The next evening I went down to the Ashley Arms. I was wearing the Lawrence Safes Corporation uniform: a buff blouse, bottle green slacks and a
peak cap with a badge.
Roy had said he would meet me with the truck as soon as he was off duty. I
get to the Ashley Arms a little after ten-thirty.
The doorman was in his office, thumbing through a paperback, a bored
expression on his face.
He recognised me as I came into the lobby and nodded to me.
“You again? If you’re looking for Mr. Cooper you’re unlucky. He’s out.”
“When will he be back?” I asked, leaning up against the counter and taking
out a pack of cigarettes.
The doorman glanced up at the wall clock.
“In half an hour.”
“I’ll wait. I have a special delivery for him.”
“Leave it with me. I’ll give it to him.”
I shook my head.
“I can’t do that. It’s the key of his safe. I have to hand it to him personally
and get a receipt.”
He shrugged his shoulders, taking the cigarette I offered him,
“Please yourself.”
“Are you sure he’ll be back in half an hour?”
“Yeah. He never misses. He leaves here at eight and gets back at eleven.”
“Some guys are like that,” I said. “You can set a clock by them.”
“He’s one of them. He owns three nightclubs. He checks them every night.
Sundays included. He comes back here for dinner at eleven, then he goes out
again around one o’clock to see the clubs shut down and count the loot. He never misses.”
“Are you on duty all night?” I asked casually.
“I go off at one. After one, we lock up here. Everyone living here has a key.”
The doorman scowled. “You’d be surprised the number of times I get dragged out of bed because some dope has forgotten his key.”
This was falling right into my lap.
“Cooper lost the key to his safe the other night,” I said. “He loused up my
evening.”
“A great guy for losing keys,” the doorman said bitterly. “Only last week he
lost his door key. He had me out of my bed at five o’clock in the morning for
Pete’s sweet sake!”
“Is that the time he gets back?”
“Yeah, then sleeps all day … the way some guys live!”
I now had the information I wanted. I casually changed the subject. We
chewed the fat about this and that until Cooper came in.
He came in a minute to eleven o’clock.
I crossed the hall and met him half way.
“I have the key to your safe, sir,” I said.
It took him a moment or so to recognise me.
“Oh, you.” He scowled at me. “Let’s have it then.”
“I’d better see if it’s okay, sir. If I could come up …”
“Oh, sure.”
He led the way to the elevator.
Reaching the third floor, he unlocked his front door and I followed him into
the lounge.
I tried the key in the safe door while he stood over me. A wild idea flashed
into my mind that when I opened the safe door I’d turn on him, knock him
out and help myself to his money, but I didn’t do h. Instead, I relocked the
safe and handed him the key.
“It’s okay, sir.”
“Right.” He put the key in his pocket. “Thanks.” He said it grudgingly and
his hand went to his pocket, but that was as far as it went. I could read his
mind. He had already given me two bucks. He was telling himself that was
plenty.
That little act of meanness decided me. For the past twenty-four hours I had
been in two minds about taking his money, but I had only wanted an excuse
to push me over the line. He had given it to me.
I left him, took the elevator to the ground floor, waved to the doorman and
went out into the rain.
Roy was sitting in the truck, waiting for me.
“Was that Cooper? The fat punk with the red face?”
“That’s him.” I got into the truck beside Roy. “There’s nothing to it,” I went
on as he drove the truck into the street “We can skin him on Sunday.”
We decided to do the job on Sunday because both of us were off duty then.
Roy hired a car and we were set to go.
It was a drowning wet night which was a good thing for us. The rain kept
people off the streets, not that there were ever many people wandering around
at one o’clock in the morning in this one horse town.
Roy picked me up at my place and we drove to the Ashley Arms, arriving
there, as planned, at five minutes to one a.m.
Roy slid the car between a Cadillac and a Packard in the private parking lot
with about forty other cars left out in the rain.
We sat side by side, watching the front entrance of the building. We were
both pretty worked up. “I could hear Roy’s breathing coming fast through his
short, thick nose, and I wondered if he could hear my heart pounding.
As the hands of the dashboard clock moved to the hour, we saw Cooper come
out and cross over to a white Jaguar, parked ten yards from where we waited.
He came out, running, his head bent against the rain, and he didn’t look our
way. We watched him slide his bulk into the car and then drive off into the
darkness.
“That’s one of them out of the way,” Roy said. His voice sounded husky and
unsteady.
A few minutes later we saw the doorman close the glass doors of the main
entrance and turn the key. We watched him through the glass doors walk
across the lobby and disappear down the stairs to the basement.
“Let’s go,” Roy said and opened the car door.
My heart was pounding so hard I was short of breath. I grabbed up my tool
kit and slid out of the car. The rain felt cold against my face as I ran to the
glass doors.
We knew exactly what we had to do. I was to open the doors while Roy kept
watch.
There was a long drive-in to the block and the entrance couldn’t be seen from the street. Unless someone living in the apartment block unexpectedly
showed up, we were reasonably safe.
I had trouble with the lock of the glass doors. In an ordinary way, I would
have fixed it in three or four seconds, but my hands were shaking. I finally
got the doors open as Roy began to curse me.
He joined me as I pushed open the doors and we walked silently and quickly
to the stairs. We had decided not to use the elevator in case the doorman
hadn’t gone to bed and wondered who was around.
We walked up the stairs. We didn’t meet anyone. Both of us were panting
when we reached Cooper’s front door.
This time I had no trouble with the lock. The first key I tried unlocked it.
I pushed open the door and stepped into the dark hall. Roy crowded in after
me. For some moments we stood motionless, listening. We heard only a
clock ticking somewhere and the occasional rumble of the refrigerator in the
kitchen.
“Come on! come on!” Roy said. “What are we waiting for?”
I moved into the lounge and turned on the light
Roy followed me and shut the door.
“He certainly knows how to live, doesn’t he?” he said as he looked around.
“Where’s the safe?”
I went over to the fat nude and swung aside the frame. I spun the dial, setting
the combination. Then using the key I had cut when I had cut Cooper’s
duplicate key, I unlocked the safe and pulled open the door.
“Take a look!”
Side by side, we stood staring at the neatly stacked piles of hundred dollar bills.
“Gee!” Roy’s fingers gripped my arm. “This’ll put us on easy street for the
rest of our lives!”
Then we both heard a sound that froze us: the unmistakable sound of a key
being pushed into a lock and the lock snapping.
I was so scared I couldn’t move. I just managed to turn my head to stare at
the closed door, but the rest of me was paralysed.
But not Roy.
For a split second, he remained frozen, then he became alive. He slid away from me with the quickness of a lizard. He snapped off the light as the door
pushed open.
The light from the hall fell into the darkened room, making a rectangle of
hard white light in which I stood.
Standing in the doorway was the long legged blonde. For maybe a second we stared at each other.
Then she started back and let out a scream that went through my head like a
red-hot wire.
“There’s someone in here!” she yelled. “It’s a burglar!”
Cooper’s bulky frame loomed up behind her. He pushed her aside and came storming into the darkened room.
All this happened so fast I was still standing in front of the open safe, scared
silly and unable to move.
The girl bolted out of the apartment and started down the stairs, screaming
like a train whistle.
I could see Roy’s dim outline as he pressed himself against the wall by the
door. As Cooper came into the room, he didn’t see Roy. He was glaring at me and his hands were extended as if he were going to grab me by the throat Roy moved silently. I saw him swing the heavy crowbar we had brought with us
in case we had trouble with the locks. He slammed it down on Cooper’s head
as Cooper made a grab at me.
Cooper went down like a felled ox. His clawed fingers scraped down the
front of my coat as he fell.
“Quick!” Roy gasped. “Out!”
We could hear the girl screaming as she bolted down the stairs.
I rushed to the door.
“Chet!” Roy’s voice came behind me in a hiss of fear. “Not down! Up!”
But I was already on the stairs, going down. My mind was frozen with panic.
I had only one thought—to get out into the open and to get away.
“Chet!”
I heard him, but I kept on. I reached the second floor and started a blind rush
to the head of the stairs. An apartment door facing me opened, and a thin,
white haired scared looking man peered out. We glared at each other, then he
hurriedly slammed the door shut I took the next flight of stairs in three
thudding jumps, lost my balance and sprawled on the landing. I struggled to
my feet and dived frantically down the last flight of stairs into the lobby.
The long legged blonde was crouching by the doorman’s office door. She
stared in horror at me, her red lips parted and this nerve jarring scream
coming out of her.
The doorman, in shirt and trousers, his hair standing on end, came charging
up from the basement and flung himself at me. We went down together in a
heaving, thrashing assortment of arms and legs.
I hit him about the head and body and I took a couple of stiff pokes in the face before I threw him off. I staggered up and made a dive for the door.
As I got it open, the doorman began blowing a police whistle. This whistle
and the girl’s screams made an inferno of sound that galvanised me into the
rain.
I ran down the drive into the street. I could still hear the girl’s screams, but
the piercing blast of the police whistle rose above any noise she could make.
With my heart pounding and sweat running down my face, I bolted down the
street. I heard a man’s voice yell after me. I looked back to see a shadowy
outline of a man in a peak cap, pounding down the street after me.
I kept on running, then I heard the bang of a gun. Something that sounded
like a hornet zipped past my face.
I dodged frantically and darted across the street to where it was darker.
The gun banged again. I felt a giant’s hand thump on my back and I sprawled
face down in the road. White hot pain bit into me. I tried to roll over, but the
pain paralysed me. The last thing I remembered before I blacked out was the
sound of pounding feet coming towards me.
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