Burglars Can't Be Choosers Read online

  “I know. I want to go to the library. And check the Times Index—we talked about that last night. I don’t know how else we’re going to learn anything about Flaxford unless I go track down his ex-wife and talk to her.”

  “That sounds like more trouble than it’s likely to be worth.”

  “The Times? I just go to Forty-second and Fifth—”

  “I know where the library is. I mean the ex-wife.”

  “Well, it might not be any trouble at all, actually. Do ex-wives come to memorial services for their ex-husbands? Because that’s where I’m going this afternoon. There’s a memorial service for him at two-thirty. What’s the difference between a memorial service and a funeral?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think it’s whether or not you have the body around. I guess the police are probably hanging onto the body for an autopsy or something. To make sure he’s really dead.”

  “They already established cause and time of death.”

  “Well, maybe they just aren’t releasing the body, or maybe it’s being shipped somewhere. I don’t know. But that’s the difference, isn’t it? You can’t have a funeral without a corpse, can you?”

  “Tell that to Tom Sawyer.”

  “Funny. Maybe I’ll go over to that bar. Pandora’s Box.”

  “Just Pandora’s. Why would you go there?”

  “I don’t know. The same reason I’m going to the memorial service, I suppose. On the chance that I might run into the little man who wasn’t there.”

  “I don’t see why he would be at the memorial service.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t either. But if he’s a business acquaintance of Flaxford’s he might have to go, and anything’s possible, isn’t it? And if he’s not at the service he might be drowning his sorrows at Pandora’s.”

  And she went on to explain her reasons for thinking Pandora’s might be our friend’s regular hangout, and they were pretty much the same reasons which had led me to drop in there for a beer the night before. If he was at the bar or the memorial chapel, she felt certain she’d recognize him from my description.

  We sat around talking about this and other things for perhaps another hour before she decided it was time for her to head uptown. Several times I was on the point of mentioning that I’d gone to Pandora’s myself just a matter of hours ago, but for one reason or another I never did get around to it.

  Once she was gone, the day sagged. She was out doing things, pointless or otherwise, and all I had to do was hang around and kill time. I decided I should have put on the wig and the cap and tagged along after her, and I decided that would have been pretty stupid, since the cops would certainly have a man on duty at the service just as a matter of routine. I found myself wondering if Ruth was aware of this possibility, and if she knew enough not to attract attention there or to be followed when she left.

  When you have nothing better to worry about, you make do with what you’ve got. I decided I ought to let her know about this danger. But I couldn’t call her because I didn’t have her number and anyway she was going straight to the library. Of course I could call the library and have her paged, except I was by no means certain that they would page people, although I could always claim it was a matter of life and death….

  No, all that would do was draw attention. So I could put on the wig and the cap and go up to the library and tell her, and no doubt I would corner her in a room where three cops were browsing at the moment, and she’d call me by name, and my cap and wig would fall off.

  So instead I went and shaved. I took as much time as possible doing this, soaping and rinsing my face four or five times first, then shaving very carefully and deliberately. I treated myself to the closest shave I’d had in years—unless you count my departure from the Flaxford apartment, heh heh—and I left my moustache unshaven, figuring that it might become a useful part of my disguise, no doubt combining nicely with wig and cap.

  Then I dragged the cap and the yellow wig out of the closet and tried them on, and I scrutinized the patch of eighth-of-an-inch fur on my upper lip, and I returned wig and cap to closet shelf and lathered up again and erased the attempted moustache altogether.

  And that was about the size of it. I had done as thorough a job of shaving as I possibly could, and the only way to invest more time in the process would be to shave my head. It’s an indication of my state of mind that there was a point when I actually considered this, thinking that my wig would fit much better if I had no hair of my own underneath it. Fortunately the notion passed before I could do anything about it.

  At one point I did dial my own apartment again, just out of boredom. I got a busy signal and it spooked me until I realized that it didn’t necessarily mean my phone was off the hook. It could mean that the circuits were busy, which happens often enough, or it could mean that someone else was trying to call me and he’d gotten connected first. I tried a few minutes later and the phone rang and no one answered it.

  I went back to the television set and hopped around the channels. WOR had some reruns of Highway Patrol and I sat back and watched Broderick Crawford giving somebody hell. He’s always been great at that.

  I took out my little ring of keys and picks and weighed it in my hand, while weighing in my head the possibility of giving some of the other apartments in the building a quick shuffle. Just to keep my hand in, say. I could check the buzzers downstairs, get the names, look them up in the phone book, determine over the phone who was home and who wasn’t, and go door to door to see what would turn up. Some clothing in my size, say, or some cat food for Esther and Mordecai.

  I never really gave this lunacy serious consideration. But I was so desperate for things to think about that I did give it some thought.

  And then somewhere along the line I dozed off in front of the television set, paying token attention to the story until some indeterminate point where it faded out and my own equally uninspired dreams took over. I don’t know exactly when I fell asleep so there’s no way of saying just how long I slept, but I’d guess it was more than an hour and less than two.

  Maybe a noise outside woke me. Maybe my nap had simply run its course. But I’ve always thought it was the voice itself; I must have heard and recognized it on some subconscious level.

  Whatever the cause, I opened my eyes. And stared. And blinked furiously and stared again.

  It was a few minutes after five when Ruth got back. I’d very nearly worn out the rug by then, pacing back and forth across its bare threads, scuttling periodically to the phone, then backing away from it without so much as lifting the receiver. At five o’clock the TV news came on but I was too tautly wired to watch it and could barely pay attention while a beaming chap rattled on and on about something hideous that had just happened in Morocco. (Or Lebanon. One of those places.)

  Then Ruth’s step on the stairs and her key in the lock, and I opened the door before she could turn the key and she popped energetically inside and spun around to lock the door, the words already spilling from her lips. She seemed to have no end of things to tell me about the weather outside and the facilities at the public library and the service for J. Francis Flaxford, but she might as well have been speaking whatever they speak in Morocco (or Lebanon) for all the attention I was able to pay her.

  I cut in right in the middle of a sentence. “Our fat friend,” I said. “Was he there?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Not at the service and not at Pandora’s. That’s a pretty crummy bar, incidentally. It—”

  “So you didn’t see him.”

  “No, but—”

  “Well,” I said. “I did.”

  Chapter

  Nine

  “An actor!”

  “An actor,” I agreed. “I slept through most of the movie. I was just lucky that I woke up for his scene. There he was, looking back over the seat of his cab and asking James Garner where he wanted to go. ‘Where to, Mac?’ I think that was the very line I came in on, word for precious word.”


  “And you recognized him just like that?”

  “No question about it. It was the same man. The picture was filmed fifteen years ago and he’s not as young as he used to be, but who do you know that is? Same face, same voice, same build. He’s put on a few pounds since then, but who hasn’t? Oh, it’s him, all right. You’d know him if you saw him. As an actor, I mean. I must have watched him in hundreds of movies and TV shows, playing a cabdriver or a bank teller or a minor hoodlum.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Who knows? I’m rotten at trivia. And they didn’t run the list of credits at the end of the movie. I sat there waiting, and of course Garner never happened to hail that particular cab a second time, not that I really expected him to, and then there were no credits at the end. I guess they cut them a lot of the time when they show movies on television. And they don’t always have them in the first place, do they?”

  “I don’t think so. Would he be listed anyway? If he didn’t say more than ‘Where to, Mac?’ ”

  “Oh, he had other lines, Maybe half a dozen lines. You know, talking about the weather and the traffic, doing the typical New York cabbie number. Or at least what Hollywood thinks the typical New York cabbie number ought to be. Did a cabdriver ever say ‘Where to, Mac?’ to you?”

  “No, but not that many people call me Mac. It’s funny. You said he seemed familiar to you and you couldn’t figure out where you saw him before.”

  “I saw him on the screen. Over and over. That’s why even his voice was familiar.” I frowned. “That’s how I recognized him, Ruth. But how in the hell did he recognize me? I’m not an actor. Except in the sense that all the world’s a stage. Why would an actor happen to know that Bernie Rhodenbarr is a burglar?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe—”

  “Rodney.”

  “Huh?”

  “Rod’s an actor.”

  “So?”

  “Actors know each other, don’t they?”

  “Do they? I don’t know. I suppose some of them do. Do burglars know each other?”

  “That’s different.”

  “Why is it different?”

  “Burglary is solitary work. Acting is a whole lot of people on a stage or in front of a camera. Actors work with each other. Maybe he worked with this guy.”

  “I suppose it’s possible.”

  “And Rodney knows me. From the poker game.”

  “But he doesn’t know you’re a burglar.”

  “Well, I didn’t think he did. But maybe he does.”

  “Only if he’s been reading the New York papers lately. You think Rodney happened to know you were a burglar and then he told this actor, and the other actor decided you’d be just the person to frame for murder, and just to round things out you went from the murder scene to Rodney’s apartment.”

  “Oh.”

  “Just like that.”

  “It does call for more than the usual voluntary suspension of disbelief,” I admitted. “But there are actors all over this thing.”

  “Two of them, and only one of them’s all over it.”

  “Flaxford was connected with the theater. Maybe that’s the connection between him and the actor who roped me in. He was a producer, and maybe he had a disagreement with this actor—”

  “Who decided to kill him and set up a burglar to take a fall for him.”

  “I keep blowing up balloons and you keep sticking pins in them.”

  “It’s just that I think we should work with what we know, Bernie. It doesn’t matter how this man found you, not right now it doesn’t. What matters is how you and I are going to find him. Did you notice the name of the picture?”

  “The Man in the Middle. And it’s about a corporate takeover, not a homosexual ménage à trois as you might have thought. Starring James Garner and Shan Willson, and I could tell you the names of two or three others but none of them were our friend. It was filmed in 1962 and whoever the droll chap is who does the TV listings in the Times, he thinks the plot is predictable but the performances are spritely. That’s a word you don’t hear much anymore.”

  “You wouldn’t want to hear it too often.”

  “I guess not,” I said. She picked up the phone book and I told her she’d want the Yellow Pages. “I thought of that,” I said. “Call one of those film rental places and see if they can come up with a print of the picture. But they’ll be closed at this hour, won’t they?”

  She gave me a funny look and asked me what channel the movie had been on.

  “Channel 9.”

  “Is that WPIX?”

  “WOR.”

  “Right.” She closed the phone book, dialed a number. “You weren’t serious about renting the film just so we could see who was in it, were you?”

  “Well, sort of.”

  “Someone at the channel should have a cast list. They must get calls like this all the time.”

  “Oh.”

  “Is there any coffee, Bernie?”

  “I’ll get you some.”

  It took more than one call. Evidently the people at WOR were used to getting nutty calls from movie buffs, and since such buffs constituted the greater portion of their audience they were prepared to cater to them. But it seemed that the cast list which accompanied the film only concerned itself with featured performers. Our Typical New York Cabdriver, with his half-dozen typical lines, did not come under that heading.

  They kept Ruth on the phone for a long time anyway because the fellow she talked to was certain that an associate of his would be sure to know who played the cabdriver in Man in the Middle. The associate in question was evidently a goldmine of such information. But this associate was out grabbing a sandwich, and Ruth was understandably reluctant to supply a callback number, and so they chatted and killed time until the guy came back and got on the line. Of course he didn’t remember who played the cabdriver, although he did remember some bit taking place in a cab, and then Ruth tried to describe the pear-shaped man, which I felt was slightly nervy, since she’d never seen him, either live or on film. But she echoed my description accurately enough and the conversation went on for a bit and she thanked him very much and hung up.

  “He says he knows exactly who I mean,” she reported, “but he can’t remember his name.”

  “Sensational.”

  “But he found out the film was a Paramount release.”

  “So?”

  Los Angeles Information gave her the number for Paramount Pictures. It was three hours earlier out there so that people were still at their desks, except for the ones who hadn’t come back from lunch yet. Ruth went through channels until she found somebody who told her that the cast list for a picture more than ten years old would be in the inactive files. So Paramount referred her to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and L.A. Information came through with the number, and Ruth placed the call. Someone at the Academy told her the information was on file and she was welcome to drive over and look it up for herself, which would have been a time-consuming process, the drive amounting to some three thousand miles. They gave her a hard time until she mentioned that she was David Merrick’s secretary. I guess that was a good name to mention.

  “He’s looking it up,” she told me, covering the mouthpiece with her hand.

  “I thought you never lie.”

  “I occasionally tell an expeditious untruth.”

  “How does that differ from a barefaced lie?”

  “It’s a subtle distinction.” She started to add something to that but someone on the other side of the continent began talking and she said things like yes and uh-huh and scribbled furiously on the cover of the phone book. Then she conveyed Mr. Merrick’s thanks and replaced the receiver.

  To me she said, “Which cabdriver?”

  “Huh?”

  “There are two cabdrivers listed in the complete cast list. There’s one called Cabby and another called Second Cabby.” She looked at the notes she had made. “Paul Couhig is Cabby and Wesley Brill is S
econd Cabby. Which one do you suppose we want?”

  “Wesley Brill.”

  “You recognize the name?”

  “No, but he was the last cabby in the picture. That would put him second rather than first, wouldn’t it?”

  “Unless when you saw him he was coming back for an encore.”

  I grabbed the directory. There were no Couhigs in Manhattan, Paul or otherwise. There were plenty of Brills but no Wesley.

  “It could be a stage name,” she suggested.

  “Would a bit player bother with a stage name?”

  “Nobody sets out to be a bit player, not at the beginning of a career. Anyway, there might have been another actor with his real name and he would have had to pick out something else for himself.”

  “Or he might have an unlisted phone. Or live in Queens, or—”

  “We’re wasting time.” She picked up the phone again. “SAG’ll have addresses for both of them. Couhig and Brill.” She asked the Information operator for the number of the Screen Actors Guild, which saved me from having to ask what SAG was. Then she dialed another ten numbers and asked someone how to get in touch with our two actor friends. She wasn’t bothering to be David Merrick’s secretary this time. Evidently it wasn’t necessary. She waited a few minutes, then made circles in the air with her pen. I gave the phone book back to her and she scribbled some more on its cover. “It’s Brill,” she said. “You were right.”

  “Don’t tell me they described him for you.”

  “He has a New York agent. That’s all they would do is give me the agents’ names and numbers, and Couhig’s represented by the West Coast William Morris office and Brill has an agent named Peter Alan Martin.”

  “And Martin’s here in New York?”

  “Uh-huh. He has an Oregon 5 telephone number.”

  “I suppose actors would tend to be on the same coast as their agents.”

  “It does sound logical,” she agreed. She began dialing, listened for a few minutes, then blew a raspberry into the phone and hung up. “He’s gone for the day,” she said. “I got one of those answering machines. I hate the damn things.”