Burglars Can't Be Choosers Read online

  And what do they do with the clippings? Stow ’em in a pigeonhole, I suppose.

  The blue leather box wasn’t under the rolltop, and my pear-shaped client had so positioned his little hands as to indicate a box far too large for any of the pigeonholes and little drawers, so I opened the other lock and released the catches on all the lower drawers. I started with the top right drawer because that’s where most people tend to put their most important possessions—I’ve no idea why—and I worked my way from drawer to drawer looking for a blue box and not finding one.

  I went through the drawers quickly, but not too quickly. I wanted to get out of the apartment as soon as possible because that’s always a good idea, but I had not committed myself to pass up any other goodies the apartment might contain. A great many people keep cash around the house, and others keep traveler’s checks, and still others keep coin collections and readily salable jewelry and any number of interesting things which fit neatly enough into a Bloomingdale’s shopping bag. I wanted the four thousand dollars due me upon delivery of the blue box—the thousand I’d received in advance bulged reassuringly in my hip pocket—but I also wanted whatever else might come my way. I was standing in the apartment of a man who did not evidently have to worry about the source of his next meal, and if I got lucky I might very well turn a five-thousand-dollar sure thing into a score big enough to buy my groceries for the next year or so.

  Because I no longer like to work any more than I have to. It’s a thrill, no question about it, but the more you work the worse the odds get. Crack enough doors and sooner or later you are going to fall down. Every once in a while you’ll get arrested and a certain number of arrests will stick. Four, five, six jobs a year—that ought to be plenty. I didn’t think so a few years ago when I still had things to prove to myself. Well, you live and you learn, and generally in that order.

  I gave those drawers a fast shuffle, down one side and up the other, and I found papers and photograph albums and account ledgers and rings full of keys that probably didn’t fit anything and a booklet half-full of three-cent stamps (remember them?) and one of a pair of fur-lined kid gloves and one of a pair of unlined pigskin gloves and one ear-muff of the sort that your mother made you wear and a perpetual calendar issued in 1949 by the Marine Trust Company of Buffalo, New York, and a Bible, King James version, no larger than a pack of playing cards, and a pack of playing cards, Tally-Ho version, no larger than the Bible, and a lot of envelopes which probably still had letters in them, but who cared, and stacks of canceled checks bearing various dates over the past two decades, held together by desiccated rubber bands, and enough loose paper clips to make a chain that would serve as a jump rope for a child, or perhaps even for an adult, and a postcard from Watkins Glen, and some fountain pens and some ball pens and some felt pens and no end of pencils, all with broken tips, and…

  And no coin collections, no cash, no traveler’s checks, no bearer bonds, no stock certificates, no rings, no watches, no cut or uncut precious stones (although there was a rather nice chunk of petrified wood with felt glued to the bottom so it could be used as a paperweight), no gold bars, no silver ingots, no stamps more precious than the three-cent jobs in the booklet, and, by all the saints in heaven, no blue box, leather or otherwise.

  Hell.

  This didn’t make me happy, but neither did it make me throw up. What it made me do was straighten up and sigh a little, and it made me wonder idly where old Flaxford kept the Scotch until I reminded myself that I never drink on a job, and it made me think about the cigarettes in the silver dish until I recalled that I’d given up the nasty things years ago. So I sighed again and got ready to give the drawers another look-see, because it’s very easy to miss something when you’re dealing with a desk that is such a reservoir of clutter, even something as substantial as a cigar box, and I looked at my watch and noted that it was twenty-three minutes of ten, and decided that I would really prefer to be on my way by ten, or ten-thirty at the very latest. Once more through the desk, then, to be followed if necessary by a circuit of other logical hiding places in the living room, and then if need be a tour of the apartment’s other rooms, however many there might be of them, and then adieu, adieu. And so I blew on my hands to cool them as they were beginning to sweat a bit, not that blowing on them did much good, encased in rubber gloves as they were, and this may well have led me to sigh a third time, and then I heard a key in the lock and froze.

  The apartment’s tenant, J. Francis Flaxford, was supposed to be off the premises until midnight at the very least.

  By the same token, the blue box was supposed to be in the desk.

  I stood facing the door, my hip braced against the desk. I listened as the key turned in the lock, easing back the deadbolt, then turning farther to draw back the spring lock. There was an instant of dead silence. Then the door flew inward and two boys in blue burst through it, guns in their hands, the muzzles trained on me.

  “Easy,” I said. “Relax. It’s only me.”

  Chapter

  Two

  The first cop through the door was a stranger, and a very young and fresh-faced one at that. But I recognized his partner, a grizzled, gray chap with jowls and a paunch and a long sharp nose. His name was Ray Kirschmann and he’d been with the NYPD since the days when they carried muskets. He’d collared me a few years earlier and had proved to be a reasonable man at the time.

  “Son of a gun,” he said, lowering his own gun and putting a calming hand upon the gun of his young associate. “If it ain’t Mrs. Rhodenbarr’s son, Bernard. Put the heat away, Loren. Bernie here is a perfect gentleman.”

  Loren bolstered his gun and let out a few cubic feet of air. Burglars are not the only poor souls who tend to tense up when entering doors other than their own. And trust Ray to make sure his young partner cleared the threshold ahead of him.

  I said, “Hi, Ray.”

  “Nice to see ya, Bernie. Say hello to my new partner, Loren Kramer. Loren, this here is Bernie Rhodenbarr.”

  We exchanged hellos and I extended a hand for a shake. This confused Loren, who looked at my hand and then began rumbling with the pair of handcuffs hanging from his gunbelt.

  Ray laughed. “For Chrissake,” he said. “Nobody ever puts cuffs on Bernie. This ain’t one of your mad dog punks, Loren. This is a professional burglar you got here.”

  “Oh.”

  “Close the door, Loren.”

  Loren closed the door—he didn’t bother to turn the bolt—and I did a little more relaxing myself. We had thus far attracted no attention. No neighbors milled in the hallways. And so I had every intention of spending what remained of the night beneath my own good roof.

  Politely I said, “I wasn’t expecting you, Ray. Do you come here often?”

  “You son of a gun, you.” He grinned. “Gettin’ sloppy in your old age, you know that? We’re in the car and we catch a squeal, woman hears suspicious noises. And you was always quiet as a mouse. How old are you, Bernie?”

  “Be thirty-five in April. Why?”

  “Taurus?” This from Loren.

  “The end of May. Gemini.”

  “My wife’s a Taurus,” Loren said. He had liberated his nightstick from its clip and was slapping it rhythmically against his palm.

  “Why?” I asked again, and there was a moment of confusion with Loren trying to explain that his wife was a Taurus because of when she was born, and me explaining that what I wanted to know was why Ray had asked me my age, and Ray looking sorry he’d brought the whole thing up in the first place. There was something about Loren that seemed to generate confusion.

  “Just age making you sloppy,” Ray explained. “Making noises, drawing attention. It’s not like you.”

  “I never made a sound.”

  “Until tonight.”

  “I’m talking about tonight. Anyway, I just got here.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know, a few minutes ago. Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes at the outside. Ray? You
sure you got the right apartment?”

  “We got the one’s got a burglar in it, don’t we?”

  “There’s that,” I admitted. “But did they specify this apartment? Three-eleven?”

  “Not the number, but they said the right front apartment on the third floor. That’s this one.”

  “A lot of people mix up left and right.”

  He looked at me, and Loren slapped the nightstick against his palm and managed to drop it. There was a leather thong attaching it to his belt but the thong was long enough so that the nightstick hit the floor. It bounced on the Chinese rug and Loren retrieved it while Ray glowered at him.

  “That’s more noise than I made all night,” I said.

  “Look, Bernie—”

  “Maybe they meant the apartment above this one. Maybe the woman was English. They figure floors differently over there. They call the first floor the ground floor, see, so what they call the third floor would be the floor three flights up, which you and I would call the fourth floor, and—”

  “Jesus.”

  I looked at Loren, then back at Ray again.

  “What are you, crazy? You want me to read you your rights and all so you’ll remember you’re a criminal caught in the act? What the hell’s got into you, Bernie?”

  “It’s just that I just got here. And I never made a sound.”

  “So maybe a cat knocked a plant off a shelf in the apartment next door and we just got lucky and came here by mistake. It’s still you and us, right?”

  “Right.” I smiled what certainly ought to have been a rueful smile. “You got lucky, all right. I’m nice and fat tonight.”

  “That so?”

  “Very fat.”

  “Interesting,” Ray said.

  “You got the key from the doorman?”

  “Uh-huh. He wanted to come up and let us in but we told him he ought to stay at his post.”

  “So nobody actually knows I’m here but you two.”

  The two of them looked at each other. They were a nice contrast, Ray in his lived-in uniform, Loren all young and neat and freshly laundered. “That’s true,” Ray said. “Far as it goes.”

  “Oh?”

  “This’d be a very good collar for us. Me’n Loren, we could use a good collar. Might get a commendation out of it.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said.

  “Always possible.”

  “The hell it is. You didn’t nail me on your own initiative. You followed up a radio squawk. Nobody’s going to pin a medal on you.”

  “Well, you got a point there,” Ray said. “What do you think, Loren?”

  “Well,” Loren said, slapping the stick against his palm and nibbling thoughtfully on his lower lip. The stick was beat up and scratched in contrast to the rest of his outfit. I had the feeling he dropped it often, and on surfaces more abrasive than Chinese carpets.

  “How fat are you, Bernie?”

  I didn’t see any point in haggling. I generally carry an even thousand dollars in walkaway money, and that was what I had now. Coincidentally enough, the ten hundreds in my left hip pocket were the very ones I’d taken as an advance on the night’s work, so if I gave it all to my coppish friends I’d break even, with nothing lost but my cab fare and a couple of hours of my time. My shifty-eyed friend would be out a thousand dollars but that was his hard luck and he would just have to write it off.

  “A thousand dollars,” I said.

  I watched Ray Kirschmann’s face. He considered trying for more but must have decided I’d gone straight to the top. And there was no dodging the fact that it was a satisfactory score since it only had to be cut two ways.

  “That’s fat,” he admitted. “On your person right now?”

  I took out the money and handed it to him. He fanned the bills and gave them a count with his eyes, trying not to be too obvious about it.

  “You pick up anything in here, Bernie? Because if we was to report there was nobody here and then the tenant calls in a burglary complaint, we don’t look too good.”

  I shrugged. “You could always claim I left before you got here,” I told him, “but you won’t have to. I couldn’t find anything worth stealing, Ray. I just got here and all I touched is the desk.”

  “We could frisk him,” Loren suggested. Ray and I both gave him a look and he turned a deeper pink than his usual shade. “It was just a thought,” he said.

  I asked him what sign he was.

  “Virgo,” he said.

  “Should go well with Taurus.”

  “Both earth signs,” he said. “Lots of stability.”

  “I would think so.”

  “You interested in astrology?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “I think there’s a lot to be said for it. Ray’s a Sagittarius.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Ray said. He looked at the bills again, gave a small shrug, then folded them once and found them a home in his pocket. Loren watched this procedure somewhat wistfully. He knew he’d get his share later, but still…

  Ray gnawed a fingernail. “How’d you get in, Bernie? Fire escape?”

  “Front door.”

  “Right past the clown downstairs? They’re terrific, these doormen.”

  “Well, it’s a large building.”

  “Not that large. Still, you do look the part. That clean-cut East Side look and those clothes” I live on the West Side myself, and usually wear jeans. “And I suppose you carried a briefcase, right?”

  “Not exactly.” I pointed to my Bloomie’s bag. “That.”

  “Even better. Well, I guess you can pick it up and walk right out again. Wait a minute.” He frowned. “We’ll leave first. I like it better that way. Otherwise, why are we taking so much time here, et cetera, and et cetera. But don’t get light-fingered after we split, huh?”

  “There’s nothing here to take,” I said.

  “I want your word on it, Bernie.”

  I avoided laughing. “You’ve got it,” I said solemnly.

  “Give us three minutes and then go straight out. But don’t hang around no more’n that, Bernie.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Well,” he said. He turned and reached for the door, and then Loren Kramer said he had to go to the bathroom. “Jesus Christ,” Ray said.

  Loren said, “Bernie? Where is it, do you know?”

  “Search me,” I said. “Not literally.”

  “Huh?”

  “I never got past this desk,” I said. “I suppose the john must be back there somewhere.”

  Loren went looking for it while Ray stood there shaking his head. I asked him how long Loren had been his partner. “Too long,” he said.

  “I know what you mean.”

  “He ain’t a bad kid, Bernie.”

  “Seems nice enough.”

  “But he’s so damn stupid. And the astrology drives me straight up the wall. You figure there’s anything in that crap?”

  “Probably.”

  “But even so, who gives a shit, right? Who cares if his wife’s a Taurus? She’s a good-looking bitch, I’ll give her that much. But Loren, shit, he was ready to search you. Just now when you said ‘Search me.’ The putz woulda done it.”

  “I had that feeling.”

  “The one good thing, he’s reasonable. They gave me this straight arrow a while back and you couldn’t do nothing with him. I mean he even paid for his coffee. At least Loren, when somebody puts money in his hand he knows to close his fist around it.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  “That’s what I say. If anything, he likes the bread too much, but I guess his wife is good at spending it fast as he brings it home. You figure it’s on account of she’s a Taurus?”

  “You’d have to ask Loren.”

  “He might tell me. But you can put up with a lot of stupidity in exchange for a little reasonableness, I have to say that for him. Just so he don’t kill hisself with that nightstick of his, bouncing it off his knee or something. Bernie? Take the gloves off.�
��

  “Huh?”

  “The rubber gloves. You don’t want to wear those on the street.”

  “Oh,” I said, and stripped them off. Somewhere in the inner recesses of the apartment Loren coughed and bumped into something. I stuffed my gloves into my pocket. “All the tools of the trade,” Ray said. “Jesus, I’d always rather deal with pros, guys like you. Like even if we had to bag you tonight. Say I had the doorman backing my play and there was no way to cool it off. No money in it that way but at least I’m dealing with a professional.”

  Somewhere a toilet flushed. I resisted an impulse to look at my watch.

  “You feel comfortable about it,” he went on. “Know what I mean? Like tonight, coming through that door. I didn’t know what we was gonna find on the other side of it.”

  “I know the feeling,” I assured him, and started to reach for my shopping bag. I caught a glimpse of Ray’s face that made me turn to see what he was staring at, and what he was staring at was Loren at the far end of the room with a mouth as wide as the Holland Tunnel and a face as white as a surgical mask.

  “In…” he said. “In…In…In the bedroom!” And then, all in a rush: “Coming back from the toilet and I turned the wrong way and there’s the bedroom and this guy, he’s dead, this dead guy, head beaten in and there’s blood all over the place, warm blood, the guy’s still warm, you never saw anything like it, Jesus, I knew it, you can never trust a Gemini, I knew it, they lie all the time, oh God—”

  And he flopped on the rug. The one that may very well have been a Bokhara.

  And Ray and I looked at each other.

  Talk about professionalism. We both went promptly insane. He just stood there with his face looming, not going for his gun, not reaching for me, not even moving, just standing flatfooted like the flatfoot he indisputably was. And I, on the other hand, began behaving wholly out of character, in a manner neither of us ever expected I might be capable of.

  I sprang at him. He went on gaping at me, too astonished even to react, and I barreled into him and sent him sprawling and bolted without waiting to see where he landed. I shot out the door and found the stairs right where I’d left them, and I raced down two flights and dashed through the lobby at the very pace the word breakneck was coined to describe.