The Burglar who thought he was Bogart

CHAPTER Eighteen

That left me with a couple more phone calls to make, and I made them. Then I got on the East Side IRT and rode uptown once again, riding one stop past Hunter College this time and emerging at Seventy-seventh Street. I walked down a block and found the building where the whole thing started, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to call it that. It seemed clear that this business started a long while before the previous Wednesday night, and a long ways away.

But it was Hugo Candlemas’s building I was standing in front of now, and he had been more my employer than my partner, but he was dead, too, and it looked as though I was supposed to do something about it. I wasn’t sure just where he’d been killed, but there was no question as to where Cappy Hoberman had been stabbed to death, and I felt it was about time for me to return to the scene of the crime.

In the entrance hall, I studied the four buzzers before pushing the top one, marked CANDLEMAS, to save me the embarrassment of walking in on some police lab technicians, themselves returned to the crime scene in the wake of the second murder. I didn’t really expect there’d be anybody around, and there wasn’t, and when I’d waited long enough to establish that I took out my ring of tools and let myself into the building.

You’d have thought they were my American Express card, the way I never left home without them.

Up on the fourth floor, the door to Candlemas’s apartment was secured by a whole lot of that yellow crime scene tape, along with a couple of large handbills proclaiming the premises to be off-limits to unauthorized persons, sealed by order of the New York Police Department. To add a little muscle, someone-probably the yutz of a locksmith who’d opened up for the cops-had mounted a hinged hasp on the outside of the door and jamb and fastened it with a shiny new padlock.

None of this looked to be inexpungable. The stoutest padlock is no match for a brute armed with a can of freon and a hammer; spray it with the one and swat it with the other and you’ve unfastened the Gordian knot. I had neither of those precision instruments, but I wouldn’t need them; I knew this brand of lock, and it’s notoriously easy to pick.

I was more concerned with the paper and plastic. Anyone could get past them, but not without leaving traces of one’s passage. The ideal, of course, would be to have a roll of crime scene tape and a couple of handbills in your hip pocket; instead of trying to restore the originals on your way out, you could simply replace them.

But I was not so equipped. I filed the thought away for future reference, cast a wistful glance at the padlock, and trotted downstairs.

On my way, I remembered Ray’s review of the building’s other tenants-the gay couple in the basement, the blind woman on the ground floor, a businessman from Singapore in the Lehrmans’ apartment on two, and an unidentified tenant or tenants on the third floor. “The hell with who lives on the third floor,” Ray had said. “They’re like everybody else, they don’t know shit.”

In the front hall, I found their buzzer, marked GEARHARDT. I tried them first, hoping that they knew at least to get out of town on a holiday weekend. But no, not long after I poked their buzzer a male voice came over the intercom, asking me who I was.

“My name is Roger,” I said cheerfully, “and my friend’s name is Mary Beth, and we’d like to talk to you about the state of your immortal soul.”

“Whyntcha shove it up your ass?” he suggested.

“Oh!” I said, trying to sound shocked, but I think it was a waste of time, because he’d already broken the connection. I moved on to the buzzer immediately below it, deciding on a different approach for the fellow from Singapore. I couldn’t take the chance that he might welcome a visit from a couple of urban missionaries, or be too polite to let on otherwise. I could just pretend I was looking for the Lehrmans.

But I didn’t have to, because he didn’t answer the bell. I reentered the building-no lockpicking this time, I’d kept my foot in the door-and went up a flight, to confront a door equipped with two excellent locks, one your basic Segal, the other a police lock fitted with one of the new pickproof Poulard cylinders.

Pickproof indeed.

The Lehrmans had a nice place, furnished with a little too much of everything-too many rugs on the floor, too many paintings on the walls, too much furniture crowded together in the rooms. Too many knickknacks on the marble mantel over the fireplace, too many on the whatnot shelf in the corner by the window. A minimalist decorator would have shuddered, and I don’t know what a Chinese businessman from Singapore would have made of it, but from a professional standpoint I have to say I was thrilled.

It was a decorative scheme to gladden the heart of a burglar. You’ll never catch a burglar proclaiming that less is more. A burglar knows that less is less, and more is more. People who cram their apartment full of stuff, assuming they’re not the Collier brothers and the stuff is not old newspapers, are people who like things. They’re a lot more likely to have something worth taking than a guy who beds down on a futon in a room with nothing else in it but the track lighting on the ceiling.

It would have been fun to have a look around, but who had the time? I walked straight through the apartment to the large bedroom at the rear, moved a bookcase and a large jade plant in a pot that looked like Rockwood, unlocked and raised the bedroom window, and crawled out onto the fire escape. I climbed two flights, past the sullen Mr. Gearhardt and his imperiled soul, and wasted close to ten minutes trying to find a benign way to open the late Mr. Candlemas’s bedroom window. He had casement windows, secured by a lever that you raised and lowered from within. But you couldn’t reach it from outside, naturally enough, not unless you could pry the window back from the frame and get the right sort of gizmo in that way. It’s not that hard if you’ve got the tools for it. Just watch an enterprising teenager open a locked automobile in the wink of an eye and you’ll get the idea.

This wasn’t the identical operation to grand theft auto, but it requires a similar instrument, and I didn’t have one on hand. I tried to get in without it and kept coming teasingly close, which in turn kept me trying. It finally dawned on me that I was spending far too much time in plain sight on a fire escape, whereupon I used the glass cutter on my tool ring and cut out one of the window’s little panes. I reached in, turned the latch, and let myself in.

I was in there for hours. It was stuffy at first, but I opened a window in the front room, and the pane I’d removed in the rear provided good cross-ventilation. It didn’t take me long to find the spot where Cappy Hoberman had lain bleeding. They hadn’t outlined the body in tape or chalk. They don’t do that anymore, preferring to have the crime scene photographer expose a few rolls of film before they move the body. But they hadn’t done anything about the blood, either, and a lot of it had soaked into the carpet.

I stood there and looked at it. He’d died on the Aubusson, and his blood hadn’t done a lot for the rug’s appearance. Even if you assumed that Candlemas had bought the rug from someone other than its rightful owner, he must have paid a good sum for it. It looked terrible now, but somebody someday would be able to get the stains out. They’ve got all sorts of chemicals and enzymes available, and nowadays they can get blood out of anything, even a turnip.

But they couldn’t pump it back into Hoberman.

I walked around the apartment, running alternate scenarios through my mind. Hoberman gives Charlie Weeks the bone carving of the mouse, cuts his visit short, and returns to this apartment. By cab, natch, since he didn’t have me along to urge him to walk. Something he says or does moves Candlemas to kill him. Candlemas grabs something sharp-this letter opener, say, or one of these Sabatier knives from the kitchen, or some other implement even better suited to dispatching a visitor. Candlemas strikes, Hoberman crumples and falls, and Candlemas slips out and legs it over to Second Avenue, looking to buy Hefty bags and a Skilsaw.

Then what?

Earlier, Weeks and I had spun out a theory in which Candlemas got home, found the cops on the scene, muttered, “Curses, foiled again!” and stole off into the night. But his own death put a different light on things. When he left Hoberman bleeding, he evidently encountered someone. Maybe he went to the wrong person for help, or maybe someone was lying doggo, waiting for him.

Maybe it was that person who made the 911 call that sent the cops to Seventy-sixth Street. In any case, the cops came. Hoberman, the way I figured it, was still breathing when Candlemas took a powder. His wounds were mortal, and he was alive but not lively, probably inert and unconscious. Somewhere along the way he rallied and wrote six unfathomable letters on my heretofore blameless attaché case, using his own life’s blood for ink. Then, perhaps even as the Keystone Kops were sending out for a locksmith, the valiant captain breathed his last.

It was probably around that time, too, that I was downstairs myself, wondering what had happened to Candlemas and considering a little illegal entry of my own. Even loopy with Ludomir, I’d been able to spot that for a bad idea. A good thing, too, considering what I would have walked in on. I could have saved the city the price of a locksmith’s house call, but I’d have had a lot of explaining to do, and my task wouldn’t have gotten all that much easier when the attaché case turned out to be mine.

The new scenario was pretty reasonable, I decided, and a substantial improvement over the one Charlie Weeks and I had hatched the previous morning. It made the mysterious telephone call to the police a little less inexplicable, and fit the dying message into a logical time frame.

But it didn’t do a whole lot to decode it.

C-A-P-H-O-B. What the hell could it mean?

I thought about it as I ambled to and fro, opening drawers and rummaging around in them, exploring closets, looking inside and beneath and behind this and that and the other thing. I was glad to have something to ponder, because this was the worst way to search a place.

The best way is when you know what you’re looking for and where it is. You go in, get it, and get out. Almost as good is when you know what you’re looking for; you go through the place systematically, checking those locations where it’s likely to be, and as soon as you find it you get to go home.

The next best thing-and probably the most enjoyable-is when you’re not looking for anything in particular. Missions of this sort are burglary at its best, and they run the gamut from the meticulously planned suburban break-in, where you time the neighborhood security patrol and run rings around the electronic alarm system, to a completely impulsive crime of opportunity, where you kick the door in and hope for the best. You don’t know what they’ve got or where they put it, but you get to be Goldilocks, sleeping in all the beds and eating all the porridge, and you never know what you’re going to find until you find it.

And, finally, we have the kind of fool’s errand I was on this lovely Sunday. I didn’t know what I wanted or where he’d stashed it, or even if it existed, whatever it might turn out to be. I had to look everywhere, because I didn’t know how big or small it was, or if it had to be kept cold or dry or out of drafts.

And it’s terribly frustrating. If you find something, is that it? Or is there something more waiting to be found? Conversely, if you don’t find anything, do you keep at it until something turns up? Or should you go on home because there’s nothing there?

You know what it’s like? Sex without orgasm. How can you tell when you’re supposed to stop?

So I was almost glad to have CAPHOB to think about while I searched. I wouldn’t call my musing terribly productive, but I came up with some interesting ideas.

1. Suppose CAPHOB was an acronym. Suppose each letter stood for a word. That would be a good way to compress a lot of information into the number of letters you could fit on the side of an attaché case before your life trickled out of you. Just what the letters stood for was hard to say, but the possibilities were extensive, surely. Can Anyone Pinch Hit Or Bunt? Criminal Activity Pays Horribly On Balance. Cancel Anniversary Party-Having Our Baby! None of these struck me as the sort of thing I’d be likely to choose as my last word to the world, but I hadn’t been lying there bleeding, struggling to scribble my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the city.

2. Suppose CAPHOB was upside down. After all, I didn’t know how Hoberman had spent the years since his adventures in Anatruria. Maybe he’d devoted some of them to a career selling life insurance, until jotting things down upside down had become second nature to him. To test the hypothesis, I printed CAPHOB and turned the piece of paper upside down, and I got the same meaningless word upside down and backwards. Then I printed the individual letters upside down, and this worked a little better, because four of the letters were unchanged. What I got looked something like CVdHOB, except the V was really an upside-down A. I suppose I could have taken this a step further and tried to work out what CVDHOB might be an acronym for, but you have to draw the line somewhere.

3. Maybe the most obvious explanation was the real one, and he’d been trying to write his name. This did make a certain kind of sense, actually. There’d been no identification found on his person, which suggested that Candlemas might have taken his wallet from him while he lay dying. Maybe Hoberman had recoiled at the thought of rotting away in an unmarked grave, and wanted to let the world know who he was. When you considered the fact that even now the tag on his toe read “Hugo Candlemas,” his concern didn’t seem so farfetched. It was a damned unsatisfying dying message, pointing not to the killer but to the victim, but what are you going to do, send it back to Hoberman with a rejection slip?

4. Maybe, as Carolyn had suggested earlier, Hoberman was dyslexic. He’d written the right letters but got them in the wrong order. I switched them around without coming up with anything more promising than HOPCAB. It was true, to be sure, that the Boccaccio (say) was only a short hop away by cab, but could that possibly be the urgent information Hoberman wanted to pass on to whoever found his body? I couldn’t see it. If I was ready to say the long goodbye and sleep the big sleep, I’d at least try for something profound, like “Life is a fountain,” say, or “Take two and hit to right.”

5. Perhaps, startling as it was to entertain the notion, perhaps CAPHOB was a word. It wasn’t in the dictionary, nor was anything that started out with those first four letters, but suppose it was a proper name. In fact, suppose it was Candlemas’s name. It didn’t much sound like a name, but was it that much less plausible than Souslik or Marmotte? What would you think if you saw either of those written in blood on the side of your attaché case?

6. Was it possible it was just drivel? Consider Dutch Schultz’s famous last words, a great extended monologue duly recorded for posterity as he lay dying. They were words, all right, and some of the sentences even parsed, but the great man had made no sense at all. Suppose the good captain, presented with a small canvas, had managed the neat trick of distilling a whole world of meaninglessness into six meaningless letters.

And so on.

Sometime in the middle of the afternoon I got hungry. I was all set to order Chinese food when I realized it wouldn’t work; I couldn’t open the door to receive it because of the police seals. By this time I was really in the mood for it, too, so I thought about having it delivered to the Lehrman apartment and waiting for it down there. I don’t know what made me think that was a sensible idea. Maybe I’d overdosed on meditation, using CAPHOB as my mantra. Fortunately I nipped the whole enterprise in the bud and raided the kitchen instead.

What I found was leftover Chinese food, but it had been left too long. You wouldn’t want to touch it with a ten-foot chopstick. I toasted a couple of English muffins (the bread was stale) and spread them with peanut butter and jelly (the butter was rancid) and washed them down with black instant coffee (the milk was beyond description). Someday, I thought, when all of this was but a memory, I’d be eating real meals again, hearty coffee-shop breakfasts, overseasoned ethnic lunches with Carolyn, real dinners in real restaurants. For now, though, I seemed destined to grab breakfast on the run, skip lunch or steal it, and make the big meal of the day popcorn. My clothes were neither falling off me nor gripping me too tightly, so I seemed to be getting away with it. But it would be nice to eat like a human being again.

I drank the last of the coffee, rinsed my dishes in the sink, and got back to work.

By the time I was done, I had some calls to make. I sat down in the leather club chair, swung my feet up onto the ottoman, held the receiver to my ear and decided against it. How did I know who had one of those doohickeys on his phone that displays the caller’s number? And how could I be sure that none of the folks I wanted to call would recognize Hugo Candlemas’s telephone number?

No point taking chances. I’d left NYPD seals intact, I’d steered clear of tainted General Tso’s Chicken. After all that, I didn’t want to be hoist on the petard of modern communications technology.

I left the Candlemas residence neat and clean, with no evidence of my visit aside from the peanut butter and jelly I’d scarfed and the fingerprints I’d left behind. (I’d wiped up some after myself, but hadn’t been a fanatic about it; they already had all the prints they were ever going to lift from the crime scene.) To protect the place from the elements, I cut a rectangle of cardboard from a corrugated carton, shrouded it in plastic wrap from a drawer in the kitchen, and carried it and a roll of tape out onto the fire escape with me. There I drew the casement window shut, reached in and latched it, then withdrew my arm and taped the cardboard in place of the missing pane. Then I scuttled quickly and quietly past the Gearhardts’ window and into the Lehrmans’ apartment a flight below.

This would have been rendered more complicated if their houseguest had returned in the interim, but he hadn’t. I closed their window after me, repositioned the jade plant and the bookcase-the planter was definitely Rockwood, I decided-and chose a telephone in the front room, where I could keep an eye and ear on the door.

I made my phone calls.

When I was done I treated myself to a tour of the apartment. Aside from a massive Chippendale highboy and a closet they’d cleared out for him, the Lehrman possessions remained essentially undisturbed during their absence. I window-shopped, leaving everything where I found it, and being much more careful about fingerprints than I’d been two flights up.

I left the refrigerator unopened.

And, when I let myself out at last, I locked up after myself and left the little brownstone house without incident. The blind woman on the first floor might have heard my footfall on the stairs, the neighbors across the street might have seen me emerge from the entranceway, even as they might have seen me go in some hours earlier. But I’d given them no cause to note my passage. I’d come and gone, leaving no trace.

In King of the Underworld, Bogart plays the title role of Joe Gurney. Kay Francis and John Eldredge play a husband-and-wife team of doctors, Eldredge with a mustache almost as unfortunate as Bogie’s in Virginia City . Eldredge saves a wounded henchman of Bogart, who enlists him as the gang’s doctor. When their hideout is raided, Bogart decides Eldredge must have ratted, and shoots him. Bogart and his men get away, but the cops arrest Kay Francis.

Then, in what I thought was a terrific touch, Bogart kidnaps a writer and forces him to ghost his autobiography, planning to kill him when he’s done. First, though, he busts two captured gang members out of jail, gets wounded in the process, and manages to find Kay Francis, who’s been trying to dig up evidence that will clear her at the trial. A big help she turns out to be; she tips off the cops, infects Bogart’s wound, and blinds him with tainted eyedrops. He’s stumbling around the hideout after her and the writer, trying to kill them even if he can’t see them, when the cops burst in and gun him down.

I watched this from my usual seat, with my usual barrel of popcorn on my lap, and what was becoming my usual second ticket in the hands of the ticket-taker. While I was on line to buy the popcorn I’d caught the eye of the tall guy with the goatee and the glasses. He smiled and looked away quickly, not wanting to stare at the poor loser who was all by himself once again. Reflexively he slipped an arm around the barely perceptible waist of his girlfriend, the Pillsbury doughgirl. I guess he wanted to make sure she couldn’t get away, lest he wind up like me.

A lesser man than I might have felt sorry for himself.

During the intermission I stayed right where I was. I had plenty of popcorn left, and I didn’t need to use the john or duck out for a quick smoke. I stayed put, and after a decent interval the lights went down again and the second feature began.

Beat the Devil. Directed by John Huston, who shared the screenplay credit with Truman Capote. The cast included Gina Lollobrigida as Bogart’s wife and Jennifer Jones as a compulsive liar married to a fake English nobleman. Peter Lorre’s in it as well, along with Robert Morley and a bunch of great character actors whose names I can never remember.

I settled into my seat, thinking that maybe this time I’d be able to understand what was going on on the screen. I must have seen the movie three or four times over the years and was never able to make head or tail out of it. Everybody was trying to hoodwink everybody else, and when Jennifer Jones prefaced a statement with “in point of fact” you knew for certain she was about to come up with a whopper, but beyond that I could never quite manage to follow the plot. Maybe this time would be different.

Five or ten minutes in, I sensed a presence in the aisle. Without averting my eyes from the screen, where Morley and Lorre had their heads together, I listened hard for approaching footsteps. But I don’t know that I actually heard her draw near. It was more a matter of simply knowing, some extrasensory awareness that quickened the pulse and made it hard to breathe.

Then she was settling into the seat beside me. I still couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. A leg bumped mine momentarily, then drew away. A hand dipped into the vat of popcorn and brushed my hand before closing around a fistful of popped kernels.

I watched the movie and listened to chewing sounds.

Then came an urgent whisper. “You were right, Bern. This is really dynamite popcorn.”

Throats were cleared and programs rustled in the row immediately behind ours. I put a finger to my lips and glanced at Carolyn, who mimed a wordless apology.

And, side by side, we ate the popcorn and watched the movie.

On the way out, the ticket-taker gave me a big smile and the guy with the goatee flashed me a thumbs-up. “They’re happy for me,” I told Carolyn. “Isn’t that nice?”

“It’s wonderful,” she said. “One of those heartwarming little New York vignettes. Imagine if they knew you spent the past two nights at my apartment.”

“Please,” I said. “They’d start wondering when I’m going to make an honest woman of you.”

Across the street they had tables set up on the sidewalk, and it was a nice enough night to sit at one of them. I ordered cappuccino and Carolyn asked for Caffè Lucrezia Borgia, which sounded as though it might be poisoned but turned out to be the house special, a production number consisting of espresso with a slug of Strega in it and a topping of whipped cream and shaved chocolate. She pronounced it excellent and offered me a taste, but I passed.

“Not even a taste? It’s not going to get you drunk.”

“Without principles,” I said, “where are we?”

“I’ve got to give you credit,” she said. “Of course you’re going to be way out of shape by the time all this is over. Anyway, I’m starting to wonder if I’m in better shape than I ought to be.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I kept the store open until I finished ‘A’ Is for Train, and I only had one drink at the Bum Rap after I closed up, and I swear I didn’t even feel it, and afterward I ate a full meal at the Indian place, but even so I’ve got to admit I had trouble following the movie tonight.”

“No one can follow it,” I said. “It’s Beat the Devil. I think they must have been making it up as they went along, and I’m positive they didn’t have any prissy little rule about not having a drink when they had work to do. No worries about getting out of shape, not on that set.”

We talked some about the film, and I gave her a rundown on the first feature, King of the Underworld, which she was sorry to have missed. “Except I like it better when he doesn’t get killed at the end,” she said. “You know me, I’m a sucker for a happy ending.”

“In King of the Underworld,” I said, “the ending’s not happy until he dies. But I know what you mean. Maybe that’s why they usually show the older picture first. He tended to be alive at the end of the later ones, when he was a bigger star.”

“Makes sense. What’s the point in being a star if you’re just going to get killed the same as always?” She sipped her fancy coffee. “I brought your flight bag.”

“So I see.”

“Ray came to the store. He was actually pleasant to me, which made me a little nervous. It was him sitting in your lobby, but I suppose he told you that himself.”

I shook my head. “I never asked.”

“Well, he won’t be sitting there anymore, so I thought you might want to sleep at home. There’s stuff in there you might need if you do. But I’m not trying to get rid of you, Bern. If you want to stay downtown, I’ll just take the bag home with me. Or we’ll go together.”

“I’ve got a late appointment.”

“Oh.”

“And if Ray was sitting in my lobby, who was in the car outside?”

“I didn’t ask about that.”

“Maybe it was a couple of other cops. And maybe it was somebody with no interest in me whatsoever.” I frowned. “And maybe not.”

“So you’ll sleep at my place. Why be silly about it?”

I hefted the flight bag, put it on the ground next to me. “It was a good idea to bring this,” I said. “I’ll hang on to it.”

“But you’ll sleep at my place, right?”

“Who knows where I’ll sleep?”

“ Bern…”

“There’s always a little furnished room on East Twenty-fifth Street,” I said. “The accommodations are on the Spartan side, but I know for a fact that the bed’s comfortable. Or there’s the subway. Or a bench in the park, on a beautiful night like this.”

“What are you talking about?”

I tilted my head to one side, took hold of my chin with my thumb and forefinger, and let the words come out of the side of my mouth. “It’s like this, sweetheart,” I said. “I’ll find a place to sleep. You don’t have to worry about me.”

After I’d settled the check she said, “Caphob, caphob. Ohmigod.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Is it conceivable? Could it possibly be?”

“Could what possibly be?”

She took my arm. “Don’t you think maybe…no, you’ll just tell me I’m out of my mind.”

“I promise I won’t.”

“Okay, here’s what I was thinking. Maybe Caphob is the sled.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“I know, but at least I got a laugh out of you. Bern, the only thing I really have to worry about is that you’ve seen too many movies. At any moment you’re liable to slip into character. Or do I mean out of character? Out of your own character and into his, that’s what I mean.”

“Not to worry,” I said. “You want a cab?”

“I think I’ll take the subway. It’s a nice night.”

“And you want to enjoy it way down below the pavement?”

“I mean I won’t mind the walk from the subway stop. You knew what I meant.”

“True. I want a cab, though. I have to go across town, and I don’t want to be late.” I held up a hand and a cab pulled up almost immediately. I asked Carolyn if she was sure she didn’t want it, and she said she was. I opened the door and the driver gave me a big smile, his eyes bright with recognition.

“Great to see you,” I told him. To Carolyn I said, “Get in. This cab’s for you.”

“But…”

“Come on,” I said. “How often do you get a chance to ride with a man who knows where Arbor Court is?” I held the door for her, leaned in, and urged Max to tell her about herbs. “But not about the woman and the monkey,” I added.

“Wait a minute,” Carolyn said. “What’s this about a woman and a monkey? I want to hear this.”

I closed the door and the cab pulled away. I hailed another, and asked the Vietnamese driver if he knew how to get to Seventy-fourth and Park.

“I’m sure I’ll be able to find it,” he said dryly. His name was Nguyen Trang, and he spoke good English and knew the city cold. As we rode across town he told me what a great city it was. “But the fucking Cambodians are ruining it,” he said.