No one did, and I broke the connection. "In case he was screening his calls," I said.
"That's great," she said, "but now your voice is on his answering machine. How smart is that?"
"If it's still on there when I leave," I said, "then it could be a problem."
"You're going to erase it. That's fine if it's digital, but the old machines that use tape don't really erase anything. When you tell them to, you just program them to record over the old message when somebody leaves a new one. So what if it's a tape machine?"
"I'll steal the tape," I said.
I drove into Devonshire Close and spotted Mapes's house right away. While I couldn't have sworn to it, it looked to have the same lights on as it had two nights ago. There was a parking spot open in front of the house, and another across the street, but I did what I'd already decided to do and made the turn into Mapes's driveway. I drove all the way to the back and parked in front of the garage, leaving the motor running.
Carolyn was saying something, but I ignored her and got out of the car. The garage door was down, and didn't budge when I tried to lift it. There was a little door on the side of the garage. It hadn't been locked Wednesday night and it wasn't locked now, though the kind of lock it was likely to have wouldn't have delayed me long. Unlocked, it delayed me not at all, and I went inside and found first a light switch and then the button to raise the garage door. I killed the light once the door was up, got back in the car, drove into the garage, pulled up alongside (and felt insignificant next to) the Lexus SUV, and cut the engine.
I started to get out of the car. Carolyn hadn't moved. She said, "Bern, are you sure about this? We're in the belly of the beast."
"Not the belly. The house, where I'm going, that's the belly."
"So what's this? The jaw, and we're wedged here like a wad of tobacco, with nothing to look forward to but a lot of chewing and spitting. We're parked in the garage of the house you're gonna break into. What if somebody comes?"
"Nobody's going to come."
"What if somebody passes by and sees the car in here, and knows it's not their car?"
"Nobody can see anything once the garage door's closed."
"You're gonna close the garage door? Then if anything does happen, we're trapped."
"No," I said. "We're not trapped. The car is."
"But that's where you're leaving me, the last I heard."
"You wouldn't have to stay in the car. You could stand over by the side of the garage, where you could keep an eye on things. The only thing you have to be concerned about is if someone pulls into the driveway."
"And then what do I do? Start up the engine and let the carbon monoxide solve all my problems?"
"Then you hit the horn," I said. "Three blasts, loud and long."
"That's the signal, huh?"
"That's the signal. You sound the alarm and then you bail out."
"How?"
"Through the backyard. There's a Cyclone fence about five feet high. You can climb a fence, can't you?"
"Probably, if there's an irate homeowner coming after me. Then what? I just run away?"
"Discretion," I said, "is the better part of burglary. Run until you hit the sidewalk on the next street over, then just walk until you get somewhere."
"Where? I don't know my way around here."
"Just sort of drift until you get to Broadway, and then catch the subway. Nobody's going to be chasing you. And this is all academic, anyway, because they're not coming home until we're long gone."
"Whatever you say, Bern. Only I wish I felt as certain as you sound. Now how are you gonna get in? You were about to tell me."
"I'll show you," I said. She got out of the car and I led her out of the garage, pressing the button to lower the garage door on our way out. We started down the driveway, and when we'd covered almost half the length of the house, I stopped and pointed.
"There!" I said.
"There? That's the side door, Bern, and you just said it was hooked into the alarm system."
"To the right of the door."
"To the right of the door? There's nothing to the right of the door."
"Immediately to the right of it," I said, "at eye level. What do you see?"
"Damned if I know. A white wooden rectangle. If it was closer to the ground I'd say it was a pet door, but the only pet who could jump through it at that height would be a kangaroo, and it's too small for kangaroos. What the hell is it, anyway?"
"A milk chute," I said.
"A milk chute? I still don't know what that is."
"It's a sort of a pass-through," I said. "It's about the thickness of the wall it's in, with a door on either side. The milkman opens the outer door and puts the milk in, and the householder opens the inner door and takes it out."
"People still get milk deliveries?"
"Not that I know of," I said, "but they did when these houses were built, and a milk chute was pretty much standard equipment. I suppose the houses that got aluminum siding jobs had their milk chutes covered up, but you're not going to see much aluminum siding in Riverdale, and certainly not on a stone house. Even if you remodel, the way they did when they closed off the chute to the coal cellar, you wouldn't bother to get rid of the milk chute. It's not hurting anything, and what else are you going to do with the space, and how could you fill it without making a mess of the exterior wall? Didn't you have a milk chute when you were a kid?"
"In a twelfth-floor apartment on Eastern Parkway? The milkman would have had to be a human fly."
"Well, I grew up in a house," I said, "and we had a milk chute, and one day I came home from school and my mother wasn't home and the house was locked. And I got in through the milk chute."
"How old were you, Bern?"
"I don't know. Eleven? Twelve?"
"You were smaller then."
"So?"
"So you've grown, and the milk chute hasn't. Look at you. You'll never fit through that thing."
"Sure I will," I said. "I've grown some since I was twelve, but that wasn't the last time I wiggled in through the milk chute. I was still getting in that way when I was seventeen, and I had my full size by then. And even when I was twelve people never believed I could do it, because it looks as though you won't fit, and then you do."
"What's on the other side of the milk chute?"
"I'll be able to tell you later. But what's usually there is a closet."
"Suppose it's locked?" I gave her a look. "Sorry, Bern, I forgot who I was talking to. If it's locked you'll unlock it. Suppose, well, suppose you can't get through the thing after all?"
"Then I'll come back out," I said, "and think of something else, and if there's nothing else to think of then we'll go back home and call it a night."
If you can get your head through an opening, the rest of the body can follow.
That's a basic guideline, and it's obviously not universally applicable. If you weigh four hundred pounds, your head is going to slip through apertures that will balk at accepting your hips. (I considered the fat man who'd overpaid so generously forThe Secret Agent. A camel would fit more easily through the eye of a needle, I thought, than would he through a milk chute.)
It's a good general principle, however, and newborns prove it every day. Raffles seems to know it instinctively; if his whiskers clear an opening he'll follow them through, and if they don't he'll step back and think of another way to go, or decide he didn't really want to go there anyway.
The Mapes milk chute was large enough to accommodate my head, whiskers and all. I put on my gloves and got down to business.
The milk chute had a little catch that you turn prior to pulling the door open. It's not a lock, just a device to keep the thing from swinging open in the wind. The catch didn't want to turn, though, and then the door didn't want to open. Time and paint had made them both stuck in their ways, but a little pressure (and the tip of a knife blade) led them to change their attitude.
The chute's inner door had a catch as well, b
ut it was on the side away from me, to be opened by the person retrieving the milk. I had my tools in hand, and a thin four-inch strip of flexible steel slipped the catch as if it had been designed for that specific purpose. The inner door opened, but when I pushed it I felt resistance before it had swung inward more than a few inches. It was a yielding, spongy sort of resistance; I could force the door farther open, but when I let go it would spring back.
I used my little flashlight, and saw right away what the problem was. The milk chute opened into a closet, as I'd expected, and the resistance was being supplied by an overcoat.
I reached a hand in, shifted things around, and created enough of a space for the door to swing all the way open. I returned my tools and penlight to my pocket, kept the sheer Pliofilm gloves on, and then proceeded to poke my head into the opening and follow it with as much as possible of the rest of me. I drew my shoulders in, making myself as narrow and eel-like as possible, said a quick and urgent prayer to St. Dismas, and commenced wriggling and squirming for all I was worth.
And I have to say it brought it all back. Not just that first magical moment of youth, when I'd thrilled at having discovered a way to get into a house I'd been locked out of. There was nothing illicit or dangerous about that first time, I'd been locked out by sheer accident and had every right and reason to be inside, but the thrill had been there from the beginning, and everything that came after grew out of that initial venture.
In no time at all I was playing with locks and teaching myself how to open them, sending away to the correspondence schools that advertised inPopular Science and enrolling in their locksmithing courses, pressing my mom's house key in a bar of soap and filing a duplicate to match the impression.
And if I hadn't been locked out that fateful afternoon, would I have escaped a life of crime? Somehow I doubt it. There are, as far as I know, no felons swiping peaches from the family tree. Both the Grimeses and the Rhodenbarrs boast generations of law-abiding folk, content to play by the rules and trade an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. I, on the other hand, am a born thief, the sort of reprehensible character of whom it is said that he'd rather steal a dollar than earn five. (That's not literally true, I'm nowhere near that bad, but I'd certainly rather steal five dollars than earn one.) And I do possess an innate knack for getting into places designed to keep me out. I studied locks, I practiced opening them, but the lessons came easy to me. It is, I blush to admit, a gift.
I don't often think back to those early days, but then I don't often crawl through milk chutes. So I let all of this go through my mind, and it was a mind that might have been better occupied with the task of getting through the milk chute as quickly as possible. Because, as you can readily appreciate, one is at one's most vulnerable during the transitional interval when one is neither inside nor outside of the house. If someone were to come along while my head was in the coat closet and my legs suspended above the driveway, I'd be hard put to explain what I was doing there and unable to run off and do it somewhere else.
But I couldn't hurry through, because I'd somehow reached a point, half in and half out, where I'd achieved an undesirable state of equilibrium, an unwelcome stasis. Wriggling and squirming weren't getting me anywhere, and I couldn't grab onto something and pull myself through because, damn it to hell, I'd put my arms at my sides in order to fit my shoulders through, and now my arms were pinned there by the sides of the milk chute.
All I had to do, I told myself, was the right sort of wriggling. If I set about squirming in an ergonomically sound manner, so as to build up a little momentum, why in no time at all.
Hell.
It wasn't working.
For God's sake, was this how it was going to end? Half in and half out of somebody else's house, unable to move in either direction, with nothing to do until Mapes and his wife came home and called the cops? If this had happened when I first tried this stunt, back in my pre-salad days, my whole career in burglary might have ended before it had begun. If it hadn't happened then, why did it have to happen now?
I might have had further thoughts on the matter, might even have enjoyed the irony of it all, but right about then a pair of hands came along and grabbed me by the ankles.
Twenty-Two
Ihadn't heard a car, hadn't heard so much as a footfall. My head was in the closet, literally if not figuratively, with coats and other outerwear all around it, so that would tend to muffle the sound. And it's not as though I was listening hard all the while. I was too busy with my wriggling and squirming, not to mention my remembrance of milk chutes past, to have been keeping an ear open. Had Carolyn honked the horn? Three times, I'd told her, loud and long. But would I have heard it if she had? The car was in a closed garage, and I was in a coat closet. Maybe she'd honked and I hadn't noticed.
The hands on my ankles might as well have been bands of steel. My heart sank, my mind froze, and all I could do was hope Carolyn got out in time, and that she'd think to call Wally Hemphill for me.
Hours passed, or maybe they were only seconds. And a voice said, "It's me, Bern."
And that's all she said. There were any number of other things she could have said, and I'd have had to listen to them, but she didn't, and that is just one more reason why Carolyn and I will be friends forever. She didn't say another word, but what she did do was tighten her grip on my ankles and give a little push, and that was all it took. I landed facedown in a dark closet, and I couldn't have been happier about it.
Forty minutes later I unlocked the side door, the one adjacent to the milk chute, and let myself out of the house. I'd found the control panel for the alarm system in the entry hall next to the front door-that's where they usually put it, so the homeowner can punch in his code when he walks in the door. I'd studied the Kilgore system, and knew it had zones; you could set it to bypass certain zones, so that you could open a second-floor window for ventilation without setting off a ton of bells and whistles. I worked out what zone the side door was in, bypassed it, and let myself out of the house.
Like most homemakers, Mrs. Mapes kept extra grocery bags in a kitchen cupboard. I'd helped myself to four, because what I was taking was heavy enough to warrant double-bagging. I tucked each of two shopping bags into each of two others, filled them up with what I'd found in the safe in the master bedroom, added one other item I could hardly leave behind, and carried everything out of the house and up the length of the driveway to the garage, where Carolyn let out a breath she must have been holding for the greater portion of the time I'd been inside.
"I was beginning to worry," she said. "You were in there for almost an hour."
"It was forty minutes," I said.
"That's almost an hour. Here, let me get the door for you. You want me to push the button for the garage door?"
"After I get these in the car." There was a release button for the trunk lid, especially convenient if you don't have a key. I pressed it, put the bags in the trunk, and got behind the wheel. Carolyn pressed the button, and by the time the garage door was up she was in her seat next to me. I started the car and backed all the way out of the garage, leaving the motor running while I pressed the button a final time to lower the garage door. I was still wearing my gloves, and I used my gloved hands to wipe off surfaces she might have touched.
She noticed this, and told me she was pretty sure she hadn't touched anything. "Well, just in case," I said, and went back to the side door, using my picks to relock it. Carolyn had closed the milk chute door earlier, after I'd cleared it, and I opened it long enough to wipe it free of prints, then closed it and fastened the latch to leave it as I'd found it. I'd already refastened the catch on the inner door.
I got in the car again, backed the rest of the way out of the driveway. There was no traffic on Devonshire Close, which was good and bad-there were fewer passers-by to notice us, but we were correspondingly more noticeable to anybody who did. Soon, though, we were on another street-Ploughman's Bush, it must have been-and before long we were on Broa
dway, heading south toward Manhattan.
We could have gone home the same way we'd come-the Henry Hudson, the West Side Drive-but something kept me on Broadway, moving at a sedate pace, stopping for red lights, resuming our journey when they turned green. It's a venerable old road, Broadway, running from the foot of Manhattan clear up to Albany. I'd read an article written by a fellow who walked the length of it-not from Albany, but from the Westchester County line. He'd told about what he'd seen, and the history of it all, and I gather you could see quite a bit on a walk like that. You can probably see a fair amount driving, as far as that goes, but I wasn't paying attention.
"Bern?"
"What?"
"Is something wrong?"
"No. Why?"
"You're not talking."
Burglar on the Prowl Page 15