“This building is robbery-proof, girlie. You won’t get away with it.”
“We’ll see. Both of you stay down there. Don’t even lift your heads or I’ll shoot!”
As soon as they saw the empty desk, Tony and the Briggs brothers came through the revolving door. They were wearing stocking masks, and she wasn’t too happy about being barefaced. Still, the knit cap and scarf helped hide her features.
“Ten minutes,” Tony said as he went by her.
She watched the floor numbers as the elevator rose, keeping the gun steady on the two guards. “Who are they after?” the elevator man asked.
“Shut up!”
Eight long minutes later she saw the elevator start down from the top floor. No one else had entered the lobby and she was thankful for that. When the elevator stopped, Sam Briggs was the first one off, carrying a bulging plastic trash bag in one hand. The other two were behind him. “Let’s go!” he told her.
“Don’t follow us,” she warned the two guards. “Stay on the floor!” Then, as she backed toward the door, she asked Tony, “How’d it go?”
“Great! No trouble.”
Basil had left the car on one of the secondary roads in Central Park, with a phony television press card on the windshield in case anyone got curious. They broke onto Central Park South, running across toward the low park wall. Carol was in the middle of the street when she heard a shouted command.
“Police! Stop or we’ll shoot!”
At the same instant she saw the police cars, realized both ends of the street were blocked off. “The guard must have pushed a silent alarm,” Tony gasped at her side. “Forget the car and run for it!”
She heard a shot, and turned to see Basil with his gun out. Then there were three more shots close together and he spun around and went down in the street.
She kept running, afraid to look back.
There were more shots, and the stone wall of the park was before her. She went over it fast, her legs scraping against the rough stone. Tony was somewhere behind her, and she turned to look for him.
“Run!” he screamed at her. “Run!”
She saw the blood on his face, saw him reaching out for her as he ran toward the wall, then his whole body shuddered and he went down hard.
She ran on, deep into the park, until the breath was torn from her lungs in pulse-pounding gasps and she sank to the frozen earth and started to cry.
God! Oh, God!
Tony was hit, probably dead. And the others too.
After a long time, she picked herself up and after walking for what seemed hours she managed to reach Fifth Avenue, at 66th Street. She hailed a taxi and took it downtown, getting out a block from the apartment in case the police tried to trace her later. She circled the block twice on foot, mingling with the late strollers, until she felt it was safe to go in. Then she collapsed onto the bed and pulled the blankets tight around her, trying not to think.
She must have lain there an hour or longer before she heard a gentle knock on the door. Her first thought was the police, but they’d have been less timid. She got up and listened at the door. The knocking came again, and she could hear breathing on the other side of the door.
“Who is it?” she asked softly.
“Me!”
“Tony!” She threw off the bolt and opened the door.
It was Sam Briggs. “Let me in!”
“I—”
He pushed her aside and closed the door after him. “I thought they got you too.”
“No.”
“Basil and Tony are both dead. The cops were right on my tail but I lost them in the park.”
“You can’t stay here,” she said. “I want to be alone.”
“Come on! There’s only the two of us left now. Tony’s dead!”
She turned away from him. “What about the money?”
“I dropped the bag when I was running. I had to save my skin!”
She didn’t know whether to believe him, but it didn’t really matter. “You’ll have to go,” she repeated. “You can’t stay here.”
“I’m afraid to go back to my place. They’ll be looking for me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“To hell with you! I’m staying!”
She walked casually over to her coat and slipped the pistol from the pocket. Pointing it at him, she said, “Get out, Sam.”
His eyes widened. “Hell, Carol, we’re partners! I always liked you, from the first time I saw you.”
“I was Tony’s partner, not yours. Get out!” The gun was steady in her hand.
He smiled. “You wouldn’t use that.”
“Wouldn’t I?” In that instant, she wanted to. She wanted to squeeze the trigger and wipe the smile off his face for good. He had caused Tony’s death, and now he was standing grinning at her.
But he was right about the gun. She wanted to use it, but she couldn’t.
“You can sleep on the couch,” she told him. “Just for tonight.” She went into the bedroom and closed the door, taking the gun with her.
In the morning, he was still asleep as she dressed quickly and left the apartment. She bought a paper at the corner store and read about the robbery: actor’s penthouse robbed at gunpoint—police slay two fleeing scene. The dead were identified as Tony Loder and Basil Briggs, both ex-convicts.
She put the paper down.
So that was Tony’s epitaph, after all the things he’d been. Not lover, nor dreamer, nor even thief. Only ex-convict.
She started reading again. The police were seeking Sam Briggs, brother of the slain man, and an unidentified woman, who were believed to have fled with an estimated $80,000 in cash and jewelry.
So Sam had lied about dropping the bag. He’d stashed it somewhere, probably in a locker at the bus station.
She thought about going back to the apartment and confronting him, pointing the gun at him again and demanding a share for her and Tony.
But Tony was dead, and she’d shown Sam last night that she wouldn’t use the gun.
She went to a phone booth and dialed the police. When a gruff voice answered, she said, “You’re looking for Sam Briggs in connection with last night’s robbery. If you hurry, you can find him at this address.”
After that she took the subway to the Port Authority Terminal on Eighth Avenue and caught the next bus home.
They were hiring again at Revco, and they took her back without question. She had her old spot on the assembly line, with many of the same girls, and when they asked where she’d been she only smiled and said, “Around.”
She learned from the New York papers that Sam Briggs had been arrested and the loot recovered. The unidentified woman wasn’t mentioned. Even if Sam had given them her name, he didn’t know where she came from. After a month, she stopped worrying about being found. Instead, she felt that by some miracle she had been given a second chance.
For a time she was happy at work, and she thought of Tony only at night. But with the coming of spring, boredom set in once again. The routine of the assembly line began to get her down. She tried going out drinking with the other women on Friday nights, but it didn’t help. There was nothing in their bickering conversations or the half-hungry glances of their male friends to interest Carol.
One morning in May she phoned in sick, then dressed in a dark sweater and jeans and went out for a drive.
She parked near an apartment house in a better section of town and walked through the unguarded lobby. An inner door had to be opened with a key or by a buzzer from one of the apartments. She pressed three or four numbers until someone buzzed the door open, then took the elevator to the third floor.
Tony had told her once never to go up too high, in case she had to run down the fire stairs.
She used the knocker on a door chosen at random and nobody answered. Taking a plastic credit card from the pocket of her jeans, she used it on the bolt the way Tony had shown her. She was lucky. There was no chain, no Fox lock. In a moment, she was inside the apar
tment.
It was tastefully furnished in a masculine manner, with an expensive TV-stereo combination and a few original paintings. She saw a desk and crossed to it.
“Hello there,” a male voice said.
She whirled around, tensed on the balls of her feet, and saw a man standing there in his robe. His dark hair was beginning to go grey, but his face still had a boyish quality. He was smiling at her. “This is my first encounter with a real live burglar. Are they all as pretty as you?”
“I’m no burglar,” she said, talking fast. “I must have gotten the wrong apartment.” She turned and started for the door.
“Not just yet!”
“What?”
“I want you to stay a bit, talk to me.”
She was reminded of that day last year when she’d been home in bed. “Are you sick?”
“Only unemployed. I lost my job last month. It’s sort of lonely being unemployed. I’d find it interesting to talk with a burglar. Maybe I can pick up a few pointers.”
She moved a step closer. “Are you going to call the police?”
“I’d have done that already if I was going to.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “I suppose you would have.”
She sat down in a chair facing him.
“Tell me what it’s like breaking into apartments. Is it exciting? Can you actually make money at it?”
“It’s like nothing else in the world,” she said.
He smiled again, and suddenly she knew that this was her real second chance, now, with this man whose name she didn’t even know.
And maybe this time it wouldn’t end the same way.
The Greek Refrain
Frank Sisk
The bronze plaque glinted like gold in the noonday sun. Recessed in the high wall of red brick, it was large enough to be read 20 feet away. Sitting at the wheel of my shabby two- door sedan, I read it with an uneasy sense of wonder. I even tried the sibilants aloud: “Surcease Isle.”
The entrance was guarded by an iron gate wrought into scrolls and fleurs-de-lis that formed a black garland around two rampant white lions. Beyond the gate, a concrete road glistened as if bleached between borders of rich green grass. Heroic formality—this was the general aspect of Surcease Isle. For a moment, I was almost afraid to honk my horn, but only for a moment.
The single intrepid summons immediately produced the gatekeeper. He could have been hiding behind the rampart to which the gate was hinged. He was a huge man with a curly black beard; at his heels capered a small Scottish terrier.
“I’m here to see Miss Goodis,” I said.
“Das Geschaft, vat iss?” said the gatekeeper in the burliest gutturals I’ve ever heard.
“A luncheon appointment is das Geschaft,” I replied civilly. “I’m a lawyer—Charles Homer.”
“Das Mittagessen, ja. Das Tor I open now up, Herr Homer.” And he began to fit into the heavy padlock a key at least eight inches long. The little terrier barked with delight. “Be shtillen, Harold,” the gatekeeper growled; and the terrier, lowering its muzzle as if understanding the pain of rebuff, skulked a pace backward.
Finally, the outsize key did its work and chains rattled free, and in another moment the enormous gate swung slowly inward to the right.
I shifted the car into first and drove cautiously ahead, offering a half salute to the keeper and a winking tch-tch to the downcast Harold. Then my attention was wholly occupied by the enchanting vista that spread before me.
The main house, reputedly constructed of yellow Sienna marble, crouched on a terraced eminence half a mile up the gleaming road amid a sheltering grove of Babylonian willows. Here and there the façade shone like butter through the pale-green lace of leaves, and the roof, rising above the pendulous branches, displayed its red tiles to the blue sky like a banked fire.
For years I had been hearing of this place. Now, seeing it for the first time, it was as though each item of interest had been foretold in my most fanciful dreams.
There were the fabled water lilies, big as dinner plates, floating in the artificial pond beside reflections of the pink roses that climbed round four fluted pilasters. Here a swan and luscious Leda became one as a bronze fountain whose silvery spray eternally caressed the stone breasts of naked dryads. A grotto of myrtle and bittersweet parted briefly on my approach to disclose a piping Pan clothed only in a hand-held bunch of grapes.
Everything about the place was incredibly rich and yet expected. Twice at a distance I sighted deer browsing on carpets of purple clover, and once a big-horned goat with whiskers the color of cornsilk peered at me (wistfully, it seemed) from a break in a green hedge. I’m in another world, I thought, where reality is half hallucination.
But truth compels me to say that Surcease Isle was not really out of this world, and it was not an island at all. According to the deed on file in the town clerk’s office, it was 76 acres of gently rolling pasture and woodland near the southern tip of one of the Finger Lakes.
It was known to the natives as the Goodis Estate. They usually thought of it in connection with Andrew Goodis, although at the time of this visit he had been dead at least ten years, and his daughter Millicent was as fully and forcefully in residence as he had ever been. It was she, in fact, who named it Surcease Isle on succeeding, as the old man’s only child, to the Goodis millions.
The natives regarded father and daughter as two of a kind, a most uncommon kind, and kept a respectful distance.
Andrew Goodis had been a steel baron when such Gothic nomenclature was significantly current. His withdrawal from the hard realm of business, he used to say, was ordained the day he saw an up-and-coming young steel executive drinking cocktails in the Detroit Athletic Club with a union leader. Thereafter the old man had devoted himself somewhat quixotically to blooded horses, skittish blond women, thoroughbred hunting dogs, and his beloved daughter—allegedly in that order. Unlike Millicent, he had spent more time abroad than at home. He is reported to have once said, apparently without tongue in cheek, that he found Paris infinitely more entertaining than Pittsburgh. He died at his grouse-shooting lodge in Scotland.
Taking over the reins and leashes, Millicent at 25 wasted no time following in her father’s wide-ranging footsteps as closely as the difference in sex would permit. She liked blond men, but she was not averse to brunets either. She required brawn, not brains.
Sometimes her notoriously transitory interest in a certain man lasted long enough to result in marriage. The count now stood at four husbands, perhaps five. This ambiguity revolved around doubt in many quarters as to whether her liaison with Burton Dray had ever been sanctified or notarized.
Dray, a second-string linebacker for the Giants, had left his post six months earlier with the publicized intention of becoming, as the sports writers put it, the fifth Mr. Goodis. His red foreign sports car had been observed one evening to enter the gateway of Surcease Isle. Two evenings later, other anonymous observers saw the same rakish car issue from the walls with Millicent and Dray in the front buckets, and a prizewinning Irish setter sitting aloof in the back.
Within a week, spectators at a gymkhana in Pinehurst noted the couple attending; and within two more days they (or at least Millicent) were reported to have shifted to active participation at field trials for pointers and setters in Augusta.
A month passed then before Millicent, alone, was seen and interviewed by reporters at Kennedy International a few minutes before boarding a plane Zurich-bound.
Where was her supposed spouse?
Obviously not present, admitted Millicent grandly. After all, many arrangements fall unhappily short of expectations.
Not much aghast, the scandalmongers desired to know if a divorce were imminent.
Millicent merely acknowledged that ties had been severed, most amicably on both sides, which obtuseness disposed one newshawk to inquire if a marriage had actually taken place. And if so, where—among the Carolina jumpers or the Georgia scenters?
Millicent was said t
o have smiled mysteriously at this insolence. “You would not have me compromise myself,” she murmured, then vanished into Swissair.
Apparently Burton Dray had also vanished, but in another direction. At any rate, on the day of my visit to Surcease Isle he was still absent from his accustomed haunts. I hoped his case was not a precursor of the matter that was bringing me here.
It was exactly 12:15 p.m. when I parked the jalopy under the friezed portico and, attaché case in hand, mounted the eight marble steps leading to the entrance door—an impressive slab of black mahogany into which was carved a nude archer (Heracles, as I learned later) drawing a powerful bow whose arrow was aimed in the general direction of an ivory doorbell button. I gave the button a decisive push and half turned to view the Corinthian columns supporting the portico. It didn’t really surprise me to see a mule leaning against one, as if preparing to scratch the side of his belly.
The only thing about Surcease Isle that kept me continually astonished was the fact that it was only about 20 miles from Ithaca, New York, where at this moment the mundane citizenry were engaged in the production of shotguns, salt, cement, men’s shirts, and ladies’ underwear. And where, at this moment, the part-time stenographer in my cramped law office was taking advantage of my absence by phoning her Cornell University bedmate to discuss his major, which was purebred sheep in general and Dorset rams in particular.
As I stood there exchanging speculative glances with the itchy mule, I suddenly felt a void nearby and again with a half-turn, perceived that the heavy door had been opened wide by a man as black as itself.
“Monsieur Shari Omay, is it not?” he asked in a voice as rich as the red velvet jacket and pantaloons clothing his lank frame.
“It never sounded better,” I said.
“The mademoiselle is expecting of you, monsieur. If you please to follow me.”
So it was still mademoiselle, despite four or five husbands, I thought as I followed the plush majordomo back into a large hall. The ceiling arched at least 30 feet above my head, and was ornamented with arabesques of fruit and foliage inhabited by repetitions of the same unicorn and phoenix. Mademoiselle and pere like it gaudy, I mused, passing a Gobelin tapestry. The letter G (for Goodis, obviously) recurred as a cartouche on such things as lamp standards, cabinets, and door panels.
Women's Wiles Page 5
