Burglars Can’t Be Choosers

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 Second 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.”

“Everyone does.”

“If my agent had a machine instead of a service I’d get a new agent.”

“I didn’t know you had an agent.”

She colored. “If I had one. If we had some ham we could have ham and eggs if we had some eggs.”

“We’ve still got some eggs. In the fridge.”

“Bernie-”

“I know.” I looked again in the phone book. No Wesley Brill, but there were a couple of Brill, W’s. The first two numbers answered and reported that there was no Wesley there. The third and last went unanswered, but it was in Harlem and it seemed unlikely that he’d live there. And telephone listings with initials are almost always women trying to avoid obscene calls.

“We can find out if he has an unlisted number,” Ruth suggested. “Information’ll tell you that.”

“An actor with an unlisted number? I suppose it’s possible. But even if we find out that he does, what good will it do us?”

“None, I suppose.”

“Then the hell with it.”

“Right.”

“We know who he is,” I said. “That’s the important thing. In the morning we can call his agent and find out where he lives. What’s really significant is that we’ve found a place to start. That’s the one thing we didn’t have before. If the police kick the door in an hour from now it’d be a slightly different story from if they’d kicked it in two hours ago. I wouldn’t be at a complete dead end, see. I’d have more than a cockeyed story about a round-shouldered fat man with brown eyes. I’d have a name to go with the description.”

“And then what would happen?”

“They’d put me in jail and throw the key away,” I said. “But nobody’s going to kick the door in. Don’t worry about a thing, Ruth.”

She went around the corner to a deli and picked up sandwiches and beer, stopped at a liquor store for a bottle of Teacher’s. I’d asked her to pick up the booze, but by the time she came back with everything I’d decided not to have any. I had one beer with dinner and nothing else.

Afterward we sat on the couch and drank coffee. She had a little Scotch in hers. I didn’t. She asked to see my burglar tools and I showed them to her, and she asked the name and function of each item.

“Burglar tools,” she said. “It’s illegal to have them in your possession, isn’t it?”

“You can go to jail for it.”

“Which ones did you use to open the locks for this apartment?” I showed her and explained the process. “I think it’s remarkable,” she said, and gave a delicious little shiver. “Who taught you how to do it?”

“Taught myself.”

“Really?”

“More or less. Oh, once I was really into it I got books on locksmithing, and then I took a mail-order course in it from an outfit in Ohio. You know, I wonder if anybody but burglars ever sign up for those courses. I knew a guy in prison who took one of those courses with a correspondence college and they sent him a different lock every month by mail with complete instructions on how to open it. He would just sit there in his cell and practice with the lock for hours on end.”

“And the prison authorities let him do this?”

“Well, the idea was that he was learning a trade. They’re supposed to encourage that sort of thing in prison. Actually the trade he was learning was burglary, of course, and it was a big step up for him from holding up filling stations, which was his original field of endeavor.”

“I guess there’s more money in burglary.”

“There often is, but the main consideration was violence. Not that he ever shot anybody but somebody took a shot at him once and he decided that stealing was a safer and saner proposition if you did it when nobody was home.”

“So he took a course and became an expert.”

I shrugged. “Let’s just say he took the course. I don’t know if he became an expert or not. There’s only so much you can teach a person, through the mails or face to face. The rest has to be inside him.”

“In the hands?”

“In the hands and in the heart.” I felt myself blushing at the phrase. “Well, it’s true. When I was twelve years old I taught myself how to open the bathroom door. You could lock it from inside by pressing this button on the doorknob and then the door could be opened from the inside but not from the outside. So that nobody would walk in on you while you were on the toilet or in the tub. The usual privacy lock. But of course you can press the button on the inside and then close the door from the outside and then you’ve locked yourself out of it.”

“So?”

“So my kid sister did something along those lines, except what she did was lock herself in and then just sit there and cry because she couldn’t turn the knob. My mother called the Fire Department and they took the lock apart and rescued her. What’s so funny?”

“Any other kid who went through that would decide to become a fireman. But you decided to become a burglar.”

“All I decided was I wanted to know how to open that lock. I tried using a screwdriver blade to get a purchase on the bolt and snick it back, but it didn’t have the flexibility. I could almost manage it with a table knife, and then I thought to use one of those plastic calendars insurance men pass out that you keep in your wallet, you know, all twelve months at a glance, and it was perfect. I figured out how to loid that lock without even having heard of the principle involved.”

“Loid?”

“As in celluloid. Any time you’ve got a lock that you can lock without a key, you know, just by drawing the door shut, then you’ve got a lock that can be loided. It may be hard or easy depending on how the door and jamb fit together, but it’s not going to be impossible.”

“It’s fascinating,” she said, and she gave that little shivery shudder again. I went on talking about my earliest experiences with locks and the special thrill I’d always found in opening them, and she seemed as eager to hear all this as I was to talk about it. I told her about the first time I let myself into a neighbor’s apartment, going in one afternoon when nobody was home, taking some cold cuts from the refrigerator and bread from the bread drawer, making a sandwich and eating it and putting everything back the way I’d found it before letting myself out.

“The big thing for you was opening locks,” she said.

“Opening locks and sneaking inside. Right.”

“The stealing came later, then.”

“Unless you count sandwiches. But it didn’t take long before I was stealing. Once you’re inside a place it’s a short step to figuring out that it might make sense to leave with more money than you brought with you. Opening doors is a kick, but part of the kick comes from the possibility of profit on the other side of the door.”

“And the danger?”

“I suppose that’s part of it.”

“Bernie? Tell me what it’s like.”

“Burglary?”

“Uh-huh.” Her face was quite intense now, especially around the eyes, and there was a thin film of perspiration on her upper lip. I put a hand on her leg. A muscle in her upper thigh twitched like a plucked string.

“Tell me how it feels,” she said.

I moved my hand to and fro. “It feels very nice,” I said.

“You know what I mean. What’s it like to open a door and sneak into somebody else’s place?”

“Exciting.”

“It must be.” Her tongue flicked at her lower lip.

“Scary?”

“A little.”

“It would have to be. Is the excitement, uh, sexual?”

“Depends on who you find in the apartment.” I laughed a hearty laugh. “Just a joke. I suppose there’s a sexual element. It’s obvious enough on a symbolic level, isn’t it?” My hand moved as I talked, to and fro, to and fro. “Tickling all the right tumblers,” I went on. “Stroking here and there, then ever so gently easing the door open, slipping inside little by little.”

“Yes-”

“Of course your crude type of burglar who uses a pry bar or just plain kicks the door in, he’d be representative of a more direct approach to sex, wouldn’t he?”

She pouted. “You’re joking with me.”

“Just a little.”

“I never met a burglar before, Bernie. I’m curious to know what it’s like.”

Her eyes looked blue now and utterly guileless. I put a finger under her chin, tipped her head up, placed a little kiss upon the tip of her nose. “You’ll know,” I told her.

“Huh?”

“In a couple of hours,” I said, “you’ll get to see for yourself.”

It made perfect sense to me. She was remarkably good at getting people to tell her things over the phone, and maybe she could worm Wesley Brill’s address out of his agent first thing in the morning, but why wait so long? And why chance the agent’s passing the word to Wesley? Or, if the agent was in on the whole thing, why set his teeth on edge?

On the other hand, Peter Alan Martin’s office was located on Sixth Avenue and Sixteenth Street, and if there was anything easier than knocking off an office building after hours I didn’t know what it was. At the very least I’d walk out of the building with Brill’s address a few hours earlier than we’d get it otherwise, and without arousing suspicions. And if I got lucky-well, it had the same attraction as any burglary. You didn’t know what you might find, and it could always turn out to be more than you’d hoped for.

“But you’ll be out in the open,” Ruth said. “People might see you.”

“I’ll be disguised.”

Her face brightened. “We could get some make-up. Maybe Rod has some around. I’ll make you up. Maybe a false moustache for a start.”

“I tried a real moustache this afternoon and I wasn’t crazy about it. And make-up just makes a person look as though he’s wearing make-up, and that’s the sort of thing that draws attention instead of discouraging it. Wait here a minute.”

I went to the closet, got the wig and cap, took them into the bathroom and used the mirror to adjust them for the best effect. I came out and posed for Ruth. She was properly appreciative, and I bowed theatrically, and when I did so the cap and wig fell on the rug in front of me. Whereupon she laughed a little more boisterously than I felt the situation absolutely required.

“Not that funny,” I said.

“Oh, nonsense. It was hysterical. A couple of bobby pins will make sure that doesn’t happen. It could be embarrassing if your hair fell off on the street.”

Nothing happened last night, I thought. But I didn’t say anything. I hadn’t mentioned that I’d gone out on my own and I felt it would be awkward to bring it up now.

It was around nine when we left the apartment. I had my ring of tools in my pocket along with my rubber gloves and a roll of adhesive tape I’d found in the medicine cabinet; I didn’t think I’d have to break any windows, but adhesive tape is handy if you do and I hadn’t cased Martin’s office and didn’t know what to expect. Ruth had found some bobby pins lurking in the bottom of her bag and she used them to attach the blond wig to my own hair. I could bow clear to the floor now and not worry about dislodging the wig. Of course I’d lose the cap, and she wanted to pin the cap to the wig as well, but I drew the line there.

Outside the door I took Rod’s spare keys from her and locked all three locks, then gave them back to her. She looked at them for a moment before dropping them back into her bag. “You opened all those locks,” she said. “Without keys.”

“I’m a talented lad.”

“You must be.”

We didn’t run into anyone on the way out of the building. Outside the air was fresh and clear and not a touch warmer than it had been the night before. I almost said as much until I remembered I hadn’t been out the night before as far as she was concerned. She said it must feel good to be outside after spending two days cooped up, and I said yeah, it sure did, and she said I must be nervous being on the streets with every cop in the city gunning for me, which was something of an exaggeration, and I said yeah, I sure was, but not too nervous, and she took my arm and we headed north and east.

It was a lot safer with her along. Anybody looking at us saw a guy and a girl walking arm in arm, and when that’s what meets your eye it doesn’t occur to you to wonder if you’re eyeballing a notorious fugitive from justice. I was able to relax a good deal more than I had the past night. I think she was edgy at first, but by the time we’d walked a few blocks she was completely at ease and said she couldn’t wait until we were inside the agent’s office.

I said, “What you mean we, kemosabe?”

“You and me, Tonto. Who else?”

“Uh-uh,” I said. “Not a chance. I’m the burglar, remember? You’re the trusted confederate. You stay on the outskirts and guard the horses.”

She pouted. “Not fair. You have all the fun.”

“Rank has its privileges.”

“Two heads are better than one, Bernie. And four hands are better than two, and if we’re both checking Martin’s office things’ll go faster.”

I reminded her about too many cooks. She was still protesting when we reached the corner of Sixteenth and Sixth. I figured out which was Martin’s building and spotted a Riker’s coffee shop diagonally across the street from it. “You’ll wait right there,” I told her, “in one of those cute little booths with a cup of what will probably not turn out to be the best coffee you ever tasted.”

“I don’t want any coffee.”

“Maybe an English muffin along with it if you feel the need.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Or a prune Danish. They’re renowned for their prune Danish.”

“Really?”

“How do I know? You can hold up lanterns in the window. One if by land, two if by sea, and Ruth Hightower’ll be on the opposite shore. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Two If By Sea. That’s the show Rod’s in, did you know that? Anyway, I’ll be on the opposite shore, and I won’t be terribly long. Get in and get out, quick as a bunny. That’s my policy.”

“I see.”

“But only in burglary. It’s not my policy in all areas of human endeavor.”

“Huh? Oh.”

I felt lighthearted, even a little lightheaded. I gave her a comradely kiss and steered her toward the Riker’s, then squared my shoulders and prepared to do battle.