The Burglar in Short Order Page 12

  “You don’t think they might have been the least bit odd to begin with?”

  “No,” she said. “No, I don’t. Oh, once in a while, maybe, you get a slightly wacko lady, and next thing you know she’s up to her armpits in cats. But most of the Cat Ladies start out normal. By the time you get to the end of the story they’re nuts, all right, but having thirty or forty cats’ll do that to you. It sneaks up on you, and before you know it you’re over the edge.”

  “And the Third Cat’s the charm, huh?”

  “No question. Bern, there are primitive cultures that don’t really have numbers, not in the sense that we do. They have a word that means ‘one,’ and other words for ‘two’ and ‘three,’ and after that there’s a word that just means ‘more than three.’ And that’s how it is in our culture with cats. You can have one cat, you can have two cats, you can even have three cats, but after that you’ve got ‘more than three.’”

  “And you’re a Woman With Cats.”

  “You got it.”

  “I’ve got it, all right. I’ve got your third cat. Is that the real reason you never mentioned it? Because you were planning all along to palm the little bugger off on me?”

  “No,” she said quickly. “Swear to God, Bern. A couple of times over the years the subject of a dog or cat has come up, and you’ve always said you didn’t want a pet. Did I ever once press you?”

  “No.”

  “I took you at your word. It sometimes crossed my mind that you might have a better time in life if you had an animal to love, but I managed to keep it to myself. It never even occurred to me that you could use a working cat. And then when I found out about your rodent problem—”

  “You knew just how to solve it.”

  “Well, sure. And it’s a great solution, isn’t it? Admit it, Bern. Didn’t it do your heart good this morning to have Raffles there to greet you?”

  “It was all right,” I admitted. “At least he was still alive. I had visions of him lying there dead with his paws in the air, and the mice forming a great circle around his body.”

  “See? You’re concerned about him, Bern. Before you know it you’re going to fall in love with the little guy.”

  “Don’t hold your breath. Carolyn? What was his name before it was Raffles.”

  “Oh, forget it. It was a stupid name.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Do I have to?” She sighed. “Well, it was Andro.”

  “Andrew? What’s so stupid about that? Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Andrew Carnegie—they all did okay with it.”

  “Not Andrew, Bern. Andro.”

  “Andrew Mellon, Andrew Gardner . . . not Andrew? Andro?”

  “Right.”

  “What’s that, Greek for Andrew?”

  She shook her head. “It’s short for Androgynous.”

  “Oh.”

  “The idea being that his surgery had left the cat somewhat uncertain from a sexual standpoint.”

  “Oh.”

  “Which I gather was also the case for Patrick, although I don’t believe surgery had anything to do with it.”

  “Oh.”

  “I never called him ‘Andro’ myself,” she said. “Actually, I didn’t call him anything. I didn’t want to give him a new name because that would mean I was leaning toward keeping him, and—”

  “I understand.”

  “And then on the way over to the bookstore it just came to me in a flash. Raffles.”

  “As in raffling off a car to raise money for a church, I think you said.”

  “Don’t hate me, Bern.”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  “It’s been no picnic, living a lie for the past three months. Believe me.”

  “I guess it’ll be easier for everybody now that Raffles is out of the closet.”

  “I know it will. Bern, I didn’t want to trick you into taking the cat.”

  “Of course you did.”

  “No, I didn’t. I just wanted to make it as easy as possible for you and the cat to start off on the right foot. I knew you’d be crazy about him once you got to know him, and I thought anything I could do to get you over the first hurdle, any minor deception I might have to practice—”

  “Like lying your head off.”

  “It was in a good cause. I had only your best interests at heart, Bern. Yours and the cat’s.”

  “And your own.”

  “Well, yeah,” she said, and flashed a winning smile. “But it worked out, didn’t it? Bern, you’ve got to admit it worked out.”

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  The Burglar on the Screen

  If my work has had any enduring impact on the film business, it’s been as an example of unlikely casting. “You think that’s crazy,” someone will say, upon hearing that ChiChi the Chihuahua has been inked for the title role in Cujo. “How about Whoopi Goldberg playing Bernie Rhodenbarr in Burglar?”

  Well, I can’t say that’s how I saw the character.

  My friend Donald Westlake wrote an extended series of books about a criminal named Parker. Wonderful books, and over the years several of them were filmed. The first three actors to portray Parker were Anna Karina, Lee Marvin, and James Brown. “Parker’s been played by a white man, a black man, and a woman,” a friend told Don. “I think your character lacks definition.”

  The friend who made this observation was a writer named Joe Goldberg. No relation to Whoopi.

  Oddly, I was living in Hollywood when I first wrote about Mrs. Rhodenbarr’s son Bernard. It was early 1976 and I had a one-bedroom apartment at the Magic Hotel on Highland between La Brea and Franklin. (The hotel owed its marvelous name to the Magic Castle, a private club for magicians located just up the hill to the north. I’d been there once a few years earlier as the guest of a friend, and we sat at a table where an impressively drunk practitioner of the dark arts was showing off with a deck of cards. “I’ll bet you’ve never seen anything like this before,” he said at one point, and puked onto the table with sangfroid I found enviable.)

  I was broke, with no money and no prospects. I’d done nothing but write for a living since college, had in fact dropped out of college to write magazine fiction and paperback novels, and now I was 38 years old, with a couple of books written that my agent couldn’t sell and a few others I’d started and couldn’t finish. I’d split with my wife three years earlier, and now I owed alimony and child support. I couldn’t get a job because I couldn’t find one to apply for. “Man wanted to sweep up after the horses,” I’d read in the want ads, and I’d figure that was something I could do. “Experience a must,” it would go on, and that would kill it for me. I could tell how the interview would go. “Get the fuck out of here,” the hiring boss would say, after one look at me. “You candy-ass son of a bitch, you never once swept up after a horse in your whole miserable life.”

  Actually, I did apply for a job. I’d left New York the previous summer, after a batch of things went wrong. We needn’t dwell on them; suffice it to say that I told myself a moving target was harder to hit, and drove my rusted-out Ford station wagon down the coast to Florida and across to Los Angeles. H. L. Mencken observed somewhere that a divine hand had taken hold of the United States by the state of Maine, and lifted, with the result that everything loose wound up in Southern California.

  It took me six or seven months to get there. I stopped here and there, did some writing to no discernible purpose, and kept waiting for things to get better. I stayed a month or so in Charleston, South Carolina, in an establishment on Fulton Street called Rooms, as that’s what it said on the sign. A few blocks from Rooms was a cobbler’s shop, and one afternoon I spotted a sign in the window, advertising the need for an apprentice.

  I went in and talked with the fellow. I don’t recall most of what he asked me, but I don’t believe his questions could have probed too deeply. I doubt he even checked to make sure I was wearing shoes.

  But I remember the last question. “Here’s what I need to know,” h
e said. “Will you stay? Because the last thing I want is to spend a couple of months training somebody and then have him take off just when he’s starting to be of some use to me. So will you stick around?”

  All I had to do was say yes and the job was mine, but I just couldn’t do it. I admitted that I’d probably be moving on in a matter of weeks.

  “Well, I appreciate your honesty,” he said. “I really do. But it’s a shame, because I’m a pretty decent judge of people, and I have the feeling you’ve got the makings of a damn good shoe-repair man.”

  At the Magic Hotel, I found myself wondering if I’d missed out on the opportunity of a lifetime. I might have found myself as a shoe-repair man, and a damn good one at that. It seemed unlikely, given that the only tool with which I’d ever been at all agile was my Smith-Corona, but who was I to question a self-acknowledged good judge of people? Suppose I’d tossed my typewriter and put down real roots at Rooms. We hadn’t discussed salary, but my room at Rooms was a mere $20 a week, and I’m confident I could have negotiated a monthly rate.

  Of all sad words of tongue or pen . . .

  Never mind.

  Where do ideas come from? Always the beautiful question, but once in a while there’s an answer.

  I was, as I’ve mentioned, at the Magic Hotel. My rent, with daily maid service, was $325 a month. (Just today Trip Advisor quoted me a price of $259 a day. Even so, it would be easier to go back there than to Rooms; on my most recent visit to Charleston, I found a vacant lot where the place used to be. Now how could that happen in the very Mecca of Urban Preservationism?)

  My quarters were comfortable, and all I really needed was a source of income. I had enough cash on hand to pay the rent for another month or two, but it wouldn’t last forever. Since I couldn’t even bring myself to apply for a job, I was unlikely to find one.

  A little voice said, Don’t rule out crime.

  Huh?

  Walk into a liquor store with a pistol, the voice continued, and no one’s gonna ask if you’ve done this before.

  I got the point, but the idea didn’t sit well. I didn’t own a pistol, or have any idea where to get one, and how would I find a liquor store where they didn’t already know me? Yes, crime was a way around the experience-a-must requirement that kept me from sweeping up after the horses, but I was temperamentally unsuited to anything that might involve the threat of violence to another person—or, worse yet, to myself.

  Burglary, said the voice. And this time it may have been a different voice. It may in fact have been mine.

  A burglar could work alone. A burglar could avoid human contact, and was in fact well advised to do so. A burglar could set his own hours, creeping about by day or night, as he preferred.

  It struck me that it wasn’t that different from writing for a living. On the plus side, after you’d completed a bit of work, you didn’t have to wait for some schmuck in a suit to give you notes on it.

  On the downside, you could get arrested . . .

  I pushed the idea away. I wasn’t a criminal, for God’s sake. Aside from that one time I removed the little Do-Not-Remove-This-Tag tag from the bottom of a mattress, I’d led a remarkably law-abiding life.

  And what did it get you?

  That voice again. Oh, what the hell, I thought, and began schooling myself in the arts of illegal entry. Specifically, I tried opening my hotel room door with a credit card. I knew that what I was trying to do was called loiding the door, as in celluloid, which I guess was what illegal entrants used in the days before credit cards. My AmEx card was made not of celluloid but of some sort of plastic, and it would no longer open doors in the conventional manner, having bounced the last time I tried to use it. It did in fact open the door to my room, but not without a fair amount of work on my part. And I had a feeling the doors at the Magic Hotel were not the last word in high-tech security.

  Still, I had the feeling that I was resourceful enough to get into a house. I’d ring the bell, I’d make sure no one was home, and I’d find a way in. And I’d work quickly, and I’d avoid leaving fingerprints, and I’d limit myself to cash and jewelry, and I’d be considerate and not make a mess. And I’d get the hell out and hurry back to my hotel room, and if I’d forgotten my key I could always let myself in with my AmEx card.

  Unless, of course, I managed to trigger some kind of silent alarm, and the cops caught me in the act.

  So?

  So? What do you mean, So?

  If they catch you, they have to feed you. Think this through, will you? You’ve led a lawful life. You’ll plead guilty and throw yourself on the mercy of the court. You’re a writer, you can say you were doing research and it got out of hand. It’s a first offense, they won’t know about the mattress tag, so you’ll probably get a suspended sentence. And who knows? It might be something for you to write about.

  Oh, I thought. And went and made myself a sandwich, and was maybe three bites into it when another thought arose.

  Suppose I was in somebody’s bedroom, going through the dresser drawers, when the police stormed in. And suppose I threw my hands in the air, getting jewelry all over everything, prepared to go quietly and give the arresting officers no trouble. One of them would cuff me, and another would give the place a once-over, and—

  And then suppose they found a dead body in another room?

  Oh, said the little voice.

  Oh? That’s all you can say? Oh?

  That would be a problem.

  A problem? A problem? The hell you say. That would be a book.

  And so it would, and was. Within a day or so of this lightbulb moment, I sat down at my kitchen table and started writing. Within the week I’d completed three or four chapters, along with a couple of paragraphs of outline explaining with unwarranted confidence that Bernie Rhodenbarr would elude the police, track down the actual murderer, and win the heart of the girl, if there was one. I slapped a title on it—Burglars Can’t Be Choosers—bundled it up and mailed it to my agent, and he sent it straight off to Random House, and they bought it.

  Just like that.

  My daughters flew out to spend the summer. They shared my Magic digs for July, and we spent August driving east. I got a little writing done in July and none in August, and after I dropped the kids with their mother in New York, I finished the book in a motel in Greenville, South Carolina. Random House liked it, and published it in 1977. And by the time it came out I was living in New York again, in an apartment in Greenwich Village, and working on a second book about Bernie.

  So you could argue that the fellow saved me from a life of crime.

  Something curious happened when I began writing the book. It was coming out funny.

  That wasn’t the plan. The notion of being apprehended while committing one crime and winding up charged with a far more serious crime had arisen out of my own criminous fantasies. It was in fact something that I imagined happening to me, and there was nothing inherently amusing about it.

  But Bernie, who waltzed past an Upper East Side doorman with a Bloomingdale’s shopping bag for camouflage, insisted on being flip and sassy and loaded with attitude. And when he exits the premises, dashing off with the cops on his heels, and the doorman reflexively holds the door open for him, he calls out “I’ll take care of you at Christmas!”

  Hell, I thought. It’s not supposed to be funny. I’ll have to fix it later.

  Just leave it alone, said the voice. You idiot.

  In 1985 my wife and I relocated to Fort Myers Beach, Florida, and that’s where we were when Hollywood took an interest in Bernie Rhodenbarr. By then I’d published five books about him, four with Random House and a fifth with Arbor House. In the second, The Burglar in the Closet, he’s your basic Urban Lonely Guy who just happens to be a burglar; he gets in trouble doing a felonious favor for his dentist. In the third book, The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling, the series defined itself; he’s become the owner of an antiquarian bookshop in Greenwich Village, and his best friend is Carolyn Kaiser, the le
sbian dog-groomer with a shop two doors from his. The store and the best friend continue to feature prominently in the next two books, The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza and The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian—and indeed in the six books that have appeared since I resumed writing about Bernie in 1994.

  But in 1985 there were just those five, and a deal came together to film The Burglar in the Closet. I was in Florida, my agent was in New York, and Hollywood was in Hollywood—so I only had a vague idea what was going on. I heard various names proposed for the title role, but the one that seemed most likely to all concerned was Bruce Willis, who had just emerged as the costar with Cybill Shepherd in the hit TV series, Moonlighting. This was well before Die Hard and its sequels made Willis a tough world-weary action hero; on TV he was flip and sassy and up to his ears in attitude—and thus a very sensible choice for the part of one Bernard Grimes Rhodenbarr.

  And Whoopi Goldberg would be his best friend, Carolyn.

  Now I don’t know if they planned on keeping her a lesbian. My guess is someone figured out that her African-American heritage would be enough to limit her relationship with Bernie to one of Friends Without Benefits, but who knows? It doesn’t matter, because at the ninth or tenth hour, if not quite the eleventh, Bruce Willis left the building.

  I’ve never known what happened. Maybe Willis didn’t like the deal they offered him. Maybe he got a look at the script and came to his senses. Or maybe the people in charge decided they didn’t like him, or his attitude, or the way he combed his hair.

  Who knows? Most deals fall apart. So? Everybody dies, but not everybody gets an autopsy. Life goes on. Movies go on. And this one needed somebody else to play the lead.

  “They’ve decided on Whoopi,” my agent told me. “No, not as Carolyn. As Bernie.”

  The way I heard it, it was her idea. “I can do that,” she said.