Robert Tanenbaum - No Lesser Plea

Two men were leaning against the yellow Firebird talking quietly, ignoring the street life around them. The two men were professional criminals and they were plotting a crime. They were in upper Manhattan, on a mean street, one of the poor ones that smell like a barbecue party held in a garbage dump. It was noisy in the early twilight, with the shrieking of kids at play or in pain, and the contributions from half a dozen different radios drifting or blasting from the windows of parked cars or apartments. Frightened old men hurried home as the shadows deepened, past groups of idlers, past junkies, past staggering drunks, past poor folks chatting on steps and crates. It was late spring in New York, the first really mild day of the year, when New Yorkers are able to forget the hideous reality of both winter and summer in that city.

“We gonna use this car?” said the younger of the two. His name was Preston Elvis, twenty years old, recently out of Attica, where he did time on an armed robbery charge, thus making him a real man in his social circles.

“Yeah, man, we’re gonna use this car. We gonna use my yellow Firebird, that everybody in the whole fucking neighborhood knows is my car, with my tags, and we’re gonna drive it to a supermarket, and ace some dude and take his cash bag and then drive it back and park it in front of my building. That your plan, Pres?”

“Well, I mean …”

“Look, baby, when I say no connection between us and the deed, I mean zero connection. Different car. Different tags. After all, we don’t hang out together, we don’t know each other, dig?”

“So we steal a car?” Elvis was fascinated. He had been to crime school in Attica, of course, but the problem there, which even he could see, was that all the available teachers were failures-they’d been caught. This dude, now, this dude had never been caught. This was Mandeville Louis, by his own claim the most successful armed robber in New York. Elvis didn’t know whether the claim was true. Certainly he’d never heard of him in prison or on the street. But the man had a definite style. Elvis liked the way he talked-this dude had brains, no question-liked his clothes, liked his car, liked his apartment and the women he hung out with. Fresh out of the slams, tap city, Elvis was a willing student. He’d fallen into conversation with Louis in a bar off 126th Street about two weeks ago, and since then he’d felt like a kid up from Triple A who’d been singled out by Pete Rose for special attention.

“No, baby, we don’t steal no car. Cars is for car thieves and dumb kids. We steal a new car, we got eyes on us the whole way, especially in this here DE-prived environment. Then the owner squeals like a muthafucka to the cops and every pig wagon in the city got a description of our car pinned up on their visor. You wanna get stopped with a bag of money in your lap?

“We steal a old car, the bastard got a fucked-up fuel pump he forgot to tell us about. We break down in front of the Twenty-third Precinct. Forget it. No, little bro, we get a guy to drive us there, in his own wheels and drive us back. Then we pay him off and bye-bye. He don’t know us, we don’t know him.”

“Hey, but what happens if he gets picked up,” said Elvis. “I mean, you know …”

“Nothing happens. First, the dude don’t know nothing. What he gonna say? Mister PO-lice, it wasn’t me took the money, offed the dude, it was two other niggers, I don’t know their names, don’t know where they live. What they say? Bullshit, boy, we got you, you goin’ up! Other thing is, the dude drive the car, he what they call a high-risk individual. You gotta find somebody maybe won’t be round town too long.”

“Won’t be round town?” said Elvis. “What you mean? You mean we give him a ticket to somewhere?”

“Yeah, you could say that, Pres, we give him a ticket.”

Elvis was drinking in criminal strategy like a sponge. Basically a smash and grab artist, he had pulled off no more than half a dozen crimes before being caught, all but one of them sneak thievery. They were crimes of opportunity, that required no more than a strong back, swift feet, and street sense. The best part of being a criminal to him was not so much the loot, which in his case had been petty-a couple of TV sets, a couple of purses, a pretty good stereo-but the feeling of power, of personal worth that went with being a bad dude on the street.

His desire for even more status led him to purchase a small caliber revolver for $20, and to try his hand at armed robbery. He stuck up a dry cleaner in his neighborhood, got away with $48, and was arrested the next day, on the information of the store owner, who had been robbed eleven times and made it his business to register every jitterbug in the district in his mind’s eye.

Elvis’s public defender spent twenty minutes on the case: Elvis was copped to a lesser-grand larceny and weapons-and went up for a bullet-a year, minus time served and good behavior. He had been in for nine months-not unpleasantly, since he was big, and looked tough, and as an armed robber was at the top of the pecking order in prison society.

Louis continued his lecture. “Deal is this. You ever meet a guy name of Donald Walker?”

“No, why?”

“You sure? Bout as big as me, bright colored, got a little Afro, little beard, they call him ‘Snowball’?”

“No, Man, I don’t know no dude like that. Who is he?”

“He our driver. He got a four-door Chevy sedan, I checked it out, he keep it up real good. Now, I got him set to meet us tomorrow night. We leave from here, take the subway downtown, get off at Fiftieth and Lex. He pick us up outside the subway station, ten-thirty on the dot. We drive nice and slow down to Thirty-ninth and Madison, shouldn’t take us no more than fifteen minutes, tops.

“There’s this supermarket there, closes at eleven. ‘Bout ten minutes after, the manager comes out carrying two cash bags. He meet a guard from the guard service and they drive to the bank. We gonna be parked around the corner. When the man lock up, I get out of the car. I’m wearing my mean black suit, shirt, tie, carrying a little attaché case. You dig, I just been selling stocks or some shit, nobody scared of me, way I dressed. I get even with the car. The guard always stand outside the car and open the door for the manager. So, I pull out the shotgun from under my suit coat, off one, off the other, put the bags in the case, and walk back to the car. We drive back to the subway station, and then we go our separate ways. Then, in a couple days, you call me, we get together, I give you your share, you give Snowball his. You got any questions.”

Elvis had a million questions. This was the first he heard he was getting involved in a double murder. He stared at Louis, but the look of the other man dissuaded him from raising any serious objections. Louis was wearing his usual expression of friendly engagement, as if he had just invited an acquaintance to admire the wax job on his car. Elvis found it uncomfortable to meet his gaze. He dropped his eyes to the ground, and said, drawing on his ultimate reserves of cool: “Sound good, Man, sound good, but well, what about me, what I be doin’ while you doin’ that?”

“Glad you ask that, Pres. You got just the one job. When that gun go off, that little mutha Snowball gone shit his pants. Your job is, when I come ‘round the corner, I expect my getaway vehicle be where I expect it to be, dig?”

“Yeah, that don’t sound too hard.”

“OK, that’s cool. Well, Pres, see you around.”

It was a dismissal. “OK, Man, see you tomorrow night.”