The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

27

My first thought, before we even got in that cab on Greenwich Avenue, was that we’d walk in on a scene reminiscent of Dresden after the bombing. Bookcases tipped over, books all over the floor, Raffles’ water dish in pieces. But by the time I opened the door and switched on the light, my expectations had changed. My visitor, uninvited and certainly unwanted, may have been inconsiderate enough to vandalize a set of window gates, but he’d also taken the trouble to mend my window after he’d had his way with it. I didn’t know who he was or what he wanted, but I was fairly confident he wouldn’t make a mess.

Nor had he. I walked around, looking at bookshelves, glancing here and there. I have one set of glassed-in shelves where I keep the more valuable collector’s items under lock and key, and it was undisturbed. He could have helped himself to whatever he wanted from the rest of my stock and I wouldn’t know it until I chanced to look for a particular book and found it missing. But everything looked untouched.

As did both of the cat’s dishes. The water dish still had water in it, and—

“Bern, where’s Raffles?”

I looked over to the front window, where he’s apt to be more often than not, dozing in a patch of sunlight. The sunlight wasn’t there, of course, not in the middle of the night, and neither was the cat. Carolyn walked around, calling his name, and that had about as much effect as it generally does. I’m pretty sure Raffles knows his name, but he’s never felt obliged to respond to it.

“He’s probably in back,” I said.

“When you lock up,” she said, “you always leave the door to the back room ajar. So he can get to the bathroom.”

Before he was rather cunningly foisted upon me, Raffles spent enough time in residence on Arbor Court to learn what Carolyn had long since taught Archie and Ubi — i.e., to use the toilet instead of a litter box. (She employed a training method popularized by Charles Mingus, the late jazz musician and self-acknowledged genius, who so trained his own cats. And no, I am not making this up, and if you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe Google.)

“I’m sure I left it open,” I said, “and I’m also sure I left the window gates and the front door intact. Whoever broke in here closed the door when he left, probably with Raffles on the other side of it.”

She hurried to the door, reached for the knob, then hesitated. “You don’t think—”

“That somebody’s lurking there? No, because the gates were drawn shut, disabled or not, and you’d have to be on the other side of them to manage that. You can open the door. If there’s anybody lurking behind it, it’ll be Raffles.”

She opened it a few inches, and that was all that was required. Raffles put a paw through the opening, followed with the rest of his estimable self, and would have brought a tail along if he’d had one. He glanced briefly at each of us in turn, seeing nothing worth further attention, went straight to his water dish, sampled its contents, then strode the rest of the way to the spot he favored and made himself comfortable.

“If it’s a clear day tomorrow,” I told Carolyn, “sometime in the late morning the sun will show up, and he’ll be ready.”

“It’s a good thing we don’t have to understand cats in order to enjoy having them around.” She wrinkled her nose, as if at an odor she was trying to pin down. “But I guess you could say the same thing for people.”

“That’s a point.”

She started to draw the door shut, then remembered to leave it ajar. She asked me if I’d checked the cash register. I hadn’t, but did so now, and nothing seemed to be missing.

I started to say as much, but stopped when I heard my name called. I looked at the front door, and there was a man on the other side of it, telling me to open up.

I couldn’t make out his features in the darkness, and it took a moment for his voice to register. When it did I said, “Ray,” but I said it to Carolyn, in a normal tone of voice, and it couldn’t have carried to the door and beyond it.

He tried to turn the doorknob, but when I’d closed the door I’d automatically pushed the button to engage the snap lock, so that didn’t get him anywhere.

“God damn it, Bernie!”

I heard that, of course, clear as a bell if less euphonious. Before I could respond, Ray Kirschmann gave the doorknob a good shake. It stayed locked, but the shaking was enough to dislodge the circle of window glass that had been (a) neatly removed and (b) just as neatly Scotch-taped back in place.

The sound of a glass disc smashing on a sidewalk after a fall of a few feet couldn’t have been all that loud.

But it did get one’s attention.

It also apparently froze one in place. I have to open the door, I thought, but I stayed right where I was, behind my counter. Carolyn was on the other side of the counter, looking hard at the door, but not taking so much as a step toward it.

The man at the door seemed the only one of us capable of action. I watched as he extended a careful hand through the circular opening and turned the doorknob on the inside, opened the door and stepped through it.

“Bernie,” he said. “Carolyn. One of you want to tell me what the hell is goin’ on?”

“Um.”

He stalked across the room, extended a finger, poked me gently perhaps four inches north of my belly button, then hooked my tie and drew it toward him so that he could have a good look at it.

“Like I figured,” he said.

I’d loosened the tie before tucking into Rocco’s spaghetti, and tightened it again en route to what I thought was my appointment on West Third Street, only to loosen it once more on my way to Paula’s. It was loose now, and my shirt collar unbuttoned, but it wasn’t the state of the half-Windsor knot that was commanding Ray’s attention, it was the tie itself, and I found myself looking down at it, wondering if it bore a telltale spot or stain.

“Red and blue,” he said. “That’s navy blue. Diagonal stripes maybe a quarter of an inch wide.”

“I’d have to say that’s a good description, Ray. You could phrase it in those very words in your report, if there was any earthly reason for you to write one.”

“Bernie, Bernie, Bernie,” he said, sounding deeply disappointed. “Why don’t we speed things up, and whichever of you’s got the Kloppmann Diamond cough it up and hand it over. What do you say?”