The Burglar on the Prowl

by Lawrence Block

  “Tall and muscular,” I said.

  “Dark complexion, as if he goes straight from the gym to the tanning salon. Black hair, and he parts it on the side and slicks it down with mousse or goo or something, so it wouldn’t move in a hurricane. Has a big jaw, not enough to remind you of Jay Leno, but it’s out there. Eyes are set deep, with a little bit of a slant to them.”

  “That’s a pretty good description.”

  “You think? It seems to me it would fit a lot of people. You couldn’t pick him out of a lineup, could you? Oh, I know!”

  She turned around and came back with an order pad and a pencil, tore a sheet from the pad and turned it over on top of the bar. “I took a course,” she said. “Drawing on the right side of the brain. The trick is getting into a right-brain mode. Do you mind?” She picked up my glass of Laphroaig and downed it in a single swallow. “Yuck, I don’t know how you can stand that stuff. Just give it a minute. Okay, I think I’m shifting into a right-brain frame of mind.”

  She began sketching, and I watched, fascinated, as Barbara’s date-rape date took shape upon the slip of paper. “He’s a good-looking guy,” I noted. “You wouldn’t think he’d have trouble getting girls on his own.”

  “I suppose so. Not my type, though.” She turned the pencil around, erased an area around the mouth, then tried it again. “I like older men.”

  “He’s thirty-four.”

  “Well, he was born about thirty years too late. ‘If you’re not gray, please go away.’ That’s my motto.”

  “Really.”

  “Older men know how to treat a woman,” she said. “On the one hand they pamper you, and at the same time they see right through your bullshit. They may think it’s charming, but they know it’s crap. The worst thing about this job is the crowd’s too young. I never meet anybody I’m interested in.”

  “The only older guys I know,” I said, “are either married or gay.”

  “You can keep the gay ones, but married’s fine. I’m a lot happier with a man who’s got a wife to go home to.” She frowned at the drawing, turned it to face me. “It’s getting close,” she said, “but it’s not quite right, and—well, fuck me with a stick.” She picked up her drawing, crumpled it in her fist, and flipped it over her shoulder onto the back bar, where it nestled between bottles of Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark.

  “Hey,” I said. “Even if it’s not Van Gogh, I could use it.”

  “You don’t need it. Don’t turn around, not just yet. You’ll never believe who just walked in the door.”

  Of course I believed it. I should have expected it. With the long arm of coincidence rolling the dice, how could William Johnson fail to make an appearance just as Sigrid was putting the finishing touches on his portrait?

  And, granted a look at the original, I have to say she’d turned out an excellent likeness. Up close and in living color, there was a quality of spoiled self-indulgence she hadn’t quite captured, a look around the mouth reminiscent of some of the Roman emperors. And not Marcus Aurelius, either. More like Nero, say, or Caligula.

  He was wearing a muscle tee, sleeveless to display his delts and triceps and skintight to showcase his pecs, along with tight black jeans to show off his glutes. He had a deep tan already, and it wasn’t even summer yet. He surveyed the room purposefully, then headed for the back, where two women were seated together at the bar.

  “Here we go,” Sigrid said. “He’s found his quarry.”

  “That’s if he can split them up.”

  “If he drugs them,” she said, “he may not have to. He can take them both home.”

  “They’ve got short hair,” I pointed out.

  “So? Oh, they might be gay? I don’t think so, but once he slips them the Roofies, does it really matter?”

  “Good point. What do we do?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t you have a plan?”

  “I was going to follow him home,” I said, “and find out where he lives. But that won’t work if he goes home with them instead.”

  “And it won’t be the evening they’re hoping for, either. C’mon.”

  “C’mon? C’mon and do what?”

  “Improvise,” she said. “Go help him hit on them while I take care of everybody’s drinks.”

  She was, as I already knew, an actress and a model. She’d also demonstrated an enviable facility for drawing faces. I was willing to believe she had multiple talents, some of the more interesting of which I’d never learn about because I was too young for her. One of them, it turned out, was close-up magic. I don’t know how she did it, but after two rounds of drinks Audrey and Claire and I were clearheaded enough to drive an obstacle course, while William Johnson was a coma looking for a place to lie down.

  The two women, who’d thought Johnson and I were at least promising, found his sudden lapse into word-slurring eye-rolling idiocy more than a little disconcerting. Sigrid acted as though he pulled this all the time.

  “Oh, not again,” she said, in a voice that carried throughout the room. “He’s a nice enough guy, but that’s the last time he’s getting a drink in here. Bernie, grab him, will you? Before he slides off the stool and lands on his empty head.”

  She came around from behind the bar, deputized one of her regulars to cover for her, and the two of us each got an arm under one of his and walked him out the door. He was a big guy, but she was a big girl, and must have had muscles even if they didn’t show the way his did. Between the two of us, we had surprisingly little trouble walking him down the block and around the corner. There was a narrow alley on 37th Street, running between a pair of apartment buildings; I’d spotted it while on the prowl, and that’s where we took him now.

  Some of the city’s native fauna scuttled out from among the garbage cans when we maneuvered him to the rear of the alley. We got maybe three-fourths of the way there, turned him around, and gave him a light shove, and he landed on his rear end and clunked his head on the brick wall. He wound up sprawled there, his oversized jaw slack, with drool leaking out of the side of his mouth.

  “Jesus, what a charmer,” she said.

  I bent over him, came up with his wallet. Without thinking I scooped out the bills, gave half to her, and stuck the rest in my pocket. “He got drunk,” I explained, “and passed out in an alley, and some lowlife rolled him.” She looked at the money for a moment, then put it away, while I went through his wallet looking for a current address. His driver’s license had him living on 40th just off Lexington, and he’d renewed it less than a year ago, so it was probably current. I was going to write it down, but it was easier to take the license along with me, and while I was at it I took his credit cards.

  That brought a raised eyebrow from Sigrid. “I’m not going to use them,” I said, “but he won’t know that, will he? He’ll have to go through the hassle of calling the card companies.”

  “Good,” she said. “Look at him, the misogynistic son of a bitch. I could kick him in the balls and he wouldn’t even feel it. Or would he?” She decided to find out, and the result of the experiment was inconclusive. He groaned, but didn’t really stir.

  “He’ll feel it when he wakes up,” I said.

  “God, I hope so. Look at him, will you? He makes an almost perfect picture. It’s just a shame he didn’t puke on himself.” She thought a moment, said, “Well, I can fix that,” and stuck a finger down her throat, anointing him generously with the missing element.

  “Adolescent bulimia,” she explained. “I outgrew it years ago, but you never forget how. Like falling off a bicycle.”

  “Or drowning.”

  “Exactly. I’d better get back to Parsifal’s before Barry gives away the store.” She pinched my cheek. “You’re cute. It’s a shame you’re not twenty years older.”

  “I’m aging as fast as I can.”

  “You haven’t got an uncle with a roving eye, have you? Oh, I know what I wanted to ask you. That noise when we first walked into the alley, sort of something scuttling away? Was that r
ats?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Good,” she said. “Let’s hope they’re hungry.”

  Thirty-Four

  The lock on William Johnson’s front door was nothing special, but for some reason it gave me a hard time. Working away at it, I wondered why I hadn’t had the sense to fish his keys out of his pocket while I was rolling him. It certainly would have made things easier.

  Once I was inside, my first thought was that I was too late, that someone somehow had beaten me to it. The apartment, a large L-shaped studio, looked as though it had been lately tossed by a team who’d taken the verb literally, picking up everything mobile and flinging it somewhere. It would have been just one more coincidence to add to the string, and it took a few minutes to realize that I was Johnson’s first and only illicit visitor. The place was a mess because that’s the way he kept it. Maybe, I thought, he hadn’t meant any harm when he dumped Barbara’s jewelry drawer on the floor. Maybe he wasn’t vandalizing the place after all. Maybe he was helping her redecorate.

  The state of the place made my task harder than it might have been. It’s not easy to look for something when you have to include the floor among the places to be searched. Nor, oddly, is it as easy to leave things as you found them, because how can you tell when they’re back where they belong?

  I did the best I could, and didn’t linger. According to Sigrid, he’d wound up with a double dose of Rohypnol, with the capsules intended for both Claire and Audrey somehow winding up in his glass. It had certainly been enough to knock him cold, but who knew how long he’d stay that way? I wanted to be gone before he came back.

  On my way out, I took time to pick his lock again, leaving that too as I’d found it. It was quicker the second time, but would have been quicker still with his key. Then again, I consoled myself, if I’d taken his keys he’d have missed them, and might have suspected that whoever had taken them would head straight for his apartment.

  I walked for a block or two, buoyant with the heady sensation I get from illegal entry. It was cool enough so that I stuck my hands in my pockets for warmth, and realized I still had his credit cards. I was going to throw them away, but I decided that would be wasteful. Just because I wasn’t inclined to run around charging DVD players and iBooks to Wee Willie Johnson, why should I deprive some other citizen of the pleasure?

  I left the cards here and there, out in plain sight, where whoever came along could pick one up and do as he pleased with it. A person with a conscience as overdeveloped as Johnson’s upper body could seek out the card’s owner and return it. One who was merely honest could simply leave it where it lay. And a truly enterprising individual, a passerby with energy and the will to better himself, would max out that card as quickly as possible.

  When the cab stopped for me, I would have loved to go straight home and call it a night. Instead I gave the driver an address on Park Avenue that turned out to be between 62nd and 63rd.

  The building I wanted was a fully serviced luxury apartment house, with a concierge on the front desk and an attendant in the elevator. The only way to get into a building like that is through subterfuge; ideally, you find a bona fide tenant to invite you in, and make a little detour on your way out. That’s hard to arrange on the spot in the middle of the night, and I hadn’t had time to set anything up. I was, God help me, on the prowl again, and I didn’t see any way to avoid it if I was going to make this work.

  Fortunately, I didn’t have to get past the desk, or take the elevator anywhere. On either side of the building’s entrance was a staircase descending a flight to a suite of basement offices, all of them occupied by members of the medical profession. The one I wanted was on the left, and if I got down the stairs I’d be all right. No one at street level could see me while I worked on the lock, and I couldn’t believe there would be a burglar alarm on the door.

  What there was, and I could even see the goddam thing, was a security camera. I didn’t care what wound up on the tape, because no one would look at it unless a crime was committed. I planned on committing one—I’d do so the minute I opened the door, and might even fit the definition of criminal trespass when I went down the stairs for no legitimate reason. But if all went well no one would know I’d been there, so why review the night’s tapes?

  The danger lay in being caught in the act, which could happen if the concierge was looking at the closed-circuit TV monitor on his desk while I was passing in front of the camera. They don’t sit there and stare at it by the hour, they’d go nuts if they did, but all it takes is a glance at just the wrong time, and they pick up the phone and call 911, and another hapless burglar gets free room and board as a guest of the governor.

  I found a pay phone, made a phone call, and came back to where I could watch the building. When the guy brought the pizza, I made my move, and I was down those stairs in a hurry. The lock was a cinch, and it took me hardly any time to find everything I was looking for. I took a sheet of paper from a desk drawer and wrote down what I needed to know, and I folded it up and put it in my pocket, and that was all I took. Unless they counted the letterhead, no one could possibly know they’d had a visitor.

  So I was out of there in a hurry. I was tempted to leave the door unlocked, but I’d done everything else right, and I didn’t want to stop now. I picked it shut and walked quickly up the stairs and away from there. This was the dangerous part, because from where I stood there was no way I could see if the concierge was busy, but when I was clear of the place and took a look back, it was clear I’d had nothing to worry about. The pizza guy was still there, talking away on his cell phone, while the concierge stood there with his hands on his hips, and it looked as though it might take them a while to sort it all out.

  I caught a cab and went home.

  I would have loved to stay there. My humble abode had never felt so welcoming, nor had my bed ever looked so inviting. I decided to stretch out for just a minute, and I told myself not to be an idiot. I put some coffee on and took a quick wake-up shower while it brewed, then threw a couple of ice cubes in it so I wouldn’t have to wait for it to cool.

  Was there no way I could avoid another trip to Riverdale?

  None I could think of. I spent a few minutes preparing the parcel I would take with me, then bit the bullet and got to it. I walked around until I found the Mercury Sable, opened its door, diddled its ignition, and drove it the nine or ten miles to Riverdale, found Devonshire Close without getting lost, and parked the car not in Mapes’s driveway—the unfamiliar noise of a car in their own driveway might wake Mapes or his wife—but two blocks away. I walked the two blocks, well aware of the impossibility of appearing innocent walking residential streets at that hour. I went up the driveway to the side door, and looked longingly at it. I’d set the alarm to bypass that door, and unless someone had noticed, it was still like that. But I couldn’t find out without opening the door, and if they’d changed the setting—well, that was a sentence I didn’t want to finish.

  That left the milk chute. Let’s just say I didn’t get stuck this time. Not on the way in, and not on the way out, either.

  I drove home, parked the car right where I’d found it—who’d grab a parking space away from me at that hour? I got myself home, exchanged a friendly word with Edgar, and went straight to bed.

  Thirty-Five

  Bern, I hate to say it, but you don’t look so hot.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It is?”

  “I don’t feel so hot, either, and I’d just as soon be consistent. I ran myself ragged until daybreak, and I was tired enough to sleep until nightfall, but I made myself set the alarm and forced myself to get out of bed when it rang. Don’t ask me how.”

  “I won’t,” she said. We were at the Poodle Factory. I’d opened up at eleven, having stopped on my way down to pick up a new prepaid cell phone on 23rd Street. I made a few calls with it, then picked up lunch at Two Guys from Kandahar, and brought Carolyn up to date while we ate.

  She s
aid she couldn’t believe I’d gotten so much done in one night, and when I thought about it, neither could I. “I kept wanting to call it quits,” I said. “When the poor bastard showed up from Twenty-four/Seven Pizza, I wanted to walk in there, pay him for it, take it home, eat it, and go to bed.”

  “Instead you broke into Mapes’s office. Swipe any drugs while you were there?”

  “I told you, I didn’t take anything.”

  “You went through all that just to look at his appointment book.”

  “I had to, in order to schedule things. I couldn’t set up a big showdown at a time when he was going to be busy giving some kid from Larchmont a new nose in time for her Sweet Sixteen party. I needed to know his schedule before I did anything else.”

  “And you called him this morning? How did you know what to say?”

  “I didn’t. I played it by ear. ‘Mapes? I think you know who this is.’ And evidently he thought so, too, because we went on from there.”

  “Was that the voice you used, Bern? Were you trying to sound like anybody in particular?”

  I thought about it. “Maybe Broderick Crawford,” I said. “Playing a heavy, not being one of the good guys in Highway Patrol. Basically I was trying to sound menacing.”

  “Well, you picked a good voice for it. Did you use it for the other calls?”

  “No, because I wasn’t sure menacing was the way to go. With some of them I wanted to sound ingratiating, and with others I just wanted to sound like a reasonable man with a reasonable proposition. It was strange, because I was calling people I didn’t know.”

  “Telemarketers do that all the time, Bern.”

  “ ‘Hello, Mr. Quattrone. How are you today?’ ”

  “I know, I can’t figure out why they do that. The only person who ever starts a conversation by asking me how I am is some dimwit on Montserrat trying to sell me a time share in Omaha.”

  “Are you sure it’s not the other way around? The thing is, they want you to think they’re having a conversation with you, but most of them have never had one, so they’re at a loss. I was at a loss of my own, because I was cold-calling people without knowing whether they were interested in what I had to sell. If not, I just wanted to move on to somebody else. The hard part was deciding whether they were expressing genuine bafflement or just playing dumb. Anyway, I told them the time and the place, and we’ll see who shows up.”