The Burglar in the Closet

by Lawrence Block

  Her eyes widened, her lower lip trembled. She gnawed prettily at it. “Those two policemen got here about three-quarters of an hour after Mr. Verrill left. They said you broke into Crystal’s apartment again last night. There were police seals on it and it was broken into. They say you did it.”

  “Somebody hit Crystal’s place again?” I frowned, trying to figure it. “Why would I do that?”

  “They said you must have left something behind. Or you wanted to destroy evidence.”

  That was what Kirschmann had been talking about. He thought I’d make a second trip for the jewels. “Anyway,” I said, “I was here last night.”

  “You could have stopped on the way here.”

  “I couldn’t have stopped anywhere last night. I couldn’t see straight, if you’ll remember.”

  She avoided my eyes. “And the night before that,” she said. “They say they have a witness who spotted you leaving Crystal’s building right around the time she was killed. And they have another woman who says she actually spoke to you in Gramercy Park earlier that night.”

  “Shit. Henrietta Tyler.”

  “What?”

  “A sweet little old lady who hates dogs and strangers. I’m surprised she remembered me. And that she talked to the law. I figured no one who hates dogs and strangers can be all bad. What’s the matter?”

  “Then you were there!”

  “I didn’t kill anybody, Jillian. Burglary was the only felony I committed that night, and I was busy committing it while somebody else killed Crystal.”

  “You were—”

  “On the premises. In the apartment.”

  “Then you saw—”

  “I saw the closet door from the inside, that’s what I saw.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t blame you. I didn’t see who killed her but I had a busy night tonight and now I know who killed her. It all fits, even the second break-in.” I leaned forward. “Do you suppose you could put up a fresh pot of coffee? Because it’s a long story.”

  CHAPTER

  Seventeen

  She listened with appropriately wide eyes while I recreated the circumstances of the burglary and the murder. When I moved along to the story of my visit to Knobby Corcoran’s humble digs, she stared in awe and admiration. I may have improved on reality a bit, come to think of it. I may have made the drop from one rooftop to the other greater than it actually was, and I may have added a gap of a few yards between the buildings. Poetic license, you understand.

  When I got to the attaché case she made oohing sounds. When it was Naugahyde instead of Ultrasuede she groaned, and when I opened it up and found all the money she gasped. “So much money,” she said. “Where is it? You don’t have it with you, do you?”

  “It’s in a safe place. Or else I wasted fifty cents.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing important. I stashed the attaché case but I held onto a few bills because I thought they might come in handy.” I took out my wallet. “I’ve got two left. See?”

  “What about them?”

  “Nice, aren’t they?”

  “They’re twenty-dollar bills. What’s so special about them?”

  “Well, if you saw a whole suitcase full of them you’d be impressed, wouldn’t you?”

  “I suppose, but—”

  “Compare the serial numbers, Jillian.”

  “What about them? They’re in sequence. Wait a minute, they’re not in sequence, are they?”

  “Nope.”

  “They’re…Bernie, both of these bills have the same serial number.”

  “Really? Jesus, that’s remarkable, isn’t it?”

  “Bernie—”

  “A world where no two snowflakes are the same, where every human being has a different set of fingerprints, and here I go and take two twenties out of my wallet and I’ll be damned if they don’t both have the same serial number. It makes you think, doesn’t it?”

  “Are they—?”

  “Phony? Yeah, that’s what it means, I’m afraid. Hell of a note, isn’t it? All that money and all it is is green paper. Take a close look, Jillian, and you’ll see it’s a long way from perfect. The portrait of Andy Jackson is damn good compared to most counterfeits I’ve seen, but if you really look at the bill it doesn’t look wonderful.”

  “Around the seal here—”

  “Yeah, the points aren’t sharp. And if you turn the bill over you’ll see some other faults. Of course these bills are new ones. If you age them and distress them a little, give ’em fold lines and take the newness out of the paper by cooking them with a little coffee—well, there are tricks in every trade and I don’t pretend to know some of the ones counterfeiters have come up with lately. I have enough work staying ahead of the locksmiths. I’ll tell you, though, those bills you’ve got in your hand would pass banks nineteen times out of twenty. The serial number’s about the only obvious fault. Would you look twice at one of these if you got it in change?”

  “No.”

  “Neither would anybody else. As soon as I saw the money was counterfeit I went straight back to Grabow’s place. One step inside the door and I knew I was on the right track. He was an unsuccessful artist who’d turned to printmaking and had made no big success of that, and here he was living in a loft most New Yorkers would kill for, tons of space, beautiful furniture, a few thousand dollars’ worth of primitive artifacts on the wall. I poked around and found enough inks and paper to make better money than the Bureau of Engraving and Printing turns out, and if there was any doubt it vanished when I found the actual printing plates. He does beautiful line work. It’s really high-quality engraving.”

  “Grabow’s a counterfeiter?”

  “Uh-huh. I wondered why he was so suspicious when he had me trapped in the vestibule of his building. I did a pretty good job of looking like a dumb schmuck who was chasing the wrong Grabow, but he was full of questions. Who was I? How’d I get his address? How come I was working on a Saturday? He came up with questions faster than I could come up with answers, that’s why I had to run out on him, but why would he have so many suspicions if he didn’t have something to hide? Yes, he’s a counterfeiter. I can’t swear that he made the plates himself, but he’s got them now. And he certainly did the printing.”

  “And then he gave the money to Knobby Corcoran? I don’t understand what happened next.”

  “Neither do I, but I can make a few guesses. Suppose Crystal brought Knobby and Grabow together. Grabow was her boyfriend and maybe she took him around the bars a few times. That’s what she did with the Legal Beagle, her other boyfriend, so why wouldn’t she do the same thing with Grabow?

  “Anyway, Grabow and Corcoran set something up. Maybe Grabow was going to produce the counterfeit twenties and Knobby was going to find a way to turn them into real money. There was some kind of a doublecross. Say Knobby wound up with the twenties and Grabow wound up talking to himself. Maybe Crystal crossed him one way or another, maybe she wound up with the money.”

  “How?”

  I shrugged. “Beats me, but it could have happened. Or maybe the deal with the counterfeit went fine but Grabow found out she was just using him, two-timing him with other men and stringing him along for the sake of the counterfeiting deal. Maybe he learned she was sleeping with Knobby, maybe he found out about the other boyfriend. He got jealous and he got mad and he picked up a dental scalpel and went after her.”

  “Where would he get a dental scalpel?”

  “Celniker Dental and Optical, same as Craig.”

  “But why would he—”

  “He’s got a whole collection of them. All sorts of picks and probes and scalpels, and it looks to me as though they’re all made by Celniker unless other manufacturers also put hexagonal shafts on their instruments. I suppose they’re handy for printing and printmaking, cutting linoleum blocks, making woodcuts, any of that sort of detail work. Either he took one along as a murder weapon or he just happened to have one in his pock
et.”

  “That seems strange, doesn’t it?”

  It did at that. “Try it this way, then. He’d had Crystal up to his loft and she spotted the tools and mentioned that Craig had the same kind at his office. After all, she was his hygienist back before she married him. Matter of fact, that could explain the coincidence of Grabow having the same kind of tools as Craig. Maybe he was using something else, X-acto knives or God knows what, and Crystal told him he should get a set of dental instruments because the steel’s high quality or whatever the hell she told him. Anyway, if he knew Craig used Celniker instruments, he could have taken the scalpel along to make it look as though Craig did the killing. He wouldn’t have any reason to get rid of his own Celniker tools because there’s nothing to connect him with Crystal in the first place, and once Craig’s tagged with the crime the cops won’t have any reason to look any further.”

  “So he took the scalpel along with the intention of using it as a murder weapon?”

  “He must have.”

  “And he picked her up and went to bed with her first?”

  “That would have been fiendish, wouldn’t it? I just met him briefly but I didn’t get the impression that he was that devious a person. He struck me as pretty direct, the strong and silent type. When she went out to the bar she probably met the Legal Beagle and brought him back. I don’t remember their conversation very well because I was making such a determined effort to ignore it, but it certainly wasn’t Grabow. At least I don’t think it was.

  “No, here’s what I figure happened. Say Grabow was watching the house, or maybe he tracked her from the bar where she met the lawyer. Or whoever she met, it doesn’t have to be the lawyer. In fact we can forget the lawyer because I don’t think he really enters into it. The fact that Frankie Ackerman mentioned three men as friends of Crystal’s doesn’t mean all three of them are involved in her murder. It’s remarkable enough that two of them are.”

  “Anyway,” Jillian prompted, “she brought home some man or other and Grabow was watching.”

  “Right. Then the guy left. Grabow saw him leave. He gave him a minute or two to get lost, then came on over and leaned on the bell. When Crystal let him in, he did his strong and silent number and stuck the scalpel straight into her heart.”

  Jillian clutched her own heart, her small hand pressing high on the left-hand side of the navy sweater. She was following the line as if it were a movie and she were seeing it on TV.

  “Then he came on into the bedroom,” I went on. “First thing he saw was my attaché case standing against the wall under the French woman’s portrait. He went over and—”

  “What French woman?”

  “It’s not important. A picture on Crystal’s wall. But he didn’t see the picture because he only had eyes for the attaché case. See, he figured an attaché case is an attaché case. He assumed it was full of the counterfeit money and this was his chance to swipe it back.”

  “But the money was in a black vinyl case, wasn’t it?”

  “Black Naugahyde. Right. But how would Grabow know that?”

  “Wouldn’t he have packed it like that to begin with?”

  “Maybe, but how do we know that? Maybe he gave Crystal the money in a Bloomingdale’s shopping bag. That’s what I usually use on burglaries. It looks like you belong, striding along with a Bloomie’s bag full of somebody else’s property. Suppose he just knew someone had transferred it to an attaché case, and here was an attaché case, the very item he was looking for. The natural thing would be for him to grab it and get the hell out and worry later what was in it.”

  “And later, when he opened the case—”

  “It probably confused the daylights out of him. For a minute he must have thought Crystal was some kind of medieval alchemist who managed to transmute paper into gold and diamonds. Then when he had it figured he had to go back for the money. That would explain the second break-in, the burglary after the police had already sealed the apartment. Grabow went back for the money, broke the seals, searched the place, and went home empty-handed. Because the counterfeit bills were all packed up at Knobby Corcoran’s apartment, sitting on a shelf in the closet.”

  Jillian nodded, then frowned. “What happened to the jewels?”

  “I suppose Grabow held onto them. People tend to retain jewelry rather than leave it for the garbage man. I didn’t see them around his loft, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. The jewels are evidence and he wouldn’t leave them lying around because they’d lock him into the murder.”

  “He kept the dental tools around.”

  “That’s different. There’s no way to explain the jewelry and he’d have to realize that. He must have stashed it somewhere. It’s possible he tucked it away right there on King Street. It wouldn’t be terribly difficult to hide the jewels under the floorboards or inside the modular furniture where I wouldn’t find them on a routine search. As far as that goes, I found a safe-deposit key among his other stuff. It’s possible the jewels are already in the bank. He could have gone Friday before the banks closed and stashed them in his safe-deposit box. Or he might even have fenced them. That’s not inconceivable. As a counterfeiter, the odds are he knows somebody who knows somebody who fences stolen gems. It’s no harder to find a fence in this town than it is to place a football bet or buy a number or score drugs. But there’s really no reason to speculate about the jewels. There’s already enough evidence against Grabow to put him away for years.”

  “You mean the dental tools?”

  “That’s a start,” I said. “I moved things around at his place, just in case he decides to get rid of the evidence. I put some of the twenties where you’d have to search to find them. Same with a few dental instruments. If he panics and throws out the instruments, there’ll be a few he won’t find that the police would turn up easily on a search. And I hid the printing plates. That might make him panic if he goes looking for them, but the way I left things he’ll never believe a burglar set foot in the place. I even picked the lock on my way out to relock it, and that’s a service relatively few burglars perform for you. I left his loft empty-handed, you know. In fact I walked out of there with less than I brought, since I planted those fake twenties on him. If I did that all the time I’d have a problem coming up with the rent every month.”

  She giggled. “My mother used to say that if burglars came to our house they’d leave something. But you’re the only one I ever heard of who actually did.”

  “Well, I’m not going to make a habit of it.”

  “Have you been a burglar all your life, Bernie?”

  “Well, not all my life. I started out as a little kid, just like everybody else. I love the way you giggle, incidentally. It’s very becoming. I guess I’ve been a burglar since I got done being a kid.”

  “I don’t think you ever did get done being a kid, Bernie.”

  “I sometimes have that feeling myself, Jillian.”

  And I got to talking about myself and my crazy criminous career, how I’d started out sneaking into other people’s houses for the sheer thrill of it and learned before long that the thrill was all the keener if you stole something while you were at it. I talked and she listened, and somewhere in the course of things we finished the coffee and she broke out a perfectly respectable bottle of Soave. We drank the chilled white wine out of stemmed glasses and sat side-by-side on the couch, and I went on talking and wished the couch would do its trick of converting into a bed. She was lovely, Jillian was, and she was a most attentive listener, and her hair smelled of early spring flowers.

  Around the time the bottle became empty she said, “What are you going to do now, Bernie? Now that you know who the killer is.”

  “Find a way to get information to the cops. I suppose I’ll run the play through Ray Kirschmann. It’s not his case but he smells money and that’ll make him bend procedures like pretzels. I don’t know how he’s going to make a dollar out of this one. If the jewels turn up they’ll be impounded as evidence. But
if there’s a buck in it he’ll find it, and that’ll be his problem not mine.”

  “I know he wants you to call him.”

  “Uh-huh. But not now, I’m afraid. It’s the middle of the night.”

  “What time is it? Oh, it really is the middle of the night. I didn’t realize it was so late.”

  “I’ll have to find someplace to stay. I’m afraid my own apartment’s no good for the time being. They probably don’t have it staked out but I’m not going to risk it now, not if they’ve got a pickup order out on me. I can get a hotel room.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “You figure that might be ridiculous? I suppose you’re right. Hotels don’t get that many check-ins at this hour and it might look suspicious. Well, there’s something else I could always try. Just scout an empty apartment, one where the tenants are gone for the weekend, and make myself right at home. That worked well enough for Goldilocks.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You stayed here last night and you can stay here again. I don’t want you to take a chance of getting arrested.”

  “Well, Craig might—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Craig won’t be coming over and I wouldn’t let him in if he did. I’m pretty angry with Craig, if you want to know. I think he behaved terribly and he may be a great dentist but I’m not sure he’s a very wonderful human being.”

  “Well, that’s great of you,” I said. “But this time I’ll take the chair.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Well, you’re not going to sit up in that thing, for God’s sake. I’m not going to let you give up your bed again.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Huh? I don’t—”

  “Bernie?” She gazed up at me from beneath those long eyelashes. “Bernie, don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Oh,” I said, and looked deeply into her eyes, and smelled her hair. “Oh.”

  CHAPTER

  Eighteen

  It must have been around ten when we woke up the next morning. There were a few churches on the block and it kept being some denomination’s turn to ring bells. We lay in bed for the next two hours, sometimes listening to the church bells and sometimes ignoring them. There are worse ways to spend a Sunday morning.