The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

13

We stepped into a kitchen that might have been a wet dream of Bobby Flay’s. It had everything you’d find in the Oh-My-God kitchens on HGTV, the island and the quartz countertops and the ceramic tile backsplash, but it didn’t stop there. A dozen gleaming copper frying pans in graduated sizes hung overhead. There was an enormous knife rack, there was an even larger spice rack, there was every kind of rack except the kind that had come in so handy during the Spanish Inquisition.

It was a hell of a kitchen, but it got less of my attention than it might have, because when I stood there and listened, I could hear something that hadn’t reached me when we were on the other side of the fire door.

Carolyn clutched my arm. She heard it, too.

I closed my eyes, listened harder. Human voices. A conversation, and while I couldn’t make out any of the words, the intensity got through. We were not alone in the Vandenbrinck penthouse, and whoever the other people were, they had more right to be here than we did.

I glanced over at the door we’d come through.

And then the conversation stopped, and I heard muted music, and then another voice, a voice that was trying to tell me something that it felt I needed to know.

“It’s TV,” I whispered to Carolyn. “It was some sort of dramatic scene, and now it’s a commercial.’

“I guess it’s not Netflix,” she whispered back.

“Or HBO.”

“Whatever it is, Bern, if there’s a TV on there’s somebody watching it.”

“Unless it’s a tree falling in the forest. He left the lights on in the kitchen, so why couldn’t he leave the TV running in the living room?”

“I guess he doesn’t worry much about the Con Edison bill. Is that where it’s coming from? The living room?”

I didn’t know. “It’s toward the front of the building,” I said, “which is a logical place to put a living room, but this place has got drop-dead views in all directions, so who knows? But if the TV’s on over there—”

I pointed. She nodded, and we headed in the opposite direction.

A penthouse doesn’t have to be large. All it has to be is on the top floor of an apartment building, and it can share that floor with other apartments. (In point of fact, there was a time when a top-floor location wasn’t required; the word was once applicable to an outhouse or shelter built onto the side of a building, having a sloping roof.)

Never mind. This one was on the top floor of the Innisfree, and it had that floor all to itself. And, trust me, it was large.

I don’t know about the sloping roof.

We walked toward the rear of the building, and away from the sound of the television set. There were lights on throughout, and doors were open, and as far as I could tell we had that part of the apartment all to ourselves.

But we kept quiet all the same.

Carolyn didn’t ask where I was leading her, or why we were passing various rooms without giving them much of a first look, let alone a second one. I saved my explanation until I found the room I was looking for.

It was darker than most of the others, illuminated only by a bronze bedside lamp with a Handel shade. But it was very obviously the room I was looking for, and when we’d crossed its threshold I closed the door and turned on the overhead lights.

“The master bedroom,” I said, not in a whisper, but not far from it.

“They don’t call it that anymore, Bern.”

“They don’t?”

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s a reference to plantation culture and the whole language of slavery. If you’re going to tear down statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, how can you in good conscience call this a master bedroom?”

I frowned. “So what are you supposed to call it?”

“The primary bedroom.”

“Suppose it’s the only bedroom in the place?”

“Then you wouldn’t have to call it anything, would you? You’d just call it the bedroom.”

“The primary bedroom,” I said.

“That’s the term I hear the most.”

“On that Flipflop show? You know what I bet? I bet Vandenbrinck calls it the master bedroom.”

And it looked the part. The bed, flanked by a pair of boxy black night tables, was king-sized at a minimum, and looked to me to be six inches to a foot longer and wider, suitable for an NBA point guard, if not a center. For people of ordinary size, it was big enough to sleep three or four of them; if they were there for a pursuit more active than sleep, I couldn’t guess how many it might accommodate.

The walls held half a dozen oil paintings of various sizes, each housed in a carved and gilded frame. And each painting showed a woman, and none of the women could have been more attractive if she’d been painted by Titian. In four of the paintings, the subject was alone. A fifth showed two women, a pneumatic blonde and a not-quite-boyish brunette, and the redhead in the sixth painting was accompanied by two men who might have come straight from Gold’s Gym.

Nobody was wearing any clothes.

Was one of the paintings there to hide a wall safe? No, as a quick check revealed. They were just there for the appreciative aesthetic response they might engender.

“He doesn’t know much about art,” Carolyn said, “but he knows what he likes, and now so do we.”

She looked at each painting in turn, paying particular attention to the one that showed the two women. “Doesn’t that look like it would hurt, Bern? I mean, not just her hand but halfway to her elbow.”

“Um.”

“But the blonde seems to like it, going by the expression on her face. And you have to admit it’s hot.”

I didn’t argue the point.

“And these three. Doesn’t that look complicated?”

“I suppose if you’d been doing yoga all your life—”

“Maybe, but that’s the least of it. I mean from a mental standpoint. I just think it would be confusing. Bern?”

I’d been looking at the painting, which did in fact appear complicated from just about every standpoint, and now I looked at her and found her looking back at me.

“Bern, did you ever?”

“What? Oh. Well, once.”

“Two boys and a girl, like the picture?”

“The other way around.”

“You and two girls?” She cocked her head. “Anybody I know?”

“I don’t think so. I’d seen this woman a couple of times, and we were never going to be Dante and Beatrice or Heloise and Abelard—”

“Or A-Rod and J-Lo.”

“—but it would do to improve the idle hour. And one night we went out to dinner and when we came home her roommate was there, and the three of us sat around smoking.”

“Smoking? You don’t smoke.”

“I don’t smoke tobacco,” I said. “Or anything else in years, but this was a long time ago. In fact it was before I had the store, so that meant it was before you and I knew each other.”

“And you got stoned.”

“I got a little high. We passed one joint around, and everybody got a slight buzz, and my girl and I started kissing, and I expected the other one to disappear into another room, but the one I was kissing pulled away and told her roomie, ‘Oh, Bernie’s a good kisser. You should kiss him and see for yourself.’ And it sort of went from there.”

“So it was your date’s idea.”

“It was. I mean, they were both attractive, so it’s not as though the idea never entered my mind, but it never would have occurred to me to try to make it happen. And afterward I thought about it—”

“I’ll bet you did.”

“—and it dawned on me that they’d planned this and it was something they’d done before.”

The whole conversation was part of a what you’d call a walk-and-talk if it turned up in an Aaron Sorkin script, because along with the paintings and the enormous bed, the room held a pair of glossy black dressers that were a match for the night tables. One of them taller than it was wide, the other wider than it was tall; a while back I’d have thought of them as a highboy and a lowboy, but in the spirit of desktop printing I thought of the tall one as Portrait and his brother as Landscape.

I started with Portait’s top left-hand drawer and worked my way through one drawer after another. They all held clothing, and all were at least half-full, and I didn’t need to look at labels to know that he didn’t do his shopping at Kmart. There were two sock drawers, two underwear drawers — boxers and briefs — and three drawers that held nothing but dress shirts, most of them in their original wrapping.

A walk-and-talk, except that I let my blue-gloved hands do the walking.

“So your three-way turned out to be a one-and-done, Bern?”

“I’m trying to think if I ever saw either of them again,” I said, closing one drawer only to open another. “I’m pretty sure I didn’t.”

“Didn’t you enjoy it?”

“It was kind of confusing and unreal, and part of that may have been the dope I smoked. It was exciting, but mostly in the sense of Oh my God look what’s going on here.”

“Like fulfilling a longtime fantasy.”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“But you never went back for more?”

“No, and what stopped me?” I was at Landscape now, moving on from polo shirts to turtlenecks. Why on earth would anybody have so many clothes? “Oh, right.”

“You met someone else,” she said, “and fell in love.”

“I had to leave town. I, uh, went to somebody’s house in Larchmont, and nobody was home.”

“But the door was open.”

“Not at first,” I said. “But soon enough. I made out okay, but one way or another I managed to arouse suspicion, and I didn’t have a store to run, and the days were getting shorter and the thermometer was dropping, so why not spend a few weeks on the island of Tobago?”

“Why Tobago?”

“I have no idea, but while I was there the cops arrested some joker who’d been kicking in one door after another in Larchmont and Mamaroneck, and they took the burglary I’d committed and put it on his tab, and if he even realized it was one he hadn’t done, why make a fuss? His lawyer pleaded him out and he went away for a while.”

“And you came home.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And never saw the two girls again.”

“Never.”

Close a drawer, open a drawer. It had to be here. Hadn’t Vandenbrinck told one TV reporter he didn’t believe in bank vaults, because why spend a lot of money on something you couldn’t lay your hands on whenever you got the urge?

The New York One interview had made YouTube, and I’d played it a few times and watched him smirk while he explained how the Kloppmann Diamond could be expected to improve his love life. “When you hang a stone like that around a woman’s neck,” he said, “it tends to get her in the mood. I mean, imagine how you yourself might feel, if that was the only thing you were wearing.”

It was hard to read the interviewer’s expression. Did she want to fuck him or kill him?

Maybe both.

“Bern?”

“It’s got to be here,” I said. “He told the whole world where the banks could stuff their vaults. By God, he was going to keep it in his apartment, and you know he’s planning to bring his new girlfriend here tonight, when she’s already flushed with excitement from her off-off-Broadway debut—”

“Bern.”

“—and he’ll lead her straight to the bedroom and show her the Kloppmann, and the next thing you know she’ll be naked and he’ll be hanging sixty million dollars around her neck.”

“Bern,” she said, “is this what I think it is?”