by Ed McBain
Alex went past the checkout counters again and walked through the market, past the meat counter, and into the room where the cartons were stacked. The kid was still in there sweeping.
“Lady out there needs some help,” Alex said.
“What?” the kid said. “What lady?”
“Wants you to carry some bundles out to her car.”
“Where’s Jerry?” the kid asked. “Jerry’s supposed to do that.”
“Don’t ask me,” Alex said. “I’m just telling you what the lady wants.”
“Shit,” the kid said, but he put his broom in the corner and went out.
The moment he was gone, Alex swiftly checked the room to see which parts of it had already been swept, chose a corner farthest from the door, and picked up two of the large toilet-tissue cartons. He laid one of these on its side, so that the open end was facing the wall. Then he turned the other one upside down and put it in front of the first carton. Quickly, he began stacking a row of cartons on top of each other around the larger cartons. It was three minutes to six when he went around behind the barrier he’d created and crawled into the carton he’d laid on its side. The fit was tight, his shins and feet were sticking out. But they were facing the wall, and hidden by the mound of cartons he had stacked around his little cave.
A moment later, he heard someone coming into the room. Then he heard the sound of the broom. A little while after that, someone else came into the room.
“Hey, Jerry, you see a lady out there?” the kid asked.
“What lady?” Jerry said.
“Some lady needed bundles carried.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Guy said some lady needed bundles carried.”
“I didn’t see no lady. It’s six o’clock. Finish up, and let’s get out of here.”
“Hold the dustpan for me, will you?”
He listened as they finished the sweeping. There were voices outside in the market now, employees wrapping up for the day, walking past the room in which he was hidden. The front doors were probably locked already, it would take them maybe another half-hour to tally the registers and put the money in the box. Maybe the manager would stay another half-hour after that, checking over the books, who the hell knew what? Alex was counting on all of them being out by seven; Archie had said they would all be out by seven. But to play it safe, he would stay hidden till eight.
“How’s that?” the kid said.
“Beautiful. You want a fuckin medal for sweepin the floor?”
The kid and Jerry both laughed, and together they went out of the room. Alex waited. From somewhere outside, he heard a man say, “… those beef sides in tomorrow, better try to get here early.”
“Yeah, goodnight, Sam.”
“See you in the morning.”
There was a water tap dripping someplace. He lay inside the carton, curled like a fetus in its womb, listening to the steady dripping of the water tap and the ticking of his own watch. He remembered when he was a child living in the Bronx, hiding under the dining room table with his cousin Cecily, the tablecloth his mother had tatted coming almost to the floor. Shoes going by. They could see shoes going by below the edge of the tablecloth. “Where are the kids?” his aunt asked. “Have you seen the kids?” Putting his hand on Cecily’s thigh in the gloom of their hiding place. “They must have gone downstairs,” his mother said. In the kitchen, the sound of a cabinet door being opened, a chair being scraped back from the enamel-topped table. “Too early for a pick-me-up?” his mother asked, and his aunt replied, “Never too early, Demmy.” His mother’s name was really Demetria, but everyone called her Demmy. Greek women weren’t supposed to drink a lot, but his mother did. His aunt was Irish, like his father, and there were statistics on the Irish being big boozers, belligerent too when they got drunk. His aunt was his mother’s good steady drinking companion. Under the dining room table, he slid his hand up under Cecily’s skirt and into her cotton panties.
Alex looked at his watch. It was only six-fifteen, it was going to be a long night. He had already thought of what he would say if someone came back there and found him curled up inside the carton—provided it wasn’t the manager, who already knew him. He would simply pretend he was drunk, a drunken bum who had stumbled in there and curled up for a good night’s sleep. They’d just kick him out of the store, unless it was the manager, who’d remember him asking for cartons, and who might put two and two together. But even if it was the manager, he wasn’t expecting too much intelligence from a machine who ran a fuckin supermarket. Maybe the drunk act would work even if it was the manager. Anyway, he hoped nobody would come back there, why would anyone come back there? Check out a bunch of empty cartons? No way.
He heard more voices outside, but he couldn’t distinguish what they were saying. Probably on the other side of the store, near the manager’s office. Maybe the cashiers were bringing the receipts back for him to put in the box. Cecily’s box under the dining room table, his hand easing up under the elastic legband of her panties. Cecily trapped, a partner in crime already, unable to protest without giving away their hiding place and ruining the little cocktail hour out there in the kitchen. Enjoying it besides, wriggling as he explored. In the kitchen, his mother and his aunt drank their booze and laughed softly, the sounds of summer coming through the open kitchen windows and wafting into the dining room where in the cool shade Cecily wriggled beneath his questing hand and murmured something he could not hear for the pounding of blood in his ears. “Good night, Josie,” someone called in the market outside, and he heard the sound of high heels clattering across the tiled floor, echoing in the high-ceilinged room. He looked at his watch again. It was six-twenty; only five minutes had passed since the last time he’d looked.
By seven, the room was becoming dim, the market had grown still except for the steady clatter of what he assumed was an adding machine in the manager’s office. Nighttime was coming, he felt a sudden chill. Lying curled inside the carton, his arms crossed over his chest, his knees up, his shins and feet exposed to the encroaching darkness, he hugged himself and thought of how empty the Bronx apartment had seemed after his father left, the sounds in the night, water pipes usually, or sometimes toilets flushing, or occasionally a mouse in the walls, gnawing at the plaster lath with all the fury of a jungle beast. But most often, the sound of his mother weeping or swearing in the kitchen as she drank herself into a stupor. The room was getting darker and darker, the hands of his watch were luminous the next time he looked at them. Twenty minutes past seven, and still the fuckin adding machine was going. Cecily’s teeth chattering in the darkness on the roof of the building. “We’re cousins,” she whispered. He had sawed through the shackle on the roof door’s padlock, and they had gone around to the other side of the peaked structure into which the door was set. This was October, she was wearing a cheerleader’s white sweater with a huge red R between her breasts, a pleated maroon skirt, white bobby sox and loafers. She squirmed against the brick wall to which he held her pinned, and whispered again, “We’re cousins,” and he listened for the sound of the door opening, knowing it could be opened now, knowing someone might find the sawed-off padlock, and open the door, and find them in the darkness, his hands up under the pleated skirt.
The adding machine stopped suddenly.
He listened.
He heard a door closing. The door to the manager’s office had a knob-operated drop bolt lock on it, but the upper panel of the door was glass, which meant the lock wasn’t worth a shit. He could not hear any sound coming from across the market now, but he assumed the manager was locking the door to his office. The next thing he’d do, if Alex knew anything at all about alarms, he’d test to make sure everything was all locked up, and then he’d turn on the alarm and leave.
All the alarm systems Alex had ever seen, no matter how crude or sophisticated, were composed of three basic units. You had your protective circuit, your control box, and your signaling device, that was all.
Your protective circuit was an electrical current which, if you disturbed it, flashed a signal to the control box. Your control box was the brain of the system; the minute a window or door or whatever was opened, disturbing the electrical flow, the brain immediately triggered the signaling device. The signaling device was either a bell outside, like here at the market, or else something that flashed or rang at a remote station. That’s all there was to it.
The control box here was just inside the rear door of the market, no larger than the switch plate for a light. The face of the recessed box had on it a red light, a white light, and a slot into which you put the alarm key. When you were ready to activate the alarm, you locked all your doors and windows, and if the white light stayed on, that meant something was still open. So you looked around for it, closing everything till that white light went out. That meant the place was now secure. Then you put your key into the slot on the face of the box, and you turned it to the right, and the red light came on, telling you the alarm system was now set. With these alarms that had the control box on the inside of a place, there was usually a thirty-second delay that allowed you to open the door and go outside without the alarm going off. After that thirty seconds, though, if anybody opened a window or door, a skylight or transom—bang went the bell on the wall outside. Very nice—unless somebody was already inside waiting to fuck up the wiring.
The market was still.
He waited till eight, and then he crawled out of the toilet-tissue carton, and stretched his legs which had got stiff from his curled-up position. He listened just inside the door before he went out of the room, and then he walked past the meat counter in the dark, and went directly to the manager’s office. In one pocket of his jacket, he was carrying a screwdriver, a knife, a pair of pliers, a compass, a six-inch piece of electrical wire, and a hacksaw blade. In the other pocket, he was carrying a fifty-cent glass cutter and a suction cup. Tucked into the waistband of his trousers were a hammer and a cold chisel. Strapped to his right thigh with adhesive tape was the hacksaw itself. He pulled on his gloves, walked directly to the control box on the right of the rear door, and then spread his tools on the floor, leaving only the glass cutter and the suction cup in his pocket. He had to lower his pants to get at the hacksaw, and he thought how comical it would be if the law arrived just then, found him with his tools all over the floor, and his pants down around his knees. He pulled up his pants again, fastened his belt, and inserted the blade into the hacksaw. The red light on the alarm box was glowing; the alarm was alive and well and living in the Bronx.
On his trip here this morning, he had not seen any exposed wiring, which meant all of it was in the walls. There were no exposed screws on the control-box plate, nor had he expected to find any there. He didn’t plan to mess around with the brain, anyway; it was much simpler to fuck up the wiring. He knew that wherever the wiring was inside those walls, it eventually had to feed into that control box, so he picked up his hammer and chisel and began chipping away at the plaster around the box, trying to locate the BX cable. By law, any inside-the-wall wiring had to run inside the BX, which was a piece of twisted steel tubing. He began working just above the control box, at twelve o’clock, and then he worked his way around to three o’clock and finally hit the cable at six. He kept chipping until he had a clear area all the way around the cable, and then he hooked it with his pliers and began working on it with the hacksaw. As he came closer to sawing through it, he became extremely cautious, not wanting to saw right through the wires that were inside it. Do that, and the fuckin bell would go off.
There were four wires inside the BX. Just as he and Archie had expected, this was a combination system. Basically, you had only three different kinds of alarm systems—your open-circuit, your closed-circuit, and your combination. The open-circuit system was the cheapest kind and the easiest to knock out. It was nothing more than the kind of wiring you’d use on your front doorbell. Gap in the wiring, press the bell button outside, it closed the gap and allowed the current to pass through, ringing the doorbell. When you used this kind of wiring for an alarm, the gap got closed whenever a door or a window was opened, and this allowed the current to run through and trigger the bell. A pair of shears could knock out an open-circuit system, because all you had to do with it was cut the wires, and that was that, the current never could run through wires that had been cut.
Your closed-circuit system operated in exactly the opposite way. A mild current ran through the wires at all times, and when a door or a window was opened, it broke the current and caused a relay to jump out, and this triggered the bell. If you cut the wires in this system, it was the same thing as opening a door or a window; you’d break your current and the bell would go off. The way you beat this system was to cross-contact the wires, so that the current would continue running through no matter how many doors or windows you opened later. He had been taught how to beat both of these systems by a con up at Sing Sing, who’d explained it to him in the simplest possible terms. For that bell to ring in an open-circuit system, the circuit had to be closed; in the closed-circuit system, the circuit had to be opened. To beat them, you just made sure the open stayed open and the closed stayed closed. Simple. As for the combination system, that was exactly what it sounded like—a combination of open and closed. To beat it, you had to cut one set of wires and cross-contact the other set, and the only thing you had to be careful about was cutting the wrong wires. You couldn’t cut the ones carrying the current, or the bell would go off.
Which is why Alex was carrying a compass.
With the wiring exposed, he put the compass against each wire in turn and when the needle jumped he knew which two were carrying the current. Using the knife, he stripped a section on each of those wires, exposing the copper through which the current ran. Then he stripped both ends of the six-inch piece of wire he had brought with him. He twisted one end of this small section around one of the current-bearing wires, and the other end around the second wire. If he’d done his cross-contacting right, he should now be able to knock out the entire system, simply by cutting all the wires inside the BX. He had no reason to believe he’d done anything wrong. Swiftly he cut the wires. The red light on the face of the control box went out, as effectively as if he’d put a key in the slot to turn off the alarm. He looked at his watch. It was twenty minutes to nine. He still had twenty minutes before Archie would try the back door. He decided not to unlock it until close to zero hour, just in case a cop came around and shook the door. Instead, he took the suction cup and the glass cutter from his jacket pocket and went to the door of the manager’s office.
He spit into the suction cup, wetting it, and then pushed it hard against the glass panel on the side of the door closest to the lock. He tested the cup to make sure it was holding securely to the glass, and then took the glass cutter from his pocket. In less than a minute he had cut almost a full circle in the glass. He grabbed the suction cup with his left hand, tested it to make sure it was still holding, cut away the remainder of the circle, and pulled the glass free of the panel. He put the glass circle on the floor, away from the door so that he wouldn’t step on it by accident, and then reached into the hole with his left hand and turned the knob on the drop bolt.
At three minutes to nine, he unlocked the back door of the market. Archie came into the place at nine sharp, carrying the heavier tools they’d need to open the mercantile. As it turned out, all they needed was a sledge and a punch because that broad form box must’ve been an old one even when Hector was a pup. They knocked off the dial, and then punched the spindle shaft clear back through the gut box, and broke the lock nuts, and opened it in less than four minutes flat.
There was $3,500 in cash inside that sweet old box.
On Tuesday, the idea came to him that maybe it wasn’t necessary to do a dry run on the Reed house. He took a taxi over to Grand Central Station, where he knew he could find a Westchester-Putnam telephone directory. In the yellow pages at the back of the book, he looked up Burglar
Alarm Systems and came across a quarter-page ad that read:
PROVIDENT ELECTRONIC SECURITY
INVISIBLE
SILENT ALARMS
• Homes & Apartments
• Offices & Showrooms
• Cash & Vault Areas
• Wireless Hold-up Alarms
SPECIALIZING IN:
• Automatic Telephone Police Dialers
• Low-Cost Temporary Alarms
• Thin-Line Window Security
• Area Surveillance
RESIDENTIAL AND COMMERCIAL
Free Estimate and Consultation
The company was on Mamaroneck Avenue, in White Plains. Alex jotted down the phone number and then flipped through the yellow pages until he came to a heading for Taxicab Service. He checked out the companies under that heading, but could find no listing for Duncan’s Livery. He then looked up Limousine Service on the off chance Duncan’s setup was a very exclusive one, but there was no listing there, either. Finally, he tried to find a listing for Duncan under Livery but there was only a heading for Livery Stables, and under that it said “See Stables.” So he had to figure Duncan was a nickel-and-dime operator who couldn’t even afford an ad in the yellow pages. In the white pages, he looked up Duncan’s Livery and found three telephone numbers, one under the other:
Duncan’s Livery Service
Cross Rdge Rd
Lngston LA 4-7210
Post Mls PO 8-3461
Duncan Charles
Cross Rdge Rd
Lngston LA 4-7210
The two Langston listings were identical, and they told Alex that Duncan was running his business out of his home. There was no address for the listing in Post Mills; Alex had to assume it was a telephone answering service. He turned to the area-code map at the front of the directory and saw that Post Mills and Langston were about a quarter-inch apart. There was no scale on the map, but he knew the mileage from Post Mills to New York City, and by comparing the distances, he estimated that Langston was a good ten miles from Post Mills. This meant that even if they did trigger the alarm in the Reed house, it’d take Duncan at least ten minutes to get there, doing sixty miles an hour.