Ed McBain - Downtown

On a table near the metal entrance door on the right-angled wall, there was a tomato-stained and empty pizza carton and three empty Coke bottles. A green metal file cabinet was on the wall near an open door that led to the toilet. On the other side of the door, there was a huge black safe with the word MOSLER stamped on its front.

Michael went to the file cabinet and pulled open the top drawer. A glance at one of the folders told him that this was where Ju Ju Rainey kept his inventory records. A methodical receiver of stolen goods. The bottom drawer was locked.

“Do you know how to do something like that?” Connie asked.

“Like what?”

“Like pick a lock?”

“No,” Michael said.

“Let’s see if anybody brought in a set of tools,” Connie said.

They began rummaging through the stolen goods as if they were at a tag sale. It was sort of nice. Shopping this way. you could forget that dead bodies were involved. Like that day in the jungle. With the baby. Not a thought of danger, Charlie was miles and miles away. Just strolling in the jungle. Birds twittering in the treetops. Andrew smoking a cigarette, the baby suddenly—

He turned off all thoughts of the baby.

Click.

Snapped (hem off.

Connie had stopped at a pipe rack from which hung at least a hundred fur coats.

The baby crying.

Click.

“This is gorgeous,” Connie said.

She was looking at a long red fox coat.

Michael moved away from her, deeper into what looked like a smaller version of the Citizen Kane storehouse. There was a makeshift counter — sawhorses and planks — covered entirely with Walkman radios. There had to be at least a thousand Walkman radios on that counter. All sizes and all colors. Michael wondered if all those radios had come from a single industrious thief. Or had a thousand less ambitious thieves each stolen one radio? Another counter was covered entirely with books. It looked like a counter in a bookshop. Very big and important books like Warday and Women’s Work and Whirlwind were piled high on the counter. Michael could easily understand why someone would want to steal these precious books and why Ju Ju had been willing to take them in trade for dope. He’d probably planned to resell them later to a bookseller who had a blanket on the sidewalk outside Saks Fifth Avenue.

Connie was lingering at the fur-coat rack. In fact, she was now trying on one of the coats, which he hoped she didn’t plan to steal. The temptation to steal something from a thief was, in fact, overwhelming. The goods, after all, were not the thief’s. The thief, therefore, could not rightfully or even righteously claim that anything of his had been stolen, since the stolen goods had already been stolen from someone else. Moreover, the transaction by which the thief had come into possession of the property was in itself an illegal one, the barter of stolen goods for controlled substances, and the thief could expect no mercy on that count. Especially if he was dead, which Ju Ju Rainey happened to be. On the other hand, if it was okay to steal stolen goods from a dead thief, then maybe it was also okay to have caused that thief’s death, and to have put another man’s identification on his corpse, and to have laid the blame on a third person entirely, which third person happened to be Michael himself. It was all a matter of morality, he guessed.

The coat Connie was trying on happened to be a very dark and luxuriant ankle-length sable.

The coat was screaming, “Steal Me, Steal Me!”

He hoped she wouldn’t.

The baby screaming.

Click.

“I would love a coat like this,” Connie said.

Michael was at a counter covered with musical instruments now. There were violins and violas and cellos and bass fiddles and even lyres. There were piccolos and oboes and saxophones and clarinets and English horns and bassoons and flutes. There was an organ. There were acoustic guitars and electric guitars and banjos and mandolins and a pedal steel guitar and a synthesizer and a sitar and an Appalachian dulcimer. There was a set of drums. And three bagpipes. And fourteen harmonicas and a book called How to Play Jazz Harp, which had wandered over from the book display across the room. There were trumpets and Sousaphones and tubas and French horns and comets and bugles and seventy-six trombones. Michael guessed it was profitable to steal musical instruments.

The next counter was covered with tools. More tools than he had ever seen in one place in his entire lifetime. He guessed it was profitable to steal tools, too. On the other hand, maybe it was profitable to steal anything. There were hammers and hatchets and mallets and mauls. There were pliers and wrenches and handsaws and drills. There were planes and rasps and chisels and files. There were circular saws and scroll saws and electric sanders and electric chain saws. Michael picked up one of the electric hand drills and a small plastic case with bits in it, and carried them to where Connie was now standing at a table covered with weapons.

“Look at all these guns,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

There were revolvers and automatic pistols of every size and caliber and make. Smith & Wesson, Colt, Browning, Walther, Ruger, Harrington & Richardson, Hi-Standard, Iver Johnson, you name it, you had it. There were rifles and shotguns, too — Remington, and Winchester, and Mossberg, and Marlin, and Savage, Stevens & Fox. And there were several military weapons as well, guns Michael recognized as AK-47 assault rifles and AR-15 semiautomatics. Rambo would have felt right at home at this counter. Rambo could have picked up an entire attack arsenal at this counter.

“I think we can drill out the lock with this,” Michael said.

“Is it a crime to steal stolen goods?” Connie asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Is what I thought,” she said.

He walked past her to where the filing cabinet stood against the wall. He opened the little plastic case, and was searching for a bit he hoped would tear through the metal lock on the cabinet, when Connie joined him, her hands in the pockets of the short black car coat. Michael chose his bit, fitted it into the chuck collar, tightened the collar with a chuck key, found a wall outlet near the cabinet, knelt to plug in the drill, tested it to see if he had power, and then went back to the cabinet. Connie was still standing there with her hands in her pockets. He studied the lock for a moment, and got to work.

The bit snarled into the metal.

There was a high whining sound.

Baby over there, Andrew was saying.

Where?

Over there. Crying.

Curls of metal spun out from behind the bit.

The lock disintegrated.

Michael yanked open the drawer.

They were looking in at an open shoe box containing two little plastic vials of crack.

“Must’ve used all his dope to pay for the merchandise in here,” Michael said.

“Either that, or there’s more dope someplace else.”

“Like where?”

“Like where would you keep a whole bunch of crack?”

Michael looked at the safe.

“Do you know how to do something like that?” Connie asked.

“No,” Michael said.

“I didn’t think so.”

“But I have a question.”

“Yes?”

“Would you lock a file drawer that had nothing but two vials of crack in it?”

Connie looked at him.

“Neither would I,” he said.

He knelt beside the file cabinet, lifted the shoe box, turned it upside down, and looked at it. Nothing. He ran his hands along the bottom and back of the drawer, and then moved them forward along each side of the drawer to the front of it, and then felt along the back of the front panel and—