Doors Read online

  EARLY BIRD BOOKS

  FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

  BE THE FIRST TO KNOW—

  NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY!

  There are no

  DOORS

  that can lock this man out!

  Meet Alex Hardy, Burglar Supreme, a professional’s professional. He can plan and execute a robbery with the consummate skill of a genius. He appreciates the financial rewards his art brings him … and women appreciate him; but what intrigues him most is a beautiful “score.” One like that rich house in Westchester where his friend Daisy, the one-legged whore from Harlem, has a steady date. Once a week she goes up there to service old man Reed while his wife shops in the city.

  Cooperative Daisy can keep Reed busy while Alex operates. It could be the best job he ever pulled—and the most dangerous.…

  Doors

  Ed McBain writing as Ezra Hannon

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  This is for Ingram Ash—who I think might have enjoyed it.

  ONE

  They were sitting at a table in the back room of Henry’s jewelry shop in the Bronx. There was a big black double-door Mosler on one wall, and all of the windows were barred on the outside. At the front of the store, both plate-glass windows had been covered with metal grilles for the night. Alex had noticed them on the way in.

  He watched now as Henry rose and walked ponderously to a wall cabinet opposite the safe. He took from it two glasses and a bottle of whiskey, and then carried them back to the table with him. Henry was an enormously fat man, dressed in a black suit, a white shirt open at the throat, no tie. There were rumors that he had once done time in a German concentration camp, but Alex couldn’t believe a man so fat had been through such an ordeal. Henry spoke with a marked German accent though, so maybe the stories were true. He set the glasses down on the table and poured a generous amount of whiskey into each.

  “Have you ever been arrested?” he asked.

  “Twice,” Alex said. “The first time when I was eighteen. I got off with a suspended sentence. The last time was three years ago. I did eighteen months at Sing Sing.”

  “Ah, too bad,” Henry said, and shook his head and lifted his drink. He wore thick rimless spectacles. His eyes behind them were a watery brown, magnified by the lenses.

  “I learned a lot there,” Alex said.

  “Drink, please,” Henry said, and raised his own glass in encouragement. Sipping at the whiskey, he said, “You are working with someone else now?”

  “I usually work alone.”

  “I do not mean on the job,” Henry said. “I am talking about receiving.”

  “I have two fences,” Alex said.

  “Do they also finger jobs for you?”

  “One of them does. The other is strictly a receiver.”

  “I hear very good things about you,” Henry said. “You are a good burglar.”

  “Thanks,” Alex said. “What’s this job you have in mind?”

  “Well, let’s talk a little more, eh?” Henry said. “Or are you in a rush?”

  “I’m not in any rush,” Alex said.

  “How well do the police know you?”

  “They come around every now and then. Whenever there’s a job they can’t dope out, they figure I did it. They don’t worry me, they can come around as often as they like. I’ve got a lawyer, and also a bondsman who’ll go to twenty grand if it’s necessary. But so far, I’ve only been inside a station house three times since I got out of Sing Sing.”

  “You have your own lawyer, eh? And a bondsman, too?”

  “That’s right, I don’t count on fences for that kind of help. All I want from anybody who receives the goods is quick cash.”

  “Well, naturally, no one wants to keep fourteen television sets in his basement, eh?”

  “I hardly ever steal home appliances,” Alex said. “That’s for your junkie burglars.”

  “Then you are not on narcotics, eh?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good. How old are you, may I ask?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “What has been your biggest score?” Henry asked. “More to drink?”

  “A little, thanks. The biggest I ever got, my end of it, was forty-two thousand. That was after I got out of Sing Sing.”

  “Where was that? A hotel, a residence?”

  “An apartment house. I’m a crib burglar. I don’t work hotels, I don’t work offices or stores. Strictly apartments, and strictly during the day.”

  “You are opposed to working at night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why is that? I know some very good burglars who work at night.”

  “Not me. I work percentages. If you’re stealing from stores or offices, you do it at night because that’s when the people are supposed to be home in bed. If you’re stealing from apartments, you do it during the day, when the people are supposed to be at work. I don’t want to see anybody when I’m inside a place. If I so much as hear a pussycat fart, I’m out in a minute. What exactly do you have in mind here?” Alex asked. “Tommy told me you needed a good burglar, that’s why I’m here. Is this a regular thing we’re talking about, or just a one-shot?”

  “It would be a regular thing,” Henry said. “Provided it works out.”

  “The only way it wouldn’t work out is if I got busted,” Alex said. “I don’t intend to get busted ever again.”

  “So,” Henry said, and smiled.

  “So what’s the job? Or ain’t you interested anymore?”

  “I am, of course, still interested,” Henry said. “Did Tommy tell you what percentage I work on?”

  “No, what is it?”

  “I pay twenty-five percent of the value,” Henry said, and peered at Alex from behind his eyeglasses.

  “That ain’t enough,” Alex said, and rose immediately from the table.

  “Sit down,” Henry said. “Please. What are you accustomed to getting from your other receivers?”

  “Thirty percent.”

  “That’s high,” Henry said.

  “It ain’t high, it’s standard.”

  “Yes, but these other men do not finger jobs for you.”

  “One of them does, I already told you that. And he gives me a straight thirty, and that’s what I work for. If there’s a man along as helper, if that’s what the job calls for, then I’ll give him ten percent of my end. But that’s it.”

  “Still, thirty percent …”

  “Look, we’re wasting time here,” Alex said, and started for the door.

  “Sit down,” Henry said again. “I think we can maybe do business together.”

  They began talking about the job then.

  Alex thought he had handled himself fine.

  That bullshit about the twenty-five percent was strictly for crude burglars, your goddamn window men, if they got even that. Windows were from hunger, amateur night in Dixie. You took any punk, he could wrap a towel around a brick and smash in a window, and reach up for the latch. He was usually some junkie, he had a habit as long as your arm to feed. He stepped over the fire escape, he tried the window next to it cause people usually locked the window right on the fire escape, but they didn’t bother locking the one alongside it. If it was unlocked, the guy was in free and clear. If it wasn’t, then he’d try the window on the fire escape, slip a knife up between the window frames, turn the latch that way. Those window latches weren’t worth a shit. A chimpanzee could open any one of them in thirty seconds flat.

  But sometimes the latch and even the window itself was painted shut, and that’s when your crude burglar would smash it in with a wrapped brick. It depended on how crude he was, whether or not he’d tape the window first. If he taped it, the glass wouldn’t make so much noise cause it’d stick to the tape, and then he could lift ou
t the pieces until he had a big enough hole to get in through. Sometimes, though, if he was a desperate junkie, he couldn’t be bothered with taping, he was just interested in getting in there fast and getting out. So he’d wrap the brick and smash out the whole pane of glass, and in he’d go, never mind about noise, never mind about maybe cutting himself in the bargain. He was only going to be in there three, four minutes, anyway. He’d grab whatever he saw around, it didn’t matter, he was only interested in getting enough for his next fix. He never had a big score in mind, cause he stole from people living in cheap neighborhoods, so what could he expect to get? A portable radio? A toaster? A guitar if it was a Spanish neighborhood? Three or four bucks somebody left in a bureau drawer? Small-time shit.

  Your crude burglar, he hit in the daytime like most crib burglars, but he wouldn’t know a diamond from a piece of glass, and anyway he didn’t expect to find any diamonds in those cheap dumps he made. He had to keep busy, that was it, he had to make as much as two hundred bucks a day to support his habit, depending on how long it was. That meant he had to rip off a lot of places each and every day of the week, cause you had to figure he’d get cheated on the value of what he stole. Usually, he wasn’t connected with a finger or a fence. His pusher took the goods from him, and the pusher discounted it for whatever the traffic would bear. If the guy was real sick, the pusher would take from him a portable black-and-white TV worth a hundred and fifty bucks, and instead of giving him what he’d give a pro, which was fifty bucks, or even what he’d give a rank amateur, which was fifteen bucks, he’d give him instead a dime bag of heroin, and the junkie burglar would run around the corner to shoot up, and half an hour later he’d be looking for another score.

  You either know what you’re doing or you don’t, Alex thought, it’s just like any other profession. A junkie don’t know what he’s doing, he’s driven all the time. He’s got to have that fix, he’ll steal his own mother’s wedding band to get the bread for it. When he ain’t shooting up or nodding, he’s stealing. But he doesn’t figure the odds, that’s the trouble. He goes into a place and steals a typewriter which, if he’s lucky, he could get thirty bucks for, but if he gets caught he’s going to get hit with a burglary three rap, and that’s a class-D felony for which he can get a minimum of a year or a maximum of anywhere from three to seven. That’s if they didn’t throw the book at him and charge him with possession of burglar’s tools, or even criminal mischief. The criminal mischief would be if he’d damaged any property while he was inside the place, which a lot of these junkies did because they were in such a hurry. One to seven, that was it, but Alex always liked to figure it as strictly seven because he never knew what kind of judge he’d be coming up against if he ever got busted again.

  If you were a real pro, you had to operate on percentage, just like he’d told Henry. You had to know the risk you were taking, and you didn’t go after cheap crap that could get you the same time in prison a big score would get you. That was what the crude burglars didn’t realize. A man could steal a $3,500 mink jacket or a $25 portable radio, and it would still be seven years if that was what the judge felt like handing out that day. The value of what the man stole added grand or petit larceny to the burglary charge, but breaking and entering was still the basic beef. If a burglar made a hole only big enough to stick his hand inside a building, that was breaking and entering. He didn’t have to put his whole body in there, he didn’t even have to step over the windowsill. Just poke his pinky or even a tool into that little hole he made, and that was breaking and entering, and that could be seven years if he came up against a judge who didn’t like the color of his eyes.

  A man didn’t even have to steal anything while he was in there. Just going in there, even if he went in with a key—which Alex had done any number of times—was enough. He could go in there expecting the Hope Diamond, finding instead an empty room without a stick of furniture in it, and if they caught him and could prove he intended to commit a crime in there, that was it, the charge was burglary three. Of course, if they couldn’t prove he was planning to rip off the place, then the charge was only criminal trespass, which was a bullshit violation—fifteen days or a $250 fine. But if anyone was banking on criminal trespass, he’d better not have anything on him that even faintly resembled a burglar’s tool. That included a credit card, even if it was made out in his own name, because a credit card or any similar piece of plastic could be used to force open a door lock.

  Yeah, he felt pretty good about the way he’d handled himself with that fat Kraut, who was probably a Jew besides—not that Alex ever rated a man by his color or his religion or anything except whether he was good at what he did. Archie Fuller, for example, was one of the best burglars he knew, and he was black. Some of the best burglars he’d ever met were either Jews or Italians, but he knew guys who said Canadians couldn’t be beat. He knew some old-timers, too, who remembered back to before Castro, and they’d told him Cubans used to be the best around. It didn’t make any difference to Alex. Still, that fuckin Henry shouldn’t have tried to Jew him down by five percent.

  The job looked like a good one, but it bothered him a little because it took away the element of surprise. Before he’d made this connection with Henry today, he’d had only one other fence who also fingered jobs for him, and that was Vito. He had to have fences, of course, what the hell was he supposed to do with a hot wristwatch? Stop a stranger on the street and whisper in his ear that he had a bargain for him? Bullshit. He knew one burglar who’d done that, and the stranger turned out to be a detective from Midtown North. Anyway, that was the same thing as being a salesman, and if Alex had wanted to be a salesman, he’d have taken a nine-to-five, like a square. And maybe miss a chance at that big score he was always looking for.

  That’s what bothered him about this job—he knew just what was in there, he knew just what he would net. Whenever he was on the prowl for himself, he never knew what to expect. Forty percent of the time, he’d come away with goods worth somewhere between a hundred and five hundred dollars. One time out of twenty, he’d get lucky and score between a thousand and five thousand. On a job that hadn’t been set up in advance, he considered anything over five thousand a tremendous score. But there was always the chance of going in some place and stumbling upon that treasure trove, that half-a-million-dollar score, or maybe more. He’d heard stories of guys who’d done that. That’s what was missing from this job.

  Still, he felt pretty good.

  Henry had told him he was a good burglar.

  On Monday morning Alex went to work.

  The building was on the corner of Sixty-ninth and Madison, across the street from the Westbury Hotel. The neighborhood was a good one, and he was dressed for it. He was wearing a gray suit, a white shirt with a dark blue tie, blue socks, and black shoes. And, because this was April and still a bit chilly, he had on a light topcoat. A copy of The New York Times was tucked under his left arm, and in his right hand he held a dispatch case he had bought at Mark Cross on Fifth Avenue. He wore no hat. His hair was blond, and he had often thought this a disadvantage, but had never once considered dyeing it a less identifiable color. Henry had told him everything he needed to know about the job, but Alex never went into a place without first checking it out himself; if he got caught in there, it would be his ass, not Henry’s. The information had been pieced together from two sources, Henry himself and the maid who worked for the Rothmans. It was Henry who knew exactly what kind of loot was inside there. Henry had to know because he was the one who’d sold the ring to the Rothmans four months ago, just before Christmas.

  They had come all the way to his shop in the Bronx because they’d heard he dealt in exceptional pieces, most of them antiques purchased from European estates. That was true enough. He also dealt in stolen jewels, but the Rothmans hadn’t known that. They certainly hadn’t known that the diamond ring they’d bought from him was marked for theft four months later. He had sold them the ring for thirty thousand dollars, explaining that
the six-carat marquise diamond was flawless and the setting extraordinary—notice the way the two tapered baguette diamonds are set into the platinum, please, this ring belonged to a countess in Germany, you do not find this sort of workmanship anymore.

  He had been telling the truth, old Henry. You did not find this sort of workmanship anymore, and come Thursday the Rothmans wouldn’t find it anymore either. Come Thursday it would be back in Henry’s fat little hands, and he’d remove the stones from their extraordinary setting, maybe shave a bit off the top of the big diamond to reduce the number of carats, and then ship all three diamonds back to Europe, where they would get lost on one or another of the diamond exchanges. He had told Alex the ring was worth thirty, but he’d probably shaved that a bit, too. Still, Alex could expect nine thousand for the job, plus thirty percent of whatever else happened to be in the wallbox.

  The maid had been cultivated by a black gambler Henry knew. She was a girl in her twenties, just up from the South, dumb as the day was long. The gambler had been supplied with only her first name, which the Rothmans had casually mentioned on the day they were buying the ring, but it hadn’t taken him long to find out which Gloria in the building was the one employed by the Rothmans. He had made her acquaintance in a coffee shop on Lexington Avenue, after following her from the building on her way home one night. He’d begun dating her in February, and had since learned everything there was to know about the habits of the Rothmans, without ever once indicating that he was in any way pumping the girl for information. She had seen him only last week. She didn’t yet know she would never see him again. For that matter, she didn’t even know his real name. On Thursday, when the ring was delivered, Henry would give the gambler three thousand dollars for his part in setting up the burglary.

  According to the maid, Mr. Rothman worked as a stockbroker down on Wall Street. He left for work at nine each morning, in time for the market’s opening at ten, and generally got home earlier than the usual square; the market closed at three-thirty, and most days he was home by four-thirty or five. Mrs. Rothman did not work—she was sixty-one years old—but she was generally out of the apartment between ten and twelve in the morning, when she went over to Central Park for a brief stroll. That was on good days. On rainy days she never budged from the apartment, a fact about which her maid had complained bitterly to the gambler. But aside from that two-hour-long Central Park constitutional, Mrs. Rothman rarely ventured outside on sunny days either, which meant Alex had to hit the place between ten and twelve. That was cutting it very thin, even though he knew exactly where the box was.