Enough Rope Read online

  This is for Marty Greenberg

  and the Green Bay Packagers

  Contents

  PerfectBound exclusive e-book extra: Keller By a Nose

  Introduction

  Short Stories

  A Bad Night for Burglars

  A Blow for Freedom

  A Little Off the Top

  And Miles to Go Before I Sleep

  As Good as a Rest

  The Books Always Balance

  The Boy Who Disappeared Clouds

  Change of Life

  Cleveland in My Dreams

  Click!

  Collecting Ackermans

  The Dangerous Business

  Death Wish

  The Dettweiler Solution

  Funny You Should Ask

  The Gentle Way

  Going Through the Motions

  Good for the Soul

  Hilliard’s Ceremony

  Hot Eyes, Cold Eyes

  How Would You Like It?

  If This Be Madness

  Leo Youngdahl, R.I.P.

  Like a Bug on a Windshield

  Like a Dog in the Street

  The Most Unusual Snatch

  Nothing Short of Highway Robbery

  One Thousand Dollars a Word

  Passport in Order

  Someday I’ll Plant More Walnut Trees

  Some Days You Get the Bear

  Something to Remember You By

  Some Things a Man Must Do

  Sometimes They Bite

  Strangers on a Handball Court

  That Kind of a Day

  This Crazy Business of Ours

  The Tulsa Experience

  Weekend Guests

  When This Man Dies

  With a Smile for the Ending

  You Could Call It Blackmail

  Chip Harrison

  Death of the Mallory Queen

  As Dark as Christmas Gets

  Martin Ehrengraf

  The Ehrengraf Defense

  The Ehrengraf Presumption

  The Ehrengraf Experience

  The Ehrengraf Appointment

  The Ehrengraf Riposte

  The Ehrengraf Obligation

  The Ehrengraf Alternative

  The Ehrengraf Nostrum

  The Ehrengraf Affirmation

  The Ehrengraf Reverse

  Bernie Rhodenbarr

  Like a Thief in the Night

  The Burglar Who Dropped In on Elvis

  The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke

  Keller

  Answers to Soldier

  Keller’s Therapy

  Keller on the Spot

  Keller’s Horoscope

  Keller’s Designated Hitter

  Matthew Scudder

  Out the Window

  A Candle for the Bag Lady

  By the Dawn’s Early Light

  Batman’s Helpers

  The Merciful Angel of Death

  The Night and the Music

  Looking for David

  Let’s Get Lost

  A Moment of Wrong Thinking

  New Stories

  Almost Perfect

  Headaches and Bad Dreams

  Hit the Ball, Drag Fred

  How Far It Could Go

  In for a Penny

  Like a Bone in the Throat

  Points

  Sweet Little Hands

  Terrible Tommy Terhune

  Three in the Side Pocket

  You Don’t Even Feel It

  Two Old Stories

  It Took You Long Enough

  You Can’t Lose

  About the Author

  Books by Lawrence Block

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  “Eighty-four stories?”My friend gave me a look. “That’s not a book,” he said. “That’s a skyscraper.”

  It’s a handful, too, as you’ve no doubt already noticed yourself, and I’m conscious as I prepare these introductory remarks that I’m only making the damned thing longer with every word I write. This book was very nearly entitled Long Story Short, and it’s been observed that when you utter the words “to make a long story short,” it’s already too late.

  But I digress, and not for the first time. A short story collection seems to cry out for an introduction, especially when it’s a huge doorstop of a thing like this one, and especially when it represents one person’s entire output of short fiction over a career that began in (gulp!) 1957.

  Well, virtually entire . . .

  My earliest stories, collected a few years ago in a signed limited edition (One Night Stands, Crippen & Landru), have been purposely omitted. I don’t think much of them—which puts me in the majority, I’d have to say—and, while I’m not unwilling for collectors and specialists to have them, they don’t belong in this book. (I’ve made one exception, my first published story, called “You Can’t Lose.” It seemed worth including, if only as a curiosity.)

  Two more recent shorter fictions, “Speaking of Lust” and “Speaking of Greed,” have also been omitted. Each is the title novella in a volume of the Seven Deadly Sins anthology series, and when all seven novellas have been written and published, they’ll be gathered into a single volume. I’m very fond of the two written to date—but they’re long, running around 20,000 words each, and they don’t belong here.

  And, come to think of it, my episodic novel Hit Man is essentially a collection of ten short stories, and that constituted a quandary all its own. If I were to include them all, I’d be folding a full book into this one, and making people buy it a second time. If I left them all out, well, I’d be passing up the chance to include one story that was shortlisted for the Edgar Allan Poe Award and two others that won it outright. Some authors might be modest enough to omit such stories, and even to leave off mentioning the awards, but I am not of their number.

  So I’ve compromised, and included those three of the ten, along with two more Keller stories—“Keller’s Horoscope,” extracted from the second Keller novel, Hit List, for publication in a German anthology, and “Keller’s Designated Hitter,” written for an anthology of baseball stories and otherwise unpublished. If there’s a third book about Keller, perhaps it will be included. Then again, perhaps not. At any rate, it’s here.

  Once I’d selected the stories, I had to put them in order.

  As far as I can see, there are three accepted ways to organize collections of short fiction. You can line them up in the order they were written, you can alphabetize them by title, or you can place them here and there like paintings in a gallery, trying to arrange them so that they’ll complement one another.

  The last is altogether beyond me—how the hell do I know in what order you’ll enjoy coming upon these stories? And chronological order is out the question, because I couldn’t possibly recall precisely when each story was written. Alphabetical order has always made perfect sense to me, it’s so deliciously arbitrary and yet so marvelously unequivocal. How better to construct a sheer hodgepodge with the illusion of order?

  But there’s another variable to weigh in the balance, and that’s that some of my stories are about series characters, and they really ought to be set off by themselves. And I do recall the order in which the series stories were written, and they really ought to be arranged in that order.

  So here’s the plan:

  The stories which appeared in my three previously published collections, Sometimes They Bite, Like a Lamb to Slaughter, and Some Days You Get the Bear, appear first, in one great alphabetically ordered jumble.

  The groups of stories which follow—about Martin Ehrengraf, Chip Harrison, Keller, Bernie Rhodenbarr, and Matthew Scudder—appear chronologically. Many of these showed up in the three above-named collectio
ns, but quite a few did not, and these are collected here for the first time: “The Ehrengraf Presumption,” “The Ehrengraf Riposte,” “The Ehrengraf Affirmation,” and “The Ehrengraf Reverse”; “As Dark as Christmas Gets”; “Keller’s Horoscope” and “Keller’s Designated Hitter”; “The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke”; and “The Night and the Music,” “Looking for David,” “Let’s Get Lost,” and “A Moment of Wrong Thinking.”

  Next are twelve new non-series stories. (One of them, “It Took You Long Enough,” was written thirty years ago and just now rediscovered.) And last and least is an old story, indeed a first story, “You Can’t Lose,” sold to Manhunt in the summer of 1957 and published in February 1958.

  And is that it?

  Well, I hope not. I still get an enormous amount of satisfaction out of writing short stories, and I still find things I haven’t done and try to work out ways to do them.

  There is one thing I’ve noticed over the years, and maybe it’s worth comment. It is, simply, that the stories have grown longer over time. In the early days I had to work at it to stretch a story to 3,000 words—and that was when I had every incentive to write long, as every word I used meant another cent and a half in my pocket. Now, when I tend to get paid by the story rather than by the word, I have to work even harder to hold them to two to three times that length.

  (The same’s true for books, and you hear people blame computers for making it easier to go on and on. I thought that might be it, until I wrote Tanner on Ice, the first Tanner novel in twenty-eight years, and found it running half again as long as its predecessors. I couldn’t blame a computer, either, as I wrote the thing with a ballpoint pen on a stack of legal pads.)

  Not long ago I read a thoughtful and perceptive introduction to a collection called Here’s O’Hara, by Albert Erskine, John O’Hara’s longtime editor. He noted that the more recent stories were substantially longer than the earlier ones, and said that they were also better. He wouldn’t be foolish enough to argue that they were better because they were longer, Erskine wrote, but thought it was fair to contend that they were longer because they were better.

  I know that’s true for O’Hara, and I’d like to think it’s true of my work as well. And maybe it is, maybe I write longer these days because my characters and situations are more richly conceived, and I consequently have more to say about them.

  Or perhaps I’m just turning into a wordy old bastard. Tell you what—you decide.

  —Lawrence Block

  Greenwich Village

  A Bad Night for Burglars

  The burglar, a slender and clean-cut chap just past thirty, was rifling a drawer in the bedside table when Archer Trebizond slipped into the bedroom. Trebizond’s approach was as catfooted as if he himself were the burglar, a situation which was manifestly not the case. The burglar never did hear Trebizond, absorbed as he was in his perusal of the drawer’s contents, and at length he sensed the other man’s presence as a jungle beast senses the presence of a predator.

  The analogy, let it be said, is scarcely accidental.

  When the burglar turned his eyes on Archer Trebizond his heart fluttered and fluttered again, first at the mere fact of discovery, then at his own discovery of the gleaming revolver in Trebizond’s hand. The revolver was pointed in his direction, and this the burglar found upsetting.

  “Darn it all,” said the burglar, approximately. “I could have sworn there was nobody home. I phoned, I rang the bell—”

  “I just got here,” Trebizond said.

  “Just my luck. The whole week’s been like that. I dented a fender on Tuesday afternoon, overturned my fish tank the night before last. An unbelievable mess all over the carpet, and I lost a mated pair of African mouthbreeders so rare they don’t have a Latin name yet. I’d hate to tell you what I paid for them.”

  “Hard luck,” Trebizond said.

  “And just yesterday I was putting away a plate of fettucine and I bit the inside of my mouth. You ever done that? It’s murder, and the worst part is you feel so stupid about it. And then you keep biting it over and over again because it sticks out while it’s healing. At least I do.” The burglar gulped a breath and ran a moist hand over a moister forehead. “And now this,” he said.

  “This could turn out to be worse than fenders and fish tanks,” Trebizond said.

  “Don’t I know it. You know what I should have done? I should have spent the entire week in bed. I happen to know a safecracker who consults an astrologer before each and every job he pulls. If Jupiter’s in the wrong place or Mars is squared with Uranus or something he won’t go in. It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? And yet it’s eight years now since anybody put a handcuff on that man. Now who do you know who’s gone eight years without getting arrested?”

  “I’ve never been arrested,” Trebizond said.

  “Well, you’re not a crook.”

  “I’m a businessman.”

  The burglar thought of something but let it pass. “I’m going to get the name of his astrologer,” he said. “That’s just what I’m going to do. Just as soon as I get out of here.”

  “If you get out of here,” Trebizond said. “Alive,” Trebizond said.

  The burglar’s jaw trembled just the slightest bit. Trebizond smiled, and from the burglar’s point of view Trebizond’s smile seemed to enlarge the black hole in the muzzle of the revolver.

  “I wish you’d point that thing somewhere else,” he said nervously.

  “There’s nothing else I want to shoot.”

  “You don’t want to shoot me.”

  “Oh?”

  “You don’t even want to call the cops,” the burglar went on. “It’s really not necessary. I’m sure we can work things out between us, two civilized men coming to a civilized agreement. I’ve some money on me. I’m an openhanded sort and would be pleased to make a small contribution to your favorite charity, whatever it might be. We don’t need policemen to intrude into the private affairs of gentlemen.”

  The burglar studied Trebizond carefully. This little speech had always gone over rather well in the past, especially with men of substance. It was hard to tell how it was going over now, or if it was going over at all. “In any event,” he ended somewhat lamely, “you certainly don’t want to shoot me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, blood on the carpet, for a starter. Messy, wouldn’t you say? Your wife would be upset. Just ask her and she’ll tell you shooting me would be a ghastly idea.”

  “She’s not at home. She’ll be out for the next hour or so.”

  “All the same, you might consider her point of view. And shooting me would be illegal, you know. Not to mention immoral.”

  “Not illegal,” Trebizond remarked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You’re a burglar,” Trebizond reminded him. “An unlawful intruder on my property. You have broken and entered. You have invaded the sanctity of my home. I can shoot you where you stand and not get so much as a parking ticket for my trouble.”

  “Of course you can shoot me in self-defense—”

  “Are we on Candid Camera?”

  “No, but—”

  “Is Allen Funt lurking in the shadows?”

  “No, but I—”

  “In your back pocket. That metal thing. What is it?”

  “Just a pry bar.”

  “Take it out,” Trebizond said. “Hand it over. Indeed. A weapon if I ever saw one. I’d state that you attacked me with it and I fired in self-defense. It would be my word against yours, and yours would remain unvoiced since you would be dead. Whom do you suppose the police would believe?”

  The burglar said nothing. Trebizond smiled a satisfied smile and put the pry bar in his own pocket. It was a piece of nicely shaped steel and it had a nice heft to it. Trebizond rather liked it.

  “Why would you want to kill me?”

  “Perhaps I’ve never killed anyone. Perhaps I’d like to satisfy my curiosity. Or perhaps I got to enjoy killing in the war and hav
e been yearning for another crack at it. There are endless possibilities.”

  “But—”

  “The point is,” said Trebizond, “you might be useful to me in that manner. As it is, you’re not useful to me at all. And stop hinting about my favorite charity or other euphemisms. I don’t want your money. Look about you. I’ve ample money of my own—that should be obvious. If I were a poor man you wouldn’t have breached my threshold. How much money are you talking about, anyway? A couple of hundred dollars?”

  “Five hundred,” the burglar said.

  “A pittance.”

  “I suppose. There’s more at home but you’d just call that a pittance too, wouldn’t you?”

  “Undoubtedly.” Trebizond shifted the gun to his other hand. “I told you I was a businessman,” he said. “Now if there were any way in which you could be more useful to me alive than dead—”

  “You’re a businessman and I’m a burglar,” the burglar said, brightening.

  “Indeed.”

  “So I could steal something for you. A painting? A competitor’s trade secrets? I’m really very good at what I do, as a matter of fact, although you wouldn’t guess it by my performance tonight. I’m not saying I could whisk the Mona Lisa out of the Louvre, but I’m pretty good at your basic hole-and-corner job of everyday burglary. Just give me an assignment and let me show my stuff.”

  “Hmmmm,” said Archer Trebizond.

  “Name it and I’ll swipe it.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  “A car, a mink coat, a diamond bracelet, a Persian carpet, a first edition, bearer bonds, incriminating evidence, eighteen-and-a-half minutes of tape—”

  “What was that last?”

  “Just my little joke,” said the burglar. “A coin collection, a stamp collection, psychiatric records, phonograph records, police records—”

  “I get the point.”

  “I tend to prattle when I’m nervous.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “If you could point that thing elsewhere—”

  Trebizond looked down at the gun in his hand. The gun continued to point at the burglar.

  “No,” Trebizond said, with evident sadness. “No, I’m afraid it won’t work.”

  “Why not?”

  “In the first place, there’s nothing I really need or want. Could you steal me a woman’s heart? Hardly. And more to the point, how could I trust you?”