Burglars Can’t Be Choosers

Chapter Twelve

Most people who checked into the Cumberland had either a suitcase or a girl in tow. I was unusual in that I had one of each with me. My canvas suitcase looked slightly disreputable, but then so did my girl. She was wearing skintight jeans and a bright green sweater a size too small for her with no bra under it. And she’d done something moderately sluttish to her hair, and she was wearing dark lipstick and several pounds of eye shadow. She looked remarkably tawdry.

The clerk looked her over while I registered us as Mr. and Mrs. Ben G. Roper of Kansas City, which might have made more sense had my luggage been monogrammed. I gave him back the registration card along with a pair of ten-dollar bills, and while he was finding my change Ellie slid an envelope onto the counter. The clerk gave me $6.44 or thereabouts, then spotted the envelope with Brill’s name printed on it and blinked. “Where’d this come from?” he wondered.

I shrugged and Ellie said she thought it was there all along. The clerk didn’t seem terribly interested in this or much of anything else. He stuck it in a pigeonhole numbered 305.

Our own key was numbered 507. I grabbed my bag-there was no bellhop at the Cumberland -and Ellie walked with me to the elevator, her behind swaying professionally to and fro. The old man in the elevator cage chewed his cigar and took us up to the fifth floor without a word, then left us to let ourselves into our room.

It wasn’t much of a room. The bed, which took up most of it, looked as though it had had hard use. Ellie sat lightly on the edge of it, removed make-up, did something to her hair to make it as it had been originally.

“A lot of trouble for nothing,” she said.

“You enjoyed the masquerade.”

“I suppose so. I still look like a tramp in this sweater.”

“You certainly look like a mammal, I’ll say that much.”

She glowered at me. I checked my wig and cap in the bathroom mirror. They hadn’t made much of an impression on Mrs. Hesch, who never even noticed that my hair had changed color.

“Let’s go,” I said, then did a Groucho Marx thing with my eyebrows. “Unless you’d like to make a couple of dollars, girlie.”

“Here? Ugh.”

“A bed is a bed is a bed.”

“This one’s no bed of roses. Do people actually have sex in rooms like this?”

“That’s all they do. You don’t think anyone would sleep here, do you?”

She wrinkled her nose and we left, taking our suitcase with us. A call from Childs had established that Wesley Brill was out, and a knock on his door established that he hadn’t come back yet. I could have picked his lock in a couple of seconds but it turned out that I didn’t have to, because I stuck our room key in on a hunch and oddly enough it worked. Quite often the rooms on a particular line will respond to the same key-305 and 405 and 505, for instance-but now and then in older hotels the locks loosen up with age and a surprising number of keys turn out to be interchangeable.

Brill’s room was nicer than the ones they used for the hot sheets trade. It still wasn’t much but at least there was a piece of carpet covering some of the floor and the furniture was only on its penultimate legs. I put my suitcase on a chair, rummaged idly through Brill’s closet and dresser, then took my suitcase off the chair, put it on the floor, and sat on the chair myself. There was another chair with arms, and Ellie had already taken it.

“Well,” she said, “here we are.”

“Here we are indeed.”

“I wonder when he’s coming back.”

“Sooner or later.”

“Good thinking. I don’t suppose you thought to bring along a deck of cards?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Well, I never thought of playing cards as proper equipment for a burglar.”

“You always worked alone.”

“Uh-huh. You’d think he’d have a deck of cards here. You’d think anyone who spent a lot of time in this room would play a lot of solitaire.”

“And cheat.”

“Most likely. I’d pace the floor if there was room. I find myself remembering bad stand-up comics. ‘The room was so small…’ ”

“How small was it, Johnny?”

“The room was so small you had to go out in the hall to close the door.”

“That small, eh?”

“The room was so small the mice were hunchbacked. I have to admit I’ve never understood that line. Why would mice be hunchbacked in a small room?”

“I think you’ve got an overly literal mind.”

“I probably do.”

She smiled. “You’re nice, though. Just the same, literal mind or not, you’re nice.”

We would talk, fall silent, talk some more. At one point she asked me what I would do when it was all over.

“Go to jail,” I said.

“Not once we find the real killer. They’ll drop the other charges, won’t they? I bet they will.”

“They might.”

“Well, what’ll you do then? After it’s all over?”

I thought about it. “Find a new apartment,” I said at length. “I wouldn’t be able to stay where I am, not even if those visitors hadn’t turned it into a slum. All this publicity, the whole building knows about me. I’ll have to move someplace else and take the apartment under another name. It’ll be a nuisance but I guess I can live with it.”

“You’ll stay in New York?”

“Oh, I think so. I think I’d go crazy anywhere else. This is home. Besides, I’m connected here.”

“How do you mean?”

“I know how to operate in New York. When I steal something I know who’ll buy it and how to negotiate the sale. The cops know me, which in the long run does you more good than harm, although you might not think so. Oh, there’s any number of reasons why a burglar is better off operating in territory that he knows in and out. I don’t even like to work outside of Manhattan if I can avoid it. I remember one job I went on up in Harrison, that’s in Westchester -”

“You’re going to go on being a burglar.”

I looked at her.

“I didn’t realize that,” she said. “You’re going to keep on opening locks and stealing things?”

“What else?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ellie, on some level or other I think you think you’re watching all of this on television and I’m going to reform right in time for the final commercial. That may keep the audience happy but it’s not terribly realistic.”

“It isn’t?”

“Not really, no. I’m almost thirty-five years old. Opening locks and stealing things is the only trade I know. There’s a lot of ads in Popular Mechanics telling me about career opportunities in meatcutting and taxidermy but somehow I don’t think they’re being completely honest with me. And I don’t figure I could cut it by raising chinchillas at home or growing ginseng in my backyard, and the only kind of work I’m qualified for pays two dollars an hour and would bore the ass off me before I’d earned ten dollars.”

“You could be a locksmith.”

“Oh, sure. They break their necks running around handing out licenses to convicted burglars. And the bonding companies are just standing in line to do business with locksmiths with criminal records.”

“You must be qualified for something, Bernie.”

“The state taught me how to make license plates and sew mailbags. This is going to stun you but there’s very little call for either of those skills in civilian life.”

“But you’re intelligent, you’re capable, you can think on your feet-”

“All important qualifications that help me make it as a burglar. Ellie, I’ve got a very good life. That’s something you don’t seem to realize. I work a couple of nights a year and I spend the rest of my time taking things easy. Is that such a bad deal?”

“No.”

“I’ve been a burglar for years. Why should I change?”

“I don’t know.”

“Nobody changes.”

We didn’t have too much to say after that exchange. The time passed about as quickly as the Middle Ages. While we waited, the management kept renting out the room next door to us. Several times we heard footsteps in the hallway and sat motionless, thinking it might be Brill, and then the door next to us would open, and before long bedsprings would creak. Soon the bedsprings would cease creaking and shortly thereafter the footsteps would return to the elevator.

“True love,” Ellie said.

“Well, it’s nice the hotel serves a purpose.”

“It does keep them off the streets. That last chap was in rather a hurry, wouldn’t you say?”

“Probably had to get back to his office.”

Then at last footsteps approached from the elevator but did not stop at the room next door. Instead they stopped directly in front of the door behind which we lurked. I drew a quick breath and got to my feet, padding soundlessly into position at the side of the door.

Then his key turned in the lock and the door opened and it was him all right, Wesley Brill, the man with the soft brown eyes that had never quite met mine, and I stood with my hands poised waist-high at my sides, ready to catch him if he fainted, ready to grab him if he tried to bolt, ready to hang a high hard one on his chin if he decided to get violent.

What he did was stare. “Rhodenbarr,” he said. “This is utterly incredible. How on earth did you manage to find me? And they didn’t tell me anyone was waiting for me.”

“They didn’t know it.”

“But how did you-oh, of course. You’re a burglar.”

“Everybody’s got to be something.”

“Indeed.”

His voice and his whole manner of speaking were completely different. The Runyonesque diction was gone and he no longer bit off his words at their final consonants. There was an archness to his inflections, a lilt that was either theatrical or slightly faggoty or both.

“Bernie Rhodenbarr,” he said. Then he caught sight of Ellie, broadened his grin, raised a hand and lifted a brown trilby hat from his head. “Miss,” he said, then turned his attention to me once more. “Just let me close this door,” he said. “No need to share our business with a whole neighborhood of buyers and sellers. There. How on earth did you ever find me, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I saw you on television.”

“Oh?”

“An old movie.”

“And you recognized me?” He preened a bit. “Which film?”

“The Man in the Middle.”

“Not that dog with Jim Garner? I played a cabdriver in that one. I played a lot of cabdrivers.” His eyes misted up at the memory. “No question about it, those were the days. Last year, God help us all, I drove a cab for a couple of weeks. Not in a film, but in what we call real life.” He swung his arms back and forth, then put his little hands together and rubbed his palms as if to keep warm. “Those days are dead and gone. Let us live in the present, eh? The important thing is that she still wants the box.”

I looked at him.

“That’s why you looked me up, isn’t it? The infamous blue leather box.”

“Leather-covered,” I said. Don’t ask me why.

“Leather, leather-covered, whatever. Just so you’ve got it. As far as killing Flaxford, well, that certainly wasn’t what she had in mind, but it’s my impression she figures it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. What she didn’t know was whether you’d managed to pick up the box before you had to get out of there, but if you did she definitely wants it and she’ll be glad to pay for it.”

I stared at him, but of course his eyes didn’t meet mine. They were aimed over my shoulder, as usual.

“Look, Bernie-” He grinned suddenly. “You don’t mind if I call you Bernie, do you? You know who I am and I don’t have to play the heavy any longer, do I? And you can call me Wes.”

“Wes,” I said.

“Excellent. And I don’t think I’ve met the little lady.”

“C’mon, Wes. You’re slipping back into character. Wesley Brill wouldn’t say that. ‘The little lady.’ ”

“You’re absolutely right.” He faced Ellie and made a rather courtly bow. “Wesley Brill,” he said.

“Ruth Hightower,” I said.

He smiled. “Not really.”

“That’s a private joke,” Ellie said. “I’m Ellie Christopher, Wes.”

“My pleasure, Miss Christopher.”

She said he could call her Ellie, and he told her to call him Wes, which she’d already done, and he added that no one called him Wesley, that indeed his name had originally been John Wesley Brill, his mother having seen fit to name him for the founder of Methodism, a move she might not have dared had she suspected he was destined for an actor’s life. He’d dropped his first name entirely the first time he trod the boards. (That was his phrase, trod the boards.) Ellie assured him that she thought dropping a first name altogether was perfectly all right but that when you retained an initial out in front it was a sign of a devious character. Good ol’ Wes said he couldn’t agree more. Ellie mentioned G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt and Wes chimed in with J. Edgar Hoover. While they were at it I thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald and decided there might be a few weak spots in Ellie’s theory.

“Wes,” I cut in, “the purpose of our call wasn’t entirely social.”

“I’d guess not. You’re up to your neck in it, aren’t you? Killing old J. Francis. That really surprised her because she said you never impressed her as violent. I told her it must have been self-defense. Although I don’t suppose the law calls it self-defense when it happens in the middle of a burglary.”

“The law calls it first-degree murder.”

“I know. It doesn’t seem entirely fair, does it? But the big question, Bernie, is, have you got the box?”

“The box.”

“Right.

I closed my eyes for a minute. “You never actually saw the box yourself,” I said. “Because you described it very precisely but you didn’t know what color blue it was. And you didn’t make up an answer when I asked.”

“Why would I make up an answer?”

“You’d make one up if there was no box in the first place. But there really is a box, isn’t there?”

He peered intently at me and his forehead developed a single vertical line just above the nose like the one David Janssen has in the Excedrin commercial, the one that makes you certain he really does have one rat bastard of a headache.

“The box exists,” I said.

“You mean you thought-”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Which means you don’t-”

“Right. I don’t.”

“Shit,” he said, pronouncing the word as emphatically as if he’d just stepped in it. Then he remembered that the little lady was present. “I beg your pardon,” he said.

She told him not to worry about it.

There really was a box. In fact he’d been waiting for me in Pandora’s that first night, sitting in a back booth with four thousand dollars on his hip, stretching out his drinks until they closed the place. It wasn’t until the following day that he found out what had gone wrong.

“And you didn’t kill Flaxford,” he said, after I’d done some recapping on my own.

“And neither did you.”

“Me? Kill the man? I never even met him. Oh, I see what you mean. You thought I set you up. But if you didn’t kill Flaxford-”

“Somebody else did. Because beating your own head in with a blunt instrument is no way to commit suicide.”

“I wish I knew more about this,” he said. “I’m not really in the center of things. There’s a lot happening I don’t know about.”

“I know how you feel.”

“All I am is an actor, really. And that career’s not going too well. One thing leads to another, and I had this drinking situation that’s over with now, thank God, but I reached a point where I couldn’t remember lines. I still have trouble. I can improvise, which is what I was doing the two times I saw you, building a role around a framework, but you can’t do that in the movies unless you’re directed by Robert Altman or something. The jobs stopped coming, and this agent I’m with now, I’d have to say he’s more pimp than agent.”

“I know. I was in his office.”

“You met Pete?”

“I was in his office,” I repeated, “but he wasn’t. Last night. To get your address.”

“Oh,” he said. He looked for a moment at his own door, no doubt reflecting on its failure to keep us out of his room. “The point is, I’m in this because I’m an actor. I used to play a lot of heavies and that’s what she hired me for, to hire you to get the box and then to pay you off and take the box to her.”

“How did you know to hire me?”

“She told me to.”

“Right, sure,” I said. “She told you to hire a burglar. But how did you happen to know that I happened to be one?”

He frowned. “She told me to hire you,” he said. “You specifically, Bernard Rhodenbarr. I’m an actor, Bernie. How would I go about finding a burglar on my own? I don’t know any burglars. I can play crooks but that doesn’t mean I hang around with them.”

“Oh.”

“I used to know a bookie but since off-track betting came in I couldn’t tell you if he’s alive or dead. As far as burglars are concerned, well, I now know one burglar, or-” with a nod to Ellie “-or possibly two, but that’s all.”

“The woman who hired you,” Ellie said. “She knew Bernie was a burglar.”

“That’s right.”

“And she knew where he lived and what he looked like, is that right?”

“Well, she took me over there and pointed him out to me.”

“How did she know him?”

“Search me.”

Loren the cop would have frisked him. I just said, “What’s her name, Wes?”

“I’m supposed to keep her name out of this.”

“I’m sure you are.”

“That’s why she hired me in the first place.”

Ellie’s eyes flashed. “Now you just wait a damned minute,” she said. “Don’t you think Bernie has a right to know who got him into this mess? He’s wanted for a murder he didn’t commit and he’s taking a chance every time he sets foot outside, and he has to go around wearing a disguise-”

“The hair,” Wes said. “I knew something was different. You dyed your hair.”

“It’s a wig.

“Really? It looks remarkably natural.”

“God damn it,” Ellie said. “How can you have the nerve to tell us the woman doesn’t want her name mentioned?”

“Well, she doesn’t.”

“Well, that’s too bad. You’ll just have to tell us who she is or else.”

“Or else what?” he asked. Reasonably, I thought.

Ellie frowned, then glanced at me for help. But I was getting flashes and the tumblers were beginning to drop. Brill hadn’t known me, hadn’t even known I was a burglar. But this woman had hired him to rope me in, selecting him because he was an actor who had made a career out of playing underworld types. She didn’t know any real underworld types, nor did she know any real burglars except for me, but she did know who I was and where I lived and what I looked like and how I kept the wolf away from my door.

I said, “Wait a minute.”

“You can’t let him get away with it, Bernie.”

“Just hold it for a minute.”

“You can’t. We found him and we trapped him and now he’s supposed to tell us what we want to know. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to go?”

I closed my eyes and said, “Cool it, will you? Just for a minute.” And the last tumbler tumbled and the mental lock eased open so sweetly, so gently, like the petals of a flower, like a yielding lady. I opened my eyes and beamed at Ellie, then turned the warmth of my smile on Wesley Brill.

“He doesn’t have to tell me a thing,” I said to Ellie. “It’s enough that he told me it was a woman. That triggered it, really. A woman who doesn’t know anything about crime except that a guy named Bernie Rhodenbarr burgles for a living. I know who she is.”

“Who?”

“Does she still live in the same place, Wes? Park Avenue, right? I don’t remember the address offhand but I could draw you a floor plan of the apartment. I tend to remember the layout of places where I’ve been arrested.”

Brill was perspiring. Beads of sweat dotted his forehead and he wiped them away not with his whole hand but with an extended index finger. The gesture was very familiar. I must have seen him do it dozens of times in movies.

“Mrs. Carter Sandoval,” I said. “Didn’t I tell you about the Sandovals, Ellie? Of course I did. Her husband had a monster coin collection that I’d taken an interest in. He also had a monster of a gun and his doorbell was out of order and he and his wife were home when I came a-calling. I’m sure I told you about this.”

“Yes, you did.”

“I thought so.” I grinned at Brill. “Her husband was head of CACA. That’s not a bathroom word, it stands for the Civic Anti-Crime Association or something like that. It’s a group of high-minded pests who push for everything from more foot patrolmen on the beat to investigations of political and judicial corruption. The sonofabitch held a gun on me and I tried to buy my way out, and he was the wrong man to offer a bribe to. He even wanted to prosecute me for attempted bribery but he wasn’t a cop, for God’s sake, and there’s no law against trying to bribe a private citizen. At least I don’t think there is, but come to think of it I’m probably wrong. There’s a law against just about everything, isn’t there? Of course I didn’t know he was the head CACA person. All I knew was that he did something terribly profitable on Wall Street and thought rare coins were a hell of a hedge against inflation. Does he still have the coins, Wes?”

Brill just stared at me.

“I remember them well,” I said. I was enjoying this. “And they would remember me, Wes. I saw them the night I was arrested, of course, but they were also on hand when I went before the judge. They didn’t have to be. I copped a plea to a lesser charge, and don’t think that didn’t take some doing. Carter Sandoval wasn’t nuts about the idea of that. But somebody must have taken him aside and explained that the courts would never get anything done if every criminal went through the ritual of a jury trial, and he must have decided it would get more of us evildoers off the streets if the system was allowed to go along as usual, so he and his wife showed up to watch me stand up and plead guilty and get sent away to the license plate factory. I suppose he figured it would be good publicity for his cause with him there to watch justice triumph. And I think he got a personal kick out of it, too. He seemed pretty attached to those coins and thoroughly steamed at the thought of me violating the sanctity of his home.”

“Bernie-”

“She was a lot younger than him. She must have been around forty or close to it, so I guess she’s around forty-five now. Good-looking woman. A little too much jawline for my taste, but maybe she was just setting her jaw with determination the times I saw her. Is her hair still the same color, Wes?”

“I never told you her name.”

“That’s true, Wes, and I wish you would. It’s on the tip of my tongue. It’s not Carla and it’s not Marla and what the hell is it?”

“Darla.”

Something made me glance at Ellie. Her shoulders were set and her head cocked forward. She looked to be concentrating intently. “Darla Sandoval,” I said. “Right. That ring any kind of a bell for you, Ellie?”

“No. I don’t think you mentioned her name before. Why?”

“No reason. Why don’t you call her, Wes?”

“She calls me. I’m not supposed to call her.”

“Call her and see if she wants the box back.”

“But you don’t have the box, Bernie.” He eyed me in his oblique fashion. “Or do you? I’m getting more confused by the minute. Do you have the box or don’t you?

“I don’t.

“I didn’t think so because you didn’t even believe there was a box. You didn’t get the box from Flaxford’s apartment, then. Did you see it there and-”

“No.”

“You went through the desk? There was a desk there, wasn’t there? A large rolltop?”

“There was, and I went through it pretty carefully. But I couldn’t find any kind of blue box in it.”

“Shit,” he said, and this time he didn’t think to apologize to Ellie. I don’t think she minded. I’m not even sure she heard him. She seemed to have something else on her mind.

“That means they got it,” he said.

“Who?”

“Whoever killed him. You didn’t commit the murder or steal the box, so somebody else did both those little things and that’s why the box was gone when you got there. So that’s the end of everything.”

“Call Darla.”

“What’s the point?”

“I know where the box is,” I said. “Call her.”