Donald Westlake - Cops and Robbers

They hadn’t done any more talking about the robbery idea since that one time in the car, but they’d both been thinking about it. Not that it was real, not that they thought they would actually commit a major robbery somewhere, but just that it was nice to daydream about a possible way of getting themselves out of this grind.

Joe wasn’t thinking about the robbery idea at the moment, mostly because his mind was taken up with the problem of the pool filter, but Tom’s mind was ticking along on the subject, and all at once he said, “Hey.”

Joe was sitting cross-legged on the ground, surrounded by hoses and washers and nuts. He put a double handful of parts down, wiped his face with his hand, drank beer, looked over at Tom, and said, “What?”

“What do you think the Russians would pay for him,” Tom said, “if we kidnapped their ambassador?”

Joe squinted at him in the sunlight. “You serious?”

“Why not? Profitable and patriotic both.”

Joe thought about it for a couple of seconds, and then he looked all around the backyard and said, “Where the hell are we going to keep the Russian ambassador?”

Tom looked off toward his own yard next door. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s a problem.”

Joe shook his head and went back to the pool filter. Tom drank some more beer. They both thought their thoughts.

The squeal was at a junior high school; they’d found a missing teacher, dead.

It was about eleven in the morning, a cloudy day that promised rain for later on. Ed and I drove over in the Ford and parked in the school zone out front. It was one of the old gray stone school buildings, three stories high, looking more like a fortress than a place for kids. A concrete-covered play yard was on the right, surrounded by eight-foot-high chain link fence. Nobody was in it.

A recent fad among the kids has been to write nicknames on walls and subways and all over the damn place in either spray paint or felt-tip pen, both of which are very tough to get rid of, particularly from a porous surface like stone. The fad is for a kid to write his name or his nickname or some magic name he’s worked out for himself, and then under it write the number of the street he lives on. “JUAN 135,” for instance, or “BOSS ZOOM 92,” that kind of thing.

The fad had hit the school building. As high as a child’s arm could reach, the names and numbers were scrawled everywhere on the walls, in black and red and blue and green and yellow. Some of the signatures were like little paintings, carefully and lovingly done, and some of them were just splashed and scrawled on, with runlets of paint dripping down from the bottoms of the letters, but most of them were simply reports of name and number, without flair or imagination: “Andy 87,” “Beth 81,” “Moro 103.”

At first, all of that paintwork looked like vandalism and nothing more. But as I got used to it, to seeing it around, I realized it gave a brightly colored hem to the gray stone skirt of a building like this, that it had a very sunny Latin American flavor to it, and that once you got past the prejudice against marking up public property it wasn’t that bad at all. Of course, I never said this to anybody.

Inside, we went to the principal’s office, and he said he’d show us where the body was. Walking down the corridor with us, he said, “The room was a girl’s lavatory, but all of the plumbing is out of it now. That’s as far as they got with the modernizing plan.” He was balding, about forty, with a moustache and horn-rim glasses and a slightly prissy manner, as though he were more sinned against than sinning.

We got curious stares from the teen-agers we passed, so apparently the news wasn’t general yet about the discovery of the teacher’s body.

Ed said, “Why didn’t you report her missing?”

“So many of these younger teachers,” the principal said, “they’re apt to take two or three days off without warning, we didn’t think a thing of it. Another teacher noticed the smell this morning, that’s why she happened to look.”

I said, “We’ll want to talk to her. The other teacher.”

“Of course,” he said. “She’s in the building at the moment. With Miss Evans, what we think happened, a group of them must have decided to rape her, and took her in there. At some point she must have fought back. I don’t think they brought her in there with the intention of killing her.”

Intentions didn’t matter, if she was dead. None of us said any more, until the principal stopped and pointed at a door and said, “She’s in there.”

I went to the door as Ed said to the principal, “What about her family? You try calling her at home?”

I opened the door and took a step in, and the smell hit me in the face. Then, in the dim light through the dirty translucent windows, I saw her lying on the floor over against the green wall. Plaster showed white where they’d pulled the sinks out. She’d been there for a week, and there were rats in the building. “God,” I said, and backed out, and slammed the door.

The principal was answering Ed’s question, saying, “She lived alone in—” Then he noticed, and said, “Oh, I’m terribly sorry! I should have warned you, I suppose.”

Ed took a step toward me, looking worried. “You okay, Tom?”

I waved my hand at him, to keep back away from the room. “Leave it for the ambulance.” I could feel the blood draining out of my head, a sensation of coldness in my arms and feet.

The principal, still prissy but bewildered, said, “I’m really very sorry. I took it for granted you were hardened to that sort of thing.”

I pushed past the two of them, needing to get outdoors. Hardened to that sort of thing. Jesus H. Christ!

They had the midnight-to-eight shift that week. It’s the quietest of the three shifts, but at eight o’clock in the morning, driving home eastward into the rising sun, a man’s eyes feel covered with sand and he thinks his stomach will never be comfortable again.

Joe left the station first and got the Plymouth out of the lot and drove down the block to double-park across the street from the precinct house. He had to wait ten minutes before Tom came out, looking disgusted, and slid into the passenger seat.

Joe said, “What’s the problem?”

“Little talk from the Lieutenant,” Tom said. “Some damn thing about narcotics.”

“What about it?”

Tom yawned, fighting it, and gave an angry shrug. “Anything you pick up, be sure you turn it in. The usual noise.”

Joe put the Plymouth in gear and started through the maze crosstown and downtown to the Midtown Tunnel. “I wonder who they caught,” he said.

“Nobody from this house,” Tom said. He yawned again, giving in to it this time, and rubbed his face with both hands. “Boy, am I ready for sleep.”

“I got me an idea,” Joe said.

Tom knew at once what he meant. Looking at him, interested, he said, “You do? What?”

“Paintings from a museum.”

Tom frowned. “I don’t follow.”

“Listen,” Joe said. “They got paintings in those museums, they’re worth a million dollars each. We take ten, we sell them back for four million. That’s two million for each of us.”

Tom’s frown deepened. He scratched the side of his jaw, making a sound like sandpaper. “I don’t know,” he said. “Ten paintings. They’d be as tough to hide as my Russian ambassador.”

“I could put them in my garage,” Joe said. “Who’s gonna look in a garage?”

“Your kids would wreck them in a day.”

Joe didn’t want to give this up; it was the only idea he’d managed to come up with. “Five paintings,” he said. “One million apiece.”