The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart

by Lawrence Block

  I had my hand on the doorknob and the tip of one of my picks a quarter-inch into the top lock when it occurred to me to ring the bell. I was sure no one was home, I just took that for granted, but I reminded myself that this was one of those little professional procedures I never neglected to perform, and I might as well play this one by the book.

  So I rang, and I waited for a moment because that too is part of the way you do it, and you can just imagine my surprise when I heard the footsteps approaching the door.

  I just had time to get the incriminating evidence out of the lock and back in my pocket when the door opened to reveal a young man standing about six-two, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist and a handsome, square-jawed, open countenance. He had a big smile on his face; he may not have had the faintest idea who I was, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t glad to see me.

  “Hello,” he said heartily. “A beautiful day, yes?”

  “Gorgeous,” I agreed.

  “And how may I help you?”

  Good question. “Ah,” I said. “I’m Bill Thompson, and I’m the building’s representative for the American Hip Dysplasia Association.”

  “You are from the building?”

  “I live in the building,” I explained. “On another floor. I work on Wall Street, but I volunteered to collect for this charity. Very good cause, as I’m sure you know.”

  “Yes,” he said, one hand dipping into a pocket of his jeans. He was wearing black Levi’s and a polo shirt that I’d call blue-green, but that the Lands’ End catalog probably calls teal. “Well, of course I would like to make a donation.”

  Jesus, maybe I was in the wrong business. “I don’t even have my receipt book with me,” I said. “That’s not what I came to see you about. Let’s see now, you’d be James Driscoll, have I got that right?”

  He smiled and shook his head.

  “No? How can that be?” I dug out my wallet, consulted a slip of paper—one I’d be well advised to hang on to, if I ever wanted to get my shirts back from the Chinese laundry—and looked up at him again. “O’Driscoll,” I said. “You’re either James O’Driscoll or Elliott Bookspan. Or else I’ve got the wrong apartment.”

  “It would seem you have the wrong apartment.”

  “Well, I’ll be. This is Eight-B?”

  “It is.”

  “And your name is—?”

  “Not O’Driscoll, I assure you. Or the other either. What was the second name you said?”

  What indeed? I had to think a moment myself. “Bookspan,” I said.

  “Bookspan,” he agreed. “No, not that either.”

  “Well, hell,” I said, and shook my head and clucked my tongue. “I guess you’d be a better judge of that than I. Man’s a good bet to know his own name. Obviously I copied down the apartment number wrong, and I’m sorry to bother you.”

  “It’s no trouble.”

  What did I have to do to get a name out of him? Or a look around his apartment? Tentatively I said, “I don’t suppose I could use your phone?”

  Another smile, another shake of the head. “I’m so sorry,” he said, “but that would be awkward. I have company.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Ordinarily it would be my pleasure, but—”

  “I understand. Say no more.”

  “Well,” he said.

  “Well,” I said. “Again, my name’s Bill Thompson”—and what’s yours, you idiot?—“and I’m very sorry to have disturbed you.”

  “Please. There is no need for apology.”

  “That’s damned decent of you,” I said, “and I hope you’ll be just as gracious a couple of days from now when I come around again to ask you for a donation.”

  “Ah,” he said, and went for his pocket again, this time coming up with a black morocco billfold. He reached in and drew out a twenty.

  “That’s damned generous of you,” I said, “but I wasn’t planning on collection today. I don’t have my receipts with me.”

  “I won’t need a receipt. And this will save you a visit next week.” And would save him an interruption, but that he left unsaid.

  “Well…”

  “Please,” he said.

  I reached for the bill but did not let my fingers close around it. “I’m supposed to give you a receipt,” I said. “I suppose I could put it in the mail. At any rate, I need your name for the records.”

  “Of course,” he said. “It’s Todd.”

  “Good to meet you, Todd. And your last name?”

  “No, no. Todd is the last name.”

  “Well, it’s certainly not O’Driscoll or Bookspan, is it?” We chuckled at that one, and I asked him his first name.

  “Michael,” he said.

  “Michael Todd. The same name as—”

  “As the filmmaker, yes.”

  “I bet you get that all the time, jokers asking you what it was like being married to Elizabeth Taylor.”

  “Not so much,” he said. “After all, it is not an uncommon name.”

  “Hell, neither’s mine. When I think of the number of Bill Thompsons in the world—”

  “Yes,” he said, “and now I really must not keep you any longer, Mr. Thompson.”

  “Michael,” a woman called from deep within the apartment. “What is taking so long? Is anything the matter?”

  “One moment,” he called to her. He gave me a smile that was not so much sheepish as goaty. “You see?” he said. “I really must say good day now. Thank you again.”

  For what? But I nodded and smiled while he closed the door, and then stood there for another few seconds, taking it all in, thinking it all over. Then I walked to the nearest stairwell and headed up to the twelfth floor again. It struck me that it would be just my luck to run into Charlie Weeks in the hallway, and I tried to figure out what to tell him. I couldn’t pretend I’d spent all that time waiting for the elevator, or he’d be on the phone in a flash, wanting to know what the hell had gone wrong with the Boccaccio’s vaunted white-glove service.

  I’d tell him the truth, I decided, but I’d amend it a little. I’d say that I did spend a long time waiting for the elevator, and at length decided to have a look-see on Eight. And should I tell him the fellow had been home? No, I’d say nobody was home, and that I’d decided against letting myself in. Or maybe I should say—

  But I didn’t have to say anything. The elevator came, the doors opened, the attendant and I beamed at each other, and I went down and out.

  It was a beautiful day, by God, just as Michael Todd—not the film producer—had said it was. I walked two blocks west to the park, bought a hot dog and a kasha knish from a vendor, and found a bench to sit on. It seemed like a good enough venue for thought, and I had some things to think about.

  First of all, the woman hadn’t called him Michael. She’d said something that sounded more like Mikhail.

  Second, I’d recognized her voice.

  I walked across Central Park, pausing at the zoo to watch the polar bear. He’d had a lot of press recently because someone had noticed that he was swimming an endless series of figure eights in his pool. This made a lot of people anxious, and there was speculation that his behavior was neurotic at best, and possibly cause for considerable concern. Various experts blamed various elements—his close confinement, his diet, his yearning for female companionship, his irritation at being observed so closely, his sense of alienation at not being observed closely enough, his lack of engaging reading material. The immediate result of all of this media attention was that the bear got visitors like never before, and pleased everybody by continuing to put four and four together. “He’s doing it,” they would announce, and he’d keep on doing it, and finally they’d go away and others would take their place. “He’s doing it!” the new ones would cry, whereupon he’d do it some more.

  I watched, and sure enough, he was doing it. I felt he was making a hell of a good job of it, too. If you were going to swim a number, it seemed to me that eight was definitely the one to go
with. Two and four and five were altogether too tricky, and even seven was getting complicated these days, with so many people crossing it in the European fashion. For day-in-day-out swimming, the only real alternative to eight was zero, and then you’d just be going around in circles.

  So I didn’t know what the hell they wanted from the poor bear. In an easier town—Decatur, say—people would be proud of a bear that could swim any number at all. But New Yorkers are a demanding lot. If our bear started churning out 3.14159, people would wonder what kind of a moron he was, unable to work out π beyond five decimal places.

  Across the park, I stopped at a phone booth and tried Carolyn twice, first at her apartment, then at the Poodle Factory. No answer. I walked on across to West End and Seventy-first, and I got the same prickly feeling on the nape of my neck that I’d had the night before. Then it had kept me from getting out of Max Fiddler’s taxi. Now it led me to stand under an awning on the far corner, doing what I could to observe without being observed.

  After ten minutes I was fairly certain my place was staked out, although I couldn’t absolutely swear to it. There was a car parked some fifty feet from the front entrance with two men in it, and inside the lobby, where I couldn’t see too clearly, there was what might be a man sitting in a chair reading a newspaper. But it could also have been a shadow, and if it was a man that didn’t mean he was waiting for me.

  Still, why take chances? I circled the block and wound up at the service entrance, which was locked and unattended. Mine is not a high-security building. The doorman, handy for receiving packages and discouraging low-level muggers and prowlers, is hardly the Maginot Line. There’s no closed-circuit TV, no electronic security system, and the locks, while decent enough, are a far cry from state-of-the-art. I had opened this one on several occasions, most recently during a stretch when I wasn’t getting along with one of the doormen and refused to use the front entrance when he was on duty. That lasted for a couple of weeks, by which time enough other tenants had complained about him that he’d been let go, and good riddance. But the point is that I was pretty good at zipping through that particular lock, and my sang could hardly have been froider at the prospect of opening it, and why not? A cop who caught me in the act might have given me an awkward moment, but not much more than that; after all, it’s not illegal entry when you live there.

  I took the elevator to the floor above mine out of an excess of paranoia, walked down a flight, and had a look at my own door. It’s not the Maginot Line, either, but I’ve replaced the original locks and added some refinements over the years, so it’s reasonably secure.

  But it looked as though someone had had a go at it. There were scratches that looked fresh, and someone had mucked about with the jamb, trying to get a purchase with a pry bar. Nothing will keep a person out who is sufficiently determined to get in—a resourceful housebreaker, confronted with an unbreachable door, will simply go through the wall—but whoever had paid me a visit had been unwilling or unable to carry things that far. I let myself in with my keys, reasonably certain no one had entered in my absence, and locked the locks behind me. I checked everything, including my hidey-hole, just to be sure, and everything was fine.

  I drew a tub, soaked in it, got out and dried off and lay down on the bed for a minute. I didn’t even realize I was tired, but I must have been gone the minute my head touched the pillow. I don’t know how long I slept, because I don’t know what time I lay down, but when I opened my eyes it was ten after six, and I was sufficiently disoriented that I had to check my calendar watch to be entirely certain it was still that afternoon, not six the following morning.

  I called Carolyn and couldn’t reach her at home or at work. I put on clean clothes, tossed some other clothes and sundries into a flight bag from a defunct airline, and rode the elevator to the basement. If it had stopped at the lobby floor I might have been able to get a peek at the man with the newspaper, if he was still there, but he might have been able to get a peek at me at the same time, so I guess it was just as well the trip was nonstop. I let myself out through the service entrance, circled the block to avoid the little reception committee in front of the building, and tried to figure out where to go next.

  Was I hungry? I’d had a hot dog and a knish a couple of hours back. I didn’t really feel like sitting down to a meal, but I felt like eating something. But what?

  Of course. What else?

  Popcorn.

  CHAPTER

  Sixteen

  “I think it’s so romantic,” Carolyn said. “I think it’s just about the most romantic thing I ever heard of.”

  “It wasn’t romantic,” I said.

  “Oh, come on, Bern, how can you even say that? It’s incredibly romantic. Night after night, a man goes to the theater all by himself.”

  “What do you mean, night after night?”

  “Last night and tonight, that’s night after night.” She shook her head at the wonder of it. “Each time he buys two tickets and saves two seats, always in the same location. Each time he gives one of them to the ticket-taker and tells him that a woman may be joining him later.”

  “And each time he buys the largest-size popcorn,” I said. “Don’t forget that. And sits there and eats it all himself. You can’t beat that for romance.”

  “Bern, forget the popcorn.”

  “I wish I could. I’ve got a husk stuck between two molars and I can’t budge it. I just hope it’s biodegradable.”

  “You’re just trying to be cynical to hide how romantic you are.” She made a fist, punched me playfully on the shoulder. “You son of a gun,” she said, not without admiration. “I didn’t know you were going to the movies tonight.”

  “I hadn’t planned on it.”

  “You just happened to be there when the movie was about to start. Just the way I happened to be out in front when it let out the other night, so I could just happen to catch a glimpse of Ilona.”

  “In my case it’s almost literally true,” I said. “I couldn’t reach you, I didn’t know what to do with myself, and I was five minutes from the Musette with half an hour until curtain. And I asked myself if I felt like seeing two more Humphrey Bogart films, and I had to admit the answer was yes.”

  “So you bought two tickets because it seemed like the hardheaded and sensible thing to do.”

  “Maybe that was romantic,” I admitted.

  “Maybe?”

  “To tell you the truth,” I said. “I thought there was a slight possibility she would show up.”

  “Honestly?”

  “If she wanted to get in touch with me,” I said, “that was the way to do it. Obviously I didn’t have to leave a ticket for her. But I figured I could afford it. I had twenty bucks from her boyfriend.”

  “Mike Todd?”

  “Mikhail,” I said, giving the name the full treatment.

  “You’re positive that was her in his apartment, Bern?”

  “Not necessarily. She could have been in the next apartment, shouting through a hole in the wall.”

  “You know what I mean. You’re sure it was her?”

  “Positive.”

  “Because a lot of women have accents, especially the ones you find hanging out with guys named Mikhail. I mean, what exactly did you have to go by? It’s not as if she said ‘Bear-naaard.’”

  “No, it’s as if she said ‘Mikhail,’ and I’m positive it was her. Unless it just happened to be someone else with great tits and an Anatrurian accent.”

  “What tits? You didn’t get a look at her, so how do you know what kind of tits she had?”

  “I’ve got a good memory for that sort of thing.”

  “But the girl in Mikhail’s apartment—”

  “Was Ilona. Trust me on this, will you? I recognized her voice, the pitch, the inflection, the accent, everything. If she’d come to the door I would have recognized the rest of her, tits and all. Okay?”

  “Whatever you say, Bern.”

  “I think it was brilliant of me
not to drop my jaw on the floor when I heard her speak up. I just took his twenty dollars and got the hell out of there.”

  She frowned. “Bern,” she said, “I hope you’re not planning on keeping that twenty.”

  “Why not?”

  “You got it under false pretenses.”

  “I get most of my money under false pretenses,” I said. “I felt relatively legitimate for a change. He actually handed me the money. Most of the time I take it out of somebody’s strongbox.”

  “This is different, Bern.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “That money was a donation. If you keep it, you’re not stealing it from Mike Toddsky, or whatever you want to call him. You’re actually stealing it from the AHDA.”

  “The what?”

  “The American Hip Dysplasia Association. What’s the matter? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Carolyn,” I said carefully, “I made that up. I didn’t want to pick some popular disease, because for all I knew somebody else in the building had come collecting for it a couple of days ago. So I picked hip dysplasia, because I figured I was safe. There’s no such thing as the American Hip Dysplasia Association.”

  “There most certainly is.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Oh, come on’? The AHDA is leading the fight against the worst canine crippler around. They’re sponsoring some of the most important research going on in veterinary medicine.”

  “You’re serious,” I said.

  “Of course I’m serious. Look, Bern, I’m in the business, I don’t take dog diseases lightly. And I give an annual donation to the fight against hip dysplasia, not a whole lot but as much as I can afford. I mean, there are a lot of worthy causes out there. Look at feline leukemia.” She heaved a sigh, while I wondered where I was supposed to look for feline leukemia. “I was just surprised that you know about the AHDA, Bern, seeing that you’re not a dog person. But now it turns out you don’t know about it after all.”