3 - 4 - 7 - 8 . No.
3 - 7 - 4 - 8 . No.
3 - 7 - 8 - 4 . No.
3 - 4 - 8 - 7 . No.
3 - 8 - 4 - 7 . No.
3 - 8 - 7 - 4 . No.
4 - 3 - 7 - 8 . No.
4 - 7 - 3 - 8 . No.
4 - 7 - 8 - 3 . No.
4 - 3 - 8 - 7 . No.
4 - 8 - 3 - 7 . Yes!
The door opened. Propping it slightly ajar with a wad of balled-up Kleenex, just in case it became necessary to get back and the keypad on the other side of the door had a different combination, Sister Mary Grace tiptoed down the broad gray-painted metal stairs to the next floor, and there was the gray metal door to Hendrickson’s apartment, with a keypad beside it. She tried 4 - 8 - 3 - 7, but it didn’t work, so she went on down the stairs one more flight to the same closed and locked mesh screen gate that Dortmunder and Kelp would be studying two months later. This gate defeated her. She could see the hall door down on the landing, but if she were to shout, and if someone passing by were to hear her out there in the public hall, what were the chances of that someone being connected to the Margrave Corporation?
Excellent.
So she retreated from the mesh gate, as Dortmunder and Kelp would do later, and went back up to her apartment/prison on seventy-six, where she picked up the Pam again. Back down to seventy-five she went, and sprayed the keypad for Hendrickson’s apartment door, and just to be a completist she sprayed the keypad on the outside of her own apartment/prison door as well.
By the next evening, she knew her own door was 4 - 8 - 3 - 7 on both sides, and Hendrickson’s door used the numbers 2 - 5 - 8 - 9. After long trial, the right combination turned out to be 9 - 5 - 8 - 2, but then Hendrickson’s door was bolted, from the inside! The only time it wouldn’t be bolted was when Hendrickson was upstairs pestering her, when she’d be unable to get away and come down here. If he were in his own apartment, or anywhere out in the world (using the apartment’s front door), this door would be bolted, from the inside, and impassable.
The guards’ door was in much more frequent use, which made things trickier, but that was the only other alternative. The Pam trick got her through it, and down the narrow carpeted stairs with the wood-paneled walls, down two flights—there were only bare walls at the landing on seventy-five—to the back entrance to the Margrave Corporation. Pam again, and into Margrave.
Which was never empty. Never. Sister Mary Grace sneaked down there over and over, day and night, risking exposure a dozen times, and it was permanently just no good. There were several offices she could prowl through more or less safely at night, but toward the front of the area there were always people on duty. Men sat at consoles and studied closed-circuit television screens. Men talked on phones. Men unlocked gun cabinets and took out guns or put guns away. Beyond all these men, just glimpsed, women staffed a reception area, day and night, facing the only exit to the public hall. It was impossible to get through.
One of the many reasons Sister Mary Grace needed to escape from this tower was that it was so filled with the occasions of sin. During her two verbal hours every Thursday afternoon, she constantly overstepped herself, committing sins of anger and disrespect, and in her head for the rest of the week she was frequently uncharitable, unforgiving and proud. But the worst was when she had finally accepted the fact that all her cleverness with the keypads had come to naught, that she had merely expanded her prison without escaping from it, and that the farther barriers were absolutely impassable; at that point, and for some time after, she was guilty of the deadly sin of despair.
It wasn’t that she exactly contemplated suicide, although she did find herself asking God in her prayers why He didn’t simplify matters by drawing her now to His Bosom. And she was, without noticing it, eating less and less, until poor Enriqueta Tomayo finally made such a fuss one day, carrying on and crying in two and a half languages (some Indian dialect got in there), that Sister Mary Grace gave up anorexia at once.
Giving up despair, however, took a little longer. She was trapped, probably forever, in a high tower, surrounded by people who did not and would not understand her and who were determined to turn her into something she could never be. She was the butterfly, and this was the rack, and they would eventually break her, but to no one’s satisfaction.
She had always felt herself to be different, both from her siblings and from the rest of the world she knew. She didn’t care about what the others cared about. She didn’t want things. She didn’t know what she did want until, when she was sixteen, she visited a sanatorium operated by nuns where her mother was “resting.” Asking about a separate building she’d noticed on the property, she was told that was where the cloistered members of the order lived, those who had renounced the world entirely and devoted themselves exclusively to contemplation of the All-Powerful.
Around Elaine’s house, until then, the concept of all-powerful had meant only the Ritter family, personified by Frank Ritter himself. Her older brothers and sisters, great galumphing things, bowled one another over for the privilege of serving this ideal. But was there a better ideal? Was there a better way to spend one’s only transit here on Earth?
She sought counsel and instruction, and bided her time. Six years it had taken to be sure of her vocation, to be sure she believed in God and loved God and wanted to serve Him contemplatively the rest of her life. Six years, in short, to be absolutely sure she wasn’t merely running away from her father.
She was twenty-two, legally and allegedly an adult and capable of making her own decisions, when she went back to that sanatorium and applied to enter the cloister. But the order’s rules were that service in the community came first; only after so many years would the cloister be open to her. Frank Ritter’s daughter was a semi-public figure; if she were to break from the world it would have to be completely and all at once. And that led her to the Little Sisterhood of St. Filumena and the convent on Vestry Street from which, three months ago, on her biweekly turn to go to the neighborhood grocery store, she was kidnapped by her father’s goons and locked away in this tower.
Why shouldn’t she despair? But she fought against it, as she fought against Hendrickson and her father and every other target she could find, and at last the news had come from Mother Mary Forcible: a man named John would rescue her. Blessed John! Was there anything she could do to help?
Down in the Margrave Corporation, in one of the offices she could prowl at night, were the thick looseleaf books showing the tower’s security systems. Would those help? Similar books, though empty, were in a supplies closet. She took the records, left the blank books in their place, and Enriqueta smuggled them out beneath her voluminous skirts. And now Sister Mary Grace waited, despair all gone, for Blessed John to appear.
On the surface, she was silent. But inside, she sang.
16
Dortmunder and Tiny Bulcher walked up Fifth Avenue together, the Avalon State Bank Tower rising up ahead of them, bleak and gray and stern. When they reached the tower, a green-uniformed man was washing the glass entry doors to the lobby. “That means rain,” Tiny said. “Never fails.”
They went on inside, and over to enter one of the 5–21 elevators, joining two Orientals in expensive black topcoats, holding attaché cases and talking together very earnestly in Japanese. They paused briefly to look at Tiny, and one of them muttered something that sounded like “Godzilla.” Then they went back to their conversation.
Tiny pushed the button for the seventh floor and said, “Now, remember. I don’t know this bozo myself. Maybe it’s no good.”
“So what did your friend say?”
“Nothing. Just told me to come see J.C. Taylor and said he’d phone ahead to set me up. But he acted a little funny.”
The elevator door closed. The two Japanese kept talking together, secure in their native tongue. Dortmunder said, “What kind of funny?”
Shrugging, Tiny said, “I don’t know for sure. Just a feeling I had.”
“I don�
�t want to walk into anything stupid.”
“No, no,” Tiny said. “This guy wouldn’t do anything like that. People don’t do humorous things to me, they know I don’t appreciate it. I just had a little funny feeling, that’s all, the way he talked.”
The elevator stopped at seven, and they stepped out to the hall. Behind them, the door slid closed and the Japanese gentlemen rode on up.
The office directory facing the elevators listed far more firms than were on the floors higher up. A ramshackle conglomeration of small companies had rented space on this non-prestige lower floor, leaving richer businesses to pay the higher rents that went with a higher address.
“Seven-twelve we want,” Tiny said. “Down this way.”
The corridor walls were dotted with doors showing obscure names on their doors. The door of room 712 listed three:
Super Star Music Co.
Allied Commissioners’ Courses Inc.
Intertherapeutic Research Service
Dortmunder said, “Which one do we want?”
“J.C. Taylor, that’s all I know.”
Tiny pushed open the door, and they stepped into a small cluttered receptionist’s office. All the available wall space was taken up by floor-to-ceiling gray metal shelves, piled high with small brown cardboard cartons. A door in the opposite wall was marked with the one word PRIVATE. The receptionist, typing labels on an old black manual typewriter on a battered gray metal desk, was a hard-looking brunette of about thirty. She was wearing a pale blue blouse and tight black slacks over black boots. She glanced up when Dortmunder and Tiny walked in, looked back down at her work, finished the label she was typing, and swiveled from the typing side of her desk to the side with the telephone and the Rolodex and the clutter of correspondence and pencils and general trivia. “Good morning, gentlemen,” she said. She was brisk and efficient and in an apparent hurry to be rid of them, so she could get back to her typing. “What can I do for you?”
Tiny said, “J.C. Taylor, please.”
“I’m afraid he isn’t in right now. Did you call for an appointment?”
“I don’t like phones,” Tiny said. “My friend told me just come over.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “Your friend?”
“Fella named Murtaugh,” Tiny said. “Pete Murtaugh.”
“Ah.” Her attitude changed, became both more interested and more guarded. “And your name?”
“Mr. Bulcher. My friend said he’d call here, talk to Taylor for me.”
“Yes, he did.” She glanced quickly at Dortmunder, as though making up her mind about something, then said briskly to Tiny, “One moment, please,” and got to her feet.
Tiny nodded toward the door marked PRIVATE, saying, “You mean, maybe Taylor’s in after all?”
“It could be,” she said, and suddenly grinned, as though at some private joke. The grin eased the hardness out of her features and made her much better looking. “I’ll be with you boys in just a minute,” she said, and walked around the desk and through the inner door, closing it behind herself.
Tiny glanced at Dortmunder and said, “What do you think?”
Dortmunder said, “Is this the same kind of funny feeling you got from your friend?”
“Yeah, I guess it is,” Tiny said. Then he frowned and gestured at the telephone on the desk. “That button just lit up.”
“They’re making a call,” Dortmunder said. “Checking on us with your friend. Did you tell him there’d be a second guy?”
“Not in so many words.”
“Then that’s what it is.”
The light on the telephone remained on a minute longer, during which time Tiny browsed amid the cartons on the metal shelves. “Hey, look at this,” he said, and turned toward Dortmunder with a book in his hand. “Some kind of dirty book.”
Inside the book’s brown paper wrapper was a maroon pebbled cover, with the title in gold lettering: Scandinavian Marriage Secrets. The title page explained that the book was an illustrated sex manual intended for the use of psychiatrists, marriage counselors “and other professionals” in the course of their work. It also said the text had been translated from the Danish.
There wasn’t much text, but there were a lot of illustrations. Tiny leafed slowly through them, nodding in agreement, then stopped and said, “Hey. Isn’t that her?”
“Who?”
“The receptionist. That’s her.”
Dortmunder looked. The emphasis of the photograph was on other parts of the two bodies, but the girl’s face was clear enough to be recognizable. “That’s her,” Dortmunder agreed.
“Son of a bitch.” Tiny studied the picture some more. “Underneath here,” he said, “it calls the guy ‘the husband’ and her ‘the wife.’ She didn’t have any rings on, did she?”
“I didn’t notice.” Dortmunder looked over at the desk. “They’re off the phone,” he said.
“Oh.” With guilty haste, Tiny closed the book and moved to put it back where he’d found it. He was just bringing his hand back when the inner door opened and the girl came out. She glanced at Tiny’s moving hand and guilty face, but kept her own face expressionless. She looked briefly at Dortmunder, and said to them both, “You can come in now.”
“Right,” Tiny said. He seemed to be finding himself even larger and more awkward than usual; he had trouble getting around the edge of the desk. But then he made it and went on to the inner office, Dortmunder following him and the receptionist holding the door.
The inner office was also small and cluttered. A large scarred wooden desk stood in front of a big dusty window with a Venetian blind half-lowered over it. Large cardboard cartons were stacked up everywhere. A library table against one wall contained envelopes, a postage scale and postage meter, a stamp pad and various rubber stamps, and other necessities for a mailing operation. A small upright piano on the opposite wall was crammed between a tall narrow bookcase and a gray metal filing cabinet. A large audio cassette player and speaker stood atop the piano. The bookcase was packed full, mostly with what seemed to be law books, and the filing cabinet featured a complicated rod-and-padlock locking arrangement. There were only three places to sit: an ordinary old swivel chair behind the desk, a tattered brown leather chair with wooden arms in front of the desk, and a metal folding chair open in front of the piano. There was no one in the room.
Tiny and Dortmunder stopped in the middle of the clutter and looked back at the receptionist, who had followed them in and was closing the door behind her. Tiny said, “What’s going on? Where’s Taylor?”
Dortmunder pointed at the receptionist, who was grinning again, looking almost but not quite like a schoolgirl playing a joke. “You’re it,” he said.
Tiny said, “What?”
“That’s right,” the receptionist said, and edged past them to move around behind the desk. “Grab chairs,” she invited.
Tiny said, “What’s going on?” He was beginning to look as though he wanted to bite somebody.
Dortmunder, gesturing toward the girl now seated behind the desk, said, “That’s J.C. Taylor.”
She said, “Josephine Carol Taylor, at your service. Sit down, fellows.”
Dortmunder turned the folding chair in front of the piano around to face the desk, sat in it, and said, “You called this Murtaugh guy to check on us.”
“Naturally. He hadn’t said there’d be two.” She was just as briskly efficient as before, when she’d been in her receptionist role, but now without the air of disinterested impatience.
Tiny belatedly dropped into the leather chair, which groaned once and sagged in defeat. “Pete should of told me,” he said. “I’m going to mention this to him a little later.”
“I guess he thought it was a joke,” she said. Her smile turned down at the corners, to show she didn’t necessarily agree.
Dortmunder said, “How much did Murtaugh tell you?”
“He said there was a fellow named Bulcher coming over, had a proposition for me, using my office for somet
hing on the gray side.”
“He didn’t say what?”
Tiny said, “He didn’t know what. I didn’t give him any details he didn’t need.”
“Same thing he did for you,” J.C. Taylor pointed out. She sounded amused.
Dortmunder said to her, “So you don’t know if it’s something you’ll go along for.”
She shrugged and said, “As long as I don’t have to screw anybody or kill anybody, I don’t much care what you do.”
“All right.” Dortmunder glanced at Tiny to see if he’d take it from here, since he was the one who’d made the first contact, but Tiny was still too dazed by J.C. Taylor’s changes of pace, from cold receptionist to hot porno star to cool businesswoman. He sat frowning at the girl with great intensity, as though he’d been given till sundown to either figure her out or go before the firing squad.
So Dortmunder explained it himself: “We’re going to do a little burglary.”
She was surprised, and showed it. “Oh, that kind of thing,” she said. “I had the idea you were maybe con artists, you needed a store to show the mark, something like that. That’s why you two guys surprised me, you just don’t look the type.”
“We’re not,” Dortmunder agreed. “We’re going to hit some jewelry places upstairs. We need a place—”
“Some places?”
Tiny said, “A couple floors’ worth.” He’d apparently recovered from his befuddlement enough to decide the thing to do with this woman was impress her.
He succeeded. “Well,” she said, “you fellows think big.”
Dortmunder said, “We need a place to operate out of beforehand, so we can be in the building through the night. And then we need a place to stash the goods after the job. And then we’ll want to mail the stuff out with your own regular goods.”
“Accessory before,” she said, “and accessory after. What are you offering for these services?”
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