by Ed McBain
“What do you mean?” Alex said immediately.
“I can call Mr. Reed, tell him I’m sending another girl.”
“You ever do that before?”
“Time to time. When I get the curse, I do it. And once I did it when I was sick with the flu.”
“How does he feel about that?”
“He don’t care, long as the girl is black. He thinks he’s got the cab drivers fooled there’s a maid comin in to tidy up the studio. They all know we’re hookers, I turned a trick with one of them on the way back to the city one time. You want another girl, I’ll get you one. That way, there’s any heat, he don’t even know who the hell she is, he can’t blow the whistle on her.”
“That’s no good,” Archie said.
“Why not?”
“Cause it means we got to let a stranger in on the job. We got to tell her we’re in the house there, keep him busy in the studio. I ain’t about to risk my neck on some strange whore.”
“Why does it have to be a stranger?” Daisy asked.
Both men looked at each other. The name was on their lips before either of them gave it voice. Alex hesitated, not wanting to be the one who suggested it, not wanting Archie to think the only reason he might be suggesting it was that she owed him money—her share of the job would ensure payment of what she owed him, her share would enable her to pay off him and Transit both.
“Kitty,” Archie said. “Why not use Kitty?”
It was raining on the day of the job.
“Fuckin rain’s a hoodoo,” Archie said.
“It’ll help us,” Alex said.
“How’s it gonna help us, man? It’ll get us wet, is what it’ll do.”
“Rain beatin on the roof, Reed won’t be able to hear us over there in the house.”
“He won’t be able to hear us, anyway,” Archie said. “Rain’s a fuckin hoodoo jinx, all it is.”
They had planned to use the social worker’s car today, but at the last minute she’d called Archie to say her brother was coming in from California, and she had to pick him up at Kennedy. There was a greater risk with the rented car, but they were prepared with their alibi in case anyone spotted the license plate and reported it. The alibi was a variation of the one Alex had concocted that day in White Plains, just before he’d stumbled on the old lady in bed—Jesus, he hoped there weren’t any sick old ladies inside the Reed house. If the police came knocking on Archie’s door—he was the one who’d signed out the car—he’d tell them somebody had taken the car right from in front of his building, brought it back three, four hours later. Probably some kids joyriding, officer. Sure, the cop would say.
But let them try to prove Archie had been the one driving the car up there in Post Mills. They could come around from here to doomsday with their bullshit. If they didn’t catch you inside there, or going in or coming out with tools or with the actual loot, why ten people could’ve seen your license plate, and all that did was put the cops onto you, which didn’t mean they could bust you. Different if a lady picked you out of a lineup, said That’s the man who was in my house. But a license plate? Still, it would’ve been safer with the social worker’s car, cause then all the heat would go back to her, and Archie could claim he didn’t know her from a hole in the wall. But it was all right this way, too. And anyway, they didn’t plan on being spotted. Only person who could possibly spot them was old Reed the Third, and he’d be busy with Kitty out in the studio.
They had told Kitty about the job on Monday. They had sat in the kitchen of her Harlem apartment, and she had listened intently as they talked, and then a wide grin had erupted on her swollen mouth. Transit had given her the lip, she explained. He had booked her with a freak, and Kitty had walked out on the john when his demands became just a bit too bizarre, even for a hooker. Transit hadn’t liked that. You’re either a professional or you ain’t, he’d told her, and then he’d begun smacking her around. She showed them a large purple bruise on her left breast, and then cursed Transit the way only a hooker could curse a man, wishing him pestilence and disease in all his private parts. They’d explained to her that Daisy would still want a piece of the action for setting up the job, and that this would have to come out of Kitty’s end. Even so, she could expect to come away with more than enough to buy off Transit. They’d told her Daisy had already called Reed, and he was expecting her this Thursday at noon sharp. Reed would give Daisy a ring Thursday morning soon as his wife left for the city, let her know the coast was clear. Meanwhile, all Kitty had to do was meet with Daisy and find out how she could best keep Reed busy and happy out there in the studio while they ripped off the house. Kitty said it sounded like a piece of cake.
The rented car nosed its way through the rain, they knew the way to Post Mills by heart now, like fuckin horses going to stable, Archie said. They had driven up to Post Mills on Tuesday, because it had suddenly occurred to Alex that the telephone wires at the Reed house might be underground. With a lot of new houses, especially the modern ones, people didn’t want telephone or electrical wires coming overhead from the road to the house, spoiling the look of it. So they buried the wires underground, and the phone company’s protector was installed someplace inside the house, instead of on an outside wall where it, too, would spoil the clean-lined look of the place. The protector was a small box with fuses and carbon inside it, and was just what it sounded like—a protector. Against lightning. Without that little box, you got a thunderstorm while you were talking on the phone, next thing you knew you were lighting up the whole house without benefit of electricity. The wires from the terminal pole led into the protector and then the wires to the various phones in the house led out of it. If the wires to the Reed house were underground, then the protector was most likely inside the house someplace, probably in the basement, or else in the garage. If that was the case, they would have to first get into the house to cut the telephone wires, which made it all ridiculous since the reason they wanted to cut the wires in the first place was so they could get into the house. They were ready to call off the job if the telephone wires were underground.
They’d driven up Pembrook Road watching the telephone poles, and when they saw the one outside the Reed house, and saw those wires high up above the stone wall, leading right toward where the house was, they turned to each other and grinned. Then, while they were on the road, they drove up and down it several times, trying to find a good place to park the car when they made the house. They, didn’t want to drive right up to the front door, because old Reed the Third might hear them coming in and jump right off Kitty and onto the pipe to the state troopers. They found a cutoff into the woods about a thousand yards from the Reed driveway, an old dirt road overgrown with weeds. There were two rotted wooden posts on either side of the cutoff, it might have been a logging trail at one time, they didn’t know and didn’t care. A rusted chain hung between the two posts. They got out of the car to examine the chain, saw that it could easily be removed from one of the posts, and decided this was where they’d leave the car while they were looting the house. They drove back to the city then, and shook hands before leaving each other, as though they had already closed a five hundred thousand dollar deal and were congratulating themselves on their brilliance.
The wipers snicked steadily at the rain now, the defroster threw a gentle stream of warm air against the windshield. The dashboard clock read eleven-ten, and they had just passed the Greenwich tollgates. They’d be in Post Mills in twenty minutes, a half hour at most. Reed the Third had called Daisy at nine-thirty to say his wife was off and running. He had asked her a lot of questions about the girl Daisy was sending him, and she had given Kitty a real send-off and asked him to be real nice to her as she was a personal friend in addition to being a fine piece of ass. Reed had chuckled into the phone and warned Daisy to be careful, he might take a fancy to this other girl. There was something between those two that was almost like man and wife, it was really peculiar. Listening to the steady rhythm of the windshield wipers,
Alex thought about Reed and Daisy, and then thought about himself and Jessica, and of the long conversation they’d had last night.
They had talked mostly about getting out of it. She would be getting out of a bad marriage, and he would be getting out of a life he had to realize was unrewarding. That had been Jessica’s word. Unrewarding. He’d told her it wasn’t unrewarding financially, he was after all expecting to figure sixty grand on this job. That’s if they came away with half a million. Thirty percent of that would be a hundred and fifty thousand, and they’d give Daisy, say, ten for setting it up, and Kitty would get, say, another ten, which would leave the rest for him and Archie to split. That wasn’t exactly unrewarding, he said. Yes, Jessica said, but what if you get caught, Alex, what’ll happen to us if you get caught? He told her there was no chance of getting caught, they had researched this thing very thoroughly and it looked like a piece of cake. He had used Kitty’s words in describing it—a piece of cake. I’d die if anything happened to you, Jessica said. I’d die if you got caught and sent to prison. And he’d told her again there was no chance of getting caught.
But now he wondered about it. In the closed and steamy near-silence of the automobile, the only sound the steady whick-whick of the wipers and the drone of the engine and the hiss of the tires against the wet roadway, he wondered whether there was even the slightest possibility of getting caught. Kitty was already on her way up there by taxi, she’d left her apartment the moment Daisy called to tell her everything was okay. They’d arranged for Vito Bolognese to fence the stolen furs, and for Henry Green to fence the jewelry. They’d told Henry they didn’t know exactly how much they’d be taking out of the house, but according to the photographs Daisy had described it, it looked like it would be a very big haul. Henry had wanted to know what they meant by very big, and they’d told him they were hoping in the neighborhood of half a million dollars. This was a figure they’d picked out of the air, a figure only sketchily arrived at on the basis of the photographs. But it was a figure they believed nonetheless. They had talked about the job so often that now the figure seemed real to them. Five hundred thousand dollars. This was the once-in-a-lifetime score they’d both been dreaming about, and the dream seemed within reach now, and they would not compromise the dream by reducing the scope of it. Henry shook his head and said he could probably come up with seventy-five thousand by Thursday afternoon, but that they’d have to wait for the balance till the early part of next week, if that was all right with them. They’d shaken hands on the deal and promised to deliver the goods late Thursday.
So that part of it was okay. There was no chance of them getting stuck with hot goods, they’d be rid of the stuff the minute they got back to the city this afternoon. And they knew Henry’s reputation, he wouldn’t try to screw them, he’d deliver the remainder of the cash just as he’d promised, early next week, you couldn’t expect a man to have that kind of cash just laying around. There was no chance of them walking in on a house full of people either, because Reed would be out in the studio with Kitty, and besides they planned to ring the front doorbell before cutting the phone wires. Anybody answered the door, they’d give him a bullshit magazine-subscription pitch. Meanwhile, they’d be looking all around, making sure nobody was mowing the lawn or painting the shutters or whatever the hell. Nothing unexpected. They saw anything out of the way, it was good-bye, nice knowing you. Kitty’d come out of it with a hundred-dollar bill for her trouble, and a free taxi ride back to the city, and they’d both go home and weep in their beer. No, he could see nothing wrong in their approach to the job, and nothing wrong in the way they planned to dispose of the hot goods afterwards.
As for the Hawk, Alex had to admit he’d worried about him quite a bit in the past few days, especially when he’d come from the trip to Post Mills on Tuesday and found fire engines in front of the building, people standing on the sidewalk, tenants he recognized. He knew the police sometimes pulled phony bomb scares or false-alarm fires, just to get a guy out of his apartment so they could put in a wire. But they usually did that in big investigations, like when they were after somebody in the rackets and had to bug his phone for incriminating evidence, or when they suspected a big hijacking was about to take place, something like that. It cost a lot of money, after all, to get the whole fuckin fire department out just so they could send a police technician in. He’d never been afraid of anything he’d said on the telephone because he knew the cops just wouldn’t bother a burglar that way, they just wouldn’t. No matter what they said, they had a lot of respect for burglars, they didn’t consider them cheap mobsters, no, he’d never heard of a burglar whose phone had been bugged. But those fire engines outside had scared him, made him begin to think maybe the Hawk had gone to the trouble of bugging his phone, and when he talked to Archie that night, he told him to cool it, and Archie understood right away and they talked about the weather instead of the Reed job. This was after Jessica had already told him there really had been a fire in the building that day. Still, he’d been nervous.
And suppose, well, he didn’t think this was likely to happen, but suppose the Hawk had Daisy picked up, dragged her down there to the Thirteenth, started throwing a lot of questions at her, she was scared shitless as it was, that assault charge hanging over her. And suppose he promised her a deal, told her he’d whisper in the D.A.’s ear, the usual cop bullshit, get the charge reduced, maybe get the charge dropped completely, if only she’d tell them where and when her two friends were planning to hit Westchester County. Well, he didn’t think she’d tell the Hawk anything, even if he promised her the sky, because after all there was ten grand in this for her, a fuckin whore didn’t come across ten grand every day of the week. Got to turn a lot of tricks to pile up ten grand. No, he didn’t think Daisy would tell the cops anything more than she’d already told them.
So he couldn’t see any way of them getting caught, and yet the job troubled him, and he didn’t know why. He kept telling himself it really was a piece of cake, it really would be the once-in-a-lifetime score he’d been hoping for ever since he’d first broken that window in the Bronx and come away with a portable radio and $30 in cash. And if it did turn out to be the kind of score they all were hoping for, why then of course he would buy that house in Lauderdale, take Jess and the kid down there, Christ, it would be beautiful. He’d told her that last night. He’d promised her this would be the very last one, even if it turned out to be a nickel-and-dime score. Go in there, find himself a piggy bank and a fried omelet, okay the hell with it. No more. They’d go south anyway, get themselves jobs—I promise you, Jess, this is it, he’d said. This is the last one. And before she’d left him to go downstairs again, she’d made him promise to call her in the morning before he left for Post Mills. And this morning, on the phone, she’d told him she loved him, and she’d begged him to be careful, and made him promise that he would call her the minute he got back to the city, she’d be worried all that time, he had to promise he’d call her. Do you love me, Alex? she’d asked. I love you, he’d answered, I’ll call you the minute I get back. I love you, Jess.
“Almost there,” Archie said.
Alex glanced at the dashboard clock. The time was a quarter to twelve.
“Don’t want to get there before twelve-fifteen,” he said. “Give Kitty a chance to get started.”
“Yeah. You want to stop for some coffee?”
“I think we better. Arch?” he said, and then hesitated.
“Yeah?”
“You worried about this job?”
“No,” Archie said.
“Me, neither,” Alex said.
They stopped for coffee in a luncheonette in Langston, across the street from the bank. They kept watching the traffic on the main street outside. The rain had let up a little, but most of the bank’s business was still being done at the drive-in window. As they sipped at their coffee, they speculated that a bank in a one-horse town like this would be a pushover for somebody with a gun and a pair of balls—somebody
like Tommy Palumbo. When the clock’s hands were standing straight up, they paid for their coffee, and left the luncheonette, and started the drive to Post Mills. Archie seemed calm and relaxed. As for himself, Alex knew the juices wouldn’t begin flowing till he started opening one of the doors. The front door, a patio door, it wouldn’t matter; the juices would start flowing the minute he put a tool on one of those doors. The tools they would use were in a satchel in the trunk of the car. Archie had observed all the speed limits on the way up, and he drove carefully and slowly now. Neither of the men spoke. Alex was thinking that in two hours’ time, give or take, they’d each be richer by sixty grand or more. When they got to Post Mills, they drove down Pembrook Road to the cutoff they’d spotted on Tuesday. Alex got out of the car, lowered the chain and then stood in the lightly falling rain while Archie pulled the car off the road. Archie drove it as far back as he could, so that it was almost completely hidden by the trees. He took the satchel of tools out of the trunk then and came to where Alex was standing just off the road.
“Fuckin rain,” he said.