Fifty-Boy
30
Bank By Phone
She'd stopped to light a candle and caught him in the act.
Reverend LaRue did his best to split her ribs with the same jeweled cross letter opener he'd used on his co-religionist lover.
She never got to light her candle or finish her prayer. She spent the rest of the summer recovering on a blanket on Sumersea Island.
She and Janice Hammer lay on the beach at 26th Street.
They'd become friends after the robbery.
Little Adrian dug a moat around the sand castle Wanamaker built.
The ladies baked in the sun.
The voice of the summer sky was in their ears.
They were useless for anything else.
Wanamaker raised her head from her book and squinted.
"How you end up with a turd like Le-B-B?"
Janice bent her arms back and hooked her bikini top. "How you'd end up with blue eyes?" She smiled and said, "I'm too lazy to turn over and do my front. Is my butt sticking out?"Wanamkaer laughed. "How'd Vivian end up in a family of Latinos?"
Janice laughed. "Yeah, I wonder that too. She don't even like rice and beans. But what about that name they gave you, Wanamaker, good thing they didn't shop at Dicks."
Wanamaker couldn't stop laughing.
"And this island really named after your family?" Janice said.
"Yeah, or the master who owned us... Understand... That's one I could never figure out." Wanamaker sat up and put on her sunglasses.
Janice said, "He was handsome then. Wan... And fast. I probably did it just as much to spite my father as anything, marry a non-Latino. It would have been bad enough not marrying a Cuban, let alone Le-B-B."
Wanamaker lay down and stretched, her paperback up in front of the sun."So," Jan got up on her elbows. "Tell me." She ignored the two young guys staring at her and stretched her bottoms to cover her behind.
Wanamaker said, "You're not going to laugh?"
"Don't tell me. You were born at Wanamaker's Department Store, in Philly."
"By the Eagle," the detective said dryly, "Center Court."Janice said, "Can I ask you a question... You like like my sister? C'mon, be honest."
"I like her house."
The house downbeach with the stone turret and banana yellow door,
where her Aunt Edzel-Eeebie worked.
Detective Jones eyed it each time she drove by.
She'd cross Jackson Avenue into Atlantic City,
thinking about Vivian,
about the house,
about the robbery at the bank,
how it all fit together,
how Le-B-B might have done it,
if he was involved.
It was all too smooth.
It had Vivian all over it.
She'd read and re-read Janice's account and thought about it over and over again:
Janice said she arrived at work that day with a bad feeling.
She got a phone call.
"Miss Hammer." The voice was dry, without emotion. "Listen carefully."
Her stomach sank.
"Adrian, your little girl? She's with us. Don't react. Just say you understand."
Mechanically calm she said it. "I understand."
"There's a wire trash basket, orange, at the College entrance road. Say okay.""Okay."
Gather five hundred thousand, in hundreds... You savvy? Say I do."
"I do." She was trying not to visibly shiver.
"Good. Bag the money. No police. No attention from you remployees. Right?"
She froze.
"Say right, Senora."
She drew in her breath. "Right."
"Put the money in the wire basket and keep going. Go home. Say I understand."
"I understand." She whispered.
"It's ten thirty. If the money's in the basket at ten forty five, no problem. Right?"
"Right." She hoped it was a bad dream.
"When I take the money from the basket, I call my associate, who leaves your kid."
She went over the process in her mind, how to inconspicuously gather the money.
In ten minutes the money was deposited.
She was home.
The did the bank by phone.
She told the same thing to Wanamaker.
She told the same thing to the FBI.
She rehearsed the script. She knew it by heart.
Adrian wasn't there when she got home.
Adrian had been at the daycare the whole time.
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