by Ed McBain
His picks and tension bars were inside a folding, cloth tool kit he had bought in an automobile accessory store. He unfolded the kit, took out the tools he knew he would need for the lobby door, and laid them out on the dresser top. Then he put a dish towel into the case on top of the bulkier tools and placed the cloth kit on top of that. He knew some burglars who preferred a pick gun to your standard pick because all you had to do with the gun was pull the trigger and the pick moved up and down very fast, bouncing all the tumbler pins at once. There was also a little knob on top of the gun, which you could twist to adjust the spring tension, increasing or decreasing the bouncing action of the pick. He preferred feeling around for the pins himself, shoving them up one at a time as he worked his way into the lock. The way a cylinder lock worked, you shoved a key into the keyway and the notches in the key moved the tumbler pins up one by one, shoving them back up against the springs that were holding them down. Once these pins were up, you twisted the key, and that turned the cylinder and pulled back the bolt. Alex could duplicate the action of a key with his picks and tension bars, all of which he’d owned for a long time. He knew he could pick the lobby door, but he didn’t know what he’d find on the door to the Rothman apartment, so he packed into the case a small cylinder drill jig and bit for drilling through the pins, and also a pair of vise grip pliers, if he had to yank out the cylinder itself to expose the lock.
He doubted he’d find a tubular lock on the door to the Rothman apartment, but he packed his three tubular-lock picks just in case. The pick with the red handle was for right-of-center locks; the one with the blue handle was for left-of-center locks; the one with the white handle was for regular center-spaced pins. The picks had come directly from the manufacturer that way, the handles color-coded for the convenience of the locksmith—or the burglar, as the case might be. He had only run across a tubular lock once in all the time he’d been a burglar, but it paid to be prepared for anything he might come up against. He closed the lid on the case, snapped the clasps shut, and then went to his dresser drawer and took from it an aluminum strip he had cut from a Venetian blind slat. The strip was an inch and a half wide and twelve inches long; he would use it to loid the lock on the Rothman door, if he was lucky enough to find a Mickey Mouse up there. He left his royal-flush shim in the drawer, though he was tempted to take it along for luck.
He slipped the aluminum strip into his inside jacket pocket, and from the same drawer took a pair of thin, black leather gloves, which he put into the right-hand waist pocket of his jacket. On top of the gloves, in the same pocket, he put his hand picks and tension bars. From the top of the dresser, he picked up a new, unsharpened yellow pencil to which he’d fastened a rubber band by pulling one end of it through the other, leaving him with a wide loop just below the eraser tip. He put this into his inside jacket pocket, too, and then picked up a three-by-five index card upon which he had hand-lettered the words OUT OF ORDER the night before. He put this into his left-hand waist pocket, together with a roll of Scotch tape and a slip of paper onto which he’d scrawled another name he’d taken from the telephone book—for an address on Sixty-ninth this time, but further up the block. He could not expect to pull the same ploy on the elevator operator again, but it might work if he ran into trouble with the doorman. Into that same left-hand pocket, he put a box of wooden toothpicks.
He picked up the dispatch case, looked at himself in the mirror over the dresser, tried to think of anything he might have forgotten, decided he was all set—and left the apartment.
At five minutes past ten, he dialed the Rothmans’ phone number. He counted the rings. One, two, three …
Don’t be home, he thought.
Four, five, six …
Don’t answer.
Seven … eight … nine … ten.
Relaxing, he let the phone ring another ten times, just to make certain. Then, instead of hanging up, he lowered the receiver, allowing it to dangle on the end of its cord. He glanced over his shoulder toward the counter, and then he took the Scotch tape and the three-by-five index card from his pocket. Tearing off a sliver of tape, he fastened the OUT OF ORDER sign to the phone, covering the coin slots. The receiver was still dangling on the end of the cord when he left the booth and the shop and began walking swiftly down Madison Avenue. On the corner of Madison and Sixty-ninth, he checked his watch. It was ten minutes past ten, and the doorman was standing in front of the building. In ten minutes, if Alex had figured correctly, the lobby phone would ring, and the man in the homburg would tell the doorman to go fetch his ’73 Caddy.
Alex waited.
He could not hear the lobby phone when it rang, but he was certain it had rung because he saw the doorman rush inside and then come out again not a moment later, heading for the garage across the street. Alex immediately walked toward the building. He hesitated only briefly outside the glass entrance doors, looking into the lobby toward the elevator bank. The brass doors were closed, the elevator operator was nowhere in sight. He moved swiftly into the lobby and walked directly to the mailboxes, glancing up at the floor indicator as he passed the closed brass doors. The elevator was on the eighteenth floor … the nineteenth … it was still heading upward as Alex turned away into the alcove.
There was no mail in the Rothman box. Good. She’d come down already, the apartment was empty. His heart was pounding. He came out of the alcove and did not even glance up at the floor indicator over the brass doors. There was no time to waste now, no time for superfluous action; he had to pick the lock on that fuckin fire door and be out of the lobby before either the elevator came down or the doorman returned or some tenant walked in from the street. He hated going in, going in was the worst fuckin time, especially in a lobby like this one. Couldn’t wear your fuckin gloves, ran the risk of leaving prints all over the goddamn lock, he should’ve told Henry to go to hell with his fuckin job.
His hand was shaking as he took his tools from his pocket and selected a pick thin enough to slide into the keyway. In the movies, you saw a man picking a lock, he stuck a pick into the hole, jiggled it twice, and whammo the door was open. Bullshit. You could use your pick to raise each of the spring-loaded pins to their proper position, but they’d spring right back and the fuckin door would stay locked if you didn’t hold them in the raised position. There were five pins inside that fuckin lock, and Alex had to get them all up, one at a time, hold the first one up with the tension bar while he moved on to the next one, and then tension that one, too, working his way down the line till he had all of them up, the tension bar offset so he could hold it in a way that didn’t interfere with the manipulation of the pick. He got the first pin up and tensioned it, and he thought Now come on, baby, open for me, and he felt for the second pin, guiding the pick, working the pin up and then holding it up with the tension bar, Come on, sweetheart, open for me, come on, you cunt! He heard the elevator whining down the shaft, his upper lip was beaded with sweat as he jiggled the pick, attacking the third pin, Come on, feeling it yield. Yes, come on, the pin was up, he tensioned it, he was almost there now, the fourth pin went up, and then the fifth, and he used the tension bar to rotate the cylinder, and the bolt sprang back. He twisted the knob and opened the door. Holding it open, he wiped the knob clean with his handkerchief and then stepped inside. Quickly, he closed the door behind him and leaned against it, breathing heavily.
He looked at his watch. The time was ten twenty-three. He had opened the door in less than two minutes, it had seemed like a fuckin year. He started up the metal steps, counting the floors, just in case they weren’t numbered on this side of the fire door on each landing. But they were numbered, in red. Thank you very much, he thought, taking the steps two at a time as he went up to the sixteenth floor. He paused outside the fire door there, to catch his breath and to listen for sounds in the hallway. Then he took the thin leather gloves from his jacket pocket, and put them on. Opening the door, he stepped into the service alcove. The alcove was perhaps eight feet square. There was a door
on his left, and it was marked 16B. The door on his right was marked 16A. The door directly opposite him was unmarked, and undoubtedly led to the corridor that ran past the elevator bank and the front doors of the two apartments. There was no question in his mind about whether he should try the front door or the service door. The service door, for some reason, usually had a crappier lock on it than the front door. Besides, the front door could be seen by the elevator operator if he dropped anyone off on this floor, whereas the only danger Alex might run into in the service alcove was somebody in 16B deciding to put out the garbage. There were three small garbage pails in the hallway, one outside 16B and two outside 16A. The alcove stank to high heaven.
Alex put his ear to the door of the Rothman apartment. Inside, he could still hear the phone ringing. He had dialed the apartment at ten-oh-five, and it was now almost ten thirty, and the phone was still ringing, which was good enough insurance for him. He put down the dispatch case and looked at the lock. He almost couldn’t believe his eyes. It was the cheapest fuckin lock you could buy. People had a thirty thousand dollar diamond in there, they put a ten-cent lock on the back door. This one he could have opened with a playing card. He slid the shim in above the bolt, working it around the wooden door frame and into the crack where door met jamb. That’s it, he thought, nice and easy, working the shim down, feeling for the bolt, feeling the resistance when aluminum met steel, and then twisting the shim, working it against the bolt. Celluloid was more flexible, you could do things with celluloid you couldn’t do with a fuckin piece of aluminum, but there we go, that’s the way, you could loid a cheap lock in ten seconds flat, Come on, sweetheart, edging it into the narrow slit now, feeling it, That’s the way, he was almost in there, he shoved the shim all the way down, and the bolt sprang back.
He twisted the knob and shoved the door inward. It opened three or four inches, and then stopped. A chain lock. No problem. He reached into his inside jacket pocket, took from it the pencil with the rubber band fastened below the eraser, and then eased the pencil into the open crack between the door and the jamb. Fishing with the wide loop of the rubber band, it took him less than a minute to snare the knob on the chain. Easing the door slightly closed, he kept the pressure tight on rubber band and knob, and the knob snapped all the way back to the entrance hole at the opposite end. He jiggled the pencil, and the chain fell free.
He was in.
Picking up the dispatch case, he stepped into the apartment, closed the door behind him, and then turned the latch so that the door was now unlocked. If anybody came home while he was in here, he wanted to be able to get out fast, and he didn’t want to be fooling around with any latches. The phone was still ringing, he knew it would drive him out of his gourd if he let it ring like that while he was working on the box. He walked to the wall extension on the wall near the refrigerator, lifted the receiver from the hook, and just let it dangle. Then he went out of the kitchen, through the dining room, and into the living room, where he went directly to the front door. The front door had a better lock on it, but not much better than the one on the service door. He unlocked this one as well, took a toothpick from the box in his pocket, opend the door a crack and stuck the toothpick into the lock’s keyway. He broke it off flush with the cylinder, closed the door, and then locked it again. If either of the Rothmans came home unexpectedly, they would undoubtedly try to enter through the front door, because that’s where the elevator would leave them off. They would try to put a key into the lock, but they’d meet the resistance of the toothpick, and while they fumbled around out there trying to push the key in, they’d make enough racket to wake the dead. Satisfied that he now had his own personal burglar alarm system, plus a safe escape route, Alex went into the bedroom. A clock on the dresser told him it was already twenty minutes to eleven. He had an hour and ten minutes to get the hell out of here.
The maid had said the safe was on the back wall of the double-door closet opposite the windows. He went to the doors immediately, slid one of them open, and then shoved aside a dozen or so dresses hanging on the clothes bar. Your boxes came with square doors or round doors, and you also had what was called a cannonball, which was just what it sounded like, a big black ball with a screw door. Your cannonball was obsolete, you never ran into one of them these days. The Rothman box wasn’t a cannonball, he hadn’t expected it to be, nor was it even a round-door box. But neither was it an old box. You could punch one of your old boxes in twenty seconds flat, if you were experienced, but this one was a bright, new square-door job, and he knew he’d have trouble with it. It probably had a lead spindle shaft and lock nuts that were away from the shaft, so that he wouldn’t be able to pound the shaft through the gut box and break the lock nuts that way. He’d try punching it, because maybe he’d get lucky, but he doubted punching it would work.
Before he started any manual labor, though, he automatically checked the safe to see if it was on day combination. A lot of people, especially if they went into a box five, six times a day, would give the combination dial just a partial turn each time they closed the box. This made it impossible for anyone to turn the handle and open the door, and it also made it easier for the guy going into his own box; all he had to do was twist the dial slowly back to the last number in the combination while applying pressure on the handle. Saved him the time of going through the whole combination whenever he wanted to open the box. Trouble was, if you left the box on day comb, it wasn’t really locked, and anybody could do what the owner of the box had done—just twist the dial slowly, and keep the pressure on the handle, and the door would open.
Alex tried that now. The box did not open, it was not on day comb. He then tried the five-ten method of opening a box without forcing it. Lots of people had difficulty remembering combinations, and when they ordered a box, they asked that the three digits in the combination be multiples of five. Or four. Eight-twelve-sixteen, like that. Or three, or seven, or any multiplication table that was easy to remember. Most people steered away from the nine table; nine was a hard one to remember, for some reason. Sometimes they asked that the digits be their birthdate. Like if he’d known, for example, that Mrs. Rothman had been born on September 15, 1913, he’d have tried nine left, fifteen right, and thirteen left again. He didn’t know her birthday, though, so he tried some simple multiplication table combinations, and then he tried the first six digits of the Rothman telephone number. But the Rothman box wasn’t keyed to their phone number, and he gave up trying to manipulate the dial after four minutes of playing around with it. This was going to be work, after all.
He opened his dispatch case and dug down under the dish towel for his sledgehammer and one of his punches. With one sharp blow of the hammer, he broke off the combination dial, revealing the spindle shaft beneath it. It looked like lead to him; he’d find out in a minute. Holding the punch in his left hand, and the hammer in his right, he centered the punch on the spindle and began pounding on it. He was aware of the noise he was making, but he was counting on two factors that had always worked in his favor. First, your average apartment house tenant got used to hearing all kinds of construction or repair noises during the daytime, and second, even if anybody did hear the pounding and wonder about it, they’d feel stupid investigating it. In New York City, people tended to mind their own business. A junkie burglar had once told Alex he’d spent fifteen minutes on a fire escape trying to get in a window, while in a building across the way a guy sat on his own fire escape watching him all the time. Guy never moved from the fire escape. Sat there fascinated. Probably thought he was watching a big caper movie.
The fuckin spindle wasn’t budging, it had to be lead, it was mushrooming with each successive blow of the hammer, the hell with it. He’d have to peel the box. Which meant he could be into it in either five minutes or five hours, depending on how strong the box turned out to be. He looked at his watch. It was ten to eleven, he had to be out of here in an hour. Getting a start on the door would be the tough part. Basically, you had your two
kinds of boxes—the record box and the money box. Your record box usually had a square door, and your money box had a round one. The round door locked with a mechanism that engaged lugs all around the door frame, and it was originally designed to stop your burglar who was using explosives. Alex hardly knew any burglars nowadays who used explosives, but the stronger door style was still common. Your money box was usually constructed entirely of heavy steel layers, and it was advertised by safe manufacturers as being “burglar-resistant.” There wasn’t a safe company in the world who’d ever claim its product was “burglar-proof,” it was always “burglar-resistant.” Your money box always had a punch-resistant spindle and sometimes a boltwork relock device, and sometimes even a copper sheet in the door to resist an acetylene torch attack.
The Rothmans had a standard record box, and Alex knew exactly what to expect in its construction. The door and all the sides of a record box were made like a sandwich, with several layers of thin steel on either side of an insulating material. Your money box was burglar-resistant, but your record box was only fire-resistant, designed to protect the contents from destruction in case the place went up in flames. This didn’t mean it would be a cinch to get into. It just meant it would be a little easier. Why the Rothmans would want to keep a $30,000 piece of jewelry in a fire-resistant box was a mystery to Alex—unless Rothman had some stocks and bonds in there, too. He was, after all, a stockbroker, so maybe he had some valuable papers in there.