At the far end was another featureless wooden door, which Chauncey opened with the same key, stepping out to a brick floored areaway in front of a townhouse very like his own. The door he’d emerged from looked as though it belonged to this house, was perhaps a basement entrance, though in fact there was no direct link between them.
It was two and a half blocks to the meeting place with Dortmunder and the alarm specialist, and as Chauncey neared it, coming south on Madison, he moved very slowly, determined to see Dortmunder and the other one before they saw him. It was just after eleven now, the streets were full of hurtling cabs and blundering buses and cowering private cars, and the sidewalks were virtually empty. Chauncey’s breath steamed in the air and he came to a complete halt partway up the block, frowning, looking forward at all four corners of the intersection. Dortmunder wasn’t there.
Had something gone wrong? Chauncey believed be understood Dortmunder, the man’s low-key style, his low expectations and defeatist outlook. A man like that was ripe for direction from a stronger personality, which was the way Chauncey saw himself. He had been pleased with Stonewiler’s choice, and convinced he could deal with Dortmunder without fear of being outfoxed.
Not that he intended to default. He would pay the man his hundred thousand, and welcome to it.
On the other hand, where was he? Not sure what was going on, Chauncey backed into the darkened entranceway of a nearby boutique, and his left heel came down on something soft, which moved. “Ouch!” yelled a voice in Chauncey’s ear. “Get off my foot!”
Chauncey spun about, astonished. “Dortmunder! What are you doing in here?”
“The same thing you are,” Dortmunder said, and limped out to the sidewalk, followed by a skinny scholarly looking man wearing large spectacles and carrying the kind of black leather bag doctors used when doctors made house calls.
Dortmunder glared back over his shoulder at Chauncey, saying, “Well? You coming?”
Chapter 7
Dortmunder and Chefwick nosed their way around the roof of Arnold Chauncey’s house like a pair of hunting dogs in search of the scent. Illuminated by light angling up through the open trapdoor, Chauncey stood and observed, a faint expectant smile on his face.
Dortmunder wasn’t sure about this fellow Chauncey. It was all right, for instance, for Dortmunder and Chefwick to hang around in dark corners, that was more or less part of their job, but Chauncey was supposed to be a straight citizen, and not only that, a wealthy one. What was he doing lurking in doorways?
It was Dortmunder’s belief that in every trade with glamour attached to it – burglary, say, or politics, movies, piloting airplanes – there were the people who actually did the job and were professional about it, and then there were the people on the fringe who were too interested in the glamour and not enough interested in the job, and those were the people who loused it up for everybody else. If Chauncey was another clown leading a rich fantasy life, Dortmunder would have to rethink this entire proposition.
In the meantime, though, they were here and they might as well look the thing over. Even if the Chauncey deal fell through, it could be useful to know how to get into this place at some later date.
This was one of a row of ten attached houses built shortly before the turn of the century, when New York’s well-to-do were just beginning to move north of 14th Street. Four stories high, twenty-five feet wide, with facades of stone and rear walls of brick, they shared one long continuous flat roof, with knee-high brick walls delineating each property line. Three of the houses, including Chauncey’s, featured roof sheds housing elevator mechanisms, added later. Television antennae sprouted like an adolescent’s beard on all the roofs, but many of them were tilted or bent or utterly collapsed, marks of the spread of cable TV. The roof construction was tar over black paper. The front parapet showed marks of a fire escape, since removed.
While Chefwick studied the wires that crossed to the roof from the nearby power and telephone poles, clucking and muttering and peering through his spectacles, Dortmunder took a stroll down the block, stepping over the low brick walls, crunching on one tarred roof after another until be reached the end of the row, where he stood facing a blank brick wall. Or, not entirely blank; here and there the outlines of bricked-in windows could be seen.
What was this building? Dortmunder went to the front, leaned over the parapet – trying not to see, from the corner of his eye, the sidewalk forty feet below – and saw that it was some kind of theater or concert hall, which faced onto Madison Avenue. What he could see from here was the side of the building, with its fire exits and posters of coming attractions.
Leaving the edge, Dortmunder backed off to study that blank wall, which rose another fifteen or twenty feet above the level of the row-house roofs. Near the top of the wall were several grilled vents, but none of them looked useful for a human being seeking passage.
Finished, Dortmunder retraced his steps, finding Chauncey still waiting by the open trapdoor and Chefwick now dangling off the rear of the building, head hanging down, humming happily to himself as he fingered the wiring. A line tester glowed briefly, showing Chefwick’s earnest absorbed face.
Dortmunder continued on, walking to the other end of the row of houses, and there he found a ten-foot open space across a driveway, with an apartment building on the far side, its drapes and curtains and Venetian blinds and Roman shades and Japanese screens and New England shutters all firmly closed. The vision of a board stretched across that open space from one of those windows to where he was standing was followed immediately in Dortmunder’s mind by a vision of himself crawling across that board. Turning his back on both vision and building, he returned to the Chauncey roof, where Chefwick was cleaning his hands on a Wash’n’Dri from his leather bag. “We’ll come from down there,” Dortmunder said, pointing toward the blank back of the concert hall.
“Our best bet would be the elevator shaft,” Chefwick said. To Chauncey he said, “It would be easier if the elevator weren’t on the top floor.”
“It won’t be,” Chauncey promised.
“Then there’s really no problem,” Chefwick said. “Not from my point of view.” And he looked a question at Dortmunder.
It was time to clear the air. Dortmunder said to Chauncey, “Tell me about that passage we came through, the one into your back yard.”
“Oh, you won’t be able to use that,” Chauncey said. “You’d have to go right up through the house, all full of people.”
“Tell me about it anyway.”
“I’m sorry,” Chauncey said, moving closer, away from the trapdoor illumination, “but I don’t understand. Tell you what about it?”
“What’s it for?”
“Originally?” Chauncey shrugged. “I really don’t know, but I suspect it began merely as a space between walls. I understand my house was a speakeasy at one point during Prohibition, and that’s when the new doors were added.”
“What do you use it for?”
“Nothing really,” Chauncey said. “A few years ago, when there were some rock musicians hanging about, a certain amount of dope came in that way, but normally I have no use for the thing. Tonight was different, naturally. I don’t think I should be seen with suspicious characters just before my house is robbed.”
“Okay,” Dortmunder said.
Chauncey said, “Now let me ask a question. What prompted the interest?”
“I wanted to know if you were a comic-book hero,” Dortmunder told him.
Chauncey seemed surprised, then amused. “Ah, I see. No romantics need apply, is that it?”
“That’s it.”
Chauncey reached out to tap a finger against Dortmunder’s upper arm, which Dortmunder hated. “Let me assure you, Mr. Dortmunder,” he said, “I am no romantic.”
“Good,” said Dortmunder.
Chapter 8
One of the regulars was flat on his back atop the bar at the O.J. Bar and Grill on Amsterdam Avenue when Dortmunder and Kelp walked in on Thursday evening. He was holding a damp filthy bar rag to his face, and three other regulars were discussing with Rollo the best way to treat a nosebleed. “You put an ice cube down the back of his neck,” one said.
“You do and I’ll flumfle your numble,” the sufferer said, his threat lost in the folds of the bar rag.
“Give him a tourniquet,” another regular suggested.
The first regular frowned. “Where?”
While the regulars surveyed the body of their stricken comrade for a place to put an anti-nosebleed tourniquet, Rollo came down the bar, nodded at Dortmunder and Kelp over his impaired customer’s steel-toed work boots, and said, “How you doing?”
“Better than him,” Dortmunder said.