The Door on Cherry Lane

Elias Corbin was a lawyer who looked like one. He was fifty-four, tall and dry, with a face that had been pressed flat by thirty years of reading other people's documents, and a manner so undemonstrative that strangers took him for cold until they needed him, at which point they took him for exactly the man they had been looking for. He drank gin when he was alone and water when he was not. He had never married. He had an office on Congress Avenue with his name and one other on the door, and a house in Clarksville that was too full of books, and a Sunday walk that he had kept for twenty years with his cousin twice removed, Jude Malloy.

Malloy was twenty-five years younger than Corbin, long-legged and weatherproof, and he sold old buildings to people who wanted to believe they were buying new ones. He knew Austin the way a man knows a house he was raised in. He knew which bridges were worth crossing in August and which were not, and he held the walker's superstition that any destination was improved by arriving on foot. They had little in common. Corbin knew this and did not mind it. He had made his friendships early and kept them the way he kept his furniture, for the length of time he had owned them rather than for any quality they revealed.

On the first Sunday in November, the weather turned. The night before had brought a hard frost, the first of the season, and the morning came up clear and cold, with a sky the color of a washed sheet. They met at the foot of the bridge at two o'clock, crossed the lake with their hands in their pockets, and went up through the university grounds and out along the wide street where the old houses stood behind their walls with their windows dark against the afternoon. Corbin talked about a trust he was drafting for a widow in Pflugerville who could not decide whether her son deserved anything. Malloy listened for a while and then said, "She'll leave it to the dog."

"She has no dog," Corbin said.

"She'll get one," said Malloy.

They turned off the wide street onto a lane.

The lane was not a street. It ran behind a row of properties that faced elsewhere, and it had no name that anyone used. There were trash bins set out in a line, and a loading dock with a steel lip, and a fire escape that climbed the brick of a building that had once been a warehouse and was now something else, though what it was could not be told from the lane. About halfway down, the wall on the left broke and showed a plain metal door.

The door was set flush in the brick, painted the color of dried blood, with a keypad on the jamb and no window and no sign. It was clean, which made it strange, because the lane around it was not clean. Graffiti climbed the neighboring walls; a shopping cart lay on its side in the weeds. The door itself had been scrubbed, or replaced, recently enough that the paint had not begun to chip.

"Did you ever notice that door?" Malloy asked, and when Corbin said that he had, "It's connected in my mind with a very odd story."

"Indeed," said Corbin, with a slight change of voice. "And what was that?"

"It was this way," said Malloy. "I was coming home from somewhere out past the airport, about three in the morning, a black winter night, and my way took me through a part of town where there was nothing to be seen but streetlights. Street after street, all lit up as if for a parade and all empty as a church. I got into that state of mind when a man listens and listens and begins to long for the sight of a police car. All at once I saw two figures. One was a small man stumping along at a good clip, and the other was a little girl, maybe eight years old, running as hard as she could down a cross street. They hit each other at the corner. It was an accident, and then it wasn't. The man stepped over her and kept walking."

"Over her," Corbin said.

"Over her," said Malloy. "She was on the ground screaming and he just stepped over her, like she was a grate in the sidewalk. I hollered, ran after him, and grabbed him by the collar. He came along without a struggle, cool as a cucumber. The girl's family came out, and the father, and a neighbor who said she'd called nine-one-one. The man stood in the middle of all of them with a kind of black sneering coolness. He was frightened, I could see that, but he carried it off like he was doing us a favor by standing there."

"What did he look like?" Corbin asked.

"He is not easy to describe," said Malloy. "There is something wrong with his appearance. Something displeasing. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn't specify the point. He's an extraordinary looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. It's not want of memory, because I can see him this moment."

The ambulance came, and the girl was not much the worse. The paramedic, a tired man with a strong Arkansas accent, said she was more frightened than hurt. But the crowd was not satisfied, and the man knew it. "Name your figure," he said at last, and Malloy named one. It was a stiff figure, and the man would have liked to argue, but there was something about the lot of them that meant business, and at last he struck.

"The next thing was to get the money," Malloy said, "and where do you think he carried us? To that place with the door. He tapped a code into that keypad, went in, and presently came back with a check for the balance, drawn payable to cash, signed with a name I can't mention, though it's one of the points of my story. It was a name at least very well known and often printed."

"The bank cashed it," said Corbin, not a question.

"Next morning, we all went down to the branch together, the paramedic, the girl's father, the man, and me. I handed over the check myself and said I had every reason to believe it was a forgery. Not a bit of it. The check was genuine."

"Tut-tut," said Corbin.

"I see you feel as I do," said Malloy. "Yes, it's a bad story. For my man was a fellow that nobody could have to do with, a really damnable man; and the person that drew the check is the very pink of the proprieties, celebrated too, and, what makes it worse, one of your fellows who do what they call good. Blackmail, I suppose. An honest man paying through the nose for some of the capers of his youth. Black Mail House is what I call the place with the door, in consequence. Though even that, you know, is far from explaining all."

He fell into a vein of musing, and Corbin let him muse. They walked on in silence for a while, and then Corbin asked, rather suddenly, "And you don't know if the drawer of the check lives there?"

"A likely place, isn't it?" said Malloy. "But I happen to have noticed his address. He lives somewhere on the west side."

"And you never asked about the place with the door?"

"No, sir. I had a delicacy. I feel very strongly about putting questions. You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on top of a hill, and away the stone goes, starting others, and presently some bland old bird, the last you would have thought of, is knocked on the head in his own back garden and the family have to change their name. No, sir. I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask."

"A very good rule, too," said Corbin.

"But I have studied the place for myself," Malloy continued. "It seems scarcely a house. There is no other door, and nobody goes in or out of that one but, once in a great while, the gentleman of my adventure. There are three windows on the mezzanine level looking out on the lane. They're always shut, but they're clean. And there's a vent fan that runs at odd hours, so somebody lives there or works there. And yet it's not so sure, because the buildings are packed together so tight about the lane that it's hard to say where one ends and another begins."

They walked on again in silence. Then Corbin said, "Malloy, that's a good rule of yours."

"Yes, I think it is," said Malloy.

"But for all that, there's one point I want to ask. I want to ask the name of that man who walked over the child."

"Well," said Malloy, "I can't see what harm it would do. It was a man of the name of Rook. Silas Rook."

"Hm," said Corbin. "What sort of a man is he to see?"

"He is not easy to describe," Malloy said again, and Corbin noticed that he did not add anything. He had described the man once, and the description had cost him something; he did not care to spend it twice.

"Are you sure he used the keypad?" Corbin asked at last.

"My dear sir," Malloy began, surprised out of himself.

"Yes, I know," said Corbin. "I know it must seem strange. The fact is, if I do not ask you the name of the other party, it is because I know it already. You see, Jude, your tale has gone home. If you have been inexact in any point, you had better correct it."

"I think you might have warned me," said Malloy, with a touch of sullenness. "But I have been pedantically exact. The fellow used the keypad, and what's more, he has the code still. I saw him use it not a week ago."

Corbin sighed deeply but said never a word. The young man presently resumed. "Here is another lesson to say nothing," he said. "I am ashamed of my long tongue. Let us make a bargain never to refer to this again."

"With all my heart," said Corbin. "I shake hands on that, Jude."

They walked the rest of the way in silence, and Corbin's silence was of the heavy kind. He knew the name on the check. He had drawn the will that went with it, or rather, he had refused to draw it and had watched the man who did. The will belonged to his oldest friend, Dr. Roland Vane, and it left everything Vane owned, in the event of his death or of his disappearance from ordinary life for a period exceeding three calendar months, to a young man named Silas Rook. Corbin had argued about that document until he was tired of his own voice. He had told Vane that the clause was an invitation, and Vane had told him, with a smile that Corbin had never quite forgiven, that he did not understand the situation and hoped he never would.

Now, standing in the cold lane with his hands in his pockets, Corbin understood that he had not been wrong to argue, and that the situation was worse than he had imagined, because the man who had trampled a child and paid her family with a certified check drawn on Roland Vane's account was the same man to whom Vane had promised everything he owned.