It was a brisk walk back, retracing my steps through the residential area. Half a block from the business street I tiptoed silently up onto a front porch, opened the milk box there, and took out the four empties I found inside. Then I carried the box away with me, and hurried on downtown.
The banks were two blocks to the left, on the other side. There was no traffic at all now, which for my purposes was both good and bad. I wanted privacy, but I also needed customers, who might not be forthcoming at eleven-thirty at night in a small town in the middle of the week.
I considered both banks, and the gray stone monolith of Western National seemed somehow better suited architecturally to my milk box, which was a steel-colored metal cube with a lidded top plus thick sides for insulation. I put it on the sidewalk under the night deposit slot, took the note from my pocket, unrolled it, and tried to find some way to attach it to the building. I should have asked the waitress for some Scotch tape.
Then the simple solution came to me: I opened the night deposit slot, slid the back half of the place mat into it, and closed the slot again with the note hanging out. Stepping back near the curb, I surveyed my handiwork and decided it wouldn’t fool anybody.
But it was all I had; and in any case I shouldn’t hang around here, admiring my work. Checking both ways, still seeing no traffic and no pedestrians. I hurried off, and had gone nearly a block before I began wondering where I was going.
Nowhere. With no more money, I couldn't go back to the diner. The air was getting steadily colder, so I couldn’t stay outside. There was nobody around for me to try with my panhandler imitation. I did see an open bar up ahead, but I was afraid to go in there with no cash to spend.
So I went back to the Dombey house. The lights were out, so Bob and Alice had gone to bed. Vaguely, to distract myself, I tried to work up some prurient thoughts about that, an inmate outside the prison and in bed with a woman, but it was impossible. I hadn’t met Alice Dombey, but I’d met her husband, the first man I’d seen passing the laundry room door, the hunch-shouldered skinny one with the shifty weasel expression, and there was just no way to fantasize him married to a sex symbol.
I went through the side door and downstairs to the corridor Vasacapa had constructed. The twenty-five watt bulb burned dimly in the ceiling. There was no radiator in here, but some heat did seep through from the rest of the house. I sat down on the carpeting, leaned my head against the paneled wall, and gave myself over to brooding thoughts.
And sleep. I don’t quite know how it happened, but the next thing I knew I was lying on my side, all curled up, and I’d been sound asleep. Cold had awakened me, and when I moved I was as stiff as a motel towel. I creaked and cracked, moaned and groaned, and slowly made it to my feet, where I hopped up and down and flapped my arms around in an effort to get warm.
Christ, but it was cold; the Dombeys must be the thrifty type who turn the heat down during the night. I’d been in prison a month and a half and this was the worst night I d ever spent anywhere, and I was outside the goddam jail.
Well, there was no point in it. A warm bunk awaited me in the gym, so I might as well get to it. Awkwardly I lowered myself to my knees again and entered the tunnel.
I was about halfway back when I remembered the note and the milk box, and realized I ought to go back and see if I’d caught anything.
I really didn’t want to. There wouldn't be anything in the milk box, I was sure of it, and I was cold enough already without another long useless walk. I also wanted to go back to sleep.
But I had to check, didn’t I? Facing Phil and Joe and the others tomorrow with no money to show them-no, not if there was any alternative at all. So I had to go back.
Did you ever try to turn around in a three-foot-wide concrete pipe? Don’t. At one point I was wedged in so completely, with my head between my knees and my shoulders stacked up together somewhere behind me, that I was convinced I’d never be able to move again; I could see Phil, tomorrow afternoon, sending Billy Glinn down to dismantle me in order to clear the blockage.
Finally, though, I did get myself facing the other way, and by then the exercise had made me warmer, more limber and very nearly awake. Except for a splitting headache and a total sense of despair I was in pretty good shape as I crawled back through the tunnel and hurried through the still-dark streets toward the bank. A clock in a barbershop window told me it was twenty minutes to four.
There was a gray canvas bag in the milk box. I stared at it, refusing to believe it, then stared suspiciously all around, expecting a trick. Practical jokers, of course, always have to believe that someone else is going to return the favor in kind.
There was no one in sight. The parked cars in the general vicinity all seemed to be empty. When I hesitantly reached into the milk box and prodded the gray canvas bag, no alarm bells jangled, no spotlights flashed on. But I did hear the clink of coins.
Well I’ll be damned, I thought.
I took the bag out of the milk box. I could feel coins in there, and wads of paper.
Son of a bitch, I thought.
I stuffed the bag inside my jacket, grabbed my note from the night deposit slot and jammed it into a pocket, and walked briskly away, leaving the milk box as mute testimony to the gullibility of man.
I had just committed my first true felony. We have all read the statements of prison reformers claiming that jail creates more criminals than it rehabilitates, and by golly it turns out to be true!
11
THE DAMN BAG didn’t want to open. I stood in the Vasacapa corridor in the Dombey basement, wrestling with the gray canvas bag full of money, and gradually my new self-image as a master criminal crumbled into ashes at my feet. Some crook; I couldn’t steal my way into a canvas bag.
In my defense, I must say it was a tough bag to crack. Made of heavy canvas, it had a reinforced mouth that closed with a zipper, which in turn was attached by a small gleaming metal lock that would only open with a key. I fussed and fidgeted with the damn thing, listening to the coins clinking and the paper rustling in there, until finally I noticed a nail tip jutting through the side wall of the corridor, where Vasacapa had put up his paneling. Since this side of the wall hadn’t been finished, it was the back of the paneling I was looking at. Something had been fastened to the wall over there, with a nail that poked all the way through, extending a full inch into the corridor.
So I gashed the bag to death. I kept scraping it against the nail until I’d gnawed a hole in it, and then forced and pried and gouged until the hole was big enough for me to shake the contents out onto the carpet.
Coins came tumbling out first, quarters and dimes and nickels bounding around like playful fish on the silent carpet, and then a thick wad of paper held together with a red rubber band.
The paper was money: bills, half a dozen checks, and a deposit slip. The checks were made out to Turk’s Bar & Grill, and it was likely that Turk, or his representative, had been treating himself to a few on the house tonight, which was why he’d fallen for my sign-and-milk box routine. Although as I remembered it, that fellow I’d read about in the paper several years ago had caught all sorts of citizens when he’d done the same thing. A businessman late at night, tired, impatient to be home, distracted by the events of his day, sees a note and something that looks vaguely like a strongbox, and just drops in the day’s receipts. In fact, the only reason that former practitioner of this dodge had gotten himself arrested was because he’d kept doing it too often. A mistake I wouldn’t repeat; this had been my first felony, and would be my last.