Doors

by Ed McBain

  Archie’s supermarket. It seemed like a simple job, get in there, knock out the alarm, open the box in no time at all. Still, it would have to be at night. A dwelling’s a building in Burglary Two, unless it’s at night, like in Burglary One. This wouldn’t be a dwelling at night, a supermarket was only a building. So it would still be only Burglary Three, unless they ran into somebody inside there and had to hurt him. Neither of them would be carrying guns, he’d make sure of that; anyway, Archie didn’t normally work with a gun, so there’d be no problem about it. It was the nighttime that bothered him, even if the rap was just the same as going into an apartment during the day. Something about the nighttime spooked him. You had to work with a flashlight, there were fuckin shadows all over the place, the hell with it, he’d tell Archie no.

  They went to a lobster joint for dinner that night.

  He liked the way she ate. She had a truck driver’s appetite, it was a wonder she didn’t weigh a thousand pounds. She hardly talked at all while she ate, she was busy dissecting lobster all the time, she scarcely even looked at him except when she paused occasionally to lift her glass of Muscadet and her eyes met his over the rim. There were things he liked about this damn girl. He liked the look of her, the clean, swift racehorse look, and the way she moved, whether it was picking up a fork or ripping the cellophane strip off a package of cigarettes, or just lifting her arms to untie the lobster bib. He liked her sense of humor, too, though at first he’d thought she was essentially humorless, like most square girls, but maybe that was because people who were in it joked about different things, things the squares could never hope to understand. But he found her picking up instantly on things he said, like when a lady came into the restaurant with a chihuahua in a little pink basket, and Alex took one look at the dog and said, “Used to be a Great Dane before she washed him,” and Jessica burst out laughing, her mouth full of strawberry shortcake, and immediately grabbed for her napkin. And when she laughed at anything he said, he then found himself elaborating on the initial joke, expanding it into an anecdote, a short story practically, making it up as he went along, the crazier the better.

  At one point during the meal, while they were sitting there over their second cups of coffee, he got into a routine that had her in stitches for a full five minutes, a thing about two bank robbers who got locked inside a vault and who started playing poker with the bank’s money and one of them was winning six million dollars when the manager opened the vault the next morning, and by that time the thief actually believed the money was his, the six million he’d won, and asked the manager if he could open an account with his winnings, and the manager was so thrilled to be getting such a big account that he forgot for a moment there were two thieves inside his vault.

  Alex didn’t know where the story came from, he was certain it had never happened, never been told to him by any of the cons up at Sing Sing. It had just popped into his head—he couldn’t even remember what either of them had said to trigger it—and he’d begun snowballing it, encouraged by her laughter, falling into street jargon when the two thieves were supposed to be talking, and then beginning to feel totally exhilarated by the zany freedom of inventing something that was causing her to fall off her chair, as though the two of them were building a high together without benefit of dope. She was laughing helplessly by the time he finished the story, and she rose swiftly and put her napkin on the table, and said, “I’m going to wet my pants,” and walked immediately to the ladies’ room. He’d liked that about her, too, her remark about wetting her pants; there were things about this girl he liked a hell of a lot.

  In the car, on the way back to the Red Lion, she put her head on his shoulder, and hummed along with a song Sinatra was singing, and then broke into the lyrics where she remembered them, and suddenly he was singing with her, they were both singing softly and probably out of tune, the car windows were open, there was a brisk snap to the air. The song reminded her of another song, and she turned off the radio, and he began singing that one with her, too, and he just continued driving past the Red Lion, turning right at the corner there, one song recalling another, “Remember this one, Alex?” or “How about this one, Jess?”—each of them beginning a song in turn, the other joining in immediately, sometimes just humming when either one of them didn’t know the lyrics. Singing, they drove all the way to Pittsfield and back, Jessica’s head on his shoulder, his arm around her, and after he’d parked the car in front of the Red Lion, they went into the lobby arm in arm and then upstairs to the room. She undressed as shyly as a bride and then put on a nightgown she had brought along, he had never seen her in a nightgown before. Outside the room, they could hear the trucks lumbering past on Route 7, an occasional laugh on the street below, and once, as they lay side by side in breathless silence, the clicking of the traffic light hanging over the main street.

  In the middle of the night, she woke up and said, “Alex?”

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Alex,” she said, “I think I’m in love with you.”

  It was then that he decided to go in with Archie on the supermarket job.

  He went into the market alone on Monday morning and bought a shopping cart full of groceries while he looked the place over. It was a privately owned neighborhood market, small in comparison to the chain stores, but it seemed to be doing a brisk business even at ten in the morning. Archie had told him a day’s receipts at any supermarket were usually in the two to three thousand dollar range, and that the receipts were almost always in the box at night because the market closed too late to get to the bank with them. In some of your markets, on Thursday nights when they stayed open late, you could sometimes beat them for five, six grand, but Archie didn’t want to wait till Thursday, and anyway they had to go up to Post Mills on Thursday to case the Reed house. Besides, the place was a sitting duck, and he wanted to get in there before somebody else got the bright idea of knocking it over.

  So they decided to do it on Monday night, provided the setup seemed okay to Alex once he’d had a chance to look it over. They had discussed all this on the phone the night before. While Jessica sent her mother-in-law packing, Alex phoned Archie from his own apartment and told him he wanted to go ahead with the job. Jessica rang him a half-hour later to tell him the coast was clear, and then he went downstairs. Jessica made dinner for them both, and then she put the kid to bed, and they made love again in her bedroom, and again she told him she thought she was falling in love with him, and just before he went upstairs again, she said, “I love you, Alex,” without any thinking about it this time, just “I love you, Alex,” straight out.

  He spent less than a half-hour in the market, and while he was there he went into the manager’s office and told him he was moving some of his stuff to his sister’s house and would need some empty cartons, did the manager have any he could spare? The manager told him where the cartons were kept and Alex said he’d be back later in the afternoon with his station wagon, all he had outside right now was a small car. He asked the manager what time the store closed, and the manager said six o’clock. He thanked the manager, told him he’d see him later, and then paid cash for the groceries and carried them out to the rented car. He had spent $46.10 in the place, but he expected to get that back tonight, plus a little bit more. They didn’t plan to use the rented car tonight. Tonight, they’d be using a car Archie would borrow from his Jewgirl social worker. The square wouldn’t know they’d be using the car in a burglary, of course; squares never thought of things like that.

  He drove back home, put the groceries away, and then phoned Archie to tell him the place looked just the way he’d described it, and he’d already set up getting into the room where they kept the cartons, it all looked fine. He told Archie he’d taxi up to Harlem around four-thirty and then they’d drive up to the Bronx together, and he’d plan to go in around a quarter to six. Archie asked him if he wanted to come up to Harlem right now, have a few beers together, but Alex told him no, there were some other things he h
ad to do before tonight. Actually, there wasn’t anything he had to do, but he liked to be well rested before a job, and he planned to take a little nap before heading uptown.

  He didn’t call Jessica. He had told her he’d be out job hunting all day long and probably wouldn’t be home till late. He’d only told her that because he knew she’d be asking questions, squares were always asking their stupid questions. But even so, he’d made it clear he wasn’t accounting to her for his time, he didn’t have to account to anyone for his time. He’d told her that on the phone, early this morning, before he’d left for the Bronx. There had been a long silence on the line, and then she’d said in a very low voice, “I wasn’t asking you to account for your time, Alex,” which had made him feel like apologizing or something, he didn’t know what for. It had finally ended up with him promising to call her when he got in tonight, though he told her one of the jobs he was looking into was way out on Long Island, for a summer theater out there (“Oh, which one?” she had asked immediately. “The one in East Hampton?”), and he might be getting in very late. No, not the one in East Hampton, he had said just before hanging up.

  He took off all his clothes now, and pulled back the covers on the bed, and then opened the window a little so that he could hear the lulling sounds of the traffic far below. He set the clock for three, then lay down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling for a while, and then closed his eyes and tried to sleep. But he couldn’t seem to drift off, so he got up and went naked into the living room, and put on some Charlie Parker and listened to that, lying on the couch, the speakers up full until he suddenly realized Jessica might check to see if he’d come home early, and hear the speakers blaring and knock on the door. He got up from the couch and turned down the speakers, but this wasn’t the way you were supposed to listen to jazz, you were supposed to feel you were right in the middle of the band, right in there playing with them. He lay down on the couch again, barely able to hear one of the greatest alto sax solos ever recorded, and unable to enjoy it because it was so low. Like why the hell should he care if she knocked on the door? Knock on the door, he’d open it bare-assed and say Sorry, kid, I’m busy. He was tempted to turn the volume up full again, but suppose she did come upstairs on the off chance he might be home, suppose she did knock on the door, he’d have to let her in, wouldn’t he? If only to give her another alibi about where he’d be tonight while he and Archie were ripping off the market.

  That was the thing about square girls. You took your ordinary whore, you said to her I’ll be out awhile, honey, she didn’t ask you where you were going, what you were going to be doing, she knew you were a burglar and where you were going was to steal somebody blind, that’s where you were going. Your square girl automatically figured you had some unexplained time, why then you had to be cheating on her. Thing with a whore, she gave you any trouble, you smacked her one. She was used to that, you couldn’t find any whore who hadn’t spent at least some time hustling for a pimp, she was used to getting smacked around. Smack around a square girl, she’s on the pipe right away, calling the police. Law comes up there, says All right, folks, what’s the trouble here? Square girl is all smiles by then. She’s got a black eye, but she says No trouble at all, officer, there must be some mistake. Cops had a rough job with squares. Squares were trouble for everybody, even the fuckin cops. He didn’t know why he’d started up with a square, and what was this about loving him? She hardly knew him, for Christ’s sake! How could she be in love with him?

  There was no use trying to sleep, and no use listening to jazz with the volume all the way down like that. He got off the couch and was walking to the bar to pour himself a drink when he remembered he’d be working later in the day. He made it a rule never to touch a drop before a job. Never. He’d heard stories about burglars going in a place and making a really heavy score, and then sitting down to celebrate with a bottle of the guy’s Scotch. Man comes home, finds two drunken bums rolling around his living-room floor. Alex had never touched anything inside a place, not booze and not food either, except that one time when he knew the people were on vacation and he decided to make himself a sandwich and found the thousand bucks inside the loaf of bread. He smiled now, thinking about that time. Those were the times he liked best, when he came upon something unexpected like that.

  So what the hell was he supposed to do now?

  He decided to go uptown after all, sit around and chew the rag with Archie till it was time to go to the Bronx.

  He hadn’t expected to find Kitty up there.

  He’d gone first to Archie’s place, and when he’d knocked on the door and got no answer, he went looking for him in the bars along Lenox Avenue. Kitty was sitting on a stool in the third place he tried. He thought for a minute he was seeing things. But it was Kitty all right, sitting on the stool and drinking a crème de menthe over ice, watching the television set above the bar. He took the stool next to hers, and then said, “Hi, I thought you were in jail.”

  She turned away from the television set, the stool swiveling around, a fixed smile on her face, a hooker smile, a square-john greeting. Then she saw it was Alex, and the smile turned to something more personal, and she said, “You never sent me so much as a candy bar.”

  “How you doing, Kitt?”

  “Okay,” she said

  “When’d you get out?”

  “Just this morning. Transit went for my bail.”

  “Oh,” Alex said.

  Transit was a white pimp who’d been trying to get Kitty in his stable even when she and Alex were still living together. His real name was Travis Croft, but he’d worked for the Transit Authority years ago, when he was still a square john, and he’d picked up the nickname in prison, after everybody found out what he was in there for. He was in there for grand larceny because one day he’d decided he was fed up with sitting in the change booth on Eighty-sixth Street and Lexington Avenue, and he’d simply packed $300 in quarters, dimes, and nickels into his lunch pail and walked off the job. No way of getting away with it, no possible way of making it work. A typical square-john caper.

  While he was in prison, though, he met a black pimp from Schenectady who told him how to start a stable, and as soon as Transit got out—he was serving one-to-three and had plenty of time to learn all about pimping—he got himself a few girls and set himself up in business. He had maybe half a dozen girls now, all of them black, and he dressed like a spade pimp himself, with the big hat and the high-heeled shoes and the flashy suits and dark glasses. Transit was five feet ten inches tall and built like an oak tree. He had a reputation for severely beating his girls if they didn’t turn what he considered a respectable number of tricks every day of the week. You could always tell one of Transit’s girls standing on a Sixth Avenue street corner. She usually had a split lip or a shiner, and Alex had even seen one of them hustling with her arm in a cast. He was a stupid ox of a man, Transit was, and a sweetheart besides. And now he’d sprung for Kitty’s bail.

  “He’s got me a good lawyer, too,” Kitty said. “Man named Aronberg, do you know him?”

  “No,” Alex said.

  “He thinks he may be able to get me off with a suspended sentence.”

  “Is Transit doing all this out of the goodness of his heart?”

  “Well, we have a sort of deal,” Kitty said.

  “Why the fuck did you go to Transit?”

  “He come to me,” she said. “Well, you know, he’s always been after me.”

  “So now he’s got you.”

  “It’s just a temporary arrangement,” she said. “Till I can pay him back what he gave the bondsman.”

  “Why didn’t you go to a bondsman direct?”

  “Fuckin judge set bail at five thousand, said I was a bad risk. I just couldn’t raise the five hundred for the bondsman’s commission. Transit went the five.”

  “How’re you gonna pay him back, Kitty?”

  “Well, Transit’s got a fine book. I won’t be one of his scaly-legs standin on Forty-n
inth, don’t worry about that. I’ll be turnin hundred-dollar, two-hundred-dollar tricks.”

  “Transit must be coming up in the world.”

  “He’s got a fine book. Out-of-town johns comin in, you know.”

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “It’s the truth, Alex. I know it’s the truth. Anyway, he came up with the five, and he’s got me a good lawyer, and maybe I’ll beat the fuckin rap. Or maybe we can get it reduced. Either way, I’m ahead.”

  “How much is the lawyer costing?”

  “I don’t know. Transit’s takin care of that.”

  “Great. He owns you now, huh?”

  “Nobody owns me,” Kitty said, and looked into her drink.

  He went into the supermarket at a quarter to six and walked directly to the room where the cartons were stacked. A kid was back there sweeping up. He looked at Alex when he came in.

  “Manager said I could have some cartons,” Alex said.

  “Okay with me,” the kid said, and shrugged, and went back to his sweeping. Alex spent two or three minutes looking over the cartons, selecting those he wanted, noting at the same time that there were several very large toilet-tissue cartons he could use later, when he stashed himself. He put three cartons into a larger carton, and then said to the kid, “I’ll be back, I’m going to need more of these,” and went out of the room and past the checkout counters and then to the parking lot where the Jewgirl’s car was parked. He put the cartons on the back seat and then looked at his watch. It was eight minutes to six.

  He wondered how long that kid would be in there sweeping, but he couldn’t waste any more time, he had to get in there again before they closed the front doors. He took the car keys from his pocket and put them into the ignition. As he walked back to the market, he saw Archie coming around the corner and heading for the car. Archie would drive off with it and come back later, at nine o’clock sharp; they figured Alex would have knocked out the alarm and unlocked the back door by then. Archie would park the car, kill the lights, and then just shake the door to see if it was unlocked. If it wasn’t yet unlocked, he’d come back a half-hour later, and keep coming back every half-hour till he found it unlocked.