The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart

by Lawrence Block

  Time to take another tack. “Ray,” I said, “when your wife answered earlier, I found myself remembering the time I helped you get a coat for her. Remember?”

  “That’s changing the subject all to hell an’ gone,” he said, “but it’s a funny thing you should mention it, because I was thinkin’ earlier about it myself.”

  “Really.”

  “She was sayin’ as to how the coat has seen better days, which who hasn’t, herself included, only you don’t want to try tellin’ her somethin’ like that. It seems as though they don’t last forever, which they damn well ought to, the prices they get for them. Personally I think the only thing the matter with hers is she’d like a new one, but this is gonna be a bitch because she’s got a particular style an’ color in mind. One of these days, Bernie, the two of us’ll have to sit ourselves down an’ talk about it.”

  “Maybe we won’t have to,” I said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Maybe Mrs. Kirschmann will be able to walk into some place nice, like Arvin Tannenbaum’s, say, and buy her own coat.”

  “Very funny,” he said. “The only reason the coat she’s got is from Tannenbaum’s is that’s where you hooked it for her. You think I can let her walk into their showroom an’ pick somethin’ out? Where am I gonna come up with that kind of dough?”

  “Ah,” I said. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  CHAPTER

  Eighteen

  That left me with a couple more phone calls to make, and I made them. Then I got on the East Side IRT and rode uptown once again, riding one stop past Hunter College this time and emerging at Seventy-seventh Street. I walked down a block and found the building where the whole thing started, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to call it that. It seemed clear that this business started a long while before the previous Wednesday night, and a long ways away.

  But it was Hugo Candlemas’s building I was standing in front of now, and he had been more my employer than my partner, but he was dead, too, and it looked as though I was supposed to do something about it. I wasn’t sure just where he’d been killed, but there was no question as to where Cappy Hoberman had been stabbed to death, and I felt it was about time for me to return to the scene of the crime.

  In the entrance hall, I studied the four buzzers before pushing the top one, marked CANDLEMAS, to save me the embarrassment of walking in on some police lab technicians, themselves returned to the crime scene in the wake of the second murder. I didn’t really expect there’d be anybody around, and there wasn’t, and when I’d waited long enough to establish that I took out my ring of tools and let myself into the building.

  You’d have thought they were my American Express card, the way I never left home without them.

  Up on the fourth floor, the door to Candlemas’s apartment was secured by a whole lot of that yellow crime scene tape, along with a couple of large handbills proclaiming the premises to be off-limits to unauthorized persons, sealed by order of the New York Police Department. To add a little muscle, someone—probably the yutz of a locksmith who’d opened up for the cops—had mounted a hinged hasp on the outside of the door and jamb and fastened it with a shiny new padlock.

  None of this looked to be inexpungable. The stoutest padlock is no match for a brute armed with a can of freon and a hammer; spray it with the one and swat it with the other and you’ve unfastened the Gordian knot. I had neither of those precision instruments, but I wouldn’t need them; I knew this brand of lock, and it’s notoriously easy to pick.

  I was more concerned with the paper and plastic. Anyone could get past them, but not without leaving traces of one’s passage. The ideal, of course, would be to have a roll of crime scene tape and a couple of handbills in your hip pocket; instead of trying to restore the originals on your way out, you could simply replace them.

  But I was not so equipped. I filed the thought away for future reference, cast a wistful glance at the padlock, and trotted downstairs.

  On my way, I remembered Ray’s review of the building’s other tenants—the gay couple in the basement, the blind woman on the ground floor, a businessman from Singapore in the Lehrmans’ apartment on two, and an unidentified tenant or tenants on the third floor. “The hell with who lives on the third floor,” Ray had said. “They’re like everybody else, they don’t know shit.”

  In the front hall, I found their buzzer, marked GEARHARDT. I tried them first, hoping that they knew at least to get out of town on a holiday weekend. But no, not long after I poked their buzzer a male voice came over the intercom, asking me who I was.

  “My name is Roger,” I said cheerfully, “and my friend’s name is Mary Beth, and we’d like to talk to you about the state of your immortal soul.”

  “Whyntcha shove it up your ass?” he suggested.

  “Oh!” I said, trying to sound shocked, but I think it was a waste of time, because he’d already broken the connection. I moved on to the buzzer immediately below it, deciding on a different approach for the fellow from Singapore. I couldn’t take the chance that he might welcome a visit from a couple of urban missionaries, or be too polite to let on otherwise. I could just pretend I was looking for the Lehrmans.

  But I didn’t have to, because he didn’t answer the bell. I reentered the building—no lockpicking this time, I’d kept my foot in the door—and went up a flight, to confront a door equipped with two excellent locks, one your basic Segal, the other a police lock fitted with one of the new pickproof Poulard cylinders.

  Pickproof indeed.

  The Lehrmans had a nice place, furnished with a little too much of everything—too many rugs on the floor, too many paintings on the walls, too much furniture crowded together in the rooms. Too many knickknacks on the marble mantel over the fireplace, too many on the whatnot shelf in the corner by the window. A minimalist decorator would have shuddered, and I don’t know what a Chinese businessman from Singapore would have made of it, but from a professional standpoint I have to say I was thrilled.

  It was a decorative scheme to gladden the heart of a burglar. You’ll never catch a burglar proclaiming that less is more. A burglar knows that less is less, and more is more. People who cram their apartment full of stuff, assuming they’re not the Collier brothers and the stuff is not old newspapers, are people who like things. They’re a lot more likely to have something worth taking than a guy who beds down on a futon in a room with nothing else in it but the track lighting on the ceiling.

  It would have been fun to have a look around, but who had the time? I walked straight through the apartment to the large bedroom at the rear, moved a bookcase and a large jade plant in a pot that looked like Rockwood, unlocked and raised the bedroom window, and crawled out onto the fire escape. I climbed two flights, past the sullen Mr. Gearhardt and his imperiled soul, and wasted close to ten minutes trying to find a benign way to open the late Mr. Candlemas’s bedroom window. He had casement windows, secured by a lever that you raised and lowered from within. But you couldn’t reach it from outside, naturally enough, not unless you could pry the window back from the frame and get the right sort of gizmo in that way. It’s not that hard if you’ve got the tools for it. Just watch an enterprising teenager open a locked automobile in the wink of an eye and you’ll get the idea.

  This wasn’t the identical operation to grand theft auto, but it requires a similar instrument, and I didn’t have one on hand. I tried to get in without it and kept coming teasingly close, which in turn kept me trying. It finally dawned on me that I was spending far too much time in plain sight on a fire escape, whereupon I used the glass cutter on my tool ring and cut out one of the window’s little panes. I reached in, turned the latch, and let myself in.

  I was in there for hours. It was stuffy at first, but I opened a window in the front room, and the pane I’d removed in the rear provided good cross-ventilation. It didn’t take me long to find the spot where Cappy Hoberman had lain bleeding. They hadn’t outlined the body in tape or chalk. They don’t
do that anymore, preferring to have the crime scene photographer expose a few rolls of film before they move the body. But they hadn’t done anything about the blood, either, and a lot of it had soaked into the carpet.

  I stood there and looked at it. He’d died on the Aubusson, and his blood hadn’t done a lot for the rug’s appearance. Even if you assumed that Candlemas had bought the rug from someone other than its rightful owner, he must have paid a good sum for it. It looked terrible now, but somebody someday would be able to get the stains out. They’ve got all sorts of chemicals and enzymes available, and nowadays they can get blood out of anything, even a turnip.

  But they couldn’t pump it back into Hoberman.

  I walked around the apartment, running alternate scenarios through my mind. Hoberman gives Charlie Weeks the bone carving of the mouse, cuts his visit short, and returns to this apartment. By cab, natch, since he didn’t have me along to urge him to walk. Something he says or does moves Candlemas to kill him. Candlemas grabs something sharp—this letter opener, say, or one of these Sabatier knives from the kitchen, or some other implement even better suited to dispatching a visitor. Candlemas strikes, Hoberman crumples and falls, and Candlemas slips out and legs it over to Second Avenue, looking to buy Hefty bags and a Skilsaw.

  Then what?

  Earlier, Weeks and I had spun out a theory in which Candlemas got home, found the cops on the scene, muttered, “Curses, foiled again!” and stole off into the night. But his own death put a different light on things. When he left Hoberman bleeding, he evidently encountered someone. Maybe he went to the wrong person for help, or maybe someone was lying doggo, waiting for him.

  Maybe it was that person who made the 911 call that sent the cops to Seventy-sixth Street. In any case, the cops came. Hoberman, the way I figured it, was still breathing when Candlemas took a powder. His wounds were mortal, and he was alive but not lively, probably inert and unconscious. Somewhere along the way he rallied and wrote six unfathomable letters on my heretofore blameless attaché case, using his own life’s blood for ink. Then, perhaps even as the Keystone Kops were sending out for a locksmith, the valiant captain breathed his last.

  It was probably around that time, too, that I was downstairs myself, wondering what had happened to Candlemas and considering a little illegal entry of my own. Even loopy with Ludomir, I’d been able to spot that for a bad idea. A good thing, too, considering what I would have walked in on. I could have saved the city the price of a locksmith’s house call, but I’d have had a lot of explaining to do, and my task wouldn’t have gotten all that much easier when the attaché case turned out to be mine.

  The new scenario was pretty reasonable, I decided, and a substantial improvement over the one Charlie Weeks and I had hatched the previous morning. It made the mysterious telephone call to the police a little less inexplicable, and fit the dying message into a logical time frame.

  But it didn’t do a whole lot to decode it.

  C-A-P-H-O-B. What the hell could it mean?

  I thought about it as I ambled to and fro, opening drawers and rummaging around in them, exploring closets, looking inside and beneath and behind this and that and the other thing. I was glad to have something to ponder, because this was the worst way to search a place.

  The best way is when you know what you’re looking for and where it is. You go in, get it, and get out. Almost as good is when you know what you’re looking for; you go through the place systematically, checking those locations where it’s likely to be, and as soon as you find it you get to go home.

  The next best thing—and probably the most enjoyable—is when you’re not looking for anything in particular. Missions of this sort are burglary at its best, and they run the gamut from the meticulously planned suburban break-in, where you time the neighborhood security patrol and run rings around the electronic alarm system, to a completely impulsive crime of opportunity, where you kick the door in and hope for the best. You don’t know what they’ve got or where they put it, but you get to be Goldilocks, sleeping in all the beds and eating all the porridge, and you never know what you’re going to find until you find it.

  And, finally, we have the kind of fool’s errand I was on this lovely Sunday. I didn’t know what I wanted or where he’d stashed it, or even if it existed, whatever it might turn out to be. I had to look everywhere, because I didn’t know how big or small it was, or if it had to be kept cold or dry or out of drafts.

  And it’s terribly frustrating. If you find something, is that it? Or is there something more waiting to be found? Conversely, if you don’t find anything, do you keep at it until something turns up? Or should you go on home because there’s nothing there?

  You know what it’s like? Sex without orgasm. How can you tell when you’re supposed to stop?

  So I was almost glad to have CAPHOB to think about while I searched. I wouldn’t call my musing terribly productive, but I came up with some interesting ideas.

  1. Suppose CAPHOB was an acronym. Suppose each letter stood for a word. That would be a good way to compress a lot of information into the number of letters you could fit on the side of an attaché case before your life trickled out of you. Just what the letters stood for was hard to say, but the possibilities were extensive, surely. Can Anyone Pinch Hit Or Bunt? Criminal Activity Pays Horribly On Balance. Cancel Anniversary Party—Having Our Baby! None of these struck me as the sort of thing I’d be likely to choose as my last word to the world, but I hadn’t been lying there bleeding, struggling to scribble my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the city.

  2. Suppose CAPHOB was upside down. After all, I didn’t know how Hoberman had spent the years since his adventures in Anatruria. Maybe he’d devoted some of them to a career selling life insurance, until jotting things down upside down had become second nature to him. To test the hypothesis, I printed CAPHOB and turned the piece of paper upside down, and I got the same meaningless word upside down and backwards. Then I printed the individual letters upside down, and this worked a little better, because four of the letters were unchanged. What I got looked something like CVdHOB, except the V was really an upside-down A. I suppose I could have taken this a step further and tried to work out what CVDHOB might be an acronym for, but you have to draw the line somewhere.

  3. Maybe the most obvious explanation was the real one, and he’d been trying to write his name. This did make a certain kind of sense, actually. There’d been no identification found on his person, which suggested that Candlemas might have taken his wallet from him while he lay dying. Maybe Hoberman had recoiled at the thought of rotting away in an unmarked grave, and wanted to let the world know who he was. When you considered the fact that even now the tag on his toe read “Hugo Candlemas,” his concern didn’t seem so farfetched. It was a damned unsatisfying dying message, pointing not to the killer but to the victim, but what are you going to do, send it back to Hoberman with a rejection slip?

  4. Maybe, as Carolyn had suggested earlier, Hoberman was dyslexic. He’d written the right letters but got them in the wrong order. I switched them around without coming up with anything more promising than HOPCAB. It was true, to be sure, that the Boccaccio (say) was only a short hop away by cab, but could that possibly be the urgent information Hoberman wanted to pass on to whoever found his body? I couldn’t see it. If I was ready to say the long goodbye and sleep the big sleep, I’d at least try for something profound, like “Life is a fountain,” say, or “Take two and hit to right.”

  5. Perhaps, startling as it was to entertain the notion, perhaps CAPHOB was a word. It wasn’t in the dictionary, nor was anything that started out with those first four letters, but suppose it was a proper name. In fact, suppose it was Candlemas’s name. It didn’t much sound like a name, but was it that much less plausible than Souslik or Marmotte? What would you think if you saw either of those written in blood on the side of your attaché case?

  6. Was it possible it was just drivel? Consider Dutch Schultz’s famous last words, a great extended
monologue duly recorded for posterity as he lay dying. They were words, all right, and some of the sentences even parsed, but the great man had made no sense at all. Suppose the good captain, presented with a small canvas, had managed the neat trick of distilling a whole world of meaninglessness into six meaningless letters.

  And so on.

  Sometime in the middle of the afternoon I got hungry. I was all set to order Chinese food when I realized it wouldn’t work; I couldn’t open the door to receive it because of the police seals. By this time I was really in the mood for it, too, so I thought about having it delivered to the Lehrman apartment and waiting for it down there. I don’t know what made me think that was a sensible idea. Maybe I’d overdosed on meditation, using CAPHOB as my mantra. Fortunately I nipped the whole enterprise in the bud and raided the kitchen instead.

  What I found was leftover Chinese food, but it had been left too long. You wouldn’t want to touch it with a ten-foot chopstick. I toasted a couple of English muffins (the bread was stale) and spread them with peanut butter and jelly (the butter was rancid) and washed them down with black instant coffee (the milk was beyond description). Someday, I thought, when all of this was but a memory, I’d be eating real meals again, hearty coffee-shop breakfasts, overseasoned ethnic lunches with Carolyn, real dinners in real restaurants. For now, though, I seemed destined to grab breakfast on the run, skip lunch or steal it, and make the big meal of the day popcorn. My clothes were neither falling off me nor gripping me too tightly, so I seemed to be getting away with it. But it would be nice to eat like a human being again.

  I drank the last of the coffee, rinsed my dishes in the sink, and got back to work.