Doors

by Ed McBain

  “He’s got a chauffeur, a gardener, a cook, and two maids.”

  “And all of them are off on Thursdays, huh?”

  “That’s what she says.”

  “If I had five in help, I’d keep some of them on. Case I needed my back washed. Who drives his wife into the city? Does she drive in by herself?”

  “Why?”

  “I’m thinking if maybe the chauffeur isn’t off on Thursdays, then maybe he’s the one drives the wife in. And be just our luck she’ll say James, you may pick me up at six in front of Bonwit’s, and he’ll drive back out to the country early and find the two of us in the house there working the box. If there is a box.”

  “I thought three guys,” Archie said.

  “Three? Why three?”

  “Well, Daisy don’t want any of this to rub off on her, you dig?”

  “No, I don’t. What do you mean?”

  “She don’t want this to look like an inside job. She says her twenty-five percent ain’t worth …”

  “Twenty-five percent! Forget it.”

  “She’ll earn it, man. She’s gonna try getting in the house next Thursday, check it out for us.”

  “Still, time we fence the stuff … and what do you mean three guys? We got to give her twenty-five, and then split the rest three ways? After the fence skims seventy off the top? No way, Arch.”

  “This could be a big score, Alex.”

  “It could be shit, too. We got to split thirty percent four ways, that comes to … What does it come to, anyway?”

  “Little more than seven percent each. Seven and a half, actually.”

  “What do we need a third guy for?”

  “I told you. To give Daisy an out.”

  “Fuck Daisy. Tell her to …”

  “Without Daisy, there’s no job.”

  “With her, there’s only seven percent of a job.”

  “Seven and a half,” Archie said.

  “I still don’t know what the third guy is for.”

  “To put a gun on Daisy and the old man. Go in the studio there and put a gun on them. To make it look like Daisy had nothing to do with it. Maybe smack her around a little.”

  “Forget it, we don’t need a gun. And all Daisy’s worth is ten percent.”

  “I already told her twenty-five.”

  “So go back and tell her ten. She don’t like it, that’s too fuckin bad. I don’t know what’s the matter with you, Arch, tellin a whore twenty-five percent. There’s your exit, comin up there.”

  “Yeah, I see it.”

  “You ever give anybody twenty-five percent before? For just fingering a job?”

  “No, but she’s the only one can get in there and look it over. What do I do when I get off, Alex? I wrote it on the edge of the map.”

  “You make a left when you get off the parkway. There’s a sign says Stamford and North Stamford, you head toward North Stamford. When you cross over into New York State …”

  “All right, give me the rest when I get to it,” Archie said.

  “We go in, we take all the risk, and you’re ready to hand Daisy twenty-five percent. Ten is enough, Arch. We give her ten, and we split the rest. Let’s say this is a really big score here, okay? Let’s say we go in there, we find maybe half a million bucks’ worth of goods, okay? Tremendous score. The fence takes … Who you got in mind for swagman, anyway?”

  “I thought maybe Vito.”

  “We don’t even know what’s in there yet. If this is lots of jewels in there, Vito’s no good for it. Maybe we go to Henry Green. Anyway, whoever we go to, he gives us thirty percent, which on a five-hundred-grand haul is … What? A hundred and fifty grand, right?”

  “Right,” Archie said.

  “Okay, we give fifteen grand to Daisy, that leaves a hun thirty-five to split between just the two of us. So let’s sweeten it just a little for her; let’s say we give her twenty grand, round it out. That’s sixty-five grand left for each of us, Arch. That makes it worthwhile.”

  “What about the gun?”

  “No way. We bring a gun in on this, put a gun on the old man and Daisy, that makes it armed robbery. No way, Arch.”

  “How’s it armed robbery if it’s two separate buildings? There’s two buildings, Alex, the studio and the house. We got a man with a gun in one of the buildings …”

  “No fuckin gun, I said.”

  “… and we’re doing the burglary in the other building, how’s that armed robbery?”

  “It’s armed robbery even if we put a gun on him and sent another guy to a fuckin bank to pick up money he made a phone call for, we forced him to make a phone call. Now that’s armed robbery, Arch, and I happen to know it, and I’m telling you no gun.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “And, anyway, Arch, this whole thing sounds shitty to me.”

  “Well, let’s look over the house, okay? We come all the way out here, let’s at least look it over.”

  They drove up and down Pembrook Road a dozen times before they even located a marker for the house. The marker was a round brass escutcheon engraved with the name Reed, set high up on one of the huge stone pillars flanking the entrance drive, partially obscured by a branch from a pine tree.

  “There it is,” Archie whispered.

  He stopped the car and then backed it up so they could look into the driveway.

  “You see anything?” Alex whispered.

  “Nothing. House must be all the way back in there. Daisy says it’s right on a lake.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “You want to drive in there?”

  “If you weren’t black, Archie, I’d say yes. I’d drive in there and tell them I’m looking for my cousin Ralph Hennings the Fourth. But you being black, and you being such a mean-looking mother fucker, we’d have six German shepherds on us in a minute.”

  “There’s no dogs in there,” Archie said, laughing. “Daisy says there’s no dogs. Whyn’t you get in the back seat,” he said, still laughing, “and make like I’m your chauffeur? We’ll drive up there, and you can tell them your man here seems to have lost his way. Let’s see how far this stone wall runs, now we know which house it is.”

  They followed the stone wall down the road in one direction for about three hundred feet, where it ended in a clump of pines. Then Archie backed the car around in the next driveway up the road and followed the wall to its end on the other side of the property. The wall ran a good six hundred feet on that side.

  “Old Reed the Third has a nice chunk of land in there,” Archie said.

  “Come on, let’s go home,” Alex said.

  They talked about it all the way back to Harlem. They didn’t know much about it yet, and were skeptical even about what they did know, but they talked about it nonetheless. It seemed to them both that the next step was for Daisy to give them a report on the house itself. If she couldn’t get in there and look around, then the hell with the job, they weren’t about to go in blind. They debated her percentage again, and Alex admitted he had once paid fifteen percent to a finger, but the guy had really done a lot of preliminary work for him, and fifteen percent had seemed fair in that particular case. He agreed to go to fifteen now, but only if Daisy really set the thing up for them, which meant reporting on the alarm system and giving them the exact layout of the house, and how much they could expect to get in there, and where the Reeds stashed their valuables and cash if there wasn’t a box.

  He also wanted a full report on the live-in help, because he needed to make certain they were all off on Thursdays—he still couldn’t believe this was possible. He hoped to do a dry run on the house, and he wouldn’t appreciate running into any two-hundred-pound chauffeur who used to be a heavyweight prizefighter. And he wanted to know when Daisy usually got out to Post Mills, and when she and Reed the Third were busiest out there in the studio, because that’s when he planned to do the dry run, while they were out there banging away. He figured the dry run was necessary so they could study the alarm system
themselves, see if it was something they could knock out, or maybe find a point of entry that wasn’t tied in to the alarm, if there was an alarm. He knew one guy, for example, who’d gone down the chimney in a place that was otherwise wired like Fort Knox. He thought they should try the dry run Thursday after next, by which time Daisy would have already been inside the house and given them her report. Daisy was going to try to get in next Thursday, and they’d do the dry run the following Thursday, and maybe pull the job the Thursday after that—May the second.

  “Does that sound all right to you, Arch?” he asked.

  “I was hoping it could be sooner,” Archie said. “I’m really running low.”

  “Yeah, but we need the dry run, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, sure. And I don’t see how we can do one less all the help is away, and that’s only on Thursdays.”

  “Right.”

  “So I guess we’ll have to wait till May second to pull the job, though I sure wish it could be sooner.”

  “You think this guy is really a millionaire?” Alex asked.

  “That’s what Daisy says.”

  “We ought to go in there with a truck,” Alex said, and laughed. “Really wipe the fuckin place out, load up the fur coats and the paintings and the jewelry and the cash and everything that ain’t nailed down.”

  “I don’t want nothing to do with paintings,” Archie said. “They’re too hard to get rid of. Only way to realize any cash on paintings is to hold them for ransom, give them back when the owners cough up. But that’s more like kidnapping.”

  “I don’t much care for paintings, either,” Alex said. “But if we roll in there with a truck, we could really cart off everything but the fuckin speedboat.”

  “Maybe we could get a truck big enough to put the speedboat on, too,” Archie said, and they both laughed. They fell silent then, and Archie seemed very thoughtful for the longest time. At last he said, “I still think a gun would be very valuable on this job. Not only to protect Daisy, but to make sure Reed the Third stays put out there in the studio while we’re loading the goods. Daisy won’t be able to keep him out there all by herself, she’s got only the one leg, he’ll knock her over and come barreling out of there if he hears any noise in the driveway.”

  “No, absolutely not,” Alex said. “No fuckin gun.”

  “Well,” Archie said, and shrugged.

  “But I’m glad you brought up this matter of noise because it’s important to know just how far the studio is from the main house. So we’ll know whether noise’ll carry out there if we have to peel a box.”

  “Yeah, I’ll ask Daisy to check on that,” Archie said.

  There wasn’t much else they could do until they had a full report from Daisy; wasn’t even much else to talk about. So they had something to eat at a Spanish restaurant, and then they went to a movie. They left each other at ten that night, promising to meet again on Friday, after Daisy had got in the house.

  Alex went home, watched Johnny Carson till he signed off, and then went to sleep.

  When he had it, he spent it.

  The first thing he did on Monday morning was get out there and shop for some new threads. Summertime was coming, and his stuff from last year, though still practically new, was beginning to bore him. He had maybe thirty tailor-made suits and sports jackets in his closet, a dozen of them summerweight stuff, but he got tired of clothes fast, wore a suit six or seven times and then let it hang there gathering dust. It was the same way with ties. He’d spend twenty-five bucks for a tie, wear it once, and then never look at it again.

  Shoes were a different story. He loved shoes, good shoes. You could tell by the kind of shoes a man was wearing whether he was flush or not. Alex usually bought his shoes from an English bootmaker on Madison Avenue, and he took very good care of them—worked the leather with expensive creams and polishes, had them resoled or heeled whenever they needed it, kept shoe trees in them when he wasn’t wearing them. He never threw away shoes he’d grown tired of. There was always somebody could use a good pair of shoes, and when he gave them away it wasn’t with rundown heels or holes in the soles. He gave them away in mint condition, and usually polished besides. He liked polishing shoes. He liked the smell of the leather and the smell of the polish, and it gave him a great feeling of satisfaction to work a pair of shoes till the leather glowed under his hands. It made him feel good to give them away, too, when he’d grown tired of them. Put a pair of expensive shoes in a man’s hands, shoes he could see you’d taken good care of, his eyes lit up like diamonds. Man had a good pair of shoes on his feet, he walked taller. You’re standing in something cost a hundred and ten dollars, you’ve got to feel there’s a solid base under you, a foundation.

  He went to his tailor first. He was a regular customer there, and though his usual salesman was busy fitting another customer, he excused himself and walked right over and shook Alex’s hand, told him he’d just be a minute, why didn’t Alex look over some tropical-weight materials meanwhile—he was interested in a new wardrobe, wasn’t he?

  Alex told him that’s why he was here, and to take his time, there was no rush. He went to the end of the room, where the big windows faced out on Forty-fourth Street below, and began looking through swatches and bolts of material. His taste in clothes was somewhat conservative, he knew burglars who dressed like getaway cars. He picked out a tan worsted with a faint windowpane pattern, and even though he wasn’t looking for any winter clothes, he found a beautiful gray cloth he thought would make a nice suit. He also picked out a tropical-weight blue hopsack weave, and was looking over a possibility for a sports jacket when the salesman came over.

  “No, Mr. Hardy,” he said, “you don’t want that.”

  “Too flashy, huh?” Alex asked.

  “Not your style. No, no,” the salesman said. “Definitely not. No. Ah, you found the windowpane. Isn’t that beautiful? That’s an English tropical, a Rangoon cloth. It’s cool, and it’ll hold a press nicely. That’ll make up beautifully. I’ve seen it made up. Good with your hair coloring, too. Perfect for you. What else did you see?”

  “I thought this one,” Alex said, indicating the gray cloth. “Not for the summer, but I can use a good dressy suit this fall.”

  “Elegant,” the salesman said. “You’re right, it’s elegant. That’s an English hard-finish worsted. Very dressy, and elegant, too. The bird’s eye design, elegant. And because it’s so subdued, we can afford to be more colorful in the lining. A Thai silk? No, I don’t think so. But a red wouldn’t hurt for the lining. Open the jacket, we see a flash of red. Or at the back vents. You have it made with two back vents, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Alex said.

  “I remember. I have your card here, but I remember.”

  “Red may be too much,” Alex said. “For the lining.”

  “Not if we use the dull side. I’m not talking about fire-engine red now, this is too elegant for that. Let me show you the lining,” he said, and reached under the counter and pulled out a bolt of cloth. “This is the bright side, but look at the reverse.”

  “It’s more like maroon,” Alex said.

  “Maroon, that’s right. It isn’t red, it isn’t fire-engine red, it’s more like maroon, you’re right. Look at that against the bird’s-eye,” he said. “Is that elegant?”

  “Yeah, that would be nice, I think,” Alex said. “You don’t feel it’s too much, huh?”

  “I know how you dress,” the salesman said, “I wouldn’t suggest anything too flamboyant. Unless you choose to go that way. I mean deliberately. I have a fabric we got in yesterday, it’s flamboyant, yes, that’s the word, flamboyant. It’s flamboyant. But it makes up beautifully as a sports jacket, if that’s the way you choose to go. It’s flamboyant, it has flair, and it makes up beautifully. But the maroon lining with the bird’s-eye, yes, definitely. And a simple button, a very dark grey button … You take three buttons on the sleeve, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Alex said.

  “
I remember. I have your card here, but I remember. Open buttonholes on the sleeve, am I right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I remember. Were you looking at the hopsack, too?”

  “What do you think?” Alex said.

  “If you want a blue, I have one here with a faint shadow stripe …”

  “I have that in the standard weight,” Alex said.

  “Yes, I remember. Then you don’t want it in the tropical, no. Well, let’s see, have you decided on the windowpane? If you’re taking the windowpane, that’s in the beige area, you don’t want another in beige, do you? No, that wouldn’t, no, blue is what we want to concentrate on. The bird’s-eye is for the fall, but for the summer you’ve got the windowpane, and a blue is what we’re looking for. Or, if you’d like another gray, gray’s a very good color for you, I have a pearl-gray worsted flannel you can wear both summer and fall, a beautiful fabric, unfinished worsted flannel. Would you like to see that?”

  “I’d also like to see the flamboyant one,” Alex said.

  “For a sports jacket, mind you. It would be too much for a suit, too flamboyant.”

  “Yes, for a sports jacket. I also had in mind, for a sports jacket, something like a camel’s hair—that color, but in a tropical weight.”

  “That’s beautiful on you, camel’s hair. We made up a camel’s hair for you, didn’t we?”

  “Yes, but it’s a winter jacket.”

  “I remember, yes. With the bone buttons?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I remember. I have your card here, but I remember. Would you go for a cashmere? It’s the same color as the camel’s hair, but it has the lightness we’re looking for, and it makes up beautifully. Well, let’s see what we have here, we’ll find something perfect, I’m sure.”

  Alex bought three suits and two sports jackets, one of which he picked from the rack, but which he knew they would alter to his measurements. The suits cost him $510 apiece; the cashmere jacket cost him $450, and he paid $360 for the Shetland he had picked from the rack.

  He left his tailor at about one o’clock and walked crosstown to a French restaurant he knew on Fiftieth and First, where he had a Beefeater martini, and then ordered the escargots and the sole meunière, with a half bottle of Pouilly Fumé. After lunch he walked over to Battaglia’s on Park Avenue and bought himself half a dozen T-shirts in different muted pastel colors, and a long-sleeved pale blue polyester sports shirt. The T-shirts cost him $37 each, but they were made of fine wool jersey and the one he tried on fit him beautifully. The polyester shirt cost $22.