The Burglar on the Prowl

by Lawrence Block

  “These are good,” she said, “but how authentic do you figure they are? I mean, do they even have pita bread in Afghanistan?”

  “Does it matter? I mean, do they have tacos in Beijing? Or cal-zone in Tirana?”

  She saw my point. We were, after all, in New York, where half the taco stands are run by Chinese, and most of the pizzerias by Albanians. “You’re right,” she said. “But getting back to Marty. This is something different for him, isn’t it? The jobs he steers you to are usually friends of his who want to be burgled so they can collect the insurance. This Mapes doesn’t sound like a friend—”

  “Not unless you consider shitheel a term of endearment.”

  “—and I don’t suppose he’s going to be in on the burglary. What’s in the safe?”

  “Cash.”

  “How does Marty know that? Don’t tell me it was open.”

  “If it had been open,” I said, “he could have taken the money himself. Not that he would have, because at the time he didn’t have anything against Mapes. He didn’t much care for him, he’d always thought of him as a weasel and a fourflusher, but this was long before Marty had met Marisol.”

  “Who was probably still in high school in San Juan.”

  “Oakmont, actually.”

  “Wherever. Oakmont? Where’s that, Bern?”

  “Pennsylvania. It’s outside of Pittsburgh.”

  “So’s Philadelphia,” she said. “Outside of Pittsburgh, that is. How does he know about the cash?”

  “Things Mapes let drop. I don’t know what he said exactly, but the implication was that he got paid now and then in cash, and that it stayed out of the bank, and off the books.”

  “I hardly ever get cash anymore,” she said. “It’s almost all credit cards nowadays. Which is fine, because they don’t bounce the way checks used to. Do you get much cash?”

  “When it’s less than ten dollars, almost everybody pays cash. And just the other day I had a sale that came to forty-eight dollars and change, and the guy handed me a fifty-dollar bill. But that’s a rarity.”

  “The forty-eight-dollar sale? Or getting paid in cash.”

  “Both. When it’s a two-dollar sale from the bargain table, sometimes I just put it in my pocket. But most of the time I ring the sale. I mean, I’m not looking to skim cash from the business. I’d rather show as much store income as possible, and declare it and pay taxes on it.”

  “Because your other job’s tax-free.”

  “That’s the thing about burglary,” I said. “There’s no tax bite, and very little paperwork.”

  “I’m not gonna ask about the pension plan, Bern. Anyway, what does Mapes do?”

  “He’s a doctor.”

  “And he gets paid in cash?”

  “Not entirely, but there’s a fair amount of cash involved.”

  “But everybody has medical insurance,” she said. “Who pays cash?”

  “I don’t have medical insurance.”

  “Well, no. Neither do I, Bern. We run our own businesses, and the cost of medical coverage would bankrupt us. Fortunately my health is good, so it doesn’t come up very often, but when I have to go to the doctor I wind up writing a check. That way at least it’s tax deductible.”

  “Right.”

  “Of course maybe Mapes is an old-fashioned doctor,” she said, “like the one I go to over in Stuyvesant Town. You don’t need an appointment, you just walk in and take a number like you were at Zabar’s. And it’s fifteen or twenty dollars for your basic office visit. But the guy’s a saint, Bern, and Mapes doesn’t sound much like a candidate for canonization.”

  “He doesn’t, does he?”

  “So what kind of a doctor is he?”

  “A plastic surgeon.”

  “You’re kidding, right? A guy does nose jobs and gets paid in cash?”

  “According to Marty,” I said, “most plastic surgery is elective. The insurance companies won’t reimburse you for it. If you want breast enhancement or liposuction or rhinoplasty, it’s going to come out of your own pocket.”

  “Or out of my checking account, because if I shell out that kind of money I’d at least like to get the tax deduction. It’s still deductible, isn’t it? Even if it is elective?”

  “I think so.”

  “So?”

  “People who wind up with a lot of cash of their own,” I said, “are always looking for ways to pay cash that won’t show up. Say you’re skimming a hundred thousand dollars a year off the top of your business.”

  “Which would be a neat trick, in my business. I mean, skimming the surface wouldn’t do it, Bern. I’d be going through bedrock and halfway to China.”

  “It’s a hypothetical example.”

  “Not a dog grooming facility at all. Got it.”

  “You’ve got all that cash,” I said, “and what are you going to do with it? You can buy your wife a diamond necklace, that’ll work, but then you may not be able to insure it, or somewhere down the line someone might ask you where it came from. If you’re a collector, of course, you’re in the clear. You can buy stamps and coins and rare books until the cows come home, paying cash for everything, and your hobby’ll soak up every spare dollar you’ve got. But another thing you can do—”

  “Is pay the plastic surgeon?”

  “You’d have to write a check to the hospital,” I said, “and you could deduct that, but maybe the surgeon lets you know that he wouldn’t mind getting his fee in cash, and that he might even shave it a little in return for cash payment. That way everybody comes out ahead.”

  “Neat.”

  “Very neat,” I agreed. “Also, I gather that Mapes has some acquaintances on what I’d call the wrong side of the law, if it weren’t that I spent so much time on that side myself.”

  “Criminals.”

  “Of one sort or another, yes. The scuttlebutt, according to Marty, is that he’s the go-to guy when somebody like Tony Soprano needs an illegal operation.”

  She looked puzzled. “An illegal operation? You mean an abortion, Bern? Last I heard, they were still legal.”

  “I mean if you want a gunshot wound stitched up,” I said, “by someone who won’t report it. Or if you walk in with a poster off a post office wall and ask him to make you look different from the picture, and incidentally how about removing some of the tattoos and distinguishing marks they mentioned? I don’t suppose Mapes gets a lot of those, but I bet they pay top dollar and they don’t try to put it on their MasterCard.”

  She thought it over, nodded. “Bottom line,” she said, “he takes in a fair amount of cash. And keeps it in a wall safe.”

  “That’s how Marty figures it.”

  “And how do you figure it, Bern?”

  “I figure he takes in a lot of cash,” I said, “and he keeps something in the safe. If it’s not cash, it’s still going to be something worth taking. The thing is, I know he’s got a safe, and I know where it is. I even know what picture’s in front of it.”

  “A painted ship on a painted ocean.”

  “A poorly painted ship on a poorly painted ocean.”

  “You figure the safe’ll be easy to open?”

  “A wall safe? I never yet found a really difficult one. And if he’s got the mother of all wall safes, well, all that means is I’ll have to pull it out of the wall and take it home and work on it at leisure. That’s another thing about wall safes, they’re portable. They have to be or you couldn’t stick them in the wall.”

  “Are you gonna do it, Bern?”

  “I told Marty I’d have to think about it. He really wants me to do it. He offered to come along on the job, and even said he’d be willing to waive his end.”

  “What was he gonna wave his end at?”

  “Waive with an i. He’d get a finder’s fee, and if he came along, too, he’d get a share. But he said he’d be willing to go the whole route and not get a nickel for his troubles. Of course he probably knows I wouldn’t take him up on the offer, but the fact that he mad
e it in the first place shows how strongly he feels. He doesn’t care about the money. He just wants to see Crandall Mapes get one in the eye. Whatever he’s got in the safe, it’s either cash or something he bought for cash. So it’s not insured, which makes it a dead loss to the good doctor.”

  “You figure Mapes is really that big a shitheel, Bern?”

  “Well, I don’t suppose he’s one of nature’s noblemen. At the very least he’s a bounder, and probably a cad in the bargain. Marty’s got a particular reason to hate him, because he took Marty’s girl away from him before he was done with her. Personally, I’ve got nothing against Dr. Mapes. He hasn’t done anything bad to me, and he’s not likely to, since I haven’t got a girlfriend for him to steal.”

  “Neither have I.”

  “But I don’t have to hate a man in order to steal from him. I’ve never bothered to justify what I do, because I recognize it’s not justifiable.”

  “You’ve said it’s a character defect.”

  “It is, and I probably ought to do something about it. And maybe I will, someday.”

  “But not today, huh, Bern?”

  “Not today,” I said, “and not tomorrow, and not the day after tomorrow.”

  “What’s the day after tomorrow?”

  “Friday.”

  “Thanks, Bern. If I didn’t have you for a friend I’d have to go out and buy a calendar. What happens on Friday?” I just looked at her, and she put her hand on her forehead. “Duh,” she said. “That’s when you’re gonna do it. Friday night? I guess that means you’ll be ordering Perrier at the Bum Rap.”

  We meet every day after work at a gin mill around the corner for a ritual Thank-God-It’s-Finished drink, to unwind after a high-pressure day of washing dogs and peddling books. On those occasional evenings when the work has just begun for me, my standard tipple is Perrier water. Scotch, my usual drug of choice, mixes well with any number of things, but burglary, alas, is not among them.

  “But that’s okay,” she said, “because I won’t be there myself.” She cocked her head, winked. “I’ve got a date.”

  “Anybody I know?”

  “Nope. Well, I shouldn’t be so quick to say that. You might know her. But I don’t.”

  “You met her online.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Which service? Date-a-Dyke?”

  “They’re the best, Bern. They’re much better than Lesbe Friends at screening out the teenage boys. What’s the deal with adolescent males and gay women, do you have a clue? Why are they so fascinated with us? Because I can assure you it’s not reciprocal.”

  “You mean to say you don’t have fantasies of being a fifteen-year-old boy, or fooling around with one?”

  “Oddly enough,” she said, “I don’t. Bern, you were a fifteen-yearold boy once.”

  “That was before computer dating and online chat rooms.”

  “Yeah, but it wasn’t before Sappho. Did you have a thing about lesbians?”

  “I did have a thing,” I said, “though I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. As far as lesbians were concerned, I barely knew they existed. I had a pretty elaborate fantasy life, but as far as I can remember it was pretty much dyke-free.”

  “I just have this image of a hot chat room conversation, with two gay women pulling out all the stops and telling each other just what they want to do and how they’ll do it, and each one of them is actually a boy. I just thought of something.”

  “What?”

  “Well, the boys who do this. I mean, they may be crazy but they’re not stupid, right?”

  “So?”

  “So don’t you figure they know their online buddy is about as much of a lesbian as they are? And if they know, and get off on it anyway, what does that make them?”

  “Happy,” I suggested.

  “I guess. Anyway, you get a lot less of that crap with Date-a-Dyke. There’s no chatting, you just post messages back and forth. And if you click you make a date to meet.”

  “And this’ll be what, your fourth date?”

  “Only the third, Bern. I had one all set a week ago, and she canceled.”

  “Cold feet?”

  She shook her head. “Warm memories. She and her ex were going to try to make it work after all. So it was just as well she canceled, because earlier she’d said she was footloose and fancy-free, that her last relationship was a horror and she never wanted to see the bitch again. If she was going to be carrying all that baggage, well, I’m glad I didn’t waste an evening on her.”

  “Figures.”

  “The one I’m seeing Friday,” she said, “is a paralegal at a law firm that represents lenders in commercial real estate transactions.”

  “She probably tweaked it a little to make it sound exciting.”

  “So it’s not glamorous. It’s not as though washing dogs day in and day out is gonna get you on the cover of Vanity Fair. Anyway, she sounds interesting. Of course, without a photograph it’s hard to know if you’re going to be attracted to one another.”

  “No photos on Date-a-Dyke?”

  “That’s one way to keep the boys away. You’d think it’d be the other way around, that they’d have trouble finding photos to post, but they just download them from somewhere else.” She rolled her eyes. “Teenage boys sending each other naked pictures of the women they’re pretending to be. Some world we live in, huh, Bern?”

  “What’s her name, the woman you’re meeting?”

  “If we hit it off, she’ll probably tell me sooner or later. Right now we’re on a screen name basis. She’s GurlyGurl.”

  “She probably won’t show up dressed to go duck hunting.”

  “I think the screen name’s partly ironic, actually. She’s not ultra-femme, but she doesn’t drive a Peterbilt semi, either.”

  “Somewhere in the middle.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “ ‘I’m not a lipstick lesbian, but I play one at the office.’ ”

  “Something like that, Bern. She sounds pretty interesting. Even if it’s not a romance, it should make for a fun evening. So I’d have to say I’m looking forward to Friday.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  Three

  I went back to the bookstore and opened up, and I can’t say my afternoon would have been any less exciting if I’d been, say, a paralegal at a law firm representing lenders in commercial real estate transactions. GurlyGurl must have earned more than I did that day, and I’ll bet she’s got medical coverage, too.

  I closed up around six, brought in my bargain table from its place on the sidewalk, made sure Raffles had dried food in his food dish and fresh water in his water bowl, and that the bathroom door was ajar so he could use the toilet. I met Carolyn at the Bum Rap, and we ordered our usual scotches, hers on the rocks, mine with a splash of soda. Maxine brought them and we drank to something—crime, most likely—and worked on our drinks. Somewhere in the middle of our second round, Carolyn asked if I wanted to come over to her place for an evening in front of the television set. It was Wednesday, she pointed out, and that meant The West Wing and Law & Order, both of which would go perfectly with some take-out Chinese from Hunan Pan.

  “Can’t,” I said.

  “You’ve got a date?”

  “The last date I can remember,” I said, “is 1066.”

  “The Battle of Hastings?”

  “If I’d been there,” I said, “I’d have been on Harold’s side. That’s how well dating works for me.”

  “You could try the computer, you know.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “And even if you don’t, Bern, you’ll meet someone. It’s just a question of time.”

  “By the time I meet someone,” I said, “I’ll have forgotten what it is you’re supposed to do with them. No, I haven’t got a date tonight. I’ve got to go to work.”

  “Tonight? I thought that was Friday.”

  “Tonight too.”

  “But you’re drinking, Bern.”

  “I’m not
drinking alone, though, am I?”

  She frowned. “Bern, you never have a drop of alcohol before you go out burgling. It’s a firm rule of yours, and just about the only one.”

  “I don’t play cards with men named Doc,” I said, “or eat at places called Mom’s.”

  “Or drink before you burgle.”

  “Or drink before I burgle,” I agreed. “Three sound rules, I’d have to say.”

  She thought it over. “You’re working tonight, but it’s not going to involve breaking and entering.”

  “I shall not break,” I said. “Neither shall I enter.”

  “Are you doing an appraisal?”

  My antiquarian book business sometimes has me working evenings, appraising a client’s library for insurance purposes or making an offer to a potential seller. But that wasn’t what I had on tonight’s agenda.

  “It’s burglary-related,” I said, “and it demands a reasonably cool head, but not necessarily a sober one. I’m taking the subway up to Riverdale for a look at the Mapes estate.”

  “A reconnaissance mission. Do you want company?” She frowned. “But I’d have to be back by nine o’clock. This is gonna sound silly, but I really don’t want to miss The West Wing.”

  “It doesn’t sound silly. Tonight’ll be boring, anyway. All I’m going to do is look at the house and walk around the neighborhood.” I picked up my drink, observing its pleasing color. “Friday’s when I could use company, but you’re tied up with GurlyGurl.”

  “Wait a minute. I thought Marty was going with you.”

  I shook my head. “He’d be willing, but there’s no way I’d want to take him along. Remember, he knows Mapes. If he’s spotted in the area, if there’s anything at all to connect him to the burglary—”

  “And you were going to ask me to come with you? Why didn’t you say something?”