Burglars Can't Be Choosers Read online

  So I hefted my suitcase, killed the lights, opened the door, stepped out into the hallway, and there was Mrs. Hesch.

  She was wearing a shapeless housedress with faded flowers on it. (Printed on it, that is. Not pinned to it or anything like that.) She had cloth slippers on her feet and her gray hair was pinned up in a sort of sloppy chignon. An unfiltered cigarette with a good half-inch of ash hung from the right corner of her wide mouth. I’d seen her in this outfit before, or in one very much like it. I’d also seen her dressed to the nines, but I’d never seen her without a cigarette smoldering in the corner of her mouth. She never took it out to talk and I’m not positive she removed it when she ate.

  “Mr. Rhodenbarr,” she said. “I thought I heard you moving around in there. Meaning I thought I heard somebody. I didn’t know it was you.”

  “Uh,” I said. “Well, it was.”

  “Yeah.” Her bright little eyes took in the suitcase. “Going someplace? Not that I blame you. Poor boy, you got some kind of trouble for yourself, huh? The years we live across the hall from each other, you and me, and whoever would guess a nice boy like you would be a burglar? You never bothered anybody in this building, did you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Exactly what I said. You know the kind of conversations you hear in the laundry room. There are crazy women in this building, Mr. Rhodenbarr. One the other day, she’s running off at the mouth like a broken record. ‘We ain’t safe in our own beds!’ I said to her, ‘Gert,’ I said, ‘in the first place you’d be safe in anybody’s bed, believe me.’ And I said to her, I said, ‘When did Mr. Rhodenbarr ever hurt anybody? Who did he ever rob in this building, and who cares what he does over on the East Side, where the rich momsers deserve whatever happens to them?’ You might as well be talking to a wall.” Ashes spilled from her cigarette. “We shouldn’t stand here like this,” she said, her voice pitched lower. “Come on into my place, I got coffee on the stove.”

  “I’m really in sort of a rush, Mrs. Hesch.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You always got time for a cup of my coffee. Since when are you in such a rush?”

  I followed her into the apartment as if hypnotized. She poured me a cup of really excellent coffee and while I sipped it she stubbed out her cigarette and replaced it immediately with a fresh one. She went on to tell me how I’d brought no end of excitement to the building, how the police had been in and out of my apartment, and how there had been other visitors as well.

  “I didn’t see them,” she said, “but the door was wide open when they left. It was yesterday afternoon when Jorge put the new lock on it. I saw what they did to your apartment. Like animals, Mr. Rhodenbarr. Except an animal wouldn’t do nothing like that. Who was it? Cops?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You know who it was?”

  “No, I wish I did. You didn’t see them?”

  “I don’t even know when they were there. Such a mess they made you’d think I’d of heard them, but when I got the set going I don’t hear nothing. You don’t know who did this thing? Is it mixed up with the man you killed?”

  “I never killed anybody, Mrs. Hesch.”

  She nodded thoughtfully, neither buying nor rejecting the statement. “I can imagine you a burglar,” she said slowly. “But killing somebody is something else again. I said as much to the cop that questioned me.”

  “They questioned you?”

  “They questioned the building, believe me. Listen, I didn’t tell them a thing. I’ll be honest with you, I got no use for the momsers. The time my niece Gloria was raped all they did was ask her stupid questions. What I told them about you was you’re a nice boy who would never hurt a cockroach. I wouldn’t tell a cop if his pants was on fire, believe me. But what he told me, the cop, he told me you ran into this Flaxford—that’s his name?”

  “Flaxford, right.”

  “He says when Flaxford discovered you, you panicked, but I thought about this, Mr. Rhodenbarr, and I don’t know if I can see you killing somebody in a panic. You didn’t do it?”

  “Definitely not, Mrs. Hesch. In fact I’m trying to find out who did.”

  “If you say so.” She was still keeping an open mind on the subject. “Though to be frank, those momsers on the East Side, what do I care if you did or didn’t? They got it coming is how I look at it. This is good coffee, isn’t it?”

  “The best.”

  “Coffee’s one thing I make a fuss about. You got to take the trouble or you’re drinking dishwater. Maybe you’re hungry, I didn’t think to ask. You like cinnamon buns?”

  “I just had breakfast, Mrs. Hesch, but thanks.”

  “Sit anyway. Where are you going? Sit, you’ll have another cup. You don’t have to be in such a hurry. One more cup of coffee ain’t gonna kill you. Sit!”

  I sat.

  “So you’re a burglar,” she said. “You mind a personal question? You make a pretty decent living at it?”

  “I manage.”

  She nodded. “Exactly what I told Whatsername in 11-J. I said a bright boy like that, clean-cut and a good dresser, always a smile or a nice word for a person, I said if he ain’t making a living he’ll get into something else. But it’s like talking to a wall, believe me, and then the other one, Gert, she starts in how she’s not safe in her bed. The people in this building, Mr. Rhodenbarr, take it from me, it’s like talking to a wall.”

  Chapter

  Twelve

  Most people who checked into the Cumberland had either a suitcase or a girl in tow. I was unusual in that I had one of each with me. My canvas suitcase looked slightly disreputable, but then so did my girl. She was wearing skintight jeans and a bright green sweater a size too small for her with no bra under it. And she’d done something moderately sluttish to her hair, and she was wearing dark lipstick and several pounds of eye shadow. She looked remarkably tawdry.

  The clerk looked her over while I registered us as Mr. and Mrs. Ben G. Roper of Kansas City, which might have made more sense had my luggage been monogrammed. I gave him back the registration card along with a pair of ten-dollar bills, and while he was finding my change Ellie slid an envelope onto the counter. The clerk gave me $6.44 or thereabouts, then spotted the envelope with Brill’s name printed on it and blinked. “Where’d this come from?” he wondered.

  I shrugged and Ellie said she thought it was there all along. The clerk didn’t seem terribly interested in this or much of anything else. He stuck it in a pigeonhole numbered 305.

  Our own key was numbered 507. I grabbed my bag—there was no bellhop at the Cumberland—and Ellie walked with me to the elevator, her behind swaying professionally to and fro. The old man in the elevator cage chewed his cigar and took us up to the fifth floor without a word, then left us to let ourselves into our room.

  It wasn’t much of a room. The bed, which took up most of it, looked as though it had had hard use. Ellie sat lightly on the edge of it, removed make-up, did something to her hair to make it as it had been originally.

  “A lot of trouble for nothing,” she said.

  “You enjoyed the masquerade.”

  “I suppose so. I still look like a tramp in this sweater.”

  “You certainly look like a mammal, I’ll say that much.”

  She glowered at me. I checked my wig and cap in the bathroom mirror. They hadn’t made much of an impression on Mrs. Hesch, who never even noticed that my hair had changed color.

  “Let’s go,” I said, then did a Groucho Marx thing with my eyebrows. “Unless you’d like to make a couple of dollars, girlie.”

  “Here? Ugh.”

  “A bed is a bed is a bed.”

  “This one’s no bed of roses. Do people actually have sex in rooms like this?”

  “That’s all they do. You don’t think anyone would sleep here, do you?”

  She wrinkled her nose and we left, taking our suitcase with us. A call from Childs had established that Wesley Brill was out, and a knock on his door established that h
e hadn’t come back yet. I could have picked his lock in a couple of seconds but it turned out that I didn’t have to, because I stuck our room key in on a hunch and oddly enough it worked. Quite often the rooms on a particular line will respond to the same key—305 and 405 and 505, for instance—but now and then in older hotels the locks loosen up with age and a surprising number of keys turn out to be interchangeable.

  Brill’s room was nicer than the ones they used for the hot sheets trade. It still wasn’t much but at least there was a piece of carpet covering some of the floor and the furniture was only on its penultimate legs. I put my suitcase on a chair, rummaged idly through Brill’s closet and dresser, then took my suitcase off the chair, put it on the floor, and sat on the chair myself. There was another chair with arms, and Ellie had already taken it.

  “Well,” she said, “here we are.”

  “Here we are indeed.”

  “I wonder when he’s coming back.”

  “Sooner or later.”

  “Good thinking. I don’t suppose you thought to bring along a deck of cards?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Well, I never thought of playing cards as proper equipment for a burglar.”

  “You always worked alone.”

  “Uh-huh. You’d think he’d have a deck of cards here. You’d think anyone who spent a lot of time in this room would play a lot of solitaire.”

  “And cheat.”

  “Most likely. I’d pace the floor if there was room. I find myself remembering bad stand-up comics. ‘The room was so small…’ ”

  “How small was it, Johnny?”

  “The room was so small you had to go out in the hall to close the door.”

  “That small, eh?”

  “The room was so small the mice were hunchbacked. I have to admit I’ve never understood that line. Why would mice be hunchbacked in a small room?”

  “I think you’ve got an overly literal mind.”

  “I probably do.”

  She smiled. “You’re nice, though. Just the same, literal mind or not, you’re nice.”

  We would talk, fall silent, talk some more. At one point she asked me what I would do when it was all over.

  “Go to jail,” I said.

  “Not once we find the real killer. They’ll drop the other charges, won’t they? I bet they will.”

  “They might.”

  “Well, what’ll you do then? After it’s all over?”

  I thought about it. “Find a new apartment,” I said at length. “I wouldn’t be able to stay where I am, not even if those visitors hadn’t turned it into a slum. All this publicity, the whole building knows about me. I’ll have to move someplace else and take the apartment under another name. It’ll be a nuisance but I guess I can live with it.”

  “You’ll stay in New York?”

  “Oh, I think so. I think I’d go crazy anywhere else. This is home. Besides, I’m connected here.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I know how to operate in New York. When I steal something I know who’ll buy it and how to negotiate the sale. The cops know me, which in the long run does you more good than harm, although you might not think so. Oh, there’s any number of reasons why a burglar is better off operating in territory that he knows in and out. I don’t even like to work outside of Manhattan if I can avoid it. I remember one job I went on up in Harrison, that’s in Westchester—”

  “You’re going to go on being a burglar.”

  I looked at her.

  “I didn’t realize that,” she said. “You’re going to keep on opening locks and stealing things?”

  “What else?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ellie, on some level or other I think you think you’re watching all of this on television and I’m going to reform right in time for the final commercial. That may keep the audience happy but it’s not terribly realistic.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “Not really, no. I’m almost thirty-five years old. Opening locks and stealing things is the only trade I know. There’s a lot of ads in Popular Mechanics telling me about career opportunities in meatcutting and taxidermy but somehow I don’t think they’re being completely honest with me. And I don’t figure I could cut it by raising chinchillas at home or growing ginseng in my backyard, and the only kind of work I’m qualified for pays two dollars an hour and would bore the ass off me before I’d earned ten dollars.”

  “You could be a locksmith.”

  “Oh, sure. They break their necks running around handing out licenses to convicted burglars. And the bonding companies are just standing in line to do business with locksmiths with criminal records.”

  “You must be qualified for something, Bernie.”

  “The state taught me how to make license plates and sew mailbags. This is going to stun you but there’s very little call for either of those skills in civilian life.”

  “But you’re intelligent, you’re capable, you can think on your feet—”

  “All important qualifications that help me make it as a burglar. Ellie, I’ve got a very good life. That’s something you don’t seem to realize. I work a couple of nights a year and I spend the rest of my time taking things easy. Is that such a bad deal?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve been a burglar for years. Why should I change?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Nobody changes.”

  We didn’t have too much to say after that exchange. The time passed about as quickly as the Middle Ages. While we waited, the management kept renting out the room next door to us. Several times we heard footsteps in the hallway and sat motionless, thinking it might be Brill, and then the door next to us would open, and before long bedsprings would creak. Soon the bedsprings would cease creaking and shortly thereafter the footsteps would return to the elevator.

  “True love,” Ellie said.

  “Well, it’s nice the hotel serves a purpose.”

  “It does keep them off the streets. That last chap was in rather a hurry, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Probably had to get back to his office.”

  Then at last footsteps approached from the elevator but did not stop at the room next door. Instead they stopped directly in front of the door behind which we lurked. I drew a quick breath and got to my feet, padding soundlessly into position at the side of the door.

  Then his key turned in the lock and the door opened and it was him all right, Wesley Brill, the man with the soft brown eyes that had never quite met mine, and I stood with my hands poised waist-high at my sides, ready to catch him if he fainted, ready to grab him if he tried to bolt, ready to hang a high hard one on his chin if he decided to get violent.

  What he did was stare. “Rhodenbarr,” he said. “This is utterly incredible. How on earth did you manage to find me? And they didn’t tell me anyone was waiting for me.”

  “They didn’t know it.”

  “But how did you—oh, of course. You’re a burglar.”

  “Everybody’s got to be something.”

  “Indeed.”

  His voice and his whole manner of speaking were completely different. The Runyonesque diction was gone and he no longer bit off his words at their final consonants. There was an archness to his inflections, a lilt that was either theatrical or slightly faggoty or both.

  “Bernie Rhodenbarr,” he said. Then he caught sight of Ellie, broadened his grin, raised a hand and lifted a brown trilby hat from his head. “Miss,” he said, then turned his attention to me once more. “Just let me close this door,” he said. “No need to share our business with a whole neighborhood of buyers and sellers. There. How on earth did you ever find me, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I saw you on television.”

  “Oh?”

  “An old movie.”

  “And you recognized me?” He preened a bit. “Which film?”

  “The Man in the Middle.”

&n
bsp; “Not that dog with Jim Garner? I played a cabdriver in that one. I played a lot of cabdrivers.” His eyes misted up at the memory. “No question about it, those were the days. Last year, God help us all, I drove a cab for a couple of weeks. Not in a film, but in what we call real life.” He swung his arms back and forth, then put his little hands together and rubbed his palms as if to keep warm. “Those days are dead and gone. Let us live in the present, eh? The important thing is that she still wants the box.”

  I looked at him.

  “That’s why you looked me up, isn’t it? The infamous blue leather box.”

  “Leather-covered,” I said. Don’t ask me why.

  “Leather, leather-covered, whatever. Just so you’ve got it. As far as killing Flaxford, well, that certainly wasn’t what she had in mind, but it’s my impression she figures it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. What she didn’t know was whether you’d managed to pick up the box before you had to get out of there, but if you did she definitely wants it and she’ll be glad to pay for it.”

  I stared at him, but of course his eyes didn’t meet mine. They were aimed over my shoulder, as usual.

  “Look, Bernie—” He grinned suddenly. “You don’t mind if I call you Bernie, do you? You know who I am and I don’t have to play the heavy any longer, do I? And you can call me Wes.”

  “Wes,” I said.

  “Excellent. And I don’t think I’ve met the little lady.”

  “C’mon, Wes. You’re slipping back into character. Wesley Brill wouldn’t say that. ‘The little lady.’ ”

  “You’re absolutely right.” He faced Ellie and made a rather courtly bow. “Wesley Brill,” he said.

  “Ruth Hightower,” I said.

  He smiled. “Not really.”

  “That’s a private joke,” Ellie said. “I’m Ellie Christopher, Wes.”

  “My pleasure, Miss Christopher.”

  She said he could call her Ellie, and he told her to call him Wes, which she’d already done, and he added that no one called him Wesley, that indeed his name had originally been John Wesley Brill, his mother having seen fit to name him for the founder of Methodism, a move she might not have dared had she suspected he was destined for an actor’s life. He’d dropped his first name entirely the first time he trod the boards. (That was his phrase, trod the boards.) Ellie assured him that she thought dropping a first name altogether was perfectly all right but that when you retained an initial out in front it was a sign of a devious character. Good ol’ Wes said he couldn’t agree more. Ellie mentioned G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt and Wes chimed in with J. Edgar Hoover. While they were at it I thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald and decided there might be a few weak spots in Ellie’s theory.