19 Purchase Street (51 page)

She clicked on her flashlight and went to the closet—a walk-in closet with some wire hangers lonely on the clothes rack, a three-step ladder for reaching the high shelves that were now bare except for a spare blanket that smelled of moth balls.

She shined the light on the ceiling. And there it was, exactly as the architectural plans had promised. A small, not obvious trap door. From the floor to the trap door was eight feet. The stepladder helped with two and a half feet of that. Standing on the top of the ladder Leslie pressed upward on the trap door. She'd expected it would just pop open, but evidently no one had used it in many years and coats of paint held it tight in place. She pushed more and then with all her might and with the top of her head as well. The trap door grudgingly gave way.

Holding the little flashlight between her teeth, she pulled herself up through the opening. Put the trap door back into place, shined her light around.

It wasn't an attic, rather a crawl space between the rooms of the north wing and the roof. Isolated from similar areas elsewhere in the house. There was about a four feet clearance at the highest point, tapering with the slant of the roof to no clearance along the exterior edge. Sturdy two-by-eight joists ran crosswise every two feet. The spaces between the joists were packed with fiberglass insulation. Overhead were the two-by-eight rafters that supported the roof. These also were set two feet apart. Leslie noticed the sharp ends of nails where they'd been hammered through the subroof planks about a half inch. The long-uncirculated air smelled of dust.

In a crouch, Leslie made her way from joist to joist to where she knew she was surely over The Balance Room. She determined an exact spot by measuring from the nearby chimney and from the outside edge of the crawl space. There, she used a well-honed pocketknife to cut away a large section of the fiberglass insulation, threw the yellow puffy mass and its brown paper wrapping aside.

Exposed now down between the joists was the smooth, gray surface of a Sheetrock panel.

Leslie was glad to see that. On the blueprints the architect had specified three coats of plaster over lathing and mesh. Apparently, when The Balance rooms had been renovated to suit their special purpose it had been necessary to tear down the original ceilings, and then it was decided its current-day counterpart would suffice.

That was luck.

Sheetrock was now going to make this part easier.

Leslie went to work at it.

Tested the thickness of the Sheetrock by pressing into it the point of a pin from her kerchief. Found it to be about three-quarters of an inch thick.

She was careful not to go quite that deep with her knife, scoring through the face paper and into the white, powdery core of the Sheetrock, creating a potential hole two feet by four feet. A short way from that she repeated the process for a second hole only an inch and a half in diameter.

That done, she switched off the flashlight and sat waiting. The two inch edge of a joist was hard on her bottom, cut off circulation, made her feet tingle. She refused to think she was waiting unnecessarily, that Gainer, Chapin and Vinny had retreated to the house in Bedford. Gainer wouldn't do that to her.

Ten interminable minutes.

She heard something hard and flat come down on the roof just above her. It scraped a little across the slate shingles. Then, footsteps on the roof that had to be his.

She stood on a joist, her head tilted up, only inches from the subroof, anticipating. Soon shreds of wood were falling on her face, and when there was hardly a large enough hole made she raised up on her toes, offered her mouth up. For the kiss that was taken. A long kiss, all things considered.

It was him all right.

Gainer and Chapin pried the planks away. The hole they made in the roof was above where Leslie had scored the Sheetrock. Above both holes Chapin had clamped together the various lengths of two-by-fours. He had braced them against the chimney in such a way that they formed a sturdy superstructure to which he attached a tackle arrangement of nylon lines and pulleys.

Gainer handed down to Leslie a shoebox containing dry ice. And a bundle of laundry bags, black nylon mesh bags each eighteen inches wide, thirty inches deep, with a nylon cord threaded through four grommets at the neck so it could be drawn closed and tied.

Gainer and Chapin lowered themselves down into the crawl space.

It started to rain. Not much, just a light sprinkle.

Gainer took a moment to check that they had everything they would need. They kneeled on the joists. Leslie brought out the squirmy sack. It was a flannel drawstring sack in Tiffany light blue with the Tiffany name discreetly on it. Originally, six years ago, a pair of engraved sterling shoetrees had come in it, a little nothing-something from Rodger.

Chapin finished cutting the small hole Leslie had started, the one and a half inch hole. He lifted away the little round cutout piece of Sheetrock. It was cut on the inward slant, so it fitted like a plug.

Leslie brought out a plastic baggy, unwound its twist tie and removed two Carr's water biscuit crackers and an inch square piece of aged ten-year-old Vermont cheddar cheese. She crushed one of the crackers into crumbs, broke off a few shreds of the cheese. Dropped some of each down through the ceiling hole.

Then the squirmy sack.

“Want me to do that?” Gainer asked.

Leslie didn't bother to answer, pulled the drawstring sack open, reached in and tenderly enclosed a live thing within her fingers.

A
Mus musculus
.

A house mouse.

It fit easily headfirst into the hole, and when Leslie let its sleek little shape slip from her hand she tried not to think that the creature was plunging an equivalent of fifty stories. It landed awkwardly, but without injury, on the floor of The Balance Room below. Any discomfort it suffered was offset by its immediate discovery of the superb cheese and crackers.

Chapin put the Sheetrock plug back into place.

In twenty seconds the heat sensor alarm unit reacted to the body temperature of the mouse. The alarm gave off an electrical squeal.

At that moment, in his second floor sitting room in the south wing, Darrow was in a Sulka robe and slippers watching the Steelers play the Dolphins in Miami. He had taken the three and a half points, bet the Steelers for a dime, in other words a thousand. Already he was a couple of touchdowns behind and the Dolphins were on the twelve yard line going for more. Darrow felt he'd been sucked in, personally misled by Bradshaw and the whole old bunch from Pittsburgh. He had that enraged, futile, nearly bilious feeling of a bad loser. Andrew, he thought, would have probably told him to bet Miami.

The squeal of the heat sensor alarm jumped Darrow. He hurried into the adjoining room, got a .380 automatic from the top drawer of his nightstand. In the lower drawer was a telephone. He didn't have to lift the receiver, merely work the touch-tone dial. Dab out the tonal code that only he knew, the eight digits that would electronically, automatically release the elaborate bolting device of The Balance Room door at this hour. He rushed out and down the hall, coverged with five security men on the run up the main stairs. They had automatic rifles at the ready. They went ahead of Darrow along the hallway of the north wing to the closed door of the vault. Two security men flattened out against one wall, two against the other. Darrow ducked into one of the regular rooms for cover. The fifth security man warily approached The Balance Room door, shoved it open abruptly and in the same motion stepped aside, out of line of possible fire.

After a long moment, two of the security men charged into The Balance Room. Within seconds the lights were turned on in there and the two men appeared in the doorway with their automatic weapons relaxed, gesturing that all was safe. They shut off the squeal of the alarm and went back to their regular duties.

Hine and Sweet appeared on the scene. They followed Darrow down the hall and into The Balance Room. Darrow now had the superior air of an inspector.

The mouse had scurried beneath a lower shelf when he heard all that rushing about. However, he wasn't about to be denied the first delicacy he'd had in days. He came back out and hoped he'd be overlooked there on his haunches in the middle of The Balance Room floor, nibbling on cheese and crackers as fast as his jaws would allow.

Darrow was actually relieved when he saw the creature, but he didn't let it show, decided it was an opportunity to piss on certain people. He turned on Hine and Sweet.

“I've had it with you,” he told Hine.

“What the hell did I do now?”

“Both of you,” Darrow said, including Sweet with a glance.

“We were down in the library going over next week's carries—”

“I've told you time and time again there was to be no eating up here,” Darrow said, gritting. “Now we've got mice, look at the goddamn mouse!”

The mouse had one eye on them. Only his mouth was moving.

“I can't depend on
anyone
.” Darrow even raised his voice. He brought his right hand from the pocket of his robe, pretended to forget that he had the .380 automatic pistol in it. He gestured wildly, underscoring the words. “I especially can't depend on you, Hine. You're obviously intent on fucking things up. I don't care how many degrees you've got, you're only smart where the skin's off. I swear I'm going to have you replaced,” Darrow said, and then added just ominously enough “… or something.”

Hine and Sweet couldn't help but duck away from Darrow's jerks and waves of the automatic. What made it so bad was if it went off and blew one of them away, Darrow wouldn't even be punished.

“I'm to blame,” Hine said.

“Then catch the fucking mouse,” Darrow told him.

Hine got a carton from the collating area.

The mouse, with a jawful of cheddar, almost evaded the inverted carton that was dropped over him.

Hine slipped a piece of cardboard under the carton and handed the whole thing to Sweet, who promised to do away with the creature.

“I ought to make you eat it,” Darrow said.

Sweet shrugged, as though that might not be worse than a lot of other things.

They left the north wing. Darrow returned to his bedroom, put the .380 automatic back into the drawer and performed the tonal sequence code that rebolted The Balance Room door. Went into his sitting room, heard the lopsided score in favor of Miami. Thought he might go pay a bedroom visit to Mrs. Pickering. The young Andrew came to mind. A comparison by Mrs. Pickering would be unavoidable. Darrow decided he wasn't up to it tonight. He clicked on the Betamax to watch a Vittorio Gassman film. He'd seen it several times. He had about every film that Italian actor ever appeared in. Someone had once told Darrow he resembled Gassman.

In the crawl space, Gainer, Leslie and Chapin had overheard every move and word that they and the mouse had caused. As soon as Darrow closed the door to The Balance Room a faint whirring sound began. It was the air cooling system down there. Gainer had timed it, until it shut off, found that it took two minutes and forty-eight seconds for it to lower the temperature of the air in the rooms to sixty-eight degrees—the point at which the heat sensor alarms automatically reset.

Chapin removed the Sheetrock plug.

Leslie dropped more cheese and cracker crumbs down through it.

And three more mice.

Again, after mere seconds, the alarm began its squeal.

Again, the five security men came on the run with their automatic rifles. Darrow, only momentarily startled by the sound, didn't bother with his automatic pistol this time, merely touched off the tonal combination to release the locking mechanism of The Balance Rooms and went down the hall in a quick but unhurried pace.

By the time he arrived on the scene the security men were already inside The Balance Rooms. Their report to Darrow was more mice.

Darrow was no longer in the mood for histrionics. He merely let Hine know with his clipped, harsh tone that this compounded his feelings. He instructed Hine to arrange for an exterminator in the morning and meanwhile to somehow get rid of those three mice that were sitting there on the floor enjoying a late snack. Notify him when they had, so he could lock up the damned place.

Darrow returned to his rooms and the Gassman film.

The mice, with no holes to retreat into, just scurried about and hid behind the legs of things. It took Hine and Sweet ten minutes on their hands and knees to capture them. They left The Balance Rooms, closed the door behind them.

The air cooler went on again.

At once Chapin and Gainer began cutting all the way through the Sheetrock where Leslie had scored the two-foot-by-four-foot hole. It went fast, easy, they simply broke most of it away with their hands.

They had a length of half-inch rope attached to one of the roof rafters. Dropped that ten feet down into the room.

Gainer slipped down the rope.

Then Chapin.

Leslie tossed down the shoebox of dry ice.

The half-inch-by-five-inch squares of dry ice were individually contained in heavy clear plastic bags.

The heat sensor alarm units were where Sweet had said they'd be, two pair of them on the ceiling and the wall above the door in each area—storage and collating. The units were disc-shaped, four inches in diameter, raised in concentric layers around a half-inch opening in the center.

Hurry.

Racing against the cooling system.

The air in the rooms was already chilling down.

Gainer kicked away some money and stepped up onto a shelf to reach the heat sensors in the money room. Chapin climbed up on the counter in the collating area to get at the units there. The dry ice within the heavy plastic bags was difficult to handle, so cold it stuck to their fingers, burned. They used staple guns from their carryalls to attach the bags to the ceiling and walls around each of the heat sensor units, shot in staple after staple until the units were entirely covered by several layers of the dry ice. Just did get done when the air cooler went off and the alarm reset.