Read You Don't Love This Man for Free Online Page A

“O’Brien.”
    â€œStatement about what?” Martinez said. “He wasn’t present, so there’s nothing for him to state. Miss L’Esprit has been very helpful.” He nodded toward Catherine, and she ducked her head with a little dash of Gallic pride upon hearing her last name correctly pronounced to rhyme with unfree . “Everyone’s statements agree, and we’ve got the description from your teller,” Martinez continued. “Middle-aged men in suits don’t rob banks on the spur of the moment, so we’re probably dealing with a professional, which is good. Amateurs get nervous and hurt people, but pros are just passing through.”
    O’Brien peered at his notepad. “Too bad he took his note with him. It would be fun to see it. This is a robery . Hah. I’m impressed your teller noticed the mistake in such a stressful moment.”
    Martinez frowned, though it was unclear whether it was themisspelling or O’Brien’s delight in it that he disliked. “She didn’t know it was a stressful moment until she’d already read the note, so you’ve got the cart before the horse there,” he said. “No offense to the young lady.”
    â€œAnalyzing the handwriting would have been nice, though,” O’Brien said.
    â€œSo we could know if the guy was romantic or creative?” Martinez said. “Come on, we’re just lucky his spelling wasn’t worse, or she might not have understood the guy’s intentions at all. I’ve seen that in other situations, and it can spin the whole incident in a bad direction.”
    The officers argued over whether spelling errors revealed anything significant about a robber, O’Brien claiming yes, Martinez, no. Some preexisting rift between them had clearly translated itself into aggressive conversational cross-checking, and though I could have shared my own robbery experience, it would only have been grist for the mill between them. There was something off-putting about the fact that they felt they were experts on an experience they had never actually had. I understood police officers investigated robberies, and had no doubt Officer Martinez had probably investigated hundreds of them. But cops themselves are not robbed, and I very much doubted whether either of these men had ever been held up off duty, either. And because I had been robbed before, I couldn’t help but feel they were stepping on my toes when it came to theorizing about bank robbers. One thing I have noticed, however—and I will try to say this with as little self-pity as possible—is that no one particularly cares about the thoughts of bank managers. We are numbers men, people feel, and small-numbers men, at that. But I wished these cops would just, for the love of God, shut up. I maintained a neutral expression andsaid nothing, though, and it wasn’t until Martinez said he’d rather read a man by his face than by his spelling that Catherine finally stopped their inanities by saying, “Oh! But we can. The photos should be e-mailed by now.”
    I had forgotten about the system the bank had installed that fall, brown plastic cylinders no more than eighteen inches tall that rose between each teller station. Designed to blend visually into the mahogany dividers and beige countertops, each cylinder had a small aperture at the top through which a camera snapped a photo every time a customer stepped to the counter. Every inch of the branch fell within the gaze of one camera or another, of course, but most were hidden behind tinted ceiling domes or tucked in corners, so these new lenses just two feet from customers’ faces seemed especially bold. A few customers made halfhearted complaints, but there was really nothing to be done about it, and bank security boasted they would now be able to e-mail within an hour the image of any person who had seen a teller. After installation we heard neither