Burglars Can't Be Choosers

by Lawrence Block

  “I think I know where the box is,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “Where it’s been all along. Flaxford’s apartment.”

  “You said you looked.”

  “I looked in the desk, but that’s as far as I got. I’d have kept on looking if the Marines hadn’t landed and I think I probably would have found it. It could have been anywhere in the apartment. Just because you saw him put it in the desk doesn’t mean he left it there forever. Maybe he had a wall safe behind a picture. Maybe he stuck it in a drawer in the bedside table. It could even be in the desk but not in a drawer. Those old rolltops have secret compartments. Maybe he put the box in one of them after you left. Anyway, I’ll bet it’s still there, right where he put it, and the killer assumes I’ve got it, and the apartment’s all locked up with a police seal on the door.”

  “What can we do?”

  An idea began heating up in the back of my mind. I let it simmer there while I took a different tack with her. “This blue box,” I said. “I think it’s time I knew what was inside it.”

  “Is it important?”

  “It’s important to you and it’s important to the man who killed Flaxford. That makes it important to me. Whatever it is must be pretty valuable.”

  “Only to me.”

  “He was blackmailing you.”

  A nod.

  “Photographs? Something like that?”

  “Photographs, tape recordings. He showed me some pictures and played part of a tape for me.” She shuddered. “I knew he didn’t love me any more than I loved him. But I thought he enjoyed what we did.” She stood up, took a few steps toward the window. “My life with my husband is quite conventional, Mr. Rhodenbarr. Some years ago I learned that I’m not all that conventional myself. When I met Fran some months ago we learned we had certain, uh, tastes in common.” She turned to face me. “I never expected to be blackmailed.”

  “What did he want from you? Money?”

  “No. I don’t have any money. I had a hard time raising enough cash to hire you and Wesley. No, Fran wanted me to influence my husband. You know he’s involved with CACA.”

  “I know.”

  “There’s a man named Michael Debus. He’s the District Attorney of Brooklyn or Queens, I can never remember which. Carter’s spearheading some sort of investigation which threatens to expose this Debus.”

  “And Flaxford wanted you to pull the plug on it?”

  “Yes. As if I could, incorruptible as Carter is.”

  “What was Flaxford’s interest?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t figure out how he fits into it all. He and I became involved long before Carter began this investigation, so he didn’t start seeing me with an ulterior motive in mind. And I always understood that he was involved with the theater. He produced some shows off-off-Broadway, you know, and he moved in those circles. That’s how I met him.”

  “And that’s how you met Brill also?”

  “Yes. He didn’t know Fran or any of my other theater friends, which made me feel safer about using him. But Fran must have been involved with crime in some way that I never knew about.”

  “He must have been some kind of a fixer,” I said. “He was obviously trying to fix things for Debus.”

  “Well, he certainly fixed me.” She came over, sat down on a love seat, took a cigarette from a box on the coffee table, lit it with a butane table lighter. “He must have known just what he was doing when he started up with me,” she said levelly. “Even if the Debus investigation hadn’t started. He knew who Carter was and he must have decided that it would come in handy sooner or later to have a hold on me.”

  “Did your husband ever meet him?”

  “Two or three times when I dragged Carter to an opening or a party. I’m interested in the theater the way Carter is interested in collecting coins. With those small companies you can have the excitement of being a backer and the thrill of being an insider for a couple of hundred deductible dollars. It’s an inexpensive way to delude yourself into thinking you’re involved in creative work with creative people. Oh, you meet the most interesting people that way, Mr. Rhodenbarr.”

  She took our empty glasses into the kitchen. I think she may have helped herself to a slug from the bottle while she was at it because when she came back her face had softened and she seemed more at ease.

  I asked her when Flaxford had shown her the contents of the blue box.

  “About two weeks ago. It was only the fourth time I’d been to his apartment. We generally came here. This isn’t a friend’s apartment, you see. I rented it myself some years ago as a convenience.”

  “I’m sure it’s convenient.”

  “It is.” She drew on her cigarette. “Of course he took me to his apartment so he could make the tapes and photographs. And then he invited me up to show me his work and make his pitch.”

  “He told you to get your husband to drop the Debus investigation?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you couldn’t do that?”

  “Tell Carter to discontinue a CACA project?” She laughed. “You ought to remember just how high-principled a man my husband is, Mr. Rhodenbarr. You tried to bribe him, remember?”

  “I do indeed. Didn’t you say as much to Flaxford?”

  “Of course I did. He said he was just trying to give me a chance to work things out on my own. For the sake of our friendship, he said.” She gritted her teeth. “But if I couldn’t sway Carter myself, then he’d go to him directly, threaten to circulate the photos.”

  “What would Carter have done?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not certain. He couldn’t have allowed the photographs to circulate. Carter Sandoval’s wife doing perverted things? No, he could hardly have tolerated that, no more than he could have tolerated remaining married to me. I’m not sure just what he would have done. He might have tried something dramatic, something like leaving a detailed note implicating Fran and Debus and then diving out a window.”

  “Would he have tried killing Flaxford?”

  “Carter? Commit murder?”

  “He might not have thought of it as murder.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I can’t imagine him doing it,” she said. “Anyway, he was with me at the theater.”

  “The whole night?”

  “We had dinner together and then we drove downtown.”

  “And you were together the entire time?”

  She hesitated. “There was a one-act curtain raiser before the main production. An experimental extended scene written by Gulliver Shane. I don’t know if you’re familiar with his work.”

  “I’m not. Is Carter?”

  “Pardon?”

  “He missed the curtain-raiser, didn’t he?”

  She nodded. “He dropped me in front of the theater and then went to park the car. The curtain was at eight-thirty and I had time for a cigarette in the lobby so he must have dropped me at twenty after eight. Then he had trouble finding a parking place. He won’t park by a hydrant even though they don’t tow cars away that far downtown. He’s so disgustingly honest.”

  “So he missed the curtain.”

  “If you’re not seated when the lights go up you have to watch from the back of the theater. So he couldn’t sit next to me during the Shane play. But he said he watched from the back, and he was sitting beside me by nine o’clock, or maybe nine-fifteen at the outside. That wouldn’t have given him enough time to rush all the way uptown and kill Fran and get back to me that quickly, would it?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “And Carter wouldn’t even have known about Fran. Fran hadn’t gone to him yet, I know he hadn’t. I was supposed to have until the end of the week. And Carter wouldn’t kill anyone by striking him. He’d use a gun.”

  “Does he still have that cannon of his?”

  “Yes. It’s a horrible thing, isn’t it?”

  “You don’t know the half of it. You didn’t have it pointed at you. But suppose Carter didn’t plan any
murder. Suppose Flaxford confronted him with the photos and he reacted on the spur of the moment. He wouldn’t have had the gun with him, and—”

  I left it right there because it didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t just that Sandoval would have been acting completely out of character. Beyond that, there was no reason for Flaxford to have met him at that hour or to have been wearing a dressing gown during the confrontation. And if a man like Carter Sandoval did kill anyone in a blind rage, which was hard enough to believe, he certainly would have given himself up and taken his punishment afterward.

  “Forget all that,” I said. “Carter didn’t do it.”

  “I didn’t see how he could have.”

  “It keeps coming back to the blue box,” I told her. “We have to get our hands on it. You want those photos and tapes before some opportunist gets his hands on them. And I want to find out what’s in the box besides tapes and pictures.”

  “You think there’s something else?”

  “I think there has to be. You and your husband are the only people who’d be interested in the tapes and pictures. But if neither of you killed Flaxford and neither of you sacked my apartment, then there has to be something else for somebody else to be looking for. And once we know what it is we’ll have a shot at knowing who’s looking for it.”

  She started to say something but I tuned her out. An idea was beginning to glimmer. I picked up my glass, then put it down without drinking anything. No more liquor tonight, not for Bernard. He had work to do.

  “Money,” I said.

  “In the blue box?”

  “That’s always possible, I suppose. But that’s not what I’m talking about. You were going to pay me another four thousand dollars. Have you still got it?”

  “Yes.”

  “At home?”

  “Here, as a matter of fact. Why?”

  “Can you raise any more?”

  “Maybe two or three thousand over the next few days.”

  “No time for that. Your four thousand and my five thousand is nine thousand—isn’t it impressive the way I can work out these sums in my head—nine thousand might be enough. Ten thousand would be a lot better. Could you dig up an extra thousand dollars in the next couple of hours if you put your mind to it?”

  “I suppose I could. I’m thinking who I could ask. Yes, I could manage a thousand dollars. Why?”

  I opened my suitcase, took out the three books. I gave Gibbon to Darla Sandoval and kept Barbara Tuchman and beekeeping for myself. “Every thirty pages or so,” I said, talking as I riffled pages, “you will find two pages glued together. Tear them open—” I suited action to words “—and you’ll find a hundred-dollar bill.”

  “Where did you get these books?”

  “Mostly on Fourth Avenue. Not Guns of August, that came from Book-of-the-Month Club. Oh, you thought I stole them. No, this is my stash, my case money. I may have stolen the money but the books are all my own. They’ve been shaken and riffled and all, but they’ve refused to give up their secret. Come on, now. If we both work we’ll get the money that much faster.”

  “But what are we going to do with it?”

  “We are going to put your five thousand and my five thousand together,” I said, “and that will give us ten thousand dollars, and we’re going to use it to get me into J. Francis Flaxford’s apartment, past the doorman and through the police evidence seal and everything. We’re going to do it in the most expedient way possible. We’re going to hire a police escort.”

  Chapter

  Fourteen

  I sat back in my chair and watched Ray Kirschmann count hundred-dollar bills. He performed his operation in silence but he did move his lips as he counted so it was easy for me to keep up with him. When he was all done he said, “Ten thousand, all right. That’s what you said.”

  “Ten thousand two hundred, Ray. I must have had some bills stuck together. Careless of me. Leave two of them on the table there, huh? The price we set was ten even.”

  “Jesus,” he said, but he put a pair of hundreds on the glass-topped coffee table before shuffling the remaining ten thou into a neat if bulky roll. “This is crazy,” he said. “Dizziest damn thing I ever did. Dizziest damn thing I ever heard of, to tell you the truth.”

  “It’s also the easiest money you ever made in your life.”

  “I’m takin’ a hell of a risk, Bernie.”

  “What risk? You’ve got every right in the world to want to have another look at the Flaxford apartment, you and Loren. You were the two cops who caught the original squeal and you were right in the middle of everything.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “So there’s something you have a feeling you may have missed, so you pick up the keys and get a warrant or permission slip or whatever the hell you get, and you and Loren go let yourselves into Flaxford’s place.”

  “Except it ain’t Loren.”

  “So instead of one skinny guy in a blue uniform you have a different skinny guy in a blue uniform. All cops look alike, you know that.”

  “Jesus.”

  “If you want to put the money back on the table—”

  He gave me a sour look. I was in the same apartment where I’d met Darla Sandoval but I was drinking instant Yuban now instead of Scotch, and Darla herself was tucked away behind a pair of louvered doors in the kitchen. Since half of the ten grand was hers I figured she had every right in the world to listen in on our arrangements, but I also figured she’d be better off not meeting Ray Kirschmann face to face. If he’d even bothered to wonder whose apartment we were using he’d kept his curiosity to himself. Outside of a conventional Nice place you got here, Rhodenbarr we might as well have been meeting over hot dogs at Nedick’s.

  “I just don’t know,” he said now. “A fugitive from justice, an escaped murderer—”

  “Ray, all I ever killed is time. I already told you that.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t honestly think I killed Flaxford, do you?”

  “I got no opinion on the subject, Bernie. You’re the same fugitive from a homicide charge whether you killed him or he died of an ingrown toenail.” He frowned at an irksome memory. “If you didn’t do it,” he said, “why in the hell did you jump me the way you did? Made me feel like seven different kinds of an asshole.”

  “I was stupid, Ray. I got spooked.”

  “Yeah, spooked.”

  “If I’d already known Flaxford was dead on the floor I wouldn’t have gone nuts like that, but it shocked me, same as it shocked Loren, and I—”

  “When Loren gets shocked he faints. It’s a lot less hostile, just closing your eyes and hitting the rug.”

  “Next time I’ll faint.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m going to find something in that apartment that’ll point straight at the real killer. Because I know I didn’t kill anybody, Ray, and I’ll find out who did, and when I’ve got it worked out I’ll hand it to you and look what a hero you’ll be. ‘The resourceful cop who dug beneath the surface to get at the real truth. You’re a safe bet to make plainclothes on the strength of that.”

  “Yeah, plainclothes. When you tell it I come out of it with a promotion. When I work it out on my own I see myself winding up stepping on my cock.”

  “Forget that, Ray. A promotion and ten grand, that’s how you’ll wind up.”

  “Don’t forget I got to split with Loren.” I shot him a doubtful look and he gave me back an injured expression in exchange. “Right down the middle,” he said. “It’s the same fuckin’ risk for the both of us. You’ll be wearin’ his badge and twirlin’ his nightstick, for Chrissake. Be his gun on your hip. If the shit hits the fan he’ll be right there in front of it, arm in arm with me. So it’s five grand for him and five grand for me.”

  “Sounds fair to me.”

  He looked at me for a moment, then let out air in a soundless whistle. He patted the bulky package on the sofa beside him. “Size thirty-eight long,” he said. “That’s what
you ordered, right?”

  “That’s what I take.”

  “Loren’s smaller’n you so I picked this up new. Maybe you better try it on.”

  I unwrapped the parcel, got out of my own clothes, donned a pair of regulation police blues over a blue shirt. There was no cap; I would wear Loren’s. When I was dressed Ray inspected me, tugged here and there on the uniform, frowned, stepped back, shrugged, shook his head doubtfully and turned aside.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “You don’t look like New York’s Finest to me.”

  “Just so I’m not a disgrace to the uniform.”

  “I guess it ain’t too bad of a fit. It don’t look tailor-made, you got to admit that, but then you also got to admit that neither does Loren’s.”

  I took a moment to picture Loren. “No,” I agreed, “he doesn’t look as though the uniform was stitched together around him.” I patted my trousers, pressed out imaginary wrinkles. “So I guess I’ll do,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess you’ll do.”

  I was still in uniform when he left. After the door closed behind him Darla Sandoval emerged from the kitchen. She looked me up and down and raised her eyebrows.

  “Well?”

  “I think you look like a policeman. There’s a mirror on the bedroom door if you want to see yourself.”

  I wouldn’t have been surprised if there had been a mirror on the bedroom ceiling. (Well, maybe I would have.) But I went and checked my reflection on the mirrored door and decided I cut a reasonably dashing figure. I returned to the living room and agreed with Darla that I looked like a cop.

  “He took all our money,” she said. “Do you think that was wise?”

  “I think it was inevitable. You can’t pay cops half in advance and the balance upon delivery. You ought to be able to but they don’t like to work that way.”

  “He’s picking you up here tonight.”

  I nodded. “At twenty-one hundred hours. That’s nine o’clock in English but he said it in cop talk because I was wearing the uniform.”