The Christmas Thief (3 page)

O
n that same morning a scant hundred miles away, Packy Noonan woke up with a happy smile plastered on his face.

“It’s your big day, huh, Packy?” C.R., the racketeer in the next cell, asked sourly.

Packy could understand the reason for his sullen manner. C.R. was in only the second year of a fourteen-year stretch, and he had not yet adjusted to life behind bars.

“It’s my big day,” Packy agreed amiably as he packed his few possessions: toiletries, underwear, socks, and a picture of his long-dead mother. He always referred to her lovingly and with tears in his eyes when he spoke in the chapel in his role as a counselor to his fellow inmates. He explained to them that she had always seen the good in him even when he had gone astray, and on her deathbed she told him that she knew he’d turn out to be an upstanding citizen.

In fact, he hadn’t seen his mother for twenty years before she died. Nor did he see fit to share with his fellow inmates the fact that in her will, after leaving her meager possessions to the Sisters of Charity, she had written, “And to my son, Patrick, unfortunately known as Packy, I leave one dollar and his high chair because the only time he ever gave me any happiness was when he was small enough to sit in it.”

Ma had a way with words, Packy thought fondly. I guess I got the gift of gab from her. The woman on the parole board had almost been in tears when he had explained at his hearing that he prayed to his mother every night. Not that it had done him any good. He had served every last day of his minimum sentence plus another two years. The bleeding heart had been overruled by the rest of the board, six to one.

The jacket and slacks he had worn when he arrived at the prison were out of fashion, of course, but it felt great to put them on. And thanks to the money he swindled, they had been custom-made by Armani. As far as he was concerned, he still looked pretty sharp in them—not that they would be in his closet for thirty seconds after he got to Brazil.

His lawyer, Thoris Twinning, was picking him up at ten o’clock to escort him to the halfway house known as The Castle on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. Packy loved the story that in its long history The Castle had twice been an academy for Catholic high school girls. Ma should know that, he thought. She’d think I was defiling the place.

He was scheduled to stay there for two weeks to reintroduce himself to the world where people actually worked for a living. He understood that there would be group sessions in which the rules about signing in and signing out and the importance of reporting to his parole officer would be explained. He was assured that at The Castle they would be able to find him permanent housing. He could predict that it would be in a crummy rooming house in Staten Island or the Bronx. The counselors would also help him get a job immediately.

Packy could hardly wait. He knew that the receiver appointed by the Bureau of Securities to try to find the money lost by the investors would probably have him tailed. There was nothing he looked forward to more than the fun of losing that tail. Unlike thirteen years ago when detectives were swarming all over Manhattan looking for him. He was just leaving for Vermont to retrieve the loot and get out of the country when he was arrested. That wasn’t going to happen again.

It had already been explained to him that as of Sunday he would be allowed to leave The Castle in the morning but had to be back and signed in by dinner time. And he had already figured out exactly how he would shake the nincompoop who was supposed to be following him.

At ten-forty on Sunday morning, Benny and Jo-Jo would be waiting on Madison and Fifty-first in a van with a ski rack. Then they’d be on their way to Vermont. Following his instructions, Benny and Jo-Jo had rented a farm near Stowe six months ago. The only virtue of the farm was that it had a large if decrepit barn where a flatbed would be housed.

In the farmhouse the twins had installed an acquaintance, a guy without a record who was incredibly naive and was happy to be paid to house sit for them.

That way, just in case there were any slips, when the cops were searching for a flatbed with a tree on it, they wouldn’t start looking in places where people lived. There were enough farms with barns that were owned by out-of-town skiers for them to investigate. The skiers usually didn’t arrive until after Thanksgiving.

I wired the flask of diamonds onto the branch thirteen and a half years ago, Packy thought. A spruce grows about one and a half feet a year. The branch I marked was about twenty feet high at the time. I was standing at the top of the twenty foot ladder. Now that branch should be about forty feet high. Trouble is no regular ladder goes that high.

That’s why we have to take the whole tree, and if someone with nothing better to do than mind other people’s business asks questions, we can say it’s going to be decorated for the Christmas pageant in Hackensack, New Jersey. Jo-Jo has a fake permit to cut the tree and a phony letter from the mayor of Hackensack, thanking Pickens for the tree, so that should take care of that.

Packy’s agile brain leaped about to find any flaw in his reasoning but came up dry. Satisfied, he continued to review the plan: Then we get the flatbed into the barn, find the branch where the loot is hidden, and then we’re off to Brazil, cha, cha, cha.

All of the above was racing through Packy’s mind as he ate his final breakfast at the Federal Correctional Institution and, when it was over, bid a fond farewell to his fellow inmates.

“Good luck, Packy,” Lightfingered Tom said solemnly.

“Don’t give up preaching,” a grizzled long-timer urged. “Keep that promise to your mother that you’d set a good example for the young.”

Ed, the lawyer who had vacated his clients’ trust funds of millions, grinned and gave a lazy wave of his hand. “I give you three months before you’re back,” he predicted.

Packy didn’t show how much that got under his skin. “I’ll send you a card, Ed,” he said. “From Brazil,” he muttered under his breath as he followed the guard to the warden’s office where Thoris Twinning, his court-appointed lawyer, was waiting.

Thoris was beaming. “A happy day,” he gushed. “A happy, happy day. And I have wonderful news. I’ve been in touch with your parole officer, and he has a job for you. As of a week from Monday you will be working at the salad bar in the Palace-Plus diner on Broadway and Ninety-seventh Street.”

As of a week from Monday a bunch of lackeys will be dropping grapes into my mouth, Packy thought, but he turned on the mesmerizing smile that had enchanted Opal Fogarty and some two hundred other investors in the Patrick Noonan Shipping and Handling Company. “My mama’s prayers have been answered,” he said joyfully. His eyes raised to heaven and a blissful expression on his sharp-featured face, he sighed, “An honest job with an honest day’s pay. Just what Mama always wanted for me.”

M
y, my, this is such a beautiful car,” Opal Fogarty commented from the back seat of Alvirah and Willy’s Mercedes. “When I was growing up we had a pickup truck. My father said it made him feel like a cowboy. My mother used to tell him it rode like a bucking steer, so she could understand why he felt like a cowboy. He bought it without telling her, and boy was she mad! But I have to say this: It lasted for fourteen years before it stopped dead on the Triborough Bridge during rush hour. Even my father admitted it was time to give up on the truck, and this time my mother went car shopping with him.” She laughed. “She got to pick out the car. It was a Dodge. Daddy made her mad by asking the salesman if a taxi meter was an option.”

Alvirah turned to look at Opal. “Why did he ask that?”

“Honey, it’s because Dodge made so many taxis,” Willy explained. “That was funny, Opal.”

“Dad
was
pretty funny,” Opal agreed. “He never had two nickels to rub together, but he did his best. He inherited two thousand dollars when I was about eight years old, and somebody convinced him to put it in parachute stock. They said that with all the commercial flying people would be doing, all the passengers would have to wear parachutes. I guess being gullible is genetic.”

Alvirah was glad to hear Opal laugh. It was two o’clock, and they were on route 91 heading for Vermont. At ten o’clock she and Willy had been packing for the trip and half-watching the television in the bedroom when a news flash caught their attention. It showed Packy Noonan leaving federal prison in his lawyer’s car. At the gate he got out of the car and spoke to the reporters. “I regret the harm I have caused the investors in my company,” he said. Tears welled in his eyes and his lip trembled as he went on. “I understand that I will be working at the salad bar at the Palace-Plus diner, and I will ask that ten percent of my wages be taken to start to repay the people who lost their savings in the Patrick Noonan Shipping and Handling Company.”

“Ten percent of a minimum wage job!” Willy had snorted. “He’s got to be kidding.”

Alvirah had rushed to the phone and dialed Opal. “Turn on channel twenty-four!” she ordered. Then she was sorry she had made the call because when Opal saw Packy, she began to cry.

“Oh, Alvirah, it just makes me sick to think that terrible cheat is as free as a daisy while I’m sitting here thrilled to get a week’s vacation because I’m so tired. Mark my words, he’ll end up joining his pals on the Riviera or wherever they are with my money in their pockets.”

That was when Alvirah insisted that Opal join them for the long weekend in Vermont. “We have two big bedrooms and baths in our villa,” she said, “and it will do you good to get away. You can help us follow the map and find my tree. There won’t be any syrup coming from it now, but I packed the jar that the stockbrokers sent me. We have a little kitchen so maybe I’ll make pancakes for everyone and see how good the syrup tastes. And I read in the paper that they’ll be cutting down the tree for Rockefeller Center right near where we’re staying. That would be fun to watch, wouldn’t it?”

It didn’t take much to persuade Opal. And she was already perking up. On the trip to Vermont she made only one comment about Packy Noonan: “I can just see him working at a salad bar in a diner. He’ll probably be sneaking the croutons into his pocket.”

S
ometimes Milo Brosky wished he had never met the Como twins. He had run into them by chance in Greenwich Village twenty years ago when he attended a poets’ meeting in the back room of Eddie’s Aurora. Benny and Jo-Jo were hanging out in the bar.

I was feeling pretty good, Milo thought as he sipped a beer in the shabby parlor of a rundown farmhouse in Stowe, Vermont. I’d just read my narrative poem about a peach who falls in love with a fruit fly, and our workshop thought it was wonderful. They saw deep meaning and tenderness that never verged on sentimentality in my poem. I felt so good I decided to have a beer on the way home, and that’s when I met the twins.

Milo took another sip of beer. I should have bought back my introduction to them, he thought glumly. Not that they weren’t good to me. They knew that I hadn’t had my big breakthrough as a poet and that I’d take any kind of job to keep a roof over my head. But this roof feels as though it could fall in on me. They’re up to something.

Milo frowned. Forty-two years old, with shoulder-length hair and a wispy beard, he could have been an extra in a film about Woodstock ’69. His bony arms dangled from his long frame. His guileless gray eyes had a perpetually benevolent expression. His voice with its singsong pitch made his listeners think of adjectives like “kind” and “gentle.”

Milo knew that a dozen years ago the Como Brothers had been obliged to skip town in a hurry because of their involvement with the Packy Noonan scam. He hadn’t heard from them in years. Then six months ago he had received a phone call from Jo-Jo. He wouldn’t say where he was, but he asked Milo if he would be interested in making a lot of money without any risk. All Milo had to do was find a farmhouse for rent in Stowe, Vermont. It had to have a large barn, at least ninety feet long. Until the first of the year Milo was to spend at least long weekends there. He was to get to know the locals, explain that he was a poet and, like J. D. Salinger and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, needed a retreat in New England where he could write in solitude.

It had been clear to Milo that Jo-Jo was reading both names and that he had no idea who either Salinger or Solzhenitsyn was, but the offer had come at a perfect time. His part-time jobs were drying up. The lease on his attic apartment was expiring, and his landlady had flatly refused to renew it. She simply couldn’t understand why it was imperative for him to write late at night even though he explained that was when his thoughts transcended the everyday world and that rap music played loud gave wings to his poetry.

He quickly found the farmhouse in Stowe and had been living in it full-time. Even though the regular deposits to his checking account had been a lifesaver, they were not enough to support another apartment in New York. The prices were astronomical there, and Milo rued the day he had told his landlady that he needed to keep the music blasting at night so it would drown out her snoring. In short, Milo was not happy. He was sick of the country life and longed for the bustle and activity of Greenwich Village. He liked people, and even though he regularly invited some of the Stowe locals to his poetry readings, after the first couple of evenings no one came back. Jo-Jo had promised that by the end of the year he would receive a $50,000 bonus. But Milo was beginning to suspect that the farmhouse and his presence in it had something to do with Packy Noonan getting out of prison.

“I don’t want to get in trouble,” he warned Jo-Jo during one of his phone calls.

“Trouble? What are you talking about?” Jo-Jo had asked sadly. “Would I get my good friend in trouble? What’d you do? Rent a farmhouse? That’s a crime?”

A pounding on the farmhouse door interrupted Milo’s reverie. He rushed to open it and then stood frozen at the sight of his visitors—two short, portly men in ski outfits standing in front of a flatbed with a couple of straggly-looking evergreen trees on it. At first he didn’t recognize them, but then he bellowed, “Jo-Jo! Benny!” Even as he threw his arms around them he was aware of how much they had changed.

Jo-Jo had always been hefty, but he had put on at least twenty pounds and looked like an overweight tomcat, with tanned skin and balding head. Benny was the same height, about five-six, but he’d always been so thin you could slip him under the door. He’d gained weight, too, and although he was only half the size of Jo-Jo, he was starting to look more like him.

Jo-Jo did not waste time. “You got a padlock on the barn door, Milo. That was smart. Open it up.”

“Right away, right away.” Milo loped into the kitchen where the key to the padlock was hanging on a nail. Jo-Jo had been so specific on the phone about the size of the barn that he had always suspected it was the main reason he had been hired. He hoped they wouldn’t mind that the barn had a lot of stalls in it. The owner of the farm had gone broke trying to raise a racehorse that would pay off. Instead, according to local gossip, when he went to claiming races, he invariably managed to select hopeless plugs, all of which ate to the bursting point and sat down at the starting gate.

“Hurry up, Milo,” Benny was yelling even though Milo hadn’t taken more than half a minute to get the key. “We don’t want no local yokel to come to one of your poetry recitals and see the flatbed.”

Why not? Milo wondered, but without taking the time to either grab a coat or answer his own question, he raced outside and down the field to undo the padlock and pull open the wide doors of the barn.

The early evening was very cold, and he shivered. In the fading light Milo could see that there was another vehicle behind the flatbed, a van with a ski rack on the roof. They must have taken up skiing, he thought. Funny, he would never have considered them athletes.

Benny helped him pull back the doors. Milo switched on the light and was able to see the dismay on Jo-Jo’s face.

“What’s with all the stalls?” Jo-Jo demanded.

“They used to raise horses here.” Milo did not know why he was suddenly nervous. I’ve done everything they want, he reasoned, so what’s with the angst? “It’s the right size barn,” he defended himself, his voice never wavering from its singsong gentleness, “and there aren’t many that big.”

“Yeah, right. Get out of the way.” With an imperious sweep of his arm, Jo-Jo signaled to Benny to drive the flatbed into the barn.

Benny inched the vehicle through the doors, and then a splintering crash confirmed the fact that he had sideswiped the first stall. The sound continued intermittently until the flatbed was fully inside the barn. The space was so tight that Benny could exit only by moving from the driver’s seat to the passenger seat, opening the door just enough to squeeze out, and then flattening himself against the walls and gates of the stalls as he inched past them.

His first words when he reached Milo and Jo-Jo at the door were “I need a beer. Maybe two or three beers. You got anything to eat, Milo?”

For lack of something to do when he wasn’t writing a poem, Milo had taught himself to cook in his six months of babysitting the farm. Now he was glad that fresh spaghetti sauce was in the refrigerator. He remembered that the Como twins loved pasta.

Fifteen minutes later they were sipping beer around the kitchen table while Milo heated his sauce and boiled water for the pasta. To Milo’s dread, listening to the brothers talk as he bustled around the kitchen, he heard the name “Packy” whispered and realized that the farmhouse indeed had something to do with Packy Noonan’s release.

But
what?
And where did
he
fit in? He waited until he put the steaming dishes of pasta in front of the twins before he said point-blank: “If this has something to do with Packy Noonan, I’m out of here now.”

Jo-Jo smiled. “Be reasonable, Milo. You rented a place for us when you knew we were on the lam. You’ve been getting money deposited in your bank account for six months. All you have to do is sit here and write poetry, and in a couple of days you get fifty thousand bucks in cash and you’re home free.”

“In a couple of days
?
” Milo asked, incredulous, his mind conjuring up the happiness that $50,000 could buy: A decent place to rent in the Village. No worry about part-time jobs for at least a couple of years. No one could make a buck last as long as he could.

Jo-Jo was studying him. Now he nodded with satisfaction. “Like I said, all you need to do is sit here and write poetry. Write a nice poem about a tree.”

“What tree?”

“We’re just as much in the dark as you are, but we’ll all find out real soon.”