The Burglar in the Closet

by Lawrence Block

  “If only I could talk to him, Bernie.”

  “You haven’t heard from him?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What time did they pick him up?”

  “They didn’t say on the radio. Only that he’d been arrested for questioning. If it was just a matter of questioning they wouldn’t have had to arrest him, would they?”

  “Probably not.” I paused, chewed rhubarb-laden toast, considered. “When was Crystal killed? Did they happen to say?”

  “I think they said the body was discovered shortly after midnight.”

  “Well, it’s hard to say when they would have gotten around to picking Craig up. They might have questioned him without charging him for a while. He could have insisted they charge him, but he might not have thought of that. And he might not have bothered insisting on having a lawyer present. In any event, somewhere along the way he must have called an attorney. He wouldn’t have a criminal lawyer but his own lawyer would have referred the case to somebody and he’s almost certainly got counsel at hand by now.” I thought back to my own experiences. I used a couple of mouthpieces over the years before I finally settled on Herbie Tannenbaum. He’s always straight with me, I can call him at any hour, and he knows he can trust me to come up with his fee even if I don’t have anything in advance. He also knows how to reach the reachable judges and how to work trade-offs with the D.A.’s people. But I somehow doubted he’d be the kind of lawyer Craig Sheldrake would wind up with.

  “You could get in touch with Craig’s lawyer,” I added. “Find out from him how things stand.”

  “I don’t know who he is.”

  “Well, maybe he’ll call you. The lawyer. If only to tell you to cancel the appointments. He shouldn’t take it for granted that you happened to catch the newscast.”

  “Why hasn’t he called yet? It’s almost ten-thirty!”

  Because you’re on the phone, I wanted to say. Instead I swallowed some food and said, “They may have waited until a decent hour before they arrested him. Don’t panic, Jillian. If he’s been arrested he’s certainly in a safe place. If the lawyer doesn’t call you sometime this afternoon, make some calls and find out where he’s being held. They might even let you see him. If not, at least they’ll give you the name of his attorney and you can take it from there. Don’t expect Craig to call you. They’ll let him call his lawyer and that’s generally the extent of his phone privileges.” Unless you bribe a guard, but he wouldn’t know how to go about doing that. “You don’t really have anything to worry about, Jillian. Either you’ll hear from the lawyer or you’ll get in touch with the lawyer and either way things’ll work out. If Craig’s innocent—”

  “Of course he’s innocent!”

  “—then things’ll get straightened out in no time at all. They always pick up the husband when the wife gets murdered. But Crystal led a rather loose life, from what I’ve heard—”

  “She was a slut!”

  “—so it’s likely there were any number of men with a good motive and opportunity to kill her; and she might even have brought home a stranger—”

  “Like Looking for Mr. Goodbar!”

  “—so I’m sure there are more suspects in this case than cockroaches on Eldridge Street, and the World’s Greatest Dentist ought to be back drilling and filling in no time at all.”

  “Oh, I hope so!” She took a breath. “Can’t he get out on bail? People always get out on bail, don’t they?”

  “Not when the charge is Murder One. There’s no bail allowable in first-degree murder cases.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Few things are.” More toast, more coffee. “I think you should just sit tight, Jillian. Either where you are or at your apartment, wherever you’ll be more comfortable.”

  “I’m scared, Bernie.”

  “Scared?”

  “I don’t know why or what of but I’m terrified. Bernie?”

  “What?”

  “Could you come over? It’s crazy, maybe, but I don’t know who else to ask. I just don’t want to be alone by myself now.” I hesitated, at least partly because I had some unswallowed food on my tongue, and she said, “Forget I said all that, okay? You’re a busy man, I know that, and it’s an imposition, and—”

  “I’ll be right over.”

  There’s something to keep in mind. I didn’t agree to bop on over to Craig’s Central Park South office just because I have a penchant for sticking my head in the lion’s mouth, or into whatever orifice the beast chooses to present to me. Nor was I making the trip because I couldn’t help remembering how nice it felt when Jillian leaned against me during a cleaning, or how nice her fingers tasted.

  On the surface, it might look as though I had a vested interest in staying uninvolved. I was after all a burglar, and am hence regarded generally as a Highly Suspicious Person. And I was, further, no more than a dental patient and casual acquaintance of Craig Sheldrake, nor was my relationship with Jillian such that she’d be likely to turn to me before all others for solace in time of stress. Why, she’d never called me anything but Mr. Rhodenbarr until this morning. So at first glance it certainly looked as though I ought to keep a low profile.

  On the other hand—and there’s always another hand—whoever jammed Crystal’s pump had taken a caseful of jewels along with him. I had taken to thinking of those jewels as my own, and I still thought of them as my own, and I damn well wanted to get them back.

  I didn’t just want the jewels, as far as that goes. The precious pretties, you may recall, were in an attaché case I’d brought into the apartment with me. I was reasonably certain no one could trace that case to me—I, after all, had stolen it in the first place. But I couldn’t begin to be sure that the inside of the damn thing wasn’t covered with my fingerprints. The outside was Ultrasuede and would no more take a print than Crystal Sheldrake’s wrist would, but the inside was some sort of vinyl or Naugahyde, which might or might not take prints, and there was a lot of metal trim in the interior, and it wasn’t at all hard to conjure up scenarios in which a cadre of cops kicked my door in and sought to learn what a case with my prints on it, loaded with Crystal’s jewelry, was doing in the apartment of a murder suspect.

  So if they caught him I might be in trouble. And if they didn’t catch him he’d be getting away with my loot. And if there was no one to catch because the World’s Greatest Dentist had indeed gone and committed the world’s dumbest murder, well, that was less than super for me, too. Because in that case Craig would hand me to them on a platter. “I was talking to him about all this jewelry she had around, see, and he seemed to be taking quite an interest, and later it dawned on me that I’d read something about him being a burglar and once being mixed up in a murder, and I never dreamed he’d actually burglarize poor Crystal’s apartment—”

  I could just about write the script for him, and after the way he’d set me up a week ago, I didn’t doubt he had the acting talent to read his lines properly. It might not be enough to get him out of the soup but it would certainly put me in the kettle alongside of him.

  In fact, even if he wasn’t guilty he might try that approach. If no other suspect turned up he could panic. Or he could have the same doubts about me that I was having about him, and he could decide I might have hit Crystal’s apartment two days earlier than I said I would—which in fact I did—and that I happened to kill her accidentally in a moment of panic. He might simply have figured that our arrangement might come out so he’d better put the best possible light on it in advance.

  What it came down to was that there were far too many ways that I could wind up in trouble.

  And there was the fact that I liked Craig Sheldrake. When you are a patient of the World’s Greatest Dentist you don’t readily give him up and walk in off the street to any clown with a sign in his window advertising painless extractions. The man was taking good care of my mouth and I wanted him to carry on.

  And Jillian was certainly a charming young lady. And it was
much nicer to be called Bernie by her than Mr. Rhodenbarr, which had always struck me as overly formal. And her fingers did have that nice spicy taste to them, and it seemed reasonable to assume that this was characteristic of more of her than her fingers alone. Jillian was Craig’s personal love interest, of course, and that was fine with me, and I had no intention of horning hornily in on another chap’s romance. That’s not my style. I only steal cash and inanimate objects. All the same, one needn’t have designs on a young lady to find her company enjoyable. And if Craig should prove to be guilty, Jillian would be out of a job and a lover just as I would be out of a dentist, and there was no reason for us to do other than console each other.

  But why build sand castles? Some evil bastard had not stopped at killing Crystal Sheldrake. He’d gone on to steal jewels I’d already stolen.

  And I intended to make him pay for that.

  CHAPTER

  Five

  “You’re fantastic, Bernie.”

  I must admit I’d had fantasies in which Jillian spoke those very words to me, and in approximately that tone of voice, but I hadn’t been hanging up a telephone when it happened. I’d planned on being in a horizontal position at the time. Instead I was vertical, and I was replacing the receiver of the phone that perched on the desk of Marian the Receptionist. Marian was out for the day. Craig Sheldrake, on the other hand, was not. He was still behind bars—which was what my phone conversation had just determined.

  A few other calls had revealed a few other things. Craig’s regular attorney was a man by the name of Carson Verrill, with offices somewhere downtown. Verrill had engaged a criminal lawyer named Errol Blankenship to represent Craig in this particular matter. (The choice of phrasing was that of someone in Verrill’s office.) Blankenship had an office listed in the phone book on Madison Avenue in the thirties. I tried his phone and no one answered it. If he had a home phone, either his home was outside of Manhattan or the number was unlisted. I let it go. I figured he was in court or something and his secretary had decided to celebrate by taking a long lunch hour.

  Craig had been arrested in his own Upper East Side apartment around six-thirty in the morning. Not many good things happen at that time of day and being arrested certainly isn’t one of them. They’d let him shave and change from his pajamas into something more suitable for street wear. I hoped he’d known to wear loafers, but how many straight-arrow citizens would think of that? They don’t always take your shoelaces away from you in jail, but periodically some Yo-Yo decides you look like the suicidal sort, and there you are clumping around with your shoes falling off your feet.

  Well, probably that was the least of his worries.

  He was in a cell now in a hostile building downtown on Centre Street. I don’t suppose he was happy about it. I’ve never known anyone who was. I’d asked if he could have visitors and the person I talked to didn’t seem to be the voice of authority on the subject. He said he thought so, but why didn’t I drop around and make sure? Whatever the ruling, the last thing I wanted to do was drop around that grim establishment myself. My previous visits had not been the sort to make me anxious to return for old times’ sake.

  “You’re fantastic, Bernie.”

  Actually, she didn’t say it again. I’m repeating it so as to preserve the thread of this narrative. What I said in reply was that she shouldn’t be silly, that I was not fantastic, and even if I did happen to be moderately sensational in certain unspecified other areas, nevertheless I’d done nothing remarkable in her presence. Yet.

  “You could have made the same calls and found out the same information,” I said. “You just don’t have experience with this sort of thing.”

  “I wouldn’t have had any idea what to do.”

  “You could have figured it out.”

  “And I would have gotten all rattled on the phone. I sometimes get terribly nervous. I’m not very good at talking to people. Sometimes I think there’s too much silence when I’m working on a patient. They can’t talk, obviously, and I just can’t manage to open my mouth.”

  “Believe me, it’s a release after Craig does his Motormouth number.”

  She giggled. It was a charming giggle, which surprised me about as much as that the sun had picked the east to rise in that morning. “He does talk a lot,” she acknowledged, as if painfully admitting that the Liberty Bell had a crack in it. “But that’s only with patients. When he’s alone he’s very shy and quiet.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t expect him to talk to himself.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Everybody’s quiet when they’re alone.”

  She thought about it, then blushed prettily. I’d come to think of that as a lost art. “I meant he’s quiet when he’s alone with me.”

  “I knew what you meant.”

  “Oh.”

  “I was being a smart-ass. Sorry.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. I just—my mind’s not working too brilliantly this morning. I wonder what I should do. Do you think I can go see Craig?”

  “I don’t know whether or not he can have visitors. You could go down there and find out, but I think it would be a good idea for us to learn a little more about what’s going on first. If we had a better idea of just how good a case they’ve got against Craig, we might be in a better position to figure out what to do next.”

  “Do you think they’ve got a good case?”

  I shrugged. “Hard to say. It would help if he has an alibi for last night, but I guess if he had a good one he’d be back on the street by now. I, uh, gather he wasn’t with you?”

  She blushed again. I guess there was no avoiding it. “No,” she said. “We had dinner together last night but then we each had some things to do so we went our separate ways. I guess it was about nine o’clock that I saw him last. I went home and so did he.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Oh!” She brightened. “I talked to him before I went to bed. It was during the Carson show, I remember that. It wasn’t much of a conversation, we just said goodnight to each other, but he was home then. Would that help give him an alibi?”

  “Did you call him?”

  “He called me.”

  “Then it wouldn’t help his alibi a whole lot. You’ve only got his word as to where he was when he called you. And the police are likely to take the position that a murderer wouldn’t draw the line at lying to a pretty lady.”

  She started to say something, then gnawed a little scarlet lipstick from her lower lip. It was a becoming shade and a most attractive lower lip. I wouldn’t have minded gnawing it myself.

  “Bernie? You don’t think he did it, do you?”

  “I’m pretty certain he didn’t.”

  “Why?”

  I had a reason but I preferred to keep it to myself. “Because of the kind of guy he is,” I said instead, and that was evidently just what she wanted to hear. She started enlarging on the topic of Craig Sheldrake, World’s Greatest Guy, and I’ll be damned if she didn’t make him sound like someone I’d have really liked to meet.

  I decided to change the subject. “The fact that we know he’s innocent doesn’t do him much good,” I said, by way of transition. “The cops have to know he’s innocent, and the easiest way for that to happen is if they’ve got someone else they know is guilty. Unless you’re on the Orient Express, one murderer per corpse is all anybody could possibly ask for.”

  “Do you mean we should try to solve the crime ourselves?”

  Did I? “Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” I said, backpedaling. “But I wish I knew more than I do. I’d like to know just when the murder was committed, and I’d like to know what men Crystal was involved with lately, and where all of them were when somebody was busy killing her. And I’d like to know if anybody had a particularly strong reason for wanting her dead. Craig had a ton of reasons, and you and I know that and so does the long arm of the law, but a woman who led as active a life as Crystal Sheldrake did must have made a few enemies along the way. Maybe some lover of
hers had a jealous wife or girlfriend. There’s a whole world of possibilities out there and I hardly know where we should start.”

  She looked at me. “I’m so glad I called you, Bernie.”

  “Well, I don’t know how much help I can really be—”

  “I’m really so glad.” Her eyes did a little number, and then suddenly her forehead crinkled up and her gaze narrowed. “I just thought of something,” she said. “You were going to burglarize Crystal’s apartment on Saturday night, weren’t you? Imagine if the killer had picked that time to strike!”

  Let’s imagine no such thing, Jillian. “But Crystal was home last night,” I reminded her, carefully shifting her gears and pointing her in a safer direction. “I would never have gone in if she was home.”

  “Oh. Of course. I just thought—”

  Whatever she just thought will be forever unrecorded because she didn’t get to the end of the sentence. There was a brisk rat-tat-tat, a loud knock on the clouded glass panel of the outer door. “Open up in there,” said a professionally authoritative voice. And added, quite unnecessarily in my opinion, “It’s the police.”

  Jillian blanched.

  I, in turn, did the only possible thing under the circumstances. Without the slightest hesitation I grabbed her by the shoulders, drew her close, and brought our mouths together in a passionate embrace.

  The knock was repeated.

  Well, what the hell. So was the kiss.

  CHAPTER

  Six

  I don’t know if Jillian was nonplussed, but she certainly wasn’t plussed. Her face held an expression somewhere between bemusement and astonishment, with pronounced overtones of shock. Have I mentioned her eyes? They were the faded blue of well-washed denim, and they were large, and I had never seen them larger.

  Rat-tat-tat.

  “Bernie!”

  “Police. Open up there.”

  I was still gripping her shoulders. “I’m your boyfriend,” I whispered urgently. “You’re not Craig’s girl, you’re my girl, and that’s why you happened to ask me to drop over, and we’ve been doing a little innocent smooching.”