The Burglar on the Prowl

by Lawrence Block

  “I know, but—”

  “And I need the money.”

  I also needed the psychological lift of winning one for a change. I’d started off hiding under the bed, and things had gone downhill from there. Since then I’d been hassled by the cops, burgled by brutes, and given a supporting role in a drive-by homicide. It was time for me to make something happen instead of waiting to see what happened next. Maybe I couldn’t bomb Iraq, but I could damn well burgle Mapes, and I wouldn’t even have to wait to find out what the premier of France thought of it.

  “Wait here,” Carolyn said. “I’ll just be a minute. Don’t you dare go without me.”

  I got on the West Side Drive. The Sable rode well and handled nicely, and the traffic was almost light enough for Cruise Control, but not quite. I caught a light at 57th Street and glanced over at Carolyn. “I gather she didn’t stand you up,” I said.

  “Not at all, Bern. What I did do is sit up.”

  “Sit up?”

  “And take notice. I got there first, but only by a minute or two. I walked right into the lobby of the Algonquin, just like Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley before me.”

  “And Alexander Woollcott, and George S. Kaufman…”

  “And all those guys, right. So I took a table in the lobby, and this waiter straight out of a London men’s club came over and asked me what I wanted to drink, and I didn’t know.”

  “That’s a first.”

  “Well, there’s a bar off the lobby, where you’d go for a drink, and there’s the lobby, where people meet for tea. Now most of the people having tea were actually having it in martini glasses. Tea’s more or less an expression there. But what if she really intended to have tea, and there I am, looking like a drunk?”

  “Didn’t your Date-a-Dyke ad say you love scotch?”

  “I know, but I wasn’t sure I should love it on the first date. You know what they say, Bern. You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.”

  “Is that what they say?”

  “I think so. While I was weighing the pros and consequences, this woman walked in the door and made a beeline for my table. She didn’t even take a minute to scan the room. She zoomed right in on me and came over.”

  “She was just passing by, and thought you’d be the perfect person for a serious talk about Amway products.”

  “It was GurlyGurl, Bern.”

  “And did she live up to her screen name?”

  “She’s pretty great looking. Taller than I am, but who do you know that isn’t? Dark hair, real nice figure, peaches and cream complexion, big gray eyes—”

  “Gray?”

  “She said they used to be blue, but the color faded out of them. Have you ever heard of that happening?”

  “With hair.”

  “I guess it can happen with eyes, too, and Miss Clairol’s no help if it does. She’d just come from work, and she said she hoped I hadn’t been waiting long, and I said I just got there myself, I hadn’t even ordered yet, and she said…”

  Di dah di dah di dah. She fed me the conversation word for word, and a court reporter couldn’t have done a better job of it. I stopped listening, because I was caught up in the physical description.

  Hair, figure, complexion, eyes—granted, it could fit any number of women, but I’d had the feeling for a while now that there was a great big coincidence hovering just out of sight, waiting patiently for the chance to coincide.

  I tuned in again, and she was telling how they’d ordered drinks after all. “She asked what I wanted, and I said I’d probably have a cup of tea, and she said she thought I liked scotch, and I said I did, but tea’s nice sometimes, and she said she’s a big tea drinker herself, but after the week she’d just had scotch would sure hit the spot, and I said in that case I didn’t figure one drink would hurt me. Because I know you don’t drink before a job, Bern, and I shouldn’t either, but it would be different if I was going into the house. I’m not, am I?”

  “No, I’m on my own for that part.”

  “That’s what I thought, so I figured one drink would be fine.”

  “So you had a drink.”

  “Well, two.”

  “I thought you just said—”

  “Bern, who has one drink? It’s like one pant or one scissor. They come in pairs. Nobody has just one drink.”

  “Somebody must,” I said, “or where would the expression come from? ‘I think I’ll have a drink.’ A drink. Not two drinks, not six drinks, not ten drinks. ‘I think I’ll have a drink.’ People say it all the time.”

  “Uh-huh, and then they say ‘I think I’ll have another.’ A drink is just the stepping-off point. Anyway, we had two each, and I ate a whole dish of mixed nuts to soak up the alcohol, and I’m fine.”

  “You seem okay.”

  “That’s because I am okay. And I’m not driving, so I don’t have to worry about a Breathalyzer test, and I’m not going into the house, so what’s the problem?”

  “I don’t think there is any. I gather the two of you hit it off.”

  “I like her, Bern. And I think she likes me.”

  “You made a good impression.”

  “And a good thing, because that’s something you only get one crack at.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “Manhattan. Hey, I knew that going in. I didn’t want to meet her and be crazy about her and then discover she’s GU.”

  “Geographically undesirable. It’s a curse, all right. I met a girl once and we hit it off, and she wouldn’t tell me where she lived. She’d always meet me places, or come over to my place.”

  “Brooklyn?”

  “Way the hell out in Queens,” I said. “You had to take the subway for days, and then you took a bus, and then you walked ten blocks. That was the end of that.”

  “But if she was willing to come into the city all the time—”

  “When they’re that GU,” I said, “you wind up under all this pressure to live together, because otherwise one person’s spending half their life in transit. I figured it would save a whole lot of aggravation to break up.”

  “Wow.”

  “Besides,” I said, “she had this whiny voice, and I thought I could get used to it, and then one day I realized I didn’t want to get used to it. In fact what I didn’t want was to hear it long enough to get used to it.” I took the cell phone from my pocket, put through a call to the number I’d programmed in earlier. “So that was that,” I said, while the phone rang in the house on Devonshire Close. It rang four times before a machine picked up, and I listened to what I supposed was the recorded voice of Crandall Rountree Mapes, inviting me to leave a message. I hung up in mid-invitation.

  “Well, GG’s not GU,” Carolyn said.

  “GG?”

  “As in GurlyGurl. In fact she’s pretty desirable all across the board.”

  “No whiny voice, huh?”

  “A nice voice. Kind of throaty.”

  “She could live in Manhattan and still be a long ways away. Washington Heights, say.”

  “Washington Heights isn’t that far. I had a girlfriend in Washington Heights.”

  “That’s what I was referring to.”

  “Well, it was a disaster, but you couldn’t blame it on the neighborhood. It was just a disaster. Anyway, she lives closer than that, because she walks to work, and it only takes her fifteen minutes.”

  “Where does she work?”

  “Forty-fifth and Madison. That’s why she picked the Algonquin. Why?”

  “I just wondered. So if she lives fifteen minutes from there, she could live in the East Sixties.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Or the West Fifties.”

  “So?”

  “Or the East Thirties.”

  “What are you getting at, Bern?”

  “I just want to make sure,” I said.

  “You want to make sure of what?”

  “That she’s not who I’m afraid she is.”

  “Huh?�
�

  “Because it would be a coincidence,” I said, “but coincidences happen all the time, and I’ve had the feeling one’s on its way right about now. And if it turns out that she’s who I think she is—”

  “Who do you think she is?”

  “This would be a lot easier,” I said, “if the two of you had told each other your names, but as it stands—”

  “We did.”

  “You did?”

  “Of course we did, Bern. You only keep it anonymous until you actually meet. We told each other our names right away. Before the old guy brought the drinks, even.”

  “What did you say your name was?”

  “I said it was Carolyn, Bern. Carolyn Kaiser. Not very imaginative, I know, but I just went and pulled a name out of the air, and—”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said, ‘Hi, Carolyn.’ Taking me at my word, not suspecting for a moment that I’d lie about a thing like that, and—”

  “What did she say her name was?”

  “Lacey Kavinoky,” she said, “which rhymes with okie-dokey.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “That it rhymes? Positive, Bern. No question in my mind.”

  “I mean—”

  “I know what you mean. Am I sure it’s her name? I’m sure it’s what she said. Was I supposed to ask to see her driver’s license? Are you gonna tell me who you were afraid she was?”

  “Barbara Creeley.”

  “Barbara Creeley. The one who got—”

  “Burgled and date-raped. Yeah, you don’t have to tell me. I know it’s ridiculous.”

  “I think it would have to make a lot more sense,” she said, “in order to be no worse than ridiculous. There are eight million people in New York, Bern. What are the odds?”

  “Eight million in the five boroughs,” I said. “Only two million in Manhattan, if that many.”

  “One in two million?”

  “Half of the two million are male,” I said. “Of the one million left, by the time you cross out the ones who are under twenty and over fifty, and the married ones, and—”

  “I see where you’re going with this,” she said, “and you’re still nuts.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Anyway, forget it. Lacey’s not Barbara.”

  “I know.”

  “It would not only be a coincidence, it’d be a dumb one.”

  “I know.”

  “I sound like I’m pissed off, don’t I? I’m not. I’m just sort of incredulous, that’s all.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Her name’s Lacey Kavinoky,” she said, “and she’s cute and bright and genuinely nice. And she’s gay, Bern, and she knows it. She’s not one of those oh-I-always-thought-it-might-be-interesting-to-try-being-with-a-woman women. She’s not one of those variety’s-the-spice-of-life women, either. She’s like me, she’s got nothing against men, and high on the list of things she doesn’t hold against them is her beautiful body. You remember that song?”

  “I remember.”

  “ ‘If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?’ Well, if you told her, Bern, she wouldn’t.”

  “Great.”

  “But she might hold it against me. We’ll see. But there’s one thing I can tell you for sure, and that’s that she’s not Barbara Creeley. She’s Lacey, Lacey Kavinoky, and if anybody date-rapes her it’s gonna be me.”

  Twenty-One

  We stayed with the West Side Drive while it became the Henry Hudson Parkway, and we kept going north and crossed the Harlem River into the Bronx. I took the 232nd Street exit and wound up on Palisade Avenue. The long narrow green strip of Riverdale Park was on our left, with the Metro North tracks between the park and the Hudson River.

  I’d studied the route on the map, but there were enough one-way streets to get me disoriented, and it took a little while to find Devonshire Close. While I drove around looking for it, I told her about my mission Wednesday night, scouting the terrain and probing the Mapes defenses. The doors were out, I said, because the alarm system was one I couldn’t sabotage from outside, and all the windows were wired into it, and the coal chute, my old ace in the hole, had been trumped by bricks and cement.

  “I give up,” she said. “How are you gonna get in?”

  I told her I’d show her when we got there, and shortly thereafter we did just that. Before I made the turn into Devonshire Close I got out my cell phone and tried the number again, and got the machine again. This time I waited for the beep and said, “Dr. Mapes? Are you there? Please pick up if you are. It’s pretty important.”

  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 st
reet 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?”