Burglars Can't Be Choosers (4 page)

I scampered up four flights to the top floor and took deep breaths until my heartbeat returned to normal. Rod’s door had 5-R on it and I went and stood in front of it and listened. The door at the other end of the hallway, 5-F, had no light shining underneath it. I knocked on Rod’s door and waited, and knocked again, and then I took out my burglar’s tools.

Rod had three locks on his door. Sometime in the past an amateur had dug at the frame around one of them with a chisel or screwdriver, but it didn’t look as though he’d accomplished anything. Rod’s locks included a fancy Medeco cylinder, a
Segal police lock with a steel bar wedged against the door from within, and a cheap piece of junk that was just there for nuisance value. I knocked off the third lock first to get it out of the way, then tackled the Segal. It’s good insurance against a junkie kicking the door in and it’s not easy to pick but I had the tools and the touch and it didn’t keep me waiting long. The tumblers fell into place and the steel bar slid aside in its channel and that left the Medeco.

The Medeco’s the one they advertise as pick-proof and of course that’s errant nonsense, there is no such thing, but it’s a pardonable exaggeration. What it meant was that I had to do two jobs at once. Suppose you’re a cryptographer and you’re given a message which was encoded from an original in Serbo-Croat, a language you don’t happen to speak. Now you have to crack the cypher and learn the language at the same time. That’s not exactly what I had to do with the Medeco but it’s as close an explanation as I can give you.

It was tricky and I made some mistakes. At one point I heard a door open and I almost had a seizure but the door was on the floor below and I relaxed again. Sort of. Then I tried again and screwed up again, and then I just plain hit it right and the message turned out to be “Open sesame.” I popped inside and locked all three locks, just like the old maid in all the stories.

The first thing I did was walk through the whole apartment and make sure there weren’t any bodies in it but my own. This wasn’t that much of a chore. There was one large room with a bookcase set up as a sort of room divider screening off a sleeping alcove. The kitchen was small and uninviting. The bathroom was smaller and less inviting, and roaches scampered when I turned the light on. I turned it off again and went back to the living room.

A homey place, I decided. Well-worn furniture, probably purchased secondhand, but it was all comfortable enough. A scattering of plants, palms and philodendrons and others whose names I did not know. Posters on the walls, not pop posters of Bogart and Che but the sort printed to herald gallery openings, Miró and Chagall and a few others as unknown to me as some of the plants. I decided, all in all, that Rod had fairly good taste for an actor.

The rug was a ratty maroon carpet remnant about twelve feet square, its binding coming loose on one side and entirely absent on another, its threads quite bare in spots and patches, its overall appearance decidedly unwholesome. Next time, I thought, I’ll bring along the bloody Bokhara.

And then I started to shake.

The Bokhara wasn’t bloody, of course. Loren
had merely fainted upon it. But the rug, in the bedroom I had not seen, presumably was. Bloody, that is.

Who had killed the man in the bedroom? For that matter, who was the man in the bedroom? J. Francis Flaxford himself? According to my information he was supposed to be away from home from eight-thirty at the latest to midnight at the earliest. But if the whole point of that information had been to put me on the spot where I could get tagged for homicide, well, I couldn’t really put too much stock in it.

A man. Dead. In the bedroom. And someone had beaten his head in, and he was still warm to the touch.

Terrific.

If I’d only had the sense to give the whole apartment a looksee the minute I went into it, then it would have been an entirely different story. One quick reconnaissance mission and I’d have seen the late lamented and been on my way. By the time the illustrious team of Kirschmann and Kramer made their entrance I’d have been back in my own little tower of steel and glass, sipping Scotch and smiling southward at the World Trade Center. Instead I was a fugitive from what passes for justice these days, the very obvious murderer of a murderee I’d never even met in the first place. And, because my presence of mind had been conspicuous by its absence,
I’d reacted to things by (a) using brute force and (b) scramming. So that if there’d ever been any chance of convincing people I’d never killed anything more biologically advanced than cockroaches and mosquitoes, that chance had vanished without a trace.

I paced. I opened cupboards looking for liquor and found none. I went back, tested another chair, decided the one I’d already sat in was more comfortable, then rejected both chairs and stretched out on the couch.

And thought about the curious little man who’d gotten me into this mess in the first place.

H
e was a thick-bodied man built rather like a bloated bowling pin. While he wasn’t terribly stout, they’d been out of waists when he reached the front of the line that day. He must have had to guess where to put his belt each morning.

His face was round and jowly, with most of its features generally subdued. His eyes came closer to prominence than anything else. They were large and watchful and put me in mind of a pair of Hershey’s Chocolate Kisses. (With the foil removed.) They were just that shade of brown. His hair was flat black and perfectly straight and he was balding in the middle, his hairline receding almost to the top of his skull. I suppose he was in his late forties. It’s good I’m a burglar; I could never make a living guessing age and weight at a carnival.

I first met him on a Thursday night in a drinking
establishment called The Watering Whole. (I’m sure whoever named it took great pride in his accomplishment.) The Whole, which in this instance is rather less than the sum of its parts, is a singles joint on Second Avenue in the Seventies, and unless you own a piece of it and want to inspect the register receipts there’s really only one reason to go there. I had gone for that very reason, but that evening the selection of the accessible young ladies was as dazzling as the dinner menu on a lifeboat. I’d decided to move on as soon as my wineglass was empty when a voice at my elbow spoke my last name softly.

There was something faintly familiar about the voice. I turned, and there was the man I’ve described, his eyes just failing to meet my own. My first thought was that no, he was not a cop, and for this fact I was grateful. My second thought was that his face, like his voice, was familiar. My third thought was that I didn’t know him. I don’t recall my fourth thought, though it’s possible I had one.

“Want to talk to you,” he said. “Something you’ll be interested in.”

“We can talk here,” I said. “Do I know you?”

“No. I guess we can talk here at that. Not much of a crowd, is there? I guess they do better on weekends.”

“Generally,” I said, and because it was that sort of a place, “Do you come here often?”

“First time.”

“Interesting. I don’t come here too often myself. Maybe once or twice a month. But it’s interesting that we should run into each other here, especially since you seem to know me and I don’t seem to know you. There’s something familiar about you, and yet—”

“I followed you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“We coulda talked in your neighborhood, one of those joints on Seventy-second where you hang out, but I figure the man’s gotta live there. You follow me? Why shit where the man eats, that’s the question I ask myself.”

“Ah,” I said, as if that cleared things up.

Which it emphatically did not. You doubtless understand, having come into all this in roundabout fashion, but I had not the slightest idea what this man wanted. Then the bartender materialized before us and I learned that what my companion wanted was a tall Scotch and soda, and after that drink had been brought and my own wineglass replenished I learned what else he wanted.

“I want you to get something for me,” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

“See, I know who you are, Rhodenbarr.”

“So it would seem. At least you know my name, and I don’t know yours, and—”

“I know how you make your money. Not to beat against the bush, Rhodenbarr, but what you are is a burglar.”

I glanced nervously around the room. His voice had been pitched low and the conversational level in the bar was high, but his tone had about it the quality of a stage whisper and I checked to see if our conversation had caught anyone’s interest. Apparently it had not.

I said, “Of course I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I suggest you cut the shit.”

“Oh,” I said, and took a sip of wine. “All right. Consider it cut.”

“There’s this thing I want you to steal for me. It’s in a certain apartment and I’ll be able to tell you when you can get in. The building’s got security, meaning a doorman around the clock, but there’s no alarm system or nothing. Just the doorman.”

“That’s easy,” I said, responding automatically. Then I gave my shoulders a shake-shake-shake. “You seem to know things about me,” I said.

“Like what you do for a living.”

“Yes, just that sort of thing. You should also know that I work alone.”

“I didn’t figure to go in there with you, kid.”

“And that I find my own jobs.”

He frowned. “What I’m doing is handing you a piece of cake, Rhodenbarr. I’m talking about you
work an hour and you pick up five thousand dollars. That’s not bad for an hour’s work.”

“Not bad at all.”

“You do that forty hours a week, just go and figure the money you’d make.”

“Two hundred thousand a week,” I said promptly.

“Whatever the hell it comes to.”

“That’s what it comes to, all right. Annually, let me think now, annually that would come to ten million dollars a year. That’s with two weeks off in the summer.”

“Whatever.”

“Or a week in the summer and a week in the winter. That’s probably the best way to do it. Or I could take my vacation in the spring and fall to avail myself of low off-season rates. Though I suppose the savings wouldn’t be significant if I was earning ten million dollars a year. Hell, I’d probably start blowing the bucks left and right. Flying first class. Taking cabs all the time. Buying the Mondavi zinfandel by the case instead of a niggling bottle at a time, and of course you save ten percent by the case but it’s not a true savings because you always find yourself drinking more than you would otherwise. You’ve probably noticed that yourself. Of course the pressure might get to me, anyway, but then I’d have those two weeks of vacation to let it all out, and—”

“Funny,” he said.

“Just nerves.”

“If you say so. You done talking for a minute? I want you to do this thing for me. There’s something I need and it’s a cinch for you to get it for me. And my price is fair, don’t you think?”

“That depends on what you want me to steal. If it’s a diamond necklace worth a quarter of a million dollars, then I’d have to say five thousand is coolie’s wages.”

His face moved into what I suppose was meant as a smile. It failed to light up the room. “No diamond necklace,” he said.

“Fine.”

“What you’ll get for me is worth five grand to me. It’s not worth nothing to nobody else.”

“What is it?”

“A box,” he said, and described it, but I’ve told you that part already. “I’ll give you the location, the apartment, everything, and for you it’s like picking up candy in the street.”

“I never pick up candy in the street.”

“Huh?”

“Germs.”

He waved the thought away with one of his little hands. “You know what I mean,” he said. “No more jokes, huh?”

“Why don’t you get it yourself?” He looked at me. “You know the apartment, the layout, everything.
You even know what you’re looking for, which is more than I know and more than I want to know. Why don’t you keep the five thousand in your pocket?”

“And pull the job myself?”

“Why not?”

He shook his head. “Certain things I don’t do,” he said. “I don’t take out my own appendix, I don’t cut my own hair, I don’t fix my own plumbing. Important things, things that need an expert’s touch, what I do is I go and find an expert.”

“And I’m your expert?”

“Right. You go through locks like grease through a goose. Or so I’m told.”

“Who told you?”

An elaborate shrug. “You just never remember where you hear a thing these days,” he said.

“I always remember.”

“Funny,” he said. “I never do. I got a memory with holes in it you could fall through.” He touched my arm. “Place is filling up. What do you say we take our business outside. We’ll walk up and down the street, we’ll work everything out.”

So we walked up and down the street, and though we didn’t pick up any candy we did work everything out. We settled our terms and established that I would keep my schedule flexible for the next week or so. It wouldn’t go more than that, he assured me.

He said, “I’ll be in touch, Rhodenbarr. Next time I see you I’ll give you the address and the time and everything you gotta know. Plus I’ll have your thousand in front.”

“I sort of thought you might let me have that now.”

“Haven’t got it on me. You never want to carry heavy cash on the street at night. All these muggers, these junkies.”

“The streets aren’t safe.”

“It’s a jungle.”

“You could let me have the address now,” I suggested. “And the name of the man who won’t be home when I crack his crib. Give me that much time to check things out.”

“You’ll have all the time you need.”

“I just thought—”

“Anyway, I don’t happen to have the name or address at the moment. I told you about my memory, didn’t I?”

“Did you?”

“I coulda sworn I did.”

I shrugged. “It must have slipped my mind.”

Later that night I spent some time wondering why I’d agreed to do the job. I decided I had two motives. The money was first, and it was certainly not trivial. The certainty of five thousand dollars, plus the security of having the job already cased, outweighed
the two-in-the-bush of setting up a job cold and then having to haggle with a fence.

But there was more to it than money. Something about my shmoo-shaped friend suggested that it would be unwise to refuse him. It’s not that there was anything in particular I feared would happen to me if I told him to go roll his hoop. It just seemed unlikely to be a good idea.

And then there was curiosity. Who the hell
was
he? If I didn’t know him, why did he seem so damned familiar? More important, how did he know about me? And what was his little game all about in the first place? If he was a pro, recognizing me as another pro, why were we circling each other like tropical birds in an involved mating ritual? I didn’t necessarily expect ever to learn the answers to all these questions, but I felt they might turn up if I saw the thing through, and I didn’t have any other work I was dying to do, and the money I had in reserve wouldn’t last forever, and…

There’s a luncheonette I go to once or twice a month on Amsterdam Avenue between Seventy-fourth and Seventy-fifth. The owner is a Turk with an intimidating moustache and the food he serves is every bit as Turkish, if less intimidating. I was sitting at the counter two days after my first meeting with my new-found friend. I’d just finished polishing off an exceptional bowl of lentil soup,
and while I waited for my stuffed grape leaves I glanced at a selection of meerschaum pipes in a glass case on the wall. The man with the moustache goes home to Turkey every spring and returns with a satchel full of pipes, which he insists are better than anything you can buy over the counter at Dunhill’s. I don’t smoke a pipe so I’m not really tempted, but whenever I eat there I look at the pipes and try to figure out if there’s a pipe smoker on earth I’m a close enough friend to so that I can buy him one of these beauties. There never is.

“My old man used to smoke a meerschaum,” said a familiar voice beside me. “Only pipe he owned and he musta smoked it five, six times a day. Over the years the thing turned as black as the deuce of spades. He had this special glove he always wore when he smoked it. Just on the one hand, the hand he held the pipe in. He’d always sit in the same chair and just smoke that pipe real slow and easy. Had a special fitted case he kept it in when he wasn’t smoking it. Case was lined in blue velvet.”

“You do turn up at odd times.”

“Then one day it broke,” he went on. “I don’t know whether he dropped it or set it down hard or it just got too old or whatever the hell happened. My memory, you know.”

“Like a sieve.”

“The worst. What’s funny, the old man never
got hisself a new pipe. Not a meerschaum, not a briar, not anything. Just quit the habit like it was no habit at all. When I think about it what I always come up with is he just never believed anything would happen to that pipe, and then when it did he realized that nothing on earth lasts forever, and if that was the case he figured the hell with it and he wouldn’t smoke anymore. And he didn’t.”

“There’s a reason you’re telling me this story.”

“No reason at all. Just that it came to mind looking at those pipes there. I don’t want to interrupt your meal, Rhodenbarr.”

“One might say you’ve already done that.”

“So I’ll be on the corner gettin’ my shoes shined. I don’t guess you’ll be too long, will you?”

“I guess not.”

He left. I ate my grape leaves. I hadn’t intended to have dessert but I decided the hell with it and ate a small piece of too-sweet baklava and sipped a thick cup of inky Turkish coffee. I thought about having a second cup but figured it would keep me awake for four years and I didn’t want that. So I paid the man with the moustache and walked to the shoeshine stand on the corner.

My friend told me everything I’d always wanted to know about J. Francis Flaxford and his blue leather box. If anything, he told me more than I wanted to know without answering any of my more important questions.

At one point I asked him his own name. He slid his soft brown eyes across my forehead and treated me to a look of infinite disappointment.

“Now I could tell you a name,” he said, “but then what would you know that you don’t know now? Not too much chance that it would be a real name, is there?”

“Not too much, no.”

“So why should we make complications for ourselves? All you got to know is where and when to get the box, which we just went over, and how and where to give it to me so you can get the other four grand.”

“You mean we’ll plan that in advance? I thought I’d just go about my business and one of these days you’d turn up breathing over my shoulder at the delicatessen. Or maybe you’d be in the basement laundry room when I went down to throw my socks in the dryer.”

He sighed. “You’ll be inside Flaxford’s place nine, nine-thirty. You’ll be outta there by eleven, eleven-thirty the latest. Can’t take too long to take a box out of a desk. You’ll want to go home, have a drink, take a shower, change your clothes, that kind of thing.” And drop off burglar tools and such, along with whatever sundry swag I might happen to acquire. “So you take yourself some time, and then what you do, you go to a place nice and convenient to your apartment. There’s a bar
on Broadway and I think it’s Sixty-fourth Street, called Pandora’s. You know it?”