Doors

by Ed McBain

  He’d thought of moving after he’d kicked her out, not because he thought she’d send someone after him or anything like that, but only because the place seemed so damn big without her in it. He’d decided to stay, though, because it was really hard to find anything as good for this price; and besides, the squares all around him were a nice cover. Everytime the cops came around, he said to them, “Look where I live, I’m surrounded by hard-working people, won’t you guys ever believe I’m out of it?”

  “Sure, Alex,” the cops always said.

  He dressed and left the apartment.

  It was still pouring bullets when he got down to the lobby of his building and saw the girl standing just inside the entrance door, staring out dismally at the downpour. The girl was a square who lived in his building. He’d noticed her because she was a very attractive blonde, maybe four or five years older than he was, certainly no older than thirty-one or -two. The first time he’d seen her, she was walking up toward Broadway with her husband, who was pushing a little blond kid in one of those canvas strollers. That must have been in September. It was still mild outside, and she was wearing a skirt and a blouse without any bra underneath. She had a good set, and her nipples were poking through the fabric. He remembered thinking at the time that if he had a wife who ran around advertising her tits that way, he’d have busted her head for her. She and her husband had both recognized him from the building and nodded to him as he went past.

  Alex happened to have been carrying sixty-seven hundred dollars in cash that day because he had just ripped off an apartment in the Village and had delivered the goods to Vito, who had paid him on the spot. That had been a good score. He had stumbled upon a coin collection, and there wasn’t a fence in the city who discounted a coin collection. You always got face value for stamp collections, too. They were almost as good as credit cards, though nothing but cash beat credit cards. The trouble with credit cards was that you rarely found any during your daytime burglaries; the guy usually had them with him, in his wallet. Your nighttime crib burglar, the stupid bastard who went rummaging around in bedrooms while a man and a woman were asleep across the room, could count on scoring a lot of credit cards. But then, even if he got away without waking anybody up, the man he’d stolen the cards from would report them missing first thing in the morning, so you hardly ever got a chance to charge anything with them. The best thing to do if you stumbled across a wallet with credit cards in it was to take only one of them, or two at the most. If a guy had a dozen cards in his wallet, he might not miss the one stolen American Express card, and you could charge thousands of dollars of stuff with it before he reported it stolen.

  Alex was dressed for the weather, wearing a trench coat and a rain hat, and he was also carrying an umbrella since he figured he might have to spend quite a bit of time standing in the rain on Sixty-ninth Street. The girl had on a black raincoat and one of those clear plastic things on her head, but she wasn’t carrying an umbrella, and she’d have drowned in a minute if she stepped outside. As Alex started opening his umbrella, the girl said, “Are you walking up to Broadway?” This surprised him. In New York, people who lived in the same apartment building hardly ever spoke to each other.

  “Yes,” he said, “I am.”

  “Would you mind sharing your umbrella with me?” she said. “I’ll never get a taxi here, I’ve been waiting for fifteen minutes now.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  He opened the umbrella and she got under it, and together they began walking up toward Broadway.

  “I’m supposed to be downtown by ten o’clock,” she said. “I’ll never make it.”

  “You might have trouble getting a cab even up on Broadway,” he said.

  “I should have allowed myself more time,” she said. “I should have told the sitter eight-thirty instead of nine. But I didn’t know it’d be raining like this.”

  “How far down are you going?” he asked.

  “All the way to Pine Street.”

  “That’s a good half-hour,” he said. “Even if you get a cab right off.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I should have planned better.”

  They stood on the corner of Broadway and Ninety-eighth for ten minutes and then walked down to Ninety-sixth, hoping they might catch a cab running crosstown on the wider thoroughfare. The girl kept looking at her watch. Alex wondered about her. Ten o’clock was a little early for a matinee, but who the hell knew? Your most respectable-looking ladies sometimes spent the whole damn day fucking their brains out in New Jersey motels while their husbands were breaking their asses at a nine-to-five. He spotted a cab in the distance and whistled for it, and then waved frantically when the cab showed no sign of slowing down. The driver saw him at the last moment, cut across a lane of traffic to get to the curb, and then squealed to a puddle-splashing stop beside them.

  “Thank God!” the girl said, and reached immediately for the door handle, and then belatedly said, “Can I give you a lift downtown?”

  “I don’t want to take you out of your way,” he said.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Lincoln Center,” he lied.

  “I can drop you,” she said, “come on,” and got into the taxi and slid across the leather seat. He got in beside her, closed the door, and told the cabby where they were going. As the taxi moved away from the curb, she opened her bag, took out a package of cigarettes, and offered him one.

  “Thanks,” he said, “I don’t smoke.”

  She lit her own cigarette, exhaling a cloud of smoke that seemed a visual sigh of relief. Rain lashed the windshield, the rubber blades of the wipers snicked at it steadily. There was the sound, too, of the tires hissing against the wet asphalt, and the scent in that small contained space of wet and steamy garments, evocative of some other time, a time he could not clearly remember. The girl took the plastic cover from her head and then fluffed out her hair. It was cut close to her head, it looked like a nest of yellow feathers. She had blue eyes that squinched ever so slightly each time she took a drag on the cigarette. Her nose was narrow, with a delicate dusting of freckles on the bridge. She had a wide mouth with a full lower lip. A piece of cigarette paper stuck to the lip, and her tongue darted out to free it, and then she picked the paper off her tongue with thumb and forefinger and said, “I just hope he hasn’t got another appointment after mine.”

  “Who’s that?” Alex asked.

  She crossed her legs. She had good legs, but her nylons were spattered with darkish spots from the rain puddles. “My lawyer,” she said, and let out a stream of smoke. Does this bother you?” she asked, indicating the cigarette.

  “No, no. Are you in trouble?”

  “Trouble?”

  “A lawyer, I mean.”

  “Oh,” she said, and laughed lightly. “Well, yes, I suppose you could call it trouble. My husband and I are getting a divorce.”

  “Too bad,” Alex said.

  “I’m the one who wants it,” she said.

  “Still,” he said, not knowing really what to say. Only squares got married in the first place. If you could get all you needed without being tied down to anybody, what was the sense?

  “We’ve been separated since just before Christmas,” she said, and suddenly shifted her cigarette to her left hand, and extended her right hand to him. “I’m Jessica Knowles,” she said, “soon to be the former Mrs. Michael Knowles.” She smiled. “I hope,” she added.

  “I’m Alex Hardy,” he said, and took her hand. He felt foolish shaking hands with a woman; the handshake was brief and awkward.

  “Is that short for Alexander?”

  “Yes,” he said. “My mother’s Greek. Alexander’s a big hero to the Greeks.”

  “He was blond, too,” Jessica said. “Alexander.”

  “Yeah,” Alex said, and they were silent till the taxi pulled up in front of Lincoln Center. Alex quickly handed the driver a five-dollar bill, and said, “When you get to Pine Street, take it all out of this.”

 
; “No, no,” Jessica protested. “Now please, I …”

  “That’s okay,” Alex said, and opened the door on the curbside, and said, “Nice meeting you,” and stepped out into the rain. He was opening the umbrella as the taxi pulled away from the curb again. In a few minutes, he caught another cab and asked the driver to take him to Sixty-fifth and Madison.

  It was still raining heavily when he got out of the cab. He walked up Madison to Sixty-ninth and saw the building’s doorman standing on the corner whistling for taxis, a big red and yellow striped umbrella open over his head. With this kind of weather, he’d be up there all day long; maybe the rain was a blessing after all. Alex walked toward the building. A black man in coveralls and a clear plastic raincoat was carrying a garbage can up from the basement, coming out of a metal doorway that opened onto a narrow ramp on the left-hand side of the building. Poor bastard needed both hands to roll the garbage can to the curb, he couldn’t have held an umbrella even if he’d want to; he was drenched before he’d covered three feet of sidewalk. Alex looked over his shoulder toward Madison Avenue. The doorman was still up there. He walked directly to the building and looked in. A man with a mustache was waiting just inside the glass entrance doors. He was obviously the one who’d sent the doorman for a taxi. Toward the rear of the lobby, a lavender-haired woman in a beige raincoat was standing in front of a pair of brass doors.

  Standing under the awning, Alex took a scrap of paper from his wallet, consulted it, and then looked up at the address over the entrance doors. Inside, the lavender-haired lady was just stepping into the elevator. Alex walked directly past the man with the mustache and into the lobby. He did not want to be seen today, not by the doorman or the elevator operator, because they were supposedly paid to notice any suspicious characters lurking around the building. But tenants were another matter. Half the time tenants didn’t know who lived in a building or who didn’t. The man with the mustache didn’t even give him a second glance; all he cared about was getting a taxi.

  Closing his umbrella, Alex looked quickly to his right. In many apartment buildings, the mailboxes were just inside the entrance, but that wasn’t the case here. The next usual spot was somewhere near the elevator bank, so he walked toward that now, knowing the man with the mustache would expect him to walk toward the elevator, anyway. He looked up at the floor indicator over the brass doors. The illuminated bar had just flashed the numeral 6, and the car was continuing upward. Alex did not intend to check the contents of the mailboxes today, there would be no sense to that; he only wanted to find out where the boxes were located. He found them at once, in a recess across from the elevator bank. The man with the mustache was looking out at the street, his back to Alex. Alex scanned the lobby for a metal door, found one diagonally opposite the entrance, and walked quickly to it.

  The fire door in any apartment building was normally locked on the lobby side, in order to keep out burglars and other such riffraff. Alex tried the knob. The door was indeed locked. There was a keyway on the lobby side, but Alex knew there’d be none on the stair side. The whole point of fire stairs was to give tenants an escape route in case the building was in flames. You couldn’t expect tenants to carry keys to these doors. They opened from the stair side either by pushing on a panic bar attached to the door or else by pressing a thumb latch, either of which operations would pull the bolt back from the strike plate. The lock on the lobby side was a flush-mounted, five-pin cylinder lock, and there was a steel lip on the door frame, protecting the bolt and strike plate. The lock could not be loided, he would have to pick it on the day of the burglary.

  He heard the elevator whining down the shaft and moved swiftly to the front of the lobby. He walked past the man with the mustache again, and again the man scarcely glanced at him. Coming out of the building, Alex opened his umbrella, and then turned right and began walking toward Madison Avenue, mainly because he wanted to check out the door leading to the basement ramp. He stopped directly in front of the door and stooped as though to tie his shoelace, the umbrella effectively shielding his face. The lock was a deadbolt, he recognized it at once. It could not be loided, jimmied, or sprung. Given enough time, it could be drilled open. But on Thursday he’d only have the two hours between ten and twelve, and besides who in his right mind would stand on a sidewalk in broad daylight trying to work a deadbolt? So far as entrance through the basement was concerned, he was out of luck. It would have to be the fire door in the lobby. He stood upright just as a taxi splashed past and stopped in front of the building. The doorman got out of the cab, and the man with the mustache got in.

  There was nothing more that Alex could do here.

  He decided to go uptown to see Archie Fuller.

  You could never tell a good burglar from the way he dressed. A pimp you could spot from half a mile away on a foggy day, but a good burgler never—unless you were a cop or another burglar. As the taxi threaded its way through the traffic on Lenox Avenue, Alex looked through the rain-streaked window at the men and women hurrying along the wet sidewalks and made a game of guessing which of them were squares and which of them were in it. Then he made the game more complicated by trying to guess which part they were in.

  The pimps were the easiest; they should have worn signs around their necks instead of those wide-brimmed hats. There were hardly any hookers on the street at all, too early in the day for any action, even though it was now close to noon. He thought suddenly of Kitty and wondered how she was. He sometimes felt very sorry for that girl. Well, the hell with her, she should’ve known better than to get herself hooked on dope. Still, she was a nice girl. Still, she was a junkie, the hell with her.

  There were plenty of junkies out, in spite of the rain, and in spite of the hour. Junkies didn’t know rain from shine, they didn’t know time, their clocks were internal, the hours determined by their need for a fix. Junkies congregated. They liked to stand together discussing the availability or scarcity of shit. They were always eating candy bars. If you had the candy-bar concession at a convention of junkies, you could retire for life. Kitty always used to eat candy bars. “Sweet for the sweet,” she used to say. That was before he realized she was on dope, how stupid can a guy get?

  Your pushers were easy to spot, too. You couldn’t tell Alex that every pusher in the city wasn’t known to the fuzz, and that they could’ve busted all of them in a minute if it wasn’t for narcotics payoffs. First of all, if you could recognize a junkie so easily, then all you had to do was follow him and sooner or later he’d make contact with the Man. Now the Man had to be carrying dope with him, otherwise he’d have nothing to sell, right? And depending on how much dope he was carrying, it could be as heavy as an A-I felony, for which he could get fifteen years to life. Now a pusher who is walking around with a minimum of fifteen possible years in his coat pocket is a man who’s looking around all the time, and he doesn’t look around the way a burglar casing a joint looks around. A burglar setting up a future job isn’t carrying any burglar’s tools with him, he’s got nothing to worry about; it’s not a crime to look around, even if you’re looking for a place to hit that very afternoon. Your pusher has a furtive appearance, even more furtive than a man with a pistol in his belt. Alex spotted two pushers on the avenue. One of them was black, and Alex knew him. The other one was white, and he’d never seen him before in his life, but he knew he was a pusher. There were times when Alex thought he should have become a cop.

  He also spotted a burglar, yeah, there he was, a goddamn amateur burglar trying to be very casual about the way he was casing every store on the block. And there, right behind him, was a tail—a bull Alex recognized from the Twenty-sixth Precinct. He’d made the burglar, too, and was high-stepping it after him through the rain. Cops were very good at making burglars, though why this one was wasting time following an amateur, especially in the rain, was a mystery to Alex. Big promotion probably involved. Hey, look, Chief, I caught me a nickel-and-dime thief, do I make detective second? Very good, Fosdick, run out and
get me some coffee and crullers.

  It sometimes seemed to Alex that the only people the cops bothered arresting were the honest thieves, the ones who weren’t handing out the payola. Look at all those numbers people on the street. Alex spotted at least half a dozen as the taxi moved up Lenox Avenue and could tell you in a minute who was collecting the bets, and where the numbers drops were, and who was picking up the policy slips, and if he could do it, then so could the cops. There had to be big payoffs involved, otherwise all of them would be in jail. Not that Alex gave a shit. As far as he was concerned, if you were going to put anybody in jail, then you had to put everybody in jail because there was no such thing as an honest man.

  There was no answer when Alex knocked on Archie’s door, so he figured Archie was still asleep. Archie was a night man, and this fact somewhat diminished Alex’s respect for him. He had talked to Archie many times about the greater risks involved in nighttime burglaries, but Archie just laughed and said it was best for him at night because he blended with the air, man. And Alex always replied there was nothing whiter than a black man caught in the glare of a policeman’s torch. He knocked on the door again.

  “All right, all right,” Archie called from inside. Alex heard his footsteps approaching the door; it sounded like a herd of buffalo coming through the apartment. “Who’s there?” Archie asked.

  “Me. Alex.”

  Archie opened the door. He was wearing only striped undershorts. He was the kind of black man people crossed the street to avoid. He weighed two hundred and forty pounds, all of it muscle, and he had a jagged knife scar down the right-hand side of his face. Even if he’d been an accountant or a lawyer or a surgeon, if you saw this mother approaching, you knew knew he was going to rape you or mug you or hold you upside down by your ankles and bang your head on the pavement just for fun. Which wasn’t true. Archie was one of the gentlest men Alex had ever met. And a good burglar besides.

  “It’s the crack of dawn, man,” he said, and turned immediately from the door and walked away. Alex stepped inside and closed the door behind him. He walked familiarly through the apartment, and when he got to the bedroom, Archie was already back in bed.