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  No Lesser Plea

  ( Butch Carp and Marlene Ciampi - 1 )

  Robert Tanenbaum

  Robert Tanenbaum

  No Lesser Plea

  Chapter 1

  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.”

  “Oh, and Pres?”

  The younger man stopped and turned to face Louis. “Yeah?”

  “You got a suit coat and a tie?”

  “Yeah, I guess, somewheres. Why you wanna know?”

  “Wear them tomorro
w night. And get rid of that do rag on your head. And the goddam shades, too. We gonna be three respectable colored folks drivin’ a nice respectable Chevy Impala under the speed limit. Anybody look in the car I want them to think we goin’ to your momma’s funeral.”

  Elvis said, “Sure Man, I’m hip,” and walked off. Man was hard to take sometimes, think he own your life, he thought. On the other hand, now, he sound like he know what he doin’. Suddenly, Elvis realized what was about to happen to him. Almost all his short life he had worked to convey an image of murderous villainy. Twenty-four hours from now he would be a murderous villain in fact, or at least a murderous villain’s assistant. He gave a little skip of delight.

  Man Louis watched the big youth turn the corner. He got into the Firebird and drove slowly down Lexington Avenue. At 135th Street, he spotted an open saloon, and cruised around until he found a legal parking space. In the saloon, he waited patiently until the man using the phone had finished placing a complicated bet, and then dialed a number.

  Donald Walker jumped from his couch at the first ring of the telephone. “I’ll get it. It’s for me,” he cried.

  The voice on the phone was that of the man Walker knew as Stack.

  “How you doin’, Donald?”

  “OK, just fine. What’s happenin’?”

  “Everything set. How’s the car? You got the new plates?”

  “Yeah. The kid came and brought them over last night, just like you said. I gassed it up and changed the oil. Checked the brakes, everything. I done it myself. It runs real good.”

  “Yeah, that’s real fine, Donald. Now listen up. At ten-thirty tomorrow night you gonna be at the Fiftieth Street Lexington station. I mean ten-thirty, Donald, not ten fuckin’ thirty-one, we understand each other? Good. OK, me and my man Willy get in the car, and we drive real slow down Lex. We hang a right on Thirty-ninth and you park on the corner of Thirty-ninth and Madison, on the side street. Eleven o’clock, I get out of the car and go ’round the corner. The whole thing’ll be over in five.

  “Then I get back in the car. We drive real slow again, back to the subway. Me and Willy get out. You drive to this hotel I got picked out, I’ll give you the address tomorrow night.”

  “What’s this shit! You never said nothing about no hotel.”

  “Donald, be cool-use your head. What if somebody see your car? You want to lead them right up your front walk? Wait a day, two days, see if there any heat …”

  “What kinda heat? I don’t like this, Stack. What the fuck I gonna tell my wife?”

  “Goddam! What you worryin’ about? You some kinda man can’t even lie to a woman. Make up something.”

  “And you said I get paid right after. You said! When I’m gonna get my money?”

  “You get it when I give it to you.”

  “No way, man. I want it then.”

  There was a pause on the line. When Louis began to speak again, it was in a low, whispery voice, slow and measured, like an adult recounting the crimes of a child to whom he is about to give a savage beating.

  “Donald, let me explain something to you. You in this. You mind me now, cause if you crap out on me, if you mess with me now, you in more deep shit than you ever been in your whole life. Now you don’t know me Donald, but I know you. I know your little house out there in Queens. I know your pretty little wife and your three pretty little children. What you want, Donald, is you want to keep old Stack real happy with you, and with your house and your little family. So how you gonna keep me happy? It real simple. You do what I say, when I say it, and you keep your fat mouth shut. Now, do we have an understanding?”

  Walker’s mouth was cotton-dry. He croaked out a sound.

  “I didn’t get that, Donald.”

  “Yeah, Stack, you know I didn’t mean nothing. I just strung out, is all. You said you gonna get me some …”

  “That’s my man. I am gonna get you something to fix you right up, Donald. I got some bad shit, Donald, and a big piece got your name right on it. Now you fix it with the wife, and you be there, hear?”

  “I be there, Stack. Don’t worry.”

  “I got nothin’ to worry about, Donald.”

  The line went dead.

  “Who was that on the phone, Donald?” his wife, Ella, called from the upstairs bedroom.

  Walker shivered and wiped the sweat from his forehead with a dish towel. He walked slowly up the stairs.

  “Donald?”

  “It was Billy Cass, from the plant, he say they hiring up by that computer factory in Stamford. He say, maybe him and me should go up there, go for a job interview.”

  His wife was in her robe, sitting at her vanity table and applying face cream. Walker started to get undressed. He was a poor liar and he kept his face averted as he spoke.

  “That sounds great, Don. When were you fixing to go?”

  “Well, he say we should leave after work tomorrow and drive up. His sister live somewheres around there-he said we could spend the night there and be first in line the next morning.”

  Ella finished her face and got into bed. Walker joined her. “That sounds good, Donald. You be back Saturday, then?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess. I’ll call you from there and let you know how it comes out.”

  As he lay back and switched off the bedside light, Walker tried to compose his racing thoughts. Stack had promised him $500 for the job. That would be enough to pay off the two month’s arrears on the mortgage. He had a letter from the bank that told him that unless they saw some money by the end of the month-in less than two weeks-they would start foreclosure proceedings. Walker had busted his hump, working double shifts at the commercial laundry, to get together the down payment, but it wasn’t the thought of losing the house that bothered him as much as explaining to his wife where the mortgage money had gone.

  Walker was an easygoing young man who had married into a family of strivers. In six years of marriage it seemed to him that he had not drawn an easy breath. His wife had a year of college and his in-laws were all civil servants of one kind or another. He had not finished high school himself, and Ella was bound and determined to show her clan that she had not made a mistake in marrying the good-looking but feckless Donald Walker.

  So he worked like a dog, and got pushed harder, until each demand seemed like a razor-toothed little animal chewing away inside his skull. But lately he had found a way out. He would drive out for an evening after dinner and go to a local pool hall, and shoot a few games of eight-ball or snooker. After a while, a man named Paradise would come in, and Walker would follow Paradise into the men’s room and would give Paradise ten, or twenty, or fifty dollars, and Paradise would give Walker a glassine envelope filled with white powder. Then Walker would sit in his car and for a few hours he would be on top of things, in charge, together. He wasn’t a junkie, hell no! He could kick it easy after things settled down a little. But that’s where two months of mortgage had gone to, and that’s why Mandeville Louis had picked him, with the mystical vulturelike radar that led him to the Donald Walkers of this world, to be his wheelman.

  Chapter 2

  Walker had heard the expression “living hell” before, but he had never thought much about what it meant before the day he spent waiting for the night he was to debut as a wheelman for Mandeville Louis.

  His environment helped. A commercial laundry would encourage even a soul washed white as snow to imagine the infernal realms. The air was gray with steam and thick with the sweetish reek of solvent. Periodically, there would occur a great hissing noise from the pressers, or someone would throw open a boiler hatch and release an even heavier cloud of vapor. Through this jellied air trudged indistinct figures dripping sweat, often stripped to their waists, bearing heavy loads or pushing carts heaped with bags. Urging them on were overseers in white, short-sleeved uniforms, with their names embroidered in red on their breasts.

  “Hey, Walker, whaddya doin’? You been here two hours, you ain’t done half a rack.”

  Walke
r looked across the steam presser at the foreman. “Sorry, Jack, I guess I don’t feel so hot.”

  “Yeah? Well, be sick on your own time. You can’t do the work, punch out, we’ll get somebody else.” He walked off and Walker cursed him vehemently under his breath.

  Walker had been working at Ogden’s Martinizing Dry Cleaners and Launderers for three years. The job required nothing but the ability to stand heat and endless boredom. Ordinarily Walker had the ability to shut his mind off and put his flesh on autopilot: remove the crumpled garment from the bin, arrange it according to its type, drop the cover, steam it, shift, steam, shift, steam, hanger it, next.

  Now, however, he could not get away from his thoughts at all. He had to think about every motion; his body would not slip into its accustomed grooves. Walker was also extremely uncomfortable; every cell in his body was whining for a bath in smack. Heroin withdrawal symptoms are very similar to those of a bad case of flu: Walker’s nose ran, his joints ached, he had the chills, and he was ferociously constipated. At first he cursed himself for a fool and a coward and swore that if he could only get past this night, he would never, never touch the stuff again, would never have to see Stack again, or hear his voice. After a while, he stopped thinking about anything but his next hit; that seemed enough to think about, the only thing worth thinking about.

  So the day passed. Walker’s noon-to-eight shift came to an end and he walked out into the evening toward his car. The air was cool, at least, and after what he had been breathing, almost pure. He made himself take deep breaths, hoping to calm his pounding heart and calm the tremor in his limbs. But his anxiety was deeper than he could reach with his own resources.

  It took him half an hour to change the license plates; he kept dropping the bolts and skinning his knuckles. Afterward, he collapsed on the front seat of the car. He had intended to be straight for the drive, but he thought, “Gonna go off the goddam road if I keep shaking like this,” and reached for the envelope taped to the roof of his glove compartment.