The Sweeney 02 Read online

  So it was twenty minutes past ten when he got up and made his way to the phone to call Cassidy. He thought he’d take a quick look out the window before he dialed the American cop’s number. And it was as well that he did. Across the road there were the unmistakable signs of an armed robbery going on inside the Lexington Bank and Trust Company.

  It was like a still from a camera. Thirteen people, ten of them frozen to the spot, four of them robbers, seven bank personnel, two men presumably customers, movement only in the office to the left of the reception area. The bank manager’s hands up, sitting immobile behind his desk while one armed man covered him and the other unloaded the entire contents of the safe into two large mailbags. Outside on the pavement the normal stream of pedestrians headed for offices, completely unaware of what was going on behind the half-frosted doors and windows of the bank. Parked at the curb was a mud-covered Thunderbird, a man behind the wheel. The mud on the wheel arches also sprayed in front of and behind the car, obscuring the license plates. Regan’s brain spun like a slot machine. He knew he wasn’t going to hit the jackpot because he just wasn’t going to be able to wade in and arrest everybody singlehanded. His entire experience told him the odds were totally against him—four guys in a bank and one in a car, all presumably armed. But he must salvage something. When the combinations stopped spinning and the score turned up, the message Regan’s brain gave his reflexes was a fast call to Cassidy, then get downstairs with a gun and wade in. Meanwhile Cassidy could be on the phone to mobiles organizing reinforcements and roadblocks to stop the Thunderbird if it got away.

  Regan grabbed the phone and dialed, and nearly misdialed in his haste. Then he heard ringing and his temper went.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Fuck. Bugger,” he shouted, thinking of Cassidy lying there unconscious in an alcoholic dream.

  Cassidy picked up the phone. “Yes,” The voice was asleep, and sounding like he was swallowing sand.

  “Regan. Robbery. Lexington Bank. Happening right now. I’m in the office; I’m headed for the bank. Got it?”

  Cassidy’s voice was alert. “Got it. Go.”

  But Regan was already racing for the door, grabbing his gun, checking and spinning the chambers, and then down the stairs, three at a time.

  He hit the street. He ran flat out across it, straight in front of a cruising chauffeur-driven Chrysler with an old lady in the back. The chauffeur slammed on the brakes and horn, and the tiny Pekinese that the old lady had been carrying sailed into the back of the chauffeur’s head, losing the man his cap. Regan saw none of this. He was down on his knees aiming. He fired. The whole front windshield of the Thunderbird shattered into lace. Regan said “Jesus shit,” and started heading for the bank. He had meant to hit the Thunderbird driver in the shoulder. The bullet had gone straight through the man’s head, spraying half his skull over the pure woolmark headlining of the car.

  Regan went flat on the pavement. One of the robbers inside the bank had heard the shot, and with a very fast reaction, had momentarily opened, then banged shut the door. Regan couldn’t fire through the front glass door. There were the bank personnel in the reception area. When the fast-reaction guy slammed the door shut again, Regan was up off the pavement and running the ten feet to the door. He didn’t open the door. He smashed the butt of the Magnum into the glass. Most of it came out in a half dozen pieces. The rest of it blew out when the two guys inside opened fire.

  But Regan had jumped away after delivering the butt blow that dealt with the glass door. He now lay to the left of the main door, under the window of the office where the guy was rifling the safe. He came up on one knee, aimed the gun, and fired. The armalite, half piercing power, half shock, ripped the frosted glass into a thousand pieces like some chain chemical reaction.

  He heard running feet inside the room, poked his head up and fired twice, saw one man go down, heard a violent shriek of pain offered almost as if as an afterthought, and realized the identity of the man he had hit. He didn’t have a gun. He wasn’t a robber, but Regan knew him. Two bullets sailed brilliantly close to his head and whizzed off the brick facade of a laundry across the street.

  He decided on five seconds to take stock. There were approximately a hundred people in the immediate vicinity who were within fire and ricochet range. He shouted, “Out. Get back! I’m a policeman. Get way back.” Fortunately a yellow cab man, who had also almost collided with Regan’s cross-street run, had immediately braked his empty cab, sprawled it across the road, and got out. Now all cars were jammed and static in both directions.

  A hail of shots now started coming through the shattered windows and door woodwork as the robbers inside tried to pinpoint their assailant. Then, suddenly, came some shots followed by screams inside and shouts, “Come on, come on. Out!” And Regan leveled his gun at the smashed front door, but no one came out. The noise of gunshots and cursing faded and he realized that this office building, in common with every other building in the world, probably had a rear exit. Then two of the bank personnel ran out onto the pavement. And one fell over himself in his haste to get out. But Regan wasn’t looking because he was sprinting in.

  For the amount of shell that had been shot off in a confined space, it was a miracle that no one else had stopped anything.

  He ran into the office on his left. The guy on the floor, who Regan had shot, was unconscious, but one hand made vague circular movements on the carpet. The safe gaped open, and the two mailbags were gone.

  Regan reversed so fast he nearly tripped again, ran out into the reception area, and then down the only corridor to the rear. The corridor led to a flight of steps, and the steps to a door marked fire exit. Like all fire exits it opened out, except this one didn’t because when Regan pushed the door it opened six inches and he could see one of the metal prongs of a forklift truck that had been driven up to jam the door closed.

  He ran back upstairs fast along the corridor into the reception area, and grabbed up a phone and dialed the Fifty-ninth Precinct, although he could already hear cop cars howling and homing in within a few blocks outside.

  Meanwhile all the bank personnel had now suddenly gotten hold of revolvers and were rushing in and out of the bank but avoiding him, except for some leery looks cast in his direction.

  He waited for the phone to be answered and studied the semiconscious man. The first time Regan had seen him was when the guy had tried to shoot him in the Plaza Hotel— the last time when he had appeared from behind the rear seat of the Pontiac GTO and stuck a gun in his neck. That was prior to the chase and the late-night skin-diving activities. The man was obviously not badly hurt, and acquiring him was to finally get the sort of lead that led somewhere. Or so Regan hoped.

  Cassidy arrived at the same time as the ambulances, three of them. Regan had remained inside the bank’s reception area, except for one sortie outside to check that the guy in the Thunderbird really was dead and that the first patrolmen who’d arrived on the scene were able to manage the crowds and keep them back from the car which might be a fingerprint trap for the whole gang. Within eight minutes of the shoot-out a second patrol car was on the scene. Within fifteen minutes, the ambulances and Cassidy.

  Cassidy strode into the bank and checked the reception area and the two offices. “What happened?”

  Regan gave him a quick rundown and told him about the wounded man. Cassidy trailed Regan into the office with the rifled safe. “The guy in the Thunderbird?”

  “I didn’t aim to kill him.”

  “That’s how it happens.” Cassidy said the words offhandedly and walked out of the office. “We’re in good shape... to have the punctured skin diver.”

  The ambulance men were waiting to put the guy on a stretcher. “Where’s he hit?” Cassidy asked them.

  One shrugged, the other replied. “Entry hole in chest, left-hand side, lower. Clean through and out the back. He’ll mend.”

  Cassidy went for the man’s right-hand side, pulled out a wallet, and looked inside it. Sixty
-five dollars in bills, and the stub of an LA-to-New York American Airlines ticket issued three weeks before in the name of Mr. Tomaso Brown. Apart from these things the wallet was bare.

  “Okay.” Cassidy tapped his finger a couple of times on the man’s forehead. “You’ll be talking to me very soon, Mr. Brown.”

  Brown neither agreed nor disagreed. The two guys lifted the stretcher and took him out to the ambulance.

  “You two officers!” A shout came from down the corridor. A patrolman had found a way around the back of the building into a delivery platform, discovered the forklift truck jamming the rear door, and backed it off. When Cassidy and Regan reached him he already had his book out and was trying to get descriptions of the four guys who had run out this back way and turned right up a service ramp into Lexington Avenue.

  Cassidy took over the confused elderly store man. “How could they be shouting at each other and not be saying anything? Did they address each other by names?”

  “I don’t think so,” the store man said.

  “What d’you mean you don’t think so? Did you hear names or didn’t you?”

  The store man shrugged hopelessly. “I didn’t hear any names, mister. They was shouting but I didn’t hear any names...”

  “I can give you descriptions,” Regan said.

  “Descriptions won’t help. Do you know how many forty-year-old guys in overcoats there are on Lexington and Park avenues at this time? Two thousand. I want names or nicknames, something positively identifying...”

  As soon as he said the words they were both sprinting. Because positive identification of the bank robbers probably did exist, identification as positive as a photograph—taken by a Hanimex Intercept Surveillance camera.

  Regan was first across the street and in through the doors of the De Falla restaurant. The door was ajar. No one was in the restaurant except two cleaners who yelped like startled dogs as the cops sailed in, skidded in a right-hander up the stairs to the first floor, and banged into the empty first-floor room.

  Regan raised the window. The plant pots and foliage and everything else on the flat top of the portico of the restaurant could be clearly seen.

  It was gone. The Hanimex camera with at least one snapshot of four guys robbing the Lexington Bank had disappeared.

  The robbery had taken five minutes, the police paper work four hours, plus an hour interview with Captain Seebohm, half an hour of that in the presence of Mr. Hadley Ryan of the New York Coroner’s Office, concerning the dead man. Regan’s verbal statement was repeated again in front of Ryan and a lady from Ryan’s office acting as witness. Seebohm said very little during the proceedings. He definitely intended to keep his distance. But the sour expression on his face was a fair measure of his feelings. Regan wrote his own report and rough-drafted Cassidy’s report as a favor, while Cassidy headed off to University Hospital to talk to the doctors about how important the witness Mr. Tomaso Brown was and how it was vitally important that he should be able to interview the man as urgently as possible.

  At first it seemed Brown had somehow absorbed the blow of a bullet’s passage in and out of his left lung, and on arrival at the hospital the doctors agreed he was in good shape, all his other functions fine despite loss of blood and an imminent collapse of the lung. But it was otherwise a stable reaction to a severe injury for a man in his early forties.

  But about half an hour after his arrival at the hospital the man went into full shock, with weakening pulse, nausea, and vomiting. The doctors didn’t think the state was serious enough to warrant putting him on a critical list, but they were quite sure that Brown was to have a minimum twelve hours’ undisturbed rest.

  Regan wrote twelve pages all together, while the desk sergeant at the Fifty-ninth Precinct looked on, wondering. Detectives didn’t write reports in the Fifty-ninth Precinct, they dictated onto tape and the stuff was typed; the only writing that got done was a signature. Regan explained to the desk sergeant that he always wrote everything down, could see it in his own words and could then commit those words to memory.

  Regan typed the report himself in a corner of the charge room, then took it to Seebohm’s clerk secretary. The secretary, Sergeant Tolmer, thanked him, and Regan then headed downstairs for the street. He got as far as the front door of the precinct station when the charge room sergeant came fast down the stairs after him. “Mr. Regan. Chief Seebohm wants you.”

  Regan went into reverse and headed back up the stairs to the second floor. Two minutes later he had entered the Chiefs office and been waved to a seat.

  Regan’s eyes met the cold blue eyes of the senior American cop and held them. “This is fine,” Seebohm said speaking gently. “It’s like an affidavit written by a lawyer, not a cop.”

  Regan nodded.

  “Now if you don’t mind, I may have to use your statement in the future as an affidavit, so your signature must be independently witnessed.” He pressed his desk intercom and called his clerk in.

  Sergeant Tolmer entered. Regan signed the document and the clerk signed witness to the signature. Seebohm signaled Tolmer to go, and the sergeant left.

  Seebohm went to his office safe, opened it, put Regan’s statement inside, and came back to his desk. He sat down, put his elbows on the desk, and cupped his hands. “Inspector Regan, we checked the fingerprints of the man you killed in the Thunderbird. The prints are not on file, and the automobile has false plates. Now this affidavit is, in a legal sense, a manslaughter admission. To my knowledge you have never been assigned law officer status in the city of New York.”

  Seebohm’s voice had changed. It was hard and decisive. “Further, to my knowledge you have by your actions, from the initial theft of the case file documents through to other incidents up to the death of this man three hours ago, become a serious liability to law enforcement in this town. I have arranged to talk to Scotland Yard, Superintendent Maynon, three p.m. our time. I will be explaining to him why I am requesting you to take this evening’s six p.m. TWA flight to London. I imagine you would know there could be severe complications for a stranger in this town trying to raise a substantial bail bond. Unless you are on that plane I’ll issue warrant for your arrest for the manslaughter of the Thunderbird driver, on the basis of your written testimony. It would be criminal for me to delay arresting you longer than six hours. You have the alternatives: go back to London or end up in a cell. Make your choice, Inspector.”

  He didn’t wait for Regan’s protest. He got up, took his raincoat off the hatstand as he did every winter lunchtime, and walked out.

  Regan was angry and disappointed. But those feelings were not taken into account in his decision. Neither did he have anything against TWA, Pan Am, or the Strategic Air Command. He just had no intention of getting an American plane, or any other kind of plane, and heading east for rain and England.

  But on the bus to Christa’s place he did take out the TWA London ticket that Seebohm’s clerk had given him. And he thought about how easy it would be to go over to the East Side Terminal and transport to that plane. And he also thought about cashing in the ticket to aid his sagging finances —but reckoned this might be a technical fraud.

  He put the ticket away, sat back, and studied the drawn faces of the lunch-hunting businessmen, chattering in forced high voices, and the decompressed faces of the silent blacks who made up half the busload.

  He arrived at Eleventh Street with nothing resolved except a mood. He felt depressed. Christa opened the door and seemed surprised to see him, and hovered about in the doorway for a few seconds as if she was not going to invite him in. Then she said she was just about to go out to an appointment that she couldn’t break, and he said line, he was just passing through.

  “Would you like some coffee?”

  “Yes,” he told her.

  “Come into the kitchen.”

  He followed her in. Her greeting just seemed a little subdued. “Anything wrong?” he asked.

  She turned and smiled. “No, why should there b
e? I’m fine. How about you?”

  “The Lexington Bank was robbed four hours ago.”

  “Jesus,” she said.

  He debated about how much more he should tell her.

  “Tell me about it. That was the one you were watching?”

  The phone rang. She took the receiver off the kitchen wall and spoke into it. It was Cassidy, wanting Regan. Regan took the phone.

  “Jack. Dr. Jerome Kitson. Apartment H, One-sixty-nine East Sixty-ninth. Be there in twenty minutes. It’s important.”

  “All right.”

  He heard the phone go dead in his ear. He turned to Christa. “I have to go. I’ll tell you everything later. If I’m not back by six o’clock, and for some reason there are inquiries here for me by the police department, tell them, as far as you know, I’ve left town.”