Put a Lid on It

by Donald E. Westlake

  At the corner, Meehan turned left, to walk next to the side of the building and to see that the service entrance was an eight-foot-high iron gate, shut tight, with a garbage-can-lined alleyway running ten feet deep behind it, burrowing into the building, with a closed metal door at the far end. Ahead of him was Riverside Drive, and beyond that the Hudson River and America.

  Meehan circled the block, thinking. The only way in was past the doorman, but he didn't want to be announced. Coming back around to West End, he crossed it and continued on to Broadway, turning south there until he found the second hardware store of the day. In this one, he bought a four-foot metal ladder and a smoke detector, then walked back to 279 with the ladder's next-to-last rung resting on his right shoulder, smoke detector in his left hand. This time, he walked straight to the building, where the doorman, faintly surprised, opened the door and said, “Yeah?”

  “Smoke detector,” Meehan told him, showing it.

  The doorman looked at the box. “For what?”

  “Elevator.”

  “The elevator? Nobody told me.”

  “Well, they told me, replace the smoke detector.”

  “Which elevator?” the doorman demanded.

  “In the back.”

  Sounding dubious, the doorman said, “Go ahead. They didn't tell me a thing about it.”

  “Thanks, pal,” Meehan said, and carried the ladder past the elevator at the front end of the lobby because he was operating from the assumption that they would number the apartments from the front, which would put H at the back.

  The elevator was already here. Meehan boarded, didn't look back to see if the doorman was watching him, opened the ladder, started up it, and the elevator door closed. He immediately pushed 8.

  Having no further need for the ladder, he closed it and left it leaning in the elevator. In the short hall here, he looked at the apartment doors, and found H first on the right. He approached it, reaching into his pockets for some of his recent purchases, but there was something weird about the door. A length of shiny electrician's tape was stretched over the striker plate, from the outside of the jamb inward, so that when the door was closed the bolt wouldn't snap into place. The door would close, but it wouldn't lock.

  Who would do a thing like that? Who would put a piece of tape over a doorlock that you could see from outside? Nobody Meehan knew.

  Very cautiously, he pushed open the door. What he looked in at was a small square vestibule with heavy woodwork around the door frames, painted thirty times the last hundred years. A Utrillo print hung on the wall to the left, over a rickety little table with an empty cut-glass vase on it. To the right was a closed door, probably a closet. Ahead was a doorless entryway to a living room furnished out of the Salvation Army; heavy old pieces, kind of shabby but more or less kept up.

  Meehan slid through the doorway and let the door slowly close behind him, having to hold it because there was a very strong spring in the hinges. Maybe that's why the tape was on there; the unlocking button was stuck, as they often were in these old buildings because nobody ever used them, and the door simply wouldn't stay open by itself. But why would anybody want it to stay open?

  The door closed gently enough, but nevertheless something in its mechanism, at the last second, went click. Meehan froze, and his alert ears heard a chair scrape on a floor, two rooms away.

  No. He pulled open the door on his right, and it not only was the closet he'd expected, it was full of coats and sweaters and scarves and overshoes. Meehan slid in, pulling the door shut behind himself, scrunching through all the hanging coats, getting behind them, standing with shoulder blades against the inner wall, face in a lot of wool shoulders.

  “Yehudi?” It sounded like the same gruff voice Meehan had heard on the phone. Now it was in the living room, headed this way. “Yehudi?”

  Pause. Do I want to sneeze, Meehan wondered, and decided no, he didn't. That was a relief.

  The closet door opened. Meehan didn't move a corpuscle. The closet door closed.

  Meehan waited a good long time, what seemed like hours but was probably forty seconds, then very slowly and quietly pushed the closet door open. Nobody in the vestibule. Unfortunately, the door opened toward the living room, so he had to keep opening it until he could lean out and see around it, but then fortunately the living room was empty. He took a step from the closet, and the hall door to his left pushed open toward him, and Meehan teleported himself back into the closed closet, shoulder blades against the inner wall.

  Somebody in the vestibule. A nearby voice called, “Mostafa?” Then the closet door opened, and Meehan stopped breathing.

  “There you are,” said the original gruff voice, from some distance away.

  The new one—must be Yehudi—pawed around in the closet looking for a hanger while Meehan's cheekbones shriveled, then found one, as he said, “I got here as soon as I could. I take it he didn't show up yet.”

  “No. The doorman will have to announce him. And who knows where he's coming from?”

  Listening to them now, this close, it seemed to Meehan they both had faint accents, maybe the same, maybe not.

  Yehudi shoved the hanger back into the closet, now with a zippered vinyl jacket on it, and said, “Do we need a ladder? There's one in the elevator.”

  “For what? No, leave it.”

  “What I'd really like right now,” Yehudi said, “is a glass of tea.”

  “I have some brewed,” Mostafa told him. “Oh, take that tape off the door, now you're back.”

  “Right.” Yehudi laughed. “Wouldn't look good if our boy noticed that, would it?”

  They went away then, chuckling together. Meehan waited until he couldn't stand the silence any more, then moved forward through the coats, reaching for the door, feeling something hard and heavy in the inner pocket of the vinyl jacket Yehudi had just parked here. Knowing what it was, but having to verify the knowledge anyway, he felt around to the opening of the jacket, reached inside, and stuck fingers down into the pocket. It was pitch black in here, but his fingers knew a gun when they felt one; a small flat automatic. Afraid he might accidentally touch the trigger and shoot himself in the chest, he slowly inched his fingers back outa there.

  Who were these people? Foreign, and violent, or at least armed. Meehan thought Yehudi was a Jewish name. Was Mostafa?

  And what should he do about them? He himself was not a violent person, never had been. Sometimes, on a job, it would be a good idea for somebody to carry heat, but that somebody was never Meehan, and he preferred it when the heat remained implicit. So he wasn't going to lay hold of Yehudi's automatic now, brace the two guys over their glasses of tea, and demand to know what was going on around here.

  Still, he wanted to know. Today was Friday, October 15, and he had only until next Thursday, October 21, to put together a crew, case the Burnstone gun collection, plot and execute the job, and deliver the package to Jeffords. Not much time, and he didn't want to spend great stretches of it hanging around in Goldfarb's closet.

  So it was time to get out of here, figure out the situation, find out if he was going to need a new lawyer; for instance, if Goldfarb was lying dead in the bedroom, certainly a possibility. That happy thought having given him a slightly queasy feeling, he swallowed noisily, then silently pushed open the closet door.

  Voices, probably two rooms away. Casual, chatting voices. Meehan eased out of the closet and through the vestibule into the living room, wanting to be close enough to hear what they were saying but not close enough to be part of the conversation.

  In the living room, there were two windows on the left, a closed door on the right, and an open door straight ahead through which he could see part of a kitchen. It was from the kitchen the voices came. Meehan took a step toward that door, and the closed door on the right opened. He froze, and Goldfarb came out, looking angry and determined. The first thing he noticed was the set of handcuffs dangling from her left wrist, and the second thing he noticed was the pistol in he
r right hand. Another gun! Were all these people crazy?

  Apparently. Goldfarb, determined on what she was doing, not noticing Meehan in the doorway to her left, turned toward the open kitchen doorway to her right, snub-nosed pistol held out in front of her.

  No! You don't want to do that. “Sss,” Meehan said, and again, “Sss!”

  Startled, she turned her head, then looked absolutely astonished to see him there. He made come-to-me gestures with both hands, like the navy man on the aircraft carrier guiding the airplane into position. He backed into the vestibule, gesturing and shaking his head. Do not go into the kitchen. Do not go among those people in the kitchen.

  She hesitated. He could feel the intensity with which she wanted a confrontation, but a wiser head was going to prevail, and at this particular moment he was the wiser head around here, so he gestured more vigorously than ever, then mouthed NO, then turned both hands into guns and pantomimed them shooting at each other. He clutched his chest over his heart and let his head loll, tongue hanging out. Then he reached behind him for the knob of the apartment door, turned it slowly and quietly, and pulled the door open. Next he backed through the doorway to the hall, holding the door with right hand, beckoning with left, and all at once she made her decision. She held her cuffed hand up, palm out: wait.

  Okay, he'll wait. She turned and hurried back into the room she'd come out of, and when she returned ten long seconds later the gun was replaced by that big black leather bag, bumping on her hip. She hurried toward him, and he let the door snick shut behind her.

  Immediately, she had a cellphone out of her bag. “Wait,” he whispered. “Who you calling?”

  “The cops!”

  “Don't. Come away from the door. Tell me what's going on.”

  She let him move her down the hall to the elevator as she said, “I don't know what's going on. They're spies or something. They want to know about you.”

  “Me? What about me?”

  “They want to know what you're supposed to get for the president.”

  He stared at her. “They know about that?”

  “They don't know what it is, that's what they came around for, but I don't know either, so they were waiting around to make contact with you.”

  “And you're gonna call the cops? Ms. Goldfarb, let's take a ride in an elevator,” he finished, having already buttoned for it and it now arriving.

  She didn't want to board. “I can't leave those people in my apartment!”

  “I can't think of a better place for them,” he said. “Who we want to call is Jeffords. If you call the cops, what do you tell them?”

  “I don't, I—”

  “Elevator,” he insisted, being tired of holding its door open, and at last she stepped aboard. He followed her, and pushed LOBBY.

  She was looking at the ladder. “Where'd that come from?”

  “I brought it,” he said. “When we go out past your doorman, we're not together. Then we'll go over to Broadway and take a cab down to my place.”

  The look she gave him was ready to turn very hostile. “Your place?”

  “That's where Jeffords' phone number is. Listen, Ms. Goldfarb, they got you scared and they got you mad, but now it's time to slow down and think like a lawyer. You've got foreign spies that know there's something bad out there about your president, but they don't know what it is, but they'd like to get it for themselves. Why not have their own handle on the American president's back? But where did they find out the part they already know? Only from Jeffords' organization, that campaign committee. So he's who we want to talk to, because with the cops, you get one sentence in, then what you gonna say?”

  The elevator stopped and the door opened. Picking up his ladder, “After you,” Meehan said.

  20

  THEIR CABBY, RUNNING down Broadway, wore a skinny headset-mike thing so he could keep both hands on the wheel while engaged in a passionate, sometimes angry, sometimes sorrowful, telephone call in his native Dzavhan-Mongol dialect, a language that sounds mostly like a water buffalo clearing its throat. Under cover of this monologue, Goldfarb brought Meehan up to date.

  The doorman had announced the intruders as being from Bruce Benjamin. Not seeing any reason for anybody to lie about that, she'd said okay, send them up. When she opened the apartment door to them, they promptly pulled guns on her and handcuffed her with the cuff chain going around the cold water pipe under her bathroom sink. With her in that awkward and uncomfortable position, they made threats, but didn't touch her, insisting she tell them what it was Meehan was supposed to steal for the president. When she convinced them she didn't know the answer to that question, because why would anybody have given her that information, they decided to stick around until Meehan should make contact with his attorney, then ask him. Very angry, she had spent a long time spitting on her right wrist—“You were spitting mad,” he said, which left her unamused—and trying to squeeze that cuff off. When she finally succeeded, having scraped the skin pretty badly—“Ouch,” he said, looking at it, “we better get you some first-aid stuff.” “Later,” she said—she immediately got her own firearm from her bedside table drawer, being too mad even to think about her cellphone, which was probably just as well, and marched out of her bedroom to find Meehan himself there, having been very brave and unexpectedly altruistic, racing up there to rescue her.

  Meehan didn't mind that. If she wanted to believe he'd gone to her place on a mission of mercy, and not merely to find out what the situation meant for his own personal well-being, that was fine with him. “It was nothing,” he said, and watched while she paid the cab.

  In the motel lobby, he said, “They got a little gift shop, maybe you can find something to put on your wrist, while I go up and get the phone number.”

  “Why don't I come with you?”

  “I'm not gonna call from there,” he said, “through the switchboard. We'll find a nice noisy pay phone down by Times Square.”

  “You're the expert,” she said. She had found a rubber band somewhere in her shoulderbag and was using it to hold the dangling part of the handcuff to her left wrist, where it would be less noticeable.

  Leaving her to that, he went up to his room and found Jeffords' phone number, and when he came back down to the lobby she had a big square Band-Aid on her right wrist, allegedly flesh-colored, that made her look like a failed suicide. Pointing at it, he said, “Feel any better?”

  “I'll feel better when I can go back to an empty apartment,” she said.

  “Okay, let's find that phone.”

  The first two outdoor phones they found were broken, quite badly, as though they'd been in use by a person who'd suddenly had a psychotic episode, but the third one was fine. The number Jeffords had given Meehan started with 800, so there was no problem about putting bunches of money in or making the call collect.

  Unfortunately, the number also led directly to cheerful inhuman-yet-female voices offering menus. If you want to shit, press 1; if you want to go blind, press 2; that sort of thing. Meehan suffered through this for a very long time, under the keen raptor eye of Goldfarb, twice having to press numbers to lead him to “further options,” and then having to be very alert when one of those options was, “Enter the first three letters of your party's name.” Squinting at the buttons, Meehan pounded out 5 3 3, leading another voice to say, “If your party is Hal Jeffcott, press one. If your party is Wilma Jefferson, press two. If your party is Patrick Jeffords, press three. If—”

  Meehan whomped 3. Somewhere a phone began to ring. It rang twice, and then Jeffords' voice, sounding not quite human, said, “Hi, this is Pat Jeffords. I'm sorry I can't take your call right now—”

  “Fuck,” Meehan commented.

  “—please leave your name and number and the time of your call, and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Have a nice day.” Then there was a beep.

  “Fuck you, too,” Meehan told the recording device. “You know who this is, and the time is—” Aside, to Goldfarb, he said, “
What time is it?”

  She studied her watch. “Three-forty.”

  “The time here is three-forty,” Meehan recorded, “and I'm standing here at a pay phone on Ninth Avenue in New York City with Goldfarb.” He read the number off the face of the machine and said, “You have five minutes to call me back, or the deal is off, and we'll call the cops to come get the foreign spies out of Goldfarb's apartment.” Hanging up, he said, “Enough is enough.”

  “Nicely done,” she said. “What if he doesn't call in five minutes?”

  “You call the cops, and I steal a car and drive to Idaho.”

  She said, “Idaho? Why Idaho?”

  “Because the feds are afraid to go there,” he said, and the phone rang. Picking up the receiver, he said, “Go ahead.”

  It was Jeffords' voice, gone supersonic: “Spies? Foreign spies? What are you talking about?”

  “Two guys,” Meehan told him, “named Yehudi and Mostafa broke into Goldfarb's apartment. They know you sent me to get something, and they know why, but they don't know what it is. They leaned on Goldfarb, and they wanted to lean on me, but we both got outa there. Let me tell you something, Mr. Jeffords, in my business we don't have leaks, we never have leaks, but in your business you don't have anything except leaks, and this one is leaking on me. And Goldfarb.”

  “My God,” Jeffords said. “I can't think what, who'd—”

  “She wants to go back to her apartment,” Meehan interrupted. “Does she call the cops?”

  “What? No!”

  “So what does she do?”

  “I don't—I'll have to look into this.”

  “In the meantime,” Meehan said, “this is distracting me from the job. Remember the deadline?”

  “Oh, God.”

  “You said that before. When can Goldfarb get back into her apartment?”

  “I don't know yet, I'll have to check into this.”