The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart Read online

  “Just take the portfolio,” Hugo Candlemas had advised me. “You won’t find anything else worth the taking. The man’s some sort of company stooge. He doesn’t collect anything, doesn’t go in for jewelry. You won’t find any substantial cash on hand.”

  And what was in the portfolio?

  “Papers. We’re bit players in some sort of corporate takeover, you and I. At the very least, we’ll split a reward for recovering the documents, and your share of that will be a minimum of five thousand dollars. If I can entertain offers from the other side, you might net three or four times that amount.” He beamed at the prospect. “The portfolio’s leather with gold stamping. There’s a desk, and if it’s not right on top you’ll find it in one of the drawers. They may be locked. Will that present a problem?”

  I told him it never had in the past.

  There was a desk, all right, Scandinavian in design, made of birch and given a natural finish. There was nothing on top of it but a hand-tooled leather box and an 8x10 photo in a silver frame. The box held pencils and paper clips. The photo, in black and white, showed a man in uniform. No GI Joe, this lad; his outfit was fancy enough to get him a place behind the desk at the Boccaccio. He was wearing glasses and a toothy grin, which made him look like Theodore Roosevelt, and he had his hair parted in the middle, which made him look like a drawing by John Held, Jr.

  He looked familiar, but I couldn’t tell you why.

  I pulled up a chair, sat down at the desk and got to work. There were three drawers on each side and one in the middle, and I tried the middle one first, and it was open. And, right smack in the middle of it, there sat a calfskin portfolio, tan in color, stamped in gold with an ornamental border and a network of fleurs-de-lis.

  Remarkable.

  I sat still for a moment, just looking at the thing and listening to the silence. And then the silence was broken by the unmistakable sound of a key in a lock.

  If I’d been doing anything—shuffling through drawers, opening closet doors, picking a lock—I’d have missed it, or reacted too late. But I registered it instantly and sprang from the chair as if I’d been waiting for that very sound all my life.

  Years ago, before my time and yours, there was a baseball player in the old Negro Leagues named Cool Papa Bell. I gather he was capable of swift and sudden movement; he was frequently compared favorably to greased lightning, and it was said of him that he could turn off the bedroom light and be in bed before the room got dark. I had always thought of that as colorful hyperbole, but now I’m not so sure. Because I shoved the drawer closed, switched off a lamp, switched off another lamp, raced across the room to kill the overhead light, dove into the hall closet, and yanked the door shut, and it seems to me I was holed up there, flattening myself against the coats, before the lights went out.

  If not, I came close.

  More to the point, I had the closet door shut before the other door was opened. If my intruder hadn’t fumbled a little with the keys, he’d have walked in on me. On the other hand, if he was thin-blooded enough to have worn a topcoat, or anxious enough to have toted an umbrella, he’d be opening the closet door any second now, and then what was I going to do?

  Time, I thought. Upstate, with low companions and nothing good to read. But maybe it wouldn’t come to that. Maybe I could talk my way out of it, or bribe a cop, or get Wally Hemphill to work a legal miracle. Maybe I could—

  There were two of them. I could hear them talking, a man and a woman. I couldn’t make out what they were saying—the closet door was thick and fit snugly—but I could hear them well enough to distinguish the pitch of their voices. Two of them, a man and a woman, in the apartment.

  Oh, wonderful. Candlemas had assured me I’d have plenty of time, that the portfolio’s current owner was out for the evening. But he was quite obviously back, and he had his girlfriend with him, and all I could hope for was that they would go to sleep fairly soon, and without opening the closet door.

  They didn’t sound sleepy, though. They sounded fervent, even impassioned, and I realized why I couldn’t make out what they were saying. They were talking in a language I couldn’t understand.

  That covered everything but English, actually. But there are other languages I can recognize when I hear them, even if I can’t understand what it is I’m hearing. French, German, Spanish, Italian—I know what those all sound like, and can even catch the odd word or phrase. But these folks were flailing away at one another in a tongue I hadn’t heard before. It didn’t even sound like a language, but more like what you used to hear when you tried to play a Beatles album backward, looking for evidence that Paul was dead.

  They went on nattering and I went on stupidly trying to make sense out of it, and struggling mightily not to sneeze. Something in the closet was evidently playing host to a little mold or mildew, and I seemed to be the slightest bit allergic to it. I swallowed and pinched my nose and did all the things you think of, hoping they’ll work and knowing they won’t. Then I got angry, furious at myself for getting in a pickle like this, and that worked. The urge to sneeze went away.

  So did the conversation. It died out, with only an occasional phrase uttered and that pitched too low to make out, even if you knew the language. There were other sounds, though. What the hell were they doing?

  Oh.

  I knew what they were doing. A platform bed doesn’t have springs to squeak, so I didn’t have that particular auditory clue, but even without it the conclusion was unmistakable. While I languished in the closet, these clowns were making love.

  I had only myself to blame. If only I hadn’t dawdled, wandering around the apartment, checking the fridge, counting the paper clips in the leather box on the desk. If only I hadn’t held the silver-framed photo in my hand, turning it this way and that, trying to figure out why it was familiar. If only I had behaved professionally, for God’s sake, I could have been in and out before the two of them turned up, with the portfolio locked away in my attaché case and a fat fee mine for the collecting. I’d have been out the door and out of the building and—

  Wait a minute.

  Where was the attaché case?

  It certainly wasn’t in the closet with me. Had I left it alongside the desk, or somewhere else in the apartment? I couldn’t remember. Had I even brought it to the apartment? Had I set it down while I picked the locks, or tucked it between my knees?

  I was pretty sure I hadn’t. Well, had I had it with me when I entered the Boccaccio at Captain Hoberman’s side? I tried to visualize the whole process—up in the elevator, saying a few words to Mr. Weeks in 12-J, then hotfooting it down four flights of stairs. It didn’t seem to me that I’d been carrying anything, except for five pounds I could have done without, but it was hard to be sure.

  Had I left it home? I remembered picking it up, but I could have put it down again. The question was, had I had it when I left my apartment?

  The answer, I decided, was yes. Because I could recall having it in my hand when I hailed Max Fiddler’s cab for the second time that night, and balanced on my knees when he asked if I was on my way to a business appointment.

  Had I left it in his cab? I had his card, or his Chinese herbalist’s card, anyway, with Max’s phone number on it. There was nothing I needed in the attaché case. There was, in fact, nothing in it at all. It was a good case and I’d owned it long enough to get attached (or even attachéd) to it, but I certainly could live a rich and rewarding life without it if I had to.

  But suppose he brought it back of his own accord. He knew where I lived, having dropped me off and picked me up at the same location. I didn’t think I’d mentioned my name, or Bill Thompson’s name either, but he could describe me to the doorman, or—

  What the hell was I working myself up about? I was going stir-crazy in the damned closet. It was an empty attaché case with no identification on it and nothing incriminating about it, and if I got it back that was great, and if I didn’t that was fine, and who cared?

  Anyway, I’d
had it with me when I got out of the cab. Because I could remember switching it from one hand to the other in order to ring Hugo Candlemas’s doorbell. Which meant I’d probably left it there when Hoberman and I set out on our fool’s errand, unless I’d left it at the Wexford Castle, and I didn’t think I had. I had almost certainly left it up in Candlemas’s apartment, in which case I could get it back when I went there to drop off the portfolio and collect my money.

  Assuming I ever got out of the closet.

  Outside, the fires of love were but glowing embers, to judge from the sound track. Maybe, I thought, I could just leave. Maybe they wouldn’t notice.

  Right.

  I wondered what Bogart would do.

  In the past fifteen days I had watched thirty movies, all of them either starring or featuring Humphrey Bogart. Some of them were films that everybody knows, like The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca and The African Queen, and others were movies that nobody’s ever heard of, like Invisible Stripes and Men Are Such Fools. My companion at these outings, sitting beside me and sharing my popcorn, seemed to believe that the Bogart on-screen persona would tell you all you needed to know to cope with life. And who was I to say her nay?

  But I couldn’t think of anything better for Bogart to do than the course I’d chosen for myself, which was an essentially passive one. I was waiting for something to happen. Maybe Bogart would have taken the bit in his teeth and the bull by the horns and made something happen, but it seemed to me that he was most apt to do that when he had a gun in his fist. I didn’t even have my fucking attaché case. All I could lay my hands on was a coat hanger.

  Outside my door, activity seemed to have resumed, but of a different sort. They were walking about now, and carrying on an audible if incomprehensible conversation.

  And then there was a loud sound, and something or someone bumped into the closet door, and then there was silence. Seconds later a door opened—not, thank God, the closet door, but what sounded like the front door. Then it closed. Then more silence.

  And then, finally, I heard the sound that had started the whole thing, a key in a lock. Whoever it was must have walked halfway to the elevator before deciding to come back and lock up. Maybe the afterthought was prompted by natural tidiness, or maybe the door-locker figured this way it would take them longer to discover the body.

  Because I’d played this scene before. Once before I’d ducked into a closet when somebody came home unexpectedly. That was on Gramercy Park, and the apartment was Crystal Sheldrake’s, and when I got out of her closet I found her on the floor with a dental scalpel stuck in her heart. I have stumbled over altogether too many dead bodies in the course of my young life, and maybe you get used to it, but I haven’t yet, and don’t much want to.

  And it had happened again, I just knew it. That was what had bumped into the closet door before—a body, dead as Spam, making the awkward transition from vertical to horizontal. Now it would be in the way when I tried to open the door, and I’d wind up tampering unwittingly with evidence and trying to squeeze through an opening that would have been a snug fit for Raffles.

  Or maybe the body wasn’t dead. Maybe the person on the other side of the closet door had been merely knocked senseless, and would recover consciousness even as I was emerging from my refuge. A consummation devoutly to be wished, certainly—if one had to have bodies lying about, it was preferable that they be alive—but I didn’t really feel up for much in the way of human contact just now. I offered up a quick prayer to St. Dismas, the patron saint of burglars. Let the body be alive but unconscious, I implored him. Better yet, I thought, let it be in Schenectady—but maybe that was too much to ask.

  A thought came to me, unbidden, irresistible: Bogart would get the hell out of the closet.

  I opened the door, and of course there was no body there. I went all through the place, making sure; while a dead body is not something you want to run into, neither is it the sort of thing you’d care to overlook. No body, anywhere in the apartment. Two people had entered and two people had left, and one of them had stumbled against the closet door on the way out.

  The bed, neatly made up before, was a rumpled mess now. I looked at the tangled sheets and felt embarrassed for my own voyeuristic role. It had been involuntary, God knows, and I hadn’t seen anything, or made sense of what I’d heard, but I still found it disquieting to look upon the whole thing.

  Aside from the bed, you’d never know anyone had been in the place. The guy in the uniform, the Jazz Age Teddy Roosevelt, still grinned dopily from the silver frame. The same clothes still hung in the closet, the same paper clips still huddled together in the leather box.

  But the portfolio was gone.

  CHAPTER

  Three

  And so, minutes later, was I. If there was any reason to hang around, I couldn’t think of it. I gave the place yet another once-over, just in case one of them had taken the portfolio not to keep but merely to give the other a playful swat. I made sure it wasn’t lurking on the floor behind the dresser, or in a pile of books alongside the fireplace, or, indeed, anywhere.

  Then I got out of there. I’d had my gloves on all the time I’d been inside the apartment, so I hadn’t left any fingerprints, and if the other visitors had done so, that was their problem. I left everything the way they’d left it, unlocked the doors, and was compulsive enough to do with my picks what they’d done with keys—i.e., I locked up after myself.

  I walked back up to the twelfth floor and rang for the elevator. It was close to one in the morning, and the shifts change at midnight, but it was clearly a night when nothing could safely be left to chance. It turned out that the elevator attendant was a new face, but I’d rather climb four flights of stairs unnecessarily than have a fellow wonder how the man he’d taken to Twelve had managed to find his way to Eight.

  But he didn’t say anything to me, or look twice at me, and neither did the concierge. The doorman glanced my way only long enough to assure himself that I didn’t want him to call me a cab. I walked over to Lex and headed uptown, and the Wexford Castle was right where I’d left it, looking every bit as dingy and smelling no better than it looked. There were half a dozen old soaks at the bar, and they weren’t any more interested in me than the concierge or the elevator man, and who could blame them?

  “I was in here an hour or so ago,” I told the bartender. “I didn’t happen to leave my attaché case here, did I?”

  “You mean like a briefcase?”

  “Right.”

  “About so wide and so high? Brass locks here and here?”

  “You haven’t seen it, have you?”

  “’Fraid not,” he said. “I couldn’t swear to it, but I don’t think you had it with you. I remember you, on account of you were with a guy knocked off a double like he had a train to catch, and you didn’t have nothing yourself.”

  “Well, that was then and this is now,” I said.

  “What’ll you have?”

  “What my friend had. Double vodka.”

  I won’t drink anything when I go out housebreaking, not a drop, not so much as a sip of beer. But I’d done my work for the night, if you wanted to call it work. I called it a waste of time, and not a whole lot of fun.

  He poured from the same bottle, the one with the guy sporting the astrakhan hat and the savage grin. The brand name was Ludomir, and it was a new one on me. I picked up my glass and tossed off the shot and thought I was going to die.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Something the matter?”

  “People drink this stuff?”

  “What’s wrong with it? If you’re gonna tell me it’s watered, save your breath, okay? Because it’s not.”

  “Watered?” I said. “If it’s diluted with anything, my guess would be formaldehyde. Ludomir, huh? I never heard of it.”

  “We just started pouring it a month or so ago,” he said. “I don’t do the ordering, but when the boss tells me to make it the house vodka, you know what that tells me?”
<
br />   “It’s cheap.”

  “Bingo,” he said. He hefted the bottle, studied the label. “‘Product of Bulgaria,’” he read. “Imported, no less. Says right here it’s a hundred proof.”

  “At least.”

  “Guy on the label looks happy, don’t he? Like he’s about to do one of those dances where they fold their arms and it looks like they’re sitting down, but there’s no chair under ’em. You or I tried something like that, we’d fall on our ass.”

  “I might anyway,” I said.

  “It’s cheap shit,” he said, “but all the time I been pouring it, you’re the first person who didn’t like it.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” I said. “All I said was it must have been diluted with nail polish remover.”

  “You said formaldehyde.”

  “I did?” I thought for a moment. “You’re absolutely right,” I said. “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you give me another?”

  “You sure, buddy?”

  “I’m not sure of anything,” I said, “but give me another all the same.”

  The second drink was a little easier to take, and a third might have been easier still, but I had the sense not to find out. I walked out of the Wexford Castle feeling better than I had when I’d walked in, and what more can anybody ask from a bottle of vodka?

  I pressed on to Hugo Candlemas’s brownstone, and in the vestibule I found his doorbell and tried to decide whether I would have had to switch my attaché case from one hand to the other in order to ring it. After some reflection I decided that it would depend on which hand I was holding the case in to begin with. If I had it in my left hand, it would have been child’s play to reach out and poke the button with my right forefinger. But if I’d been holding the case in my right hand, it would have been awkward in the extreme to reach all the way across my body and push the button with my left forefinger. Therefore—

  Therefore nothing. The case was either upstairs or it wasn’t, and I’d know in a minute. I had both hands free at the moment—no attaché case, alas, and no tan leather portfolio with gold stamping, either. I picked out one of my ten fingers and rang the bell.