Following bouts of “long-distance fencing with the written word,” a thief, in search or retribution for a misdeed, boldly ventures back to the scene of the crime…
by: Tom Gartner
In any other diner, in any other town, Lawrence wouldn’t have been fazed when a cop walked in. A cop in a diner — nothing unusual about that. But this was Wichita, and this was Shelby’s Place. He’d driven 1500 miles to be there. At a minimum, the cop seemed like a bad omen.
Lawrence had only arrived ten minutes earlier. When he walked in, he expected to see Shelby behind the counter, just like she’d been that first time he stepped foot in the place, two years ago. But instead there was an exasperated blonde woman who took his order (a patty melt, just like the first time) and grudgingly let on that Shelby was somewhere in the building.
“Would you tell her Lawrence is here?”
“Lawrence?”
He nodded.
“Like Lawrence of Arabia.” He wouldn’t have expected the blonde to have irony in her repertoire, but there it was.
“Not exactly,” he said. “But yeah.”
She moved down the counter to refill a trucker’s coffee cup, and eventually retreated to the kitchen. When she came back, she gave him a faint nod. He took that to mean that she’d passed the message on, but she had nothing to say about Shelby’s reaction.
Five minutes went by. He started to think about walking back behind the counter and through the kitchen. Not like he didn’t know where Shelby’s office was.
Then the cop came in, and stood just inside the door with his hands on his hips, looking around the diner. A normal cop thing, right? He didn’t have to have a special interest in anyone who was there: The two older ladies in a booth, fussing over a lottery ticket; the trucker three stools down, looking at a racing form; the couple at the table by the window, a mousy, balding guy and a pretty woman with turquoise hair.
And now here came Shelby. She’d come out of the kitchen, was smoothing down a red apron that she wore over her green dress, forest green with narrow darker green streaks. Taller than he remembered her, her hair cut shorter now, curving around her face. She was half smiling, her cheeks bunched up, her chin lifted. She hadn’t seen him yet, she was looking around the diner in much the same way the cop was.
Then she did see him, or at least her neck twisted and her eyes moved over the space he was occupying. But her gaze rolled away from him, over to the cop standing just inside the door, and the half smile became a full smile as the cop started across the room toward Lawrence.
Up until two years ago, he’d never given Wichita, or any of Kansas for that matter, much thought. He never even considered it as a destination. And even having been there, he probably would never have given it another thought, any more than he thought about Flagstaff, Albuquerque, Amarillo, or Oklahoma City.
Except for Shelby.
She had been one of those women whose desperation and confusion were apparent within seconds of meeting her — a tall, incongruously elegant brunette who, somewhere late in her thirties, was newly divorced and working as the manager of this low-rent diner. Normally, the last sort of person he’d rob.
But he’d been down on his own luck at the time. Dishonorably discharged from the Marines after an officer picked a fight with him during a poker game, he’d washed up in Wichita, drunk and broke, while trying without much luck to hitchhike across the country.
He’d had a nice conversation with Shelby as he ate his patty melt. She’d talked too much about her ex-husband, but all in all, a good conversation. Turned out they shared an interest in photography: Walker Evans, Avedon, Ansel Adams. Maybe she was just being polite, but still, that was something, wasn’t it? He’d been surprised when she turned down his carefully phrased invitation to get loaded with him after the diner closed.
Maybe, he realized later, she’d been tired and out of sorts, like him. Whatever the reason, she hadn’t been at her most tactful in turning him down. He’d come away feeling the same sense of injustice as he had at his court-martial.
And as for the robbery — he’d come back to the diner after closing time, while she was counting out the drawers, and forced the delivery door. Easy score, $1200 from the till, another $100 from her purse, which he’d scooped up on his way out the door.
But that purse had, in a strange way, taken over his life. Before long, he realized he felt bad about it, a real low point in his career he had to admit. He couldn’t quite make himself just throw it away, or leave it behind. He jammed it in his half empty suitcase and took it with him when he left Wichita the next day. From St. Louis, he mailed her credit cards to the address on her driver’s license. From Pittsburgh, he mailed her the $100, with a note saying he was sorry about the robbery. From New York, when he finally got there, he sent the purse Parcel Post, with another note. This time he asked her to email him, to let him know she’d received it.
She didn’t, of course. Not the first time, or the second. But the third time he wrote to her, he got a reply, not an email but a letter to his PO Box in Queens: “Thank you, I received the purse. As for the requested forgiveness, I understand your circumstances, but I’m sorry. No.”
It continued to be mostly a one-sided correspondence. He’d never been much of a letter writer, but it was easy enough to tell her about photos he saw in galleries or at MoMA, about breakfasts in midtown diners, walks in Riverside Park, ball games at Yankee Stadium. Then too, he made sure she knew that he was making good money driving a delivery van, that he was living with his cousins in Queens, in short that he was a citizen now, not the guy in the back of the restaurant with a gun. If she ever came to New York, he let her know, he’d be more than happy to buy her lunch and show her the sights.
When she finally replied to another one of his letters, it was in a cool, academic tone, disputing something he’d said in one of his apologies. “You seem to think that by returning what you stole, you erase the deed. Don’t you understand that money is only money, and the thing you can’t so easily replace is trust? Figure that one out, if you really want to be forgiven.”
He couldn’t argue the point, but it struck him as Jesuitical. Of course, that wasn’t so surprising in someone who insisted on communication by snail mail.
“So if you can’t repay an intangible debt with tangible goods,” he wrote back, “Can you repay it at all?”
“I suppose it’s possible. Repentance alone doesn’t suffice. But penance might,” she replied after a month’s hiatus. “The repayment would have to be made with the right intangible, though, wouldn’t it?”
It took him another month to compose his answer. It took up a page and a half but it all came down to two words: “Which intangible?”
“I suppose I’ll know it when I see it,” was her one-sentence reply.
It wasn’t easy for Lawrence, this long-distance fencing with the written word. It meant something, he thought, that she’d communicate with him at all. So he was encouraged by that. But in the end, he knew he could only get the answer he wanted face to face.
When the cop started toward him, Lawrence thought about running. He had a sickening sense that he’d overplayed his hand with Shelby, that he’d moved too fast and taken too much for granted. Or worse, that he’d never had a hand to play, that she’d been planning to lure him here ever since that first letter.
He could try to brazen it out, get up and walk to the door. Would the cop try to stop him? He’d just keep walking. What was the guy going to do, shoot him in the back? Wrestle him to the ground? None of that seemed plausible, but even if he got away clean, what then? Drive another 1500 miles without having spoken a word to Shelby?
And yet, he didn’t want to look at her, for fear of what he might see. She was coming toward him, working her way along the back side of the counter. The blonde waitress ducked into the kitchen, almost as if she thought a gunfight was imminent. Lawrence hadn’t brought a gun with him; the gun he’d used in the robbery was in a pawn shop in the Bowery. But the waitress didn’t know that, and for that matter neither did Shelby or the cop.
“Lawrence,” Shelby said. Her tone was pleasant, as if she were mildly but not unpleasantly surprised to see him. “You’re here.”
Now he did take his eyes off the cop, who’d pulled up half a dozen yards away. His hand was on his belt, near his gun but not touching it. Lawrence looked up at Shelby. He couldn’t read anything in her face, which seemed like a bad sign considering that he’d found her so easy to read before, someone who didn’t hide her vulnerability. Then again, the current situation seemed to indicate that he hadn’t read her right at all — that she was one of those people who are weak on the surface but strong down deep.
“I’m here,” he said. “As promised.” He’d told her he was coming to Wichita, but not when. That she’d managed to have a cop on call at five minutes’ notice was yet another bad sign.
“Sort of a bold move,” she said.
“I guess it was.”
“What kind of a reception were you expecting?”
“Maybe not an armed one.” He tipped his head toward the cop. “You going to introduce us?”
“Of course,” Shelby said. “Lawrence, this is Officer Powell.”
“Credit to the uniform, I’m sure.” It had started to seem peculiar to him, the way they were dragging things out. Why not just slap the handcuffs on him and have done with it?
“He’s my brother. Hector, this is Lawrence.”
The cop stepped forward, not smiling, but nodding to Lawrence, and they shook hands. “New York to Kansas,” he said. “That’s a long drive.”
“Worth it for the patty melt.” Lawrence nodded at the sandwich, wondering if he was going to get the chance to finish it.
“No argument here.” Hector’s radio hissed, and he grimaced as he reached for it.
“Have to run. Enjoy.”
And he was gone.
“So if that was a joke…” Lawrence studied Shelby, but saw no sign that she was amused.
“Hector being here?” she asked. “Not a joke, certainly.”
“Payback, then?”
“And you don’t think you deserve that?” Now it was her giving him the searching look.
Was he going to give her the satisfaction of admitting it? A part of him resisted that. He had to fight the urge to look away. “Probably.”
“Scared you a little bit, I suppose.”
“Sure,” he said. “But not just thinking about jail. More the idea that you’d set me up.”
“See how that feels?”
“OK, fair.” He wondered now why he’d thought this would be easier face to face. “How I made you feel.”
“Exactly.”
“So does that make us even?”
“I don’t know about even.”
“Close enough that I can apologize over a drink?”
“Maybe that close.” She leaned across the counter and nudged his plate toward him. “Now finish your sandwich.”
Tom Gartner’s fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous journals, including The Madison Review, California Quarterly, Valparaiso Fiction Review, and Summerset Review. Other work is forthcoming in Third Coast. One story was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives just north of the Golden Gate and works as a buyer for an independent bookstore in San Francisco.
Delightful!