Burglars Can’t Be Choosers

Chapter Ten

The building was only a dozen stories high, but the man who built it had probably thought of it as a skyscraper at the time. It was that old, a once-white structure festooned with ornamental ironwork and layered with decades of grime. They don’t build them like that anymore and you really can’t blame them.

I looked the place over from across the street and didn’t see anything that bothered me. Most of the streetside offices were dark. Only a few had lights on-lawyers and accountants working late, cleaning women tidying desks and emptying trash-baskets and mopping floors. In the narrow marble-floored lobby, a white-haired black man in maroon livery sat at a desk reading a newspaper, which he held at arm’s length. I watched him for a few minutes. No one entered the building, but one man emerged from the elevator and approached the desk. He bent over it for a moment, then straightened up and continued on out of the building, heading uptown on Sixth Avenue.

I slipped into a phone booth on the corner and tried not to pay attention to the way it smelled. I called Peter Alan Martin’s office and hung up when the machine answered. If you do that within seven seconds or so you get your dime back. I must have taken eight seconds because Ma Bell kept my money.

When the traffic light changed I trotted across the street. The attendant looked up without interest as I made my way through the revolving doors. I gave him my Number 3 smile, warm but impersonal, and let my eyes have a quick peek at the building directory on the wall while my feet carried me over to his desk. He moved a hand to indicate the ledger and the yellow pencil stub I was to use to sign my name in it. I wrote T. J. Powell under Name, Hubbell Corp. under Firm, 441 under Room, and 9:25 under Time In. I could have written the Preamble to the Constitution for all the attention the old man gave it, and why not? He was an autograph collector and not a hell of a lot more, a deterrent for people who deterred easily. He’d been posted in the lobby of a fifth-rate office building where the tenants probably had an annual turnover rate of thirty percent. Industrial espionage was hardly likely to occur here, and if the old man kept the junkies from carting off typewriters, then he was earning the pittance they paid him.

The elevator had been inexpertly converted to self-service some years back. It was a rickety old cage and it took its time getting up to the fourth floor, which was where I left it. Martin’s office was on six, and I didn’t really think my friend in the lobby would abandon his tabloid long enough to see if I went to the floor I’d signed in for, but when you’re a professional you tend to do things the right way whether you have to or not. I took the fire stairs up two flights-and they were unusually steep flights at that-and found the agent’s office at the far end of the corridor. There were lights burning in only two of the offices I passed, one belonging to a CPA, the other to a firm called Notions Unlimited. No sound came from the accountant’s office, but a radio in Notions Unlimited was tuned to a classical music station, and over what was probably a Vivaldi chamber work a girl with an Haute Bronx accent was saying, “…told him he had a lot to learn, and do you know what he said to that? You’re not going to believe this…”

The door to Peter Alan Martin’s office was of blond maple with a large pane of frosted glass set into it. The glass had all three of his names on it in black capitals, and Talent Representative underneath them. The lettering had been done some time ago and needed freshening up, but then the whole building needed that sort of touch-up work and you knew it wasn’t ever going to get it. I could tell without opening the door that Martin wasn’t much of an agent and Brill couldn’t have much of a career these days. On the outside the building still retained an air of faded grandeur, but in here all of the grandeur had faded away.

The door’s single lock had both a snap lock and a deadbolt, and Martin had taken the trouble to turn his key in the lock and put the deadbolt to work. It was hard to figure out why, because locking a door like that is like fencing a cornfield to keep the crows out. Any idiot could simply break the glass and reach inside, and I had adhesive tape that would enable me to break the glass without raising the dead; a few strips crisscrossed on the pane would keep the clatter and tinkle to a minimum.

A broken pane of glass is a calling card, though, especially if they find it with tape on it. Since I didn’t expect to steal anything, I had the opportunity to get in and out without anyone ever knowing I’d existed. So I took the time to pick the lock, and there was precious little time involved. I knocked off the deadbolt easily, and loiding the snap lock was more than easy. There was a good quarter-inch of air between the wooden door and its wooden jamb, and a child with a butter spreader could have let himself in.

“What’s it like, Bernie?”

Well, there was a little excitement in turning the knob and easing the door open, then slipping inside and closing the door and locking up. I had my pencil light with me but I left it in my pocket and switched on the overhead fluorescents right away. A little flashlight winking around in that office might have looked strange from outside, but this way it was just another office with the lights on and I was just another poor bastard working late.

I moved around quickly, taking the most perfunctory sort of inventory. An old wooden desk, a gray steel steno desk with typewriter, a long table, a couple of chairs. I got the feel of the layout while establishing that there were no corpses tucked in odd places, then went over to the window and looked out. I could see Riker’s but couldn’t look inside. I wondered if Ruth was at a front table and if she might be looking up at my very window. But I didn’t wonder about this for very long.

I checked my watch. Nine thirty-six.

Martin’s office was shabby and cluttered. One entire wall was covered with dark brown cork tiles, which had been inexpertly cemented to it. Thumbtacks and pushpins held glossy photographs in place. The greater portion of these photos showed women, who in turn showed the greater portion of themselves. Most of them showed their legs, many showed their breasts, and every one of them flashed a savage mechanical smile. I thought of Peter Alan Martin sitting at his cluttered desk and gazing up at all those teeth and I felt a little sorry for him.

There were a few head and shoulders shots in among the sea of tits and legs, a couple of male faces in the crowd. But I didn’t see the face I was looking for.

Next to the white touchtone phone on the desk stood a Rolodex wheel of phone numbers and addresses. I flipped through it and found Wesley Brill’s card. This didn’t really come as a surprise, but all the same I felt a little thrill when I actually located what I was looking for. I tried a couple of Martin’s Flair pens, finally found one that worked, and copied down Wesley Brill, Hotel Cumberland, 326 West 58th, 541-7255. (I don’t know why I wrote down his name. I don’t know why I wrote down anything, come to think of it, because all I had to do was remember the name of the hotel and the rest would be in the phone book. Listen, nobody’s perfect.)

I put my rubber gloves on at about this point and wiped the surfaces I remembered touching, not that any of them seemed likely to take a print and not that anyone would be looking for prints in the first place. I checked the Rolodex for Flaxford, not really expecting to find his name, and was not vastly surprised when it wasn’t there.

There were three old green metal filing cabinets on the opposite side of the window from the cork wall. I gave them a quick look-through and found Brill’s file. All it held was a sheaf of several dozen 8 by 10 glossies. If Martin had any correspondence with or about Brill he either threw it out or kept it elsewhere.

But it was the pictures that interested me. Only when I saw them did I know for certain that Wesley Brill was the man who had set me up for a murder rap. Until then there was still some room for doubt. All those long-distance phone calls had had us operating in something of a vacuum, but here was Brill in living black and white and there was no doubt about it. I flipped through the pictures and picked out a composite shot, half a dozen head-and-shoulders pics arranged to show various facial expressions and attitudes. I knew it wouldn’t be missed-mostly likely the whole file wouldn’t have been missed, and possibly the entire filing cabinet that contained it-and I folded it twice and put it in a pocket.

Martin’s desk wasn’t locked. I went through it quickly, mechanically, without finding anything to tell me much about Wesley Brill. I did come upon a mostly-full pint of blended whiskey in the bottom drawer and an unopened half-pint of Old Mr. Boston mint-flavored gin snuggled up next to it. Both of these were infinitely resistible. In the wide center drawer I found an envelope with some cash in it, eighty-five dollars in fives and tens. I took a five and two tens to cover expenses, put the rest back, closed the drawer, then changed my mind and opened it again and scooped up the rest of the money, leaving the empty envelope in the drawer. Now if I left any evidence of my presence, if the clutter I left behind struck him as different from the clutter he’d left there himself, he’d simply think it was the work of some hot-prowl artist who’d made off with his mad money.

(Then why was I disguising my presence in every other respect? Ah, you’ve spotted an inconsistency, haven’t you? All right, I’ll tell you why I took the eighty-five bucks. I’ve never believed in overlooking cash. That’s why.)

But I was careful to overlook what I found in the top left-hand drawer. It was a tiny little revolver with a two-inch barrel and pearlized grips, and tiny or not it looked very menacing. I leaned into the drawer to sniff intelligently at the barrel the way they’re always doing on television. Then they state whether or not the gun’s been fired recently. All I could state was that I smelled metal and mineral oil and what you usually smell in a musty desk drawer, a drawer which I was now very happy to close once I got my nose out of it.

Guns make me nervous, and you’d be surprised how many times a burglar will run across one. I only once had one pointed at me and that was one I’ve mentioned, the gun of good old Carter Sandoval, but I’ve found them in drawers and on night tables and, more than once, tucked beneath a pillow. People buy the hateful things to shoot burglars with, or at least that’s what they tell themselves, and then they wind up shooting themselves or each other accidentally or on purpose.

A lot of burglars steal guns automatically, either because they have a use for them or because it’s a cinch to get fifty or a hundred dollars for a nice un-traceable handgun. And I knew one fellow who specialized in suburban homes who always took guns with him so that the next burglar to hit that place wouldn’t be risking a bullet. He took every gun he encountered and always dropped them down the nearest sewer. “We have to look out for each other,” he told me.

I’ve never stolen a gun and I didn’t even contemplate stealing Martin’s. I don’t even like to touch the damned things and I closed the drawer without touching this one.

At nine fifty-seven I let myself out of the office. The corridor was empty. Faint strains of Mozart wafted my way from the Notions Unlimited office. I wasted a minute relocking the door, though I could have let him figure he’d forgotten to lock up. Anybody with Peter Alan Martin’s taste in booze probably greeted the dawn with a fairly spotty memory of the previous day.

I even walked down to the fourth floor before I rang for the elevator. Nobody was home at Hubbell Corp. I rode the elevator to the lobby, found my name in the ledger-three people had come in since my arrival, and one of them had left already. I penciled in 10 P.M. under Time Out and wished the old man in the wine-colored uniform a pleasant evening.

“They all the same,” he said. “Good nights and bad nights, all one and the same to me.”

I caught Ruth’s eye from Riker’s doorway. The place was fairly deserted, a couple of cabbies at the counter, two off-duty hookers in the back booth. Ruth put some coins on her table next to her coffee cup and hurried to join me. “I was starting to worry,” she said.

“Not to worry.”

“You were gone a long time.”

“Half an hour.”

“Forty minutes. Anyway, it seemed like hours. What happened?”

She took my arm and I told her about it as we walked. I was feeling very good. I hadn’t accomplished anything that remarkable but I felt a great sense of exhilaration. Everything was starting to go right now, I could feel it, and it was a nice feeling.

“He’s in a hotel in the West Fifties,” I told her. “Just off Columbus Circle, near the Coliseum. That’s why he didn’t have a listed phone. I never heard of the hotel and I have a feeling it’s not in the same class with the Sherry-Netherland. In fact I think our Mr. Brill has had hard times lately. He’s got a loser for an agent, that’s for sure. Most of Peter Alan Martin’s clients are ladies who came in third in a county-wide beauty contest a whole lot of years ago. I think he’s the kind of agent you call when you want someone to come out of the cake at a bachelor party. Do they still have that sort of thing?”

“What sort of thing?”

“Girls popping out of cakes.”

“You’re asking me? How would I know?”

“That’s a point.”

“I never popped out of a cake myself. Or attended a bachelor party.”

“Then you wouldn’t want Martin to represent you. I wonder why he’s representing Brill. The guy’s had tons of work over the years. Here, you’ll recognize him.” We moved under a street light and I unfolded the composite sheet for her. “You must have seen him hundreds of times.”

“Oh,” she said. “Of course I have. Movies, TV.”

“Right.”

“I can’t think where offhand but he’s definitely a familiar face. I can even sort of hear his voice. He was in-I can’t think exactly what he was in, but-”

“Man in the Middle,” I suggested. “Jim Garner, Shan Willson, Wes Brill.”

“Right.”

“So how come he’s on the skids? He’s got two last names, his agent’s got three first names, and he’s living in some dump across from the Coliseum and consorting with known criminals. Why?”

“That’s one of the things you’ll want to ask him tomorrow.”

“One, of several things.”

We walked a little farther in silence. Then she said, “It must have been a new experience for you, Bernie. Letting yourself into his office and not stealing anything.”

“Well, when I first started my criminal career all I stole was a sandwich. And I haven’t stolen anything from Rod outside of a little Scotch and a couple cans of soup.”

“Sounds as though you’re turning over a new leaf.”

“Don’t count on it. Because I did steal something from Whatsisname. Martin.”

“The photograph? I don’t think that counts.”

“Plus eighty-five dollars. That must count.” And I went on to tell her about the money in the desk drawer.

“My God,” she said.

“What’s the matter?”

“You really are a burglar.”

“No kidding. What did you think I was?”

She shrugged. “I guess I’m terribly naive. I keep forgetting that you actually steal things. You were in that man’s office and there was some money there so you automatically took it.”

I had a clever answer handy but I left it alone. Instead I said, “Does it bother you?”

“I wouldn’t say that it bothers me. Why should it bother me?”

“I don’t know.”

“I guess it confuses me.”

“I suppose that’s understandable.”

“But I don’t think it bothers me.”

We didn’t talk much the rest of the way home. When we crossed Fourteenth Street I took her hand and she let me keep it the rest of the way, until we got to the building and she used her key on the downstairs door. The key didn’t fit perfectly and it took her about as long to unlock the door as it had taken me to open it without a key. I said as much to her while we climbed the stairs, and she laughed. After we’d climbed three of the four flights she walked up to 4-F and started to poke a key in the lock.

“It won’t fit,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Wrong apartment. That one’s unfit for military service.”

“What?”

“Four-F. The draft classification. We’re looking for 5-R, remember?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. Her face reddened. “I was thinking I was at my place. On Bank Street.”

“You’re in the fourth floor front?”

“Well, fourth floor at the top of the stairs. There are four apartments to a floor; it’s not as narrow a building as this one.” We walked to the final flight of stairs and began climbing them. “I’m glad no one opened the door while we were there. It would have been embarrassing.”

“Don’t worry about it now.”

In front of Rod’s apartment she fished her keys out again, paused for a moment, then turned and deliberately dropped them back into her bag.

“I seem to have misplaced my keys,” she said.

“Come on, Ruth.”

“Let’s see you open it without them. You can do it, can’t you?”

“Sure, but what’s the point?”

“I guess I’d like to see you do it.”

“It’s silly,” I said. “Suppose someone happens to come along and sees me standing there playing locksmith. It’s an unnecessary risk. And these locks are tricky. Well, the Medeco is, anyhow. It can be a bitch to open.”

“You managed before, didn’t you?”

“Sure, but-”

“I already fed the cats.” I turned and stared at her. “Esther and Mordecai. I already fed them.”

“Oh,” I said.

“This afternoon, on my way back here. I filled their water dish and left them plenty of dried food.”

“I see.”

“I think it would excite me to watch you open the locks. I told you I felt confused about the whole thing. Well, I do. I think watching you unlock the locks, uh, I think it would get me, uh, hot.”

“Oh.”

I took my ring of picks out of my pocket.

“I suppose this is all very perverted of me,” she said. She put an arm around my waist, leaned her hot little body against mine. “Kinky and all.”

“Probably,” I said.

“Does it bother you?”

“I think I can learn to live with it,” I said. And went to work on those locks.

Quite a while later she said, “Well, it looks as though I was right. I’m a kinkier bitch than I realized.” She yawned richly and snuggled up close. I ran a hand lazily over her body, memorizing the contours of hip and thigh, the secret planes and valleys. My heart was beating normally again, more or less. I lay with my eyes closed and listened to the muffled hum of traffic in the streets below.

She said, “Bernie? You have wonderful hands.”

“I should have been a surgeon.”

“Oh, do that some more, it’s divine. No wonder all the locks open for you. I don’t think you really need all those curious implements after all. Just stroke the locks a little and they get all soft and mushy inside and open right up.”

“You’re a wee bit flaky, aren’t you?”

“Just a wee bit. But you have got the most marvelous hands. I wish I had hands like yours.”

“There’s nothing wrong with your hands, baby.”

“Really?”

And her hands began to move.

“Hey,” I said.

“Something the matter?”

“Just what do you think you’re doing, lady?”

“Just what do you think I’m doing?”

“Playing with fire.”

“Oh?”

The first time had been intense and urgent, even a bit desperate. Now we were slow and lazy and gentle with each other. There was no music on the radio, just the sound of the city below us, but in my head I heard smoky jazz full of blue notes and muted brass. At the end I said “Ruth Ruth Ruth” and closed my eyes and died and went to Heaven.

I awoke first in the morning. For a moment something was wrong. The ghost of a dream was flickering somewhere behind my closed eyelids and I wanted to catch hold of it and ask it its name. But it was gone, out of reach. I lay still for a moment, taking deep breaths. Then I turned on my side and she was there beside me and for this I was grateful. At first I did nothing but look at her and listen to the even rhythm of her breathing. Then I thought of other things to do, and then I did them.

Eventually we got out of bed, took our turns in the bathroom, and put on the clothes we’d thrown off hastily the night before. She made the coffee and burned the toast and we sat down in silence and had breakfast.

There was something wrong with this particular silence. Ray Kirschmann’s young partner Loren would have slapped his battered nightstick against his palm and said something inarticulate about vibrations, and maybe that would have been as good an explanation as any. Perhaps I read something in the tilt of her head, the set of her chin. I didn’t know exactly what it was but something was not at all right.

I said, “What’s the matter, Ruth?”

“Ruth,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Dear Ruth. That’s a play.”

“Baby Ruth,” I said. “That’s a candy bar.”

“Ruth Ruth Ruth. You said that last night. And this morning, too. At the very end.”

“You said ‘Sweet fucking shit I’m coming,’ but I hadn’t planned on throwing it in your face for breakfast. If you don’t like your name why don’t you change it?”

“I like my name fine.”

“Then what’s the trouble?”

“Shit. Look, Bernie, if you keep calling me Ruth I’m going to start calling you Roger.”

“Huh?”

“As in Armitage.”

“Oh,” I said. Then my eyes widened a bit and my jaw slackened and I said Oh again, but with a little more conviction, and she gave a slow nod.

“Your name isn’t Ruth Hightower.”

“Too true.” She averted her eyes. “Well, you were calling yourself Roger and I knew that wasn’t your name and I thought we ought to start on an equal footing. And then we got it straightened out who you were and it just seemed easier for me to go on being Ruth. There was never a convenient time to tell you.”

“Until now.”

“If you’re going to murmur a name into my ear at intimate moments I’d just as soon you got the name right.”

“I guess I can understand that. Well?”

“Well what?”

“Well, what’s your name? Take plenty of time, kid. Make sure you come up with one that’ll sound nice in a husky whisper.”

“That’s not nice.”

“Not nice! Here I am feeling like an utter zip, cooing some alias into your pink shell-like ear, and you tell me I’m not nice?” I turned her face so that I could see her eyes. There were tears welling up in their corners. “Hey,” I said. “Hey, come on now.”

She blinked furiously but the tears did not go away. She blinked some more, then erased the tears with the back of her hand. “I’m all right,” she said.

“Of course you are.”

“My name’s Ellie.”

“For Eleanor?”

“For Elaine, but Ellie’ll do just fine.”

“Ellie what? Not Hightower, I don’t suppose.”

“Ellie Christopher.”

“Pretty name.”

“Thank you.”

“I think it suits you. But then I thought Ruth Hightower suited you pretty well, so who am I to say? What do I know? Is Christopher your married name?”

“No. I took my maiden name back after the divorce.”

“What was your husband’s name?”

“What’s the difference?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you angry with me, Bernie?”

“Why should I be angry?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

I went on not answering it and finished my coffee, then got to my feet. “We’ve both got things to do,” I said. “I want to go to my apartment.”

“I don’t know if that’s safe.”

I didn’t either but I didn’t feel like talking about it. I couldn’t believe the cops would have my place staked out, not at this point, and a phone call would let me know if there was anyone on the premises at the moment. And I really wanted clean clothes, and I had the feeling it would be nice to have my case money on hand. Things were almost ready to come to a head and the five grand I’d tucked away at my place might turn out to be useful.

“Things to do,” I said. “You want to go back to your place and change your clothes, freshen up, that sort of thing. And feed your cats.”

“I suppose so.”

“And empty the catbox and put out fresh kitty litter, all those things. Take the garbage out to the incinerator. The little day-to-day chores that eat up so much of a person’s time.”

“Bernie-”

“Do you really have cats? Abyssinians? And are their names really Esther and Ahasuerus?”

“Esther and Mordecai.”

“There’s a lot I don’t know about you, isn’t there?”

“Not so very damned much. I don’t see what you’re so thoroughly pissed about.”

I didn’t either, exactly. But I glared at her anyway.

“Give me a little room, huh? I’m just a neighborhood kid who wandered in one morning to water the plants.”

“Well, you don’t owe me anything, that’s for sure.”

“Bernie-”

“I’ll meet you at the Childs on Eighth Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street,” I said. “That’ll be a few doors from his hotel. Do you still want to come along?”

“Of course. And I’ll dress up like we said last night? Nothing’s changed, Bernie.”

I let that pass and looked at my watch. “It’s a quarter after ten,” I said. “Figure two hours to do everything we have to do plus a margin for error, so that makes what? I’ll meet you at the restaurant at twelve-thirty. How does that sound?”

“It sounds fine.”

I got the wig and cap and she came around and helped me with the bobby pins. I wanted to do it myself but I forced myself to stand still while she poked around there. “If I’m not there by one o’clock,” I said, “you can assume I got arrested.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Lots of things aren’t. Don’t forget to lock up. The streets are full of burglars.”

“Bernie-”

“I mean it. It’s a jungle out there.”

“Bernie-”

“What?”

“Just be careful.”

“Oh, I’m always careful,” I said, and let myself out.