The Specialists by Lawrence Block

colonel had gone over the floor plan of the New Cornwall Bank until either of them could have drawn it with both eyes closed. It wasn’t at all hard to come up with a decent line of operations for knocking the place over. But it wasn’t just a question of doing the job effectively. They had to leave fingerprints. They had to make the score duplicate the Passaic robbery in enough important respects so that the dumbest cop in New Jersey could get the message. The newspaper coverage was thorough, but the colonel had pointed out the importance of primary sources. The little details that would make for instant recognition, a gunman’s phrasing, the positioning of the robbers, these were the sort of trivial points that no one would bother to include in a news story or police report.
    Hoskins, for example, had mentioned as an afterthought that one of the gunmen had had a wart on the back of his hand. It would be easy enough to putty a wart onto the back of somebody’s hand, and the fact that the original owner of the wart might have had nothing else in common with the new wart carrier meant nothing, since no one person would have been present at both robberies. Police reports of both cases would mention that wart, and that would be a tag.
    None of the original criminals had had a mug shot on file, nor did any of Colonel Cross’s crew. A wart was a wart.
    “I think that’s all I can remember,” Hoskins said finally. “Of course there may have been other things I said to Lieutenant Frazier, but he could tell you that. Unless you’ve seen him already?”
    On the sidewalk Dehn glanced at his watch, walked over to his car. It was parked so that the license plates could not be seen from the Hoskins house. Lieutenant Frazier, he thought. Well, why not? It might look fishy if a crime reporter interviewed the hell out of the eyewitnesses and never even visited the police station. And the colonel always said that the best defense was a good offense.
    The fool things you went through, Murdock thought. All of that time and energy spent talking old Mrs. Tuthill into letting them saw an old limb off her tree, just to have a name to toss out at Platt, and here the old Jewboy could care less. Maybe that was one of the good things about being a gangster, maybe you just never had to worry about getting taken by some small-time con man. But Platt, he never even let them get a word in about Mrs. Tuthill.
    “All I know about trees is the leaves fall off ’em,” he had said. “And if they die, you can’t replace ’em, you have to put in a little one and you’re dead fifty years before it’s big enough to sit under. I don’t want trees dying, not with the kind of money I spend on this place. You see the garden? The lawn? I got the best. I pay for it and I get the best.”
    Murdock hugged the trunk of the tree, put his foot on a branch to test it. He was some thirty feet from the ground, and he turned to flash a grin at Simmons. Simmons could climb if he had to, but he wasn’t exactly at home in a tree, and it stood to reason that a fool who climbed trees for a living would move around up there like a squirrel, and Murdock could do this. Heights didn’t do a thing to him. The first ten times he jumped out of planes, he shat his pants, and the eleventh time he didn’t, and once falling held no fear, heights became quite comfortable.
    The branch was sound, so he stepped up onto it and worked up to the next one, testing first, then making the step. At least he didn’t have to saw anything off this time. They had told Platt that they wanted to go over the entire property and survey the trees, and then the boss could send them an estimate on the entire job. That was the best line they could have pitched him. Platt wanted everything perfect, all at once. He didn’t care what it cost, just so his trees and his lawn and his house and his garden were the best he could buy.
    Murdock climbed a few feet higher, took a look around. The tree was