Doors

by Ed McBain

  “Come on, wake up,” Alex said.

  “Go fuck yourself, man,” Archie said genially, and rolled over and pulled the covers up over his head.

  “It’s past twelve already,” Alex said.

  “Come back later,” Archie mumbled from under the bedclothes.

  “I’ll go make some coffee,” Alex said, and went out of the bedroom, across the living room, and into the kitchen. A pile of dirty dishes were in the kitchen sink, the rats and roaches must’ve had a feast last night. Alex searched around for the coffee pot. He found it in a cabinet near the stove. When he lifted the lid to put water in the pot, he found four hundred-dollar bills in the grounds basket.

  “I found your stash,” he called through the apartment.

  He put the four bills under an ashtray on the counter near the sink, and then filled the pot with water and the basket with coffee. He set the pot on the stove then and turned on the gas under it. There were lipsticked cigarette butts in the ashtray. One of them looked like a marijuana roach. Alex had nothing against marijuana, though he never smoked it himself. He wondered who the girl had been, and thought of Kitty again. Looking through the kitchen window, he saw at least half a dozen apartments with their fire-escape windows partially open. Small-time stuff, true, but easy pickings.

  “You boiling my money in that pot?” Archie asked from the kitchen doorway. He was still wearing only undershorts.

  “It’s under the ashtray there,” Alex said.

  Archie glanced at the ashtray with the money under it, and then said, “What time is it?”

  “I told you.”

  “What are you doing here so early?”

  “Why? Were you working last night?” Alex asked.

  “I worked hard, man,” Archie said. “I had a little fox up here. I had her climbing the walls, man. That was hard work. When you knocked on the door, I thought it was her coming back for more.”

  “Anybody I know?” Alex asked, half hoping he would say it had been Kitty.

  “A Jewgirl from the Bronx. A social worker. She set the alarm for seven-thirty, had to rush out there to assist all those poor social victims,” Archie said, and laughed. “There’s some bread in the fridge,” he said, “whyn’t you make us some toast?”

  “When did you get crippled?” Alex said.

  “Man, you’re the one woke me up,” Archie said, and sat at the table, and stretched his arms over his head, and said, “That was some festival last night, I got to tell you. That was the Fourth of July in Newark, New Jersey.” His arms froze in midair. He rose suddenly, walked swiftly to the ashtray, lifted it, and counted the bills. Rolling his eyes in relief, exhaling his breath noisily, he said, “For a minute there, I thought she might have ripped off a few hundred.”

  “Would’ve served you right,” Alex said. “Corrupting a social worker.”

  “Corrupting her? Man, she knew things the ancient whore of Babylon didn’t know. How’s that coffee doing?”

  “Coming,” Alex said, and took two slices of bread from the refrigerator and put them into the toaster. “I once made an apartment,” he said, “the people were away for the summer, they had this stale loaf of bread in the refrigerator, and between the slices there was a thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills.”

  “What were you doing in the fridge?” Archie asked, interested.

  “I got hungry while I was in there. I don’t usually fool around like that, but I knew they were away, so I had plenty of time. I decided to make myself a little sandwich, and I found a thousand bucks in the bread,” Alex said, and laughed at, the memory.

  “Bread inside the bread, huh?” Archie said, and laughed, too. “Man, the places they hide things.”

  “Like in the coffee pot,” Alex said.

  “That’s a good hiding place,” Archie said. “Would you think of looking in a coffee pot?”

  “Kitchen’s always the last place I look.”

  “See? You learned something today.”

  “Live and learn,” Alex said.

  “You been working?” Archie asked.

  “I’m on a job now.”

  “Vito set it up?”

  “No. Guy named Henry Green, he’s a jeweler in the Bronx. You know him?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Tommy put me onto him.”

  “How big a score?”

  “Pretty big, Arch. I stand to pull down a cool nine grand.”

  “Nice,” Archie said, and whistled. “What are you giving Tommy?”

  “Oh, I thought just a few bills. I mean, he only made the contact, you know? That’s enough, don’t you think? Two or three bills?”

  “Yeah, that’s enough,” Archie said. “What’s he doing, Tommy?”

  “I don’t know what he’s doing, tell you the truth. Where’re your cups?”

  “Cabinet over there,” Archie said. “If there’s any clean ones.”

  “I hear he’s looking to buy a good piece,” Alex said, and shrugged. “Maybe he’s planning a stickup, who knows?”

  “That’s dumb,” Archie said.

  “He just got out last month, he’s still wearing prison threads, looks like a panhandler, I mean it.” Pouring coffee into the two mugs he’d found in the cabinet, Alex said, “Maybe I ought to give him more than just a few bills, what do you think? Maybe half a grand, huh? Help him get started again, you know?”

  “Up to you,” Archie said, and shrugged. “You’re gonna burn that toast, you don’t look after it.”

  “Shit,” Alex said, and went to the smoking toaster, and flipped up the lever. He pulled the two slices of toast out and juggled them in his hands. Dropping them gingerly on the enamel-topped table, he said, “Too well done for you?”

  “No, that’s okay,” Archie said. He rose, went to the refrigerator, looked into it, and then said, “She drank all my orange juice.” He took out a container of milk and a wrapped slab of butter and carried them to the table. He went to the counter for the sugar bowl and took a pair of teaspoons and a butter knife from the drawer under the counter. Then both men sat at the table.

  “I got to be getting back to work soon,” Archie said. “Those four bills are the last of it.”

  “Yeah,” Alex said.

  “I’m just like you,” Archie said. “I make a score, I get lazy. Won’t go back to work till it’s all gone.”

  “Yeah, but I stash my money in the bank,” Alex said, “not in the coffee pot.”

  “I don’t trust banks,” Archie said. “Man, this toast is plain burnt.”

  “You said it was okay.”

  “That was before I tried eating it. How long’s it been raining out there?”

  “All morning,” Alex said.

  “What’s a man supposed to do on a day like today?” Archie asked, and stared glumly at the rain falling steadily outside the kitchen window.

  They went to see a mixed-doubles skin flick and then wandered up Amsterdam Avenue. It was still raining but not as heavily. Crowded under the black umbrella, they sloshed along the wet sidewalks until they found a bar serving lunch. It was almost three o’clock. The roast beef was all gone, but there was some good lean pastrami left, and they both ordered that on rye, and a schooner of beer for each of them, and a side of French fries. The place was quiet except for the baseball drone of the television set and the occasional critical comments of a handful of black men lining the bar.

  Daisy came into the bar at about ten minutes past three. She was a light-skinned black girl with only one leg, but a good body otherwise, and a narrow Egyptian-looking face wth a natural beauty spot just to the left of her wide mouth. Her face was almost unlined, her complexion clear; the years had been good to her, considering she’d been a hooker since she was sixteen.

  She spotted them where they were sitting in a red leatherette booth and hobbled over to them on her crutches. She was wearing rain-speckled sunglasses and a yellow rainslicker. She took off the slicker and hung it on a hook on the booth post. Under the slicker,
she was dressed for work—a lavender satin sheath cut low over her full breasts, nothing under it. On her one shapely leg, she was wearing a high-heeled patent leather pump with an ankle strap. Sitting, complaining about the weather, she took off the sunglasses and wiped them clean on a paper napkin. Her eyes were narrow and long, slightly tilted, amber colored. She dipped into the platter of French fries and then added salt to them, without asking Archie or Alex if that would be okay. Nibbling on the fries, she told them she was anticipating a busy day because of the rain. Rain always brought the johns out in droves. And wherever there were johns, there was a big demand for Daisy. She couldn’t understand her own popularity.

  “I ain’t a young kid anymore,” she said. “Fact is, I’ll be thirty-six come Christmas, week before Christmas. There are girls on the street, eighteen, nineteen years old, they just been turned out, they’re pretty as pictures. So it ain’t my youth or my beauty, that’s for sure.”

  “Then what is it?” Archie asked.

  “You know what I think it is?” Daisy asked.

  “What?” Alex said. He was really interested. He knew she made more money than half the whores in Harlem, and he’d often wondered why.

  “I think it’s the leg,” Daisy said. “It’s got to be the leg. A john sees me hoppin around on my crutches, he right away thinks I’m vulnable. He takes one look at me, he figures when he gets me in the sack he’s gonna be in complete control. I don’t do what he wants me to do, he’ll take away my crutches and throw me out the window. I’m not talking about your freaks now, I’m talking about your everyday johns. Most johns, they’re afraid of whores, anyway—well, shit, they’re afraid of women, period, which is why they go to whores in the first place. I ain’t got but this one good leg, and that makes them think I’m the weak one, and they’re the big strong studs, and that’s what it is. My vulnability.”

  “Well, maybe so,” Archie said.

  “I don’t think that’s the only reason men go to whores,” Alex said. “Because they’re afraid of women, I mean.”

  “That’s what it is, they can’t make it nohow with square broads.” Daisy said.

  “No, some of them just go, I think, because a whore is supposed to be a pro, he can expect like a good blow-job from her, or whatever. That’s what I think.”

  “I got me one john,” Daisy said, “all I got to do is lift my skirt and show him the stump, he gets his rocks off.”

  “Now that’s a freak, man,” Archie said.

  “No, that don’t happen to be no freak,” Daisy said. “I got lots of them like that, though not all as fast as him. This little ole stump drives them crazy, I don’t know what it is.”

  “They’re stump-humpers, that’s what it is,” Archie said, and laughed.

  “I got me another john,” Daisy said, “he’s a millionaire, he could afford the most expensive call girls, the racehorses. Instead, he phones me from Westchester once a week like clockwork. Every Thursday morning, he phones me. That’s when his wife goes in the city shopping. The minute I get his call, I hop in a taxi and go up there to Post Mills.”

  “Maybe his wife is out humping a man with a stump,” Alex said, trying to top Archie’s joke, and looking to him for approval.

  “You should see the way this cat is hung.” Daisy said. “He’s sixty-four years old, but I swear to God he’s hung like a stallion.”

  “Well, a man’s size has nothing to do with it,” Alex said. “I read a book about that.”

  “The book was full of shit,” Daisy said flatly.

  “Alex here has just this tiny little pecker,” Archie said confidentially, and held up his thumb and forefinger with an inch of space between them.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Alex said, and laughed.

  “Every Thursday,” Daisy said, “just like clockwork. He gives me a hundred bucks, plus the round-trip cab fare. You should see this place he’s got out there. It’s right on a big lake, you should see it.”

  “Where’d you say it was?” Archie asked.

  “Post Mills.”

  “Where the hell is Post Mills?”

  “I told you. Up in Westchester. Near Stamford.”

  “Stamford’s in Connecticut,” Archie said.

  “Yeah, this is right over the border. The New York border. It’s Westchester, Archie, I know what the fuck it is, it’s Westchester.”

  “Okay, it’s Westchester.”

  “Two tennis” courts, a swimming pool, big black Caddy sittin in the driveway. Another car, too, one of them small foreign jobs, I don’t know the name of it.”

  “A Volkswagen?” Archie asked, and winked at Alex.

  “No, what kind of Volkswagen? It’s one of those expensive little foreign cars. I figure there must be yet another car, too, otherwise how does his wife get in the city? I asked him once, I said would he like a one-legged live-in maid cause I’d be willing to service him three, four times a week just for the sheer pleasure of living in a place like that. He told me No, he didn’t think his wife would understand. Man’s a millionaire, got five in help as it is, all of them off on Thursdays.” In a deep, cotton-picking, watermelon accent, she said, “Tha’s cause Thusdee’s when he plumbs dee depps oh mah soul,” and suddenly burst out laughing.

  “What’s the inside of the house like?” Archie asked, and Alex turned to look at him because his tone had suddenly become very serious and very professional.

  “I never been in the house,” Daisy said.

  “Well, where do you make it?” Archie asked.

  “He’s got a studio in the woods behind the house. Way back in the woods. That’s where we go. You should see this place. Arch. I’m not kiddin you, the man’s a genuine millionaire.”

  “What’s his name?” Archie asked.

  “Well, now, I can’t go givin you the name of a customer,” Daisy said.

  “What the hell are you, a priest?” Archie asked.

  “It ain’t professional,” Daisy said with dignity.

  “Man’s a millionaire, huh?” Archie said.

  “That he is.”

  “Pays your round-trip cab fare and hands you a C-note every Thursday,” Archie said. The tone of his voice had changed to one of mocking disbelief. Alex suddenly realized he was trying to taunt Daisy into giving him the man’s name. “Got tennis courts and a swimming pool, a studio way back in the woods, a yacht … you did say a yacht, didn’t you, Daisy?”

  “No, I didn’t say no yacht, but he’s got a big speedboat, sure enough, sittin right there on the end of a private dock.”

  “Bet it’s a big dock, too,” Archie said. “How big would you say his dock is?” He extended his arms wide. “This big, Daisy? How big is the man’s dock, Daisy?”

  “Bigger’n yours, that’s for sure,” she said, and reached for her crutches where they were leaning against the side of the booth.

  “So what’s this big millionaire’s name?” Archie asked again.

  “His name is none of your business,” Daisy said, and raised herself up from the seat, and tucked her crutches under her arms. In stony silence, she put on the rain-slicker, dexterously shifting the crutches as she worked her arms into the sleeves. Then she hobbled to the bar, and said to the bartender, “You ought to throw those bums out. They got no fuckin manners.”

  As she went out the front door, Archie said, “I blew it.”

  “You leaned too heavy, man. You only got her sore.”

  “Yeah. A hooker with ethics, would you believe it?”

  “You think she was telling the truth?”

  “Who knows? The other stuff was straight goods, I know that for sure. They come runnin after her like she was in heat. But a millionaire in Post Mills?” Archie shrugged.

  “Whyn’t you find out?” Alex said.

  “Oh, I intend to, man,” Archie said. “Be the god-damnedest score ever, wouldn’t it?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Ripping off a joint while a sixty-four-year-old man is out in the woods fuckin a one-legged whore
?”

  They both burst out laughing.

  Alex got back to his building on West End Avenue at eight o’clock that night. He had gone to another movie with Archie, and then they’d eaten together in a cafeteria on Broadway. All he wanted to do now was get in bed and watch some television, maybe drift off to sleep by ten o’clock or so. He planned to go into the lobby again tomorrow, provided it was a good day, and he wanted to be fresh and alert. He hadn’t been seen by anyone but a tenant so far, and that was the way he wanted to keep it. If it became absolutely necessary to be seen going in on the day of the burglary, he wanted that to be the one and only time he was seen.

  Detective Second-Grade Anthony Hawkins was waiting outside the building. He was considerably far uptown, his precinct territory covering the streets from Fourteenth to Thirty-ninth, between Fifth Avenue and the East River. Hawkins was a dark, burly six-footer who enjoyed his nickname “the Hawk,” even when it was used derogatorily by thieves. That was because Hawkins thought he looked like Burt Reynolds, which he didn’t. But Reynolds had once starred in a short-lived television series called Hawk, which happened to be about a New York City detective. The detective in the series was supposed to be an Indian, and Hawkins was half-English, half-Irish (“With a fifth of Scotch thrown in,” as he was fond of remarking), but that didn’t stop him from enjoying the fact that a television series had been named after a New York cop called Hawk. When Burt Reynolds grew a mustache, Anthony Hawkins grew one, too. When Burt Reynolds shaved it off, Hawkins shaved his off. If Burt Reynolds ever developed an ulcer, Hawkins would probably try to do the same. Hawkins was an asshole. He also happened to have busted Alex the time he got sent to Sing Sing. He was wearing a belted trench coat, which probably made him feel more like a working dick. He was also standing in the rain; leave it to cops not to know when to come in out of the rain.

  “Hello there, Alex,” he said cheerfully.

  “Why, hello, Mr. Hawkins,” Alex said.

  “How you been?” Hawkins said, but he did not extend his hand. A cop never shook hands with a thief, even though he sometimes knew the thief better than he knew his own brother-in-law. And a cop always used a thief’s first name, thought it gave him a psychological advantage somehow. If a cop picked up a thief who had just planned and executed a brilliant burglary of Fort Knox, and the thief’s name was Israel Goldberg, the cop would automatically say, “All right, Izzie, you want to tell us about it?” If Izzie was a smart thief, he would mister and sir the cop to death, and tell him nothing at all. It was all part of the game.