by Ed McBain
Daisy smiled suddenly and radiantly.
“I ain’t a whore for nothing, I always get paid first. So I went in the bathroom out there in the studio, and I locked the door and took my shower and then put on all my clothes again, and when I come outside he said What are you doing all dressed? and I said I want to see the house, you said you’d show me the house. We can see it later, he said, now come on, Daisy. I told him I washed off all the perfume, I smell as sweet and innocent as the day I was born, and I want to see the inside of the fuckin house. Unless he was afraid I’d contaminate it or somethin, in which case maybe we ought to forget about my coming all the way out there every Thursday, I have hay fever, anyway, and all that stuff beginning to bloom is making me sneeze. So he said All right, all right, it’s just a house, I don’t know what the big deal is, and I told him it was important to me. I was like playing the square girl who wants her man to prove he values her, you know?” Daisy said, and laughed.
“So he took you over there,” Archie said.
“He took me over.”
“Any stickers on the windows?” Alex asked.
“Doors and windows both,” Daisy said. “He’s got these glass panels on the side of the front door, and there’s stickers on them, and also stickers on the glass sliding doors, and on all the windows around the house.”
“What’d it say on the stickers?”
“Provident Security.”
“These premises protected by Provident Security?”
“Yeah.”
“Provident Security. That mean anything to you, Alex?”
“Never heard of it.”
“I asked him what the stickers were, he said an alarm system. So I began joking about that, did a big bell go off if you opened the door, and he said No, it was a silent alarm, it was tied in someplace. I asked him where it was tied in, did it go off at the police station or what? He said there ain’t no police station in Post Mills, it’s the state troopers cover the town. So I asked him was the alarm tied in to the troopers, and he said No, a man named Charlie Duncan, who also runs a taxi service up there, has a dozen houses or so wired into his place, and he runs right over if one of them goes off.”
“Reed didn’t get suspicious, all these questions, did he?”
“No, no, I was just making jokes about the whole thing,” Daisy said. “This was when we were going in the house, it all sounded very natural.” In her watermelon accent, she said, “I’se jes a dumb li’l whore, you see, ain’t spected to know nothin bout no burglar larms.”
“Charlie Duncan, that’s the guy’s name?”
“Yeah.”
“And he has a taxi service there in the town, huh?”
“Yeah. Calls it Duncan’s Livery.”
“Duncan’s Livery, right.”
“This is a one-horse town, you understand,” Daisy said.
“Yeah, we been up there.”
“No police force, volunteer fire department, like that.”
“We got the picture,” Archie said. “So what’s the house like?”
“Gorgeous,” Daisy said.
“Describe it,” Alex said. “You come in the front door …”
“Yeah, you come in the front door, and it sort of goes off into two wings. It’s a very modern house, you know, glass and stone and wood, it’s really something, Arch, I’d give my other leg to live in that fuckin place. There’s stone on the floor just inside the front door, and what you’re facing is the back of the living-room fireplace. The living room’s about as big as a football field, with the fireplace on one end and these sliding glass doors covering the entire wall on the other end, looking out over the lake.”
“Did you get a look at those doors?” Alex said.
“Yeah, they’ve got stickers on them too. I told you that already.”
“What kind of locks on them? Your crappy patio door locks?”
“I don’t know anything about locks,” Daisy said.
“Were the doors glass or plastic?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was there a safety bar across them?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“A crossbar, about waist high. With a chain and a catch on it.”
“I didn’t see anything like that.”
“Okay, go on. Where are the bedrooms?”
“The house is all on one level,” Daisy said. “Behind the entrance, like divided from the entrance by the fireplace, is the living room. Then, going off to the right of the entrance, there’s the dining room and past that the kitchen. And on the left of the entrance, there’s three bedrooms. One of them is theirs, the Reeds, and the other one is a guest room, and the third they keep for when their daughter comes up. She’s thirty-four, but she ain’t married, she comes up weekends sometimes.”
“Where’s the master bedroom?”
“There’s this very wide hallway, and first there’s the daughter’s room for when she comes up, and then there’s the guest room, and then the master bedroom. The hallway is all stone like the foyer, the entrance foyer. In fact, all the floors in the house are stone.”
“Did you go in the master bedroom?”
“Yeah, he showed me the whole house. He didn’t want to take me in the house, but once we got in there, you’d think he was trying to sell me the place.”
“So off the left of the entrance, you come in this wide hallway, and first there’re the two rooms, and then the master bedroom at the end of the hall, is that it?”
“Yeah. The master bedroom looks out on the lake, too.”
“Start with the door,” Alex said. “You open the door to the master bedroom …”
“Yeah, and what you’re facing is this window wall that looks out on the lake.”
“Patio doors again?”
“One section of it, yeah. The rest is windows. Set up high on the wall.”
“What’s outside the doors?”
“A stone terrace, steps leading down to the lake.”
“Okay, we’re standing just inside the bedroom door now,” Alex said. “What’s on our right?”
“On the right is a wall of closets. Sliding doors on them.”
“Did he open the closets for you?”
“I opened them myself.”
“What’s in them?”
“The closets are Mr. Reed’s, that’s where he keeps his clothes. His wife has a separate dressing room. That’s between the bedroom and the john, it’s as big as this room we’re sitting in.”
“Okay, on the right are closets full of his clothes. Keep going around the room now, counterclockwise.”
“Counterclockwise?”
“Yeah. It’s six o’clock where we came in the room. The closet wall is six o’clock. Now what’s on the wall that’s three o’clock?”
“The bed. This big king-size bed. A painting over it.”
“Okay, that’s three o’clock,” Alex said. “Now what’s on …?”
“There’s more on three o’clock,” Daisy said.
“What else?”
“The door that goes in the wife’s dressing room.”
“Okay, fine, we’ll get to the dressing room later.”
“And the john,” Daisy said. “On the other side of the dressing room, there’s a door goes in the john.”
“Okay, we’ll get to that later. What’s at twelve o’clock?”
“These windows set high up on the wall, and under them a row of dressers. And to the left of the dressers, the doors that open up on the terrace.”
“Good. And at nine o’clock?”
“That’s just a wooden wall, this paneled wooden wall, and in front of it a very low bench with a plant on one end of it and a piece of sculpture on the other end. Jack O’Malley did it, the sculpture. It’s a statue of a very long skinny man. Mr. Reed said it was a Jack O’Malley.”
“Anything hanging on that wooden wall?” Alex asked.
“Nothing.”
“No paintings, nothing like that?”
> “Nothing.”
“Were there any other paintings in the room? Besides the one over the bed?”
“No, just that one.”
“Any mirrors?”
“Over the dressers, yes. The whole wall over the dressers is a mirror that goes up to the windows. Those high windows I was telling you about.”
“Screwed to the wall?”
“I didn’t see no screws, but it’s attached to the wall, if that’s what you mean. It doesn’t have a frame around it or anything, it’s not hanging on the wall.”
“Okay, what about the dressing room?”
“You should see the stuff that broad has,” Daisy said, and rolled her eyes. “She’s got dresses in there …”
“Never mind the dresses. Any furs in there?”
“Six of them.”
“What kind?”
“Two minks, I’m sure of. The rest, I couldn’t tell you what kind. I asked Mr. Reed could I try on one of the minks, he said he thought that wasn’t such a good idea. I never had a mink on in my life. I sure wish I could’ve tried one on.”
“Any mirror in there? A hanging mirror, I mean.”
“There’s a full-length mirror, but it’s attached to the wall, like the one in the bedroom.”
“Any paintings in the dressing room?”
“No.”
“So where the fuck’s the box?” Archie said. “Man wouldn’t hide a box behind a painting over the bed, would he? Be too hard to get at.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “Daisy, let’s get back to the bedroom, okay? Tell me about that paneled wall. What kind of wall is it?”
“Panels. Wooden panels,” Daisy said, and shrugged.
“Running vertically?”
“Up and down, right.”
“With joints?”
“Well, yeah, if I’m following you.”
“Can you see where the panels are joined, that’s what I’m asking you. Do they look like separate planks of wood?”
“Yeah, about six or seven inches wide, each plank.”
“What are you thinking, Alex?” Archie asked.
“I don’t know, maybe there’s a touch latch there, maybe you press on one of the panels, it springs open. Did you see any hinges, Daisy? On that wall, I mean.”
“Was a touch latch,” Archie said, “you’d have piano hinges, Alex.”
“Yeah, but piano hinges’ll show, too.”
“I didn’t see any hinges,” Daisy said.
“What about Reed’s closet? Did you get a look in there behind the clothes?”
“I fingered a couple of his suits, moved some of them aside on the hangers. I didn’t see any safe on the wall back there, if that’s what you want to know.”
“So where’s the box?” Archie said.
“Maybe there ain’t any,” Alex said. “Maybe he thinks the alarm system’s enough.”
“Man goes to the trouble of installing an alarm, nine times out of ten he’s got a box, too.”
“Yeah,” Alex said.
“So where is it?”
“Those dressers against the wall,” Alex said. “On the twelve o’clock wall. What’d they look like?”
“Dressers,” Daisy said, and shrugged again. “What dressers look like. They’re white, I guess they’re Formica or whatever, and they got drawers in them—they’re dressers, Alex, what the hell you think they look like?”
“All drawers? Or were there some plain panels?”
“I didn’t notice.”
“Man wouldn’t stick a box behind a panel in a dresser, would he?” Archie asked.
“I run across lots of boxes I could just pick up and carry off,” Alex said. “I had one box, must’ve been a hundred-fifty pounder, it was just sitting there between two shelves, had a sliding panel in front of it was supposed to look like books, you know. I slid the panel over, the box was just sitting loose between those shelves, a square-door box. I picked it up and carried it home with me.”
“What was in it?” Archie asked, momentarily distracted.
“Six thousand in cash. It was one of the sweetest scores I ever made. I took that little box home with me and peeled it at my leisure, it was one sweet fuckin score.”
“Maybe Reed’s got his box in the living room,” Archie said, getting back to business. “That’s possible, ain’t it?”
“Yeah, but a woman getting dressed, she doesn’t like to run out to the living room to get her good ring. It’s possible, look, anything’s possible, but most of them are in the bedrooms. That’s my experience, anyway. If I’ve run across three boxes in the living room, all the time I been working, that’s a lot. And usually, it ain’t even a living room, it’s like a library or a den or something, and then it’s a fire box, with papers in it. Your money box, that’s in the bedroom. I’m talking usually now. That’s where it usually is.”
“Well, maybe there ain’t a box,” Archie said. “Maybe it’s as simple as that. You get a chance to open any of them dresser drawers, Daise?”
“Yeah, I told him I wanted to see his wife’s underwear. He said why? I told him it’d turn me on.”
“Anything in the drawers? Besides his wife’s drawers?” Archie said.
“No jewelry, if that’s what you mean. But there’s big stuff in that house, Arch, that’s for sure.”
“How do you know?”
“There’s pictures of her all over the place, and she’s dripping diamonds in every one of them. There’s one picture in a glass frame on the dresser top, it was taken at her son’s wedding, they got two kids, the Reeds, the son is married and lives in South America someplace. He’s a doctor down there. In this picture she’s giving her son a kiss, and she’s decked out like the Queen of England, with a diamond tiara in her hair, and this diamond necklace, and diamond bracelets all over her arm, clear up to her elbow. She’s a walking Tiffany’s, that lady. I said to Mr. Reed, I said Man, where does your wife keep all this stuff, over in the bank vault?”
“What did he say?”
“He just laughed. Then he asked me did I want to take a pair of her panties over to the studio with us. He was beginning to get itchy by then, I figured it was time we got out of the house.”
“He sounds like a fuckin freak,” Archie said.
“No, he was just pickin up on my clue, the bullshit I gave him about being turned on by her underwear. So we went out to the studio.”
“How far is it from the main house?”
“I paced it off on my crutches,” Daisy said. “There’s a path runs from the house into the woods where he’s got the studio, it took me ninety-four swings to get out there. You got to figure I cover about three, four feet with each swing.”
“So that’s about a hundred yards, give or take,” Alex said. “When you’re out there, Daisy, can you hear any sounds?”
“Just heavy breathing,” she said.
“I mean, from the outside. Can you hear cars on the road, anything like that?”
“Every now and then, yeah. But the studio’s closer to the road than the house is, you know. The house is set way back but the way the property’s shaped, the studio is in the woods but closer to the road. That’s how come you can hear cars.”
“Now what about this five in help? Are you sure they’re all gone on Thursdays?”
“Positive. Mr. Reed took me in the house, didn’t he? He wouldn’t have done that if there was even a chance of anybody being around.”
“That’s right, Alex.”
“Yeah. Now listen, Daisy, we plan on looking over the house next Thursday. Is there any way you can get him out of there? Away from the place, I mean.”
“I don’t see how.”
“Ask him to take you for a ride in his car, something like that.”
“He don’t bring me up there so he can take me for a ride in his car.”
“What time do you usually get up there?”
“Around noon.”
“And what time do you get started out there in the studio?”
<
br /> “Twelve-oh-one,” Daisy said.
“Come on, I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“How long do you stay out there in the studio?” Archie asked.
“I’m there at twelve, I leave about three. He phones up a taxi for me at two-thirty. Taxi comes from Stamford.”
“Can you see the house from the studio?” Archie said.
“No, it’s too far back in the woods.”
“Well, you just make sure he stays out there in the studio while we case the joint. Say between 1:00 and 2:00. You just keep him out there and busy.”
“I’ll keep him real busy,” Daisy said, and smiled.
“I mean, he wants to go back in the house for anything, you just keep him nailed to that fuckin bed.”
“Don’t worry.”
“You said this guy Duncan runs a taxi service,” Archie said. “Who’s sittin the alarm when he’s out driving?”
“I got no idea,” Daisy said.
“Can you ask Reed? I’m thinking maybe we knock out the Duncan end of it, we don’t have to worry about whether it goes off or not.”
“That’s already another man on the job,” Alex said.
“Yeah.”
“I think we just find some way to get in there, that’s all,” Alex said. “There’s got to be some way to get in without the alarm going off.”
“Whyn’t we just haul Reed out of bed? He lets us in, turns off the alarm, and then calls this Charlie Duncan to tell him everything’s okay.”
“That means we got to show face,” Alex said. “I don’t want to show face, do you?”
“No, I don’t want to show face,” Archie said, “but …”
“You better not come in that studio,” Daisy said. “I don’t want Reed to think I had anything to do with settin this up. Fact is, once it’s over, I’d like to keep right on going up there every Thursday.”
“We won’t come in the studio, don’t worry about it,” Alex said.