Free Get Real by Donald E. Westlake

to Kelp, reached past him to thump the door, which made a sound like thumping a tree. “That’s not going
     anywhere,” he said.
    Dortmunder, well back in the pack and therefore unable to see clearly for himself, called up the stairs, “Then that’s the
     one we gotta get into.”
    “Can’t be done, John,” Kelp called back.
    Judson said, “What about from upstairs?”
    “What, down through the ceiling?” Kelp shook his head and his flashlight beam. “This time,” he said, “we don’t want to leave
     any marks we were here.”
    “I can’t
see
anything,” Dortmunder complained.
    “Okay,” Kelp said. “John, we’ll go on up the next flight.”
    Everybody thudded up the stairs, which from the second to the third floor reversed and rose from back to front, and when at
     last Dortmunder got to the impassable door he stopped to frown at it all over, to look for hinges to be removed—no, they were
     on the inside—and to press his palm to the circle of glass at waist height. But the door didn’t know him, and nothing happened.
    The others had gone on up to the third floor so, abandoning the door, Dortmunder trudged on up after them. At the top, he
     found them all lolling around at their ease in what looked like a dayroom combined with an office. A few sofas and soft chairs
     and small tables were scattered around this part of the building from front to back, with filing cabinets and stacks of cardboard
     mover’s cartons along the inside wall. Somebody had even switched on a floor lamp by one of the sofas, making a warm soft
     cozy glow.
    “John,” Kelp said, from the depths of a green vinyl easy chair, “take a load off.”
    “I will.” Dortmunder did, and said, “It’s that door, that’s what we want.”
    Tiny said, “Not without demolition.”
    “Tiny’s right,” Kelp said. “We can’t get into it, John. Not tonight. Not without doing some damage. And right now, we don’t
     want to do damage.”
    “We want to know what’s in there,” Dortmunder said. “We need to know, what’s the setup.”
    “Won’t happen,” Tiny said.
    Dortmunder took from his pocket the drugstore receipt on which he’d written the firm names in this building. “What we got
     on this floor,” he said, “is Knickerbocker Storage. It’s all storage areas the other side of that wall.”
    Stan said, “There’s a john down at the end there.”
    “Fine.” Dortmunder consulted his list. “Up one flight, that’s Scenery Stars, that’s the people gonna make the sets, like the
     imitation OJ. And up top is GR Development, their rehearsal space for their reality shows. The question is, what the hell
     is the thing
down
one flight? It’s called Combined Tool. What would that be? If your name is Combined Tool, who are you?”
    Stan said, “Do they make tools?”
    “Where? How? That’s not a factory.”
    At a side table, Judson had found phone books, and now he turned from consulting them to say, “Not in any phone book.”
    Dortmunder looked at him. “Not at all?”
    “Not in the white pages under Combined Tool, not in the yellow pages under Tools-Electric, Tools-Rentals
or
Tools-Repairing & Parts.”
    Stan said, “So who the hell are they?”
    “You got a company gets big enough,” Dortmunder said, “it’s got a dark side.”
    “But it’s still a company,” Kelp said, “so it’s still got to have records and meetings and a history of itself.”
    “Down in there,” Dortmunder said.
    Stan said, “But what would
Doug
be doing in there? He’s not that important. That door doesn’t know
his
palm print.”
    “He’s close to the operation,” Dortmunder said. “He works sometimes out of this same building. He works for them, and they
     trust him, and he happened to see something once.”
    “You open a door in New York,” Tiny said, “you never know what’s in there.”
    Rousing himself from his easy chair, Kelp said, “We might as well take off now. We’re not gonna do anything else in