The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr)

by Lawrence Block

  It’s that the residents will come home, and catch me in the act.

  I’ll do anything I can to avoid this, short of giving up the work altogether. (And I’ve even tried that, but can’t seem to stick with it.) I don’t go into a house or apartment unless I’m certain it’s empty, and that I’ll have ample time to perform my chores before the resident returns. And even then, for all that I delight in the sensation of being where I don’t belong, I make my stay as brief as I possibly can. Get in, get what you came for, and get out. Period.

  So how do you figure a cat burglar?

  I saw one interviewed on a cable show a while ago. He had a shaved head and way too many tattoos, and the manic glint in his eyes certainly didn’t inspire confidence, but his words showed he had a cool and logical mind. “The thing is,” he said, “I never have to worry about them coming home. Because, see, they’re already there.”

  That cat burglar, like all his tribe, was clearly nuts. But there was an undeniable truth in what he was saying, and I contemplated it while I worked at getting into the Button House. Because I didn’t have to begin by making phone calls and ringing door bells and banging away with a brass door knocker (which in this particular instance was evidently custom-made, because how often do you run into a door knocker in the shape of a collar button?) to make doubly certain the house was empty. It wasn’t empty, and I knew it.

  I’d already been in and out of a house and three apartments, fitting into a single evening as much work as any burglar ought to do in six months. They’d all required some skill and thought and planning, and they’d all gone off smoothly, and here I was on a pretty tree-lined Brooklyn street, pushing my luck.

  But if I went home now, everything I’d already done would be essentially pointless . . .

  The house on Willow Street was owned by a collector, and one sufficiently rabid to have obtained some valuable items in a manner that was either shady or genuinely illegal. That meant he couldn’t insure them, so he’d be burdened with even more than the usual collector’s paranoia.

  And so there was a burglar alarm, and a good one, and the telltale silvery tape showed on all the ground and parlor floor windows. Some of them might be bypassed, so that he could open a window for ventilation without throwing switches, but there was no way to determine as much from where I was.

  He had good locks, too. And there was a security camera mounted above the entrance way, keeping a keen digital eye on all comings and goings.

  Let’s see now. Was there burglar alarm tape on the third-floor windows?

  There was not, as far as I could tell, and this gave me hope.

  A slender hope, I have to admit, as I had no way of getting to the third floor—unless I was already inside the building and could use the stairs. Or, of course, I could have walked up the building’s façade—if only I’d had the foresight to bring along my anti-gravity vest, and the shoes with the suction cups on their bottoms. I’ll tell you, you try to think of everything, and then you go and leave the important stuff at home.

  Never mind.

  The Button House (or Chez Bouton, if you prefer) was the fourth in a row of five houses, identical in structure though trimmed out differently. (Or it was the second of five, depending on which end you picked to start your count. But you get the idea.)

  The houses formed a solid block, but at the end of the row there was a passageway. I picked my way past garbage cans to a cyclone fence, on the other side of which was the backyard shared by the five attached houses. There’s probably a word for the counterpart of a façade, and whatever it may be, that’s where each of the houses had a fire escape mounted. They all ended a full flight above ground level; if your house was on fire and you had to use the fire escape to get out, your weight on the lowest section would be enough to propel it downward, at which point you’d wind up standing where I was now, on a patch of concrete, looking up at a fire escape I couldn’t possibly reach.

  Unless, of course, I pulled over a garbage can and stood on top of it. There were a few on this side of the fence, too, and I chose one and positioned it where it would do the most good. Not, as you might think, beneath the Button House fire escape, but at the row’s other end; if lowering the fire escape was going to wake somebody, I’d just as soon it not be my client.

  Well, my former client, since he’d forfeited that status the moment he scarpered out of the Bum Rap with my $45,000 in hand. In fact, let’s call him my erstwhile client; that has the right sort of ring to it, doesn’t it?

  I took my time, keeping the clatter to a minimum, and when the fire escape was fully extended I remained absolutely still for a full two minutes, listening for unwelcome noises even as I watched for unwelcome lights.

  In their absence, I murmured thanks to Saint Dismas and ascended to the roof, and across its several neighbors to the roof of the Button House. Like its fellows, that roof held a trap door affording access to the fourth floor. You needed a key to unlock it—or the appropriate tools and talent.

  The lock was no problem. Lifting the thing was more of a struggle, and hard to do in the silence the circumstances demanded. But it was doable, and in the end it was done.

  I was in. Now for the tricky part.

  The top floor was essentially an attic, but one that had long since been finished off. In the right neighborhood, it could have been home to thirty or forty immigrants and an indeterminate number of chickens, but here on Willow Street all it held were the button-related collections and accumulations amassed by their owner over any number of misspent years.

  One great steamer trunk was filled to within a few inches of its top with all manner of buttons—unsorted, unclassified, and heaped together as if they’d spilled in from some gigantic chute. They came in all sizes and colors and all combinations of colors, and some were celluloid or Bakelite while others were cloth-covered. But a substantial number, I must say, looked to be very ordinary buttons of the sort found on very ordinary shirts, and I guessed I was looking at the duplicates, the leftovers, the buttonish residue that accrued when one bought no end of whole collections and accumulations.

  The man was clearly both collector and hoarder; what he didn’t need for his collection went into the trunk in his attic, because if it was a button he couldn’t bear to part with it. I suddenly knew what happened when a shirt wore out. Before it went in the trash, he’d snip off its buttons and toss them in the trunk.

  This trunk, say. Or that one over there. Or the one next to it . . .

  I plunged a cupped hand into the great sea of buttons, brought it up full, then let the buttons spill from my hand. I had a feeling the man himself did this sort of thing now and again, cavorting like Scrooge McDuck in his money bin.

  And why not? I could see how a person could get into it. Scooping up buttons, sifting through them, letting this one or that one catch your eye. It was pleasant, hunkering down here next to the trunk, while the world outside went on with its nasty and unfathomable business, and I just dipped and scooped and sifted and—

  But no. I had work to do.

  It took longer than I’d have preferred to negotiate the two flights of stairs from the fourth floor to the parlor floor. That was where he’d spent his time while Carolyn was watching, and that’s where I’d find what I was seeking. But first I had to get past the third floor, where he was sleeping, and stairs in old houses creak, and loud noises wake sleepers.

  And sometimes no noise is required. He was a youthful fellow, trim and vigorous, but what did I know about the state of his prostate? Perhaps a typical night was marked by a couple of trips to the bathroom, and perhaps he’d make one while I was on the stairs.

  And what would I do if he came bursting out of the bedroom with fire in his eyes and something lethal in his hand? For all I knew he owned the very dueling pistol with which Lachlan McIntosh had ended Button Gwinnett’s life, and kept it primed and loaded at his bedside. He’d take aim and fire, and I’d clutch my breast and fall to the floor, and three or eleven day
s later, that would be the end of me.

  Didn’t I tell you? You have to be out of your mind to be a cat burglar.

  It got easier once I was off the stairs. It still took a while because I had a lot to do, but I was able to do it in silence. Someone outside might have seen the occasional brief wink of my little flashlight, but on the list of risks I was taking, that one was down toward the bottom.

  I was just about done when I heard footsteps overhead. They stopped, and I held my breath, and let it out when I heard a toilet flush. Then more footsteps, and then silence.

  He’d evidently gone back to bed, but would he stay there? Even if he did, how could I possibly get past him unheard on my way to the roof?

  I made my way to the stairs, but went down instead of up, to the ground floor, and through the house to the rear. There was a door opening onto the yard in back, and I’d have liked to use it earlier. I’d have been spared all that business with the fire escape and the roofs. But I’d known it would be wired into the alarm system, and indeed it was.

  But I was inside now, and that made all the difference. I bridged the wiring and took the back door off the grid without disturbing the rest of the system. I unlocked the door, stepped outside, locked up after myself, and looked around.

  The sky was getting light, and that made sense; according to the calendar, we weren’t far from the shortest night of the year. From my own perspective it had gone on a little longer than the Thirty Years War, without being nearly as much fun.

  In one of our phone conversations, Carolyn had told me not to worry about feeding Raffles. “I’ll take care of that for you,” she said. “I don’t know when you’ll get home, but just go ahead and sleep as late as you can.”

  I got into bed around seven and out of it three hours later when the phone rang. I answered in a voice still full of sleep, and Ray said, “Aw, hell, Bernie. I woke you up, didn’t I?”

  “You did me a favor. I couldn’t get down from the fire escape.”

  “Huh?”

  “In the dream,” I said. “What’s funny is on some level I knew it was a dream, and I figured the way out was to fall. Just step off into space.”

  “But you couldn’t do it, right?”

  “Yeah. Why’s that?”

  “You’re a survivor, Bernie. Even in your sleep. Turns out you were right.”

  “Not to jump?”

  “About the syringe. About a couple of other things, too. You want to call me back when you’re awake enough to take it all in?”

  “I’m awake now,” I said, hoping it was true. “Let’s hear it.”

  “It all ties together,” I said. “I was pretty busy last night.”

  “Doin’ things I don’t need to know about.”

  “So how about if I tell you a few things that I happen to know, without saying how I came by the information?”

  “That’ll work.”

  When I was done he asked a few questions, listened to my answers, and made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a groan. “It’s kind of complicated,” he said. “I know what my grandmother would have called it.”

  “Oh?”

  “A real cluster fuck, God rest her soul. I guess I better not use the term in front of Meredith and Whatsisname.”

  “Nils,” I said, “and you’re right. They’d want to get in on it.”

  “I’d better get some warrants,” he said. “Problem is I got no grounds, which means gettin’ hold of the right judge. You got your hat ready, Bernie? The one you like to pull rabbits out of?”

  Did I? “Let’s hope so,” I said. “When do you want to do this? What’s today, Friday?”

  “Last I looked.”

  “Yesterday was Thursday,” I said, “even if it does feel like a week ago. It ought to be today, Ray, before anybody heads out to the Hamptons. What time? Six-thirty?”

  “Make it seven.”

  “At the Ostermaier house? Scene of the crime and all?”

  “No,” he said, after a moment’s thought. “Anything goes wrong, I’d hate to try explainin’ why I decided to hold a convention at a crime scene. You know, if you wouldn’t mind—”

  Sure, why not? Barnegat Books at seven, with all the usual suspects on hand. What the hell, it wouldn’t be the first time.

  I got to my store just in time to close for lunch. I opened up, turned on the lights, put the bargain table on the sidewalk, told Raffles I knew damn well he’d been fed, turned off the lights, and went out and locked the door. I thought of leaving a note for my wannabe customer, and I might have done so if I could have come up with anything clever. But I thought about the tasks I’d just performed and the order in which I’d performed them, and I decided my mind wasn’t working well enough to leave a blank piece of paper, let alone write something on it.

  “Juneau Lock,” Carolyn sang out when I came through her door. “And what are those bottles? Is that Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Tonic?”

  “From the deli,” I said. “It suddenly occurred to me that spicy Taiwanese food could have no better accompaniment.”

  “Somebody didn’t get much sleep last night,” she said, and a few minutes later she said, “Okay, I apologize. This is what we should have been drinking all along.”

  “It works, doesn’t it?”

  “It does,” she said, “even though it shouldn’t. A sweet fizzy soft drink that tastes like celery—”

  “Except artificial.”

  “Like artificial celery,” she agreed. “It shouldn’t go with pastrami, and yet it does.”

  “It’s almost traditional.”

  “Well, it’s a far cry from traditional with Juneau Lock, but I can see where it’s a tradition in the making. Okay, you’re a genius, Bern, especially when you’re sleep-deprived. Now tell me about last night.”

  “You know what’s funny, Bern?”

  “That it took us this long to try Dr. Brown’s with Juneau Lock?”

  “Besides that. I have this strong sense of all these people, Deirdre and Boyd and Meredith and Jackson, and yet I haven’t met any of them.”

  “Neither have I.”

  “Gee, that’s right, isn’t it? You haven’t. At least you’ve been in their homes.”

  “Not Jackson’s.”

  “You haven’t, have you? Why leave him out?”

  “He was probably home in Park Slope. And if he was in Boerum Hill with his girlfriend, then his wife and kids were in Park Slope. And his office is downtown in the Financial Center, and the only way to get into that building these days is to rent your own office there. Besides, Jackson gets a pass on the murder.”

  “It really was a murder, huh?”

  “Ray confirmed it. There’s evidence, although I’d hate to be the one presenting it to a jury.”

  “And Jackson’s in the clear.”

  “He didn’t kill anybody,” I said, “but he’s tied into the other crime, and I didn’t have to go to his home or his office to tie him in.”

  “Or his love nest?” She grinned. “I just wanted to use the phrase. How often do I get the chance? You must have found what you needed in Brooklyn Heights.”

  “I found everything I needed,” I told her.

  I went back to the store after lunch, but all I really did was make a phone call. Then I went out again, and at 2:30 I was sitting in a booth at a coffee shop on Madison Avenue, looking at a tattoo of a gecko.

  “I don’t get it,” Chloe said, squinting at the Button Gwinnett spoon. “Is there something wrong with it?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “The guy didn’t want it?”

  “Oh, he wanted it,” I said. “It made him feel like Alexander the Great.”

  “Then why isn’t he keeping it?”

  “An attack of conscience.”

  “His conscience was bothering him?”

  “Not his,” I said. “Bottom line, he’s not going to keep it.”

  She frowned. “I guess you want your money back.”

  I shook my head.


  “You don’t?”

  “We had a deal, Chloe. You gave me the spoon, I gave you the money. Period.”

  “What am I supposed to do with it now?”

  “The money? Go to Europe, if you still want to. It’s yours.”

  “The spoon,” she said.

  “I’d say just put it back in the cabinet,” I said, “but he already knows it’s missing. So I guess you’ll have to put it somewhere and discover it.”

  “Someplace where it’d be his fault for having put it there.”

  “Whatever works.”

  “And I get to keep the money.”

  “Right.”

  She thought about it. “You know,” she said, “yesterday this was the best deal ever, and now it’s even better. Unless there’s a catch. Be straight with me, okay? Is there a catch?”

  “No catch.”

  “That’s really amazing,” she said. She put the spoon in her purse, drew out a pen, scribbled on a paper napkin.

  “Here,” she said. “My cell number. That’s the best way to reach me. In case, you know, there’s something else you want me to steal.”

  I folded the napkin, put it in my pocket.

  “Even after I quit my job,” she said, “that’ll still be my number.” She grinned. “Unless I’m in Europe.”

  Back at the store, I called Ray and confirmed that we were set for seven o’clock. “Some of ’em may show up a few minutes early,” he said, “and somebody’s always a couple of minutes late, but all in all I’d say we’re gonna be on schedule.”

  “The four Ostermaier children,” I said.

  “Deirdre, Boyd, Meredith, and Jackson. Boyd’s bringin’ his partner. Stephen’s his name, but don’t ask me which partner he is.”

  “Stephen’s his life partner.”

  “Then that’s who he’s bringin’, so they can leave together for Fire Island when the show’s over. Meredith’s bringin’ Nils. Deirdre’s got nobody to bring, and Jackson’s got his wife and his girlfriend, and he’s not bringin’ either of ’em.”