The Burglar on the Prowl Page 9

  He showed up downtown at One Police Plaza, which is where Ray had taken me, and by late afternoon he had me out of there, and took me around the corner to a teahouse one flight up from a store that sold lacquered Chinese furniture. We sat at one of those low tables with a recess in the floor for your feet, and a little slip of a girl came over and taught us how to make tea. I’d never needed instructions in the past, I just dropped the tea bag in the cup and poured hot water on top of it, but this was a more elaborate procedure involving a pot full of water with a can of Sterno under it to keep it at the boiling point, and a whole system for making the tea in small batches which we were supposed to drink from these tiny china eyecups.

  “This is the real stuff,” Wally said, knocking back a quarter of an ounce of liquid the approximate color of tears. “Drink up, Bernie.”

  I did, and noted the extreme subtlety of the flavor. It tasted, I have to say, an awful lot like water.

  “Amazing, right? And there’s no place like it this side of Hong Kong.”

  “Really? You’d think there’d be a line halfway around the block.”

  “That’s the thing,” he said. “Nobody knows about it. Bernie, they’ve got nothing. That’s why they cut you loose without putting up much of a fight. I mean, what have they got? They can prove you were within a few blocks of the place around the time those people were being robbed and murdered. Well, so were several thousand other people. They can’t establish that you were in the building, let alone the penthouse apartment where the crime took place. I’ve got to wonder what Kirschmann was thinking of, hauling you in when he knew they couldn’t hold you. Unless…”

  “Unless what?”

  “Well, unless they turn something up searching your apartment.”

  “They’re searching my apartment?”

  “’Fraid so, Bernie. The fact that they had you in custody persuaded some tame judge they had grounds for a warrant, and they’re over there right now. You don’t look happy. Want to tell me what they’re likely to find?”

  “Nothing illegal,” I said. There’s a Mondrian on the wall, and it happens to be an original, but everyone assumes it’s a copy, and it’s been hanging there for years.* My burglar tools were back in my hiding place, along with both passports, and they could make a little trouble for me if they found them, but I didn’t think they would. They never have in the past.

  “Nothing from the break-in last night,” Wally said.

  “I wasn’t there, Wally.”

  “Just making sure. Nothing from, uh, any other place you might have been?”

  He hadn’t asked what I’d been doing in Murray Hill, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have a good idea. Not a thing, I told him, and he seemed satisfied.

  “More tea, Bernie?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  “When I think of all the coffee I used to drink,” he said, “it’s enough to give me the jitters. Tea’s better for you, you know.”

  “It must be.”

  “It’s got these compounds in it, I forget what they’re called, but every day it seems they’re finding something new that they do, and that’s good for you. All I know is I find it invigorating. How about you, Bernie?”

  “I’m invigorated,” I said.

  “Me too. You been seeing anybody new, Bernie? Getting anywhere in the love life department?”

  I shook my head. “How about you?”

  “Zilch. Between my practice and my workouts in the dojo, I don’t have a hell of a lot of time on my hands. Still, the old urge is always there, you know what I mean?”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “What I’d really like to do,” he said, “is get something going with our waitress. You happen to notice her?”

  “I wasn’t paying too much attention.”

  “I think she’s beautiful. The Mysterious East and all that, and those silk robes she wears drive me nuts. I think they call them cheongsams.”

  “Is that a fact.”

  “All I know for sure is I’d like to get into hers. I’d ask her out to dinner, but I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “She doesn’t speak any English. I mean, even if I managed to make myself understood, and even if she was willing to sit across a table from a round-eyed foreign devil, what would dinner be like?”

  “I don’t know. How are you with chopsticks?”

  “I mean the conversation, Bernie. We couldn’t even make small talk. I’ve been thinking of learning Mandarin.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Well, it could come in handy. The Chinese population keeps growing, and some of them need lawyers. Don’t you think they’d be more comfortable with an attorney who understood their language?”

  “They’d probably be more comfortable with one who was Chinese to begin with.”

  “You’re right, dammit. The only reason to learn the language is so I could talk to the waitress. The thing is, I think she likes me.”

  “Oh?”

  “Every time I come here,” he said, “she goes through the whole rigmarole, teaching me to make the tea. And I’m here three or four times a week, so it’s obvious I know the drill by now. So why go through it each time? I figure she likes spending time with me.”

  “That’s possible.”

  “Well, what other explanation could there be?”

  “Maybe she doesn’t remember you from one day to the next, because all Caucasian guys look alike to her.”

  “You think?”

  “Or,” I said, “maybe she figures you’re not bright enough to retain the information from one tea-brewing session to the next.”

  “You really know how to make a guy feel good,” he said. “I can’t tell you how glad I am I brought up the subject in the first place. Bernie, I’ve got to ask you a question. I know you weren’t on the scene last night, you’re about the least likely person I can think of to be involved in something like that, but do you know anything about it?”

  “Only what I heard from Ray.”

  “You were never approached? Like somebody invited you in on the job, and you said you’d pass, but you’d keep mum about it?”

  “What makes you think that, Wally?”

  “Well, it might explain what you were doing in the neighborhood, and why you couldn’t tell Kirschmann. Maybe you hung around to see how the whole deal went down.”

  I shook my head. “Nothing like that. I’ll tell you this much, I had a reason to be in Murray Hill, although I have to admit it wasn’t a very good reason. And it was something I wasn’t willing to share with Ray Kirschmann, and it’s not something you need to know about.”

  “Got it.”

  “And it had no connection whatsoever with the Rogovin burglary, which incidentally I wish people would stop calling a burglary, because that’s not what it was. It was a home invasion, and that’s something I’ve never been involved in.”

  “First thing I told them. ‘If you know anything about the man, you know it’s not his style.’ ”

  “And nobody tried to recruit me for it. The first I heard about it was when I got arrested for it. And if anybody had tried to enlist me, I’d have turned them down—”

  “Just what I said a minute ago.”

  “—and the last place I’d have gone was Murray Hill, because I’d have wanted to be a long ways away when they pulled the job, preferably in the company of two judges and a cardinal.”

  “So you’d have a solid alibi. I get the point, Bernie, but let me put it this way. You know people. You hear things.”

  “I try not to associate with criminals, Wally.”

  “So do I,” he said. “Present company excepted, of course. But much as I try, my line of work makes it difficult. And so does yours, so there’s a chance you’ll talk to someone who knows something, and if you do—”

  “I could do myself some good by passing the word.”

  “A whole lot of good. Of course I realize that might go against your code of honor. Nobody wants
to be a rat.”

  I shook my head. “Not where these clowns are concerned,” I said. “I’d love to see the cops pick them up, and not just because they’d stop bothering me. They killed three people, for God’s sake. It’s jerks like that who give burglary a bad name.”

  Thirteen

  They came to the Poodle Factory,” Carolyn said, “sometime around two. Ray and two uniformed cops. They had a warrant to search Barnegat Books, and they wanted me to open up for them. On account of I’d locked up after Ray took you downtown. I said just because they had the right to search your place didn’t mean I was under any obligation to shut down my own place of business and open up for them, and Ray said I was absolutely right, but if I didn’t open up they’d have to force their way in, and that would mean using a bolt cutter on the padlocks and window guards. So I figured you wouldn’t want that, and I did what they wanted me to. I hope that was right.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “When the place was open Ray told me I could go back to work, and I told him I wasn’t budging until they were gone and the store was locked up again. See, I wanted to be there while they searched the place. I didn’t want them making a mess, or upsetting Raffles.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “I think he just assumed they were customers. But then he’s just a cat, or he’d have spotted them as a bunch of illiterate lip-movers. At any rate, they didn’t knock themselves out searching. It’d take hours to search a bookstore thoroughly, and they didn’t even try. They rummaged around your back office and looked behind the counter, but they didn’t take books off the shelves or anything.”

  “The place looked fine to me,” I said. “I didn’t even know anybody had been in it.”

  “You went there?”

  “On my way here,” I said. We were at Carolyn’s apartment on Arbor Court, a West Village cul-de-sac that’s so quaint and charming hardly anybody knows how to get there. When Carolyn first moved in, she’d had to start from the right place every night or she couldn’t find her way home. Her apartment’s as quaint and charming as the street it’s on, with the tub in the kitchen and a sheet of plywood on top of it to transform it into a table, at which we were currently seated, tucking into some Bangladeshi takeout from No-Worry Curry. I’d spent too much time in the teahouse to agree to Chinese.

  “I figured you’d lock up,” I said, “but I wanted to make sure. And I had the rest of that sandwich waiting for me.”

  “It almost wasn’t, Bern. One of the boys in blue had his eye on it. I told him if he laid a finger on it I’d have him up on charges. Scared the crap out of him.”

  “It wouldn’t have worked with Ray.”

  “If I thought Ray was gonna eat it,” she said, “I’d have poisoned it. He had his nerve, running you in.”

  “It’s a pretty horrible crime. He’s going to do whatever it takes to solve it.”

  “But he couldn’t have thought you had anything to do with it.”

  “He probably didn’t, but it was a case of leaving no stone unturned.”

  “If he was without sin,” she said, “then he’d have the right to turn the first stone.” She frowned. “I think I know what I meant, but I’m not sure it’s what I said.”

  She asked about Wally, and I recounted our conversation at the teahouse, and she said that was the whole thing about tea—the higher the quality, the subtler the taste, until eventually you were drinking the very best stuff and it had no taste whatsoever. “With No-Worry Curry,” she said, “you can damn well taste it.”

  “Of course, we may not be able to taste anything again for the next few days.”

  “It’s worth it,” she said. “Believe me.” She mopped her forehead with her napkin and sighed with satisfaction. “So after you finished drinking tap water in the guise of tea, you went straight to the bookstore?”

  “I went home first.”

  “To see how they left your apartment. And?”

  “You could tell they’d been there,” I said, “but I have to admit they didn’t make that much of a mess. Maybe the new commissioner’s sending them to charm school. What’s the matter?”

  “I was trying to picture Ray in charm school. He’d sit in the front row, and when the teacher walked in and introduced herself, he’d fart.”

  “Funny, he always speaks highly of you.”

  “The hell he does. He can’t stand me, and thank God for that, because this way I can hate him without feeling guilty. I gather they didn’t find your hiding place.”

  “No, I was pretty sure they wouldn’t.”

  “So everything’s okay, right? And you’re off the hook for the Rogovin murders. Not that you were ever on it, but now you’re off.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if Ray dropped in to yank my chain from time to time,” I said, “but he’s apt to do that anyway. I hope they wrap up the case in a hurry, though. If only to get those creeps out of circulation.”

  “That poor doorman,” she said.

  “What about the Rogovins?”

  “Well, them too, of course, but didn’t Ray say those might not be their real names?”

  “Just because a person’s name isn’t Rogovin, that doesn’t mean it’s okay to kill them.”

  She rolled her eyes. “If they were using false names,” she said, “maybe they were crooks. And no, that doesn’t make it all right to kill them either, but it might mean they were involved with the guys who broke into their apartment, co-conspirators in a dope deal or something, and they betrayed their partners and that’s what got them killed. Hey, you read the papers, Bern. That kind of thing happens all the time.”

  “I guess.”

  “But the doorman was just minding his business,” she said, “which consisted of minding the door, and he wound up dead. So I feel sorry for him. I feel sorry for the Rogovins, too, but not as intensely.”

  “I guess I follow you.”

  “Not that it matters who I feel sorry for or how sorry I feel, because it doesn’t do any of them a bit of good. Right?”

  “Don’t ask me,” I said. “Ask Wally Hemphill. He’s studying martial arts, and it’s making him spiritual, so a question like that should be right up his alley.”

  I hung around and we watched some TV, and then I picked up a book and read for half an hour while she booted up the computer and dealt with her e-mail and worked her way through the message boards and newsgroups she subscribed to. Then I guess she found her way over to Google, the search engine, because she was able to report that one Saul Rogovin had pitched for several minor-league baseball teams in the 1950s, while a woman with the memorable name of Syrell Rogovin Leahy had published a couple of novels, before turning to mystery fiction and adopting a pen name.

  I said, “A pen name? She was born with a pen name.”

  “Anyway,” she said, “I can’t find any Lyle Rogovin, and I don’t know what his wife’s name was so I can’t look for her. You want to hear the good news?”

  “Sure.”

  She grinned. “My date’s on for tomorrow night with GurlyGurl. She says she’s really looking forward to it.”

  “I’d call that good news.”

  “Me too. Bern? What about after?”

  “After?”

  “In Riverdale. Are we still on?”

  I took a moment to think about it, because, curiously enough, I hadn’t thought about it at all. Tomorrow was Friday, and Carolyn had an early date with GurlyGurl, and Crandall Mapes and his wife had a date with Wolfgang Amadeus, and then Carolyn and I had a late date with the wall safe in their bedroom.

  Since we’d set the date, I’d committed one burglary and been arrested for another, but that was all water over the dam or under the bridge, as you prefer. The Mapeses were still opera-bound, and I was still a burglar, and Mapes was still a shitheel, and I could only assume the money was still in the safe, so why change a good plan at this late date?

  “Sure,” I said. “We’re on. Why not?”

  It must have been
around ten when I left Carolyn’s apartment. I caught the subway at Sheridan Square. That’s a local stop, and I could have changed to the express at 14th Street, but I was comfortable and stayed put. I got off at 72nd Street and walked home, trying to remember if I needed anything from the deli. It seemed to me that I did, but I couldn’t think what it was.

  I turned at West End, and when I got to my building I found that the doorman had deserted his post. Some of the building staff still smoke, and they can’t do that indoors, so they generally step outside for a cigarette. But we’ve got a couple of antitobacco activists in the building, and they’d complained about having to run a gauntlet of cigarette smoke on their way in or out, and some of the guys had taken to slipping around the corner when they felt themselves going postal with nicotine withdrawal. I figured it would all sort itself out, as soon as the mayor quit pussyfooting around and made smoking illegal anywhere in the five boroughs.

  Meanwhile, though, the lobby was wide open. If it was someone else’s building, I’d have sailed in and set about looking for someone to burgle. But I lived here, so all I did was get on the elevator and go up to my apartment.

  I had the key out, and I don’t know what made me try the knob first, but I did, and it turned and the door opened. Stupid cops, I thought. The least the inconsiderate bastards could have done was lock up, but no, that was too much for them.

  And I pushed the door open and followed it into my apartment.

  I hadn’t taken two steps before the penny dropped. The cops hadn’t left the door unlocked. I’d already been home, for God’s sake, and determined that they’d locked up after themselves, and then I’d gone out, heading first to the bookstore and then to Carolyn’s place, and I’d damn well locked up after myself, because I always do. And even if I didn’t, the snap lock would have engaged automatically and kept the door from opening.

  Which meant someone else had come here after I left, and if I’d had any sense at all I’d have realized as much the minute I tried the knob and found the door unlocked. And, armed with that realization (and nothing else) I could have spun on my heel and gotten the hell out of there.