The Door

Howard Vane was a lawyer of a kind that Boston still manufactures in small numbers, mostly for its own use. He was long and lean and dry, and he had never in his life been lit up by a smile.

He was awkward in company, backward with affection, and hard on himself — drank cheap whiskey alone to mortify a taste for better — and he had not crossed the door of a theater in twenty years. But if the wine was good and the hour was late, something human would come up in his eyes and sit there a while, and though it never found its way into his conversation, it found its way into his life. He used to say that he would rather lose a man to his own choices than to his own advice. He said it first at twenty-nine, to a cousin who had emptied his own mother's savings account, standing in a parking lot in the rain with the man's coat over his arm; and he was still saying it at sixty, to people who had stopped listening. It was why he was, again and again, the last respectable friend a falling man had, and the last one a falling man lied to.

His friends were mostly the ones he had been given. Family, or men he had known since school, or the ones who had simply been standing next to him for thirty years. Among these was Ray Sandoval, a distant cousin of his, who had done well out of commercial real estate and knew everybody in the city and could not have passed an exam on any subject whatsoever.

It puzzled people what those two found to say to each other. They were seen on Sundays, walking, and they mostly did not talk at all; they looked, according to witnesses, profoundly bored, and greeted any third party with visible relief. And yet they counted those walks the best two hours of the week, and would move dinner, and would move work, to keep them.

One Sunday in late autumn their walk took them down a narrow street in Cambridge, not far from the river.

The street was small and quiet in the way that some busy streets are quiet on a Sunday. During the week it did a brisk trade — coffee, dry cleaning, a locksmith, a shop that sold nothing but paper — and all of it shut now, and all of it recently painted, so that the whole block sat there in the gray light looking scrubbed and pleased with itself, a bright tooth in a tired mouth.

Two doors from the corner, the row was broken by the mouth of an alley. And just there, shoved forward onto the sidewalk, stood a squat two-story building that seemed to have been built by someone who resented it. No windows on the ground floor. Upstairs, one long blind face of discolored brick. Downstairs, one door. The door had no bell and no knocker, no number, no handle to speak of, and it had been painted so long ago that the paint had gone the color of a bruise. Someone had scratched a name into it with a key and then scratched it out again. Nobody had washed the sidewalk in front of it in twenty years.

Sandoval lifted his umbrella and pointed.

“Did you ever notice that door?” he said. Vane said he had. “It is connected in my mind,” said Sandoval, “with a very strange story.”

“Is it,” said Vane, in a slightly different voice.

“It was like this,” said Sandoval. “I was coming home from nowhere, about three in the morning, last February, and the street was empty the way it gets — every lamp lit, every window dark, nobody in the world but you. And I got into that state where a man starts wishing he'd see a cop, just to see one. Then I saw two figures at once. A small man, walking east, going at a good clip. And a girl, maybe eight years old, running as hard as she could down the cross street. They met at the corner. It was nothing, it was an accident, it should have been nothing. But he walked over her. Calmly. Stepped on her and kept going, and left her screaming on the pavement.”

He stopped, and looked at the door again.

“It sounds like nothing when you say it. It was obscene. It wasn't a man walking, it was a machine. I yelled, I ran, I got a hand on him and brought him back. There were already six people around the child by then, all of them family, all of them ready to tear him apart. He stood in the middle of them and never changed expression. That was the thing I couldn't get past. He was frightened, I could see he was frightened, and he carried it off like a man who had done this before. When the doctor got there — a woman from the clinic on the corner — she went white. She looked at him twice and her hands started shaking. I have been angry in my life. I have never seen anyone become angry the way that doctor became angry, and she never said a word.” Sandoval turned his umbrella over in his hands. “I went back to the clinic the following week, because it had been bothering me. She had never seen the man before in her life. She could not tell me why she had wanted to kill him.”

“And then?”

“And then we did what people do. We told him we would ruin him; we told him we would find his name and put it on the news and make sure he lost everything he had. He listened to that the way you listen to weather. Then he said — and I have thought about the wording ever since — he said, ‘If you want to make something out of an accident, I can't stop you. Nobody wants a scene. Name a number.’ And we named one. Fourteen thousand, for the child. He wanted to argue. Then he decided not to argue, and he went in through that door with a key — his own key, mind you, out of his own pocket — and came back with three hundred in cash and a check for the rest.”

“A check.”

“A check,” said Sandoval, “drawn on a real account, at a real bank, signed by a friend of yours.”

The two men walked on a little way in silence.

“I told him, standing there at three in the morning, that a man does not walk into a basement door and come out with somebody else's check for fourteen thousand dollars. And he said — cheerful, polite, absolutely at ease — ‘Set your mind at rest. I'll stay with you until the bank opens and cash it myself.’ And he did. We all went to my office and sat up till dawn, and at nine we walked into the branch on a body, the three of us and the child's father, and I handed over the check and said I believed it was a forgery. It wasn't. It was as good as gold.”

“And the name on it was Adrian Kessler's,” said Vane.

Sandoval stopped walking. “Then it is the name I know,” he said. “And the man who signed it is a philanthropist, and a trustee of two hospitals, and about as clean as anybody in this city. Which is the part I cannot make work. Blackmail, I suppose. An honest man paying, and paying through the nose, for something he did when he was young.” He shrugged. “That's what I call the place. The Payment Plan.”

“And you never asked about the man who walked over the child?”

“Not a question,” said Sandoval. “I have a rule. The more a thing smells, the less I ask. You start pulling on a thread like that, and the next thing you know, some perfectly innocent man is ruined in his own front yard and his family has to move to Florida.”

“That's a good rule,” said Vane.

“It is a good rule.”

“Nevertheless,” said Vane, “I would like the name.”

Sandoval looked at him, and understood that something had already happened, and that he was late to it. “His name is Voss,” he said.

“Voss,” said Vane. “What does he look like?”

“That's the trouble. I can't tell you. There is something wrong with him and I do not know what it is. I have never disliked a man so much at a glance, and I could not name a single thing about him out of the way. He is small. He is — I want to say he is deformed, but he is not deformed; you simply know, looking at him, that something was left out or put in wrong. I have seen him since, twice, from a distance, and it is the same each time. I know the face. I cannot describe the face.”

Vane said, quietly, that he was sure Voss had used a key.

“He had a key,” said Sandoval, and stopped walking. “And I did not tell you the last part. He still has it. I saw him use it not ten days ago.”