by Ed McBain
“Just so you understand.”
“We understand, so shut the fuck up already,” Archie said.
“I don’t want to go to jail because of something dumb you guys do.”
“You won’t go to jail.”
“Cause the first thing Mr. Reed’s gonna think anyway, is I showed her the house, she musta had something to do with it. Soon as it’s over, I’m gonna tell him I’m scared, he better get me a taxi and get me out of there fore he calls the troopers. He’s got to do that, anyway, cause otherwise his wife’ll find out what he does out there every Thursday.”
“That’s good, that’ll give us plenty of time to get far away before he blows the whistle.”
“And me, too,” Daisy said, “I want to be far away, too.”
“Sure, don’t worry.”
“Okay, then. So you guys comin up next Thursday, one o’clock, is that it? And you’ll be there an hour or so, that’s when I got to keep Mr. Reed busy.”
“That’s right.”
“Okay, then. If there’s nothin else, I got a john due in fifteen minutes.”
“Alex?”
“Nothing.”
On the sidewalk outside the building, Archie said, “So what do you think?”
“We’ll see how it looks next Thursday,” Alex said.
“You interested in anything meanwhile?”
“Like what?”
“I got a supermarket, I need me a lay-in man.”
“A nighttime job?”
“Yeah.”
“Forget it.”
“I just need somebody stay in there, rewire the alarm.”
“What kind of system?”
“Bell alarm.”
“Whyn’t you just knock out the bell? It’s outside the building, ain’t it?”
“Yeah, but it’s high up on this wall faces an apartment house. I’d need a ladder to get at it, and anybody could see me from their window. All I want is somebody to stay inside the market, get at the wiring for me.”
“What kind of wiring is it?”
“Got to figure a combination system, don’t you think? On a supermarket? You’d have all the time you need, though. I watched the place last night, there’s no doorshakers on the beat, a squad car comes by only twice, at midnight and 2:00 A.M. Makes a circle of the parking lot, shines a light on the windows, that’s about it.”
“How much you expect to find in there?”
“Got to be at least a day’s receipts. Two grand or more.”
“What kind of box?”
“Big old single-door mercantile on the floor in the office.”
“Where’s your lay-in man going to hide himself?”
“There’s a room in back where they stack all the empty cartons. I figure he’ll go in just before closing, hide himself in that back room. Cartons piled all over the place back there.”
“Still … nighttime.”
“Well, you think about it.”
“When you plan to go in?”
“Soon’s I can find me a lay-in man.”
“I think you better count me out,” Alex said.
But on Friday he found himself thinking about Archie’s supermarket. He wouldn’t have dreamt of doing a job alone at night, but maybe with a fall partner it wouldn’t be too bad. Also he’d be going in during the day actually, or at least while it was still light, and once he knocked out the alarm and let Archie into the place, the two of them working on the box could knock it off in no time. Peeling a box was all muscle, anyway, they could probably be in and out of there in just a few hours, two of them taking turns on the chisel and sledge. Might even get lucky and find a box they could punch, Archie said it was an old square-door Mosler, maybe it had a spindle they could punch.
The scent of Jessica was still in his bed. She had left him at a little past midnight because today was a school day, and she hadn’t wanted to keep Felice up too late. They had talked about possibly going away for the weekend together, and now, without getting out of bed, he dialed Jessica’s number and asked her if she’d talked to her mother-in-law yet. She told him it was all set, and they arranged a time, and then he put the receiver back on the cradle and began thinking about Archie’s job again.
He didn’t know why he was thinking about it. He had scored only last week, and he was in the middle of setting up what could be a really big one up there in Post Mills, so why the hell was he thinking about maybe going out again? He threw back the covers and swung his legs over the side of the bed, but then instead of getting out of bed, he just sat there on the edge and looked at the phone, and wondered whether he honestly wanted to spend the entire weekend with Jessica. Maybe he’d been hoping all along her mother-in-law would say no. Didn’t know what kind of mother-in-law she was, anyway, her son fighting a divorce, and she agrees to stay with the kid while Jessica runs up to Massachusetts. Jessica hadn’t told her she was going up there with anybody, of course, but still a person should be able to put two and two together and realize a good-looking girl, even if she went up there alone, the odds were she wouldn’t be alone too long.
Squares had a strange way of thinking it was “civilized” to just look the other way and make believe something wasn’t happening. See a guy dancing with your wife, he’s got his hand on her ass, do you take him outside and beat the shit out of him? Hell, no, you look the other way, you make believe it isn’t happening. That was “civilized,” that was the way squares handled things. Your daughter-in-law comes to you, says Hey, Mom, I want to get away for the weekend, do some heavy thinking about this whole thing, maybe decide not to divorce your son Michael the prick, what do you say, Mom, will you stay with the kid? Yes, my darling daughter. Squares.
He didn’t know where Stockbridge was, he’d never been up there, and it made him nervous that there was a theater up there. Jessica had told him there was a theater, maybe he’d know some of the people. Fat chance of that. But suppose she asked him to take her over to the theater, see if there were any famous actors he knew? What would he do then? Walk over to Cary Grant, say Hello there, Cary, long time no see?
The rented car kept pulling to the right, and he figured it had something to do with the balance of the wheels or the alignment, he didn’t know which. He was a total idiot when it came to automobiles, and it bothered him that the car kept pulling to the right for reasons he could only guess at. The more the car kept pulling—it did it only when he stepped on the brake—the more he found himself thinking of Archie’s supermarket and the possibility of making himself a quick thou just for crossing a few wires. The countryside was in bloom with trees and shrubs he couldn’t identify, and when he asked Jessica what they were, it annoyed him that she could reel off the names so easily. That and the car pulling to the right. And Archie’s supermarket. He was a fool even to consider going in at night, with or without a full partner. Hell with Archie, let him find himself another boy.
When they got to Stockbridge late that afternoon, he registered them as man and wife at the Red Lion Inn, a place Jessica recommended. The bellhop carried their bags up, and he tipped the kid a dollar, and then looked around the room, and heard Jessica asking if the theater was open for the season yet. The kid told her No, it was still too early, and Alex said nothing, but he handed the kid another dollar, as if the kid was the one responsible for the theater being closed. Jessica suggested that they take a stroll through the town and then drive over for dinner to a place she knew where the owner was a piano player who taught accompaniment. A lot of theater people stopped in there, she said, and sometimes they got up to entertain, it was really a lot of fun. That was just the kind of fun Alex needed, theater people, but he said Sure, whatever she wanted to do, and he watched while she freshened her lipstick, and he thought again of Archie’s supermarket.
As they walked through the town, a bunch of long-haired kids turned to look at her, and one of them whistled after they went past, and Alex wanted to go back and punch the little shithead in the mouth. It was beginning to annoy
him that Jessica never wore a bra. It annoyed him, too, that she seemed so familiar with the town, knew just where all the shops were, could tell him about all the things going on even in the nearby towns—classical music and ballet and experimental theater and even rock concerts. That was during the season, of course; she’d somehow had the feeling the season started earlier than it did; she didn’t know why. Maybe because they began advertising Tanglewood in the Times each year long before the first concert started, though she hadn’t yet seen any ads this year. Maybe she’d just wanted the theater to be open, wanted the season to have begun already so that she could share it with him.
“Yeah,” he said.
They stopped in an antiques shop in town, and all around the place, on the shelves with little glass objects and brass things and medals and the like, there were these hand-lettered index cards that said:
If you plan to steal it,
let’s talk it over instead.
Jessica asked the owner of the shop if the signs had helped cut down on shoplifting, and he said Oh, you’d be surprised. He was a jolly old fart wearing a lavender shirt with a checked vest over it, and dungaree trousers, and black loafers without socks. He explained to Jessica that there was a definite cycle involved in thefts of this sort, which he supposed fell under the general heading of burglary, he supposed shoplifting was a form of burglary—a lot the fuck he knew. They had made studies on burglary, he told Jessica, and whereas he didn’t wish to bore her with a lengthy response to her simple question, they’d discovered that burglars had the same needs as noncriminal people (No kidding, Alex thought), such as the need for money, or the need for peer-group approval, or even the need for thrills, or in many cases the need to rebel against the man in the gray flannel suit, if Jessica knew what he meant.
“This is fascinating,” Jessica said. “Isn’t it fascinating, Alex?”
“Yeah,” Alex said.
“Now this need has to be coupled with an opportunity to steal,” the owner of the shop said, “and a recognition of that opportunity. The person then makes his choice; will he, or will he not steal to satisfy his need? If he does steal, and if he gets away with it, if he’s successful, in other words, why then he’ll gain a feeling of satisfaction from having stolen, and the cycle will repeat itself over and over again—he’ll just keep right on stealing to satisfy his need.”
The owner of the shop smiled broadly, said something that sounded like “Norks,” and then spelled it out for Jessica. “N.O.R.C.S.S. Need, Opportunity, Recognition, Choice, Success, and Satisfaction. Now what I’ve done here, I’ve tried to step in at the ‘Choice’ stage of the cycle. A man comes in here with a need to steal, and he sees an opportunity to steal, and he recognizes this opportunity as a means of filling his need, why then he must make his choice. Well, my little signs allow him a freedom of choice. He doesn’t have to steal, he can come talk it over with me instead.”
“Do they ever talk it over with you?” Jessica asked.
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” the man said. “Had a fellow in here some months back, said he didn’t know what came over him but he just had to have a little figurine he saw on the shelf, and he knew he didn’t have the money for it, and was tempted to steal it. We talked it over, and I allowed him to buy it on a sort of installment plan. He gave me five dollars—the piece cost fifty—and I let him take it home with him, and he’s been sending me five dollars a month ever since. That was in November, it should be all paid up by August. Oh, yes, the signs have worked very well indeed.”
Outside the shop, Jessica said, “He’s got a good idea there, don’t you think, Alex?”
“Unless a guy really wants to steal something, in which case he’ll steal it,” Alex said. “He won’t go up there and talk to the owner. The guy who went up to him, he didn’t want to steal that piece, he just wanted to buy it on time.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Jessica said, but he could tell she didn’t think he was right.
He was surprised by the place she took him to. It had really good French food, he hadn’t expected to find anything so good up here in the sticks. And the man who ran the place was a very good piano player, who besides singing and accompanying himself, also played very good jazz. He wasn’t Monk or Jamison or Shearing, but he knew what to do with a chart, sounded a lot like Powell, in fact, must have been influenced by the early bop piano players. After dinner, sitting in the small room with the piano in one corner, and candles flickering in round red holders on all of the tables, the sound of jazz flowing through the room, the taste of good cognac in his mouth, Alex found himself relaxing for the first time that day. And later, in the big double bed back at the hotel, he and Jessica made love, and he held her close and forgot about Archie’s supermarket or any of the other things that had been troubling him all day long, including the little speech about burglary in the antiques shop.
But in the morning, while he was showering, he thought of the supermarket again, and when he came out of the shower and saw Jessica pulling a T-shirt over her head, he said, “Hey, don’t you have any brassieres?”
“What?” she said.
“Don’t you ever wear a bra?”
“Well, yes, sometimes.”
“Well, whyn’t you put one on now?”
“I don’t have any with me,” she said.
“What’d you do, go out in the street and burn them all?”
“I’ll buy one, if you like,” she said. “We’ll find a shop, and I’ll …”
“I don’t care whether you wear one or not,” he said. “You want to look like a whore, that’s your business.”
“Really, Alex, hardly any young girls …”
“You’re not that young,” he said, “you’re twenty-nine. And also you’re married and you’ve got a kid.”
“I didn’t realize it bothered you,” she said.
“It doesn’t bother me, you can do whatever you like.”
“I’ll buy a bra,” she said.
But after breakfast, when she bought herself a bra in a shop on the town’s main street, and came out of the dressing room wearing it under the T-shirt, he became annoyed again.
“You don’t have to do everything I tell you,” he said.
“I want to please you,” she said.
“I’m not the kind of man forces a woman to do anything she doesn’t want to do.”
“I know that, Alex.”
“Woman who does that is nothing but a whore.”
“Alex …”
“Let’s forget it, okay? You can wear a bra or not wear a bra, you can do whatever you like.”
“Well, I’m wearing one. I bought one, and I’m wearing it.”
He nodded briefly, and said nothing more about it, but he was still annoyed. If she was a square, then why didn’t she dress like one? He didn’t know what he was doing up here in the sticks with a square, anyway, but as long as he was here with her, he didn’t want her parading around like a whore. A girl like Kitty, you went any place with her, people immediately knew she was a whore. There was no way of disguising it, that’s what she was, and at least that was honest. It was like those square friends Jessica had, smoking pot and making jokes about the fuzz, what the hell did they know? It was the same thing here. Girl puts on a thin cotton T-shirt, nothing under it, what’s that supposed to be? Girl’s either a whore, or she isn’t, and if she isn’t she shouldn’t go around trying to look like one. Those long-haired kids yesterday, he should have cleaned the street with them. Still, you couldn’t blame them, thinking what they were thinking. Surprised they didn’t come over and ask her how much. It bothered him that she’d knuckled under that way, ran right out to buy a bra. Girl’s supposed to know her own mind, she doesn’t want to wear a bra, then the hell with what anyone else says, just do it, get out there and do your own thing. Like that guy in the antiques shop with his stupid little signs. Did he really think that was going to stop anybody from doing his thing? Serve him right somebody went in there one night and wipe
d out the whole fuckin shop, including the signs.
They spent all day Saturday looking at antiques. It was a beautiful day, he didn’t mind driving around from shop to shop, but he was bored silly once he got inside the places. Jessica loved antiques, he should have figured that from the way her apartment was decorated. His own taste ran to severe modern, he liked things clean and simple, with swift lines, like a racehorse. He had heard guys in prison describing your high-priced call girls that way, as racehorses. He didn’t suppose Kitty was a racehorse. You turned out Jessica, she’d be what you called a racehorse. Damn that fuckin Kitty, getting busted that way. Now he’d never get his two grand back.
He didn’t see one thing he liked in any of the shops they went to, not one single thing. If he’d walked into any of those places planning to steal something, there wasn’t anything he’d take. It reminded him of a story he’d heard, about a burglar who went into somebody’s house and then left a note behind saying, “You cheap bastards, you got nothing here worth stealing.” There was plenty worth stealing in all the shops they went to, that wasn’t the point. The price tags told him the stuff was valuable, but if he’d walked into a living room brimming with the stuff, he wouldn’t have known which was good and which was crap, and his own taste would have told him to leave it all there.
It was different with jewels. He could tell a piece of glass from a real diamond with only a casual glance, no need to scratch a window with it. He was sort of eager to get into that Post Mills house and get a crack at the Reed woman’s diamonds, though he couldn’t imagine where the box might be, and he knew he’d have to wait till they actually went in to even begin a search for it. He was eager to get in there for another reason, too. He wanted to see the place. He wanted to see what you could do with racehorse furniture if you had all the money you could ever hope to spend. Maybe this would be the one. Maybe this would be the big score he’d always been looking for, pull out after it, buy himself a house maybe, furnish it with good clean stuff, invest in the market maybe, or just sock it all away in the bank and let it draw interest. Still, a man could get restless, he supposed. Itch for a little action.