Hard Case Crime: Fifty to One (11 page)

Or when you didn’t.

The toilet was filthy and dim, but not completely dark despite having no bulb overhead, and not completely airless, either. What there was overhead was a piece of frosted glass laced through with chicken wire. This piece of glass was hinged at one side and wedged open about an inch, letting in what little light and ventilation the room got.

I swung the lid of the toilet down, climbed onto the seat and then onto the tank, and pressed both hands—both
gloved
hands, I was taking no chances—against the glass. And shoved.

It took three tries before the hinge creaked open far enough for me to pull myself up through the opening. I used my heel to swing it shut again behind me. The surface of the roof was caked with bird droppings and piled with years of refuse thrown from windows higher up. Behind one such pile I saw a long-tailed rat eying me hungrily, its whiskers twitching. “You’re on your own, friend,” I told it.

I’d been up here once before, when casing the job, and I knew where the rain gutter was. It was a narrow pipe that ran the height of the building and you’d have to have been a Chinese acrobat to climb it if a pipe was all there was. But the pipe was clamped to the stone every three feet with a sturdy metal bracket and those brackets had just about enough room on either side to hold a carefully placed shoe-tip. There was also a bare inch or so of space between the pipe and the wall and I’d worn a girder-man’s safety belt around my waist. I threaded the buckle behind the pipe and clicked its latch shut. I’d have to re-open and close it one-handed every three feet all the way up, but it was worth the extra effort. A fall from ten feet up might only break my leg—from fifty, it’d kill me for sure.

Or else leave me wishing it had, when my long-tailed friend came to feed.

I climbed.

Eleven stories may not seem like much when you’re riding up in an elevator; even climbing stairs, it’s no more than a good work-out. But let me tell you, climbing eleven stories one handhold and toehold at a time is agony. Your fingers seize up. Your calves start to ache. You want to let go, but you can’t, not even for a moment, because what if the belt’s not strong enough to hold you after all?

And four stories up, the windows start. Windows into offices, and unlike nightclubs, offices have people in them at two in the afternoon. You pray they’ll be empty or if, when you glance in, they’re not, you pray the people inside will leave quickly. Or if they don’t, you pray they won’t look your way.

And you keep climbing. Praying and climbing. And your fingers cry out with pain and stiffness, and your back and shoulders, and your ears from the tunneling wind of the airshaft around you, and your head’s about to burst, and your bladder too because you didn’t bother to actually
use
the toilet before climbing on top of it—and then you realize with a start that you’ve made it.

And then the real fun begins.

I reached into my jacket pocket and took out the fist-sized stone I’d picked up on the way downtown. No fancy devices for me. I smashed it into the window, used it to knock out some particularly nasty shards of glass, then dropped it down the airshaft. I had to grope for a second before I found the latch. Raising the window from the position I was in turned out to be harder than I’d expected, but once it was open I had no trouble climbing inside. I took a moment to let my eyes get used to the darkness of the room and my breathing return to normal. I flexed my fingers inside the gloves, tried to work out the kinks.

Then I made my way to the door.

The room I was in was the storage room behind the kitchen. Boxes of canned food and bottled beer were stacked from floor to ceiling, like in a warehouse. I pulled down one of the boxes and started taking bottles out of it, stacking them on the floor.

I carried the empty box with me into the kitchen.

Here, the remnants of the morning’s work were tidied up: rows of metal pots and saucepans, washed and lined up face-down to dry; sacks of kitchen whites that were headed to the laundry because after a night of cooking they weren’t so white anymore; wooden packing boxes like the one I was carrying, some broken down for disposal and others filled with empty bottles or other trash and stacked by the dumbwaiter for pick-up. I set the box down and tugged at the dumbwaiter rope till the little compartment surfaced, then tied the rope off so it couldn’t go down again.

I listened at the swinging doors to the main dining room, heard the labored wheeze of a carpet sweeper being pushed back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. I knew the girl pushing it, a scarred twenty-year-old Belgian by the name of Heaven LaCroix whom all the other girls on the cleaning crew—bohunks and Slavs, every one of them, and none too attractive themselves—made a point of calling ‘Heavy’ to her face. So she was carrying a few pounds—what business was it of theirs? Looked like it was all muscle anyway, the sorts of labor they had her doing.

I glanced at her through the circular window in the kitchen door, then ducked when she turned in my direction. I’d figured she’d be finished with the dining room by now, but it looked like she still had plenty to go. I’d have to take the long way around.

Hefting the box, I picked my way to the far side of the kitchen, past the cold storage room where steaks and butter and ice were kept, past the grills and deep industrial sinks, past the trestle table where the dancers and musicians bolted their suppers between shows, to the door that led backstage. This door was locked overnight but everyone who worked at the Sun knew where the key was kept. I pried up the cover of the light switch with one fingernail, fished out the key, and used it to open the lock. The area beyond ran behind the orchestra platform and the dance floor, past the wings, and to a corridor that, during working hours, always had a man in it, someone to keep any straying patrons—or employees, for that matter—from straying too far. This time of day it was empty. I made my way to the far end.

And here I faced another locked door.

This was the one that counted.

It could all end here. Or it could all begin.

I knelt in front of the keyhole. From the inside pocket of my coat I took a rolled-up square of felt, cinched around the middle with twine. I drew the knot open and unrolled the cloth. It clanked lightly against the floor.

There were three narrow pockets, and from two of them I drew a machinist’s hammer and a broad-edged chisel. The head of the hammer was a barrel-shaped slug of metal and heavy as hell. I wedged the chisel point into the groove where the shaft of the doorknob met the wooden surface of the door, then swung the hammer down, hard.

It took four blows before the knob came off. I paused after each, certain the clang of metal against metal had been heard. But this deep into the floor the place was silent and still. I went back to work like some ghostly blacksmith, hammering and pausing and hammering again in the darkness until the metal shaft bent and then snapped off, its counterpart falling to the floor on the other side of the door.

With the knob off, I had an opening into which I could insert the third of my tools, which I drew from its pocket now, a tapered hacksaw. Only its long, narrow nose could fit into the hole, but that was enough. I began the process of cutting a squared-off horseshoe shape into the wood around the latch.

I had a bad moment when the blade caught and I couldn’t get it free. I was scared to pull too hard and maybe break the blade. For half a minute, while precious seconds ticked away, I knelt staring at it and did nothing. Then I began easing the blade slowly back and forth. After a tense minute I was able to dislodge it. I wiped my forehead on my sleeve. I started sawing again. Coming back at the same point from underneath, I was able to break through.

I was breathing heavily when the door finally swung open. The luminous dial of my wristwatch showed I’d taken almost an hour at my task. It was 3
PM
now and it wasn’t unheard of for some of the staff to show up to work before 4. I had to move more quickly.

Or else—

Or else I’d be making the trip back down the airshaft without benefit of handholds and toeholds.

I picked up the broken halves of the doorknob, wrapped them up along with my tools in the felt square, and deposited the bundle in one corner of the empty box. Once inside the counting room, I closed the door and walked up to the safe.

It was the height of a man—a taller man than me. The dial was almost the size of a captain’s wheel from an old schooner, only made of cast iron rather than wood. There were eight stubby metal arms you could use to turn the thing and numbers painted onto the rim in white, zero through 99. No hacksaw or chisel would get you into this beauty. Nothing short of knowing the combination would.

So it was a good thing that I did.

I turned the dial clockwise to 75.

Sal Nicolazzo—
Zio Nicolazzo
, as he liked to call himself, Uncle Nick—was a sentimental man. A mean bastard, sure, a vicious man, a gambler who’d wager on anything anytime, the bloodier the better—all true. But he fancied himself a good family man who took care of his own. He had family members by birth and marriage on his payroll and even the ones who didn’t work for him he sent money to now and then, a little present when they needed it to keep them in the black.

I spun the dial back the other way to 23.

There was one relative, though, that he couldn’t send presents to, except for flowers once a week, regular as clockwork, to dress her headstone. Her name had been Adelaide Barrone and she’d been his kid sister’s younger daughter. Born in the U.S.A., served in the U.S. Army, died of malaria in North Africa in 1945. She’d been a WAC, and her dogtag number had been A-752344.

I turned the dial to 44.

The door to the safe swung open.

Sentimental bastard. I almost felt sorry for him.

Almost.

The dough was stacked neatly and it took me only ten minutes to transfer it to the box. I stopped when the box was full and the safe was empty, a happy coincidence. I didn’t know how much I’d gotten. There’d be time to count it later.

If there was a later.

A grunt escaped my throat as I lifted the box. I felt a muscle spasm in my back, but didn’t put it down again. No time. I could buy all the heating pads I wanted when I got home.

I retraced my steps as quickly as I could, one lurching step at a time.

Corridor. Backstage. Kitchen.

The dumbwaiter, bless it, was waiting where I’d left it. I slid the box inside, then unwound the rope holding it up and climbed in next to the box. It was a tight fit. Hand over hand, I let the rope play out and the dumbwaiter slowly descended. When we settled at the bottom of the shaft, I peeked through the closed door—lights off, no signs of movement—before raising it. I backed out, pulled the box out after me. Groped through the darkness till I found what I was looking for: one of the deep, fabric-sided carts the maintenance men used for bringing tools and supplies in and garbage and laundry out. The one I found was half full, which was perfect. With a mighty heave I lifted the box over and in, then rearranged the cart’s prior contents to cover it up. I stripped off my coat and hat, balled them up, and shoved them down deep in the cart. Underneath I had on a khaki uniform that marked me as some sort of working stiff—I figured no one would ask precisely what sort. From inside my shirt I pulled a matching khaki cap, unfolded it, and tugged it down over my head, its bill hiding my eyes.

I pushed the cart out of the room, through a long, empty corridor, and up to the gate of the freight elevator. I knocked briskly on the metal gate and a few moments later it slid open, the tired-looking operator inside greeting me with a glazed look. I wheeled the cart inside. He reached for the handle to pull the gate shut again.

Just then, someone called, “Hey, you!”

My heart stopped. Simply stopped.

A man hustled up to the still-open elevator, dragging a lumpy sack behind him.

“You headed back to Jersey?” he said.

“That’s right,” I said.

“Can you take this with you?”

Without waiting for my answer, he swung his sack up and tossed it in my cart.

“Thanks, buddy,” he said, and shuffled off.

“Next time,” the elevator man said, “you guys get everything ready
before
you make me come. Understand?”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You’re sorry, I’m sorry, everybody’s sorry.” He punched the freight car down to the basement. I stayed at the back of the car, where he’d have had to turn his head to look at me. He didn’t bother.

When he opened the gate again, I pushed the cart out of the elevator, onto the rear loading dock and into the parking area behind the building. I half expected one of the security guards to be waiting for me. Or maybe Mr. N himself, disappointment in his eyes and a pistol in his fist.

But I made it to the street without seeing anyone I knew.

Whistling softly to myself, I wheeled the cart home.

“Trixie,” Erin hissed, and then Tricia heard it, too: footsteps, coming toward the locker room. Tricia put the book down and darted over to where Erin was standing beside the door. When it opened, they’d be behind it.

It opened. They were behind it.

Two figures staggered in, one with the other’s arm slung across his shoulders, Stella and her trainer. The trainer kicked the door shut without looking back and led her to the bench in front of the lockers. She sank onto it heavily and he started kneading her shoulders as she went at the laces of her glove with her teeth.

“Hello, Stella,” Erin said.

Stella didn’t move, just stopped biting at her laces. Her trainer turned around. He was a fireplug of a man, low and broad, and looked like he might have been an athlete once himself—not a boxer, maybe, but a wrestler, a weightlifter. “Excuse me,” he said, “who are you?”

“We’re friends of your fighter there.”

“Is that true?” he asked Stella.

Stella slowly turned, brought her legs over to the other side of the bench, looked at them. Her face was bruised and there was a trail of blood under one nostril. And the marks on her cheek—looking at them now, Tricia thought they almost looked like letters, like a monogram in raised red welts.