On the other hand, there could be sixty apartments---more if the developers had chosen profit over style and subdivided. She was going to have to get into the building, learn its guts and sneak a peek at its mailboxes and intercom panel, before Catwoman went to work.
The sour-faced cashier reappeared, cleared the table, and shoved an illegible bill in front of her.
"You can pay me now."
Selina ignored him.
"C'mon, lady. I ain't got all day."
Selina made a show of looking for other customers in the otherwise empty room. "I do," she replied in a dangerously sultry voice. "Gimme a piece of your chocolate pie."
"Didn't you hear me before? There's a four-dollar minimum. I already checked you out. Pie only costs three."
"Then gimme two pieces." She smiled. Her even, ivory teeth glistened.
The East End clung to Selina Kyle like a saint's halo and was most easily detected by someone like the cashier who bore it himself. Life was a game in Gotham City. Everyone was always jockeying for a little position.
"And two coffees, with cream. Make it separate checks. One after the other."
At the rate she was going through her drug-house cash, Selina figured she'd have to take something from Eddie's apartment. She'd burn that bridge when she got to it. For the moment she had the upper hand with the cashier. His eyes smoldered and she knew he'd clout her if he dared, but he didn't dare. Instead he slunk over to the refrigerator case where tired wedges of chocolate pie were mummified in shrink wrap.
In Gotham's game you didn't lose points for making enemies, so long as you never saw them again. Selina turned her attention back to the Keystone and ignored the pies when they arrived.
The gargoyle couldn't perch on that stool twenty-four hours a day. Selina thought about coming back in the evening. She discarded the thought. Maybe the management had been lucky: maybe they didn't know a good doorman from a dead doornail. Then again, maybe they did, and if they did, and they'd left him on the day shift, she didn't want to tangle with the night-shift gorilla.
An oily sheen spread across the surface of the tepid coffee. The chocolate pie oozed across the crockery plates. The Keystone doorman never missed an opportunity to greet or challenge everyone who approached his domain. He seemed to know everyone and paused to chat with them. Conversation didn't dull his vigilance. There'd be no sneaking behind him while his head was tucked inside an overpriced baby carriage.
Selina had just begun to despair when a young man in a messenger-service jumpsuit skated around the corner, trailing a cloud of bright-colored, helium-filled balloons. The sidewalk traffic stopped as he wrangled the balloons under the Keystone awning and rolled to a stop in front of the doorman. Their animated conversation was punctuated and obscured by the bobbing balloons. The messenger removed his skates reluctantly, but he and the balloons finally got into the lobby.
She held her breath; the gargoyle went back to his stool without stopping by the intercom. He didn't always live by the rules. He was human.
Selina knew a place in the East End that did a backroom business in secondhand uniforms, cash on the counter, no questions asked. Leaving the greasy spoon, without leaving a tip, she headed downtown. She was definitely going to have to lift something from Eddie's apartment, so she stopped by her apartment and dropped off the garish scarf while picking up Catwoman's lockpicks. A few hours later, carrying an excessively large floral arrangement and wearing a shapeless polyester gabardine jumpsuit that pinched in the crotch, she reapproached the Keystone awning. She kept the flowers where they'd obscure her face, and waited for the gargoyle to scuttle forward.
"Flowers for Miz D'Onofreo."
"Eh? No one here wi' that name."
Selina's heart sank, but she didn't panic. "Not again. They do this to me every bleeding day." She fumbled with the bouquet and read the address from the card. The doorman shook his head and held his ground. Selina played her final card: "Lobb. Eddie Lobb. You got an Edward Lobb here? His name's on the receipt, maybe he's got someone staying with him."
Recognition in the gargoyle's eyes, but he said nothing.
"Give me a break, okay? I'm on the street, man, if I lose this job. Just let me take 'em upstairs." Selina did a credible imitation of despair. "Come on. It's not like I'm going to bust in and steal something, for chrissake."
It was her will against his in the lingering mist and afternoon traffic. An intense young man with designer hair, wire-rim glasses, and the gray flannel three-piece uniform of the brokerage trade climbed out of a cab and demanded to know if his graphite tennis racket had arrived. Another taxi rolled up and began disgorging luggage. A matron with too much makeup and a poodle came through the lobby without slowing down. She expected the doorman to get the door open in time.
Selina hadn't chosen rush-hour by accident. The doorman pulled in his will.
"I give you ten minutes. Then I call the cops."
Selina's smile was pure and honest. "Ten minutes. Right. Apartment five-cee. Ten minutes. Got it." She graciously opened the door for the poodle matron.
"Seven-gee!" the doorman corrected. "Seven-gee. Mister Lobb in seven-gee." But he left her holding the door while he looked for the tennis racket.
Selina would have preferred to take the stairs. She could always get a better grasp of the guts of a building from the stairwells than from an elevator, but the doorman was tracking her with his ears. He'd notice if the fire door was opened.
Eddie Lobb turned out to live one floor down from the penthouse, at the far end of a well-lit, carpeted corridor. Selina paused. She pretended to have trouble knowing which corridor to take---in case another tenant was spying through his peephole---but she was actually aligning the interior she could now see with the exterior she remembered. After putting a mental check beside a corner cluster of windows, she headed for the door and rang the bell.
She always rang the bell. There was no better way to know if no one was home. She wouldn't mind getting a close look at Eddie Lobb anyway, especially when she said the flowers were for Rose. She rang the bell a second time and studied the array of hardware on the door.
Locks were big business in Gotham City, and, as Catwoman, Selina Kyle had seen them all, from ancient skeleton keys to techno-toy motion detectors and lasers. She'd pegged the Keystone as a two-locks-per-door sort of place, heavy on deadbolts and double cylinders. People who put their faith in cold-forged steel rather than dazzling electronics. A glace up and down the corridor confirmed her overall opinion. Eddie Lobb, with a pair of digital keyless locks and evidence of fiber-optic sensors, was seriously out of step with his neighbors.
Maybe he had more to protect.
Maybe he had more to hide.