Cops and Robbers Read online

  Tom, really interested, said, “Is that right?”

  The guard nodded, for emphasis, and said, “That’s right. It was in the World Series. Remember the year the Mets won the pennant?”

  Joe laughed and said, “Who’ll ever forget?”

  “That’s right,” the guard said. “It was in the last game, the ninth inning, everybody in New York City was at their radio. Somebody walked into a vault at one of the firms on the Street, and walked out with thirteen million dollars in bearer bonds.”

  They looked at one another. Joe turned back to the guard and said, “They ever get him?”

  “Nope,” said the guard.

  At that point, Eastpoole came in from the door on the right. He was being brisk, impatient, slightly hostile. He probably didn’t like his employees gawking out of windows instead of getting their work done, and he surely didn’t like a couple of cops coming around and telling him there’s something wrong going on in his shop. He strode over, efficient, in a hurry to give them the brush-off, and said, “Yes, officer?”

  Joe had a natural talent for people like this. He just slowed himself down and became very official and very dense; it drove the hurry-up types right up the wall. Joe gave this one a suspicious look and said, “You Eastpoole?”

  Eastpoole made an impatient little hand gesture, brushing a minor annoyance away. “Yes,” he said, “I’m Raymond Eastpoole. What can I do for you?”

  “We got a complaint,” Joe said, taking his time about it. “Items ejected from the windows.”

  Eastpoole didn’t believe it, and made no attempt to hide the fact. Frowning, he said, “From these offices?”

  Joe nodded. “That’s the report we got,” he said. He was showing that nothing would either ruffle him or hurry him up. He said, “We want to check out the northeast corner of the building, all the windows over on that side.”

  Eastpoole would rather have had nothing to do with them or their complaint or anything else concerned with today. He glanced over at the guard behind the counter, but there was obviously no help there, so finally he gave an angry shrug and said, “Very well. I’ll accompany you myself. Come along.”

  Joe nodded, still taking his time. “Thank you,” he said, but not as though anybody had done anybody any favors. His style was that they were all equals in this room. It was a style guaranteed to rub somebody like Raymond Eastpoole the wrong way.

  Which it did. Eastpoole turned away, to lead them on their tour of the northeast corner of the building, and then turned back to frown at the guard again and say, “Where’s your partner?”

  The guard hesitated, showing his embarrassment. And when he lied, he did a lousy job of it, saying, “Uh, he’s, uh, he’s to the men’s room.”

  Eastpoole couldn’t show his anger in the cops’ direction, but he could aim it at the guard. His voice taut with fury, he said, “You mean he’s leaning out a window somewhere, watching the parade.”

  The guard was blinking, scared of this bastard. “He’ll be right back, Mr. Eastpoole,” he said.

  Eastpoole thumped a fist onto the counter. “We pay,” he said, “for two men at this counter, twenty-four hours a day.”

  “He just went off a minute ago,” the guard said. He was really sweating.

  Partly to get the guard off the hook, and partly because they had their own schedule to think about, Joe broke in at that point, saying, “We’d like to check things out, Mr. Eastpoole, before anything else gets dropped.”

  Eastpoole would clearly have preferred to keep nagging at the guard. He glowered at Joe, glowered at the guard, and then mulishly gave in, turned on his heel and led the way from the room. They followed him, Joe going first and then Tom coming along behind. Passing through the doorway, Tom glanced back and saw the guard hurriedly reaching for the phone; to call his partner to haul ass away from the window, no doubt.

  They walked down a fairly long corridor, and then through several large offices, each of them full of desks and filing cabinets, and all of them lined with windows along one wall. The desks were all unoccupied, and people were standing looking out of all the windows.

  They hadn’t heard the drums or the music from the time they’d gotten into the elevator to come up here, but now the sound was with them again, and they walked automatically to the rhythm of the drums. Tension seemed to shimmer upward from the street outside those windows like heat waves off asphalt paving in the summertime. Both of them were tense again, walking along in Eastpoole’s wake, the drums echoing in their bloodstreams.

  And yet, they still hadn’t reached the point of no return. They could still even at this late date change their minds and not go through with it. They could do an inspection tour of the windows with Eastpoole, find nothing, give him a lecture, and walk out. Return the squad car, drive home, forget the whole thing; it was still possible. But any second now, it would stop being possible for good and all.

  Twice, as they walked along, they saw TV cameras mounted high on the wall in the corner of a room. The camera would turn slowly back and forth, like a fan, angled shallowly downward so as to get a good view of the entire room. These two were among the six that showed up on the screens out by the reception area. And on other sets of screens on this floor, as well. One of the big advantages of this brokerage for Tom and Joe was that their check into the security systems showed there wasn’t any closed-circuit TV communication to any other floor; it was all confined to this one level.

  From the office with the second camera in it, they passed on to a short empty corridor. They entered it, and Joe made the decision that moved them finally over the line, making them criminals in fact as well as in theory. And he did it with two words: “Hold it,” he said, and reached out to take Eastpoole by the elbow and stop him from walking on.

  Eastpoole stopped, and you could see he was offended at being touched. When he turned around to find out what the problem was, he jerked his elbow free again. “What is it?” he said. He sounded very petulant for a grown man.

  Joe looked around the corridor and said, “Is there a camera in here? Can that guard check this area?”

  “No,” Eastpoole said. “There’s no need for it. And there are no windows here, if you’ll notice.” He half-turned away again, gesturing at the far end of the corridor. “What you want is—”

  Joe put an edge in his voice, saying, “We know what we want. Let’s go to your office.”

  “My office?” Eastpoole didn’t have the first idea what was going on. Staring at them both, he said, “What for?”

  Tom said, “We don’t have to show you guns, do we?” He spoke calmly, not wanting Eastpoole to be so upset he’d lose control.

  Eastpoole kept staring. He said, “What is this?”

  “It’s a robbery,” Tom said. “What do you think it is?”

  “But—” Eastpoole gestured at them, at their uniforms. “You two—”

  “You can’t tell a book by its cover,” Tom said.

  Joe poked Eastpoole’s arm, prodding him a little. “Come on,” he said, “let’s move. To your office.”

  Eastpoole, starting to get over his shock, said, “You can’t believe you can get away with—”

  Joe gave him a shove that pushed him into the corridor wall. “Stop wasting our time,” he said.“I’m feeling very tense right now, and when I’m tense sometimes I hit people.”

  Eastpoole’s skin was turning pale under the eyes and around the mouth. He almost looked as though he might faint, and yet there was still arrogance in him, he might still be stupid enough to talk back. Tom, moving forward between Joe and Eastpoole, being the calm and reasonable one, said, “Come on, Mr. Eastpoole, take it easy. You’re insured, and it isn’t your job to deal with people like us. Be sensible. Do what we want, and let it go.”

  Eastpoole was nodding before Tom had finished talking. “That’s just what I’ll do,” he said. “And later, I’ll see to it you get the maximum penalty of the law.”

  “You do that,” Joe said.
r />   Tom, turning to Joe, said, “It’s all right, now. Mr. Eastpoole’s going to be sensible.” He looked back. “Aren’t you, Mr. Eastpoole?”

  Eastpoole was looking sullen, but subdued. Half-gritting his teeth, he looked at Tom and said, “What do you want?”

  “To go to your office. You lead the way.”

  Joe said, “And don’t be cute.”

  “He won’t be cute,” Tom said. “Go ahead, Mr. Eastpoole.”

  Eastpoole turned and started walking again, and they both followed him. It’s such an old tried-and-true technique, one partner hard and one partner soft, that it’s become a cliché in the television police shows. But the fact is, it works. You give a guy one person to be friends with and one person to be scared of, and between the two you’ll most of the time get whatever you want.

  This time, what they wanted was Eastpoole’s office, and that’s what they got. They walked there, and the outer office was empty, and they went directly on through. Eastpoole’s secretary, who should have been at the desk in the outer office, was in here, looking out a window at the parade. Her own room didn’t have any windows in it.

  Eastpoole’s office looked like half of a living room and half of a rich man’s den. It was a corner office, with windows in two walls, and near the juncture of those two walls was the desk, a big free-form mahogany thing with an onyx desk set and two telephones—one white, one red—and only a few neatly stacked pieces of paper. A couple of chairs with upholstered seats and backs in a blue-and-white vertical-stripe cloth were near the desk, and a large antique refectory table was over against the inner wall.

  Down at the end of the room opposite the desk there was a white latticework divider that separated off about a third of the floor space. Behind it was a glass and chrome diningroom table, several chrome chairs with white vinyl seats, and a bar with fluorescent lights on each shelf. Some kind of real ivy growing out of pots on the floor had been trained to grow up the latticework, giving the glass-and-chrome section behind it the look of a special private nook, the kind of secret place that shows up in children’s stories.

  In front of the latticework on this side was a long blue sofa, with an octagonal wooden coffee table in front of it, and a pair of armchairs nearby. There were lamps and end tables and heavy ashtrays. Spotted on the walls around the room were half a dozen paintings, probably original, probably valuable. And amid them, positioned for easy viewing from the desk, was the double rank of six television screens. Tom and Joe looked at those screens the instant they walked into the room, and there was no unusual activity showing on any of them. So far, so good.

  They both noticed that there were now two guards showing on the screen for the reception area.

  Eastpoole’s secretary belonged in this setting. She was a tall, cool, beautiful girl in a beige knit dress. She turned away from the window now and came walking over, saying to her boss, “Mr. Eas—”

  Eastpoole, angry, not wanting to hear whatever normal business the secretary had been about to discuss with him, interrupted her, gesturing over his shoulder at the two cops and saying, “These people are—”

  Not that way. Tom overrode him, pushing forward and saying, “It’s okay, Miss. Nothing to worry about.”

  The secretary, looking from face to face, was beginning to get alarmed, but not yet really frightened. Addressing the question to all of them equally, she said, “What’s the matter?”

  Bitterly, Eastpoole said, “They aren’t really police.”

  Tom made a kind of joke of it, to keep the girl from going into panic. “We’re desperate criminals, mam,” he said. “We’re engaged in a major robbery.”

  Whenever Joe was confronted by a woman he wanted to get into bed with and knew it wasn’t possible to he got hostile, and showed it in a kind of angry smiling manner. As he did now, coming forward and saying, “They’ll ask you questions on TV, just like a stewardess.”

  With an unconscious automatic gesture, she reached up and patted her hair. At the same time, her eyes were getting more frightened, and there was a tremor in her voice when she said, “Mr. Eastpoole, is this really—”

  “Yes, it’s really,” Tom said. “But you yourself are in absolutely no danger. Mr. Eastpoole, you sit down at your desk.”

  The secretary stared at everybody. “But—” she said, and then ran down, unable to formulate the question. She moved her hands vaguely, and stared, and looked frightened.

  Eastpoole did what he was told. Sitting down behind the desk, he said, “There’s no way you can get away with this, you know. You’re just endangering people’s lives.”

  “Oh, my God,” the secretary said. Her right hand fluttered upward to her throat.

  Joe pointed at the guards on the TV screens, and said to Eastpoole, “Any of them gets excited while we’re here, you’re all through.”

  Eastpoole tried to give him a scornful stare, but he was blinking too much. “You don’t have to threaten me,” he said. “I’ll let the authorities pick you up later.”

  Nodding, Tom said, “That’s the way to think, all right.”

  Joe pulled one of the blue-and-white striped chairs around behind Eastpoole’s desk, so he could sit beside him. But he didn’t sit yet; instead, he stood next to the chair and said to Eastpoole, “You and me are going to wait here. My partner and your lady friend are going to the vault.”

  The secretary’s head jerked back and forth. “I—I can’t,” she said, in a thin voice. “I’ll faint.”

  Reassuring her, Tom said gently, “No, you won’t. You’ll do just fine, don’t worry about a thing.”

  Joe told her, “You just do what your boss tells you to do.” Then he gave Eastpoole a hard meaningful look.

  Eastpoole’s response was surly, but defeated. Gazing down at his neat desktop, he said, “We’ll do what they want, Miss Emerson. Let the police handle it later.”

  “Right,” Joe said.

  Tom, looking at the secretary, gestured toward the door.

  “Let’s go, Miss,” he said.

  She gave one last appealing look in Eastpoole’s direction, but Eastpoole was still brooding at his desktop. Her hands fluttered again, as though in accompaniment to the statement she hadn’t quite found the words for; but then she turned and walked obediently to the door, and she and Tom went out together.

  Tom

  Until the second Joe reached out and grabbed Eastpoole’s elbow and said, “Hold it,” I still hadn’t been one hundred per cent sure we were actually going to go through with this. Maybe it had been necessary that I keep some doubt in my mind, maybe that was what had made it possible for me to go on moving along through all the preparations and then get out of bed today and come to New York and in real life start step by step to do the things we’d decided on. That small uncertainty had been a kind of escape hatch for me, I suppose, to keep me from getting too nervous and frightened of what we had in mind.

  Well, now the escape hatch was gone. We were in it now, we’d started. If there was anything we hadn’t thought of, it was too late to think of it. If there was any fact that we should know that we hadn’t picked up in our studies, it was too late to find it out. If there was any flaw in our plan, anything at all, it was too late now to fix it. It would fix us instead.

  The first part, escorting Eastpoole to his office and keeping him calm and tractable, hadn’t been too bad. It wasn’t that different, really, from dealing with a suspect about whose guilt you weren’t really sure, but who could possibly make things very tough if he weren’t handled just right. It was like a variation on a part of my job I already knew about, so I could almost let automatic responses do it for me.

  Besides, Joe and I had been working together at that point. I don’t know if my presence made things easier for him, but his presence definitely made things easier for me. Seeing him in the same position I was in, knowing we were locked into this together, had made it easier to keep moving.

  But now I was on my own. Eastpoole’s secretary, that he’d
called Miss Emerson, was walking with me through offices filled with people. What if she suddenly panicked, started to scream? What if her fright was only an act, and she was just waiting her chance to pull a fast one? What if a thousand different things happened that weren’t supposed to happen? I hadn’t the first idea how I’d handle it if she didn’t obey orders, and I wasn’t sure anymore what was the best way to treat her to make sure she would obey. Her physical being, walking beside me, terrified me, and all I knew for sure was that I couldn’t let her know how nervous I was. It would either throw her into a complete panic or make her start thinking she could outsmart me, and I didn’t want either of those things to happen.

  There was a sexual element, too, which surprised me; I hadn’t expected anything like that. I don’t mean my sexual instincts are dead, or that my awareness is limited to Mary. I covet other women as much as any man, and in fact several years ago I had an affair with a woman in the neighborhood. She lived down the block from us, her husband worked for Grumman Aircraft. They’re gone now, they left a few years ago and moved out to California. It happened in the fall, early in October, and it was possible because of the funny shifts I work that have me around the house a lot in the daytime. This woman—Nancy, her name was—came around one day setting up a car pool for something with the kids. Mary wasn’t home but I was, and Nancy had just the night before had a big fíght with her husband, and all of a sudden there we were screwing on the living-room floor. It was amazing.

  It was also the only time we made it in my house. From then on, if I was home in the daytime and felt like it, I’d drift on down to her place and we’d have sex in her bedroom, on the bed. She had slightly different preferences and manners from Mary, and newness makes things exciting, and for a while I was really pleased with myself, having two women on the same block. Then the holidays came along, and there was a whole different mental attitude developed in both our minds, where we both grew much more interested in our own families again, and it all sort of faded away. We never had a fight or anything, we never officially broke it off, but by the middle of December I wasn’t making any more visits and she wasn’t calling up—as she’d done a couple times in October and November—to suggest it was a nice day for a bounce on the bed.