The Burglar on the Prowl

by Lawrence Block

  I guess Barbara Creeley functioned satisfactorily in her role as a flesh-and-blood inflatable doll, because her partner seemed to be having a good time. He moaned and grunted a lot, and said “Baby, baby” and that sort of thing, and made a lot of noise as he reached the finish line. Then the bed stopped creaking and rocking above me, and all was mercifully silent for a moment, and then his weight shifted and he got up from the bed.

  “Not bad,” he said. “You’re a pretty good piece of ass for a dead girl.” And he laughed that deep-throated laugh I’d heard earlier, and said, his tone mock-earnest, “Well, darling? Was it good for you?” and started in laughing all over again.

  I stayed where I was. Not bad for a dead girl. But it was just a drug, wasn’t it? Just a couple of Roofies, enough to sedate her but not enough to kill her. He couldn’t really mean it literally, could he?

  While I lay there and wondered about it, he clomped around the apartment, making more noise than a man generally makes getting dressed. I heard him yanking drawers out, spilling things, and I had a pretty good idea what was going on. But I couldn’t do anything about it. I kept knowing what the son of a bitch was doing, and I kept being unable to do anything about it.

  Eventually he walked off, and I didn’t hear him for a while and wondered if he might have left. Then his footsteps returned, and I heard a buzzing sound. I couldn’t place it, until he spoke and cleared things up for me.

  “Your name’s Barbara,” he said, with the air of having just discovered this fact. “Hey, Barbie Doll, how about if I give you a shave? Be a nice surprise for you when you wake up. Make things a little smoother and sweeter for the next man in your life, too.”

  The shaver went on buzzing.

  “Nah, the hell with it,” he said, and there was a noise which it didn’t take too much imagination to identify as the sound of the electric shaver hitting the floor. “So long,” he said. “Sleep tight, you stupid cow.”

  He slammed the door on his way out, and he didn’t stop to lock the locks. I heard his heavy footsteps on the stairs, and I heard the door slam down on the first floor. And then, when I didn’t hear anything more, I set about wriggling and squirming, and the heroic devil-may-care burglar got out from under the bed.

  He’d left a godawful mess behind. I’d figured out the noise he was making was a by-product of a search for something to steal; having taken what he could sexually, he was looking to turn a cash profit on the night as well.

  Her black leather handbag was on the floor where he’d flung it, its contents strewed all over the place. I scooped up a lipstick and a comb and her checkbook and a set of keys and returned them to her purse. Her wallet, a little French purse of green leather with gold tooling, lay in a corner where he’d flung it; I picked it up and saw that her driver’s license was halfway out of its frame, and figured that’s how he’d learned her name. The license identified her as Barbara Anne Creeley, gave a date of birth that made her thirty-two years old, and showed a picture of a pretty woman with dark hair and about as winning a smile as anyone can manage while being photographed by some schmendrick from the Department of Motor Vehicles.

  I carried the wallet over to the bedside, past the heap of clothing she’d been wearing. She was sprawled on her back, her head angled to one side, and her mouth was open, which never helps one to look one’s best, but it was the same woman, no question about it, and she’d have struck me as prettier if she’d been less pitiable. She was naked, and that bothered me enough so that I covered her with a sheet, even at the risk of waking her. But of course it didn’t wake her. She was alive, her breathing was deep and even, and she was in no danger of waking up, not for hours.

  I went through her wallet and saw that he’d left her credit cards. Her bank card was there, too. He couldn’t use it at an ATM unless he knew her PIN number, but he might have taken it anyway, and I was glad to see he hadn’t. He was an amateur, it was clear to me, and not a real thief at all. There are some burglars who will rape a woman if they encounter her in the course of a burglary, not because they’re rapists by inclination but because she’s there and they like her looks so what the hell. Similarly, there are some rapists who, having enjoyed a woman’s favors, feel they might as well put a few dollars in their pocket. He was in the latter category, and that’s why she still had her credit cards, but that’s also why the place was such a mess; it was all part of the rape.

  And of course there was no money in her wallet.

  I put her purse in order, with the wallet in it. I found the various drawers he’d upended, restored their contents, and put them back where they’d come from. It seemed to me that he’d taken some of the jewelry I’d passed up, but I was glad to see he’d missed the locket with her parents’ pictures, although he’d managed to take her class ring, the son of a bitch.

  In her bathroom, he’d hurled a couple of bottles against the wall, but all but one were plastic and didn’t break. I cleaned up the one broken bottle, and got rid of the shards of glass so she wouldn’t cut herself. I found her Lady Remington that he’d switched on and then hurled to the floor, and wasn’t surprised to discover that it no longer worked. The pink plastic case was cracked, and when I moved the switch nothing happened. I laid it in the wastebasket, then changed my mind, wrapped it in a paper towel, and tucked it away in a jacket pocket.

  I got the place as neat as I could, short of scrubbing the floors on my hands and knees, and then I went in for a last look at her. It was the closest I’d been to a naked woman in longer than I cared to remember, and all I felt was sad.

  I went to the door, opened it. Then I sighed heavily and returned to the bedroom for one final stab at chivalry. It didn’t take long, maybe five minutes, after which I let myself out of Barbara Creeley’s apartment, picked her locks shut, and went home.

  Ten

  If Crandall Oaktree Mapes is a shitheel—”

  “Crandall Rountree Mapes.”

  “Whatever. If he’s a shitheel just for taking Marty’s girlfriend away from him, Bern, what does that make this guy?”

  “There must be a word,” I said, “but I can’t think of it.”

  “Well, for openers,” Carolyn said, “I’d have to say he’s a prick. You never got a look at him?”

  “For all the time he was there, I was under the bed. All I got a look at were the dust bunnies.”

  “It’s good you didn’t sneeze.”

  “It is,” I agreed. “It’s good I didn’t even think about sneezing, because it was unpleasant enough without having that to worry about. But no, I never got a look at him. I decided he was six-four with a washboard stomach and shoulders out to here, but that was my imagination. All I really know is he had a deep voice.”

  “I know women with deep voices, Bern. You can’t tell too much from a deep voice.”

  It was Thursday, a few minutes after noon, and we were having lunch at my bookstore. Carolyn had gone clear over to the Second Avenue Deli for sandwiches piled high with the best corned beef and pastrami and tongue in town. What, I’d asked her, was the occasion, and she’d replied that there was no occasion beyond the fact that she’d spent much of the previous night dreaming about delicatessen.

  “I missed dinner,” she said. “I was on the computer for hours, browsing the listings on Date-a-Dyke, and I figured instead of wasting time eating I’d go over to the Cubby Hole and snack on the bar food. So I went to bed with nothing in my stomach but a couple handfuls of Beer Nuts, and I had this endless dream where they kept making my sandwich but never got around to bringing it to the table. And by the time I woke up I knew just what we were gonna have for lunch today. It’s good, isn’t it?”

  We were working on the sandwiches and sipping our Cel-Ray tonic, and it turned out to be just what I wanted, even if I hadn’t had a dream to tell me so. Corned beef is Raffles’s favorite thing in all the world, and Carolyn had brought a little extra and slipped it into his food dish, where he was at once eating it and talking to it, a ritual he goes thro
ugh with kosher corned beef and nothing else. Siamese talk to their food occasionally, or so Carolyn tells me, but Raffles is a tailless tabby, allegedly a Manx but lacking the characteristic body shape and rabbity gait of the typical Manx. His only Manx trait, really, is the tail he doesn’t have, and I’ve often suspected that he’s a Manx manqué, but I could be wrong about that. He’s certainly not Siamese, but he sounded like one when he had corned beef in his dish, so that’s how you might have pictured him if you’d been hiding under the bed, with nothing to go by but his voice.

  Carolyn said, “How do you figure a guy like that, anyway? I mean, it goes without saying that he hates women, but why would he want her unconscious?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe conscious partners tend to give him bad reviews.”

  “I guess Barbara Creeley couldn’t tell him he was a lousy lover, since she didn’t have a clue what was going on. Still, you’d think he’d want someone capable of responding. Maybe his first girlfriend was English.”

  “I suppose it’s possible.”

  She put down her sandwich. “That was a joke, Bern. You know the old one about the Frenchman who finds a girl on the beach and starts making love to her?”

  “I know the joke.”

  “Someone comes along and tells him she’s dead and he’s horrified. ‘Soccer blew,’ he said. ‘I thought she was English!’ ”

  “I know the joke. Soccer blew, huh?”

  “That’s what they say. Frenchmen, they say it all the time. Soccer blew. Don’t ask me what it means.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  “Bern? That was pretty decent of you, straightening up before you left. You must have been anxious to get out of there.”

  “Well, I felt sorry for her. I wanted to do something.”

  “It sounds as though you did everything but wash the windows.”

  I shook my head. “All I did was straighten up a few things. I was going to put her clothes away, but I figured I’d just put them in the wrong place. Besides, there was no way to keep her from knowing she’d been out of it when she got home, or that she’d had sex. But I couldn’t leave her stuff in a heap on the floor, so I folded her things and put them on a chair.”

  “And put the stuff in her purse, and so on. Bern, do you suppose he left her any souvenirs?”

  “Souvenirs?”

  “Like a pregnancy she wasn’t counting on, or an STD.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’d say probably not. He used a condom.”

  “Really? You wouldn’t figure him to be that considerate, would you?”

  “I think he was considering himself,” I said, “and practicing safe sex more for his own benefit than for hers.”

  “And maybe to keep from leaving evidence.”

  “Evidence?”

  “You know, DNA. She could go to the police and they’d take a swab and be able to identify him if they ever caught him. From his DNA.”

  “If he was concerned about that,” I said, “he’d probably have taken the condom away with him.”

  “He left it there?”

  “On the floor.”

  “Yuck. What did you do?”

  “I got rid of it.”

  “How?”

  “I picked it up and flushed it down the toilet.”

  “You touched it? Double yuck. How could you even do that, Bern?”

  “I was wearing gloves.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “And I couldn’t just leave it where I found it.”

  “No, of course not. You know something, Bern? Barbara Creeley was lucky you were there.”

  “Oh, absolutely,” I said. “It was her lucky night all around.”

  “I mean it, Bern. If you hadn’t been there, that prick would have taken her watch and her charm bracelet and her diamond earrings.”

  “Instead, I took them.”

  “But you put them back, Bern.”

  “Well, I felt sorry for her. An unprincipled son of a bitch slipped a drug into her drink and brought her home and raped her, and now I was adding insult to injury by stealing her stuff.”

  “Except you got there first.”

  “Even so. I’d already picked up the jewelry he left behind and put it away, and I figured if I put the good stuff back, she might not even know she’d been robbed. There were a few things missing, but what kind of moron would snatch a class ring and pass up a bracelet dripping with gold coins?”

  “She’ll just think she must have misplaced the ring.”

  “If I could manage to find out who he was,” I said, “I’d pay him a visit one of these nights and get her ring back for her.”

  “Unless he’s sold it by then.”

  “Oh, he won’t sell it. He won’t know where to go with it, and anyway he’ll want to keep it for a souvenir. Something to remember her by, the son of a bitch.”

  “That’d be neat, if you could steal it back. How would you get it to her? Just drop it in the mail?”

  “Or let myself into her apartment and put it in the drawer it came from.”

  “Perfect. She’d just think she missed it the last time she looked for it, that it was hiding under a piece of costume jewelry.” She frowned. “Or else she’d worry that she was losing her mind. But at least she’d have her ring back.”

  “I always leave a place as neat as I found it,” I said, “though in his case I might make an exception. But it’s academic, because I don’t have any idea who he is or where he lives.”

  “And you got rid of the only thing that would identify him.” When I looked blank, she said, “You flushed it down the toilet, remember?”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Not that you could run around giving DNA tests to every guy with a deep voice. Bern, I know you didn’t break into her apartment out of an urge to do her a good deed. But that’s what you wound up doing, and she was lucky you were there. Didn’t you tell me you even put money in her wallet?”

  “A few dollars.”

  “How much?”

  “Well, there was no way to know how much she started with. I didn’t think she’d carry too much cash. I wound up tucking a hundred and twenty dollars into the bills compartment.”

  “A burglar who gives you money. That’s gotta be a first, Bern.”

  “You think?”

  “And that’s in addition to putting back everything you took—the bracelet and the earrings and the watch.”

  “Right.”

  “And the envelope full of money you found in the fridge. Bern? You put that back, didn’t you?”

  “Well, no,” I said. “I didn’t.”

  “Oh.”

  “I took a hundred and twenty bucks out of it,” I said, “and that’s what I put in her wallet. But I kept the rest.”

  “Oh.”

  “Chivalry only goes so far.”

  “I guess.”

  “You’re surprised,” I said.

  “Yeah, kind of. I guess I was starting to see you as a knight in shining armor.”

  “I’m afraid the armor’s a little tarnished. I went there to steal, Carolyn. I put back most of what I took, but I wanted to come out a few dollars ahead on the deal.”

  “So you made a profit of…”

  “Eleven hundred and twenty dollars,” I said. “Minus cab fare.”

  “Well, that’s a better hourly rate than you make selling books.”

  “No kidding.”

  “But considering the risk…”

  I shook my head. “I don’t even want to go there. It was crazy, going on the prowl like that, and I just hope I got it out of my system, at least for a little while. The thing is, I knew how irrational it was, and how dangerous.”

  “But you did it anyway.”

  “I did it anyway. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say I couldn’t help myself, and I really couldn’t keep from hanging on to the money in the brown envelope, either. I can tell myself that I’m a pretty literate guy and a decent fellow. I don’t go out of my way to offend
people, and I certainly wouldn’t slip Rohypnol into a lady’s drink. But there’s no getting around it. When all is said and done, I’m a burglar through and through.”

  There’s a bell hanging from the door of the bookstore, so arranged that it makes a not-unpleasant jingling sound when the door opens. I was already into my last sentence when I heard the bell, and I suppose I could have chopped the words off instantly, but I didn’t.

  “Now ain’t that the truth,” my visitor said. “Truer words were never spoken, not by Mrs. Rhodenbarr’s son Bernard, at any rate. A burglar through an’ through, that’s what you are, all right, an’ all you’ll ever be if you live to be older’n Methuselah.”

  I felt, if not as old as Methuselah, as though I could easily pass for his younger brother. “Hello, Ray,” I said. “How’s crime?”

  He sighed and shook his head, and when he spoke the jaunty banter was gone. “As if you didn’t know,” he said. “You really put your foot in it this time, Bernie. You screwed up big time. I don’t know how the hell you’re gonna get yourself out of this one.”

  Eleven

  That’s a nice suit,” I said. “Armani?”

  “Close,” he said, and held back the lapel to show me the label. “Canaletto. Another of your Eyetalians, an’ you can’t beat ’em for suits.”

  Whichever fine Italian hand had crafted his suit, the price tag would have been too high for a policeman’s income, but then Ray Kirschmann had never attempted to live on what the city paid him. Fortunately no one would look at him and guess that his suit cost a bundle, because it had stopped looking expensive the minute he put it on. It was, as I’d said, a perfectly nice suit, but whatever suit he wore wound up looking as though it had been carefully tailored for another man, and a differently shaped one at that. The suit of the moment, navy with a subtle gray stripe, was too roomy in the shoulders and too tight at the waist, and the stain on the sleeve didn’t help, either. It looked like spaghetti sauce, which was another thing the Italians were acknowledged to be good at.