Westlake, Donald E - Novel 32 (15 page)

 
          
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 comer 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 East-
poole’s
wake, the drums echoing in their bloodstreams.

 
          
And
yet, they still hadn’t reached the point of no return. They could sti
£[
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 halfturned away again, gesturing at title
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.

 
          
Tom,
tinning 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 cliche 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 dining-room 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
lattice-work, 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.