Doors

by Ed McBain

  It was almost three o’clock when he got to Gucci’s on Fifth Avenue. He wasn’t in the market for shoes, not really, though he supposed he was always in the market for a good pair of shoes. He went in there to buy an enameled belt he had seen in the window a few weeks back, but after he’d made the purchase—he chose the navy blue enamel—he wandered back to the shoe department and picked out two pairs of patent leather shoes, one in white and the other in brown with the Gucci red and green fabric trim. He walked uptown to the Doubleday’s on Fifty-seventh then and looked through the record albums there, finding a Monk album that wasn’t in his collection and also picking up the new Miles Davis, though he didn’t much care for what Miles was doing these days, trying to mix jazz with rock, what kind of combination was that?

  At four o’clock he wandered into the Sherry-Netherland’s bar, ordered another Beefeater martini, and struck up a conversation with a Chinese girl at the table next to his. The girl was wearing a wide-brimmed red hat that looked like a pimp hat. She was also wearing a Jewish star that showed in the V-slash of her blouse, nestled between tiny cupcake breasts. She explained the star was just for decoration, she was really a Catholic. He steered the conversation around to Chinese food, telling her he ate Chinese three, four times a week, and that as far as he was concerned it was the best cuisine in the world. Did she know Bo-Bo’s down in Chinatown? Or Hong Fat’s? Or Wah Kee’s? Things were going along very well until a Chinese guy, wearing glasses and dressed in a dark gray ready-to-wear, came into the bar, waved at her from the door, and then took the chair opposite her at the table. Alex finished his drink and took a taxi home. It was a little past five when he got upstairs to his apartment.

  He didn’t know what he planned to do tonight—maybe go down to Broadway or up to Harlem, see if anybody was around. He felt very good about the purchases he had made, and he took out the shirts and tried on each and every one of them, looking at himself in the mirror, sucking in his stomach and expanding his chest. He looked like a fuckin weight lifter, he thought, or maybe a fag, one of your beach fags, well, more like a weight lifter; were the goddamn T-shirts too faggoty? He debated returning them to the store, and then decided he’d keep them and wear them. Anybody called him a fag, he’d hit them with his fuckin purse. Grinning, he put the shirts in the second drawer of his dresser, and then tried on first the belt and then the shoes he had bought, opening the closet and looking at himself in the full-length mirror hanging on the door. He liked both pairs, they were real stud shoes. He put trees into them and then put them on the floor together with his other shoes. The clock on his dresser read twenty to six.

  He went out into the living room, mixed himself another martini and then sipped at it leisurely while he changed his clothes. He put on a tan sports shirt and a pair of brown tailored Italian slacks and tan socks and the new brown patent-leather shoes with the red and green trim. He debated whether he would need a sports jacket, decided to put one on because you never knew what might come up, what kind of place you might want to go to, and then left the apartment.

  He didn’t see anybody he knew down on Broadway, so he had some pizza at a sidewalk stand on Forty-second, then went to a massage parlor on Eighth Avenue and asked for a girl named Pearl, but they gave him a girl who looked a lot like the Chinese girl he’d talked to at the Sherry-Netherland. When she finally got down to business, he asked her would she like to make an extra twenty, and she told him thirty was more like it, and they settled on twenty-five for a blowjob. He got home about midnight, and went straight to bed.

  In the middle of the night, he woke up, turned on the light, went to the dresser, and opened the second drawer. Taking out one of the wool jersey T-shirts, he tried it on over just his jockey shorts and then looked at himself in the mirror. He decided to bring them all back to the store tomorrow because they made him look fruity.

  On Tuesday morning, before he returned the shirts, he walked over to the park. Jessica wasn’t there. He didn’t know why he was looking for her, anyway. He sat on a bench in the sunshine for close to half hour, and then said the hell with it and taxied downtown. At Battaglia’s he told the salesman he thought the wool shirts might be too hot for the summer, and the salesman told him they had the same style in cotton. He said no, he didn’t think so, and they gave him his money back without any static; he was, after all, a steady customer there. It was 11:00 in the morning; he didn’t know what he wanted to do next. He didn’t normally feel restless after a score, especially a nice one like the Rothman job, but he felt restless this morning and didn’t know what the hell it was.

  He didn’t realize he was going to commit another burglary until he found himself in a store on Madison Avenue, buying a deck of playing cards. When he got outside the store, he separated the ten, jack, queen, king, and ace of hearts from the deck, and then threw the rest of the cards into a sidewalk trash container. He had no other tools with him, he still hadn’t replaced the tools he’d left behind on the Rothman job. But he wasn’t looking for anything difficult, just a nice easy score, and that royal-flush shim would be good enough for what he had in mind. He told himself he was keeping his hand in, staying in shape, even though he had done his last job only five days ago. He also told himself the Rothman job had been something of a disappointment because he’d known exactly what he was going to find in there, and even though he’d picked up an additional eighty-four hundred, it still had been a setup job without any real excitement to it. Maybe today would be his lucky day. Maybe he’d stumble upon that once-in-a-lifetime score, net himself enough to get out of the business completely.

  He didn’t know where he’d go, he knew only that he was looking for an easy score, a door he could loid open with the royal-flush shim. Intuitively, he decided against the city. He wanted a nice easy one, no series of doors to open, just one big door with a Mickey Mouse spring latch, or maybe a patio door, those patio doors were like opening a rip-top beer can. He decided he might need a screwdriver if he came up against a patio door, so he stopped in a hardware store on Sixth Avenue and bought himself one. And since there was a deli right next door, he went in and helped himself to a few toothpicks from a container on the cashier’s counter. The cashier glared at him, and he thought Fuck you, lady. That was all he’d need, the screwdriver, the royal-flush shim, and the toothpicks.

  He rented a car, drove up the West Side Highway and onto the Cross County, and finally got off in White Plains. He had been to White Plains before, had taken Kitty to a movie up there and then checked into the Roger Smith Hotel with her. But he’d never done a job there, so he just kept driving around now, looking for a neighborhood with big expensive houses. There was no urgency to this job, if he didn’t find anything that looked good, he’d just call it a day. But he hoped he found something. He wanted to get in somebody’s house. He wanted to open a door and get in there and start rummaging around. He wanted to find all their hiding places.

  The neighborhood he ended up in—this was all hit-or-miss, he didn’t know White Plains from a hole in the wall—had houses he guessed were in the $80–100,000 range, set way back from the street. There were a lot of old trees on the winding roads, none of them in full leaf yet; this was still only April. But most of the houses had good foundation planting around them, and the evergreens had grown quite tall over the years and would afford him good cover from the street. He drove through the neighborhood leisurely, looking for signs that would tell him a particular house was empty. He didn’t expect anyone to be away on vacation in April, so he didn’t bother looking for newspapers on the front porches, or bulging mailboxes, or a lawn that badly needed cutting, or a house with all the drapes and blinds closed, or even a house with lights burning in the upstairs windows at one in the afternoon. He saw one house with the garage door open and no cars in it, and he marked that down as a definite possibility; and he saw another house with a note tacked to the front door, and he figured this one had potential, too. But both these houses were in the middle of the street, with
houses on either side of them, and he preferred a corner house, if he could find one, where his chances of being noticed would be cut in half. He wrote down the names on the mailboxes anyway, continued driving around, and suddenly got lucky.

  The street he was on ended in a T-shaped intersection. On his right, there was a big English Tudor house, with good cover shrubbery near the front door. The name on the mailbox outside was R. Nichols. On his left, there was a house with a six-foot-tall Walpole fence surrounding the entire property. Across the intersecting road, he could see the greens of a golf course. This meant that the front of the English Tudor was facing the fence, and its right-hand side was facing the golf course. He backed the car up past the Tudor and then parked at the curb, reached over to the glove compartment, and pulled out a map. Pretending to study it, he looked instead at the stand of pines that separated the Tudor from the next house up the street. In effect, the Tudor had three blind sides. He lowered the hand brake, inched the car forward so that he could see up the driveway, and that was when he got lucky.

  As he watched, a woman came out of the house, locked the door behind her with a key, and then walked swiftly to the connecting garage. She rolled up the garage door, and he saw there was only one car in there. Then she went into the garage, started the car, and backed it out into the oval in front of the house. She left the garage door open. As the car moved out of the driveway, Alex drove his own car to the full-stop sign on the corner, stopped there briefly, and then made a right turn and continued driving past the golf course.

  There was one thing that looked bad about the house, but several things that looked very good indeed. The woman had used a key to lock the door when she came out; this meant that the lock on the front door wasn’t a spring latch, which would have locked simply by pulling the door shut. It was probably a lock he couldn’t force with either the shim or the screwdriver—that was the bad news. But the good news was that she’d bothered to lock it at all. If a woman leaves her house, and there’s a housekeeper inside there, she doesn’t go to the trouble of locking the front door with a key. This indicated to Alex that the house was empty; this and the fact that there’d been only one car in the garage. Hubby was off to work, and now the lady of the house was on her way, and the place was empty. And there were three blind sides. That’s the way he read it, and it looked very good. But to play it safe, he stopped at a drugstore and looked up R. Nichols in the phone book and found a listing for Robert Nichols. He dialed the number and let it ring ten times. Then he hung up and drove back to the street.

  He drove directly into the driveway and backed the car around so that its front end was facing the street. He wasn’t worried about anyone spotting the rented car, even though he’d had to show his license and sign for the car with his own name. Anyone saw the license plate and reported it to the police, he’d tell them Yes, that’s the car I rented, all right. Left it on the street for a minute, and somebody drove off with it. Brought it back just a little while ago, and left it right where I’d parked it. Must’ve been your fuckin burglar.

  Turning off the ignition, he put the keys in his pocket, looked around, and then walked to the front door. At the front door, he listened for a moment. He heard a radio going inside, but he knew a great many people left radios going as deterrents to burglars, and that didn’t bother him either. He had seen the lady of the house leaving, he had seen her locking the door behind her, he had seen her taking the only car from the garage, and he had let the phone ring ten times without getting an answer. Boldly, he rang the front doorbell now. If he’d been mistaken, if there was a housekeeper inside there, he’d tell her he was selling lightning rods or storm windows or whatever the hell, and she’d tell him to come back another time, when the lady of the house was home.

  He kept on leaning on the bell, and he heard it ringing loud and clear inside the house, but no one came to answer the door. He checked the windows on the front of the house for any stickers that would tell him the house was wired, but he found none. Swiftly, he walked to the connecting garage, and into the garage, and then to the door on the back wall of the garage—the door that led directly to the inside of the house. He didn’t know what it was, you’d find people with expensive deadbolts on every door of the house except the fuckin door that led in from the garage. What you usually found on an interior garage door was a cheap, five-pin cylindrical lock, with a keyway on the garage side and on the other side a button you either pushed in or twisted to lock the door. That’s what was on this door, and Alex slipped the bolt in thirty seconds flat, using the ace of hearts loid. He stepped inside the house, quickly closed the door behind him, and stood stock still, listening. All he heard was the radio.

  Using that as a directional beam, since he had first heard it while standing outside the front door, he moved through a narrow hallway that went past the kitchen, a bathroom, and a television den, and then opened into the foyer. A wide doorway led into the living room. He could see the stereo setup across the room, the tuner and amplifier on, playing music loud enough to wake the dead. Moving instantly to the front door, he unlocked it, broke off a toothpick in the key-way outside, locked the door again, and then went up the carpeted steps to the second floor of the house, where he expected the bedrooms were. He was looking for the master bedroom because that’s where the valuable stuff would be, if there was any valuable stuff. He would look for a wall box first, taking down pictures and mirrors to see what was behind them, and then checking out the closets to see if a box was mounted inside one of them. If he couldn’t find a box, then he’d go through the dresser drawers looking for jewelry, cash, or credit cards, which he’d stuff in his pockets. Then he’d go back to the closets again and take any furs that were in them. If he ran across just a single fur, he’d probably carry it out on his arm. If there happened to be three or four of them, he’d look around for a suitcase and pack them inside it, together with whatever else looked good. Cash was the best, of course, you didn’t have to share cash with anybody, you didn’t have to go to a fence with cash. Credit cards were almost as good as cash, but they were hard to come by. Coin and stamp collections were good, too, but he didn’t expect to find any of those in the bedroom—you usually came across those in a library or a den. He planned to check the house out thoroughly before he left it, going through it room by room, but first he wanted to find the master bedroom and give it a good working-over.

  The stairs opened onto a long, carpeted, second-floor corridor with three doors in it. The first door in the corridor was open, and he looked in at a child’s room with animals parading on the wallpaper. There was a single bed in the room and a dresser painted yellow, and on the dresser a piggy bank. He would bust open the piggy bank later, not because he was interested in pennies, but only because sometimes Grandma stuffed a five or a ten in there when she came visiting. He figured that the closed door at the end of the hall led to the master bedroom; for some reason, the master bedroom was usually at the end of the hall. But there was another closed door just past the child’s room, and he went to that now, and twisted the knob, and opened it.

  A woman was in there.

  He froze in the doorway, he felt needles prickling along his spine and racing up into his skull. The woman had white hair, she was maybe seventy-five, eighty years old, she was sitting up in bed propped against the pillows, reading a book. Alongside the bed, there was a night table with a glass of water on it, and a box of Kleenex, and a whole collection of pill bottles—he had stumbled across a fuckin sick old lady in bed. She turned toward the door the minute he opened it and stared across the room at him, and neither of them said anything for several moments, and then he saw her mouth beginning to open, saw the scream forming on her mouth, and knew that she would scream in the next instant.

  He turned, almost turned to run, and then wondered if he could get down the stairs and out the door and into the rented car before her scream brought down the whole neighborhood. He found himself walking into the room instead, moving swiftly t
o the bed, the scream about to erupt, the woman’s eyes round and frightened, his own heart pounding as he reached the side of the bed and clamped one hand behind her head and the other hand over her mouth.

  She smelled of medicine, she smelled of old age, she was a sick old lady in a house that should have been empty, why the hell hadn’t she answered the phone when he’d called here? He saw now that there was no telephone in the room, the lady was bedridden, she couldn’t have got up to answer a phone even if she’d wanted to. He still had his hand clamped tight over her mouth, he didn’t want to let go of her mouth because the scream would sure as hell follow. But he couldn’t stay in here all day long either, with his hand over her mouth and her daughter or her niece or whoever it was maybe ready to come back to the house any minute. There was a sick person in the house, she wouldn’t be gone long, she’d maybe run down to the drugstore to get some more medicine, she’d maybe gone to the same drugstore he’d made the call from, and that was only four blocks away, he was beginning to sweat. The sweat broke out on his forehead and under his arms; it was sweat that stank of fear, and it mingled with the medicinal old-age stink of the woman and made him sick to his stomach. He wanted nothing more than to get out of there, but if he let go of her mouth she would scream.

  “I’m not gonna hurt you,” he said.

  The old lady nodded. Her head moved under his hand, he kept his hand clamped over her mouth, pressing hard. He could feel the outline of her teeth against his hand and the wetness of her lips, but he did not remove his hand, he kept pressing it against her mouth, his other hand at the back of her head. He thought for an instant that her skull would shatter between his hands, and he quickly said, “I don’t want to hurt you, I just want to get out of here. If I take my hand off your mouth, and you scream, then I’ll have to hurt you,” he said. “You hear me?”