Doors Read online

  Henry had told him there was a doorman and an elevator operator in the building. Alex wanted to check that out, of course, but he also wanted to see whether the maid had been right about Mr. Rothman going off to work at nine, and Mrs. Rothman going down for her stroll at ten. He had been given a fair description of what the Rothmans looked like, but he wasn’t about to base his calculations on maybe identifying the wrong people. There were easier ways of checking on whether the apartment was indeed empty between ten and twelve on Thursdays. Alex had already decided on Thursday for the hit; Thursday was the maid’s day off.

  He arrived at the apartment house at seven-thirty on Monday morning, walking past it on the other side of the street, just to get a feel of the place. The doorman was standing on the sidewalk outside the glass entrance doors, under a green awning that ran to the curb. There was very little activity at this hour of the morning. Alex walked down to Park Avenue, crossed the street, walked uptown to Seventieth, and then circled the entire block, walking past the building on the same side of the street now, not five feet from where the doorman still stood inside the glass entrance doors. The doorman was a man in his sixties, brawny, redfaced, very fat in the behind. He was wearing a gray uniform with a narrow blue stripe down each outside trouser leg. He scarcely glanced at Alex when he went past, but Alex knew he couldn’t go by the building too often without attracting his attention sooner or later.

  He circled the block again, this time walking downtown to Sixty-eighth and coming up to Madison that way. Then, instead of going into the street again, he crossed Madison Avenue and positioned himself on the corner diagonally across from the building, where he could study the building and the street without being noticed by the doorman. The time was seven-forty-five A.M.

  As he stood on the corner, he occasionally raised his newspaper toward an approaching taxicab, but only if he could tell the cab was already carrying a passenger. Whenever an empty cab approached in the distance, he kept his newspaper under his arm. Every now and then, he glanced at his wristwatch, as though fearful he would be late for work. He did all of this unobtrusively, even though he knew nobody in New York gave a damn about anyone else in New York. As far as any of the passers-by were concerned, he could be turning cartwheels trying to get a taxi and none of them would have noticed. Still, he tried to keep track of the people going by because he didn’t want some little old lady to notice he’d been standing on the same corner for a half-hour, trying to get a goddamn taxicab. There weren’t many people on the street now, anyway, though the activity began to pick up as it came closer to eight and people started going off to work.

  There was an underground parking garage across the street from the building, and many of the men who came out went directly across the street and down the ramp to it. Alex counted sixteen women coming out of the building between eight and eight-thirty. All of them were well dressed, and he automatically assumed they were going off to work, since a woman going shopping would not leave the house all dressed up so early in the morning. Your shopping women usually left around ten-thirty, eleven, something like that. Your women who were playing around left near noon. He always knew when a woman was on her way to get laid; there was just something in the way she walked. He made a note to keep this building in mind for future hits. Sixteen working women meant the possibility of sixteen empty apartments from nine to five.

  But he wasn’t here to case the joint for next July, he was here to look it over for a job that had to be done this Thursday. He’d been standing on the corner too long, he had seen the same man walk by twice with a pair of black poodles on a leash. Also, now that it was getting close to eight-forty, the doorman from the building was running up to Madison Avenue more and more often, blowing his whistle at cruising taxis and then signaling back to the front of the building to this or that person who had asked him to hail a cab. Alex moved off.

  There was a coffee shop a block up from the Westbury and he went there and ordered himself a cup of coffee and a toasted English. Then he went to the phone booth and looked up the telephone number for Jerome Rothman on East Sixty-ninth Street, and found a listing for him. He deposited a dime, dialed the number, and listened to the phone ringing on the other end. A woman picked up the receiver.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Mr. Rothman, please,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, he’s already left,” the woman said. “May I take a message?”

  “Do you know if I can reach him at work?” Alex asked.

  “Yes, who’s this, please?”

  “I have the number, I’ll try him there,” Alex said, and hung up, and went back to the table, where his coffee and toasted English were waiting.

  The telephone, of course, was as essential a burglar’s tool as was the cylinder jig, and the jimmy, and the various picks and tension bars he would later carry in the expensive leather dispatch case. In the right-hand pocket of his topcoat, he would carry a royal-flush poker hand—the ten, jack, queen, king, and ace of hearts. The cards were plastic coated and could be used to loid any door with a spring latch. But if a cop stopped him for a casual frisk and didn’t bother to look inside the dispatch case, Alex could always say he was carrying the royal flush as a remembrance of the one time in his life he had ever drawn such a hand. He realized this was a far-fetched hope—any cop stopping him would naturally look inside the dispatch case, too, and find a potful of burglar’s tools. But a plastic-coated playing card made as good a loid as a hotel’s DO NOT DISTURB sign, and besides Alex liked to think of himself as a gambler of sorts. Actually, he was a very good poker player, which was not surprising since he’d taken a great deal of time to memorize the odds and never played in crazy wild-card games where the odds got all fucked up. Percentages. It was all percentages.

  The percentages on Mrs. Rothman thinking there was anything suspicious about his early morning call were practically nil. The one thing nobody ever suspected was that a burglary was being set up, especially if the caller asked for someone who actually lived in the apartment. He had protected the call by pretending he knew Rothman’s office number as well, and had hung up before Mrs. Rothman could ask any more questions. If she ever mentioned the call to her husband when he came home that afternoon, Alex would be greatly surprised. On his next call, he would have to be more careful. But that would wait till tomorrow. For today, he wanted to check out the doorman and the elevator operator, and he wanted to find out what time the mailman came. He needed to be dead certain the apartment would be empty when he made it on Thursday. The one thing he never hoped to run across was an occupied apartment. He hadn’t so far, not even on those two times he’d been busted, and he hoped he never would.

  Alex would no more have dreamed of becoming an armed robber than he would have a lion tamer. Walk into a liquor store and shove a gun in the owner’s face? No way. Unless you shot the guy dead, he could identify you later on. And besides, the risk was greater. Armed robbery was a class-B felony, and the maximum rap was twenty-five years, and no one could convince Alex that any amount of money was worth twenty-five years behind bars. He never carried a gun on any of his jobs because first of all guns scared him half to death, and secondly, a gun elevated the burglary, even if it was a daytime burglary, to a class-C felony, and for that you could get as much as fifteen years—not to mention what they’d tack on for the gun violation itself. No, thank you. Alex would stick to simple burglary three.

  In Sing Sing he’d been leafing through some back magazines in the prison library, and he’d come across a good article about burglary. In it there was a very interesting and comical poem written by a guy who used to be a Manhattan D.A. The poem wasn’t about burglary, it was about robbery. But Alex’s cellmate at the time was a dumb bastard from Arkansas who’d got in trouble in New York State by sticking up a gas station—with a Civil War pistol, no less. Alex thought he’d get a kick out of the robbery poem, so he’d memorized it, and that night after lights out he recited it to him. The redneck didn’t get it,
naturally, but Alex still knew it by heart:

  Most robberies without knife or gun

  Are Robbery One or Robbery Two.

  If two men rob, it’s Robbery One,

  If only one, it’s Robbery Two.

  There’s something else called Robbery Three,

  Which isn’t Robbery One or Two.

  I can’t define this third degree,

  Except to say it’s Robbery, too.

  “Whut’ choo mean?” the redneck had asked. “How kin robbery three be robbery two?”

  Stupid bastard.

  All that week Alex had tried to write a poem on his own about burglary, modeled on the one he’d read in the back-issue magazine. He’d never got past his junior year in high school, but he’d always been good with words, and he figured he’d take a whack at it. What else was there to do in jail? Writing the poem was more difficult than he’d thought at first, but that was-primarily because the penal law definitions had changed since he was a kid, and he kept mixing up the new ones with the old ones. But he finally got the poem written according to the new definitions, and he thought it was very good and in fact better than the robbery poem written by the ex-D.A.

  A dwelling’s the key to Burglary One,

  And it has to be nighttime for Burglary One.

  In addition to that, you must have a gun,

  Or while in the dwelling you must hurt someone,

  Or threaten him with the aforementioned gun,

  For it to add up to Burglary One.

  A dwelling’s a building in Burglary Two.

  Unless it’s at night, like in Burglary One.

  But once in this building, if you’ve got a gun,

  Or once in the building you hurt anyone,

  Or threaten him with the aforementioned gun,

  That’s Burglary Two, not Burglary One.

  No mention of dwellings in Burglary Three.

  No mention of nighttime in Burglary Three.

  No mention of guns like in Two or in One.

  No mention of threats or of hunting someone.

  A building’s a building in Burglary Three.

  And breaking and entering is Burglary Three.

  The key to all this is the dwelling, you see.

  The building’s a dwelling at all times in One.

  The building’s a dwelling at nighttime in Two.

  The dwelling’s a building in daytime in Three.

  And none of it makes any damn sense to me.

  “What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?” the cracker asked, and that was the last time Alex tried his hand at poetry, in or out of prison.

  He looked at his watch.

  It was ten past nine, time to get back on the job.

  There was a restaurant on the southwest corner of Sixty-ninth and Madison, but a sign in the window told him they didn’t start serving till eleven-thirty. That was too bad because he’d have liked nothing more than to take a table by the window and watch the building from there. He didn’t want to hang around on the corner hailing imaginary taxicabs again, nor did he want to walk past the building too often, so he went about a third of the way up the block, sat on the front stoop of the brownstones, and took off his shoe and began massaging his foot. If anyone came out of the brownstone and chased him off the stoop, he would apologize and say he’d had a sudden cramp in his arch. He was well dressed, he was carrying a dispatch case, and he was certain they’d accept his story at face value. In the meantime, he could watch the building across the street at his leisure.

  The maids began arriving during the next half-hour. They were black, he assumed they were maids. Almost all of them were carrying shopping bags; he wondered why the hell black maids always carried shopping bags. During that time, the doorman ran up to Madison Avenue a total of four times. On one occasion, it took him ten minutes to get a taxicab. That was good. Alex could count on him being away from the front door more often than he was there. As for the elevator operator, he wasn’t at all worried about him. Elevator operators all had their ups and downs, as the saying went, and Alex knew he had to be somewhere between floors at least sometime during the day, hopefully when old Fat Ass was chasing taxis.

  The mailman came at nine-forty-five.

  This was very important to Alex.

  The mailman was inside the building for seven minutes, and then he came out again and went walking up the street. Alex waited another ten minutes, and then put on his shoe and tied the laces. At a little past ten o’clock, he strolled past the front door of the building and left the street. He had learned enough for today. Tomorrow morning, at exactly five minutes past ten, he would call the Rothman apartment again.

  It was raining on Tuesday morning, and that annoyed hell out of him because it meant Mrs. Rothman wouldn’t go down for her walk in the park. If she didn’t leave the apartment, he couldn’t call to find out whether it was true that she normally did leave it at ten o’clock each morning—as she was supposed to do on sunny days. He hoped it wouldn’t be raining on Thursday. It would do him no good at all to have the maid out of the apartment if rain stopped the old lady from taking her customary walk. Well, if it rained this Thursday, the job would just have to wait till next Thursday. He was halfway considering a postponement anyway. He still had work to do down there, primarily in the lobby, and he didn’t know if he could get it all done by Thursday. One good thing about the rain today, though, was that the doorman would be busier than ever hailing taxicabs, so Alex figured he’d better get down there right away, before it stopped.

  He had set the alarm for eight o’clock, knowing he didn’t have to get up at the crack of dawn today. He planned to be downtown by ten, shortly after which he’d have called the Rothman apartment and then gone over to check out the mailboxes and the lobby. It wouldn’t do him any good to check the mailboxes today though, not if Mrs. Rothman hadn’t gone for her walk. Damn it, this rain was a pain in the ass. He was counting on the mailbox for additional insurance, and had planned to check it for two days running before the day of the burglary. But tomorrow was Wednesday already, and that gave him only one day to check it.

  As he showered, he considered whether he wanted to go ahead with it this Thursday. Trouble was, he needed the damn money. His last hit had been in March, when Vito had set up a job that netted three thousand bucks. But when Alex had money, he spent it, and he was down to almost zilch now, and he didn’t like borrowing from any of the shylocks because those bastards charged twenty percent interest a week. You borrowed a grand from a shy, the next thing you knew you owed him two grand, and before long you were working for the company store. Miss too many interest payments, and some gorilla knocked on the door and politely inquired whether you would like to have your legs broken tomorrow night at sunset. No way. His end of this would be a sure $9,000, and the sooner he got it the better. He knew Henry by reputation, and he knew the payoff would be immediate, no waiting till he disposed of the diamonds, nothing like that. Damn it, why did it have to be raining today?

  The apartment Alex lived in was on Ninety-eighth and West End, in a building occupied mostly by squares. In fact, he was sometimes tempted to rip off his own apartment building, but he figured that would be playing it too close to home. Anyway, that was crude thinking, he was sorry he’d even thought of it. That was what a junkie would do. A junkie would live on a Hun Twentieth and Fifth, and he’d knock off a building on a Hun Twenty-first and Fifth. Cops come around, say Hello, Pancho, you steal something right next door? Junkie burglar looks at them, says Who me? Oh, no, señor, I am clean as the day is long, and meanwhile he’s got a stolen radio sticking up his asshole. The building Alex lived in was a pretty good one. The rooms were tremendous, in fact, and Alex had five of them in his apartment, which was very nice when he was living with someone, like when Kitty used to be here. You didn’t get in each other’s way when you had such a big place.

  Kitty was a black girl Archie had introduced him to. He had really liked that girl a lot. He knew she was peddl
ing cunt, but that didn’t matter, who the hell cared if some square john was paying for something he was getting free? She had even offered to turn over her earnings, but that would’ve made Alex a pimp, and he had no respect for pimps. What ended it with Kitty was that he found out she was on dope, hell she’d been on dope even when Archie first introduced them. When Alex found out, he’d gone uptown looking for Archie. He’d said to Archie, “Why’d you introduce me to a junkie?” Archie said he hadn’t known about that. Fuck he hadn’t known.

  Anyway, Alex should have known himself. You live with a person, you should realize she’s shooting up—unless you’re some kind of dimwit. She cried when he told her he wanted her to get out. She said she’d kick the monkey, she’d do anything for him, Sure, kick the monkey. He told her Get the hell out right this minute, I don’t want a junkie living here with me, the law comes up here and finds shit stashed around here, I’ll be back inside for something I didn’t even do. She kept crying, and finally he dragged her to the front door and threw her out in the hall. Then he went through her pocket-book and found the key he’d given her, and threw the bag out in the hall, too. She was sitting on the floor with her skirt pulled way up. He said Go on, get out of here. Up the hall, one of the squares opened a door and looked out. She had her hair in curlers, the square. She said Oh excuse me, and closed the door again. That was the last time he’d seen Kitty.