The Big Bad City

by McBain, Ed

  “Money?”

  “About the bill? It being too expensive. Anything like that?”

  “No, why would she?”

  “It came to something like nine dollars each. Including tip. Why would she think that was expensive?”

  “Well, she was on a tight budget, wasn’t she?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Never said anything about how hard it was to make ends meet?”

  “No. Why would she? She was earning a good salary.”

  “How much was she earning, do you know?”

  “Twenty-two dollars an hour, same as us. I think. No, wait a minute, it might have been less. Rene and I are RNs. Mary was an LPN.”

  “She was probably getting fifteen, sixteen bucks an hour,” Rene said. “But how is that pertinent?”

  “We’ve been told she was worried about money.”

  “What’s that got to do with how much money we earn? How much money do you earn, okay?”

  “Did she mention any threatening telephone calls or letters?”

  “No.”

  “Would you know if she owed money to anyone?”

  “Yes,” Jenna said. “She owed me a buck seventy-five for bus fare. Her transit card gave out, so I ran her through on mine.”

  · · ·

  Later, Rene told her mother that the shvartzeh had grilled her like a common criminal.

  “It’s what we get,” her mother said.

  Jenna later asked her boyfriend, who was a lawyer, if she could sue Carella for treating her like a common streetwalker.

  “How were you sitting?” her boy friend asked.

  6

  COOKIE BOY NEVER WENT FOR THE BIG SCORE. HE FIGURED THAT WAS FOR AMATEURS. EVERYBODY WAS IN THE business for money, sure, but amateurs were also in it for the glamour and the thrill, the goddamn glory. Amateurs thought of themselves as movie stars. Get past security in a luxury high-rise overlooking the park, pick the lock on the door, crack the safe behind the framed Rembrandt on the wall, walk off with a fortune. Thank you, thank, you, this is an honor. I also want to thank my mother, my drama coach, and my police dog.

  Amateurs.

  America was a nation of lucky amateurs.

  Cookie Boy never even thought of the big score. He’d see a lady in a sable coat that dusted her ankles, strutting out of a luxury building, doorman whistling for a cab, holding an umbrella for her, whisking her inside the taxi, Cookie Boy walked right on by. Sure, you managed to get in her pad you’d find a couple more furs, loads of diamonds, priceless artwork, whatever. Which you had to get out with, don’t forget. Even if you got past security once, going in, you still had to get past them a second time, going out. Not only going out, but going out with a shitpot full of stolen goods, try explaining that to the members of the Academy, thank you all, I love you all so very much, this is such a great honor.

  What Cookie Boy had learned early on in his career was that even poor people had treasures. Whether it was a locket that used to be Grandma’s they kept in a candy tin, or five hundred bucks hidden in the bottom rail of a venetian blind, everybody had something. Well, not everybody. He didn’t go into tenement apartments in Diamondback, for example, where he wouldn’t find anything but cockroaches and empty crack vials.

  Cookie Boy chose to walk the middle ground.

  He considered himself a moderate.

  He knew there were people in the profession who felt that if you were going to take the chance of going in at all, then you might as well go for the big one. You were looking at the same time whether you walked off with Grandma’s locket or the rich lady’s sable. It was all burglary. Well, there were different degrees of burglary, depending on whether you went in armed—he never went in armed, that was foolish—or whether it was the daytime or the nighttime or whether it was a dwelling or a place of business, or whether the place was occupied at the time or not. All of these factors determined how long you could stay in prison, where Cookie Boy had never been, and where he never intended to go, thank you very much.

  But the amateur thinking went: If you’re looking at five, ten, twenty, whatever, depending on the particular circumstances, God forbid you should kill somebody during the commission, which made it a felony murder and you were looking at the long one, baby—

  But the amateur thinking went: Suppose you were looking at ten in the slammer, that wasn’t going to change no matter what you stole, the price of admission was ten in the slammer, got it? You wanted to play, you had to understand you were looking at ten down the line if you got caught.

  Cookie Boy never intended to get caught.

  First of all because he didn’t go after the really big scores, that was for amateurs. Second because he was content with the smaller hits, didn’t go around grumbling or complaining, didn’t tell bartenders he coulda been a contenduh, didn’t let it bother him that he went home with three, four grand a week instead of five hundred thou on a single hit. Cookie Boy was living well and enjoying himself besides. And every now and then, he’d pop a crib and lo and behold he’d discover a red-fox jacket and a candy tin full of all kinds of baubles and beads. He’d fence the jacket for five hundred and the jewelry for a thou, which gave him a fifteen-hundred-dollar profit for jimmying a window and spending twenty minutes in an apartment.

  Sometimes you went in and you found a shithole, what could you do? You could tell at a glance you wouldn’t find anything of value in such an apartment, but you tossed it fast, anyway, so it shouldn’t be a total loss, and you got out as fast as you came in, no sense looking at time for no reason at all, risks were for amateurs. Never mind leaving any cookies, either, thanks for nothing, lady!

  What he tried to do was find a well-kept building in a low-crime area, didn’t have to be silk stocking. Just your average middle-class neighborhood where you’d find buildings without doormen, some of them walk-ups without elevators, it didn’t matter. You were looking for something without security. You walked the neighborhood three or four times, got the feel of it, looked for steps leading down to the backyards, made a few trips behind the buildings. Anybody questioned you, you told them you were a “city inspector,” checking “ordinances,” and you moved on to another block. If you took no risks, you spent no time upstate.

  The backyards were another world.

  It was like being inside a piece of modern sculpture back there, a fantastic universe of flapping clotheslines and telephone poles and fire escapes and soot-stained brick and blue sky overhead, all crazy angles, wood and iron and concrete against the soft billowing curves of laundry drying. Another world. Music coming from open windows, television voices blending with real voices, toilets flushing, cooking smells floating out over fences and walls, a private world back here, hidden from the street. Exciting, too, in a way that had nothing to do with risk. Exciting because it was an intimate glimpse. Like catching sight of a girl’s panties when she crossed her legs.

  In the summertime, you avoided any apartment where a window was open. This usually meant somebody was home trolling for a breath of fresh air. An occupied apartment was the one thing on earth you did not desire, unless you were an amateur who got his kicks scaring sick old ladies in bed. Apartments with air conditioners were tricky because all the windows had to be kept closed, and you couldn’t tell if anyone was in there or not. So you looked for an apartment with closed windows and fire-escape access, and then you took your chances. Went up, listened outside, you could usually tell if anybody was home or not. Lots of windows were closed but unlocked; people got careless, even in a city like this one. If the window was locked, you jimmied it. If the lock was painted shut, you used a glass cutter, though in such cases it was usually best to meander on by and look for another score. You dropped a piece of glass, the noise of it shattering was the best burglar alarm in the world. Once you had the window open, you took a deep breath and went in.

  The apartment he’d chosen today was on the third floor of one of those white-brick buildings that had been all the r
age a few decades back. Once they got covered with all the filth and grime of the city, they didn’t look so hot anymore, and landlords discovered they cost a fortune to clean, so they just let them revert to the jungle. Some of these buildings still had doormen, but not the one he’d chosen. This one was sandwiched between two red-brick walk-ups. He preferred a building with access to structures on either side, rather than a corner one. When there were adjoining buildings, if ever push came to shove you had rooftop escape routes.

  The backyard here was uncommonly still this afternoon.

  He thought at first something might be wrong, everything so still. The way a forest went suddenly still whenever a predator approached. He stood in the tunnel leading from the steps into the yard itself, garbage cans already in for the night at three-thirty in the afternoon, lined up along the walls of the tunnel, faint whiff of garbage here, everything so still. He waited. If the super or anyone else was prowling the backyard, he’d do his city-inspector routine and disappear. What he usually did, a building like this one, he went in through the fire escape and then took the elevator on his way out, if there was one. Otherwise, he walked down the stairs and strolled out through the lobby. He never went in with anything but a small suitcase containing his tools and the box of chocolate chip cookies he’d baked that morning. He was holding that suitcase in his right hand now.

  He kept waiting.

  It was very hot here in the tunnel. He moved to the very end of it where he had a better view of the yard, white sheets hanging limply overhead on a breezeless afternoon. Somewhere a radio was going. He loved the intimacy back here.

  Well, he thought, let’s boldly go, and stepped out into brilliant sunshine. The yard was empty. The radio was playing an opera, he didn’t know which one. He moved swiftly toward the fire escape he had located on his last reconnaissance mission, jumped up for the hanging ladder, pulled it down, and began climbing in almost the same motion. The windows on the first-and second-floor landings were closed. He walked quickly past them, and climbed to the third floor. The tenor was reaching for a high note. It hung on the summer air, liquid and pure, and then fell with a dying grace.

  He crouched outside the window, listening intently.

  The apartment was still.

  He tried the window gently. Like a skilled craftsman, he knew better than to force anything. He always tried it delicately, seeing if it would ease open at a touch. Sometimes, he got lucky. The window slid open under his hands, but an unlocked window didn’t mean an apartment was empty. He waited, listening. He had read someplace that professional burglars always went in through a door. Subverted the alarm, picked the lock, went in that way. Burglars who went in windows were supposed to be junkie burglars, your smash-and-grab types. He was not a junkie, but he was most certainly a burglar. In fact, he was a professional burglar going in through a window right this very minute, Beam me down, Scottie, he thought, and stepped through and dropped softly to the floor.

  He was in a dining room.

  The apartment was dim, not a light burning, no sunlight streaming through the east-facing windows at this hour of the day. Still as a tomb. Just what one would expect at three-thirty in the afternoon, occupants off working or shopping, place all to himself. He kept listening. Every minute he was inside, he listened. Never knew when someone might be coming home unexpectedly. He heard an elevator moving up the shaft. Heard a telephone ringing in an apartment somewhere on the floor. Heard the muffled voice of an answering machine picking up. Listened. At last, he took a chamois cloth from the small suitcase, and turned back to the window, and wiped the sill behind him, and the sash inside and out.

  He never started in a dining room because he didn’t know anything about expensive dinnerware, and silverware was heavy to carry and often difficult to fence. He never stole television sets, either, because that was a sure way of getting a hernia, struggling a heavy TV set out of the building. He waited a moment longer, and then, still carrying the suitcase, he moved toward a closed door at the end of the room. Again, he moved cautiously. Turned the knob slowly and gently, eased the door open, and stepped into a long corridor running left and right from the open door.

  To the left were walls bearing framed photographs. At the end of the corridor, there was a closed door. To the right, there was an open door leading into a kitchen. People sometimes hid jewelry in ice cube trays, he wondered if he should give the fridge a shot first. Listened again. Someone turning a water faucet on either next door or above. Off again. Silence again, except for what he long ago learned to identify as ambient room noise.

  He decided to try what he guessed was a bedroom behind the closed door at the end of the corridor. The bedroom was where you usually hit the jackpot. This was where the man of the house kept his watches and his cuff links, the lady kept her bracelets and necklaces and rings. Cash, too, you’d find in dresser drawers or even old shoe boxes. Rich people took their valuables to banks and put them in safe-deposit boxes. Bedrooms were the vaults of the lower middle class and the poor.

  The photographs on the wall were family pictures, most of them black-and-white, more recent ones in color. A blonde woman and her obvious husband were the framed stars of weddings and graduations and birthday parties and picnics, and other indoor and outdoor events Cookie Boy could not nor did not care to identify. Walking softly past and through the smiling faces on either side of him, he knew he was marching through a history not his own, and one he somehow resented. By the time he reached the door at the end of the hall, he was mildly annoyed, although he could not have clearly explained why to anyone, least of all himself.

  He took the knob in his hand and gently twisted it.

  He eased the door open.

  A woman was naked and flat on her back on the bed, legs and arms widespread. A man was between her legs, similarly naked.

  Cookie Boy’s heart leaped into his throat.

  He stood unseen in the open doorway, transfixed, scarcely daring to breathe.

  He was backing away when the couple decided to change positions. The man rolled off of her, turning as he did. The woman sat up. They both saw Cookie Boy in the very same instant. The woman was the blonde who’d featured so prominently in most of the photographs lining the wall outside. In her late forties, Cookie Boy guessed, with a round face and wide surprised blue eyes. The man, however, was not the one in so many of the photos outside, the smiling, dark-eyed, mustached man so obviously her husband. In fact, the man naked in bed with her was hardly a man at all. He was instead a boy of sixteen or seventeen with flaming red hair and a freckled face and eyes as blue and as surprised as the woman’s.

  Cookie Boy had stumbled into a matinee with the delivery boy. He had walked smack into a burlesque skit, which might have been comical if he hadn’t been here to burglarize the apartment.

  “Oh my God!” the woman yelled, as well she might have since she’d never seen Cookie Boy in her life and here he was standing in her bedroom door holding a suitcase in his right hand, as if he were checking into a hotel, and here she was in bed with a sweaty kid named Jerry whose last name she didn’t even know, while her husband was toiling downtown in the law offices of Hamlin, Gerstein and Konstantine, whose first names she sometimes couldn’t remember, like now.

  “Don’t get nervous,” Cookie Boy said. “I’m out of here.”

  But the delivery boy had other ideas.

  Cookie Boy could not later clearly remember the flow of events that followed. He supposed the initial impetus had something to do with the high level of testosterone in teenage boys especially when they got excited. What happened was the kid jumped off the bed like Spider Man himself, hurling himself on Cookie Boy’s back just as he was turning to flee.

  “Jerry, let him go!” the blonde yelled.

  “Call the cops, Mrs. Cooper!” the kid yelled. But Mrs. Cooper wasn’t about to call any cops because here she was naked in bed with little Jerry here at three-thirty in the afternoon, why the hell would she want cops here? Why not s
ell tickets instead? “Call the cops!” he yelled again, hanging on tight to Cookie Boy, which forced him to ram his elbow backward into the kid’s gut. The last thing he wanted here was physical combat of any nature, but Jerry grabbed his shoulder, and spun him around, and brought up his fists in the classic street fighter’s pose, naked, however, freckled, and still wearing an erection you might have thought would have disappeared by now, but apparently the fight was keeping him excited.

  The blonde hadn’t yet screamed. Cookie Boy kept hoping she wouldn’t scream. All he wanted to do was get out of this apartment and out the front door and down the steps to the street. But the kid kept swinging as if trying to prove he was Mrs. Cooper’s true champion and defender, punching repeatedly at Cookie Boy’s face, hurting him now, jabbing at his eyes and his nose, drawing blood from the nose, a torrent of blood, causing Cookie Boy to see red at last, literally. The woman also saw all that blood—and panicked. She didn’t scream yet, but she panicked. This was the most dangerous moment, the woman panicking. But Cookie Boy didn’t realize this because he was too busy trying to keep the delivery boy out of his face.

  Blood was pouring steadily from his nose. Jerry kept jabbing at his eyes, trying to close them. Mrs. Cooper was scrabbling across the bed on her hands and knees now, naked, scooting for the night table beside the bed, but Cookie Boy didn’t see this. He kept trying to defend himself from this little prick with the hard-on, but his left eye was already punched shut, and the kid was working steadily on the right. There was a phone on the night table, but Mrs. Cooper wasn’t going for the phone. Mrs. Cooper was opening the drawer in the night table. She was taking a gun from the night-table drawer. From his still miraculously open right eye, Cookie Boy saw the gun, and now he panicked, because what was supposed to have been a very simple burglary was turning into something quite messy.

  “You dumb fuck!” he yelled, and flailed out at the kid, moving inside his punishing fists, getting in close, and bringing his knee up sharp and hard into the kid’s balls. Like magic, the erection folded and so did the kid. Doubled over, moaning, he backed away, one hand clutching his groin,the other extended in mute supplication. Cookie Boy turned toward the blonde.