The Burglar on the Prowl

by Lawrence Block

Twenty-Three

  When I got back to Arbor Court, there was a whole buffet arranged on the plywood slab that topped the tub. Beef with orange flavor from Hunan Pan, pumpkin kibbee from the little Syrian joint, cold cuts from the Korean deli. “It occurred to me that neither of us had dinner tonight,” Carolyn said, “and that I was hungry enough to gnaw wood, and you probably were, too. But I didn’t know what you wanted, so I just walked along Hudson Street and bought some of everything.”

  We filled plates and emptied them, while her two cats, Archie and Ubi, gazed at us as plaintively as the kids in those Foster Parents Plan ads. It didn’t work. Archie’s a Burmese and Ubi’s a Russian Blue, and neither one looks as though he’s missed a meal since his first victory over a ball of yarn.

  We had, however, and ate as if determined to make up for it. There was food left when we’d finished—she’d bought a ton, as one does when one shops while hungry—and some of the leftovers went in the fridge, and the rest went to the cats.

  “Look at those drama queens,” she said. “Now that the food’s in their bowls, they stroll over to it as if it’s the last thing on their minds. ‘Oh, what have we here? Food, is it? Well, I’m not terribly hungry, but I’ll just force myself so her feelings aren’t hurt.’ ”

  “That’s what I did,” I said. “I forced myself. Now I think I’ll force myself to have a cup of coffee.”

  “Well, I made some, because you said to. But won’t it keep you awake?”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  “Miles to go before you sleep?”

  “Miles and miles. I don’t suppose you had time to count the money, did you?”

  “Count it? I didn’t even want to look at it. I left the two bags in the closet, right where you put them, and before I went shopping I stuck a chair in front of the closet door. Like that would make a difference.”

  “It would have been a bad time for a burglary. Some junkie kicks the door in, hoping to grab a portable radio he can sell on the street for ten bucks, and hello, what have we got here?”

  “That’s what was going through my mind.”

  “Well, the chair would have stopped him,” I said. “You were clever to think of it.”

  I got the bags from the closet and drank two cups of strong coffee while we counted. The dope traffickers don’t bother counting, they just dump the cash on a scale and weigh it, knowing that you get so many bills to a pound. That works when they’re all the same denomination—for those guys, it’s hundreds—but the Mapes haul ran the gamut from singles all the way up, and the only scale in the place was the one in the bathroom, and neither of us knew how many bills made a pound, anyway. So we sorted them by denomination and counted. It took a long time, but counting money is not an unpleasant task, not if you get to keep what you count.

  We’d each pick up a stack and count it, then write the total on a sheet of paper, then reach for another stack. When all the stacks were counted I added up the numbers on the sheet of paper and wrote the total at the bottom. I showed it to Carolyn and her eyes got very big.

  “Two hundred thirty-seven thousand,” she said. “Even?”

  “I rounded it off.”

  “That’s almost a quarter of a million.”

  “Pretty near.”

  “My God, it’s a fortune.”

  “Keep it in proportion. It’s the price of a large studio apartment in a good building.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” she allowed. “But since I’m not shopping for a place to live, there’s another way I like better. It’s enough to pay the rent on this place for a thousand months. How many years is that?”

  “More than eighty. Of course even with rent control, you’d have some increases over the years. Figure sixty-five years.”

  “That’s plenty, Bern. Sixty-five years from now I’ll probably want to move over to the Village Nursing Home, anyway. I just hope they’ll let me bring the cats. Anyway, not all of this is mine. How much have I got coming, can you figure it out for me?”

  I could, with pencil and paper, subtracting Marty’s share and dividing the remainder by three. Her end, I was able to tell her, came to $67,150.

  “I’m rich, Bern.”

  “Well, you’re richer than you were a few hours ago.”

  “I’m richer than I ever was. Bern, I’m scared to have the money in the house.”

  “It should be safe here. Your locks are good ones. You’re on the ground floor, but you’ve got bars on your window. Most important, no one’s got any reason to think you’ve got anything worth taking.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “You know what I meant. There’s a lot of money here, but you and I are the only ones who know about it, and I don’t plan to tell anyone.”

  “Neither do I. And I know it’s safer than your place. But the closet, Bern? Isn’t that the first place they’d look?”

  She had a point. I asked her if she needed a bath. “Not desperately,” she said. “Or do I?” She raised an arm, sniffed herself. “Nothing that would make a billy goat leave the room,” she said. “I’ll have a bath before I go to bed. Why?”

  “Have it now.”

  “Huh? Oh, I get it.”

  “I’ll turn the other way,” I said, “and bury my nose in a book. I wish I had the one I was reading. The new John Sandford.”

  “I bought it, Bern. I read it, I finished it a week ago. I was gonna ask if you wanted to borrow it.”

  “I would have, if I’d known. A copy came into the store, and I started it the other day. The one where the guy’s killing vegetarians.”

  “That’s the one. I wanted to kill one myself once. I had this sweet young thing over for dinner, and I splurged and bought a gorgeous beef Wellington at Ottomanelli’s, and I bring it to the table just in time for her to tell me she doesn’t eat red meat. ‘Take it home with you,’ I wanted to tell her, ‘and leave it out on the counter for a week, and it won’t be red anymore. It’ll be nice and green and you can pretend it’s a vegetable.’ Did you find it yet? I think it’s on the top shelf.”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “I loved it. I think the best scene’s where he gets the diet doctor, the one who has all his patients eating nothing but bean sprouts and celery.”

  I told her I hadn’t gotten that far yet, and she said she’d stop before she spoiled it for me. I got caught up in the book and read until she told me I could turn around now, that she was all bathed and dressed.

  “And I took a towel,” she said, “and dried the tub. How’s the book? Enjoying it?”

  “Yeah, it’s terrific.”

  “I think it may be his best. I even like the title. Lettuce Prey. The tub’s all ready, Bern.”

  I put the two bags of money in the tub, put the cover on, then took it off again. “It’s a shame your cats know how to use the toilet,” I mused.

  “It is? I always thought it was a blessing. Oh! If we covered up the money with Kitty Litter, anybody who looked would just figure it was one big catbox.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  “They’d also figure my cats were cleaner than their owner, because what would I use for bathing? But the hell with the good opinion of burglars. Present company excepted, of course.” She winked. “The deli’s still open. You think one bag’s enough? Or should we get two?”

  Two bags did the job. Anybody who took the lid off the bathtub—and why anybody would do that was beyond me—would put it back on in a hurry. We could have upped the verisimilitude quotient by encouraging the cats to use the thing, but Carolyn drew the line at that. It had taken her long enough to teach them to use the toilet, and if they switched to the tub she’d have to put them to sleep and start over with two new kittens.

  “I think we’re set,” she said. “Oh, I forgot to ask. His answering machine, that you left a message on. Did you get the tape?”

  “It was digital, so all I had to do was erase it. And I got rid of the cell phone. Nowadays it’s the easiest thing in t
he world for them to find out the source of an incoming call. Even if you don’t have Caller ID, or if it just registers as Unknown Caller, the cops can pull the LUDS and know exactly who called and when.”

  “I know, they do it on Law & Order all the time.”

  “But with a prepaid cell phone,” I said, “all they can find out is where the phone was sold, but not who bought it. So I dumped the phone, and that’s the end of that.”

  “You just threw it away?”

  “I could have, but it seemed wasteful. All of those prepaid minutes. I left it on the subway on my way down here. Somebody’ll find it and call his mother in Santo Domingo for free.”

  “That was thoughtful, Bern.”

  “I was almost thoughtful enough to top up the gas tank on the Mercury,” I said, “but not quite. I managed to find a parking place just a few doors down from where it was when I borrowed it. And I put back the ignition cylinder that I’d pulled. The owner won’t know the difference.”

  “Except that it’s not where he clearly remembers parking it. So he’ll just think it’s early Alzheimer’s. Bern, what happened?”

  “Huh?”

  “You were preoccupied,” she said, “and now you’re not. What happened?”

  “I’m still preoccupied,” I said. “I just put it on the shelf.”

  “You did?”

  “Literally,” I said, and went to the closet. I’d taken something besides the money from the Mapes house, had tucked it into one of the bags before I left the house, and had removed it from the bag when I put it and its fellow in the closet. I’d put it on a high shelf, out of harm’s and Carolyn’s way, and now I took it down and handed it to her.

  “It’s a book,” she announced. “Hardbound, no dust jacket.” She squinted at the spine. “The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad. Isn’t that the title of the book you sold to the fat man?”

  “For thirteen hundred dollars.”

  “And you found a replacement copy in Mapes’s library? That’s handy, Bern. Now you can make that customer happy. What was his name again?”

  “Colby Riddle.”

  “Right, and how’d I forget it? Ought to be an easy name to remember. Well, you said you had a feeling there was a coincidence waiting to show up, and I’d say this qualifies, wouldn’t you? Or did he have such a huge library the book just about had to be there?”

  “He had a very small library.”

  “Yeah? Then it was a real coincidence.”

  “More than you know,” I said.

  “Bern, you’re kidding.”

  “Look on the flyleaf. It’s priced at twelve dollars, and you can probably recognize the numerals as mine. And it wasn’t in the bookcase, either. It was downstairs, on the desk in his den.”

  “It’s the same book.”

  “Right.”

  “Not just the same title, but the same book.”

  “Right.”

  “Bern, that’s more than a coincidence. That’s…Bern, how the hell did it get there?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but you wanted to know why I was preoccupied. That’s why.”

  Twenty-Four

  The fat man took the book.”

  “Right.”

  “But he didn’t have it long. Whoever shot him took it and drove off with it.”

  “Right.”

  “The fat man thought it was something else, and so did whoever killed him and took it away from him.”

  “Right.”

  “And then it wound up in Mapes’s den. Was it Mapes in the car? Did Mapes kill him?”

  “He’s a shitheel,” I said, “but Marty never called him a thug. The man’s a plastic surgeon. He uses a scalpel, not an AK-47.”

  “Is that what the fat man was shot with?”

  “It was some kind of automatic weapon. You hold the trigger and the bullets keep coming out. All I know about guns is that I like to stay away from them.”

  “Me too. Either Mapes was in the car, or the guy in the car took the book to Mapes.”

  “That sounds logical.”

  “But the book’s connected to the Rogovins, except that’s not their real name. I forget their real names.”

  “Lyle and Schnittke.”

  “What have they got to do with Mapes?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I don’t know anything. Who were the people in the car? I mean, were they the same ones who killed the Rogovins? Lyle and Schnittke, I mean. Are they the ones who killed Lyle and Schnittke?”

  “That’s what I thought. Now I’m not so sure. My apartment was tossed by the people who killed Lyle and…you know what? I’m going to call them the Lyles. I don’t know if they were married or living together or just good friends, but I’m sick of saying Schnittke.”

  “It doesn’t roll trippingly off the tongue, does it?”

  “No, it doesn’t. Anyway, the same people did those two things, because they gave both doormen the same treatment.”

  “Sort of a signature. They’re the ones we’ve been calling the perps.”

  “Right, the perps. I don’t know who’s who, Carolyn. It’s all too deep for me. All I know is the book was in Mapes’s den, and it shouldn’t have been there.”

  “And you took it.”

  “I know, and don’t ask me why. It may not have been the brightest thing I ever did. I broke into his house and emptied his safe, and I was nice and anonymous about it, and then I took the book, and that narrows the suspect list from all burglars to a burglar with a particular interest in a particular book by Joseph Conrad. I might as well have taken along an etching tool and signed the safe.”

  “Bern, he just lost a quarter of a million dollars.”

  “Not quite.”

  “Close enough. He just lost the price of a studio apartment—”

  “Well, a pretty nice studio apartment, in a good neighborhood.”

  “—and you think he’s even going to notice the book is missing, or give a rat’s ass about it if he does? Besides, the book’s not the McGuffin. It’s a fake McGuffin, and people only want it until they find out it’s not what they want.”

  “Isn’t that true of everything?”

  “Bern—”

  I got to my feet, holding my hands palm-outward to ward off more questions. “It’s too deep for me,” I said. “All of it.”

  “Where are you going, Bern?”

  “A bar.”

  “You’re gonna get drunk? You can stay right here, Bern. I’ve got plenty of booze in the house.”

  “But no softballs.”

  “Huh?” She waved the thought away, like a pesky fly. “You just drank a quart of coffee, and now you’re going out drinking? You’ll get falling-down drunk, and you’ll lie there with the shakes from the coffee. I don’t think it’s a great idea, Bern.”

  “I’m not going to get drunk,” I told her. “I’m barely going to drink. I’m going to a bar in Murray Hill. I want to see just how far coincidence goes these days.”

  I took a cab to Parsifal’s. That’s the only sensible way to get there from the West Village, especially at that hour, and when I thought about the money in Carolyn’s bathtub, I figured I could afford it.

  It was late, but when I’d been there earlier, guzzling Pellegrino, it had felt like the kind of joint that keeps selling booze as long as the law allows. The law in New York lets you keep going until four every night but Saturday, when the bars have to close an hour early, at three in the morning. (When you’re dealing with drinking laws in New York, counterintuitive is definitely the way to go.)

  The crowd at Parsifal’s was a little lighter than it had been earlier, but these people made up for it in volume, as their alcohol intake raised their personal decibel levels. Collectively, they added up to something well below your average wide-open motorcycle engine, but a long ways up from the well-bred purr of a Rolls-Royce. I could still hear myself think, though why I would want to was another question.

  The same blonde bartender was on d
uty, and I don’t know how she remembered me, but she proved she did by asking me if I wanted a Pellegrino. I shook my head and said I’d have scotch.

  “Good for you,” she said. “Any particular brand? The bar pour is Teacher’s.”

  “You don’t have Glen Drumnadrochit, do you?”

  She wrinkled her nose and said she’d never even heard of it, and I wasn’t hugely surprised. I’d only come across it once, at an eccentric bed-and-breakfast in the Berkshires,* and when I came home I had three bottles of it in my suitcase. I made them last as long as I could, but they were gone now, and I wondered if I’d ever taste anything that good again.

  The thought alone spoiled me for Teacher’s, and I asked for a single malt, and they had a decent selection of them. I settled on Laphroaig, perhaps out of pride in my ability to pronounce it, and ordered a double. It’s got a distinctive taste, one that you have to acquire. I’d acquired it some years ago, but it had gone the way of the Drumnadrochit, so I took a sip and set about acquiring it all over again. Slow sipping, that’s the way to do it. You take little sparrow-sized sips, and you keep telling yourself you like the taste, and by the time you get to the bottom of the glass, it’s true.

  I took a first sip, and thought Yes, that’s Laphroaig, all right. I’d forgotten what it tastes like, but that’s it, and I’d know it anywhere. Later I took a second sip, and was able to decide how I felt about the taste. I decided that I didn’t like it. Somewhere around the fifth sip, it had achieved the virtue of familiarity. I was accustomed to it, and the question of whether I actually liked it no longer seemed pertinent. It was like, say, a cousin. The man’s your cousin, for God’s sake! What do you mean, you don’t like him? You don’t have to like or dislike him. He’s your cousin!

  I was almost ready for a sixth sip of Cousin Laphroaig when a woman marched up to the bar and settled herself on a seat two stools from mine. It was getting on for two in the morning, but she looked as though she’d just come from the office. She was wearing a pants suit of charcoal gray flannel, and her dark hair was done up in a knot on the top of her head, and you already know who she was, but it took me a minute, because the last time I saw her—the only time I saw her—she had her hair down and her clothes off and her mouth open.