Joe had a natural talent for people like this. He just slowed himself down and became very official and very dense; it drove the hurry-up types right up the wall. Joe gave this one a suspicious look and said, “You Eastpoole?”
Eastpoole made an impatient little hand gesture, brushing a minor annoyance away. “Yes,” he said, “I’m Raymond Eastpoole. What can I do for you?”
“We got a complaint,” Joe said, taking his time about it. “Items ejected from the windows.”
Eastpoole didn’t believe it, and made no attempt to hide the fact. Frowning, he said, “From these offices?”
Joe nodded. “That’s the report we got,” he said. He was showing that nothing would either ruffle him or hurry him up. He said, “We want to check out the northeast corner of the building, all the windows over on that side.”
Eastpoole would rather have had nothing to do with them or their complaint or anything else concerned with today. He glanced over at the guard behind the counter, but there was obviously no help there, so finally he gave an angry shrug and said, “Very well. I’ll accompany you myself. Come along.”
Joe nodded, still taking his time. “Thank you,” he said, but not as though anybody had done anybody any favors. His style was that they were all equals in this room. It was a style guaranteed to rub somebody like Raymond Eastpoole the wrong way.
Which it did. Eastpoole turned away, to lead them on their tour of the northeast corner of the building, and then turned back to frown at the guard again and say, “Where’s your partner?”
The guard hesitated, showing his embarrassment. And when he lied, he did a lousy job of it, saying, “Uh, he’s, uh, he’s to the men’s room.”
Eastpoole couldn’t show his anger in the cops’ direction, but he could aim it at the guard. His voice taut with fury, he said, “You mean he’s leaning out a window somewhere, watching the parade.”
The guard was blinking, scared of this bastard. “He’ll be right back, Mr. Eastpoole,” he said.
Eastpoole thumped a fist onto the counter. “We pay,” he said, “for two men at this counter, twenty-four hours a day.”
“He just went off a minute ago,” the guard said. He was really sweating.
Partly to get the guard off the hook, and partly because they had their own schedule to think about, Joe broke in at that point, saying, “We’d like to check things out, Mr. Eastpoole, before anything else gets dropped.”
Eastpoole would clearly have preferred to keep nagging at the guard. He glowered at Joe, glowered at the guard, and then mulishly gave in, turned on his heel and led the way from the room. They followed him, Joe going first and then Tom coming along behind. Passing through the doorway, Tom glanced back and saw the guard hurriedly reaching for the phone; to call his partner to haul ass away from the window, no doubt.
They walked down a fairly long corridor, and then through several large offices, each of them full of desks and filing cabinets, and all of them lined with windows along one wall. The desks were all unoccupied, and people were standing looking out of all the windows.
They hadn’t heard the drums or the music from the time they’d gotten into the elevator to come up here, but now the sound was with them again, and they walked automatically to the rhythm of the drums. Tension seemed to shimmer upward from the street outside those windows like heat waves off asphalt paving in the summertime. Both of them were tense again, walking along in Eastpoole’s wake, the drums echoing in their bloodstreams.
And yet, they still hadn’t reached the point of no return. They could still even at this late date change their minds and not go through with it. They could do an inspection tour of the windows with Eastpoole, find nothing, give him a lecture, and walk out. Return the squad car, drive home, forget the whole thing; it was still possible. But any second now, it would stop being possible for good and all.
Twice, as they walked along, they saw TV cameras mounted high on the wall in the corner of a room. The camera would turn slowly back and forth, like a fan, angled shallowly downward so as to get a good view of the entire room. These two were among the six that showed up on the screens out by the reception area. And on other sets of screens on this floor, as well. One of the big advantages of this brokerage for Tom and Joe was that their check into the security systems showed there wasn’t any closed-circuit TV communication to any other floor; it was all confined to this one level.
From the office with the second camera in it, they passed on to a short empty corridor. They entered it, and Joe made the decision that moved them finally over the line, making them criminals in fact as well as in theory. And he did it with two words: “Hold it,” he said, and reached out to take Eastpoole by the elbow and stop him from walking on.
Eastpoole stopped, and you could see he was offended at being touched. When he turned around to find out what the problem was, he jerked his elbow free again. “What is it?” he said. He sounded very petulant for a grown man.
Joe looked around the corridor and said, “Is there a camera in here? Can that guard check this area?”
“No,” Eastpoole said. “There’s no need for it. And there are no windows here, if you’ll notice.” He half-turned away again, gesturing at the far end of the corridor. “What you want is—”
Joe put an edge in his voice, saying, “We know what we want. Let’s go to your office.”
“My office?” Eastpoole didn’t have the first idea what was going on. Staring at them both, he said, “What for?”
Tom said, “We don’t have to show you guns, do we?” He spoke calmly, not wanting Eastpoole to be so upset he’d lose control.
Eastpoole kept staring. He said, “What is this?”
“It’s a robbery,” Tom said. “What do you think it is?”
“But—” Eastpoole gestured at them, at their uniforms. “You two—”
“You can’t tell a book by its cover,” Tom said.
Joe poked Eastpoole’s arm, prodding him a little. “Come on,” he said, “let’s move. To your office.”
Eastpoole, starting to get over his shock, said, “You can’t believe you can get away with—”
Joe gave him a shove that pushed him into the corridor wall. “Stop wasting our time,” he said.“I’m feeling very tense right now, and when I’m tense sometimes I hit people.”
Eastpoole’s skin was turning pale under the eyes and around the mouth. He almost looked as though he might faint, and yet there was still arrogance in him, he might still be stupid enough to talk back. Tom, moving forward between Joe and Eastpoole, being the calm and reasonable one, said, “Come on, Mr. Eastpoole, take it easy. You’re insured, and it isn’t your job to deal with people like us. Be sensible. Do what we want, and let it go.”
Eastpoole was nodding before Tom had finished talking. “That’s just what I’ll do,” he said. “And later, I’ll see to it you get the maximum penalty of the law.”
“You do that,” Joe said.
Tom, turning to Joe, said, “It’s all right, now. Mr. Eastpoole’s going to be sensible.” He looked back. “Aren’t you, Mr. Eastpoole?”
Eastpoole was looking sullen, but subdued. Half-gritting his teeth, he looked at Tom and said, “What do you want?”
“To go to your office. You lead the way.”
Joe said, “And don’t be cute.”
“He won’t be cute,” Tom said. “Go ahead, Mr. Eastpoole.”
Eastpoole turned and started walking again, and they both followed him. It’s such an old tried-and-true technique, one partner hard and one partner soft, that it’s become a cliché in the television police shows. But the fact is, it works. You give a guy one person to be friends with and one person to be scared of, and between the two you’ll most of the time get whatever you want.