The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling

by Lawrence Block

  This time I was properly equipped. I had my glass cutter and a roll of adhesive tape, and I used them to remove a pane from the Porlock window swiftly and silently. I turned the catch, raised the window, and let myself in.

  “That’s what I was talking about before,” Gert said “Listen. Can you hear it?”

  “The drumming.”

  She nodded. “That’s Mboka. Now, is that him drumming or is it a record? Because I can’t tell.”

  “He was doing it while you were downstairs,” Carolyn said. “Personally I think it’s him drumming.”

  I said I couldn’t tell, and that I’d been unable to hear him from the Porlock apartment.

  “You never hear anything through the walls,” Artie said. “Just through the floors and ceilings. It’s a solid building as far as the walls are concerned.”

  “I don’t mind the drumming most of the time,” Gert said. “I’ll play music and the drumming sort of fits in with it. It’s in the middle of the night that it gets me, but I don’t like to complain.”

  “She figures it’s the middle of the afternoon in Africa.”

  We had a hard time getting out of there. They kept giving us shortbread and coffee and asking sincere little questions about the ins and outs of burglary. Finally we managed to fight our way to the door. We said our goodbyes all around, and then Gert hung back a little while Artie caught at my sleeve in the doorway.

  “Say, Bernie,” he said, “we all squared away now?”

  “Sure thing, Artie.”

  “As far as the insurance company’s concerned…”

  “Don’t worry about a thing. The coat, the watch, the other stuff. I’ll back your claim.”

  “That’s a relief,” he said. “I must have been crazy, putting in that claim, but I’d look like a horse’s ass changing it now, and why did we pay premiums all those years anyway, right?”

  “Right, Artie.”

  “The thing is, I hate to mention this, but while you were downstairs Gert was wondering about the bracelet.”

  “How’s that, Artie?”

  “The bracelet you took. It was Gert’s. I don’t think it’s worth much.”

  “A couple of hundred.”

  “That much? I would have said less. It belonged to her mother. The thing is, I wondered what’s the chance of getting it back?”

  “Oh,” I said. “I see what you mean. Well, Artie, I’m kind of pressed right now.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “But when things are back to normal, I’m sure we can work something out.”

  He clapped me on the shoulder. “That’s terrific,” he said. “Listen, take all the time you need. There’s no rush.”

  CHAPTER

  Twelve

  The Pontiac, untowed and unticketed, waited for us at the bus stop. The suitcase huddled undisturbed on the floor in back. All of this surprised Carolyn, but I’d expected nothing less. There was something about that car that inspired confidence.

  On the way downtown I learned what Gert Blinn had told her. While I was a floor below in Madeleine Porlock’s apartment, Gert had maneuvered Carolyn into the kitchen, presumably to copy down a recipe but actually to dish a little dirt. The late Madeleine Porlock, she’d confided, was no better than she should be.

  “Gert was vague,” Carolyn said. “I don’t know that Porlock was a hooker exactly, but I got the impression that her life tended to revolve around men. Whenever Gert met her on the stairs she was with some man or other, and I gather that’s how her rent got paid.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Well, it surprises me,” she said. “I never saw Porlock, but the way you described her she was the furthest thing from slinky. The woman you were talking about sounded like she could play the mean matron in all the old prison movies.”

  “That’s on a bad day. On a good day she could have played the nurse in Cuckoo’s Nest.”

  “Uh-huh. Bern, I admit I don’t know what men go for, because it’s never been a burning issue with me, but she doesn’t sound the type to get her rent paid.”

  “You didn’t go through her drawers and closets.”

  “Oh?”

  A cab stopped abruptly in front of us. I swung the wheel to the right and slipped neatly around it. No question, I thought. The Pontiac and I were made for each other.

  “Lots of sexy underwear,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “Wispy things. Scarlet gauze and black lace. Peekaboo bras.”

  “Men really go for that crap, huh?”

  “So it would seem. Then there were a few garter belts, and a couple of tight corsets that you’d have to be a graduate engineer to figure out.”

  “Tight corsets?”

  “A couple of pairs of boots with six-inch stiletto heels. Lots of leather stuff, including those cunning wrist and ankle bracelets decorated with metal studs.”

  “A subtle pattern begins to emerge.”

  “Doesn’t it? And I haven’t even mentioned the small but tasteful wardrobe in skintight black latex or the nifty collection of whips and chains. Or the whole dresser drawer full of gadgets which we might euphemistically designate as marital aids.”

  She twirled an imaginary mustache. “This Porlock creature,” she said, “was into kink.”

  “A veritable mistress of kink,” I said. “It was beginning to get to me, prowling around in all that weirdness.”

  “I’m surprised it didn’t make the papers. ‘Dominatrix Slain in East Side Pleasure Pad’—that should be good for page three in the Daily News any day of the week.”

  “I thought of that. But nothing was out in plain sight, Carolyn, and when I was up there the first time, all I saw was a tastefully decorated apartment. Remember, the cops had an open-and-shut case, a woman shot in her own apartment by a burglar she’d evidently caught in the act. They didn’t have any reason to toss her apartment. And she really lived there, it wasn’t just her office. She had street clothes there, too, and there were dishes in the kitchen cupboards and Q-tips and dental floss in the medicine cabinet.”

  “Find any cash? Any jewelry?”

  “There’s a jar in the kitchen where she used to throw her pennies. And there was some loose jewelry in one of the bedroom drawers, but none of it looked like much. I didn’t steal anything, if that’s what you were getting at.”

  “I just wondered.”

  A siren opened up behind us. I edged over to the right to give them room. A blue-and-white police cruiser sailed past us, wailing madly, barreling on through a red light. I braked for the same light, and as we waited for it to turn green a pair of foot patrolmen crossed the street in front of us. The one with the mustache was doing baton-twirler tricks with his nightstick. At one point he swung around so that he was looking directly at us, and Carolyn gripped my arm and didn’t let go until he and his companion had continued on across the street.

  “Jesus,” she said.

  “Not to worry.”

  “I could just picture a lightbulb forming over his head. Like in the comic strips. Are you sure he didn’t recognize you?”

  “Positive. Otherwise he’d have come over to the car for a closer look.”

  “And what would you have done?”

  “I don’t know. Run the light, probably.”

  “Jesus.”

  I felt the subject deserved changing. “I thought of bringing you a present,” I said. “A fur jacket, really smart-looking.”

  “I don’t like fur.”

  “This was a good one. It had an Arvin Tannenbaum label in it.”

  “Is that good?”

  “He’s as good as furriers get. I don’t know much about furs but I know labels. This was pretty. I think it was Canada lynx. What’s the matter?”

  “That’s a kind of a cat, Bernie. Don’t tell me how pretty it was. A lynx is like a bobcat. Wearing a lynx coat would be like having lampshades made of human skin. Whether or not they’re attractive is beside the point.”

  Another sire
n oogah-oogahed in the distance. An ambulance, from the sound of it. They’ve got ambulances these days that sound like Gestapo cars in war movies.

  That last thought blended with Carolyn’s lampshade image and made me ready for another change of subject. “The wig was there,” I said hurriedly. “The orange one that she wore to the bookstore. So it wasn’t just that my brain was addled from the drug. That was her buying Virgil’s Eclogues.”

  “She must have been afraid someone would recognize her.”

  I nodded. “She could have worn the wig so I wouldn’t recognize her at a later meeting, but that doesn’t really make much sense. I suppose she was afraid Whelkin would spot her. They must have known each other because he sent me over to her apartment, but I wish I had something more concrete to tie them together.”

  “Like what?”

  “Pictures, for instance. I was hoping for a batch of telltale snapshots. People with a closetful of whips and chains tend to be keen Polaroid photographers. I didn’t turn up a one.”

  “If there were any pictures, the killer could have taken them.”

  “Possible.”

  “Or maybe there weren’t any to begin with. If she was only with one person at a time there wouldn’t be anybody to take the pictures. Did you find a camera?”

  “Nary a camera.”

  “Then there probably weren’t any pictures.”

  “Probably not.”

  I turned into Fourteenth Street, headed west. Carolyn was looking at me oddly. I braked for a red light and turned to see her studying me, a thoughtful expression on her face.

  “You know something I don’t,” she said.

  “I know how to pick locks. That’s all.”

  “Something else.”

  “It’s just your imagination.”

  “I don’t think so. You were uptight before and now you’re all loose and breezy.”

  “It’s just self-confidence and a feeling of well-being,” I told her. “Don’t worry. It’ll pass.”

  There was a legal parking place around the corner from her apartment, legal until 7 A.M., at any rate. I stuck the Pontiac into it and grabbed up the suitcase.

  The cats met us at the door. “Good boys,” Carolyn said, reaching down to pat heads. “Anybody call? Did you take messages like I taught you? Bernie, if it’s not time for a drink, then the liquor ads have been misleading us for years. You game?”

  “Sure.”

  “Scotch? Rocks? Soda?”

  “Yes, yes, and no.”

  I unpacked my suitcase while she made the drinks, then made myself sit down and relax long enough to swallow a couple of ounces of Scotch. I waited for it to loosen some of my coiled springs, but before that could happen I was on my feet again.

  Carolyn raised her eyebrows at me.

  “The car,” I said.

  “What about it?”

  “I want to put it back where I found it.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “That car’s been very useful to me, Carolyn. I want to return the favor.”

  I paused at the door, reached back under my jacket. There was a book wedged beneath the waistband of my slacks. I drew it free and set it on a table. Carolyn looked at it and at me again.

  “Something to read while I’m gone,” I said.

  “What is it?”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s not Virgil’s Eclogues.”

  CHAPTER

  Thirteen

  I felt good about taking the car back. You don’t spit on your luck, I told myself. I thought of stories of ballplayers refusing to change their socks while the team was on a winning streak. It was high time, I mused, to change my own socks, winning streak or no. A shower would be in order, and a change of garb.

  I headed uptown on Tenth Avenue, left hand on the wheel, right hand on the seat beside me, fingers drumming idly. Somewhere in the Forties I snuck a peek at the gas gauge. I had a little less than half a tank left and I felt a need to do something nice for the car’s owner, so I cut over to Eleventh Avenue and found an open station at the corner of Fifty-first Street. I had them fill the tank and check the oil while they were at it. The oil was down a quart and I had them take care of that, too.

  My parking space was waiting for me on Seventy-fourth Street, but Max and his owner were nowhere to be seen. I uncoupled my jumper wire, locked up the car, and trotted back to West End Avenue to catch a southbound cab. It was still drizzling lightly but I didn’t have to wait long before a cab pulled up. And it was a Checker, with room for me to stretch my legs and relax.

  Things were starting to go right. I could feel it.

  Out of habit, I left the cab a few blocks from Arbor Court and walked the rest of the way. I rang, and Carolyn buzzed me through the front door and met me at the door to her apartment. She put her hands on her hips and looked up at me. “You’re full of surprises,” she said.

  “It’s part of my charm.”

  “Uh-huh. To tell you the truth, poetry never did too much for me. I had a lover early on who thought she was Edna St. Vincent Millay and that sort of cooled me on the whole subject. Where’d you find the book?”

  “The Porlock apartment.”

  “No shit, Bern. Here I thought you checked it out of the Jefferson Market library. Where in the apartment? Out in plain sight?”

  “Uh-uh. In a shoe box on a shelf in the closet.”

  “It must have come as a surprise.”

  “I’ll say. I was expecting a pair of Capezios, and look what I found.”

  “The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow. I didn’t really read much of it. I skimmed the first three or four pages and I didn’t figure it was going to get better.”

  “You were right.”

  “How’d you know it would be there, Bern?”

  I went over to the kitchen area and made us a couple of drinks. I gave one to Carolyn and accompanied it with the admission that I hadn’t known the book would be there, that I hadn’t even had any particular hope of finding it. “When you don’t know what you’re looking for,” I said, “you have a great advantage, because you don’t know what you’ll find.”

  “Just so you know it when you see it. I’m beginning to believe you lead a charmed life. First you run an ad claiming you’ve got the book, and then you open a shoe box and there’s the book. Why did the killer stash it there?”

  “He didn’t. He’d have taken it with him.”

  “Porlock stashed it?”

  “Must have. She drugged me, frisked me, grabbed the book, tucked it away in the closet, and got it hidden just in time to let her killer in the front door. She must have been alone in the apartment with me or he’d have seen her hide the book. She let him in and he killed her and left the gun in my hand and went out.”

  “Without the book.”

  “Right.”

  “Why would he kill her without getting the book?”

  “Maybe he didn’t have anything to do with the book. Maybe he had some other reason to want her dead.”

  “And he just happened to walk in at that particular time, and he decided to frame you because you happened to be there.”

  “I haven’t got it all worked out yet, Carolyn.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Maybe he killed her first and started looking for the book and came up empty. Except the apartment didn’t look as though it had been searched. It looked as neat as ever, except for the body on the love seat. When I came to, I mean. There was no body there tonight.”

  “How about the trunk of the Pontiac?”

  I gave her a look. “They did leave chalkmarks, though. On the love seat and the floor, to outline where the body was. It was sort of spooky.” I picked up the book and took it and my drink to the chair. Archie was curled up in it. I put down the book and the drink and moved him and sat down, and he hopped onto my lap and looked on with interest as I picked up the book again and leafed through it.

  “I swear he can read,” Carolyn said. “Ubi’s not much on books but A
rchie loves to read over my shoulder. Or under my shoulder, come to think of it.”

  “A cat ought to like Kipling,” I said. “Remember the Just So Stories? ‘I am the cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.’ ”

  Archie purred like a handsaw.

  “When I met you,” I said, “I figured you’d have dogs.”

  “I’d rather go to them than have them. What made you think I was a dog person?”

  “Well, the shop.”

  “The Poodle Factory?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, what choice did I have, Bernie? I couldn’t open a cat-grooming salon, for Christ’s sake. Cats groom themselves.”

  “That’s a point.”

  I read a little more of the book. Something bothered me. I flipped back to the flyleaf and read the handwritten inscription to H. Rider Haggard. I pictured Kipling at his desk in Surrey, dipping his pen, leaning over the book, inscribing it to his closest friend. I closed the book, turned it over and over in my hands.

  “Something wrong?”

  I shook my head, set the book aside, dispossessed Archie, stood up. “I’m like the cats,” I announced, “and it’s time I set about grooming myself. I’m going to take a shower.”

  A while later I was sitting in the chair again. I was wearing clean clothes and I’d had a nice close shave with my own razor.

  “I could get a paper,” Carolyn offered. “It’s after eleven. The Times must be out by now. The first edition.”

  We’d just heard the news and there wasn’t anything about the Porlock murder. I pointed out that there wouldn’t very likely be anything in the paper, either.

  “Our ad’ll be in, Bern. In the Personals.”

  “Where’s the nearest newsstand open at this hour?”

  “There’s one on Greenwich Avenue but they don’t get the early Times because they close around one or two. There’s an all-night stand at the subway entrance at Fourteenth and Eighth.”