The Burglar on the Prowl Read online

  “In a twelfth-floor apartment on Eastern Parkway? The milkman would have had to be a human fly.”

  “Well, I grew up in a house,” I said, “and we had a milk chute, and one day I came home from school and my mother wasn’t home and the house was locked. And I got in through the milk chute.”

  “How old were you, Bern?”

  “I don’t know. Eleven? Twelve?”

  “You were smaller then.”

  “So?”

  “So you’ve grown, and the milk chute hasn’t. Look at you. You’ll never fit through that thing.”

  “Sure I will,” I said. “I’ve grown some since I was twelve, but that wasn’t the last time I wiggled in through the milk chute. I was still getting in that way when I was seventeen, and I had my full size by then. And even when I was twelve people never believed I could do it, because it looks as though you won’t fit, and then you do.”

  “What’s on the other side of the milk chute?”

  “I’ll be able to tell you later. But what’s usually there is a closet.”

  “Suppose it’s locked?” I gave her a look. “Sorry, Bern, I forgot who I was talking to. If it’s locked you’ll unlock it. Suppose, well, suppose you can’t get through the thing after all?”

  “Then I’ll come back out,” I said, “and think of something else, and if there’s nothing else to think of then we’ll go back home and call it a night.”

  If you can get your head through an opening, the rest of the body can follow.

  That’s a basic guideline, and it’s obviously not universally applicable. If you weigh four hundred pounds, your head is going to slip through apertures that will balk at accepting your hips. (I considered the fat man who’d overpaid so generously for The Secret Agent. A camel would fit more easily through the eye of a needle, I thought, than would he through a milk chute.)

  It’s a good general principle, however, and newborns prove it every day. Raffles seems to know it instinctively; if his whiskers clear an opening he’ll follow them through, and if they don’t he’ll step back and think of another way to go, or decide he didn’t really want to go there anyway.

  The Mapes milk chute was large enough to accommodate my head, whiskers and all. I put on my gloves and got down to business.

  The milk chute had a little catch that you turn prior to pulling the door open. It’s not a lock, just a device to keep the thing from swinging open in the wind. The catch didn’t want to turn, though, and then the door didn’t want to open. Time and paint had made them both stuck in their ways, but a little pressure (and the tip of a knife blade) led them to change their attitude.

  The chute’s inner door had a catch as well, but it was on the side away from me, to be opened by the person retrieving the milk. I had my tools in hand, and a thin four-inch strip of flexible steel slipped the catch as if it had been designed for that specific purpose. The inner door opened, but when I pushed it I felt resistance before it had swung inward more than a few inches. It was a yielding, spongy sort of resistance; I could force the door farther open, but when I let go it would spring back.

  I used my little flashlight, and saw right away what the problem was. The milk chute opened into a closet, as I’d expected, and the resistance was being supplied by an overcoat.

  I reached a hand in, shifted things around, and created enough of a space for the door to swing all the way open. I returned my tools and penlight to my pocket, kept the sheer Pliofilm gloves on, and then proceeded to poke my head into the opening and follow it with as much as possible of the rest of me. I drew my shoulders in, making myself as narrow and eel-like as possible, said a quick and urgent prayer to St. Dismas, and commenced wriggling and squirming for all I was worth.

  And I have to say it brought it all back. Not just that first magical moment of youth, when I’d thrilled at having discovered a way to get into a house I’d been locked out of. There was nothing illicit or dangerous about that first time, I’d been locked out by sheer accident and had every right and reason to be inside, but the thrill had been there from the beginning, and everything that came after grew out of that initial venture.

  In no time at all I was playing with locks and teaching myself how to open them, sending away to the correspondence schools that advertised in Popular Science and enrolling in their locksmithing courses, pressing my mom’s house key in a bar of soap and filing a duplicate to match the impression.

  And if I hadn’t been locked out that fateful afternoon, would I have escaped a life of crime? Somehow I doubt it. There are, as far as I know, no felons swiping peaches from the family tree. Both the Grimeses and the Rhodenbarrs boast generations of law-abiding folk, content to play by the rules and trade an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. I, on the other hand, am a born thief, the sort of reprehensible character of whom it is said that he’d rather steal a dollar than earn five. (That’s not literally true, I’m nowhere near that bad, but I’d certainly rather steal five dollars than earn one.) And I do possess an innate knack for getting into places designed to keep me out. I studied locks, I practiced opening them, but the lessons came easy to me. It is, I blush to admit, a gift.

  I don’t often think back to those early days, but then I don’t often crawl through milk chutes. So I let all of this go through my mind, and it was a mind that might have been better occupied with the task of getting through the milk chute as quickly as possible. Because, as you can readily appreciate, one is at one’s most vulnerable during the transitional interval when one is neither inside nor outside of the house. If someone were to come along while my head was in the coat closet and my legs suspended above the driveway, I’d be hard put to explain what I was doing there and unable to run off and do it somewhere else.

  But I couldn’t hurry through, because I’d somehow reached a point, half in and half out, where I’d achieved an undesirable state of equilibrium, an unwelcome stasis. Wriggling and squirming weren’t getting me anywhere, and I couldn’t grab onto something and pull myself through because, damn it to hell, I’d put my arms at my sides in order to fit my shoulders through, and now my arms were pinned there by the sides of the milk chute.

  All I had to do, I told myself, was the right sort of wriggling. If I set about squirming in an ergonomically sound manner, so as to build up a little momentum, why in no time at all…

  Hell.

  It wasn’t working.

  For God’s sake, was this how it was going to end? Half in and half out of somebody else’s house, unable to move in either direction, with nothing to do until Mapes and his wife came home and called the cops? If this had happened when I first tried this stunt, back in my pre-salad days, my whole career in burglary might have ended before it had begun. If it hadn’t happened then, why did it have to happen now?

  I might have had further thoughts on the matter, might even have enjoyed the irony of it all, but right about then a pair of hands came along and grabbed me by the ankles.

  Twenty-Two

  I hadn’t heard a car, hadn’t heard so much as a footfall. My head was in the closet, literally if not figuratively, with coats and other outerwear all around it, so that would tend to muffle the sound. And it’s not as though I was listening hard all the while. I was too busy with my wriggling and squirming, not to mention my remembrance of milk chutes past, to have been keeping an ear open. Had Carolyn honked the horn? Three times, I’d told her, loud and long. But would I have heard it if she had? The car was in a closed garage, and I was in a coat closet. Maybe she’d honked and I hadn’t noticed.

  The hands on my ankles might as well have been bands of steel. My heart sank, my mind froze, and all I could do was hope Carolyn got out in time, and that she’d think to call Wally Hemphill for me.

  Hours passed, or maybe they were only seconds. And a voice said, “It’s me, Bern.”

  And that’s all she said. There were any number of other things she could have said, and I’d have had to listen to them, but she didn’t, and that is just one m
ore reason why Carolyn and I will be friends forever. She didn’t say another word, but what she did do was tighten her grip on my ankles and give a little push, and that was all it took. I landed facedown in a dark closet, and I couldn’t have been happier about it.

  Forty minutes later I unlocked the side door, the one adjacent to the milk chute, and let myself out of the house. I’d found the control panel for the alarm system in the entry hall next to the front door—that’s where they usually put it, so the homeowner can punch in his code when he walks in the door. I’d studied the Kilgore system, and knew it had zones; you could set it to bypass certain zones, so that you could open a second-floor window for ventilation without setting off a ton of bells and whistles. I worked out what zone the side door was in, bypassed it, and let myself out of the house.

  Like most homemakers, Mrs. Mapes kept extra grocery bags in a kitchen cupboard. I’d helped myself to four, because what I was taking was heavy enough to warrant double-bagging. I tucked each of two shopping bags into each of two others, filled them up with what I’d found in the safe in the master bedroom, added one other item I could hardly leave behind, and carried everything out of the house and up the length of the driveway to the garage, where Carolyn let out a breath she must have been holding for the greater portion of the time I’d been inside.

  “I was beginning to worry,” she said. “You were in there for almost an hour.”

  “It was forty minutes,” I said.

  “That’s almost an hour. Here, let me get the door for you. You want me to push the button for the garage door?”

  “After I get these in the car.” There was a release button for the trunk lid, especially convenient if you don’t have a key. I pressed it, put the bags in the trunk, and got behind the wheel. Carolyn pressed the button, and by the time the garage door was up she was in her seat next to me. I started the car and backed all the way out of the garage, leaving the motor running while I pressed the button a final time to lower the garage door. I was still wearing my gloves, and I used my gloved hands to wipe off surfaces she might have touched.

  She noticed this, and told me she was pretty sure she hadn’t touched anything. “Well, just in case,” I said, and went back to the side door, using my picks to relock it. Carolyn had closed the milk chute door earlier, after I’d cleared it, and I opened it long enough to wipe it free of prints, then closed it and fastened the latch to leave it as I’d found it. I’d already refastened the catch on the inner door.

  I got in the car again, backed the rest of the way out of the driveway. There was no traffic on Devonshire Close, which was good and bad—there were fewer passers-by to notice us, but we were correspondingly more noticeable to anybody who did. Soon, though, we were on another street—Ploughman’s Bush, it must have been—and before long we were on Broadway, heading south toward Manhattan.

  We could have gone home the same way we’d come—the Henry Hudson, the West Side Drive—but something kept me on Broadway, moving at a sedate pace, stopping for red lights, resuming our journey when they turned green. It’s a venerable old road, Broadway, running from the foot of Manhattan clear up to Albany. I’d read an article written by a fellow who walked the length of it—not from Albany, but from the Westchester County line. He’d told about what he’d seen, and the history of it all, and I gather you could see quite a bit on a walk like that. You can probably see a fair amount driving, as far as that goes, but I wasn’t paying attention.

  “Bern?”

  “What?”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No. Why?”

  “You’re not talking.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You’re right, I guess I’m not.”

  “So I thought maybe something was wrong.”

  “No,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

  “Oh.”

  “There was a whole lot of money,” I said. “I guess he got paid in cash fairly often, and the trouble with cash is you have to launder it. Either that or declare it, and then you have to pay taxes on it, and then what’s the point? But until you figure out how to launder it, without paying as much in laundry bills as you’d have had to pay in taxes, well, you can just stow it somewhere.”

  “And that’s what he did?”

  “He stowed it in his safe, and that’s the wrong word for it, because it wasn’t. I thought I might have to pull it out and take it home where I could work on it in private, and that would have been fine, but once I took the seascape down from the wall and went to work on it, it was about as hard to open as the milk chute.”

  “And you didn’t have to crawl through it, either.”

  “Aside from the cash,” I said, “he had the usual things you keep in a safe. Stock certificates, the deed to the house, a couple of insurance policies, other important papers. And some of her jewelry. She had a little rosewood chest on top of her dresser, and it was full of jewelry, but she kept some of her better pieces in the safe.”

  “I’ll bet they’re not there anymore.”

  “You’d lose. I left the papers, and I left all the jewelry.”

  “That’s not like you, Bern.”

  “All things considered,” I said, “I’d just as soon the police never hear about what we just did. Not that they’re likely to figure out who did it, let alone prove it, but they can’t begin to investigate it if they don’t even know it happened. If I took the jewelry, Mapes would have a reason to report it. It’s probably insured, and they can’t make a claim unless they file a report. But if all I take is cash, and it’s cash he never declared, what sense does it make for him to bring the police into it? He’s not insured for the loss, he can’t logically expect them to recover any of it, and all of a sudden he’s got people from the IRS wondering where the cash came from.”

  “So you think he’ll just bite the bullet and keep smiling?”

  “He’ll probably piss and moan,” I said, “but he’ll do it in private. He probably thought of the cash as easy come, and now he can think of it as easy go.”

  “That’s great,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “It really is. The shitheel’s out a bundle, and he can’t do a thing about it. How much is it going to come to, do you have any idea?”

  I shook my head. It was a mix of bills, I told her, from hundreds all the way down to singles, some in rubber-banded stacks, some crammed into envelopes, some loose. I figured it was more than a hundred thousand and less than a million, but I was just guessing.

  “Enough so that you can give Marty his finder’s fee and still have a lot for yourself.”

  “Don’t forget your cut,” I said.

  “It shouldn’t be much. All I did was keep you company.”

  “All you did,” I said, “was save my life. If it wasn’t for you I’d still be half in and half out of the closet.”

  “I had a girlfriend like that once, Bern. It’s no fun. Okay, I was helpful, but I didn’t take any risks.”

  “If you’d been caught, what would you tell them? That you were only keeping me company?”

  “No, but—”

  “Marty gets fifteen percent off the top. You get a third of what’s left after his fifteen percent comes off.”

  She was silent while she did the math. “I don’t have pencil and paper,” she said, “so maybe I got this wrong, but the way I figure it I’m getting something like thirty thousand dollars.”

  “It’ll probably come to more than that.”

  “Gosh. You know how many dogs I have to wash to make that kind of money?”

  “Quite a few.”

  “You said it. Bern? What’ll I do with all that cash?”

  “Whatever you want. It’s your money.”

  “I mean do I have to, you know, launder it?”

  I shook my head. “It’s not that much. I know, it’s a fortune, but you’re not looking to buy stocks with it. You just want to be able to live a little better, without worrying whether you can afford an extra blue blazer, or tickets f
or The Producers. So you’ll stick it in a safe-deposit box and draw out what you need when you need it. Believe me, if you’re anything like me, it’ll be gone before you know it.”

  “That’s a comfort.”

  We stayed on Broadway all the way to my neighborhood, where we picked up Columbus Avenue and cruised past Lincoln Center. The plaza was crowded with people on their way out, and for a moment I thought Don Giovanni was over, but it was too early for that. There was a concert in Avery Fisher Hall tonight, too, and it had just let out, and if I’d stolen a cab instead of the Sable I could have had my pick of fares. I passed them all by and headed for the Village.

  “Bern? If I’m in for a minimum of thirty thousand, you’re going to get upwards of sixty. Right?”

  “Right. I figured two-to-one was fair, but if you think—”

  “No no no,” she said. “It’s more than fair. But that’s not where I was going. The thing is, if you’re getting all that money, and you don’t have to deal with a fence, you don’t have to worry about the cops—”

  “So?”

  “So how come you’re not happy?”

  “I’m happy.”

  “Yeah? You don’t seem happy to me. You seem…”

  “What?”

  “Preoccupied, Bern.”

  “Preoccupied,” I said. “Well, I guess maybe I am.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Eventually,” I said. “But here’s what I’m going to do right now. First I’ll drop you and the money at your place. I’ve been getting too many visitors lately and I don’t want to have piles of cash around the apartment, not until the traffic thins out and I have a new cupboard built to hide stuff in. I’ll drop everything, and then I’ll take the car back, and do something about the phone. And then I’ll come down to Arbor Court again. And there’ll be coffee made, and maybe something from the deli, and I’ll sit down with a cup of coffee and put my feet up. And then we can talk about what’s preoccupying me.”