Inside Man (part two)

Some of the hostages are sitting quietly together on the floor of a room. However, a youngish man has had enough of his painter’s apparel and rips off his mask. ‘They want to shoot me for taking off my mask, they can go ahead’. The other hostages don’t agree with this unilateral act of rebellion and a loud argument ensues. Dalton bustles in, to the traditional accompaniment of screeching from the female hostages, and drags this rogue element off by his legs .The young turk quickly ditches the bravado and promises to fall into line, meanwhile trying to grab onto things as he is pulled along. Dalton lifts him up and punches him in the face.

Interview room. Holmes and Watson are trying to crack the Rabbi. They make him produce his hearing aids when he claims he couldn’t hear much of what the robbers were saying, then they try calling him ‘Steve’ to see if he responds and finally they ask how much ‘they’ are going to pay the Rabbi. Despite these fiendish stratagems, no confession is forthcoming.

Bugged pizza delivery! The boys in blue have even thrown in a few bottles of pop to wash them down with. Some policemen dump the goods outside and Dalton emerges (‘If he gives us a tip, I’m keeping it’). Keith has tagged along and gets the men to shut up when, so cool a moment ago, they yet again start emitting panicked yells the moment someone comes out of the bank (‘Put that gun down! Check that weapon!’). Keith greets Dalton with a civil ‘How you doing?’ and introduces himself. ‘I hope the pizzas are okay, They might be a little cold.’ Why on earth might that be the case? Any Tom, Dick or Harry has been able to have a piping hot pizza delivered to their door for the last 20-odd years but these pizzas, which presumably would have been given ultra-high priority, have somehow managed to get ‘a little cold’? Why not just say ‘They might be a little cold … because we’ve spent the last half-hour faffing about putting digital recorders inside them,’ and be done with it? Or, better yet, don’t draw Dalton’s attention to the temperature of the pizzas at all? Keith continues: ‘Listen, you pick up the phone anytime you want. It’s a direct line to me, I would love to talk to you.’ Nothing if not anti-social, Dalton picks up the grub and sods off, leaving Keith to nosily peer through the locked bank door. Fortunately, Dalton’s so eager to tear into his pizza that he forgets he’s meant to toss a couple of bodies out if any police come near the door.

Back inside the van, the good guys are listening to the dodgy Hawaiians. A foreign voice is talking and Darius decides the crooks must be ‘f*****g Russians’ and starts to lose patience with Keith’s modus operandi. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing. Because if my guys got to shoot it out with those f*****g savages …’ Keith, presumably accustomed to being questioned at every turn, expertly placates him.

Inside the bank, Stevie collects some hostages and leads them into another room. Outside she puts her own hood up, starts wailing and Steve or Steve-O throws her into the room with them as if she’s one of the captives, before leaving with another hostage, who he vulgarly refers to as ‘Boobs’. She takes umbrage but he’s not interested and tells her to move her ‘fat ass’. Again, she finds fault with his terminology but she receives short shrift and is moved into a room with a different batch of hostages. What peculiar goings on.

We’ve reached the picture board round of the post-match interview process. Some guy is looking at photos of the hostages and telling Crockett and Tubbs who he recognises. ‘She was on line in front me, he was the teller on my line, etc etc.’ He recognises one girl because of her ‘great tits’ and Keith laughs approvingly. Mitch asks this connoisseur of the female figure if he saw any of them after the ‘painters’ arrived. ‘Yeah, I saw her one time afterwards’. ‘How are you sure you saw her again’. ‘I could see under the suit. (You) Can’t hide quality like that’. I see. Everyone else is frightened for their life and wondering if they will get to see their loved ones again, meanwhile this clown is busily picturing women ‘under the suit’. It’s easy to mock but I wonder if I’d behave any differently. You do need to try and relax in times of stress.

Next in the chair is a woman who, it has to be reported, in order for you to understand the premise of this idiotic plot point, has ‘great tits’. It’s the loud phone-talker (Nancy) from the start of the film. She holds up a photo of a man and says, ‘This guy, he almost got us all killed,’ before going on to tell Scooby Doo and Shaggy about how the unfortunate lad tried to foment an uprising and got beaten up for his trouble. No, she didn’t see him again after that. No, she doesn’t recognise anyone else. She seems to have quickly surmised that her interlocutors are total dimwits and treats them with hostility: ‘You wanna take another picture? I could bend over and pick up a pencil. (Pause) Whatever. This guy (she holds up the photo again). Asshole.’

Inside the bank, Stevie does some manual labour next to the hole in the storage room. The shot allows us to appreciate that she too has ‘great tits’. Put them in painters’ masks and you could easily get her and Nancy mixed up! Yes, establishing this fact is the only point of the scene.

A Russian-speaking policeman arrives in the van, ready to tell Keith and company what the bank dwellers are chatting about. By the way, you can easily tell that the foreign voice, singular, which they’re listening to, is reading a speech of some sort, and sounds nothing like a group of people conversing as they eat pizza, but naturally these chumps haven’t noticed. The other problem is that the language isn’t Russian after all. Next time Keith, don’t go to Darius with your linguistic questions. The lingo is apparently neither Polish or Hungarian either and, to the chagrin of all concerned, the best the man can do is narrow it down to ‘Central European. Sort of’. The outlook is bleak but Keith has a idea …

… which is to play the tape over the van’s loud speakers and see if anyone out on the street recognises the language. Steve-O leans out of a window above, before turning around and yelling, ‘Boss, I think they might be bugging the pizzas!’ Okay, of course he doesn’t, but that doesn’t make the plan any less asinine. Keith only has to walk a few yards up the street to question the gaggle of bystanders, so the van can’t be that far from the bank. A man in a hard hat and builder’s gear duly recognises the language - it’s Albanian. He’s escorted towards the van muttering, ‘what am I doing here?’ to himself disbelievingly. If you don’t want to have any dealings with the police, don’t hang around crime scenes and then actively seek to help them, you buffoon. ‘Am I getting arrested for something?’ he asks. Yes pal, it’s illegal to admit you recognise the Albanian language.

Inside the van, the reluctant helper informs Keith that he recognises the dialect but cannot actually translate it. ‘I thought you said you spoke Albanian?/ I never said that’ back and forth. He doesn’t speak it himself but he is familiar with it because ‘my ex-wife and her parents are Albanian’. All above board. There didn’t look to be that many people out by the barricades but New York is so cosmopolitan that you can’t walk a block without running into someone who has an Albanian ex-wife. Keith turns to a policewoman. ‘Call the Albanian Consulate. See if they can get somebody over here to translate this for us. Make it happen fast.’ Good job he added the last sentence because she was originally planning to tell them to pop over in their own sweet time. Our Eastern Europe correspondent is told to ‘hang around in the back’ of the van. ‘Oh man, not again,’ is his latest nonsensical utterance. The other day he recognised some Albanian for a traffic cop in the Bronx and had to wait around for ages afterwards.

Mitch comes in but, as per, he’s got squat. ‘Van was stolen two days ago, but it’s clean. No prints.’ ‘Nothing?’ asks Keith. ‘Oh, apart from a bunch we found belonging to some dude called Dalton Russell,’ says Mitch. Just kidding, he confirms that when he said there were no prints, he did indeed mean there were no prints. Keith decides to check yet again that the exotic language is Albanian. ‘100% … undeniable,’ says a weary voice from the back of the van.

Back at the bank, the kid hostage is sitting on his own in the safe playing on his video game. Dalton brings him a slice of pizza and a bottle of drink. He takes a pew and inspects the game - it seems to involve a black guy driving around a ghetto-type arear shooting other black guys. ‘How does this game work?’ asks Dalton. ‘You get points for doing dirt, like jacking a car or selling crack. And you lose points if someone jacks your ride or shoots you.’ When he’s conquered this game, I don’t think the kid will be turning his attention to Pac-man and Space Invaders. We see the protagonist in the game get out of the car and shoot someone, which makes no sense because Dalton is holding the game while the kid munches away, and Dalton doesn’t know what the game involves, let alone how to play it. ‘Jesus!’ he exclaims, stunned by the violence. ‘What’s the point of this?’ Does he mean the game or this scene? The boy thinks the former. ‘Like my man 50 says, ‘Get rich or die tryin’. Yo, you’d get mad points for knocking over the bank.’ ‘You think that’s cool?’ says Dalton, delighted to meet a fan at long last. The poor bloke is greeted by screams of terror whenever he tries to engage with the other hostages, although, in fairness, said efforts to engage usually consist of dragging one of their number away for a beat-down. ‘Hell, yeah,’ says the kid. ‘You trying to get paid too.’ Dalton sort of laughs. ‘Finish your slice, I’ll take you back to your father.’ Why’s he been taken away from his father in the first place? (‘Hey kid, one of the Steves has called in sick. Watch the safe for a while wouldya?’) ‘I got to talk to him about this game.’ Dalton promises that ‘it’s gonna be okay’. ‘Cool’ says the tyke, who doesn’t seem in the slightest need of reassurance.

The policewoman brings bad tidings on the Albanian translation front. ‘I couldn’t tell what the guy (at the Albanian consulate) was talking about. I think he wanted money. I tried the State Department. That takes a month.’ Keith wants Bob the Builder to call his ex-wife but he demurs at first. ‘I hate that b***’. He doesn’t take much persuading though and I’m starting to warm to old Bob. He’s one of those martyr types who will do almost anything to help you out, but you then have to endure a lot of moaning from him while he gets on with it.

After a pointless scene of Dalton brooding in the bank, it’s time for ex-wife hi-jinks, because Ilina Miritia is in the house. She’s hot and I think Bob should reconsider his stance, although, knowing him, she played on his kindness to get a Green Card and then quickly got rid. Ilina presents Keith with a medium-sized bag. ‘What’s this?’ ‘Parking tickets. You can fix them?’ Parking tickets are made of, what’s that substance? Oh yeah, paper. It doesn’t take up much room. To fill a bag that size would surely require hundreds of tickets, unless they are now issued in phone-book format. Ridiculous. Keith will see what he can do. Ilina gets a cigarette out while she listens to the Albanian, Mitch tells her she can’t light up and she stares him down. ‘S***. Go ahead.’ Mitch is having an ineffectual day, I suspect not for the first time. She listens for a while, blows a bit of smoke in Keith’s face and then bursts out laughing. She knows who it is but wants a guarantee on the parking tickets before she spills. ‘They’re taken care of’. ‘It’s Enver Hoxha … He was the president of Albania.’ You’d think Keith might now finally grasp what the audience has known for about half an hour but the implications of this news escape him. ‘You’re telling me the former president of Albania is in there robbing a bank?’ ‘Enver Hoxha’s dead. That’s a tape of him discussing how Albanian people are great people. They are immortal people. I wouldn’t worry.’ You see Keith, when people, be they friends, relatives, bank robbers or hostages, sit around and eat pizza, it’s not that normal for one of their number to get up and launch into a long speech. After 30 seconds of listening to Hoxha’s peroration, any sentient human would have said: ‘It’s a tape, we’ve been rumbled’. The Keystone Kops we are presented with here need to call in the ex-wife of a builder who happens to be milling around outside to tell them the same thing. Worth it though, when Ilina is the woman in question. ‘I had to listen to all this nonsense in school. Communism is great. Capitalism is evil. Lenin, Marx, blah, blah, blah. It’s a tape.’ She departs, after Keith tells her to ‘watch where (she) parks next time’. Keith and Mitch ruminate on the vicissitudes of life. ‘They wanted us to bug them so they could send us on a wild goose chase. Last time I had my Johnson pulled that good, it cost me five bucks’. In his wildest goose dreams, Dalton couldn’t have imagined it would take his adversaries this long to spot the tape scam. ‘Five bucks?’ says an immediately interested Darius, who has been quiet while the Clown Court has been in session but fancies some of this action. ‘Yeah, Tijuana. Don’t ask.’ Keith looks for a drawing board to head back to, Mitch, for reasons unknown, goes through the bag of parking tickets, finds something disgusting in there and throws it away, and, in a bank office, Steve (or Steve-O), sits eating pizza while an I-Pod plays the speeches of Enver Hoxha.

Stevie and Dalton go into the room in the bank containing the safety deposit boxes. She picks the lock on one of them. Dalton, cigarette in hand, opens it and takes some documents out of an envelope addressed to Arthur Case.

Just when you thought things couldn’t get much worse for Keith … the Mayor arrives with Madeleine in tow. He clambers into their car to touch base. Introductions. ‘Miss White’ may be able to help Keith. ‘She has a certain amount of influence in these matters’. Keith is at a loss so Madeleine takes over. ‘What the Mayor means is that there are matters at stake here that are a little bit above your pay grade. No offence.’ ‘Well, why don’t you just tell the Mayor to raise my pay grade to the proper level and problem solved?’ Ha! Great answer. Keith does well to resist the urge to put Madeleine’s patronising head through a window and instead tries to opportunistically work a pay rise out of the situation. ‘From what I hear, that would have happened a long time ago if you’d been a little more diplomatic. But we can certainly discuss it.’ Madeleine’s omnipotence extends to police pay grades it seems. Keith says he was joking although, if she wants to fast track his rise to first grade, he’s ‘not gonna talk (her) out of it’. But there’s another snag, namely the ‘hundred and forty thousand dollars that seems to have walked away from the Madrugada cheque-cashing bust’. Keith says it’ll walk right back if he gets promoted to first grade. No he doesn’t, he says he had nothing to do with it.

Back in the van, Keith decides it’s high time he placed a call to Dalton, who deigns to pick up this time. ‘Well?’ ‘Is this the President of Albania?’ The very same. They chat and Keith intimates that Dalton will soon be going to jail but Dalton thinks otherwise. ‘This time next week, I’ll be sucking down pina coladas in a hot tub with six girls named Amber and Tiffany.’ ‘More like taking a shower with two guys named Jamal and Jesus,’ Keith retorts, surprisingly confident based on the day’s events so far. ‘And here’s the bad news, that thing you’re sucking on, it’s not a pina coladaaaaaa.’ Ha again! Keith’s really coming in to his own. Dalton laughs uproariously. ‘You really want to piss me off.’ Emboldened, Keith tries to set the agenda, ‘All right, here’s where we stand,’ but Dalton isn’t having it: ‘I don’t need your f*****g status report, Serpico. I tell you where things stand.’ Dalton wants what he asked for or he’ll off some hostages. Keith is very much on the case but ‘it’s not like the City of New York has 747s waiting around for days like this’. ‘If you don’t get my plane ready, then you might as well send a hearse.’ ‘Let’s focus on how we can both get what we want, all right’ suggests Keith, although I’m not convinced Dalton is too concerned about getting a win for all parties here. More threats from Dalton. Keith’s on it, ‘let’s just try to keep everybody calm, okay?’ ‘Don’t I sound calm to you?’ Keith allows that this is indeed the case. Dalton hangs up.

Madeleine is in the diner, Steve/Steve-O is digging in the storage room, we’re fast forwarding to an interview with ‘Mr Damerjian’. ‘Is that Albanian?’ asks Keith hopefully. Ha ha! The man’s stupidity never ceases to amaze. The crooks could have picked the speeches of any obscure politician in the world to bamboozle the cops with, but of course they chose one which would throw suspicion on to one of their number. ‘It’s Armenian.’ ‘What’s the difference?’ Good grief. ‘Detective, I was born in Queens. I’ve never been to Armenia, (or) Albania. I went surfing in Australia once.’ He wants some water because his throat is ‘parched’, but the ‘detectives’ find this hilarious. Reliable as clockwork, they make clumsy attempts to try and elicit a tearful confession but, as usual, they come to naught. Mr Damerjian (‘call me Kenneth’) was tied up in a room most of the time. ‘I saw you see me,’ he tells Keith. ‘I was locked up the in the room. You saw me gagged when you came in.’ God knows why Keith was touring the facility but let’s get on with it.

Back in the present, Keith’s on the phone with Dalton again, trying to negotiate more time to get the plane sorted out. ‘Meanwhile, we’ll send in some more food’. Bug the food again Keith, let’s find out what the Slovenian head of state has to say for himself! Dalton decides he will ask a question. The right answer buys them extra time, the wrong one spells bad news for a hostage or two. ‘Which weighs more? All the trains that pass through Grand Central Station in a year, or the trees cut down to print all US currency in circulation. Here’s a hint. It’s a trick question’. Dalton hangs up, Keith is bemused. Uh oh, Darius is going to weigh in. ‘It’s the trains. US money isn’t printed on paper at all. It’s cotton.’ Murmurs of agreement. He’s ‘one hundred per cent sure’ about this. ‘Okay,’ says Keith amiably and turns back to the phone, while everyone else puts their headphones on to listen in. What the ****? If they get this wrong, someone is going to be killed but hey, if Darius is ‘sure’, that’s good enough for them. Why don’t they a) get on the Internet or something and find out for certain about this, seeing as it might be an idea to cover all bases when innocent lives are at stake and b) do it in relatively sedate fashion, seeing as Dalton didn’t give them any deadline and they’re looking to play for time? ‘I got it,’ Keith tells Dalton, foolishly trying to take the credit for the answer. But here comes Mitch! ‘Wait a second. Wait a second.’ Keith tells Dalton he’ll call him back. ‘It’s a trap. They both weigh the same.’ Mitch has it all worked out. ‘They both weigh nothing.’ Keith wants to be absolutely sure on this, you simply can’t be too careful when people’s lives are at stake. ‘They both weigh the same or they both weigh nothing?’ ‘Tell him they both weigh the same. Do it now.’ For Pete’s sake, what’s the rush? Did Dalton say ‘have the answer in five minutes’? No. There is no hurry whatsoever, the cops can send someone to Mount Delphi to consult the f*****g oracle if they want to but they’re behaving as though the hostages are all going to get gunned down indiscriminately if they don’t solve this riddle within seconds. Keith turns back to the phone … without even bothering to get Mitch to explain his reasoning. The lives of these hostages are being treated with truly cavalier abandon. ‘They both weigh the same,’ Keith tells Dalton. ‘This time, send sandwiches,’ the quizmaster replies and hangs up abruptly once again. You’d think there’d be some measure of cheering, or at least a few exhalations of relief, and perhaps even, I daresay, a bit of praise for Mitch, but Keith simply says he thinks Dalton is ‘nuts’. Absent any plaudits, Mitch finally decides to give everyone a glimpse inside his computer-like brain. ‘He said ‘Grand Central Station’. Grand Central Terminal is the train station. Grand Central Station is the…’ But Keith can’t even allow Mitch this small piece of glory and butts in at the end with ‘post office’. I reckon Mitch secretly hates Keith, and that his servile manner is simply a way to get close to him before bringing him down. Darius, remarkably sanguine for a man whose imbecility almost cost someone their life, speaks up again. ‘Trains don’t pass through Grand Central. It’s the last stop for every train.’ This sparks some febrile debate about the subway system (Hilariously, Mitch asks Darius ‘How the f*** do you know?’ as if a working knowledge of such Byzantine matters as train routes is restricted to a few wise old elders) but a frustrated Keith calls for quiet. ‘Let’s just get the sandwiches.’ Keith, I’ll ask this a final time: what’s the F*****G RUSH! He makes to leave but the transport discussion quickly revs up again.

We here it continue even though we’re now inside the bank, suggesting the bugg-ers have somehow become the bug-ees. Elsewhere, the hostages are chatting nineteen to the dozen inside one of the rooms. To be more specific, some smartass (Chaim) is telling Seth, Brad and Gladys what’s what. ‘They’re robbers, not terrorists.’ ‘How do you know? They could be Al-Qaeda.’ Chaim has ‘studied these things’, he teaches ‘courses at Columbia Law on genocide, slave labour, war reparation claims’. Gladys wants to know if she can ‘sue anybody when this is over’. ‘Go nuts,’ says Chaim. In the storage room, Stevie, Steve and Steve-O examine the hole in the floor. ‘Now that’s a good looking s***hole’ says one of the men.

Night has fallen and Keith phones Sylvia. He tells her he’ll be home soon but then adds ‘It’s gonna be a long night, though, so don’t wait up for me’. She suggests coming down there, but he doesn‘t want the distraction. She saw him on TV, he looked ‘good, baby. Real good.’ He has arrived at the diner so he wraps things up and tells Madeleine to follow him. Implausibly, she, a random civilian, is going to have a quick word with the chief hostage-taker, having earlier been given the ‘ground rules’ by Keith. He calls the Riddler on his mobile and puts Madeleine on. She won’t tell Dalton her name. ‘What matters is what I can offer you.’ He wants specifics. ‘If I can be assured that certain interests are protected, I might be able to help you get what you came for.’ ‘I doubt that,’ says Dalton. Exactly. It’s truly bizarre the way Keith and Madeleine try to curry favour with Dalton by offering him quid pro quos. The outcomes people want here are not mutually compatible. Dalton wants to go scot-free with a load of loot in tow, Keith wants the polar opposite and, although Madeleine’s wishes are opaque, she has made contact through Keith, so they are unlikely to tally with Dalton’s objectives. He wants to know more about these ‘interests that (she) is trying to protect’. She parries this and asks what he is ‘hoping to get out of all this?’ ‘Rich, of course.’ She wants to chat person to person and confirms she neither works for the bank, nor is a cop. ‘Come on in’.

Keith and Madeleine head towards the bank with some cops. Keith says she’s ‘got ten minutes in there’. I know it’s not standard practice for mystery women to be ushered into a bank for tête-à-têtes with hostage takers but Keith seems to have accepted his place on the food chain. ‘I know this game is a mile over my head but I’m telling you, if you f*** me over…’ Madeleine assures him she ‘got where (she is) by collecting friends, not enemies’. She goes in.

Having been frisked, she potters over to the bank counter, where Dalton is lurking. ‘What makes you think I need help?’ ‘Well, the hundred people outside, for starters.’ Dalton’s not worried about them. Madeleine knows he knows that they’re not ‘fuelling (his) jet right now as we speak’ and lays out her offer. ‘If you give up now, I can ensure that you’ll serve the minimum. I’m thinking three years, four years at the most.’ ‘You can arrange that?’ ‘Well, you haven’t hurt anyone or stolen anything so yes, as a matter of fact, I can.’ Dalton wants more, and Madeleine has more to offer. ‘When you get out, you’ll have two million dollars.’ Dalton is intrigued. ‘Will I? How?’ It will be put ‘someplace safe’ to wait for him. Dalton, quite literally, says thanks but no thanks. Madeleine doesn’t see any alternatives for him but he nosily steers the conversation back to these mysterious ‘interests’ she keeps referencing. She remains schtum but Dalton knows it all anyway. ‘During World War II, there was an American working for a bank in Switzerland. (Cut to a shot of Case). Now, I don’t need to tell you that this period in history was rife with opportunity for people of low morals. People like this man. He used his position with the Nazis to enrich himself while all around him people were being stripped of everything they owned. Then he used his blood money to start a bank. Now, does this sound like it might be the man you work for or am I just whistling Dixie out of my ass?’ ‘I believe we understand each other,’ says Madeleine, still trying to maintain the façade that she holds the upper hand in this discussion. Dalton disabuses her of that notion, ‘what the hell can you do for me since I clearly know more than you do and I’ve planned this to perfection?’ Madeleine refuses to give up and clams that ‘if I need to, I can change your entire programme’. She lamely advises him to ‘stop being (her) problem’ and ‘start being (her) solution’ and demands two minutes in the safety deposit box room (no, not with Dalton). ‘I just need to go to one box.’ It transpires there’s no need, Dalton has the box on hand. ‘This could be very embarrassing to your employer.’ He shows her an envelope, helpfully daubed with a Swastika so we all know what‘s what. ‘He should have destroyed this a long time ago. He didn’t, so now it’s mine.’ Madeleine is happily lost for words for once so Dalton presses home his advantage. ‘Now, if the day ever comes where I have to stand before a judge and account for what I did here, you and your boss will do whatever it takes to help me.’ ‘You get out of here with that envelope and we’ll pay you a lot of money.’ Dalton will take that on board. ‘You’re not gonna tell me how you’re planning to get out of here are you?’ Madeleine asks. Au contraire. ‘I’m gonna walk right out the front door. Anything else?’ ‘How did you know about all this?’ I was wondering that myself. ‘Doesn’t matter. Fact is, all lies, all evil deeds, they stink. You can cover them up for a while, but they don’t go away.’ Well, from time to time they do go away, if the only evidence of them is in your possession and you destroy it. If you had documents about your person which proved that your fortune had been obtained by criminal means would you a) burn them before you can say ‘Jack Robinson’ b) put them through the paper shredder a billion times or c) put them in a safety deposit box at a bank, meaning there is a chance, however miniscule, that one day they will come to light. This is a cracking film but the entire plot does seem to be predicated on Chase answering c) to the above question. Anyway. Madeleine says ‘murder will out?’ Dalton says ‘precisely’ and turns to leave, although she still doesn’t get ‘what (he’s) doing here’. This pleases Dalton.

Madeleine gives Keith a heavily edited version of what occurred. ‘I told him that, since he hadn’t killed anyone, it wasn’t too late to surrender and get off with a lighter sentence’. She claims that was all folks but Keith laughs in her face. ‘You know, I don’t ordinarily get offended the first time somebody treats me like an idiot (good job) but you are pushing it.’ He wants the real scoop. ‘You don’t own me. This cheque-cashing thing, this coke bust, I can face that on my own … Talk to me.’ ‘Off the record?’ ‘Everything about you is off the record.’ She gave Dalton an ‘incentive’ and he’s supposedly ‘considering it’. Why did she have to go off the record to serve up that load of bull? Keith brings up how clever Dalton is. ‘One of your types, like the Ivy League type?’ ‘Clearly well educated.’ ‘That’s what I’m talking about.’ Keith now seems to have decided that, because Dalton and Madeleine may both have gone to Harvard, she’ll be able to predict his every move. ‘You talk like him, so think like him. What do you think he’s gonna do?’ ‘He’s not gonna kill anyone.’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘Because he’s not a murderer.’ ‘How do you know? … Most of the guys up in Sing Sing weren’t murderers until they killed somebody. You never know what a person will do until you push him into a corner.’ ‘But it doesn’t seem like you’ve pushed him into a corner.’ ‘It doesn’t does it? Seems more like he chose the corner.’ Keith thinks that she’s right and sends her on her way. ‘You got a card in case I need to call you?’ Madeleine spots a chance to make an arrogant exit. ‘I don’t think you can afford me.’ He doesn’t want your over-rated services woman, it may be something pertaining to the bank robbery. He tells her to ‘kiss (his) black ass’. ‘Careful, Detective Frazier. My bite’s much worse than my bark.’

Interview room. Abbot and Costello are talking to the young boy (Brian, eight and three-quarters) and his dad. Brian says he wasn’t scared in the bank. ‘I’m from Brooklyn .. Guns don’t scare me.’ Brian tells them about his encounter with Dalton. He looks at the photos but can’t pick Dalton out. ‘With the mask, they look all the same.’ Keith resignedly agrees.

A long-haired guy (Paul) with a criminal record is next for the treatment. Mitch reads out the salient details. ‘Attempted robbery. Liquor store. Well, this was a real step up for a small-timer like you, huh?’ Paul denies involvement and it turns out the liquor store charge was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. ‘I was out with some friends and they held up a liquor store. What was I supposed to do?’ He accuses Mitch of being a ‘Wassa Wassa’. It’s a Spanish phrase for ‘a person that don’t come to your neighbourhood’. Keith pipes up: ‘How do you say ‘Rikers Island’ in Spanish?’ Droll Keith, but not helpful.

The Rabbi looks at the photos but doesn’t recognise anyone so Keith, eager not to end their chat empty-handed, decides to get some marital advice. ‘What do you think a guy like me should pay for a diamond ring?’ It all depends. ‘If you’d like, I could give you my nephew’s number … You’ll get a very good deal.’

Ren and Stimpy stare ‘aggressively’ at a woman, who I think is Stevie. They want to see what she’s wearing under her painter’s gear, the cads! She’s well endowed. Mitch: ‘You see, there’s just you and one other woman that fit the physical description of the female suspect.’ She’s curious for further details. ‘It’s your height, your age, and your, um…’ Mitch is finding it all a bit awkward but the good ship Keith sails in to harbour to help him out. ‘Your cup size.’ ‘So, I violated Section 34 double-D?’ she quips. The lads look back at her blankly.