Doors

by Ed McBain

  “Come on in out of the rain,” Alex said cordially. “Were you waiting here for me?”

  “I was,” Hawkins said.

  “Been waiting long?”

  “Just a half-hour or so.”

  “Well, come on inside the building,” Alex said. “Long time no see.”

  They walked into the lobby, and Alex closed his umbrella and shook it out. Hawkins watched him all this time. Detectives liked to believe they could tell what a man was thinking by watching every move he made, even if he was only shaking out his umbrella or picking his nose. Alex took his time shaking out the umbrella, and Hawkins watched every little shake. At last, Alex looked up at him and said, “So what brings you uptown?”

  “I have an abiding interest in you and your friends,” Hawkins said, and smiled. He thought he looked more like Burt Reynolds when he smiled. Actually, he looked somewhat ghoulish. Hawkins’s chilly smile was also part of the game. Alex sometimes thought he’d quit the game altogether if it weren’t for the cops. What good was any game, after all, if there weren’t players on the other side?

  “Well, what’s your interest this time?” he asked.

  “I’m primarily interested in a burglary that took place on March 21,” Hawkins said.

  “Um-huh,” Alex said.

  “I don’t suppose you’d know anything about it.”

  “Nothing at all,” Alex said.

  “I wouldn’t be too interested if it hadn’t taken place in my precinct,” Hawkins said. “I was away on vacation at the time. Took the wife down to Puerto Rico.”

  “It’s nice down there in Puerto Rico,” Alex said.

  “I was gone for three weeks,” Hawkins said. “Got back yesterday, had a long talk with the detective who caught the squeal. He’s new on the squad, just got transferred from the Two-Five up in Spanish Harlem. I also talked to the Burglary Squad.”

  “Um-huh,” Alex said.

  “The reason I’m asking you about it, Alex, is that it looks a lot like your m.o.”

  “I didn’t know I had a distinctive m.o.,” Alex said.

  “The broken window, I mean.”

  “I haven’t gone through a window since I was a kid,” Alex said.

  “That’s the point. The window was broken from the inside, Alex. Somebody was trying to make it look like an amateur did it.”

  “Well, I’m clean,” Alex said, “you’re barking up …” and suddenly stopped talking because the elevator doors behind them opened, and a couple stepped out into the lobby. This was where Alex lived, he didn’t want any of the tenants to know he was talking to a cop. “Look, would you like to come upstairs?” he asked Hawkins.

  “What for?” Hawkins answered.

  Alex shrugged and grimaced, hoping Hawkins would get his meaning. But as the couple paused to open an umbrella just inside the entrance doors, Hawkins said, rather loudly, “Oh, don’t you want your neighbors to know you’re a thief?”

  Alex’s eyes hardened. He looked toward the entrance alcove. The couple seemed not to have heard Hawkins. As soon as they stepped out into the rain, Alex said, “What’s the matter with you? I’m trying to lead a respectable life here.”

  “Sure, you are. Were you leading a respectable life on March 21, when an apartment on East Thirty-Sixth was burglarized?”

  “I don’t know anything about that burglary.”

  “132 East Thirty-sixth,” Hawkins said.

  “I don’t know that address.”

  “It’s a brownstone.”

  “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “The front door was jimmied, and an inside lock was picked. And then the bedroom window was smashed from the inside, to make it look crude. That’s exactly what you did the time I busted you, Alex. You smashed a window from the inside.”

  “Yeah, but I learned my lesson,” Alex said. “I’ve been clean ever since I got out. I won’t even go near anybody I know is in it.”

  “No? Not even Tommy Palumbo?”

  “What about him? He’s clean, too.”

  “Have you seen him since he got paroled?”

  “I’ve seen him, yeah. He’s a friend of mine. Of course, I’ve seen him.”

  “I hear he’s looking to buy a piece.”

  “I ain’t heard nothing like that.”

  “When you see him again, tell him we know he’s looking for one.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  “Tell him that’s a parole violation all by itself.”

  “I’m sure he knows that, he ain’t stupid.”

  “You’re all stupid,” Hawkins said flatly.

  “Look, I didn’t do your Thirty-sixth Street job, so what else do you want?”

  “I want you to know I’m back from vacation, that’s all. Sleep tight,” Hawkins said, and flashed his Burt Reynolds smile, and walked out into the rain.

  You son of a bitch, Alex thought, and stabbed at the elevator call button. What am I, the only burglar in New York who smashes a window from the inside? All right, I done the job, it was a job Vito set up, I scored three thousand bucks on that job, but suppose I hadn’t done it? That’s the thing we’re talking about here, the fact that you come around whenever anybody does anything, you son of a bitch. No wonder you ain’t been around lately, you’ve been on vacation. I wish some spic would’ve put a bullet in your head while you were down in Puerto Rico. Stay out of my way, Hawkins, he thought, or you’re gonna be sorry.

  But he was frightened.

  When he got upstairs to his apartment, he took a bottle of beer from the refrigerator, opened it, and then carried it into the bedroom. His phone was on a night table near the bed. He dialed Tommy’s number, and then drank directly from the bottle while he waited for him to answer. He let it ring ten times and was about to hang up, when he heard Tommy’s voice say, “Hello?”

  “Tommy, this is Alex.”

  “Hey, hi, Alex, how’s it going?” Tommy said.

  “Fine. I just got a visit from the Hawk.”

  “What’s he want?”

  “Tommy, now listen to me,” Alex said.

  “Yeah, what’s the matter?”

  “I been hearing around that you’re looking for a piece, and I ain’t the only one’s heard it. The Hawk knows about it, too.

  “Yeah,” Tommy-said.

  “Tommy, I think you know what that means. A man doesn’t buy a gun unless …”

  “I haven’t bought no gun, Alex.”

  “But you’re looking for one.”

  “Well.”

  “Are you looking for one, or not?”

  “It was just an idea,” Tommy said.

  “An idea the Hawk already heard about.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t buy no gun, Alex. Just an idea.”

  “A man has an idea of buying a gun, then he’s also got the idea of using it. And if he uses it for what I think, that means he’s got to show face, and that also means the Hawk’ll be on your doorstep in ten minutes flat.”

  “Yeah,” Tommy said.

  “Why don’t you take an ad in the newspaper, for Christ’s sake? Is there anybody in this city who doesn’t know you’ve been looking for a piece?”

  “Yeah,” Tommy said.

  “Now listen, Tommy, you put me onto a good thing, and I think that’s worth five bills, but I can’t pay you till I deliver, you understand me? I’m a little short right now, I won’t have the bread till this weekend sometime. What I’m trying to tell you is not to do anything stupid meanwhile. The five bills ought to tide you over for a while till you think of something to do. Something that don’t need a piece.”

  “Yeah,” Tommy said.

  “You listening to me?”

  “Yeah, Alex, I’m listening.”

  “Okay then, I just wanted you to know you’ve got five bills coming if you can hold out till the weekend.”

  “Oh, yeah, I can hold out. I ain’t desperate, Alex.”

  “Good, I’m glad to hear that. All right then, Tommy?”

  “
Yeah, fine.”

  “All right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay then, I’ll call you Friday, Saturday the latest.”

  “Right, Alex. Thanks a lot, huh?”

  “So long now.”

  He put the receiver back onto the cradle, lifted the bottle of beer, and took a long swallow of it. He didn’t know why the hell he bothered with that dumb kid. Man gets started with a gun, that’s the way it’s going to be forever. Tommy was only twenty-two, but he’d already been busted once for armed robbery, when he was just eighteen. He’d come up against a judge who’d let him off with a dime stretch at Sing Sing, and he’d got out last month on parole, after serving a third of the sentence. Alex had met him in prison, the kid had already been there for three, four months when Alex drove up. Alex was scared. He had never been to prison before; the last time he’d been busted he’d got off with a suspended sentence. But he’d heard about prison, and he knew what could happen to a man inside there. He was younger then, this was three years ago, and he knew he was a good-looking blue-eyed kid with blond hair, and he’d heard all about prison gang-rapes, and he was scared to death something like that might happen to him. He figured later that it didn’t happen to him only because of Tommy.

  Tommy had been there a little while already, and he was handsome and dark and slight, but nobody had succeeded in turning him out as a penitentiary punk. In prison you had a whole sexual hierarchy, starting with your queens, who were what they called free-world punks, guys who’d been queer even before they got sent up. These guys—or girls, as they preferred to call themselves—were usually kept apart from the rest of the prison population, segregated in the punk tank with other queens and guys who’d been sent up for sexual offenses. But you also had your penitentiary punks, who were guys who got turned out while they were in prison. And you had your studs, or your jocks, or your daddies, as they were called, and they looked over every new guy coming into the yard, and before long they’d come over and try to be friendly, offer candy or cigarettes, sound the new man as to the possibility of a relationship. These were guys who considered themselves hemen; if you ever told one of them he was engaging in homosexual acts, he’d slit your throat. That’s because he was the one doing it to some other guy, fuckin the other guy in the ass or getting sucked off.

  But one of the first people Alex met in prison was Tommy, and Tommy told him straight off that there’d be a lot of advances made, him being blond and good-looking and young, but that he didn’t have to do nothing he didn’t want to do; if he once showed these guys he was weak, that was it, mister. He knew one guy, Tommy said, they threw him down on the floor in the gym while somebody was posted as jigger, and they painted the outline of a woman on his back, tits and all, and then a dozen of them fucked him in the ass. That didn’t happen too often here, Tommy said, that gang-rape kind of thing. Where that happened mostly was in the county jails or temporary detention centers, where if you happened to be a young kid thrown in with a bunch of hardened criminals, they’d hold a knife on you or burn you all over with cigarettes till you did what they said. It happened here sometimes, of course, but not so you’d have to worry about it day and night. What you had to worry about here were the studs.

  The thing to do, Tommy said, was to turn down any kind of offer that was made. Guy offers you a pack of cigarettes till you get some money of your own together, you just tell him Thanks a lot, I’ll smoke the Bugler. Guy wants to lend you money, or offer you protection against some of the hard cases in here, you tell him Thanks a lot, I can take care of myself. And, man, you just make sure you do take care of yourself. Guy wants to turn you out, you fight him. You may end up in the shitter for a week, but at least that guy’ll respect you from then on, and nobody else’ll come around trying to get you to suck his dick. And if a bunch of them tries to get you, then you have to fight like a son of a bitch till they know you ain’t going to let nobody turn you out. Poke them in the eyes, ram your fist in their Adam’s apple, they ain’t going to risk too much of that, man, not when there are other guys who’ll go along without a struggle.

  He had followed Tommy’s advice the first time anybody approached him. The guy was twelve feet tall and a yard wide, and he was a three-time loser who figured if you couldn’t have whiskey you might as well have a little taste of the wine. Alex wasn’t about to become his bottle of Chianti, though, and when the guy came up to him and very subtly said, “Hey, kid, how’d you like to suck my joint?” Alex replied, “How’d you like to suck mine?” The lifer got rough then, he threw Alex up against the wall, clamped his hand around Alex’s throat, and said, “You do what I tell you, punk, or there’ll be fifty of us on your ass.” Alex kneed him in the balls, and when the guy doubled over, he hit him on the back of the neck with both hands clenched together like a mallet. And then, while the guy was writhing around on the floor. Alex kicked him in the side of the head. He got a month in the shitter for assaulting the lifer, and that was what stopped him from getting his parole after having served a third of his three years. But that was the end of anybody sounding him, and when his parole came up later for review, it was granted. The lifter had cost him an extra six months behind the walls, but at least when he got out he was the same as when he’d been driven up.

  During his eighteen months in prison, he and Tommy got to be good friends, such good friends in fact that there were prison rumors about them, everybody trying to figure out whether or not they had a little thing going. Alex guessed that maybe forty percent of the guys up there were involved in one kind of sexual activity or another, either giving it or taking it, and the other sixty percent spent half their time talking about who was doing what to whom. But he and Tommy were just good friends, that was all. They weren’t even cellmates, though they could have arranged that for a couple of bucks in the right hands. They decided against it because that only would have intensified the rumors and neither one of them wanted to end up in the punk tank with the free-world queers and the short eyes. But in the yard they talked, and in the dining hall they talked, and mostly they talked about what they’d do once they got outside again. Once they got out, what they were going to do was pull out completely, find a nine-to-five, join the world of the workaday squares, the hell with this prison shit.

  Yeah.

  He knew now that what you did when you got out was go right back to what you’d been doing. He’d gone back to being a burglar, and now Tommy was looking to buy a piece, and probably would buy a piece, and then go hold up a liquor store or something. He didn’t know what was wrong with Tommy, he didn’t seem to be the same guy Alex had known in prison. Maybe one of the jocks had finally succeeded in turning him out, who the hell knew? You spent enough time in prison, maybe you got tired. Maybe you just got tired of trying to be somebody else all the time. You could hardly ever be yourself in prison, that was the thing of it. And maybe after Alex had got out, and Tommy was up there all by himself with nobody to talk to honestly and openly, no chance to be himself anymore, then maybe one of the studs got to him, maybe that was it. If you ain’t going to be yourself, then you might just as well be somebody else’s boy. Alex didn’t know what it was. Tommy just seemed dead nowadays … no, wait a minute, he seemed more like he was in mourning, yeah, for somebody very close to him who’d died. Damn kid …

  The telephone rang.

  Alex was sitting on the bed right beside the phone, and when it went off he jumped half a mile. Swearing under his breath, he lifted the receiver and said, “Hello?”

  “Alex?”

  He recognized the voice at once, he didn’t think he’d ever forget her voice as long as he lived. He was glad to hear from her, but at the same time he didn’t want any part of her anymore.

  “What is it, Kitty?” he asked.

  “I need help,” she said. “Can I come there?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Alex, I really do need help,” she said. “Please.”

  “No, I don’t want you here,” he said.r />
  “I’m coming, anyway,” she said, and hung up.

  She rang the bell downstairs in the lobby at nine o’clock, and he didn’t answer the ring, but he knew that wouldn’t stop her. Five minutes later, she was outside banging on his door. He went to the door and opened it, and said, “I told you not to come here.”

  “Well, I’m here,” she said, and stepped past him into the apartment. It was still raining outside, her coat was soaking wet. She took off the coat and hung it familiarly in the hall closet. Under the coat she was wearing a short, narrow skirt and a white blouse. She took off her pumps, left them in the foyer, and then walked directly into the living room and to the bar, where she poured herself two fingers of his Scotch.

  “Make yourself at home,” he said.

  She didn’t answer. He watched her as she drank the whiskey neat and poured herself another shot. She didn’t seem at all strung out, he wondered what she wanted from him, if not money for a fix. But she looked as if she’d been taking very good care of herself, looked in fact a great deal prettier than she had when they’d been living together. She had let her hair grow out in an Afro, and somehow the style emphasized the good bones of her face, the thin, flaring nose, the high, padded cheekbones, the generous mouth. She was wearing no make-up except for a greenish-blue eye shadow over her eyes. Her complexion was smooth, the color of walnut, warm and rich and glowing in the light of the floor lamp near the bar. She carried the second drink to the couch, sat, and crossed her legs.

  “So,” she said, smiling, “how are you?”

  “Fine.”