The Burglar in the Closet

by Lawrence Block

  “I don’t?”

  “First of all, the soda water’s bad for you. The bubbles get into your veins and give you the bends, same as the sandhogs get when they don’t go through decompression chambers. It’s a well-known fact.”

  “I never heard that, Frankie.”

  “Well, you know it now. Plus the wine rots your blood. It’s made out of grapes and the enzymes from the grapes are what screw you up.”

  “Brandy’s made from grapes.”

  She gave me a look. “Yeah,” she said, “but it’s distilled. That purifies it.”

  “Oh.”

  “You want to get rid of that spritzer before it ruins your health. Have something else.”

  “Maybe a glass of water for now.”

  She looked horrified. “Water? In this town? You ever see blow-up photos of what comes out of the tap in New York City? My God, they got these fucking microscopic worms in New York water. You drink water without alcohol in it, you’re just asking for trouble.”

  “Oh.”

  “Let me look at you, Bernie.” Her eyes, light brown with a green cast to them, fought to focus on mine. “Scotch,” she said authoritatively. “Cutty rocks. Rodge, sugar, bring Bernie here a Cutty Sark on the rocks.”

  “I don’t know, Frankie.”

  “Jesus,” she said, “just shut up and drink it. You’re gonna drink to Crystal’s memory with a glass of wormy water? What are you, crazy? Just shut up and drink your scotch.”

  “Now take Dennis here,” Frankie said. “Dennis was crazy about Crystal. Weren’t you, Dennis?”

  “She was an ace-high broad,” Dennis said.

  “Everybody loved her, right?”

  “Lit up the joint when she walked in the door,” Dennis said. “No question about it. Now she’s deader’n Kelsey’s nuts and ain’t it a hell of a thing? The husband, right?”

  “A dentist.”

  “Wha’d he do, shoot her?”

  “Stabbed her.”

  “A hell of a thing,” Dennis said.

  We had left the Recovery Room a drink or two ago at Frankie’s insistence and had moved around the corner to Joan’s Joynt, a smaller and less brightly lit place, and there we had met up with Dennis, a thickly built man who owned a parking garage on Third Avenue. Dennis was drinking Irish whiskey with small beer chasers, Frankie was staying with straight Cognac, and I was following orders and lapping up the Cutty Sark on the rocks. I was by no means convinced of the wisdom of this course of action, but with each succeeding drink it seemed to make more sense. And I kept reminding myself of the little bottle of olive oil I had swigged earlier. I imagined the oil coating my stomach so that the Cutty Sark couldn’t be absorbed. Drink after drink would slide down my throat, hit the greased stomach and be whisked on past into the intestine before it knew what hit it.

  And yet it did seem as though a wee bit of the alcohol was getting into the old bloodstream after all….

  “Another round,” Dennis was saying heartily. “And have something for yourself, Jimbo. And that’s another brandy for Frankie here, and another Cutty for my friend Bernie.”

  “Oh, I don’t—”

  “Hey, I’m buying, Bernie. When Dennis buys, everybody drinks.”

  So Dennis bought and everybody drank.

  In the Hen’s Tooth, Frankie said, “Bernie, want you to meet Charlie and Hilda. This is Bernie.”

  “The name’s Jack,” Charlie said. “Frankie, you got this obsession my name’s Charlie. You know damn well it’s Jack.”

  “The hell,” Frankie said. “Same thing, isn’t it?”

  Hilda said, “Pleasure to meetcha, Bernie. You an insurance man like everybody else?”

  “He’s no fucking dentist,” Frankie said.

  “I’m a burglar,” said six or seven Cutty Rockses.

  “A what?”

  “A cat burglar.”

  “That a fact,” said someone. Jack or Charlie, I suppose. Perhaps it was Dennis.

  “What do you do with them?” Hilda wanted to know.

  “Do with what?”

  “The cats.”

  “He holds ’em for ransom.”

  “There any money in it?”

  “Jesus, lookit who’s askin’ if there’s any money in pussy.”

  “Oh, you’re terrible,” said Hilda, clearly delighted. “You’re an awful man.”

  “No, seriously,” Charlie/Jack said. “What do you do, Bernie?”

  “I’m in investments,” I said.

  “Terrific.”

  “Thank God my ex was an accountant,” Hilda said. “I never thought I’d hear myself saying that and just listen to me. But you never have to worry about an accountant killing you.”

  “I don’t know,” Dennis said. “My experience is they nickel and dime you to death.”

  “But they don’t stab you.”

  “You’re better off with a stabbing. Get the damn thing over and done with. People look at a parking garage, all they see is that money coming in every day. They don’t see the constant headaches. Those kids you gotta hire, they scrape a fender and you hear about it, believe me. Nobody appreciates the amount of mental strain in a parking garage.”

  Hilda put a hand on his arm. “They think you got it easy,” she said, “but it’s not that easy, Dennis.”

  “Damn right. And then they wonder why a man drinks. A business like mine and a wife like mine and they wonder why a man needs to unwind a little at the end of the day.”

  “You’re a hell of a guy, Dennis.”

  I excused myself to make a phone call, but by the time I got to the phone I couldn’t remember who I’d intended to call. I went to the men’s room instead. There were a lot of girls’ names and phone numbers written over the urinal but I didn’t notice Crystal’s. I thought of dialing one of the numbers just to see what would happen. I decided it was not the sort of thought to which a sober man is given.

  When I got back to the bar Charlie/Jack was ordering another round. “Almost forgot you,” he said to me. “Cutty on the rocks, right?”

  “Er,” I said.

  “Hey, Bernie,” Frankie said. “You okay? You look a little green around the gills.”

  “It’s the olive oil.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said, and reached for my drink.

  CHAPTER

  Eight

  There were a lot of bars, a lot of conversations, a lot of people threading their separate ways in and out of my awareness. My awareness, come to think of it, was doing some threading of its own. I kept going in and out of gray stages, as if I were in a car driving through patches of fog.

  Then all at once I was walking, and for the first time all night I was by myself. I’d finally lost Frankie, who’d been with me ever since the Recovery Room. I was walking, and there in front of me was Gramercy Park. I went over to the iron gate and held onto it. Not exactly for support, but it did seem like a good idea.

  The park was empty, at least as much of it as I could see. I thought of picking the lock and letting myself in. I wasn’t carrying anything cumbersome like a pry bar, but I did have my usual ring of picks and probes and that was sufficient to get me inside, safe from dogs and strangers. I could stretch out on a nice comfortable green bench and close my eyes and count Cutties sailing over rocks, and in only a matter of time I’d be…what?

  Under arrest, in all likelihood. They take a dim view of bums passing out in Gramercy Park. It’s frowned on.

  I maintained my grip on the gate, which did seem to be swaying, although I knew it wasn’t. A jogger ran by—or a runner jogged by, or what you will. Perhaps he was the same one who’d run or jogged around the park while I’d been talking with Miss Whatserface. Taylor? Tyler? No matter. No matter whether it was the same jogger or not, either. What was it she’d said about jogging? “Nothing that appears so ridiculous can possibly be good for you.”

  I thought about that, and thought too that I probably looked fairly ridiculous myself, clinging
desperately to an iron gate as I was. And while I thought this the jogger circled round again, his canvas-clad feet tapping away at the concrete. Hadn’t taken him long to circle the park, had it? Or was it a different jogger? Or had something bizarre happened to my sense of time?

  I watched him jog away. “Carry on,” I said, aloud or otherwise, I’m afraid I’ll never know. “Just so you don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.”

  Then I was in a cab, and I must have given the driver my address because the next thing I knew we were waiting for a traffic light on West End Avenue a block below my apartment. “This is good enough,” I told the driver. “I’ll walk the rest of the way. I can use the fresh air.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll bet you can.”

  I paid him and tipped him and watched him drive away, and all the while I was sorting through my brain, trying to think of a snappy retort. I finally decided the best thing would be to yell, “Oh, yeah?” but I told myself he was already several blocks distant and was thus unlikely to be suitably impressed. I filled my lungs several times with reasonably fresh air and walked a block north.

  I felt lousy, full of booze I hadn’t wanted in the first place, my brain numb and my body shaky and my spirit sagging. But I was homing in on my own turf and there’s a comfort in getting back home, even when home is an overpriced couple of rooms designed to give you a good case of the lonelies. Here, at least, I knew where I was. I could stand on the corner of Seventy-first and West End and look around and see things I recognized.

  I recognized the coffee shop on the corner, for instance. I recognized the oafish Great Dane and the willowy young man who was walking or being walked by the beast. Across the street I recognized my neighbor Mrs. Hesch, the inescapable cigarette smoldering in the corner of her mouth, as she passed the doorman with a sandwich from the deli and a Daily News from the stand on Seventy-second Street. And I recognized the doorman, Crazy Felix, who tried so hard all his life to live up to the twin standards of his maroon uniform and his outsized mustache. And in earnest conversation with Felix I recognized Ray Kirschmann, a poor but dishonest cop whose path has crossed mine on so many occasions. And near the building’s entrance I recognized a young couple who seemed to be stoned on Panamanian grass twenty hours out of twenty-four. And diagonally across the street—

  Wait a minute!

  I looked again at Ray Kirschmann. It was him, all right, good old Ray, and what on earth was he doing in my lobby, talking to my doorman?

  A lot of cobwebs began to clear from my mind. I didn’t get struck sober but it certainly felt as though that was what had happened. I stood still for a moment, trying to figure out what was going on, and then I realized I could worry about that sort of thing when I had the time. Which I didn’t just now.

  I moved back across the sidewalk to the shelter of shadows, glanced back to make sure Ray hadn’t taken notice of me, started to walk east on Seventy-first, keeping close to the buildings all the while, glanced back again a few times to see if there were any other cops around, reminded myself that this business of glancing back all the time simply gave me the appearance of a suspicious character, and what with looking back in spite of this realization, ultimately stepped smack into a souvenir left on the pavement by the galumphing Great Dane or another of his ilk. I said a four-letter word, a precise description indeed of that in which I had stepped. I wiped my foot and walked onward to Broadway, and a cab came along and I hailed it.

  “Where to?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Drive downtown a little ways, it’ll come to me.” And then, while he was saying something I felt no need to attend to, I dug out my wallet and managed to find the little card she’d given me.

  “My appointment’s with Keith,” I said. “But what good is this? It was almost two weeks ago.”

  “You okay, Mac?”

  “No,” I said. I turned the card over and frowned at what was written on it. “RH-sevenone-eight-oh-two,” I read. “Let’s try that, all right? Drive me there.”

  “Mac?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “That’s a phone number.”

  “It is?”

  “Rhinelander seven, that’s the exchange. My phone is all numbers, but some people still got letters and numbers. I think it’s more classy, myself.”

  “I agree with you.”

  “But I can’t drive you to a phone number.”

  “The address is right under it,” I said, squinting. “Right under it.” The letters, I did not add, were squirming around before my very eyes.

  “Wanta read it to me?”

  “In a minute or so,” I said, “that’s just what I’m going to do.”

  She lived in a renovated brickfront on East Eighty-fourth, just a block and a half from the river. I found her bell and rang it, not expecting anything to happen, and while I was preparing to let myself in she asked who I was via the intercom. I told her and she buzzed me in. I climbed three flights of stairs and found her waiting in the doorway, clothed in a blue velour robe and a frown.

  She said, “Bernie? Are you all right?”

  “No.”

  “You look as if—did you say you’re not all right? What’s the matter?”

  “I’m drunk,” I said. She stepped aside and I walked past her into a small studio apartment. A sofa had converted itself into a bed and she had evidently just emerged therefrom to let me in.

  “You’re drunk?”

  “I’m drunk,” I agreed. “I had olive oil and white wine and soda and Scotch and rocks. The soda water gave me the bends and the ice cracked my stomach.”

  “The ice—?”

  “Cracked my stomach. It also shrinks the blood vessels, the veins and the arteries. Crème de menthe gives you diabetes but I stayed the hell away from it.” I took off my tie, rolled it up, put it in my pocket. I took off my jacket, aimed it at a chair. “I don’t know what the olive oil does,” I said, “but I don’t think it was a good idea.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m getting undressed,” I said. “What does it look like I’m doing? I found out a lot about Crystal. I just hope I remember some of it in the morning. I certainly can’t remember it now.”

  “You’re taking your pants off.”

  “Of course I am. Oh, hell, I better take my shoes off first. I usually get the order right but I’m in rotten shape tonight. Wine’s made out of grapes and it poisons the blood. Brandy’s distilled so that purifies it.”

  “Bernie, your shoes—”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve got a cop in my lobby and something even worse on my shoe. I know all that.”

  “Bernie—”

  I got into bed. There was only one pillow. I took it and put my head on it and I pulled the covers over my head and closed my eyes and shut out the world.

  CHAPTER

  Nine

  After six or seven hours’ sleep, after the fourth aspirin and the third cup of coffee, the fog began to break up and disperse. I looked over at Jillian, who sat in a sling chair balancing a coffee cup on her knee. “I’m sorry,” I said, not for the first time.

  “Forget it, Bernie.”

  “Bursting in on you like that in the middle of the night. Jumping out of my clothes and diving into your bed. What’s so funny?”

  “You make it sound like rape. You had too much to drink, that’s all. And you needed a place to stay.”

  “I could have gone to a hotel. If I’d had the brains to think of it.”

  “You might have had trouble finding one that would rent you a room.”

  I lowered my eyes. “I must have been a mess.”

  “Well, you weren’t at your best. I cleaned off your shoe, incidentally.”

  “God, that’s something else for me to apologize for. Why do people keep dogs in the city?”

  “To protect their apartments from burglars.”

  “That’s a hell of a reason.” I drank some more coffee and patted my breast pocket, looking for a ciga
rette. I quit a few years ago but I still reach for the pack now and then. Old habits die hard. “Say, where did you, uh, sleep last night?”

  “In the chair.”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “Bernie, stop it.” She smiled, looking remarkably fresh for someone who had spent the night in a sling chair. She was wearing jeans and a powder-blue sweater and she looked sensational. I was wearing last night’s outfit minus the tie and jacket. She said, “You said you found out some things about Crystal. Last night.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “But you didn’t seem to remember what they were.”

  “I didn’t?”

  “No. Or else you were just too exhausted to think straight. Do you remember now?”

  It took me a few minutes. I had to sit back and close my eyes and give my memory little nudges, but in the end it came through for me. “Three men,” I said. “I got most of my information from a woman named Frankie who was evidently a pretty good drinking buddy of Crystal’s. Frankie was drunk when I met her and she didn’t exactly sober up as the night wore on but I think she knew what she was talking about.

  “According to her, Crystal was just a girl who liked to have a good time. All she wanted out of life was a couple of drinks and a couple of laughs and the ever popular goal of true love.”

  “Plus a million dollars worth of jewelry.”

  “Frankie didn’t mention jewelry. Maybe Crystal didn’t wear much when she went bar-hopping. Anyway the impression I got from her was that Crystal didn’t make a policy of picking up strangers. She went to the bars primarily for the booze and the small talk. Now and then she got half in the bag and went home with somebody new at the end of the evening, but as a general rule she limited herself to three guys.”

  “And one of them killed her?”

  I shrugged. “It’s a reasonable assumption. At any rate, they were the three men in her life.” I picked up that morning’s Daily News, tapped the story we’d read. The Medical Examiner had told them what I’d already known. “Somebody was intimate with her the evening she was killed. Either the killer or someone else. And that would have been early in the evening so it’s not likely that she’d already gotten smashed and dragged a stranger home with her.”