by Ed McBain
In any case, with either a money box or a record box, you had to peel back the steel until you had a hole big enough to get in with a jimmy. Once you exposed the locking mechanism, you could pry it loose and open the door. That took time. And hard work. And the hardest part was getting it started, getting a grip on the thing so you could peel it back. He dug in his dispatch case for his drill and extension cord and was carrying the cord to a socket where he could plug it in when he heard a noise that startled him.
Everything stopped.
The forward motion of his body stopped, his breathing stopped, he felt for a second that even his heart had stopped. He listened. The noise was coming from somewhere in the direction of the living room. He stepped quietly to the bedroom door, stood just to one side of it, and listened again. The noise sounded like … what the hell? Somebody bouncing a rubber ball? He moved swiftly into the living room and walked directly to the front door of the apartment. The noise was coming from outside in the hall, and, yes, it was a kid bouncing a rubber ball on the floor, he was sure of that now. The bouncing stopped, there were footsteps approaching the door.
The bell sounded.
He leaped back from the door in sudden panic. The doorbell rang again. There was another silence. Then Alex heard the sound of the rubber ball bouncing down the corridor, and then the sound of a door slamming shut. Did the kid live in 16B? Had he come to visit with dear old Mrs. Rothman, not realizing she was out for her morning stroll? Or had someone in 16B heard Alex pounding on the box spindle and sent the kid to investigate? He waited. He was half-tempted to get the hell out now, but he waited, standing just inside the front door, listening. He heard nothing more. Usually, when you were in one of these new apartment buildings, you could hear noise all over the place, toilets flushing, pipes rattling, sometimes even people arguing upstairs or next door. He heard nothing now, and the silence was reassuring; it told him the walls were well-insulated, and he could risk making at least some noise working on the box.
He went back into the bedroom, plugged in his extension cord, carried the drill to the box, and began working on the upper left-hand corner of it. He did not know of any burglars who peeled a safe from the right-hand side. That’s where the hinges were, and hinges could stop you dead. All he wanted to do now was get a hole started in the outer layer of steel so he could get his chisel under it and begin bending it back. That outer layer would be maybe just a quarter of an inch thick, and if he could peel that one back and then get in there with his jimmy, he could pry along the edge of the door plating to break the rivets or the spot welds that were holding it in place, and keep peeling back layers of steel till he got to the insulation material. He was using a high-speed bit, but the work was slow, and it took him close to ten minutes to get a hole he thought he could use. He picked up his hammer and his cold chisel, and began working the hole, the tempered cutting edge of the chisel seeking purchase on the smooth steel of the door. There was another way to get a peel job started, but it made too much noise for a fuckin apartment house. Your nighttime men who didn’t have to worry about waking anybody up in a store or an office building would sometimes pound on a corner of the door till the plating was bent out enough to get a jimmy behind it. Sure, that was all he had to do here, pound on a corner of the door—the little ball-bouncer next door would come running down the hall again wanting to know who was breaking things in the Rothman apartment.
The chisel kept slipping, it refused to get under the steel, the damn corner of the door simply would not get going. He was breathing hard now, and his face was beaded with sweat. The clock on the bedroom dresser was an electric one, but he could hear its hum in the silence of the bedroom, a steady drone behind the sound of the sledge against the head of the chisel. His ears were alerted to any alien sounds; the only sounds that belonged now were those of his own breathing, the hum of the electric clock, and the steady metallic ring of steel against steel. He paused, wiped sweat from his upper lip with the back of one gloved hand, and then looked at his watch.
It was eleven-fifteen.
Ten minutes later he got the box started. He let out his breath in relief because from here on in it was duck soup. He took the sectional jimmy out of his dispatch case, screwed the three parts together, and slid the hooked end under the corner he’d bent back with the chisel. Clutching the jimmy with both hands, he put all the strength of his arms into pushing on it, and the corner of the door bent back further. Working alternately with the chisel and the jimmy, he ripped rivets and welds, pried loose a second layer of steel, and then a third—and suddenly a puff of something resembling smoke came up out of the hole. He had hit the asbestos fireproofing material, he was home free. A grin broke on his face. It took him another five minutes to chip out the concrete and the asbestos and pry open the locking bar inside the box. The door opened. It was exactly twenty minutes to twelve.
He dumped all his tools on the floor, emptying the dispatch case. He had never left his tools behind on a job before, but the Hawk had given him a good tip the other day—even though he hadn’t meant to—and Alex now realized that another way to throw the opposition off the trail was to vary his m.o. each time out. This had never occurred to him, and he suspected it hadn’t occurred to any of the thieves he’d met in prison or out. A man got used to doing things one way, he generally did them the same way each and every time. He knew the risk of taking his tools with him—if he got caught coming out with burglar’s tools on him, this would automatically add a year or a thousand-dollar fine to the rap, and besides, would be incontrovertible evidence that he’d been in there intending to commit a crime. A man didn’t go inside an apartment with a sectional jimmy unless he intended using it, and Alex didn’t know what the hell anyone could use one for except to pry open a door or a box. But he was really fond of his tools—they fit his hand, he knew each ball, hook, diamond, and rake pick by its feel, they somehow added to his peace of mind while he was working. The tools were easy enough to replace since they were the same tools used by legitimate locksmiths, that wasn’t the point. They were his tools, and he simply didn’t like the idea of leaving them behind, the way lots of burglars did because they were afraid of the possession rap and also of paint scrapings or scratches that might link them to the burglary. So Alex had never left his tools behind, and he had almost invariably smashed a window before he went out, to make it look as though the job had been done by a junkie or any other kind of crude burglar. The Hawk had wised him up. Today he would leave his tools behind, and he wouldn’t bother smashing a window, either. Let the Hawk figure it out, the cock-sucker.
He reached into the safe.
The papers in there weren’t stocks or bonds, they were things like a marriage certificate and a deed to a house someplace and also a Xerox copy of a Haitian divorce decree—apparently this was a second marriage for Mr. Rothman. Alex threw the various documents on the floor and began digging into the safe for the good stuff. He’d been told he would find the ring in a small black box with “Henry Green, Jeweler” stamped onto its lid. He lifted the lid of the box to make sure the ring was inside it, and then he closed the lid and put the box into the dispatch case. There was a long, velvet-covered box inside the safe, too, and he opened that and found a diamond bracelet inside it, and quickly put that into the dispatch case. He didn’t bother opening any of the other boxes that were inside there. He knew what he had already, and this wasn’t the kind of job where there was plenty of time to separate the crap from the real goods. He figured if something was in the safe to begin with, it had to be valuable, so he just reached in, and put whatever he found into the dispatch case. When the safe was empty, he looked at his watch. It was almost a quarter to twelve, he still had five minutes.
He didn’t want this to look like a crude burglar had been in here, but neither did he want it to look like an inside job. Somebody comes in, goes straight to the safe, and doesn’t bother anything else in the room, you’ve got to figure he was tipped off. So he went to the dresse
r now, and began pulling out the drawers, dumping the contents onto the bed, and then tossing the empty drawers on the floor. He found a Hamilton wristwatch, which he put into the dispatch case, and he also found a pair of gold earrings with diamond chips, mixed in with a lot of costume jewelry. He left the costume jewelry where he had dumped it on the bed, but he put the gold earrings into the dispatch case. He threw some panties, slips, and blouses around the room to make it look as if the burgler had been in haste, and he went back to the closet and threw a few suits and dresses on the floor, and then he knocked over one of the lamps on purpose, and looked at his watch again, and figured it was time to call it a day. Lots of burglars he knew, or rather burglars he’d heard about—he hadn’t yet met one who was willing to admit it—would take a shit in the middle of the floor before they went out of a place, or else piss on the bed or in somebody’s shoes, let the people know they’d been there, and also let them know what the burglar thought of them. Alex didn’t think anything about the Rothmans or any people he burglarized, and he also happened to feel that the place to go to the toilet wasn’t in the middle of somebody’s bedroom or in his shoes. That was sick.
He went out of the place the same way he’d come in, through the service door. He listened at the door before he stepped out into the alcove, and then he opened the door quickly and crossed the several feet to the fire door and started down the steps. He felt almost giddy. There were burglars who dreaded coming out of a place, but for Alex the going-in was tough and the coming-out was always joyous. His juices always ran high when he was inside an apartment, but he never felt nervous unless he heard an unexpected noise, and thank God he’d never run into a human being while he was burglarizing a place. He wasn’t sure what he’d do if ever he did. He knew he’d never go back to jail again, never, and if that meant hurting somebody or even killing somebody to avoid getting busted, then he supposed that was what he’d do. Still, he hoped he’d never have to do it.
He came down the sixteen flights of stairs to the ground-floor lobby and then continued down another flight to the basement. He didn’t think he’d run into the black handyman down there, but if he did he’d just tell him he lived in the building and thought his wife might be down there doing the wash. If there weren’t any washing machines in the basement, he’d make up another story. He was good at that sort of thing, talking his way out of situations, especially when the guy he was talking to was a machine. Alex considered anyone who did manual labor a, machine. Nine-to-five office workers were something slightly higher than machines, but people who lugged garbage cans or dug ditches or brushed your coat in the men’s room were nothing but machines, and he had no respect at all for them.
The black man wasn’t in the basement. Alex looked over the room quickly, orienting himself. He spotted the exit door almost immediately, went to it, opened it, and started up the ramp to the street. The door at the top of the ramp was the one he’d stopped to examine on Tuesday morning, when he’d bent to tie his shoelace in the rain. It was no damn good for getting into the place, but it was just fine and dandy for getting out.
He opened it, stepped onto the sidewalk, and began walking immediately toward Madison Avenue. If the doorman was behind him standing at the curb, he either didn’t notice Alex or didn’t care to challenge him. No one called to Alex, no one came running after him, no one did a damn thing but let him get away with the dispatch case full of goods.
He was smiling broadly when he hailed a taxi on Madison and told the driver to take him to Yankee Stadium. He got out there, hailed another taxi, and gave the driver Henry Green’s address on Fordham Road.
TWO
As Kitty took off her clothes, she started telling Alex what had happened when she’d delivered the two grand to the numbers racketeer. Lying on the bed naked, he watched as she peeled off her dress and her half-slip. She had never shot dope into her arms, preferring the inside of her thighs, and there were scars on them still, marring the smooth dark flesh, but he could not detect any fresh punctures, so maybe she’d been telling the truth after all. She folded the slip over the back of a chair, and then carried her dress to the bedroom closet and put it on a hanger. She was a very neat person, always had been, cleaned up after herself like a cat. She had not yet removed her shoes, and as she stood at the closet wearing only panties and bra and the high-heeled pumps, he studied her, and began to want her, and became suddenly bored with the story she was telling.
“… is in Harlem, but he lives in a very fancy neighborhood. Doorman stopped me, wanted to know what I was doing there. Told him I had a package for Mr. Di Santis. He asks me my name and then calls upstairs. Send her up, Di Santis says, and I take the elevator to the twelfth floor and ring the doorbell. You got any cigarettes in the house, Alex?”
“You know I don’t smoke,” he said. “Hurry it up there, okay?”
“Patience, sweetie,” she said, and smiled at him, and then went out of the bedroom. He heard her crossing the living room to where she’d left her handbag, heard the click of the clasp as she opened the bag, heard her striking a match. When she came back into the bedroom again, a lighted cigarette was in her hand. She walked to the foot of the bed, took a long drag on the cigarette, and then stood there like a model, hip jutting forward, right elbow cupped in left hand, cigarette trailing smoke in her relaxed right hand.
“One of his gorillas opened the door,” she said, and dragged on the cigarette again. “He asked me did I have the money, and I told him yes, and he took me in to see Di Santis. This was maybe ten o’clock, it took me about a half-hour to get there from here. Di Santis is wearing a robe, he’s smiling, he says to me You’re a woman of your word.”
“This is the longest fuckin story I ever heard in my life,” Alex said.
“Patience, sweetie,” she said.
“This is a fuckin opera,” Alex said.
“I hand him the envelope,” Kitty said, “and he takes the rubber band off it and begins counting the bills. He takes his good sweet time counting them. Then he counts them again, and then he asks me are they counterfeit. They better not be counterfeit, he says. I tell him the money is good, and he counts it yet a third time, and then he says It’s not all here. His gorilla is standing behind me, Di Santis is sitting at this desk with a leather top, the money is spread out on the desk in front of him. I tell him What do you mean it ain’t all there? There’s two thousand dollars there, you just counted it three fuckin times. He says That’s the principal. I’m talking about the interest on the principal. Behind me the gorilla laughs, and Di Santis is smiling now, and he tells me You know something? I was hoping you wouldn’t be able to come up with the money. I was hoping I could fix your face. I can still do it, you know. If you don’t come up with the interest.”
“So what are you saying?” Alex asked. “Does he want more money, is that it? I can’t give you no more money.”
“No, no,” Kitty said, and went to the dresser and looked for an ashtray, and then said. “Where can I put this out?” and without waiting for an answer, went out of the bedroom again. He heard her searching for an ashtray out there, and then she said, “Never were any fuckin ashtrays in this place,” and he heard her going into the bathroom just off the entrance foyer, and then he heard the toilet flushing. When she came back into the bedroom, she took off her bra and carried it to the chair where her slip was folded over the back, and put the bra on top of the slip, and came to the bed and sat on the edge of it. He reached out to touch her breast, and she said, “I ain’t finished with the story.”
“So finish it,” he said.
“He made me blow him,” she said. “He told me that was the interest on the two grand, unless I wanted him to fix my face. The gorilla stood there all the while I did it, and then Di Santis said I think my boy here would like a little something, too, and I had to go down on the gorilla, too. Then they let me leave.”
“You shouldn’t have done it,” Alex said.
“I had to do it. I’d have done anythi
ng to get out of there. He wasn’t kidding, Alex. He opened the top drawer of the desk and took out this little bottle, and he said This could blind you, I decide to throw it in your face.”
“It coulda been water,” Alex said.
“Yeah, it coulda been, that’s right. Only way to find out was to have him throw it in my face.”
“You still shouldn’t have done it.”
“You’d have done the same thing.”
“I wouldn’t go down on nobody, he could have a whole fuckin gallon of acid, I still wouldn’t go down on him.”
“Took him a half-hour to come, the cocksucker. I think he was holding back. Just to make me work harder. The gorilla got off right away, but not Di Santis.”
“What are you telling me this fuckin story for?” Alex asked.
“I think it’s an interesting story.”
“I think it’s a fuckin disgusting story.”
“Hey, come on,” she said, and reached down for him. “Come on, sweetie, it didn’t mean nothing.”
“So what’s this supposed to be now?” Alex asked. “Is this paying back the principal or the interest or what?”
“This is different. Come on, what’s the matter with you?”
She rose suddenly, eased her panties over her hips, and then stepped out of them. Sitting on the edge of the bed again, she took off her shoes and then swung her legs up onto the bed. Her hand immediately found him again.
“Why didn’t you blow the doorman on the way out?” Alex said.
“Why don’t I blow you right this minute?” she said, and grinned. “I think that’s a much better idea.”
“What you done was disgusting,” Alex said.
“You’re something,” she said.
“Yeah, I’m something, And you’re a cheap fuckin whore, is what you are.”
“Anyway, what’s this concern with johns all of a sudden? You never used to worry about johns.”