The Lagotti Family Series Page 8

  Carter kept on thinking through the germ of this idea over the next few days. He reckoned he needed a couple of things to happen for his half-formed plan to work. First, he needed to swap the money out of the case so he could give Frank Senior’s henchmen what they were expecting to give himself enough time to get away. The second thing was to make sure his getaway was fast and final because there was no way back. And the third thing was Mary Lou needed to be lined up to leave that evening after he’d passed a case full of bricks over to Frank Senior.

  And that was as far as he’d got. The big weakness, he knew, was in switching out the money for something heavy and not getting caught out. The other way to play it would be to not do a switch and just take the money and run. Of course, that assumed none of Frank Senior’s men would be watching him during the day.

  By the end of the weekend, Carter had figured out a third way, which dealt with all the problems of his first two plans. He’d wait until the end of the day, in case he was being watched, and then instead of going to the meet up, he’d grab his car, pick up Mary Lou and off they’d go, leaving Frank Senior and Rita far behind them.

  While Carter lay awake in bed on Sunday night putting the finishing touches to his thoughts, Rita was beside him, with her back to him. He turned towards her and rested his hand on her hip. She smiled, pleased there was still some connection between them despite all their problems. He moved his hand round to her front, stroking her thigh as he traveled. He placed his fingers between her legs and fingered her for several minutes until her heavy breathing actually made him hard. Then he mounted her and came inside her.

  “That’ll keep her happy for a while,” he thought as he rolled off and headed towards sleep, knowing a new day would soon be dawning.

  Monday lunchtime, Carter went off to the Lansdowne store to buy two black cases. They’d be about the same size as each other and large enough to cope with a reasonable amount of notes. He’d grab the hundreds and twenties only because the thousands would be impossible for him to spend without arousing suspicion.

  When he got to the store, he explained to Mr. Oakesen he was looking for a couple of Christmas presents for his wife’s family. Something that didn’t just look good, but would be sturdy too, so they’d actually want to use them.

  Oakesen quickly found three contenders and Carter bought two of them, insisting Oakesen put both in big carrier bags. And when he got back to the bank, Carter put both bags in his locker, having removed them from their carriers. And they remained in the bank until the day of the robbery.

  16

  CARTER HAD TO work late that night as far as Rita was concerned. She didn’t mind because for the first time in months, he had satisfied her the night before. He’d phoned Mary Lou and arranged to meet her at their apartment. On his way over, he bought some cut flowers and brought a spring in his step, which Mary Lou had not noticed before.

  She cooked some spaghetti with a bolognese sauce. It tasted like nothing he’d had before, but this said much more about his mental state than it did about Mary Lou’s cooking. Not that she wasn’t handy in a kitchen, but tonight Carter wore his optimism in a prism through which he saw everything.

  He mopped up the remaining sauce on his plate with some bread and licked his fingers where some tomato sauce had smeared itself onto his hand. Something Rita would never allow him to do. “Manners maketh man,” she said. “BS,” he thought and Mary Lou wondered what the hell Carter was on to keep him this high. She couldn’t imagine it might be happiness or hope as she’d rarely experienced an emotion even close to that during her adult life.

  “You’re in a good mood today, aren’t you?” said Mary Lou, after they’d done the washing up and were sat down on the sofa.

  “Yeah, it’s been quite a few days.”

  “How so, dear?” While Mary Lou was here to extract information from Carter, she had started to get attached to him in a way she had not expected. He was just a mark when the game began.

  “Well, an opportunity has arisen that’ll mean we can be together properly. Without Rita in the picture, I mean.”

  “What? What opportunity?”

  “I could be coming into some money. A lot of money.”

  “How? Money?”

  “Money, yeah,” laughed Carter nervously. This was the first time he’d spoken out loud about his idea.

  “It’s a good news and bad news story.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. Look, I’ve been in a bit of bother the last year.” With those words, Mary Lou’s heart sank. Just another loser with a hard luck tale.

  “Owed some money to some people from some gambling debts. But I can get out from under the situation in the next few months. They want me to steal for them and then I’ll be square with them.” This is too freaky, thought Mary Lou.

  “But if I steal from them, they can’t do anything because they’re hardly going to go to the police and complain the money they were robbing has been stolen from them!”

  At this point, a shiver ran down Mary Lou’s spine. In the instant since Carter inhaled for breath, she saw what was happening. Carter was planning on robbing the bank instead of Frank and the crew. And it sounded as if Frank Senior was putting him up to it. Holy fuck!

  “So I’ll take the money, leave some for Rita, and then we skip the state and never look back!”

  Carter was getting excited now. And Mary Lou’s head was spinning, trying to work out what the hell was going on and how the hell she could keep on top of it all.

  “Dear, I don’t know what to say,” she said after a couple of seconds of silence. She leaned into him, kissed him squarely on the lips and pushed her hands under his pants. And squeezed.

  SO IT WAS the following weekend, she sat on the sofa with Carter in their apartment, listening to his plans to rob a bank. And as she heard what he was planning to do, a couple of thoughts ran through her head. First of all, she admired him for wanting to get himself out from under his situation. Secondly, she couldn’t believe he was going to rob their bank and steal from Frank Senior. That took more balls than she knew he had. And besides, he’d managed to hide from her the fact he had gambling debts so big the only place he could get a loan was from Frank Senior.

  What made her judder was that he was setting Carter up to take the money before the gang got a chance. Sneaky motherfucker.

  The implications of that were still seeping into her brain and she knew she had to do something. So she took her mind off the problem the only way she could think of and grabbed his dick under his pants and shorts. She stroked and squeezed it until he was hard, undid his pants and pulled down his shorts. Then she licked and sucked until he came in her mouth. Exhilarated and exhausted, he stumbled off to bed, drunk with euphoria, red wine and ecstasy. Mary Lou sure knew how to blow a guy off.

  She sat on the floor facing the sofa, head on her hands, leaning on the seat, desperately trying to make sense of it all. Carter called down to her; she hadn’t tired him out enough.

  “I’ll be up in a minute darling!” she shouted. Then did nothing but think. If he succeeded in stealing from both Frank and Frank Senior, they’d be on the run for the rest of their lives. Neither man would rest until they got their money back and the two of them were dead. If he failed, Carter’d be dead or penniless or both. The crazy thing was she was beginning to feel a certain affection for the stooge. He seemed to care about her. As her, as an individual and that was something that Frank never seemed to do. Carter might actually be a good provider - for her and their children. Mary Lou laughed at herself: “Children. Do me a favor,” she thought. “What right do I have to think about children?”

  But the thought didn’t leave her either. Both Carter and Frank were strong men, who could provide for her and make her happy, in their own different ways. How in hell’s name was she going to figure this one out?

  MARY LOU WALKED upstairs and into the bedroom of their duplex. Carter lay in bed wearing nothing but an erection and a smile. Mary Lou sli
pped off her miniskirt and panties in one downward dragging motion, undid her blouse and bra before she got into bed on top of him. With only a few thrusts she started to come and climaxed with a gurgling sound of pleasure shortly afterwards. Then they both fell asleep, dreaming of what might be. And a pile of stolen money.

  Two days later, Mary Lou entered the First Bank of Baltimore for the umpteenth time, nodded at old Grimble and walked to Carter’s desk. He looked up and smiled a knowing smile. By now, old Joe Grimble was used to seeing Mary Lou visiting, although he didn’t approve of what was going on before his eyes. Joe thought Carter should not mix his personal life so tightly with a customer - even if that customer had a body like Mary Lou’s. He also thought that married people shouldn’t play the field and Carter was pretty blatantly not just helping Mary Lou with her portfolio. She was here far too often for that and they were far too familiar with one another when she was here. Dirty bastard.

  “Why doesn’t he care what people think? And why is he treating his lovely wife with so much disrespect?” thought Grimble. The truth was Grimble had never even met Rita. To him, she was just a photo in a black frame on Carter’s desk. But Grimble was not alone asking those questions.

  In particular, JH was singularly unimpressed with the behavior of his senior financial advisor, albeit his only financial advisor. JH would be damned to eternal hell’s fire if he gave that bigamist-in-all-but-name a promotion with a harlot paramour on his arm. No sir, that would not happen under his watch.

  Mary Lou asked Carter if it was okay to use the staff bathrooms and, as ever, he nodded it was. As she brushed past him, he caught the taste of her perfume in his breath. She pushed to open the door marked ‘Staff Only’ and Mrs. Pieck buzzed her in. The door itself was flimsy at best and the security lock was clearly more for show than protection because Mary Lou reckoned she could kick it down even with flats on.

  Mary Lou smiled back at Mrs. Pieck and mouthed “Thank you” even though she knew the woman did not approve of guests crossing the line into the staff sanctuary. Again, Mary Lou looked up at the ceiling, ever so briefly, to check the security cameras were still as she remembered them. Their little red lights were still failing to blink. She alone had noticed, because the first time she had come back here she had seen them working, but not since and no-one appeared to have done anything about it.

  SHE WALKED DOWN the corridor to the restrooms and popped inside, but her real aim was to get down to the basement. So she trotted off away from the cash tellers and headed for the door at the far end of the corridor, near the exit. You could tell this was not a purpose built place because you’d want the vault entrance further from the back door, if you had any sense. But Carter had explained to her how it was only a satellite office that acted as a hub for the other branches south of Baltimore. Cash from here would be distributed across ten or more sub-branches, so they were really the most important rep office the First Bank had, even though it looked like quite a small affair.

  Mary Lou slowly turned the door handle and scurried through and down the stairs just the other side; it was like the basement she’d had when she was a girl.

  At the bottom of the stairs were a set of bars with two locks and beyond it the open vault although the bars themselves were locked. She peered into the vault to see how many shelves it had and, therefore, how much cash there was in the safe. Tuesday was the day when it was at its most full, according to Carter. Monday was the day when head office delivered notes for distribution to the sub-branches and Wednesday was when the distribution occurred. The safe was ripe on Tuesday. Besides, there were around thirty, maybe forty, safe deposit boxes lined up on the right-hand side of the vault. And they’d be crammed with bonds, jewelry and the like. A quick count of the racks alone showed Mary Lou there was more than a million dollars sat a few feet away from her. She drew in a massive breath of excitement and fear. Composing herself, she scuttled back up the stairs, closing the door quietly behind her. As she pulled down her dress, which had ridden up a couple of inches when she went up the vault stairs, she walked back to the staff room door, unlocked it using the buzzer on the left door jamb and aimed straight back to Carter.

  At this point she knew exactly what she’d do: whichever man had the money is where she’d be. And if that meant going off with Carter then that meant Frank would need to die.

  THE FOLLOWING THURSDAY, Frank decided to check up on Mary Lou Belle. A couple of minutes after she left for the bank to pay a fleeting visit to Carter and check whether the security cameras had been fixed, Frank too left the apartment, locked up and exited the block and walked in the direction of the bus stop. He could see Mary Lou getting on the bus, so he skipped to his battered old Ford, hopped in and headed straight for a parking lot at the public library, near the bank and cemetery. He popped into the graveyard and pretended to pay his respects to some long gone corpse and walked past the bank to see Mary Lou touch Carter’s shoulder and head for the back of the bank. Just as she said she would do: checking out the security.

  Frank reckoned if his face was visible now and again in the area it would pass for normal if he was seen on the morning of the job walking through Lansdowne. He was absolutely right in that regard, but he didn’t take account of the fact this same act would make things much easier for those trying to recall his face if the police took eye witness interviews.

  Friday, Frank popped back to the cemetery for another sign of respect to the dead man, but this time to follow Carter and see what he was up to. The clerk drove out of the back lot and headed west. Frank scampered to his vehicle with barely enough time to fire up the engine, turn right and get to within two hundred yards of Carter’s Dodge before he took a right northbound. Soon enough, Carter pulled into a driveway near the corner of Hazel and Baltimore Avenue, got out of the car and walked inside.

  Frank kept on driving and parked around the corner. He waited a quarter of an hour and sallied back to Carter’s white-fenced house. There was a big, leafy tree in the front yard. It had clearly been growing there for years and Frank shimmied up its thick trunk to see what he could see. Nothing much as the front rooms were either cloaked in darkness or had their curtains shut. He waited.

  Nothing. So he slid down and made his way to the back of the property. Here the lights were on and the curtains were still open. In what looked like a sitting room on the first floor Carter sat swirling a whiskey around in a glass. A woman, his wife thought Frank, was in the kitchen getting their dinner ready.

  Frank squatted in a bush by the sitting-room window until the woman called out: “Dinner’s ready!”

  “Coming, Rita,” responded the clerk.

  Frank stayed there the entire evening, but all that happened was they ate, watched TV for a while together and then Rita went upstairs to knit in the upstairs sitting room and Carter drank whiskey until the TV went blank and he stumbled upstairs to bed, where Rita was already lying asleep.

  Frank came home in the small hours and lay next to Mary Lou, out cold. After he’d warmed up a bit under the covers, Frank reached a conclusion. He might not know whether he could trust Mary Lou right now, but he sure as fuck knew he’d kill Carter before this job was over.

  MARCH

  17

  OVER THE NEXT three months, Frank kept a watchful eye on Rita and Carter, mainly Rita. He popped over to their house a couple of times a week, during the day when he knew Carter would be out at work and Rita would be on her own.

  At the back of his mind, he probably thought that peeping at Rita counted as some sort of revenge on Carter, but it obviously wasn’t, because Frank did nothing to Rita, apart from look at her from the other side of a pane of glass, and Carter was totally unaware it was going on. So no-one was particularly suffering at the hands of this revenge.

  Most of the time, he’d hide in the tree in their backyard and stare in at Rita as she cooked herself some lunch, watched the color TV or went into the back small bedroom to do some knitting, which Frank had mistaken for a sitti
ng room. But Frank still came back to the house, despite himself.

  One afternoon Frank was perched in the tree when Rita broke the pattern of her behavior: instead of heading to her knitting needles, she went to her bedroom. She sat on the bed and dialed some number on the phone. As soon as she had finished dialing, she rotated her body and lay down on the bed, on top of the covers. After about six or seven rings, the other party on the call picked up and Rita started chatting away, twisting and curling her hair around one of her fingers. She nestled down, her head pushing deeper into the pillow as the conversation continued. And then the most strange thing happened that almost knocked Frank off his perch.

  Rita’s free hand stopped playing with her hair and moved to her upper body; she started rubbing and massaging one of her breasts. Then, a couple of minutes later, the hand moved down her body and slid under her pants. Frank could see the hand, moving rhythmically beneath the material. He was shocked, even though he wasn’t quite sure what precisely was going on, but he was certain it was something dirty. And he was transfixed.

  Ten minutes later, Frank had a much better idea what Rita was up to because, by that point, she had pushed her pants down below her knees. Her legs were bent and her hand was clearly under her panties. She was massaging herself. Frank had heard of such things but hadn’t believed he would see it with his own eyes. He wondered if Mary Lou got up to such things when his back was turned. Wondered if Mary Lou was up to such a thing while he was staring at Rita’s panties.

  The one question Frank left to the end, although his eyes remained locked on Rita’s hand, was: who was she talking to? That was a fella with a mighty powerful tongue. One thing was sure: Rita was not the faithful little woman Frank had assumed she was.