Off Gardai - The Wheelman

THE MOST INTERESTING PEOPLE AT THE PARTY WERE the drunk crime writer and the drunker chief of detectives. It was a writers’ party. The host was new to Rittenhouse Towers, and new to money. Apparently he had written a surprise bestselling coffee-table book called Barbers. Page after page of black-and-white photographs of old South Philly barbers, posing with their customers, with tiny write-ups under each photograph telling each barber’s life story in about 175 words.

For a reason known only to the American public, it was a runaway smash hit, spawning a calendar, date books, posters, an ABC television special, even a line of home hair-care tools. (Which seemed to negate the very job of the old-fashioned barber, but what the hell.) The forty-something writer sat back and watched the Brinks truck pull up and shovel bales of money into his living room. He traded in his dumpy Bella Vista one-bedroom for this five-bedroom spread in one of the city’s most prestigious condos. Now he was preparing to compile a sort-of sequel, Bartenders, and had decided to show off to the rest of his old writer pals, many of whom were scraping by with $25,000-a-year gigs—if they were lucky—at one of the two competing weeklies.

All of this Lennon gathered in about twenty minutes of cocktail-conversation eavesdropping. The only thing flowing more freely than booze was the jealousy. The condo was absolutely lousy with it.

“You believe that? Six figures just for the calendar rights,” said one guy in a threadbare jacket and brand-new jeans.

“It’s a fucking racket,” Lennon replied, laying on the thickest brogue he could muster. He sipped his drink, which was Sprite.

“I didn’t catch your name.”

“Ah, me?” Lennon asked. “Donal. Donal Stark.”

Donald Westlake was one of Lennon’s favorite crime writers, but he enjoyed Westlake’s pseudonym, Richard Stark, even more.

“What happened … if you don’t mind me asking.”

“Auto wreck. My face took the worst of it.”

“It looks painful.”

“You know, after a few of these motherfookers, it feels just fine.”

“That accent … you from Galway?” Trying to sound all worldly-like.

“Listowel, actually.” Fucking Galway?

“Yeah, I thought so. You must be new at the Welcomat.”

Lennon nodded. “Ah, yeah.”

“I’ve been at the City Press for two years. They still got me stuck fact-checking restaurant listings. You know, if I had graduated five years earlier, dot coms would have been lining up to suck my dick.”

“Terrible times, these are.”

Despite the accent, Lennon tried to be boring enough to make his new friend seek conversation with someone else. Someone with ovaries, presumably. Women seemed to be at a premium at this gathering.

Speaking of which.

Lennon strolled over to check on Katie’s progress.

Katie had spotted the drunk kid in the kitchen right away, and a plan was formed. She had gone over, made nice, helped him fill up his tumbler with ice cubes—slippery little suckers were sliding all over the place. Then she located an elusive bottle of Johnnie Walker Black that was tucked away, deep in a cabinet, where the party’s hosts assumed the guests wouldn’t dare venture. The kid, a real boyish-looking guy with curly black hair and delicate features, wore a wrinkled seersucker suit, and kept his line of sight on Katie’s breasts, then hips, then eyes, thinking all the time that he was artfully stealing glances at the first two. His name was Will.

“What d’you do?” Will asked.

“You, later,” Katie whispered, pouring more Johnnie Walker into his glass.

“No, I meant for a liv—,” he started, then stopped himself. “Come again?”

Good God. This was going to take all night.

The plan: find some drunk blaggard, get him drunker, then usher him out, draped over their shoulders. The cops were looking for one or two male bandits, not a threesome.

The plan became trickier when Lennon overheard someone say, “Hey, chief. What’s with the lights outside?”

Fucking hell.

“Seems we have some escaped bank robbers in the building,” the chief said.

This was un-fucking-believable. About as un-fucking-believable as the rest of Lennon’s weekend. This shit did not happen to professionals—this was fodder for those America’s Dumbest Criminals books.

“Say what?”

“Yo—somebody get Will. We’ve got his next crime box, right here.”

“Yes,” the chief continued. “I got a call twenty minutes ago—one of our retired badges works the security detail downstairs. He thinks he spotted two of the guys who pulled that 211 at Wachovia yesterday.”

“That two-what?” someone asked.

This was really un-fucking-believable.

“Police code for bank robbery, Ben.”

“Yo, Will! Come on, man, get out here!”

Will.

Will was the drunk guy Katie was trying to sauce up. Their escape hatch. The compiler of a “crime box.”

“What did the robbers get away with yesterday, anyway?”

“The bank president told me himself that it was $650,000. Probably the biggest pinch around here in a while. But you didn’t hear that from me.”

“Shit. That’s almost as much as Feldman paid for this place.”

There were nervous titters of laughter.

“Fuck that—you know how much these Rittenhouse condos run? Don’t you keep up with Metropolitan magazine? You’d have to pull two of those Wachovia jobs to snag a pad like this.”

Lennon walked by Katie close enough to whisper one word.

Gardai.

Police.