The Burglar on the Prowl

Twenty-Two

I hadn't heard a car, hadn't heard so much as a footfall. My head was in the closet, literally if not figuratively, with coats and other outerwear all around it, so that would tend to muffle the sound. And it's not as though I was listening hard all the while. I was too busy with my wriggling and squirming, not to mention my remembrance of milk chutes past, to have been keeping an ear open. Had Carolyn honked the horn? Three times, I'd told her, loud and long. But would I have heard it if she had? The car was in a closed garage, and I was in a coat closet. Maybe she'd honked and I hadn't noticed.

The hands on my ankles might as well have been bands of steel. My heart sank, my mind froze, and all I could do was hope Carolyn got out in time, and that she'd think to call Wally Hemphill for me.

Hours passed, or maybe they were only seconds. And a voice said, "It's me, Bern."

And that's all she said. There were any number of other things she could have said, and I'd have had to listen to them, but she didn't, and that is just one more reason why Carolyn and I will be friends forever. She didn't say another word, but what she did do was tighten her grip on my ankles and give a little push, and that was all it took. I landed facedown in a dark closet, and I couldn't have been happier about it.

Forty minutes later I unlocked the side door, the one adjacent to the milk chute, and let myself out of the house. I'd found the control panel for the alarm system in the entry hall next to the front door-that's where they usually put it, so the homeowner can punch in his code when he walks in the door. I'd studied the Kilgore system, and knew it had zones; you could set it to bypass certain zones, so that you could open a second-floor window for ventilation without setting off a ton of bells and whistles. I worked out what zone the side door was in, bypassed it, and let myself out of the house.

Like most homemakers, Mrs. Mapes kept extra grocery bags in a kitchen cupboard. I'd helped myself to four, because what I was taking was heavy enough to warrant double-bagging. I tucked each of two shopping bags into each of two others, filled them up with what I'd found in the safe in the master bedroom, added one other item I could hardly leave behind, and carried everything out of the house and up the length of the driveway to the garage, where Carolyn let out a breath she must have been holding for the greater portion of the time I'd been inside.

"I was beginning to worry," she said. "You were in there for almost an hour."

"It was forty minutes," I said.

"That's almost an hour. Here, let me get the door for you. You want me to push the button for the garage door?"

"After I get these in the car." There was a release button for the trunk lid, especially convenient if you don't have a key. I pressed it, put the bags in the trunk, and got behind the wheel. Carolyn pressed the button, and by the time the garage door was up she was in her seat next to me. I started the car and backed all the way out of the garage, leaving the motor running while I pressed the button a final time to lower the garage door. I was still wearing my gloves, and I used my gloved hands to wipe off surfaces she might have touched.

She noticed this, and told me she was pretty sure she hadn't touched anything. "Well, just in case," I said, and went back to the side door, using my picks to relock it. Carolyn had closed the milk chute door earlier, after I'd cleared it, and I opened it long enough to wipe it free of prints, then closed it and fastened the latch to leave it as I'd found it. I'd already refastened the catch on the inner door.

I got in the car again, backed the rest of the way out of the driveway. There was no traffic on Devonshire Close, which was good and bad-there were fewer passers-by to notice us, but we were correspondingly more noticeable to anybody who did. Soon, though, we were on another street-Ploughman's Bush, it must have been-and before long we were on Broadway, heading south toward Manhattan.

We could have gone home the same way we'd come-the Henry Hudson, the West Side Drive-but something kept me on Broadway, moving at a sedate pace, stopping for red lights, resuming our journey when they turned green. It's a venerable old road, Broadway, running from the foot of Manhattan clear up to Albany. I'd read an article written by a fellow who walked the length of it-not from Albany, but from the Westchester County line. He'd told about what he'd seen, and the history of it all, and I gather you could see quite a bit on a walk like that. You can probably see a fair amount driving, as far as that goes, but I wasn't paying attention.

" Bern?"

"What?"

"Is something wrong?"

"No. Why?"

"You're not talking."

"Oh," I said. "You're right, I guess I'm not."

"So I thought maybe something was wrong."

"No," I said. "Everything's fine."

"Oh."

"There was a whole lot of money," I said. "I guess he got paid in cash fairly often, and the trouble with cash is you have to launder it. Either that or declare it, and then you have to pay taxes on it, and then what's the point? But until you figure out how to launder it, without paying as much in laundry bills as you'd have had to pay in taxes, well, you can just stow it somewhere."

"And that's what he did?"

"He stowed it in his safe, and that's the wrong word for it, because it wasn't. I thought I might have to pull it out and take it home where I could work on it in private, and that would have been fine, but once I took the seascape down from the wall and went to work on it, it was about as hard to open as the milk chute."

"And you didn't have to crawl through it, either."

"Aside from the cash," I said, "he had the usual things you keep in a safe. Stock certificates, the deed to the house, a couple of insurance policies, other important papers. And some of her jewelry. She had a little rosewood chest on top of her dresser, and it was full of jewelry, but she kept some of her better pieces in the safe."

"I'll bet they're not there anymore."

"You'd lose. I left the papers, and I left all the jewelry."

"That's not like you, Bern."

"All things considered," I said, "I'd just as soon the police never hear about what we just did. Not that they're likely to figure out who did it, let alone prove it, but they can't begin to investigate it if they don't even know it happened. If I took the jewelry, Mapes would have a reason to report it. It's probably insured, and they can't make a claim unless they file a report. But if all I take is cash, and it's cash he never declared, what sense does it make for him to bring the police into it? He's not insured for the loss, he can't logically expect them to recover any of it, and all of a sudden he's got people from the IRS wondering where the cash came from."

"So you think he'll just bite the bullet and keep smiling?"

"He'll probably piss and moan," I said, "but he'll do it in private. He probably thought of the cash as easy come, and now he can think of it as easy go."

"That's great," she said.

"Yeah."

"It really is. The shitheel's out a bundle, and he can't do a thing about it. How much is it going to come to, do you have any idea?"

I shook my head. It was a mix of bills, I told her, from hundreds all the way down to singles, some in rubber-banded stacks, some crammed into envelopes, some loose. I figured it was more than a hundred thousand and less than a million, but I was just guessing.

"Enough so that you can give Marty his finder's fee and still have a lot for yourself."

"Don't forget your cut," I said.

"It shouldn't be much. All I did was keep you company."

"All you did," I said, "was save my life. If it wasn't for you I'd still be half in and half out of the closet."

"I had a girlfriend like that once, Bern. It's no fun. Okay, I was helpful, but I didn't take any risks."

"If you'd been caught, what would you tell them? That you were only keeping me company?"

"No, but-"

"Marty gets fifteen percent off the top. You get a third of what's left after his fifteen percent comes off."

She was silent while she did the math. "I don't have pencil and paper," she said, "so maybe I got this wrong, but the way I figure it I'm getting something like thirty thousand dollars."

"It'll probably come to more than that."

"Gosh. You know how many dogs I have to wash to make that kind of money?"

"Quite a few."

"You said it. Bern? What'll I do with all that cash?"

"Whatever you want. It's your money."

"I mean do I have to, you know, launder it?"

I shook my head. "It's not that much. I know, it's a fortune, but you're not looking to buy stocks with it. You just want to be able to live a little better, without worrying whether you can afford an extra blue blazer, or tickets forThe Producers. So you'll stick it in a safe-deposit box and draw out what you need when you need it. Believe me, if you're anything like me, it'll be gone before you know it."

"That's a comfort."

We stayed on Broadway all the way to my neighborhood, where we picked up Columbus Avenue and cruised past Lincoln Center. The plaza was crowded with people on their way out, and for a moment I thoughtDon Giovanni was over, but it was too early for that. There was a concert in Avery Fisher Hall tonight, too, and it had just let out, and if I'd stolen a cab instead of the Sable I could have had my pick of fares. I passed them all by and headed for the Village.

" Bern? If I'm in for a minimum of thirty thousand, you're going to get upwards of sixty. Right?"

"Right. I figured two-to-one was fair, but if you think-"

"No no no," she said. "It's more than fair. But that's not where I was going. The thing is, if you're getting all that money, and you don't have to deal with a fence, you don't have to worry about the cops-"

"So?"

"So how come you're not happy?"

"I'm happy."

"Yeah? You don't seem happy to me. You seem…"

"What?"

"Preoccupied, Bern."

"Preoccupied," I said. "Well, I guess maybe I am."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"Eventually," I said. "But here's what I'm going to do right now. First I'll drop you and the money at your place. I've been getting too many visitors lately and I don't want to have piles of cash around the apartment, not until the traffic thins out and I have a new cupboard built to hide stuff in. I'll drop everything, and then I'll take the car back, and do something about the phone. And then I'll come down to Arbor Court again. And there'll be coffee made, and maybe something from the deli, and I'll sit down with a cup of coffee and put my feet up. And then we can talk about what's preoccupying me."