Burglars Can’t Be Choosers

Chapter Three

It’s a good thing the sidewalks were fairly clear. Otherwise I probably would have run straight into somebody. As it was, I managed to reach the corner with a simple stretch of broken-field running, and by the time I took a left at Second Avenue, logic and shortness of breath combined to take the edge off my panic. No one seemed to be pelting down the street behind me. I slowed to a rapid walk. Even in New York people tend to stare at you if you run. It may not occur to them to do anything about it, but it gets on my nerves when people stare at me.

After a block and a half of rapid walking I stuck out a hand and attracted the attention of a southbound cab. I gave him my address and he turned a couple of corners to transform himself into a northbound cab, but by that time I’d changed my mind. My apartment was nestled high atop a relatively new high-rise at West End and Seventy-first, and on a clear day (which comes up now and then) you can see, if not forever, at least the World Trade Center and selected parts of New Jersey. And it’s a perfect refuge from the cares of the city, not to mention the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, which is why I automatically spoke the address to the driver.

But it was also the first place Ray Kirschmann and his fellows would come looking for me. All they had to do was check the phone book, for God’s sake.

I pressed myself back into my seat and patted my left breast pocket in a reflexive hunt for the pack of cigarettes that hadn’t been there in several years. If I lived in that apartment on East Sixty-seventh, I thought, I could sit in the green leather chair and knock dottle from my pipe into the cut-glass ashtray. But as things stood…

Relax, Bernard. Think!

There were several things to think about. Like, just who had invested a thousand dollars in setting me up for a murder charge, and just why the oddly familiar pear-shaped man had chosen me for the role of imbecile. But I didn’t really have time for that sort of long-range thinking. I’d gotten a break-one cop collapsing in a providential faint, the other reacting slowly even as I was reacting with uncharacteristic speed. That break had given me a head start, but the head start probably didn’t amount to more than a handful of minutes. It could vanish before I knew it.

I had to go to ground. Had to find a bolt hole. I’d shaken the hounds from my trail for a moment or two and it was up to me to regain the safety of my burrow before they recaptured the scent. (It didn’t thrill me that all the phrases that came to me were from the language of fox hunting, incidentally.)

I shrugged off the thought and tried to get specific. My own apartment was out; it would be full of cops within the hour. I needed a place to go, some safe and sound place with four walls and a ceiling and a floor, all of them reasonably close together. It had to be a place that no one would think to connect with me and one where I could not be readily discovered or observed. And it had to be in New York, because I’d be a lot easier to run down once I was off my home ground.

A friend’s apartment.

The cab cruised northward while I reviewed my list of friends and acquaintances and established that there was not a single one of them whom I could drop in on. (In on whom I could drop? No matter.) My problem, you see, was that I had always tended to avoid bad company. Outside of prison-and I prefer to be outside of prison as often as possible-I never associate with other burglars, hold-up men, con artists, swindlers or miscellaneous thieves and grifters. When one is within stone walls one’s ability to pick and choose is circumscribed, certainly, but on the outside I limit myself to people who are, if not strictly honest, at least not the felonious sort. My boon companions may pilfer office supplies from their employers, fabricate income tax deductions out of the whole cloth, file parking tickets in the incinerator, and bend various commandments perilously close to the breaking point. But they are none of them jail-birds, at least as far as I know, and as far as they know neither am I.

It should consequently not surprise you to learn that I have no particularly close friends. With none of them knowing the full truth about me, no intimacy has ever really developed. There are chaps I play chess with and chaps I play poker with. There are a couple of lads with whom I’ll take in a fight or a ball game. There are women with whom I dine, women with whom I may see a play or hear a concert, and with some of these ladies fair I’ll now and then share a pillow. But it’s been quite a while since there was a male companion in my life whom I’d call a real friend, and almost as long since I’d been involved with a woman on more than a casual basis. That modern disease of detachment, I suppose, augmented by the solitary nature of the secretive burglar.

I’d never had occasion to regret all of this before, except on those once-in-a-while bad nights everybody has when your own company is the worst company in the world and there’s nobody you know well enough to call at three in the morning. Now, though, what it all meant was there was no one on earth I could ask to hide me. And if there was it wouldn’t help, because if I had a close friend or a lover that’s the first place the cops would look, and they’d be on the doorstep an hour or two after I was through the door.

Problems…

“You want me to turn around?”

My driver’s voice shook me out of my reverie. He had pulled to a stop and had turned around to blink at me through the Plexiglas partition that kept him safe from homicidal fares. “Senny-first ’n’ Wes’ End,” he announced. “You want this side or the other?” I blinked back, turned up my coat collar, shrank down inside it like a startled turtle. “Mac,” he said patiently, “want I should turn around?”

“By all means,” I said.

“That means yes?”

“That means yes.”

He waited while traffic cleared, then arched the cab in the traditional illegal U-turn, braking smoothly to a stop in front of my very own building. Could I spare a minute to duck inside, grab some clothes and my case money, be out in no time at all…

No.

His hand reached to throw the flag shutting off the meter. “Hold it,” I said. “Now drive downtown.”

His hand hovered over the flag like a hummingbird over a flower. Then he withdrew it and turned again to look querulously at me. “Drive downtown?”

“Right.”

“You don’t like this place no more?”

“It’s not as I remembered it.”

His eyes took on that wary New York look of a man who realizes he’s dealing with a lunatic. “I guess,” he said.

“Nothing’s the same anymore,” I said recklessly. “The neighborhood’s gone to hell.”

“Jesus,” he said, cab in motion now, driver at ease. “Lemme tell you, this here is nothin’. You oughta see where I live. That’s up in the Bronx. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Bronx. But you’re talking about a neighborhood on the skids-”

And talk about a neighborhood on the skids is precisely what he did, and he did it all the way down the western edge of Manhattan. The best thing about the conversation was its utter predictability. I didn’t have to listen to it. I just let my mind go wherever it wanted while my mouth filled in with the appropriate grunts and uh-huhs and izzatsos as the occasion demanded.

So I sent my mind on a tour of my friends, such as they were. The woodpushers I whipped routinely at chess, the card sharps who just as routinely trimmed me at poker. The sports fans. The drinking companions. The disconcertingly short list of young ladies with whom I’d been lately keeping the most cursory sort of company.

Rodney Hart.

Rodney Hart!

His name popped into my mind like a fly ball into shallow right field. A tall fellow, spare of flesh, with high and prominent eyebrows and a longish nose, the nostrils of which tended to flare when he was holding anything much better than two pair. I’d first met him at a poker game perhaps a year and a half ago, and since then I’d seen him precisely two times away from the card table-once in a Village bar when we happened to run into each other and chatted our way through a couple of beers, and another time when he had the second lead in a short-lived off-Broadway show and I went backstage after the performance with a young lady I was trying to impress. (It didn’t work.)

Good old Rodney Hart!

What, you may well ask, was so wonderful about Rodney? Well, in the first place, I happened to know that he lived alone. More important, he wasn’t home now and wouldn’t be back in town for a couple of months. Just the other week or so he’d turned up at the poker game and announced we wouldn’t have him to kick around anymore. He’d just signed for the road company of Two If By Sea and would be traveling the length and breadth of these United States, bringing Broadway’s idea of culture to the provinces. And he’d even dropped the gratuitous information that he wasn’t subletting his apartment. “Not worth it,” he’d said. “I’ve had the place for years and I pay a hot ninety a month in rent. The landlord doesn’t even bother getting increases he’s entitled to. He likes renting to actors, if you can believe it. The roar of the greasepaint and all that. He eats it up. Anyway, it’s worth ninety a month not to have some sonofabitch sitting on my toilet and sleeping in my bed.”

Ha!

He didn’t know it, but the sonofabitch who would be sitting on his potty seat and lolling between his percales was none other than Bernard Rhodenbarr. And I wouldn’t even pay him ninety a month for the privilege.

But where the hell did he live?

I seemed to remember that he lived in the Village somewhere, and I decided that was as much as I had to know while I was in this particular cab. Because I had unquestionably made myself a memorable passenger, and the papers would shortly be full of my face, and the driver might, for the first time in his unhappy life, actually go so far as to put two and two together.

“Right here is fine,” I said.

“Here?”

We were somewhere on Seventh Avenue now, a couple of blocks from Sheridan Square. “Just stop the cab,” I said.

“You’re the boss,” the driver said, using a phrase which has always seemed to me to be the politest possible way of expressing absolute contempt. I dug out my wallet, paid the man, gave him a tip designed to justify his contempt, and while so doing began to regret bitterly the thousand dollars I’d paid to Ray and Loren. Hardly the best investment I had ever made. If I had that thousand now it might give me a certain degree of mobility. But all I had, after squaring things with the cabbie, was seventy dollars and change. And it seemed somehow unlikely that Rod would be the sort to leave substantial quantities of cash around his empty apartment.

And where was that apartment, anyway?

I found that answer in a phone booth, thinking as I turned the directory how providential it was that Rod was an actor. It seems as though everyone else I know has an unlisted number, but actors are another breed; they do everything but write their numbers on lavatory walls. (And some of them do that.) Good old Rod was listed, of course, and while Hart is a reasonably common name Rodney is reasonably uncommon, and there he was, praise be to God, with an apartment on Bethune Street deep in the bowels of the West Village. A quiet street, an out-of-the-way street, a street the tourists never trod. What could be better?

The book gave not only his address but his phone number as well, as telephone books are wont to do, and I invested a dime and dialed the number. (One does this sort of thing before breaking and entering.) It rang seven times, which I thought was probably enough, but I’m compulsive; I always let phones in potentially burglarable apartments go through a tedious twelve rings. But this one rang only seven before someone picked it up, at which point I came perilously close to vomiting.

“Seven-four-one-nine,” a soft female voice said, and my risen gorge sank and I calmed down. Because just as actors have listed phones so do they have services to answer them, and that was what this voice represented; the number which had been spoken to me was nothing other than the last four digits of Rodney’s phone number. I cleared my throat and asked when Rodney would be back in town, and the lady with the dulcet tones obligingly informed me that he would be on tour for another fifteen weeks, that he was in St. Louis at the moment, and that she could supply me with the number of his hotel there if I wished. I didn’t wish. I suppressed an infantile urge to leave a comic message and returned the phone to its cradle.

It took a little doing but I managed to find Bethune Street and walked west on it until I located Rod’s building. It was half a block west of Washington Street in a neighborhood that was half brownstones and the other half warehouses. The building I wanted was a poor but honest five-story brownstone indistinguishable from its neighbors on either side but for the rusty numerals alongside the front door. I stayed on the street a moment to make sure there was no one taking obvious notice of me, then slipped into the front vestibule. I scanned the row of buttons on the wall, looking for names of illustrious actors and actresses, but Helen Hayes wasn’t listed and neither were the Lunts. Rod was, however; one R. Hart was inked in as occupying Apartment 5 – R. Since there were five floors and two apartments to a floor, that meant he was on the top floor at the rear of the building, and what could be less obtrusive than that?

Because old habits die hard, I gave his bell a good ringing and waited for anyone who might be in his apartment to buzz me back. Happily no one did. I then thought of ringing other bells at random. This is what I would do on a job. People buzz you on through the locked front door without a qualm, and if they happen to pop out into the hallway to see who you are you just smile apologetically and say that you forgot your key. Works like a charm. But Rod lived on the top floor, which meant I’d have to walk past all the other floors, and anyone who noticed me might notice again when the papers saw fit to print my picture, and I might be holed up here for a while, if not forever, and…

Didn’t seem worth the risk, small though the risk might be. Especially since it took me less than fifteen seconds to let myself through that front door. A strong wind could have opened that lock.

I scampered up four flights to the top floor and took deep breaths until my heartbeat returned to normal. Rod’s door had 5-R on it and I went and stood in front of it and listened. The door at the other end of the hallway, 5-F, had no light shining underneath it. I knocked on Rod’s door and waited, and knocked again, and then I took out my burglar’s tools.

Rod had three locks on his door. Sometime in the past an amateur had dug at the frame around one of them with a chisel or screwdriver, but it didn’t look as though he’d accomplished anything. Rod’s locks included a fancy Medeco cylinder, a Segal police lock with a steel bar wedged against the door from within, and a cheap piece of junk that was just there for nuisance value. I knocked off the third lock first to get it out of the way, then tackled the Segal. It’s good insurance against a junkie kicking the door in and it’s not easy to pick but I had the tools and the touch and it didn’t keep me waiting long. The tumblers fell into place and the steel bar slid aside in its channel and that left the Medeco.

The Medeco’s the one they advertise as pick-proof and of course that’s errant nonsense, there is no such thing, but it’s a pardonable exaggeration. What it meant was that I had to do two jobs at once. Suppose you’re a cryptographer and you’re given a message which was encoded from an original in Serbo-Croat, a language you don’t happen to speak. Now you have to crack the cypher and learn the language at the same time. That’s not exactly what I had to do with the Medeco but it’s as close an explanation as I can give you.

It was tricky and I made some mistakes. At one point I heard a door open and I almost had a seizure but the door was on the floor below and I relaxed again. Sort of. Then I tried again and screwed up again, and then I just plain hit it right and the message turned out to be “Open sesame.” I popped inside and locked all three locks, just like the old maid in all the stories.

The first thing I did was walk through the whole apartment and make sure there weren’t any bodies in it but my own. This wasn’t that much of a chore. There was one large room with a bookcase set up as a sort of room divider screening off a sleeping alcove. The kitchen was small and uninviting. The bathroom was smaller and less inviting, and roaches scampered when I turned the light on. I turned it off again and went back to the living room.

A homey place, I decided. Well-worn furniture, probably purchased secondhand, but it was all comfortable enough. A scattering of plants, palms and philodendrons and others whose names I did not know. Posters on the walls, not pop posters of Bogart and Che but the sort printed to herald gallery openings, Miró and Chagall and a few others as unknown to me as some of the plants. I decided, all in all, that Rod had fairly good taste for an actor.

The rug was a ratty maroon carpet remnant about twelve feet square, its binding coming loose on one side and entirely absent on another, its threads quite bare in spots and patches, its overall appearance decidedly unwholesome. Next time, I thought, I’ll bring along the bloody Bokhara.

And then I started to shake.

The Bokhara wasn’t bloody, of course. Loren had merely fainted upon it. But the rug, in the bedroom I had not seen, presumably was. Bloody, that is.

Who had killed the man in the bedroom? For that matter, who was the man in the bedroom? J. Francis Flaxford himself? According to my information he was supposed to be away from home from eight-thirty at the latest to midnight at the earliest. But if the whole point of that information had been to put me on the spot where I could get tagged for homicide, well, I couldn’t really put too much stock in it.

A man. Dead. In the bedroom. And someone had beaten his head in, and he was still warm to the touch.

Terrific.

If I’d only had the sense to give the whole apartment a looksee the minute I went into it, then it would have been an entirely different story. One quick reconnaissance mission and I’d have seen the late lamented and been on my way. By the time the illustrious team of Kirschmann and Kramer made their entrance I’d have been back in my own little tower of steel and glass, sipping Scotch and smiling southward at the World Trade Center. Instead I was a fugitive from what passes for justice these days, the very obvious murderer of a murderee I’d never even met in the first place. And, because my presence of mind had been conspicuous by its absence, I’d reacted to things by (a) using brute force and (b) scramming. So that if there’d ever been any chance of convincing people I’d never killed anything more biologically advanced than cockroaches and mosquitoes, that chance had vanished without a trace.

I paced. I opened cupboards looking for liquor and found none. I went back, tested another chair, decided the one I’d already sat in was more comfortable, then rejected both chairs and stretched out on the couch.

And thought about the curious little man who’d gotten me into this mess in the first place.