Free Put a Lid on It by Donald E. Westlake Page A

the way to make a few innocent purchases that fit nicely in his pockets. He walked by the facade of 279 with hardly a glance at the doorman, who stood in his uniform of navy blue trimmed with gold behind the glass of the entryway, gazing outward, hands folded at his crotch, waiting for somebody to arrive in or want a taxicab.
    At the corner, Meehan turned left, to walk next to the side of the building and to see that the service entrance was an eight-foot-high iron gate, shut tight, with a garbage-can-lined alleyway running ten feet deep behind it, burrowing into the building, with a closed metal door at the far end. Ahead of him was Riverside Drive, and beyond that the Hudson River and America.
    Meehan circled the block, thinking. The only way in was past the doorman, but he didn't want to be announced. Coming back around to West End, he crossed it and continued on to Broadway, turning south there until he found the second hardware store of the day. In this one, he bought a four-foot metal ladder and a smoke detector, then walked back to 279 with the ladder's next-to-last rung resting on his right shoulder, smoke detector in his left hand. This time, he walked straight to the building, where the doorman, faintly surprised, opened the door and said, “Yeah?”
    “Smoke detector,” Meehan told him, showing it.
    The doorman looked at the box. “For what?”
    “Elevator.”
    “The elevator? Nobody told
me
.”
    “Well, they told me, replace the smoke detector.”
    “Which elevator?” the doorman demanded.
    “In the back.”
    Sounding dubious, the doorman said, “Go ahead. They didn't tell me a thing about it.”
    “Thanks, pal,” Meehan said, and carried the ladder past the elevator at the front end of the lobby because he was operating from the assumption that they would number the apartments from the front, which would put H at the back.
    The elevator was already here. Meehan boarded, didn't look back to see if the doorman was watching him, opened the ladder, started up it, and the elevator door closed. He immediately pushed 8.
    Having no further need for the ladder, he closed it and left it leaning in the elevator. In the short hall here, he looked at the apartment doors, and found H first on the right. He approached it, reaching into his pockets for some of his recent purchases, but there was something weird about the door. A length of shiny electrician's tape was stretched over the striker plate, from the outside of the jamb inward, so that when the door was closed the bolt wouldn't snap into place. The door would close, but it wouldn't lock.
    Who would do a thing like that? Who would put a piece of tape over a doorlock that you could see from outside? Nobody Meehan knew.
    Very cautiously, he pushed open the door. What he looked in at was a small square vestibule with heavy woodwork around the door frames, painted thirty times the last hundred years. A Utrillo print hung on the wall to the left, over a rickety little table with an empty cut-glass vase on it. To the right was a closed door, probably a closet. Ahead was a doorless entryway to a living room furnished out of the Salvation Army; heavy old pieces, kind of shabby but more or less kept up.
    Meehan slid through the doorway and let the door slowly close behind him, having to hold it because there was a very strong spring in the hinges. Maybe that's why the tape was on there; the unlocking button was stuck, as they often were in these old buildings because nobody ever used them, and the door simply wouldn't stay open by itself. But why would anybody want it to stay open?
    The door closed gently enough, but nevertheless something in its mechanism, at the last second, went
click
. Meehan froze, and his alert ears heard a chair scrape on a floor, two rooms away.
    No. He pulled open the door on his right, and it not only was the closet he'd expected, it was full of coats and sweaters and scarves and overshoes. Meehan slid in, pulling the door shut behind