The office below was just as the map had described: medium size, two desks, four chairs, a short brown Naugahyde sofa, several gray-metal filing cabinets. One of the desks, empty except for a green blotter, black telephone and one wrinkled legal-sized envelope, was directly beneath the hole.
“Hold this,” Briley said. Parker took the flashlight from him, and Briley put both hands on one of the lower-level joists and dropped down into the room. He swung forward once, backward once, and dropped two feet to the desk top. He grinned up toward the flashlight and dropped lithely down to the gray carpet.
Behind each of the desks was a swivel chair; beside each desk was a straight armless wooden chair. Briley now picked up the nearest wooden chair and put it on top of the desk. “Join me.”
Keegan went next, more awkwardly than Briley, having trouble at first finding his footing on the chair. Briley held the chair steady, but didn’t touch Keegan, who got his balance, released the joist over his head, held the chair back instead, and stepped down onto the desk. He sat down on the desk, put his feet over the side, and stood up on the floor, dusting white sheetrock powder from the seat of his pants.
Parker called to Morris, “Going down now.”
“Have a good time.”
Parker dropped the flashlight to Briley, who lit his way. He dropped to the chair, jumped to the desk, then to the floor.
“This is the worst time,” Keegan said. “Right now. What would we do if that door opened and a lot of cops came in?”
Neither of the other two said anything. Keegan had lost over four hundred dollars he didn’t have yet in the blackjack game: two hundred fifty to Briley, the rest to Morris. It had made him more pessimistic and irritable than usual.
This room had a window, but it opened on a narrow airshaft that came up the middle of the building. The top of the airshaft had been their landmark on the roof. Since the door was solid wood, there was no reason not to turn the light on. Briley went over and flicked the wall switch by the door, and put away the flashlight. He said, “Now we make our stairway. To paradise, huh?”
“Listen to that music,” Keegan said peevishly. “What the hell ever happened to jazz?”
“It’s still there,” Briley said, going over to the filing cabinets, “in the same gin mills it always was. When did jazz ever play a joint like this?”
“Jazz at the Phil,” Keegan said. “I used to have all those records, before that time I got sent up.”
“Jazz at the Phil,” Briley said scornfully. “Fake.”
He opened a file drawer. “Empty! There’s a break.”
“What do you mean, fake? All the greats were on Jazz at the Phil.”
“Okay,” Briley said. “Give us a hand here, will you?”
Keegan went over to help him move the filing cabinet. “I don’t know how you can call them a fake. My God! Lester Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Johnny Hodges—”
“I guess you’re right,” Briley said, grinning. “I must of been thinking of something else.”
Parker had taken the chair down off the desk, and now stood at one end of it. Briley and Keegan put the filing cabinet down, picked up the other end of the desk, and the three of them moved it over till it was no longer directly beneath the hole. Then Briley and Keegan moved the filing cabinet to abut against the edge of the desk closest to the hole, while Parker put the chair back up on top of the desk again. They kept moving furniture, and when they were done they had a complicated stairway leading up toward the hole, and facing the doorway. A man coming in the doorway would have two or three strides into the room, then a foot-high step to an upended metal wastebasket, then a step a foot and a half high to the desk, another foot and a half up to the wooden chair, a foot to the top of three filing cabinets lined up in a row, and finally a foot and a half to the second wooden chair, on top of the filing cabinets. This put one six and a half feet above the floor, where the top of the roof came to about waist-level; an easy climb. This kind of stairway was better in two ways than any kind of rope ladder or anything of that sort they might have brought with them; first, because it meant one less thing they had to carry to the job, and second, because it could be gone up faster than any kind of portable ladder.
Briley now went up their staircase and out onto the roof, and Parker went part way up after him. Briley handed down the toolkits one at a time to Parker, who handed them down to Keegan. Briley said something to Morris, waved, and came back down into the room.
Keegan had already opened the other toolkit. The three masks he removed from it were made of black cotton and covered the entire head, with openings for eyes and mouth. The three handguns were all Smith & Wesson Model .39’s, a 9mm Luger automatic with an eight-shot clip. There were also three small blue packets: blue plastic laundry bags, costing a nickel each from a laundromat vending machine.
They put on the masks and checked their guns and stowed the little laundry-bag packages in their pockets. Then Parker nodded to Briley, who flicked off the light switch and in darkness opened the door.
There was some light in the hall outside, not much. But much more noise. Whenever the music ended, the crowd noise increased to a kind of ecstatic scream, fading as the music started up again, but gradually building through the next number till music and crowd seemed about equally matched by the end of the tune, when there would be another concerted scream.
It was five past one; they’d been working fifty-five minutes since Parker first swung the ax into the roof.
Parker was the first into the hall, looking to the right and left. Doors on both sides of the hall in both directions, mostly closed, a few standing open. No lights burning up at this level at all. Far down to the right a stairwell, with light shining up, reflecting off the pale green corridor walls, giving light to see by down here.
Parker turned right, and the other two followed, Briley turning the doorknob to be sure the lock wasn’t on, then shutting the door behind them. Keegan carried the one toolkit they still needed.
The flooring was some sort of composition, similar to linoleum; the sneakers they wore made no sounds against it. They walked slowly, leaning slightly forward, their right hands holding the automatics ahead of them and out away from their bodies.
If Morris saw trouble coming now, they were past the point where they could retrace their steps. Morris’s job
