The Burglar in the Closet

by Lawrence Block

  THE

  BURGLAR

  IN THE

  CLOSET

  LAWRENCE

  BLOCK

  for Mary Pat,

  who opened the right door

  Sir, he who would earn his bread writing books must have the assurance of a duke, the wit of a courtier, and the guts of a burglar.

  —Dr. Samuel Johnson

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  “Gramercy Park,” said Miss Henrietta Tyler, “is an oasis in…

  Chapter Two

  The problem, of course, derived from an offshoot of Parkinson’s…

  Chapter Three

  It never fails. I open my mouth and I wind…

  Chapter Four

  Around ten the next morning I was spreading rhubarb preserves…

  Chapter Five

  “You’re fantastic, Bernie.”

  Chapter Six

  I don’t know if Jillian was nonplussed, but she certainly…

  Chapter Seven

  Jillian and I left the office together ten or fifteen…

  Chapter Eight

  There were a lot of bars, a lot of conversations,…

  Chapter Nine

  After six or seven hours’ sleep, after the fourth aspirin…

  Chapter Ten

  Every block in New York sports several fire hydrants spaced at…

  Chapter Eleven

  Spyder’s Parlor was dark and empty. The chairs perched on…

  Chapter Twelve

  King Street lies just below the southern edge of Greenwich…

  Chapter Thirteen

  Happily, Walter Ignatius Grabow wasn’t in the habit of spending…

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Jeez, if it ain’t my old buddy,” Dennis said. “Saturday…

  Chapter Fifteen

  Knobby Corcoran’s building was a twelve-story prewar job with an…

  Chapter Sixteen

  The bills were arranged in inch-thick stacks with buff-colored paper…

  Chapter Seventeen

  She listened with appropriately wide eyes while I recreated the…

  Chapter Eighteen

  It must have been around ten when we woke up…

  Chapter Nineteen

  “I’ve got him on the run now,” I said to…

  Chapter Twenty

  I was ten minutes early at the Central Park South…

  Chapter Twenty-one

  “The usual thing,” I told Jillian. “He spent more than…

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Lawrence Block

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER

  One

  “Gramercy Park,” said Miss Henrietta Tyler, “is an oasis in the middle of a cruel sea, a respite from the slings and arrows of which the Bard has warned us.” A sigh escaped her lips, the sort of sigh that follows upon the contemplation of an oasis in the middle of a sea. “Young man,” she said, “I do not know what I would do without this blessed green plot. I simply do not know what I would do.”

  The blessed green plot is a private park tucked into Manhattan’s East Twenties. There is a fence around the park, a black wrought-iron fence seven or eight feet high. A locked gate denies access to persons who have no legal right to enter. Only those persons who live in certain buildings surrounding the park and who pay an annual fee toward its maintenance are issued keys that will unlock the iron gate.

  Miss Henrietta Tyler, who was seated on the green bench beside me, had such a key. She had told me her name, along with much of her personal history, in the fifteen minutes or so we’d been sitting together. Given time, I was fairly sure she’d tell me everything that had occurred in New York since her birth, which I calculated had taken place just a year or two after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. She was a dear old thing, was Miss Henrietta, and she wore a sweet little hat with a veil. My grandmother used to wear sweet little hats with veils. You don’t see them much anymore.

  “Absence of dogs,” Miss Henrietta was saying. “I’m ever so glad they don’t allow dogs in this park. It’s the only spot left in the city where one may walk without constantly scanning the pavement beneath one’s feet. A disgusting animal, the dog. It leaves its dirt anywhere at all. The cat is infinitely more fastidious, isn’t it? Not that I would care to have one underfoot. I’ve never understood this compulsion people have to bring animals into their houses. Why, I wouldn’t even care to have a fur coat. Let that sort of thing stay in the forest where it belongs.”

  I’m sure Miss Henrietta wouldn’t have talked thus to a stranger. But strangers, like dogs, are not to be found in Gramercy Park. My presence in the park indicated that I was decent and respectable, that I had a rewarding occupation or an independent income, that I was one of Us and not one of Them. My clothes had certainly been chosen to reinforce that image. My suit was a tropical worsted, a windowpane check in light and dark gray. My shirt was light blue with a medium-length button-down collar. My tie carried stripes of silver and sky blue on a navy field. The attaché case at my feet was a slim model in cocoa Ultrasuede that had cost someone a pretty penny.

  I looked, all in all, like a bachelor taking a breather in the park after a hard day in a stuffy office. Perhaps I’d stopped somewhere for a bracing brace of martinis. Now I was taking some air on this balmy September evening before I trotted on home to my well-appointed apartment, there to pop a TV dinner in the microwave oven and inhale a beer or two while the Mets dropped a squeaker on the tube.

  Well, not quite, Miss Henrietta.

  No hard day, no stuffy office. No martinis, because I do not permit myself so much as a sniff of the cork when I am about to go to work. And there’s no microwave oven in my modest apartment, and no TV dinners either, and I stopped watching the Mets when they traded Seaver. My apartment’s on the Upper West Side, several miles from Gramercy Park, and I didn’t pay a cent for the Ultrasuede attaché case, having appropriated it some months ago while liberating an absent gentleman’s coin collection. I’m sure it had cost him a pretty penny, and God knows it contained any number of pretty pennies when I waltzed out the door with it in hand.

  Why, I didn’t even have a key to the park. I’d let myself in with a cunning little piece of high-tempered German steel. The lock on the gate is a shockingly simple one to pick. It’s surprising more people don’t let themselves in when they want to spend an hour away from dogs and strangers.

  “This business of running around the park,” Miss Henrietta was saying. “There goes one of them now. Look at him, won’t you?”

  I looked. The chap in question was around my age, somewhere in his middle thirties, but he’d lost a good deal of his hair. Perhaps he’d run out from under it. He was running now, or jogging, or whatever.

  “You see them day and night, winter and summer. There’s no end to it. On cold days they wear those suits, sweating suits I believe they’re called. Unbecoming gray things. On a warm night like tonight they wear cotton shorts. Is it healthy to carry on like that, do you suppose?”

  “Why else would anyone do it?”

  Miss Henrietta nodded. “But I can’t believe it’s good for one,” she said. “It looks so unpleasant. You don’t do anything of the sort, do you?”

  “Every once in a while I think it might be good for me. But I just take two aspirin and lie down until the thought passes.”

  “I believe that’s wise. It appears ridiculous, for one thing, and nothing that looks so ridiculous can possibly be good for you.” Once more a sigh escaped her lips. “At least they’re constrained to do it outside the park,” she said, “and not inside the park. We’ve that to b
e thankful for.”

  “Like the dogs.”

  She looked at me, and her eyes glinted behind the veil. “Why, yes,” she said. “Quite like the dogs.”

  By seven-thirty Miss Henrietta was dozing lightly and the jogger had run away somewhere. More to the point, a woman with shoulder-length ash-blond hair and wearing a paisley print blouse and wheat-colored jeans had descended the stone steps in front of 17 Gramercy Park West, glanced at her watch, and headed around the corner on Twenty-first Street. Fifteen minutes had passed and she had not returned. Unless the building had held two women of that description, she was Crystal Sheldrake, the future ex-wife of Craig Sheldrake, the World’s Greatest Dentist. And if she was out of her apartment it was time for me to go into it.

  I let myself out of the park. (You don’t need a key to do that, or even a piece of high-tempered German steel.) I crossed the street, attaché case in hand, and mounted the steps of Number Seventeen. It was four stories tall, an exemplary specimen of Greek Revival architecture thrown up early in the nineteenth century. Originally, I suppose, one family had sprawled over all four floors and stowed their luggage and old newspapers in the basement. But standards have crumbled, as I’m sure Miss Henrietta could have told me, and now each floor was a separate apartment. I studied the four bells in the vestibule, passed up the ones marked Yalman, Porlock, and Leffingwell (which, taken as a trio, sounds rather like a firm of architects specializing in industrial parks) and poked the one marked Sheldrake. Nothing happened. I rang again, and nothing happened again, and I let myself in.

  With a key. “The bitch changed the lock,” Craig had told me, “but she couldn’t hardly change the one downstairs without getting the neighbors steamed at her.” Having the key saved me a couple of minutes, the lock being a rather decent one. I pocketed the key and walked to the elevator. It was in service though, the cage descending toward me, and I decided I didn’t much want to meet Yalman or Porlock—Leffingwell lived on the first floor, but I decided it might even be he in the elevator, returning to base after watering his rooftop garden. No matter; I walked on down the hallway to the stairs and climbed two flights of carpeted steps to Crystal Sheldrake’s apartment. I rang her bell and listened to two-tone chimes within, then knocked a couple of times, all in the name of insurance. Then I put my ear to the door and listened for a moment, and then I retrieved my ear and went to work.

  Crystal Sheldrake’s door had not one but two new locks, both of them Rabsons. The Rabson’s a good lock to begin with, and one of these was equipped with their new pickproof cylinder. It’s not as pickproof as they’d like you to think but it’s not a plate of chopped liver either, and the damn thing took me a while to get past. It would have taken even longer except that I have a pair of locks just like it at home. One’s in my living room, where I can practice picking it with my eyes closed while I listen to records. The other’s on my own door, keeping out burglars less industrious than I.

  I picked my way in, albeit with my eyes open, and before I even locked the door behind me I took a quick tour of the apartment. Once upon a time I didn’t bother to do this, and it later turned out that there was a dead person in the apartment, and the situation proved an embarrassment of the rankest order. Experience is as effective a teacher as she is because one does tend to remember her lessons.

  No dead bodies. No live bodies except my own. I went back and locked both locks, plopped my attaché case upon a Victorian rosewood love seat, slipped my hands into a pair of skintight sheer rubber gloves, and went to work.

  The name of the game I was playing was Treasure Hunt. “I’d like to see you strip the place to the four walls,” Craig had said, and I was going to do my best to oblige him. There seemed to be more than four walls—the living room I’d entered, a full dining room, a large bedroom, a small bedroom that had been set up as a sort of den and television parlor, and a kitchen with a fake brick floor and real brick walls and a lot of copper pots and pans hanging from iron hooks. The kitchen was my favorite room. The bedroom was all chintzy and virginal, the den angular and uninspired, and the living room an eclectic triumph featuring examples of bad taste down through the centuries. So I started in the kitchen and found six hundred dollars in the butter compartment of the refrigerator door.

  Now the refrigerator’s always a good place to look. A surprising number of people keep money in the kitchen, and many of them tuck it into the fridge. Cold cash, I suppose. But I didn’t pick up the six hundred by playing the averages. I had inside information.

  “The slut keeps money in the refrigerator,” Craig had told me. “Usually has a couple hundred stashed in the butter keeper. Keeps the bread with the butter.”

  “Clever.”

  “Isn’t it just? She used to keep marijuana in the tea canister. If she lived where people have lawns she’d probably store it with the grass seed.”

  I didn’t look in the tea canister so I don’t know what kind of tea it contained. I put the cash in my wallet and returned to the living room to have a shot at the desk. There was more money in the top right-hand drawer, maybe two hundred dollars at most in fives and tens and twenties. It wasn’t enough to get excited about but I was getting excited anyway, the automatic tickle of excitement that starts working the instant I let myself into someone else’s abode, the excitement that builds every time I lay hands on someone else’s property and make it my own. I know this is all morally reprehensible and there are days when it bothers me, but there’s no getting around it. My name is Bernie Rhodenbarr and I’m a thief and I love to steal. I just plain love it.

  The money went in my pocket and became my money, and I started slamming through the other drawers in the little kneehole desk, and several in a row contained nothing noteworthy and then I opened another and right on top were three cases of the sort that good watches come in. The first one was empty. The second and third were not. One of them was an Omega and the other was a Patek Philippe and they were both gorgeous. I closed the cases and placed them in my attaché case where they belonged.

  The watches were choice but that was it for the living room and it was actually more than I’d expected. Because the living room like the kitchen was just a warm-up. Crystal Sheldrake lived alone, although she often had overnight guests, and she was a woman with a lot of valuable jewelry, and women keep their jewelry in the bedroom. I’m sure they think they do it so it’s handy when they’re getting dressed, but I think the real reason is that they sleep better surrounded by gold and diamonds. It makes them feel secure.

  “It used to drive me crazy,” Craig had said. “Sometimes she left things lying out in plain sight. Or she’d just toss a bracelet and a necklace in the top drawer of the bedside table. She had the bedside table on the left-hand side, but I suppose they’re both hers now so check ’em both.” No kidding. “I useta beg her to keep some of that stuff in a safe-deposit box. She said it’s too much trouble. She wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “Let’s hope she didn’t start listening recently.”

  “Not Crystal. She never listened to anybody.”

  I took my attaché case into the bedroom with me and had a look for myself. Earrings, finger rings, bracelets, necklaces. Brooches, pendants, watches. Modern jewelry and antique jewelry. Fair stuff, good stuff, and a couple things that looked, to my reasonably professional eye, to be very good indeed. Dentists take in a certain amount of cash along with the checks, and hard as it may be to believe this, some of that cash doesn’t get reported to the Internal Revenue people. Some of it gets turned quietly into jewelry, and that jewelry could now get turned just as quietly right back into cash again. It wouldn’t bring in what it had cost in the first place, since your average fence is a rather more careful customer than your average dentist, but it would still amount to a fairly impressive sum when you consider that it all started out with nothing but a whole lot of toothaches and root-canal work.

  I searched very carefully, not wanting to miss anything. Crystal Sheldrake kept a very neat apartment on
the surface, but the interiors of her drawers were a scandal, with baubles and beads forced to keep company with rumpled panty hose and half-full make-up jars. So I took my time, and my attaché case grew heavier as my fingers grew lighter. There was plenty of time. She had left the house at seven-fifteen and would probably not return until after midnight, if indeed she returned before dawn. Her standard operating procedure, according to Craig, called for a drink or two at each of several neighborhood watering holes, a bite of dinner somewhere along the way, and then a few hours devoted to a combination of serious drinking and even more serious cruising. Of course there were nights that got planned in advance, dinner engagements and theater dates, but she’d left the house dressed for a casual night’s entertainment.

  That meant she’d either bring home a stranger or go to a stranger’s home, and either way I’d be long gone before she recrossed her own threshold. If they settled on his place, the jewels might be fenced before she knew they were missing. If she brought the guy home and they were both too sloshed to notice anything was missing, and if he in turn let himself out before she woke up, she might just tag the crime on him. Either way I looked to be in the clear, and enough thousands of dollars ahead so that I could coast for the next eight or ten months, even after I gave Craig his share. Of course it was hard to tell just what the attaché case contained, and it’s a long, long way from jewelry to cash, but things were looking good for Mrs. Rhodenbarr’s boy Bernard, no question about it.

  I remember having that thought. I can’t begin to tell you what a comfort it was a little later when Crystal Sheldrake locked me in the bedroom closet.

  CHAPTER

  Two