The sarge let me loose thirty-five minutes later. I wrote Bailey a check for the standard 10 percent, $500, and handed him a hundred in cash. “That’s a bonus, in lieu of a kiss,” I said, laughing with joy. “I’d give you the kiss except for that damned cigar!”
He drove me to the airport after I told him I was taking the first flight to Miami.
This is what happened later. I have it on unimpeachable sources, as the White House reporters are fond of saying. An ecstatic O’Riley, high enough with joy to require a pilot’s license himself, showed up at the jail. “Abagnale, or whatever the hell name you’ve got him booked under, trot him out,” he chortled.
“He made bond at three-thirty this morning,” volunteered a jailer. The sergeant had gone home.
O’Riley flirted with apoplexy. “Bond! Bond! Who the hell bonded him out?” he finally shrieked in strangled tones.
“Bailey, ‘Bailout’ Bailey, who else?” replied the jailer.
O’Riley wrathfully sought out Bailey. “Did you post bond for a Frank Wiliams this morning? he demanded.
Bailey looked at him, astonishd. “The pilot? Sure, I went his bail. Why the hell not?”
“How’d he pay you? How much?” O’Riley grated.
“Why, the regular amount, $500. I’ve got his check right here,” said Bailey, offering the voucher.
O’Riley looked at the check and then dropped it on Bailey’s desk. “Serves your ass right,” he growled, and turned toward the door.
“What do you mean?” Bailey demanded as the FBI agent grasped the door handle.
O’Riley grinned wickedly. “Run it through your bank account, turd, and you’ll find out what I mean.”
Outside, a Massachusetts detective turned to O’Riley. “We can get out an APB on him.”
O’Riley shook his head. “Forget it. That bastard’s five hundred miles away. No Boston cop’s gonna catch him.”
A prudent man would have been five hundred miles away. I wasn’t prudent. When you’re hot, you’re hot, and I had the cajones of a billy goat.
No sooner had Bailey dropped me at the airport, and was gone, than I grabbed a cab and checked in at a nearby motel.
The next morning I called the bank that had a branch at the airport. “Security, please,” I said when the switchboard operator answered.
“Security.”
“Yeah, listen, this is Connors, the new guard. I don’t have a uniform for tonight’s shift. My damned uniform got ripped up in an accident. Where can I get a replacement, lady?” I spoke in outrage.
“Well, we get our uniforms from Beke Brothers,” the woman replied in mollifying tones. “Just go down there, Mr. Connors. They’ll outfit you with a replacement.”
I looked up the address of Beke Brothers. I also had my fingers do some walking through other sections of the Yellow Pages.
I went first to Beke Brothers. No one questioned my status. Within fifteen minutes I walked out with a complete guard’s outfit: shirt, tie, trousers and hat, the name of the bank emblazoned over the breast pocket and on the right shoulder of the shirt. I stopped at a police-supply firm and picked up a Sam Browne belt and holster. I called at a gun shop and picked up a replica of a.38 police special.
It was harmless, but only an idiot would have ignored it were it pointed at him. I then rented a station wagon, and when I left my motel each door sported a sign proclaiming
“SECURITY-BEAN STATE NATIONAL BANK.”
At 11:15 p.m. I was standing at attention in front of the night-deposit box of the Bean State National Bank Airport Branch, and a beautifully lettered sign adorned the safe’s depository: “night deposit vault out of order, please
MAKE DEPOSITS WITH SECURITY OFFICER.“
There was an upright dolly, with a large mail-type bag bulking open, in front of the depository.
At least thirty-five people dropped bags or envelopes into the container.
Not one of them said more than “Good evening” or “Good night.”
When the last shop had closed, I secured the top of the canvas bag and began hauling the loot to the station wagon. I became stuck trying to get the dolly over the weather strip of the exit door. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the damned thing across the little ridge. It was just too heavy.
“What’s going on, buddy?”
I twisted my head and nearly soiled my drawers. They weren’t the same ones, but a pair of state troopers was standing less than five feet away.
“Well, the box is out of order, and the truck broke down, and I’ve got the bank’s station wagon out here and no goddamned hydraulic pulley, and I ain’t exactly Samson,” I said, grinning sheepishly.
The older one, a ruddy-faced redhead, laughed. “Well, hell, let us help you with it,” he said, and stepped forward and grabbed the handle of the dolly. With three of us tugging, it came over the ridge easily. They helped me drag the dolly to the station wagon and assisted me in lifting the bulky, cumbersome cargo into the back of the vehicle. I slammed shut the tailgate and turned to the officers.
“I appreciate it, boys,” I said, smiling. “I’d spring for the coffee, but I’ve got to get this little fortune to the bank.”
They laughed and one lifted a hand. “Hey, no sweat. Next time, okay?”
Less than an hour later, I had the booty in my motel room and was sorting out the cash. Bills only. I tossed the change, credit-card receipts and checks into the bathtub.
I netted $62,800 in currency. I changed into a casual suit, wrapped the haul in a spare shirt and drove to the airport, where I retrieved my bags. An hour later I was on a flight to Miami. I had a thirty-minute layover in New York. I used the time to call the manager of the airport in Boston. I didn’t get him but I got his secretary.
“Listen, tell the Bean State Bank people they can get the majority of the loot from last night’s depository caper in the bathtub of Room 208, Rest Haven Motel,” I said and hung up.
The next day I winged out of Miami, bound for Istanbul.
I had an hour’s layover in Tel Aviv.
I used it upholding my code of honor. In my entire career, I never yenched a square John as an individual.
I sought out a branch of an American bank. And laid a sheaf of bills on the counter before a teller.
“I want a $5,000 cashier’s check,” I said.
“Yes, sir. And your name?”
“Frank Abagnale, Jr.,” I said.
“All right, Mr. Abagnale. Do you want this check made out to you?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “Make it payable to Aloyius James ‘Bailout’ Bailey, in Boston, Massachusetts.”
CHAPTER EIGHT. A Small Crew Will Do- It’s Just a Paper Airplane
An entourage is expected of some people. The President. Queen Elizabeth. Frank Sinatra. Muhammad Ali. Arnold Palmer. Most celebrities, in fact.
And airline pilots.
“Where’s your crew, sir?” asked the desk clerk in the Istanbul hotel. It was a question I’d encountered before.
“I don’t have a crew with me,” I replied. “I just flew in to replace a pilot who became ill.” It was my standard answer to such queries, which were much more numerous in Europe and the Middle East than in the United States. Continental hotels, obviously, were more accustomed to catering to entire air crews. A lone pilot aroused curiosity.
And curiosity breeds suspicion.
I needed a crew, I mused that evening while dining in a Turkish restaurant. I had doffed my uniform. Save on special occasions, I now wore it only when checking in and checking out of a hotel, passing a check or cadging a free ride.
The matter of a crew had entered my mind before. In fact, it entered my mind each time I saw a command pilot surrounded by his crew. His status was not only more believable than mine, but he also always seemed to be having much more fun than I. Stews, I had noticed, tended to act as handmaidens to the pilots. My life as a bogus birdman, on the other hand, was essentially a lonely existence. But then a man on the run is usually a forlorn figure. It’s hard to play the social lion when you’re moving like a scalded cat. My dalliances, by and large, had all the permanency of rabbits’ relationships and about the same degree of satisfaction.