Burglars Can’t Be Choosers

Chapter Eleven

In the taxi heading uptown I thought about Ellie (whom I found myself still thinking of as Ruth) and wondered why I’d gotten so steamed with her. She told me a lie or three, but so what? On balance she’d placed herself in jeopardy to help a total stranger who looked to be a murderer in the bargain. On the strength of her vaunted intuition she’d put herself on the line for me. So what if she kept her name to herself? That seemed like no more than a sensible precaution-if I got nailed by the long arm of the law, I wouldn’t be able to drag her into it. Not so long as I didn’t know who she was.

And then, when the old animal passions began to churn, she felt bad about the deception. So she told me her name, and everything was right out in the open where it belonged.

So what was my problem?

Well, for openers, I’d been honest with her. And that was a new experience for me. In all my previous relationships with women, a central fact was always kept secret. Whatever else women learned about me-what I ate for breakfast, what I wore to bed, how I like to make love, whether I preferred the smooth or the crunchy peanut butter-they never got to find out what I did for a living. I would explain that I was between positions or that I had a private income or was in investments. Occasionally, if we were not likely to be more to each other than two ships passing in the night, I would equip myself with an interesting business or profession for the duration. At one time or another I had been a magazine illustrator, a neurosurgeon, a composer of modern classical music, a physical education instructor, a stockbroker, and an Arizona land developer.

And I’d always been comfortable playing one of these roles. I’d always told myself that I did this sort of thing because I couldn’t afford to let a lady friend know what I really did to support myself, but now I wondered if that was true after all. The more I thought about some of those ladies, the more I got the feeling that they might have reacted pretty much the way Ellie did. Burglary, after all, is the sort of career people are apt to perceive as exciting, the moral implications notwithstanding, and it’s been my observation that most women have highly adaptable moral systems.

I’d kept my career a secret because I liked being secretive. Because I didn’t want anyone to know me all that well.

With Ruth-no, dammit, Ellie, the woman’s name is Ellie, at least until she tells me different-with Ellie, I had no choice. And as a result she’d gotten very close to the real Bernard Rhodenbarr, and at the same time I’d found out what it was like to be intimate with a girl without holding so much of myself in reserve.

And all along I was whispering the wrong name into her ear. The shoe was on the other foot. That’s what it was. All those years of automatically lying to women and now one of them had turned the tables, and I didn’t seem to like it much.

I let the cab drop me right at my door. Not the front door, though, but the service entrance around the corner. I gave the driver one of Peter Alan Martin’s limp five-dollar bills and sent him on his way. Easy come, easy go.

I’d been prepared to pick the service entrance lock in broad daylight, that being safer on the balance than slipping past the doorman, but I didn’t have to exert any of my special talents because the door was wide open when I got to it. Two enormous men were carrying a small spinet piano through it. I stood aside while they cleared the doorway and went on to load the thing into an unmarked half-ton panel truck. Either they were un-licensed gypsy movers or they’d gone into the business of stealing pianos, which seemed unlikely but by no means impossible, New York being New York. Whatever they were doing was clearly no concern of mine, so I went on into the basement and took the elevator up to the sixteenth floor without attracting any attention whatsoever.

The long narrow corridor was happily empty. I hurried down its length to my very own door, dug my personal key ring out of my pocket, and was about to indulge myself in the unaccustomed luxury of opening a door with a key. Then I got a sudden flash that there was someone in the apartment and cursed myself for not calling up first. I extended a finger to ring my bell, then withdrew it. Either the person inside would just freeze and not answer the bell or he’d yank it open and slap cuffs on me.

I hesitated. I glanced down at my hand, the hand that held the key, and my fingers were trembling. I told myself this was silly and I told my fingers to cut it out and they did. Then I stopped looking at my fingers and looked instead at my lock, or more accurately looked where it had been the last time I’d been home.

There was a neat round hole in the door where my Rabson cylinder belonged. Above it, the Yale springlock the landlord supplied was still in place, but my key wouldn’t go into it. I dropped to one knee and had a look at it and it wasn’t the original equipment. I could see marks around it where someone had scratched and gouged the door in the process of demolishing the old lock, and now they’d put on a new one to keep people from walking in at will.

I peered through the hole where my sixty-dollar Rabson had been, but the apartment was dark and I couldn’t see anything, so I went through the rather absurd ritual of picking my own lock to let myself in. By then I had a feeling I knew what I would find, because it was already clear to me that I’d had more than one set of visitors. The cops might have drilled the Rabson out if they didn’t have anyone on hand who could pick it, but they’d have had the super use his key on the other lock, the one that came with the apartment. They certainly wouldn’t have employed brute force to kick it in, not after they’d taken the trouble to drill the Rabson. So someone else had come along afterward, someone not inclined to be gentle and painstaking, and that gave me an idea of what my apartment would look like.

But I still wasn’t prepared for what lay within. I let myself inside, closing the door and flicking on the light in a single motion, and just like that I was transported to Dresden after the bombing. The place had been turned upside-down and inside-out, and after what had been done to it I couldn’t imagine why the super had put a new lock on the door, because no future intruder could have made things any worse than they already were.

Everything I owned was in the middle of the living room floor. Chair cushions had been slashed and the stuffing torn out. Every book had wound up off the shelves and on the floor after having first been taken by the covers and shaken so that anything tucked between its pages would fall out. The wall-to-wall broadloom, imperfectly installed in the first place, had been yanked up so that whatever I might have secreted between it and the padding, or between padding and floor, could be discovered.

God, what a mess! I have always been the neatest of burglars, having nothing but respect for the private property of others, whether I intended to leave that property in their hands or transfer it into my own. The utter lack of consideration my visitors had shown literally sickened me. I had to sit down, but I couldn’t find a place to sit. There was not a single inviting surface in that apartment. I managed to put an unupholstered (hence un-slashed) chair on its feet and planted myself on it.

What was the point of all this?

The police, of course, would have searched the apartment if only to assure themselves that I wasn’t in it. They might have made off with an address book in the hope that it would lead them to possible associates and friends of mine. But the cops, however much they might dislike me for having made them look fairly foolish, would not react by waging total war on my apartment. This carnage was clearly the work of whoever had kicked the door in.

But why?

Someone had been looking for something. While no pack of adolescent vandals could have been more destructive, there was too much method to this particular madness for it to be simple vandalism. I was perfectly willing to believe the bastards had enjoyed their work, but all of their efforts had been undertaken with the aim of finding something.

What?

I walked from room to room, trying to figure it out. The little kitchen, never my favorite room at the best of times, had been sacked. I hadn’t kept anything in it more valuable than canned ravioli, so there was no reason to waste time looking at the mess. They’d even dumped the contents of the refrigerator, so mess was the right word for it

The bedroom had received similar treatment. I ignored the disorder as much as I could and waded through it to the bedroom closet. I’d built a false back wall into that closet just above the overhead shelf, giving myself a space five feet wide and three feet high and some fifteen inches deep that the building’s own architect couldn’t have found unless he knew what he was looking for. I used that space to stow whatever I might bring back from a midnight shopping spree, holding it there until I’d made arrangements to fence it. I’d had no end of swag tucked away there at one time or another, though never for terribly long. There’d been nothing in it when I was last in the apartment except for a passport and the sort of personal papers other people keep in safe deposit boxes, but I wanted to see if my visitors, thorough as they’d been, had found my hiding place.

They’d been in the closet, certainly. They had thrown all my clothing onto the bed, pausing only to rip out an occasional jacket lining. But they hadn’t found my hiding place and that made me feel a little better. I opened it up, easing the panel out of its moorings, and there were my passport and high school diploma and class picture and sundry treasures. I found myself wishing I’d left a satchel full of emeralds in there just so the bastards could have missed them.

Then I went back to the living room and began sifting through the pile of books. At least half of them had their bindings wholly or partially demolished by the treatment they’d been given. I paid as little attention to this as possible, merely going through the heap until I’d found three individual volumes. These were the book-club edition of The Guns of August, the second volume of the three-volume Heritage Press edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and something called The Romance of Beekeeping, which I’d bought because the title struck me as a contradiction in terms. All three books had seen much better days and the cover of the beekeeping book was now attached to the text by a thread and a prayer, but that was all right. I didn’t care. I toted the three books into the bedroom and put them on top of my dresser. There was plenty of room there because my visitors had tipped everything that used to be on the top of the dresser onto the floor. Considerate of them to make room for the books.

There was a smallish canvas suitcase in the closet. My leather suitcase had been carved up by a lunatic looking for a secret compartment, I suppose, but the canvas bag was so flimsy that it was obviously hiding nothing. I put my three books in it and added clean clothing from the pile on my bed and the other pile on the bedroom floor. I left myself a change of clothes, packed enough socks and shirts and underwear to last a few days, zipped up the suitcase, then took off the clothes I’d been wearing. I dropped them on the floor along with everything else and went into the bathroom to take a shower.

It was a sloppy shower because my good friends had pulled down the rod that holds the shower curtain in place. They’d also yanked the towel bars loose from their moorings. Some of these bars are hollow and some people hide things in them. I’ve never been able to understand why; the stash winds up being hard for its owner to get at, while a prowler or cop can reach it in a second by ripping the bar off the wall.

I’ve noticed over the years that your average person is not terribly good at hiding things.

Anyway, I had to shower without the benefit of shower curtain, which meant that an awful lot of water wound up on the floor. There were clothes and things there to absorb most of it as it landed. Somehow I just couldn’t bring myself to care what happened to the floor or the clothes or the whole apartment, because I was never going to have anything to do with any of them again. I couldn’t live in the apartment even if I wanted to, and now I no longer wanted to, so the hell with all of it.

I finished my shower, kicked clothing aside until I found a couple of towels to dry myself with, put on my clean clothes and slid my feet into my best pair of scotch-grain loafers. Then I added a few more things to my suitcase-my own razor, some other toilet articles, a vial of hay fever pills (although it wasn’t the season) and a rabbit’s foot key chain with no keys on it that I’d given up for lost ages ago. It must have been hiding out in the back of a dresser drawer or something and my guests had located it for me in the process of dumping the drawer. An ill wind that blows no good, said I to myself, and paused in my labors to transfer the rabbit’s foot from the suitcase to my pocket, then paused again and attached it to my little ring of picks and keys and such. As little good as the foot may have done its original rabbit owner, it had always been lucky for me, and nowadays I seemed to need all the help I could get. I took a last look around, wondering what I hoped to find. I picked up my telephone, wondered if it was tapped, decided that it probably wasn’t. But who was I going to call? I hung up and found the phone book, which had received the dump and shake treatment like every other book in the apartment. I picked it up and looked for Elaine Christopher without success. There were several E Christophers listed but none on Bank Street. I decided that the lady’s listing or lack thereof was one of an ever-increasing number of things I couldn’t be bothered to think about.

So I hefted my suitcase, killed the lights, opened the door, stepped out into the hallway, and there was Mrs. Hesch.

She was wearing a shapeless housedress with faded flowers on it. (Printed on it, that is. Not pinned to it or anything like that.) She had cloth slippers on her feet and her gray hair was pinned up in a sort of sloppy chignon. An unfiltered cigarette with a good half-inch of ash hung from the right corner of her wide mouth. I’d seen her in this outfit before, or in one very much like it. I’d also seen her dressed to the nines, but I’d never seen her without a cigarette smoldering in the corner of her mouth. She never took it out to talk and I’m not positive she removed it when she ate.

“Mr. Rhodenbarr,” she said. “I thought I heard you moving around in there. Meaning I thought I heard somebody. I didn’t know it was you.”

“Uh,” I said. “Well, it was.”

“Yeah.” Her bright little eyes took in the suitcase. “Going someplace? Not that I blame you. Poor boy, you got some kind of trouble for yourself, huh? The years we live across the hall from each other, you and me, and whoever would guess a nice boy like you would be a burglar? You never bothered anybody in this building, did you?”

“Of course not.”

“Exactly what I said. You know the kind of conversations you hear in the laundry room. There are crazy women in this building, Mr. Rhodenbarr. One the other day, she’s running off at the mouth like a broken record. ‘We ain’t safe in our own beds!’ I said to her, ‘Gert,’ I said, ‘in the first place you’d be safe in anybody’s bed, believe me.’ And I said to her, I said, ‘When did Mr. Rhodenbarr ever hurt anybody? Who did he ever rob in this building, and who cares what he does over on the East Side, where the rich momsers deserve whatever happens to them?’ You might as well be talking to a wall.” Ashes spilled from her cigarette. “We shouldn’t stand here like this,” she said, her voice pitched lower. “Come on into my place, I got coffee on the stove.”

“I’m really in sort of a rush, Mrs. Hesch.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You always got time for a cup of my coffee. Since when are you in such a rush?”

I followed her into the apartment as if hypnotized. She poured me a cup of really excellent coffee and while I sipped it she stubbed out her cigarette and replaced it immediately with a fresh one. She went on to tell me how I’d brought no end of excitement to the building, how the police had been in and out of my apartment, and how there had been other visitors as well.

“I didn’t see them,” she said, “but the door was wide open when they left. It was yesterday afternoon when Jorge put the new lock on it. I saw what they did to your apartment. Like animals, Mr. Rhodenbarr. Except an animal wouldn’t do nothing like that. Who was it? Cops?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You know who it was?”

“No, I wish I did. You didn’t see them?”

“I don’t even know when they were there. Such a mess they made you’d think I’d of heard them, but when I got the set going I don’t hear nothing. You don’t know who did this thing? Is it mixed up with the man you killed?”

“I never killed anybody, Mrs. Hesch.”

She nodded thoughtfully, neither buying nor rejecting the statement. “I can imagine you a burglar,” she said slowly. “But killing somebody is something else again. I said as much to the cop that questioned me.”

“They questioned you?”

“They questioned the building, believe me. Listen, I didn’t tell them a thing. I’ll be honest with you, I got no use for the momsers. The time my niece Gloria was raped all they did was ask her stupid questions. What I told them about you was you’re a nice boy who would never hurt a cockroach. I wouldn’t tell a cop if his pants was on fire, believe me. But what he told me, the cop, he told me you ran into this Flaxford-that’s his name?”

“Flaxford, right.”

“He says when Flaxford discovered you, you panicked, but I thought about this, Mr. Rhodenbarr, and I don’t know if I can see you killing somebody in a panic. You didn’t do it?”

“Definitely not, Mrs. Hesch. In fact I’m trying to find out who did.”

“If you say so.” She was still keeping an open mind on the subject. “Though to be frank, those momsers on the East Side, what do I care if you did or didn’t? They got it coming is how I look at it. This is good coffee, isn’t it?”

“The best.”

“Coffee’s one thing I make a fuss about. You got to take the trouble or you’re drinking dishwater. Maybe you’re hungry, I didn’t think to ask. You like cinnamon buns?”

“I just had breakfast, Mrs. Hesch, but thanks.”

“Sit anyway. Where are you going? Sit, you’ll have another cup. You don’t have to be in such a hurry. One more cup of coffee ain’t gonna kill you. Sit!”

I sat.

“So you’re a burglar,” she said. “You mind a personal question? You make a pretty decent living at it?”

“I manage.”

She nodded. “Exactly what I told Whatsername in 11-J. I said a bright boy like that, clean-cut and a good dresser, always a smile or a nice word for a person, I said if he ain’t making a living he’ll get into something else. But it’s like talking to a wall, believe me, and then the other one, Gert, she starts in how she’s not safe in her bed. The people in this building, Mr. Rhodenbarr, take it from me, it’s like talking to a wall.”