Burglars Can't Be Choosers (7 page)

“I suppose so.”

She walked half a dozen steps in one direction, then retraced them, then turned and began the process anew. It was a reasonably good Caged Lion impression. “I can’t just sit around,” she said. “I get stir crazy.”

“You’d hate prison.”

“God! How do people stand it?”

“A day at a time,” I said. “I’d take you out for a night on the town, Ruth, but—”

“No, you have to stay here,” she said. “I realize that.” She picked up one of the papers, turned pages. “Maybe there’s something on television,” she said, and it turned out that there was a Warner Brothers gangster thing on WPIX. The whole crew was in it—Robinson, Lorre, Greenstreet, and a ton of great old character actors whose names I’ve never bothered to learn but whose faces I’d never forget. She sat on the couch next to me and we watched the whole thing, and eventually I did manage to put an arm around her and we sort of cuddled, doing a little low-level necking during the commercials.

When the last villain got his and they rolled the final credits she said, “See? The bad guys always lose in the end. We’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“Life,” I announced, “is not a B picture.”

“Well, it ain’t no De Mille epic either, boss. Things’ll work out, Bernie.”

“Maybe.”

The eleven o’clock news came on and we watched it until they got to the part we were interested in. There were no new developments in the Flaxford murder, and the report they gave was just
an abbreviated version of what we’d seen a few hours earlier. When they cut to an item about a drug bust in Hunts Point Ruth went over to the set and turned it off.

“I guess I’ll go now,” she said.

“Go?”

“Home.”

“Where’s that?”

“Bank Street. Not far from here.”

“You could stick around,” I suggested. “There’s probably something watchable on the tube.”

“I’m pretty tired, actually. I was up early this morning.”

“Well, you could, uh, sleep here,” I said. “As far as that goes.”

“I don’t think so, Bernie.”

“I hate to think of you walking home alone. At this hour and in this neighborhood—”

“It’s not even midnight yet. And this is the safest neighborhood in the city.”

“It’s sort of nice having you around,” I said.

She smiled. “I really want to go home tonight,” she said. “I want to shower and get out of these clothes—”

“So?”

“—and I have to feed my cats. The poor little things must be starving.”

“Can’t they open a can?”

“No, they’re hopelessly spoiled. Their names are Esther and Mordecai. They’re Abyssinians.”

“Then why did you give them Hebrew names?”

“What else would I call them, Haile and Selassie?”

“That’s a point.”

I followed her to the door. She turned with one hand on the knob and we kissed, and it was very nice. I really wanted her to stay, and she made a rather encouraging sound down deep in her throat and ground herself against me a little.

Then I let go of her and she opened the door and said, “See you tomorrow, Bernie.”

And left.

T
he subway wasn’t doing much business by the time I got onto it. I caught an uptown Eighth Avenue local at Fourteenth Street and there was only one other person in the car with me. That was the good news. The bad news is that he was a Transit Authority cop with an enormous revolver on his hip. He kept looking at me because there was nobody else for him to look at, and I just knew that he was going to figure out why I looked familiar. At any moment a light bulb would form in the air over his head and he would spring into action.

Except he never did. At Times Square we picked up some fellow travelers—a pair of off-duty nurses, an utterly wasted junkie—and that gave the cop someplace else to focus his eyes. Then at Fifty-ninth Street he got off, and a stop later it was my
turn. I climbed the stairs and emerged into the early morning air at Seventy-second and Central Park West and wondered what the hell I thought I was doing.

Earlier that evening I’d been completely comfortable sitting around Rod’s apartment with my eyes on the television set and my arm around Ruth. But once she was gone I began finding the place unbearable. I couldn’t sit still, couldn’t watch the tube, kept pacing around and getting increasingly twitchy. A little after midnight I took a shower, and when the prospect of putting on the same clothes seemed as appalling as you might imagine it would, I went through Rod’s closet and dresser to see what he’d left behind.

There wasn’t much I could use. Either he tended to take an awful lot of clothing on the road with him or he didn’t own much in the first place. I found a shirt I could wear, although I didn’t much want to, and a pair of navy blue stretch socks, but that was about the extent of it.

Then I came across the wig.

It was a blondish wig, long but not quite hippie in style. I put it on and checked myself out in the mirror and I was astonished at the transformation. The only problem was that it was a little too garish and drew a little too much attention, but that problem was solved when I found a cloth cap on a shelf in the closet. The cap softened the
effect of the wig and made it less of an attention-getter.

Anyone who knew me personally would recognize me, I decided. But a stranger passing me on the street would just see yellow hair and a cloth cap.

I told myself I was crazy. I took off the cap and the wig and sat down in front of the television set. After a few minutes the phone started to ring, and it went on ringing twenty-two times by actual count before the caller gave up or the service did what it was supposed to do. The phone had rung periodically during the day—Ruth almost answered it once—but it had never gone so long unattended.

At a quarter to one I put on the wig and the cap and got out of there.

From the subway I walked over to my apartment building. I’d taken the subway instead of a cab because I hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone on a one-to-one basis. Maybe on some level or other I was worried that I’d run into the cabbie who’d driven me around the night before. But once I had to walk those few blocks to my building I began wishing I’d done things the other way around. There were a lot of people on Seventy-second Street and it was brightly lit, and I’d lived in that neighborhood for several years. In the course of a short walk I saw
several people whom I recognized. I didn’t know their names but I’d seen them on the streets at one time or another, and it was logical to assume they’d seen me and could recognize me if they took a good long look at me. I tried to assume a posture and a rhythm of walking that was not my usual style. Maybe it helped. In any event, nobody seemed to notice me.

Finally I was standing in the shadows on the corner diagonally across the street from where I lived. I gazed up and found my window up there on the sixteenth floor facing south. My apartment. My little chunk of private space.

God knows it wasn’t much, two small rooms and a kitchen, an overpriced cubicle in a sterile modern building. The view was the only charm the place had. But it was home, dammit, and I’d been comfortable here.

All that was over now. Even if I got out of this mess (and I couldn’t really imagine how that could happen) I didn’t see how I could go on living here. Because now they all knew the horrible truth about that pleasant chap in 16-G. He was a burglar, for God’s sake. A criminal.

I thought of all the people I nodded to daily in the elevator, the women I’d exchanged pleasantries with in the laundry room, the doormen and hall porters, the super and the handyman. Mrs. Hesch, the chainsmoking old lady across the hall from
whom I could always borrow a cup of detergent. She was the only person there that I really knew, and I don’t suppose I knew her very well, but I was on amicable terms with all those people and I’d liked living among them.

Now I couldn’t go back there. Bernard Rhodenbarr, burglar. I’d have to move somewhere else, have to use some sort of alias to rent an apartment. Jesus, it’s hard enough functioning as a professional criminal, but when you have the added burden of notoriety you’re really up against it.

Could I possibly risk going upstairs? The midnight-to-eight doorman, a stout old fellow named Fritz, was on his post. I didn’t really think the cap and the wig would fool him. It was possible that a couple of bucks would blind him to his civic duty, but it was also possible that it would not, and the downside risk seemed disproportionate to the possible gain. On the other hand, there was a side entrance, a flight of stairs leading to the basement. They kept that entrance locked; you could get out through it from inside, and the super would unlock it for deliveries, but you couldn’t get in.

You
couldn’t get in.
I
could.

From the basement I could catch the self-service elevator straight upstairs, past the lobby to the sixteenth floor. And I could let myself out the same way, and I could carry with me a suitcase full of
clothes and my five thousand dollars in case money. If I did turn myself in, or if they grabbed me, I had to have money for a lawyer. And I wanted to have the money on me, not tucked away in an apartment that I wouldn’t be allowed to go to.

I fingered my ring of keys and picks, stepped out of the shadows and started to cross Seventy-first Street. Just as I reached the opposite corner a car pulled up in front of my building and parked at a hydrant. It was an ordinary late-model sedan but there was something about the nonchalance with which the driver dumped it next to the hydrant that shouted
cop
to me.

Two men got out of the car. I didn’t recognize them and there was nothing obviously coppish about their appearance. They were wearing suits and ties, but lots of people do that, not just plainclothes detectives.

I stayed on my side of West End Avenue. And sure enough they showed something to Fritz, and I stayed where I was, backing away from the curb, as a matter of fact, and placing myself alongside the stoop of a brownstone where I wouldn’t be noticeable. Anyone who noticed me would take me for a mugger and give me a wide berth.

I just stood there for a minute. Then it occurred to me that I’d like to have a look at my window, so I crossed back to the corner I’d occupied originally
and counted up to the sixteenth floor and over to the G apartment, and the light was on.

I stayed there for fifteen long minutes and the light went right on blazing away. I scratched my head, a dumb thing to do when you’re wearing a loose-fitting wig. I rearranged the wig and the cap and wondered what the bastards were doing in my apartment and just how long it would take them to do it.

Too long, I decided. And they’d be noisy, there being no reason for them to toss my place in silence, so that if I went in after them my neighbors might very well be sensitive to sounds, and…

The hell with it.

I walked for a while. I kept to residential streets and stayed away from streetlights, walking around and trying to figure out what to do next. Eventually I found myself just half a block from Pandora’s. I found a spot where I could watch the doorway without being terribly noticeable myself and I stood there until I got a cramp in my calf and became very much aware of a dryness in my throat. I don’t know just how long I stood there but it was long enough for eight or ten people to enter the saloon and about as many to leave. None of them was my little pear-shaped friend.

Maybe I’d seen him around the neighborhood. Maybe that was why he looked familiar to me.
Maybe I used to pass him regularly on the streets and his face and figure had registered on some sub-liminal level. Maybe he’d mentioned Pandora’s because it was his regular hangout and the first place that came to mind, even though he’d had no intention whatsoever of keeping our appointment.

Maybe he was inside there right now.

I don’t honestly think I believed this for a minute. But I was thirsty enough to grab at a straw if it meant I could grab at a beer. The faint possibility of his presence in the place enabled me to rationalize going inside myself.

And of course he wasn’t there, but the beer was good.

I didn’t stay there long, and when I left I had a bad couple of minutes. I was convinced someone was following me. I was heading south on Broadway and there was a man twenty or thirty yards back of me who I was sure had come out of the bar after me. I turned right at Sixtieth Street and so did he, and this didn’t do wonders for my morale.

I crossed the street and went on walking west. He stayed on his side of the street. He was a smallish chap and he wore a poplin windbreaker over dark slacks and a light shirt. I couldn’t see much of his face in that light and I didn’t want to stop and stare at him anyway.

Just before I reached Columbus Avenue he
crossed over to my side of the street. I turned downtown on Columbus, which becomes Ninth Avenue at about that point, and to the surprise of practically no one he turned the corner and followed me. I tried to figure out what to do. I could try to shake him, I could pop into a doorway and deck him when he came by, or I could just keep walking and see what he did.

I kept walking, and a block farther on he ducked into a saloon and that was the end of him. He was just another poor bastard looking for a drink.

I walked to Columbus Circle and took a subway home. Well, to my home away from home, anyway. This time I had less difficulty finding Bethune Street. It was right where I left it. I opened the downstairs door about as quickly as I could have managed if I had a key to it, scampered up the four miserable flights of stairs, and was in Rod’s apartment in no time at all. I had no trouble with the three locks because I hadn’t had a key to lock them with when I left. Only the spring lock was engaged, and I loided it with a strip of flexible steel, an operation that honestly takes less time than opening it with a key.

Then I fastened all the locks and went to bed. I hadn’t accomplished a thing and I’d taken any number of brainless chances, but all the same I lay there in Rod’s bed and felt pleased with myself. I’d
gone out on the street instead of hiding, I’d gone through the motions of taking some responsibility for myself.

It felt good.