Burglars Can't Be Choosers (9 page)

I cut in right in the middle of a sentence. “Our fat friend,” I said. “Was he there?”

“No, I don’t think so. Not at the service and not at Pandora’s. That’s a pretty crummy bar, incidentally. It—”

“So you didn’t see him.”

“No, but—”

“Well,” I said. “
I
did.”

“A
n actor!”

“An actor,” I agreed. “I slept through most of the movie. I was just lucky that I woke up for his scene. There he was, looking back over the seat of his cab and asking James Garner where he wanted to go.
‘Where to, Mac?’
I think that was the very line I came in on, word for precious word.”

“And you recognized him just like that?”

“No question about it. It was the same man. The picture was filmed fifteen years ago and he’s not as young as he used to be, but who do you know that is? Same face, same voice, same build. He’s put on a few pounds since then, but who hasn’t? Oh, it’s him, all right. You’d know him if you saw him. As an actor, I mean. I must have watched him in hundreds of movies and TV
shows, playing a cabdriver or a bank teller or a minor hoodlum.”

“What’s his name?”

“Who knows? I’m rotten at trivia. And they didn’t run the list of credits at the end of the movie. I sat there waiting, and of course Garner never happened to hail that particular cab a second time, not that I really expected him to, and then there were no credits at the end. I guess they cut them a lot of the time when they show movies on television. And they don’t always have them in the first place, do they?”

“I don’t think so. Would he be listed anyway? If he didn’t say more than
‘Where to, Mac?’ ”

“Oh, he had other lines, Maybe half a dozen lines. You know, talking about the weather and the traffic, doing the typical New York cabbie number. Or at least what Hollywood thinks the typical New York cabbie number ought to be. Did a cabdriver ever say
‘Where to, Mac?’
to you?”

“No, but not that many people call me Mac. It’s funny. You said he seemed familiar to you and you couldn’t figure out where you saw him before.”

“I saw him on the screen. Over and over. That’s why even his voice was familiar.” I frowned. “That’s how I recognized him, Ruth. But how in the hell did he recognize me? I’m not an actor. Except in the sense that all the world’s a stage. Why
would an actor happen to know that Bernie Rhodenbarr is a burglar?”

“I don’t know. Maybe—”

“Rodney.”

“Huh?”

“Rod’s an actor.”

“So?”

“Actors know each other, don’t they?”

“Do they? I don’t know. I suppose some of them do. Do burglars know each other?”

“That’s different.”

“Why is it different?”

“Burglary is solitary work. Acting is a whole lot of people on a stage or in front of a camera. Actors work with each other. Maybe he worked with this guy.”

“I suppose it’s possible.”

“And Rodney knows me. From the poker game.”

“But he doesn’t know you’re a burglar.”

“Well, I didn’t think he did. But maybe he does.”

“Only if he’s been reading the New York papers lately. You think Rodney happened to know you were a burglar and then he told this actor, and the other actor decided you’d be just the person to frame for murder, and just to round things out you went from the murder scene to Rodney’s apartment.”

“Oh.”

“Just like that.”

“It does call for more than the usual voluntary suspension of disbelief,” I admitted. “But there are actors all over this thing.”

“Two of them, and only one of them’s all over it.”

“Flaxford was connected with the theater. Maybe that’s the connection between him and the actor who roped me in. He was a producer, and maybe he had a disagreement with this actor—”

“Who decided to kill him and set up a burglar to take a fall for him.”

“I keep blowing up balloons and you keep sticking pins in them.”

“It’s just that I think we should work with what we know, Bernie. It doesn’t matter how this man found you, not right now it doesn’t. What matters is how you and I are going to find him. Did you notice the name of the picture?”

“
The Man in the Middle.
And it’s about a corporate takeover, not a homosexual
ménage à trois
as you might have thought. Starring James Garner and Shan Willson, and I could tell you the names of two or three others but none of them were our friend. It was filmed in 1962 and whoever the droll chap is who does the TV listings in the
Times,
he thinks the plot is predictable but the performances are spritely. That’s a word you don’t hear much anymore.”

“You wouldn’t want to hear it too often.”

“I guess not,” I said. She picked up the phone book and I told her she’d want the Yellow Pages. “I thought of that,” I said. “Call one of those film rental places and see if they can come up with a print of the picture. But they’ll be closed at this hour, won’t they?”

She gave me a funny look and asked me what channel the movie had been on.

“Channel 9.”

“Is that WPIX?”

“WOR.”

“Right.” She closed the phone book, dialed a number. “You weren’t serious about renting the film just so we could see who was in it, were you?”

“Well, sort of.”

“Someone at the channel should have a cast list. They must get calls like this all the time.”

“Oh.”

“Is there any coffee, Bernie?”

“I’ll get you some.”

It took more than one call. Evidently the people at WOR were used to getting nutty calls from movie buffs, and since such buffs constituted the greater portion of their audience they were prepared to cater to them. But it seemed that the cast list which accompanied the film only concerned itself with featured performers. Our Typical New York Cabdriver,
with his half-dozen typical lines, did not come under that heading.

They kept Ruth on the phone for a long time anyway because the fellow she talked to was certain that an associate of his would be sure to know who played the cabdriver in
Man in the Middle.
The associate in question was evidently a goldmine of such information. But this associate was out grabbing a sandwich, and Ruth was understandably reluctant to supply a callback number, and so they chatted and killed time until the guy came back and got on the line. Of course he didn’t remember who played the cabdriver, although he did remember some bit taking place in a cab, and then Ruth tried to describe the pear-shaped man, which I felt was slightly nervy, since she’d never seen him, either live or on film. But she echoed my description accurately enough and the conversation went on for a bit and she thanked him very much and hung up.

“He says he knows exactly who I mean,” she reported, “but he can’t remember his name.”

“Sensational.”

“But he found out the film was a Paramount release.”

“So?”

Los Angeles Information gave her the number for Paramount Pictures. It was three hours earlier out there so that people were still at their desks,
except for the ones who hadn’t come back from lunch yet. Ruth went through channels until she found somebody who told her that the cast list for a picture more than ten years old would be in the inactive files. So Paramount referred her to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and L.A. Information came through with the number, and Ruth placed the call. Someone at the Academy told her the information was on file and she was welcome to drive over and look it up for herself, which would have been a time-consuming process, the drive amounting to some three thousand miles. They gave her a hard time until she mentioned that she was David Merrick’s secretary. I guess that was a good name to mention.

“He’s looking it up,” she told me, covering the mouthpiece with her hand.

“I thought you never lie.”

“I occasionally tell an expeditious untruth.”

“How does that differ from a barefaced lie?”

“It’s a subtle distinction.” She started to add something to that but someone on the other side of the continent began talking and she said things like
yes
and
uh-huh
and scribbled furiously on the cover of the phone book. Then she conveyed Mr. Merrick’s thanks and replaced the receiver.

To me she said, “Which cabdriver?”

“Huh?”

“There are two cabdrivers listed in the complete
cast list. There’s one called Cabby and another called Second Cabby.” She looked at the notes she had made. “Paul Couhig is Cabby and Wesley Brill is Second Cabby. Which one do you suppose we want?”

“Wesley Brill.”

“You recognize the name?”

“No, but he was the last cabby in the picture. That would put him second rather than first, wouldn’t it?”

“Unless when you saw him he was coming back for an encore.”

I grabbed the directory. There were no Couhigs in Manhattan, Paul or otherwise. There were plenty of Brills but no Wesley.

“It could be a stage name,” she suggested.

“Would a bit player bother with a stage name?”

“Nobody sets out to be a bit player, not at the beginning of a career. Anyway, there might have been another actor with his real name and he would have had to pick out something else for himself.”

“Or he might have an unlisted phone. Or live in Queens, or—”

“We’re wasting time.” She picked up the phone again. “SAG’ll have addresses for both of them. Couhig and Brill.” She asked the Information operator for the number of the Screen Actors Guild, which saved me from having to ask
what SAG was. Then she dialed another ten numbers and asked someone how to get in touch with our two actor friends. She wasn’t bothering to be David Merrick’s secretary this time. Evidently it wasn’t necessary. She waited a few minutes, then made circles in the air with her pen. I gave the phone book back to her and she scribbled some more on its cover. “It’s Brill,” she said. “You were right.”

“Don’t tell me they described him for you.”

“He has a New York agent. That’s all they would do is give me the agents’ names and numbers, and Couhig’s represented by the West Coast William Morris office and Brill has an agent named Peter Alan Martin.”

“And Martin’s here in New York?”

“Uh-huh. He has an Oregon 5 telephone number.”

“I suppose actors would tend to be on the same coast as their agents.”

“It does sound logical,” she agreed. She began dialing, listened for a few minutes, then blew a raspberry into the phone and hung up. “He’s gone for the day,” she said. “I got one of those answering machines. I hate the damn things.”

“Everyone does.”

“If my agent had a machine instead of a service I’d get a new agent.”

“I didn’t know you had an agent.”

She colored. “If I had one. If we had some ham we could have ham and eggs if we had some eggs.”

“We’ve still got some eggs. In the fridge.”

“Bernie—”

“I know.” I looked again in the phone book. No Wesley Brill, but there were a couple of Brill, W’s. The first two numbers answered and reported that there was no Wesley there. The third and last went unanswered, but it was in Harlem and it seemed unlikely that he’d live there. And telephone listings with initials are almost always women trying to avoid obscene calls.

“We can find out if he has an unlisted number,” Ruth suggested. “Information’ll tell you that.”

“An actor with an unlisted number? I suppose it’s possible. But even if we find out that he does, what good will it do us?”

“None, I suppose.”

“Then the hell with it.”

“Right.”

“We know who he is,” I said. “That’s the important thing. In the morning we can call his agent and find out where he lives. What’s really significant is that we’ve found a place to start. That’s the one thing we didn’t have before. If the police kick the door in an hour from now it’d be a slightly different story from if they’d kicked it in two hours ago. I wouldn’t be at a complete dead end, see. I’d have more than a cockeyed story about a round-shouldered
fat man with brown eyes. I’d have a name to go with the description.”

“And then what would happen?”

“They’d put me in jail and throw the key away,” I said. “But nobody’s going to kick the door in. Don’t worry about a thing, Ruth.”

She went around the corner to a deli and picked up sandwiches and beer, stopped at a liquor store for a bottle of Teacher’s. I’d asked her to pick up the booze, but by the time she came back with everything I’d decided not to have any. I had one beer with dinner and nothing else.

Afterward we sat on the couch and drank coffee. She had a little Scotch in hers. I didn’t. She asked to see my burglar tools and I showed them to her, and she asked the name and function of each item.

“Burglar tools,” she said. “It’s illegal to have them in your possession, isn’t it?”

“You can go to jail for it.”

“Which ones did you use to open the locks for this apartment?” I showed her and explained the process. “I think it’s remarkable,” she said, and gave a delicious little shiver. “Who taught you how to do it?”

“Taught myself.”

“Really?”

“More or less. Oh, once I was really into it I got
books on locksmithing, and then I took a mail-order course in it from an outfit in Ohio. You know, I wonder if anybody but burglars ever sign up for those courses. I knew a guy in prison who took one of those courses with a correspondence college and they sent him a different lock every month by mail with complete instructions on how to open it. He would just sit there in his cell and practice with the lock for hours on end.”

“And the prison authorities let him do this?”

“Well, the idea was that he was learning a trade. They’re supposed to encourage that sort of thing in prison. Actually the trade he was learning was burglary, of course, and it was a big step up for him from holding up filling stations, which was his original field of endeavor.”

“I guess there’s more money in burglary.”

“There often is, but the main consideration was violence. Not that he ever shot anybody but somebody took a shot at him once and he decided that stealing was a safer and saner proposition if you did it when nobody was home.”

“So he took a course and became an expert.”

I shrugged. “Let’s just say he took the course. I don’t know if he became an expert or not. There’s only so much you can teach a person, through the mails or face to face. The rest has to be inside him.”

“In the hands?”