing us of having anything to do with...”
“I didn’t say that. Thursday night, we were together, so the shotgun thing is a true coincidence. I grant you that. But from my point of view, why not? Why couldn’t you have hired some people to dig up further blackmail material on Jon and me? That would at least explain the break-in at our place.”
“I think it’s all a bunch of bullshit,” the girl said.
“We had nothing to do with it,” Rigley said. “Any of it.”
“Okay. So who did?”
“You’re making mountains out of molehills,” Rigley said. “You’re desperate to find an excuse to get out of this situation, and so are trying to scare us out, confuse and frighten us into letting you off the hook.”
Nolan smiled. A friendly smile. It hurt him to do it; he hated Rigley and the bitch, and being civil to them would give him an ulcer if he had to keep it up much longer. But he smiled. He said, “I’m not trying to get off any hook. It’s a good heist. It really is. It’ll be easy, fast money for Jon and me. We’ve done it before, so why not again? But don’t you see the reason the two of us are around to rob your bank a second time is that we’re careful, we only work under certain conditions, and that it’s foolish to pull a heist when there’s possibly something going on that could fuck up that heist? Don’t you see that?”