The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

28

He dragged it out and gave it up a handful of words at a time, but here’s the gist of it. Four or five hours ago, around the time Carolyn and I were drinking scotch at the Bum Rap, a pair of uniformed officers from the Ninth Precinct, responding to a 911 call, presented themselves at the front desk of the Innisfree Apartments and enlisted the aid of the concierge. That young man ushered them onto the private penthouse elevator, which whisked them up to the building’s 42nd floor.

“You need a key for the elevator,” Ray marveled, “but when you get upstairs there’s no door and no key required, you step off right into the penthouse apartment.”

“Damn,” I said. “What’ll they think of next?”

The two cops did a room-by-room search of the place, each of them holding a gun with both hands, making those herky-jerky movements when turning a corner, shouting out “Clear!” whenever a room proved to be empty. As every room in the apartment proved to be, unless you insisted on counting the dead man in the den.

“In the den,” Ray said. “That’s what I’d call it, with the big TV and the leather recliners. But there was a bookcase, so maybe Vandy called it a library.”

“Vandy?”

“Like I need to say his name, Bernie? Like you don’t know who I’m talkin’ about? You stole his diamond, the least you can do is remember his name.”

I said I didn’t know what he was talking about, let alone who.

That earned me an eye roll. “Orrin Vandenbrinck,” he said, getting the name right, which surprised me; some years back, in an episode that involved Piet Mondrian, Ray had spoken the late Dutch painter’s name innumerable times, and never once called him anything but Moon-Drain. “Now tell me you don’t know who he is.”

“Everybody knows who he is,” I said. “He’s the creep who got rich by hiking drug prices way past what anybody could afford.” I didn’t quite snap my fingers, but I did what I could to suggest that I was suddenly getting the picture. “The Kloppmann Diamond, isn’t Vandenbrinck the one who paid a fortune for it? I forget how much, but it was a lot.”

“You forget how much. Right. I’ll tell you, it was a hell of a loss to the stage and the screen when Mrs. Rhodenbarr’s son Bernard decided burglary was his ticket to fame and fortune.”

I said, “The body in the den. Was it him?”

“Vandy? That would have made a lot of people happy, but no, it wasn’t him. It wasn’t anywhere close to bein’ him. From his pictures, Vandy’s a kind of a dopey-lookin’ guy built like a dumpling. The guy in the den was somebody who got up every morning to shave his head and then spent half the day in the gym and the other half feedin’ his face.”

When the uniforms phoned it in, it was Ray who got the call. He’d confirmed what the responding officers had already determined, that the man in the den was indeed dead, and that the apartment was otherwise unoccupied. The dead man was dressed for comfort in royal blue sweatpants and a rugby-style shirt striped in yellow and green.

“Colorful,” Carolyn said.

There was a wallet in a pants pocket, holding some two hundred dollars in cash and a New York State driver’s license in the name of Jason Philbert.

“Except he didn’t look like a Jason,” Ray said, “any more than he looked like a Philbert. You saw him, Bernie. Did he look like his name ought to be Jason Philbert?”

Nice try. When I didn’t respond, he said the dead man, in the flesh and in his driver’s license photo, had a definite Eastern European cast to his features, and a couple of stainless steel teeth in his mouth that no Western dentist would have given him.

“If I had to make up a name for him,” he said, “it’d be some collection of letters that don’t belong together, hard to remember and tricky to pronounce.” He made a show of concentrating. “Istvan Horvath,” he said. “Ain’t that a mouthful, Bernie?”

“Is that his name, Ray?”

He gave me a look. “You’re good,” he said. “I got to give you that. You didn’t even flinch.”

“Why would I flinch?”

“If Istvan Horvath and Jason Philbert turn out to be one pea in a pod, it’s a hell of a coincidence. Because there’s already a guy by that name livin’ on the twenty-ninth floor, only he’s not there at the moment on account of he flew from JFK to Buenos Aires around the end of August and nobody’s seen him since.”

“Until tonight,” Carolyn suggested, “when he came home, took the penthouse elevator by mistake, tried to bench-press the refrigerator, and had a heart attack.”

He gave her a look. “Not bad, Shorty. No, the Horvath from the twenty-ninth floor is still in B.A. Nobody wants to say how he made his money, but he made a lot of it, and now he’s spendin’ some of it while he looks for a way to make some more. And the one with the driver’s license that swears his name is Jason Philbert coulda bench-pressed a Lexus, never mind a refrigerator, and it wasn’t a heart attack that killed him. Somebody shot him three times, once in the chest and twice in the forehead.”

Three shots.

“But would you believe there’s a third Istvan Horvath?”

“Why not?” She gave her thumbs a rest and looked up from her phone. “I just looked it up, and guess what? Horvath’s a pretty common name in Hungary, Ray, especially for ethnic Croatians. And Istvan is the local equivalent of Stephen.”

That last was welcome news to him. “In that case, from here on in I’ll give my tongue a rest and just call him Steve. Except for the third Horvath, because why should I change? I’ve known him for years, and I’ll go on calling him Bernie Rhodenbarr.”

I just looked at him.

“The guy on the desk,” he said. “Nice enough fellow, name of Pete. He gave a pretty good description of the guy who passed himself off as Horvath and rode up to Twenty-nine. Average-lookin’ guy, had a European accent.”

“Well, that’s me,” I said. “I mean, he nailed it, didn’t he? Of course any accent I have is New York, plus whatever trace of my Midwestern upbringing is still there. And I don’t want to come off as vain, but I think we can safely say I’m a little better-looking than average.”

“What you are,” he said, “is a piece of work. You’re also an inch or two taller than average, which Pete also said, and you maybe looked taller than you were because you had company, and it must have been you who got the elevator headed for the twenty-ninth floor, because your lady friend would need to stand on a box to reach the right button.”

“A short joke,” Carolyn said, and looked at her watch. “What took you so long, Ray?”

“Two people,” I said, “and one has a European accent. And what exactly is a European accent, anyway?”

“Whatever it was, it got you on the elevator. And your outfit helped.”

“My outfit? He saw by my outfit that I was a cowboy?”

“A navy blue blazer,” he said. “With brass buttons.”

“How many thousands of New Yorkers—”

“And a necktie, Bernie. Diagonal stripes of red and blue, narrow stripes. Jesus, he couldn’t have given a better description of your tie if he’d strangled you with it.”

I looked at him and he looked at me, and after a long moment I asked him if he honestly expected me to admit to anything, and he allowed that he didn’t.

“So if there’s no likelihood of a gotcha moment,” I said, “maybe we could skip all that crap. Did you find any trace of my presence on the twenty-ninth floor?”

“No.”

“Was anything missing from Mr. Horvath’s apartment?”

“We’d have to ask Steve,” he said, “and first we’d have to find him. But if you wanted to toss Steve’s apartment, you’d have pretended to be some other guy on some other floor. You were just using Steve to get into the penthouse.”

“How would I manage that?”

“Don’t play dumb. You’ve got skills, we both know that.”

“Any skills I may have had are rusty now. Ray, I’ve been out of that business for years now.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Technology forced me out of it,” I said, and started the old rant about security cameras and electronic locks, and how for a burglar it was the examined life that was not worth living. I didn’t get very far, though, because it dawned on me that he didn’t know what I was talking about. Electronic locks? Security cameras? The whole of Manhattan on Candid Camera?

Not in his universe.

I stopped in the middle of a sentence, and he waved away the ensuing silence. “While we’re skippin’ crap,” he said, “suppose we skip the usual crap that all you are is a bookseller. You don’t have to cop to bein’ a burglar, but how about you quit denyin’ it?”

“I’m not denying the past, Ray. But do you have any idea how long it’s been since I did any breaking and entering?”

He pointed to my front door. “From the looks of it,” he said, “no more’n an hour or so.”

“You can’t possibly believe—”

“No, of course not, because you’ve got keys, and if you lost them you’d pick the lock, not vandalize your own damn store. So leaving out whatever you did or didn’t do at the Innisfree Apartments, the question is when’s the last time you let yourself in where you had no right to be, and walked out with what you had no right to take.”

“And?”

“And we both of us know the answer, Bernie, and it probably won’t come as news to your little buddy there, either.” The smile he flashed at Carolyn went unreturned. “Sunday,” he said.

“Sunday?”

“This past Sunday, sometime after nine at night. Or I suppose it could have been pretty much anytime Monday, because that’s when they’re closed. Like, you know, a Broadway theater.”

“I broke into a theater?”

“A gallery.”

“I stole a painting?”

“You couldn’t, because they don’t have any. It’s the Ginseng Gallery on Lispenard, down below Canal Street, and what they specialize in is Chinese stuff.”

“Chinese stuff.”

“Old Chinese stuff,” he said, “like from the Ying Yang Dynasty. And what they had on display when they locked up Sunday night, and what was gone when they opened up at ten Tuesday morning, was the Edgar W. Margate collection.” He showed me a hand with the thumb and forefinger a little over an inch apart. “Twenty-one figurines about this big. You see one of ’em on your aunt’s shelf, a little squirrel holdin’ a nut, say, you’d say it was cute. A knick-knack, you’d say it was, and I’d agree with you, but Margate would tell you it was a priceless jade carving from the Ping Pong Dynasty.”

I heard all the words, even Ying Yang and Ping Pong, but there was only one that stood out.

Jade.

“And you can swear up and down you don’t know what I’m talking about, Bernie, but I know it was you.”

“If you had evidence—”

“What I’ve got,” he said, “is grounds for suspicion. Which means I’m dead certain of something I can’t prove.”

“And where does that leave us?”

“That’s something for you to think about,” he said, “while I use your bathroom. You okay with that?”

“Mi baño es su baño.”

“I’ll take that for a yes,” he said, and pushed open the door Carolyn had left ajar. I thought about twenty-one jade carvings, one of which was probably a squirrel holding a nut, and I thought about the fact that Ray Kirschmann was not the only person in the world — in this world, that is to say — who seemed unequivocally certain I’d stolen them, and I thought of another thing or two as well, and tried to make sense of it all, but I only got to do this thinking in the matter of seconds it took Ray to find his way to the light switch and flick it on.

“Jesus Ducking Christ!” he cried out, or would have if he’d been fitted with Auto-Correct. “Bernie, get in here!”