19 Purchase Street (50 page)

Footsteps below.

Leather heels on the concrete driveway.

A pair of security men making rounds, playing their flashlights here and there, sometimes upward. Gainer and Leslie had painted the underside of the slides black in case of such a situation, but there was still the chance that the security men might shine their lights upward and make out something that shouldn't be there.

They were directly below now, close by the entrance to the shed. Perhaps they'd miss their fellow guard, would enter the shed and find him. Chapin had briefly related the killing to Gainer while they were down in the tanker, explained why he'd been able to loop only two of the alarm circuits.

Both Gainer and Chapin breathed shallow and quietly as they stood on the edge of the shed roof above the two security men. Gainer had drawn his ASP with silencer on, would shoot the moment either man's fingers went for the door.

One of the men tucked his flashlight into his armpit, held it there while he fussed with something.

Gainer and Chapin heard the tear and crinkle of paper and noisy chewing.

The man, eating a candy bar, took his flashlight in hand again, proceeded with his partner to the steps of the rear terrace and disappeared.

Gainer and Chapin went back at it. They joined the two curved sections of slide and, after some adjustment, overlapped those in place. The angles and lengths Chapin and Gainer had calculated on paper seemed correct now that they'd been applied. A continuous slide with a ninety degree turn in it ran all the way from the tanker up to the north wing.

Gainer was first to try the twenty feet up to the higher main house roof. It was steeper going, and he had to climb in a crouch, thankful for the better grip of the better deck sneakers Leslie had bought to replace the Converse All-Stars he'd been ready to go with. Up he went to step off onto the slate roof and find it also steeper than he'd anticipated. He couldn't stand upright on it, got traction with the toes of his sneakers, squatted forward to the roof and made his way along it to the nearby chimney. Tall thick chimney.

Gainer used it to stand and lean against, pausing a moment to take stock. He wondered how far he was from those billions at that moment. No more than six feet was his guess. Merely a layer or two of roof and a couple of other obstacles between him and a long life, rich with Leslie. Don't count your chickens, he told himself, they're still only eggs.

Chapin came up.

Bringing ropes and pulleys. He left those with Gainer and made three more difficult trips for the two-by-fours.

Gainer measured from the base of the chimney and from the edge of the roof to determine the point of entry. Kneeling, he brought from his bib carryall a bar of steel like a strap-iron—only a sixteenth of an inch thick but unbendable. It was fourteen inches long and two inches wide. An inch of one end was turned up bluntly ninety degrees. The other end was tapered. About an inch from the tapered end were two deep V-shaped notches. One on each side. The edges of the notches were filed blade-sharp.

Gainer placed the tapered end of the steel bar in under one of the slate shingles, pried and jammed the bar in under. The shingle loosened. The V-shaped notch of the bar caught on one of the nails that held the shingle. Gainer tapped on the blunt end of the bar with a leather-covered hammer to sever the nail. The shingle was nailed in two places. He severed the second nail and then was able to wiggle the shingle, worked it free. He'd found out from an old roofer how to do that.

He removed twelve slate shingles in this manner, exposing an area about three and a half feet square.

Paused for a moment.

Heard television.

The unmistakable commentaries of Frank and Don and Howard doing a Thursday night special version of ABC Monday Night Football. The Steelers playing the Dolphins in Miami. It made Gainer consider where he was at that moment: on the high roof of a mansion in Westchester going for three billion. It made him feel strangely detached. He countered that to some degree with the reality that he had picked Miami to beat the spread of three and a half. The sound of the television, he noticed, was coming from an open window of the security staff's quarters. Good. Any noises he or the others made during the robbery were less likely to be heard.

He went back to it.

Ripped away the layer of tar paper to get at the subroofing. Planks three-quarter-inch-thick butted and nailed in place. Exactly what he'd expected from going over the architectural plans of Number 19. The planking was pine aged hard, but the wood chisel Gainer used was a good one, especially sharp, and it took deep bites from the wood. He chiseled away without letup, inspired all the more by the thought that when he'd cut through the planks what he might see was Leslie's face.

E
ARLIER
that day Leslie had shown up at Number 19. Just drifted in on Darrow complaining that she was parched, would he please have mercy and mix something tall and original and not too weak for her?

Darrow was delighted, considered it a good omen that she should arrive at that exact moment when his mind was sorting through his various better prospects. He obliged by concocting what he called a Sacré-Coeur Swizzle, a combination of absinthe, Burgundy and lime juice.

They sat in the drawing room on cream silk damask in front of a dead cold fireplace.

Leslie said she hadn't been heard from for the last couple of weeks because she'd been away. With her husband.

Darrow responded as though that was the most forgivable of all possible excuses. “How is he?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Mr. Pickering.”

“The same,” Leslie replied.

That was the subject Darrow wanted to keep on, but Leslie casually inquired after Gainer.

“Andrew is out of town.”

A little sigh of disappointment from Leslie.

“He's in Europe on the new job I arranged for him,” Darrow told her.

“You put him to work?”

“Yes.” Reluctantly.

“That was large of you.”

“You mean that?”

“Certainly.”

“Then you're not upset? I thought you might be.”

“Quite the contrary. I'm pleased. It's high time Gainer found something other to do than me.”

Darrow concealed his smirky feeling with motion, picked a speck of dust from his impeccable white antelope shoes.

“I hope the job pays well,” Leslie said. “He's extravagant, you know, spends like a demon.”

“I would have thought as much.”

“Of course, that's not bad,” Leslie said, “when one has it.”

Truer words were never spoken, Darrow believed.

By six o'clock Leslie had him jumping through conversational hoops. She pitied the ferns and floral arrangements she emptied her Sacré-Coeur Swizzles into when Darrow wasn't looking.

She acted tipsy and tipsier.

Darrow moved from the matching
étage
across the way to the one Leslie was on, took her hand and called her a “beautiful friend,” said how much he hoped he could count on her.

Oh, he could, she told him, he could count and count and count.

Well, then …

She developed a headache.

Was her room still hers?

Just as she'd left it.

She went up to it, on the way tossing over her shoulder to Darrow that she shouldn't be disturbed unless the house was in flames and then only if it was her part of the house.

A half hour later she was seated at the window of her room watching the day give way to night. She had changed into black: jeans, shirt, sneakers and carryall bib. Her hair was tightly contained by a black kerchief tied and pinned. Her face blackened. She had the receiver for her whisper-com in her ear. Her ASP harnessed on.

She waited ten minutes for a margin.

Used the time to check if she had everything. The squirmy sack, as she called it, in her carryall didn't bother her much, almost not at all. She felt it squirm just then against her stomach. Lots of the fears of women were merely traditional, she thought.

She cracked the door, glanced out.

To the left, to the right.

That wide upper hallway of the south wing was dim, lighted only by the special little bulbs directed on the paintings—the Winslow Homers and Gilbert Stuarts and James Whistlers—along the way.

She stepped out into the hall, hurried, kept the Persian runner underfoot. At the corner to the upper landing she paused for a peek around. The landing ran the entire length of the house, was better lighted. It was empty now but what would she say if she ran into Darrow or someone else—that she was on her way to a self-improvement class in mugging?

Her pace along the upper landing was close to a jog.

As she was nearing the corner of the north wing a voice stopped her. It took her a moment to realize she was hearing Chapin on the whispercom, saying he'd been unable to neutralize the yellow circuit, the one that corresponded to the sonar alarm in the hallway leading to The Balance room. In another second she would have rounded the corner and walked right into it. All hell would have broken loose.

What to do now? Her end of the plan was vital. All of Gainer's, Chapin's and Vinny's efforts would be for nothing without what she had in her carryall. Perhaps, she thought, Gainer had decided to call off the robbery.

Better ask.

She brought out her whisper-com transmitter. “Is it still a go?”

No reply.

Was her transmitter on? Perhaps she wasn't holding it correctly. She whispered the same question into it. Again, no reply. Apparently something was wrong with the transmitter. She had accidentally dropped it on the marble floor in the bathroom while getting ready. That must have knocked it out. She'd have to rely on her intuition. Improvise. Try another way of beating the sonar alarm.

Vinny had told her how burglars often went one on one with such alarms. He'd told her about a guy he knew, an experienced wise-guy, who had succeeded in going up three flights of stairs and landings in a townhouse peppered with active sonars to get to a million dollars worth of jewelry. By simply doing what Vinny called The Sonar Shuffle.

Leslie took off her sneakers, shoved them in her carryall.

From Sweet's information she recalled that the first ten feet of that north wing hall were not covered by the alarm. She looked down the hall, saw the door to The Balance Room at the far end of it, forty feet away. She saw the alarm units, two subtle panels about eight inches square inset opposite to each other in the walls. Thirty feet from her. She hoped Sweet was right. She took two semi-giant steps.

Her destination was the second room on the left, well within the sonar's range. She'd have to go about three yards to it. The door to that room was closed. How would she handle that?

Get there first.

Doing The Sonar Shuffle.

It meant keeping her entire body rigid while using her lower legs to slip her feet along. Sort of like a mime doing a mechanical doll routine but without jerky movements. Slow motion, as slow as possible, so as not to disturb the air.

Her stockinged feet slid nicely on the surface of the Persian carpet runner. She kept her eyes on the alarm unit down the way. It had a tiny red light on its frame. As long as the light was out, she was doing okay. If it came on she had failed. One abrupt motion would spoil everything.

So far so good.

How far had she come?

She just did catch herself from turning her head to see, moved only her eyes.

Four feet so far, six to go.

It seemed she'd been shuffling for hours.

Her scalp was perspiring, so were her upper lip and underarms and everything. She felt wet all over, except her mouth was dry.

She hadn't traveled a straight line, rather a diagonal one, as though the wall was irresistible, its support a tempting relief from the strain. Her heels were only an inch or two from the edge of the runner. She kept shuffling and then felt the bare floor beneath her, the varnished and well-waxed oak floor.

Slicker, an advantage for her.

She remained in place for a long moment. Decided she would let her mind do more of the work. Instead of concentrating on the unpredictability of that little red light and thinking that it was so sensitive to the mere stir of the air, she would have her mind lock the rest of herself into the required posture, dictate to every part of her that it was impossible to move any faster than the alarm allowed. Meanwhile, on a more superficial level, she would think of other relative but not threatening things. Such as how everyone all their lives went scurrying about causing invisible collisions and never gave it a thought. For instance, when a person moved just one step the space he had just vacated had to refill with air. Air rushed in from all sides, dashed against itself and caused shock waves that on some infinite Richterlike scale never entirely diminished. Maybe that was the reason she liked to drive so fast, all the more to stir up more things. Hell, every move Joan of Arc or Madame DuBarry made was still vibrating around somewhere.

The entrance to the room.

She'd reached it.

She had an urge to jump on in.

She slow-motioned her hand to the doorknob, rotated the knob gradually, pushed the door open, degree-by-degree. It was tricky, seemed the most difficult part of all because she had to extend her arm completely to open the door enough.

Once again, then, The Sonar Shuffle. Over the slick threshold and into the room. In the same extremely slow, deliberate manner she closed the door.

She felt like collapsing in a heap with relief but she also felt like doing a fast run around the room. She stood there in the dark and shook herself vigorously from head to toe to fingertip, sort of the way a dog does to reorganize its coat. Gave her head a couple of extra shakes to snap back to normal speed. She was pleased with herself for what she'd just done, with her patience and nerve. She'd tell Gainer about it later, of course, but wished he'd been there to witness it.

The squirmy sack inside her carryall made its presence felt.