Chapter 6

I gave a full report of everything Charlie had done so far and what he seemed likely to do in the near future. My father seemed slightly relieved by this and suggested that while I ought to keep a fairly close eye on things I should not to do anything 'radical' for the moment. He seemed especially interested in my personal descriptions and opinion of Charlie's general character and the fact that the strong and silent Charlie had very definitely gotten under my skin didn't escape my father's notice.

"You like him in spite of yourself, don't you," he replied after one of my regular very quiet visits down to Lovett. It hadn't escaped his notice that despite the fact nothing was happening on any legal front, I was finding increasing excuses to 'pop down to Lovett for the weekend' to check up on things.

The physical checking of the repair work seemed to only take a few minutes and I'd invariably spend the rest my time just watching Charlie work either on the repairs or at his restaurant. I'd find some meager excuse for us to exchange a few words, always pleasant ones but mostly I spent my time watching from a distance. Invariably, when I'd return to my hotel at night my panties would be soaked and I'd then masturbate for hours but not getting any lasting relief. Erotic dreams involving the two of us together were starting to become a regular event and I despaired of finding a practical workable solution out of the mess I was in and my distraction started to affect my regular work in New York.

Obviously, the situation couldn't continue the way it was going and I resolved to march right down there and write whatever sized check it would take to buy the property back for my father. Charlie could stay and lease the property from us and make his restorations as far as I was concerned. Once and for all, this matter needed to be permanently resolved and if Charlie hadn't been so nice to me it would have gone off just as I planned.

Instead, within moments of my appearance, I found myself 'working' right next to him and helping to finish one of his repair projects. We talked together like we were old friends instead of being bitter legal rivals for these last six months. He seemed to bear me no hatred at all for the pain and suffering I must have caused him, let alone the terrible legal expenses he could ill afford to play to defend against my actions against him. Further, he seemed to be subtly sorry for me somehow and that pushed all of my buttons in way that they had never been pushed before by anyone.

I was now just an emotional little girl instead of the cool and calculating woman lawyer I had previously been and I demanded to know what he really thought about me. For my many sins, he told me ... in precise and exacting detail.

I won't repeat what was said (Charlie got it 98% accurate in his account). I could not disagree, nor in the end find neither error nor fault with any of the facts. I had indeed hurt him very badly and nearly to the core but he was too much of a gentleman to repay the ill I had done him in kind. In fact his eyes betrayed a deep and terrible sadness that more than suggested he would much rather have had an entirely different sort of relationship with me altogether in other circumstances.

Yes, I was most definitely a spoiled, rotten bitch who had no meaningful dreams or aspirations of her own other than to become even more rich and spoiled. The more I started to examine them, the hollower my successes in life had been. He certainly hit the bull's-eye with his observations about my personal life, or rather my utter lack of one.

All together, I had been blessed with more truth in less than five minutes than I had heard totally in my entire previous life. Naturally I didn't appreciate it much at the time, nor even like it very much in the days and weeks that followed but I couldn't deny that all of it was true. Broodingly alone at home in New York, every single word gnawed at me like a rodent nibbling away at a bone.

The point about my 'girlfriends all hating me' seemed so blatantly obvious and easy at first to disprove, so I started with that. I had a group of ladies that I did brunch with, usually, every Sunday. We had a standing reservation for the same table every weekend and we'd been going there for years. I resolved to miss this week's encounter and placed another phone call to Freddie for a subtle piece of (illegal) wiretapping that would transmit via wireless the conversation at my girlfriend's table to another café just down the street where I could be hidden but listening in.

I got more than an earful. My absence was not terribly missed, although I did provide much of the early topics of conversation as every detail of my life was served up for snarky discussion, much as we had tore apart others that were absent at any particular time. That I 'didn't wear my clothes well' and 'could make even Yves Saint Laurent look bad' on me was only one of my most minor faults. Apparently, I was an utter and total bitch par excellence and even my so-called friends were frankly relieved not to have to put with me for the day.

I brooded upon this for a day or two before asking another women at work who was about my age, a junior lawyer that was working hard to try and make Partner in a few years, "off the record and just between us girls", if I was indeed really a Bitch?

"Total, complete and utter." Was her frank reply. We talked a bit further with my door closed and she eventually let down her hair so to speak and we 'exchanged a frankness of viewpoints' previously unheard of in the history of the Rodger's Law Firm. To put it mildly, no one including the secretaries and paralegals would be much bothered if I managed to get myself run over by a taxi. It was also a secret company tradition that every time I pissed someone off, they'd have to put $20 into a jar that was being collected for the bachelor party for my eventually poor sap of a husband-to-be. The jar currently had over $10,000 collected so far. The goal was to get my intended so utterly drunk that they could put him onto a plane for Billings, Wyoming just before the wedding and give him a narrow escape from 'clutches worse than death'.

I ought to have been utterly horrified but instead this just reinforced my open private observations. I thanked her and we even hugged and I made a note to put her on the fast track for Partner. Some honesty around here was long overdue.

I resolved to put my life into some sort of order.

I couldn't quite find a "Bitches Anonymous" but I did find a local counseling program for people whose lives had serious fucked up issues and that had a small, fairly private and intimate group counseling session twice a week. I didn't like it much at first but I forced myself to attend and even started to attend an additional private session once a week. After a few months of effort, I started to feel happier with myself and everyone around me at work was starting to treat me like a ticking atomic bomb. Even my father sensed something had changed ... but that it was distinctly for the better.

"If I get another report that you've gone another entire full month without threatening to kill anyone, set their body on fire and then taking a long piss over their ashes, I'm going to have to do something drastic." He said to me with a wink one morning, followed by his usual remark of "Have you visited your boyfriend lately?"

Since I had been very thoroughly told-off by Charlie he had gone up even further in my father's esteem. He had even requested his own private review of the investigation file on Charlie and his family shortly after I'd returned and was still apparently in quite a fit of pique. Something in his file however had greatly disturbed my father but he was not quite ready then to tell me why or offer any other confessions. His mind more frequently now dwelt upon his younger war years and he told me a great number of stories about his terrible combat experiences on Peleliu and on Okinawa as a US Marine mortar man and gave me a book to read by another Marine mortar man who served in a different company but had very similar and terrible war experiences. The book, "With the Old Breed on Peleliu and Okinawa" was horrifying and told me a great deal about what my father had suffered and the trouble he later displayed in expressing his feelings or emotions.

We began to talk more and much more often together. I had always loved my father but we started to become much closer, as a father and daughter ought to be. This was when his final guard started to come and in slow bits and pieces over several weeks, I finally learned the great and terrible secret of his life.

"I didn't go off to college to learn how to be a bank robber." He said one evening while I was pushing him in his wheelchair around the grounds of the house in Connecticut. "But I certainly met all of the folks I needed to know and learnt all of the skills necessary. I fell in with a group of three other poor lads, all from good families like mine, which had been brought down together by the Depression.

"It was the banks that were to blame; we decided one late night over cards and a good bottle of corn liquor. Each of us expressed our increasing hatred of them and the way those rich 'out of town millionaires' had stolen from us and our kin that which was our rightful due. At length some invisible line had been crossed and David (Dave), the least smart of our group stated that he'd 'even give a helping hand to the next bank robber whose path he crossed'. That started us thinking. We'd already been drinking more than was good for us.

"No one seemed too morally opposed or objected too much however and the matter lay unburied between us for awhile until Joseph (Joe), another of my buddies, announced that he would soon have to leave school and go to work full time as there was no more money at home for his education. All parties hinted at our semi-forgotten conversation and, that for our friend, there was nothing we wouldn't do to keep him (and ourselves in school).

"Before we knew it, we had planned and executed a minor after hours break-in at the small bank branch near our local rural college, located in San Marcos between Austin and San Antonio. Joe, the smartest of us, was studying chemistry and could make us some decent explosives. I was very good at planning and logistics and chose most of targets and the entrance and escape plans. William (Billy) was the boldest, most adventurous and fearless and was even willing to be the point man and our guard. Dave was loyal and a hard worker who could be counted on do whatever the rest of us thought was best.

"Starting in 1940 until late 1941, we secretly broke into and robbed 18 banks without ever being seen or caught in the act. Unlike Dillinger or Pretty Boy Floyd, or any of the other infamous bank robbers of the era, no one ever saw our faces. We took security extremely seriously and made sure we had a flawless escape plan. We split up into separate cars after each job, leaving one of us behind to hide the majority of the money until the heat was off a week or two later. We changed cars as often as we could afford to and avoided as much as possible visiting or stealing from the same city or town twice, giving no one any reason to ever remember us.

"We perfected a fine cover story that we were young traveling salesmen on the road, even obtaining some excellent quality sample sales kits. We practiced our fake sales routines until they were polished enough to pass casual examination by any policeman stopping our cars. We resolved to avoid displaying our new wealth as much as possible and bought only older but reliable cars, using our phony but apparently successful part-time sales jobs as an explanation to our families. We even ordered fancy sales-books printed with our names on them and wrote in fake orders to account for any unusually large amounts of pocket cash we might have on hand.

"We took turns being tail-end Charlie at the end of the job, remaining in town with the bulk of the cash until it could be more safely hidden later. Frankly, once we had our school expenses paid, our living expenses were not that much and we had little use for the loot that we were accumulating. At this point I think we were still doing the bank jobs out of revenge against the greedy banks rather than for the money. We agreed to keep the majority of the loot safe where it was already hidden and not to divide it all up for right now. Then we got greedy, or should I say, I recognized an opportunity that was too good to pass up.

"During the late summer, before college was about to start again, I was relaxing in a bar along the river in San Antonio one evening and became friendly with a young guy who had already had a few beers too many. He was jokingly telling me about his job with the local sewer and water company and how he'd nearly accidently broken into a bank vault by mistake when doing some work in an underground sewer pipe. He was newly married and had a sweet 'Tex-Mex wife' and needed every dollar he could lay his hands on, so it was child's play to make a large wager with him of 'a weeks pay' that his story was all 'bull'. An hour later, both of us the worse for drink, were stumbling about underground in the old downtown area and he showed me right where his concrete drill had bore right up through the center of the bank's lobby. The vault itself would have been just another 20 feet further down the sewer.

"It was the best $20 I ever spent ... and the worst. A quiet visit to the bank lobby the next day during the lunch rush revealed the recent floor repair to the white marble stone and that the entrance to a large protected vault area lay right where the sewage guy had said it was. This was a rather large branch of a chain of banks located all over Texas and along with a large money vault it also contained a separate secure area with a lot of safety deposit boxes, certain to contain valuable jewelry and a lot of gold.

"FDR had signed into law the banning of any personal possession of Gold back in 1933, so you can be certain that conservative and wealthy customers of the bank would have stashed their gold in this most safe and secure spot, rather than turning it in to the government. The idea of that much gold being just a few feet away from me gave me shivers. I purchased an empty safety deposit box there so that I could get an excellent feel for the layout and any unusual security measures it might have and resolved that this would be our next big score!

"We kept our noses fairly low back at school that fall and did only two very small weekend jobs that frankly weren't worth the risks, especially when at the last job a night watchman we had overlooked nearly caught us in the act. Billy blackjacked him from behind and by surprise, allowing us to beat a hasty getaway with about only half of the loot we had anticipated. The guard would be fine with just a headache but this was an escalation we had not wanted to be involved with. Our next job, to be done during the Thanksgiving holiday, would be our last we decided and everyone agreed on my plan for that San Antonio bank. But we found we now had a slight complication.

"Dave had been a little careless spreading his money around his home town of Waco and two of his cousins discovered what he had been up to and wanted 'in'. Neither of them were any brighter than Dave and frankly we didn't really want their help (or to give up another share of the loot pie) but it seemed logical that if they were to become also 'guilty' of bank robbery and receive a share of the loot, then they would have to remain quiet about us, or they'd go to prison themselves. In the end it was decided to let them be our 'lookouts' and receive each a ½ share. It was an unsatisfactory solution that no one was really happy with and was to prove to have tragic consequences for everyone.

"I left college a full week early to find a nearby rooming house or hotel close to the bank and began my planning and preparations. Every part of my plan worked to perfection right from the start. I was easily able to get the construction supplies I needed from a dumpy place that specialized in buying tools and construction equipment from bankrupt companies at pennies on the dollar. The rather shady looking owner didn't care a fig what I wanted the equipment for and had eyes only for my green cash. I found a perfect fleabag hotel, just right for a young traveling salesman, across the street from the bank itself and was able to carefully study the entire weekend schedule of the bank. It would be easy, there was no inside security at night and the bank was not even open on Saturdays. In fact all weekend long not a single person entered or exited the bank. The bank manager arrived to open up the doors for staff and security at 8AM sharp on Monday.