The Burglar on the Prowl

by Lawrence Block

  He bit into a doughnut, chased it with a gulp of coffee. He’d picked me up in a city car, a Chevrolet Monte Carlo that must have been confiscated from somebody buying or selling low-grade cocaine, and now we were in a restaurant near the Manhattan side of the Williamsburg Bridge. Ray was partial to it, for reasons that remain unclear to me. We’d picked up our coffee and doughnuts at the counter and taken them to a table, on which Ray was now putting his cards.

  “So we had nothin’ to go on,” he said, “an’ we ID’d him anyway.”

  “How?”

  “Good police work,” he said. “How’d he get to your store? Well, you don’t see too many fat guys on the bus or the subway, unless that’s all they can afford, an’ I already told you about his wallet.”

  “How much was he carrying?”

  “I didn’t weigh him, but he had to go over three hundred pounds. Oh, money?” He held his thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. “A wad this thick. Eighty-seven hundred bucks, all in hundreds, an’ that’s not countin’ what he had in euros. That’s a man who can afford to take a cab, but I knew right off that’s not how he got there.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “What’s he gonna do, get a cabby to break a hundred? He didn’t have any small bills, Bernie. What that tells me is he’s got a car. He drove there, an’ he’s plannin’ to drive straight home, wherever home is.” He shrugged. “Course, we checked cabbies, too, lookin’ for somebody who dropped a fat guy on your block of East 11th somewhere around lunchtime. You go through the motions, but I knew he drove.”

  “Unless he walked.”

  “A guy with his build?”

  “I don’t know, Ray. The man was light on his feet.”

  “Every fat man’s light on his feet, Bernie. They gotta be or they wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. Anyway, even if you had a point, it’s a mute one. We found the car.”

  “Oh.”

  “He left your place walkin’ east, an’ he was gettin’ ready to cross the street when he got blown away instead. So that tells me to look south an’ east of your bookstore, an’ what did we find on 10th Street between University an’ Fifth?”

  “A car?”

  “A Buick,” he said, “pulled up smack dab alongside a fire hydrant.”

  “It’s good you got there before the traffic squad towed him.”

  “Couldn’t happen, Bern. He had DPL plates. Diplomatic immunity might not keep him from gettin’ shot full of holes, but it kept his car from gettin’ hauled off to the pound. It mighta kept us from searchin’ his car, I’m not too clear on the rules, but as fate would have it I had the car open before I even noticed the DPL tags. Careless of me.”

  “But convenient.”

  “Photo ID in the glove compartment, a driver’s license plus his credentials from the Latvian embassy. Guy’s name is Valdi Berzins, an’ accordin’ to the embassy he had somethin’ to do with the Latvian mission to the UN, but nothin’ too important. That was all we got from him outside of his address, which was a hotel, the Blantyre on East 51st Street. He had a room there by the month. Not a bad hotel, but not the Carlyle, either. Only thing we found in the room was a scrapbook of newspaper clippings, an’ the last I heard they were lookin’ for someone to translate ’em.”

  “Pardon my Latvian,” I said. “I assume that’s the language they’re in?”

  “Some’s Russian, goin’ by the letters. They’re in that alphabet they got, that’s like Greek but worse.”

  “Cyrillic.”

  “No, I’m pretty sure it’s Russian. The others are in our alphabet, for all the good it does. An’ there’s one in English, speculatin’ that the Black Scourge of Riga might be hidin’ out here in America.”

  “The Black Scourge of Riga. Did they give his name?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “an’ it’s a whole string of vowels an’ consonants. He’s some kind of war criminal, would be my guess.”

  “Another doddering old European who might have been a concentration camp guard. Whatever he did, he probably can’t remember doing it.” I thought a moment. “How old was Arnold Lyle?”

  “I forget. Why?”

  “Because he changed his name from something, and it probably had vowels and consonants in it. If the Black Scourge of Riga was a war criminal, he’d have to have been at least twenty-five in 1945, and probably older than that. Otherwise he’d have been the Junior Assistant Black Scourge of Riga. But say he was twenty-five. That would make him what, eighty-four?”

  “Forget it. Lyle was fifty tops.”

  “It was just a thought. There’s a connection there, Ray. Not to the clipping about the Black Scourge, but some kind of connection tying Berzins to Lyle.”

  “They’re both Russians.”

  “Except for Berzins, who’s Latvian. But Latvia was part of the Soviet Union back when there was such a thing. Not originally, because it was independent between the two world wars, but then the Russians took it over along with the rest of the Baltics. Ray? How hard would it be to get into the murder apartment? The one at 34th and Third?”

  “It’s a crime scene, Bernie. It’s sealed.”

  “Oh.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d like to get in there.”

  “Oh, well, we’ll just ask permission from the guys in Major Cases. ‘Bernie here’s a convicted burglar, plus he’s an early suspect in the case, an’ he’d like to poke around the crime scene. Any of youse got a problem with that?’ ”

  “I thought we could do it off the books.”

  “Sneak you in, in other words. Why?”

  “Two people died in that apartment,” I said, “plus the doorman downstairs. They all got killed because someone went there looking for something.”

  “Which we don’t know what it is.”

  No, but I was beginning to have an idea. “We know they didn’t get it.”

  “Bernie, I saw the safe. It was cleaner’n a whistle.”

  “So if the McGuffin was in the safe, the perps got it.”

  “Who the hell’s McGuffin, an’ where’d he come from?”

  “It’s a name,” I said, “for the thing everybody wants, because we have to call it something and we don’t know what it is. If it was in the safe, they got it. But suppose it wasn’t?”

  He frowned at me. “Why’d they have a safe an’ not put the thing inside? Unless they didn’t have it in the first place.”

  “A possibility,” I admitted, “but I think they had it, and I think they were planning to sell it, and they bought the safe so they could keep the money in it when they got paid, because they were expecting a lot of money and they’d be getting it in cash. But suppose they kept the McGuffin somewhere else?”

  “Then the perps got it. They tortured Lyle an’ Schnittke until they handed it over, an’—”

  “Did you find evidence of torture?”

  “No, just a couple of bullets in their heads.”

  “That may have hurt,” I said, “but it wouldn’t have made them talk.”

  “Then they talked without bein’ tortured, or the perps found the stuff on their own, and you know how I know that? Because if it was there an’ they missed it, then we would have found it.”

  “I know they didn’t find it, Ray. Otherwise they wouldn’t have looked for it in my apartment.”

  He sighed. “It was us tossed your place, Bernie. We had a court order, it was all opened up aboveboard.”

  I told him about the second search, and when he protested that I hadn’t reported it, I told him about Edgar the Doorman and the INS.

  He looked hurt. “We wouldn’t rat a guy out to those assholes,” he said. “Half the guys on the force are Irish, an’ half of them got a relative with a fishy Green Card or none at all. All the same, I can see why he’d be worried. But I have to say you’re right. Same MO with the doorman means the same bunch of mopes, and if they found it they’d quit lookin’. So you know what I think? I think it wasn’t there in the first place.”

&n
bsp; “Because the murder scene was searched by trained police investigators.”

  “Right.”

  “What were you looking for, Ray? And where did you look for it?”

  “I can answer the second part. We looked high and low, searched the place top to bottom. What were we lookin’ for? We’da known if we found it.”

  “I’m a trained burglar,” I said, “and I know more places to hide things than you do, and more places to look for them. And I even have a sort of an idea what I’m looking for.”

  “An’ you want me to sneak you in there. Against all rules, in a case that ain’t my case anymore.”

  “Right.”

  “Get me two more of those crullers,” he said. “With the chocolate on ’em, an’ the jimmies.” I went and fetched them, and he ate them without a word. Then he drank down the rest of his coffee and got to his feet.

  “Well, what the hell,” he said.

  There were things I wanted to look at before I started hunting the McGuffin. First was the lock on the door to the Lyles’ apartment. You can pick a lock without leaving traces, if you’re careful not to scratch the face of the cylinder. But the cruder forms of entry all tend to involve gouges of some sort or other, and I couldn’t see any, or any scratches, either. It looked to me as though the Lyles had let their killers in.

  Ray had badged his way past the doorman, picking up a set of keys in the process, and the two of us had pulled down all the yellow CRIME SCENE tape from the door, and I balled it up and pocketed it for disposal later, far from the scene of the crime. After I’d studied the lock, he opened it with the key, and in we went.

  The forensics team had long since come and gone, but it was still hard to resist an impulse to mince around on tiptoe. I did pull on a pair of Pliofilm gloves, which got a raised eyebrow from Ray, but I couldn’t see any reason to leave a print behind, and several reasons not to.

  “The Lyles let them in,” I’d told Ray before we entered, and after a close examination I said as much for the safe. “Either Lyle opened it for them, or he told them the combination and let them do it themselves. But nobody blew it or peeled it, and I don’t think there are fifteen people in America who could open it without force and violence.”

  “Fifteen, huh? You an’ fourteen others?”

  “It wouldn’t be easy. The thing is, if they were good enough to get through this safe, they wouldn’t have kicked my door in. I had a good lock on there, but it would have been child’s play compared to this baby.”

  It wasn’t locked, so I didn’t have to show off. I opened the thing, and it was as empty as he’d said it was.

  “If it was like this when Lyle opened it for ’em,” he said, “an’ if they looked all over an’ still didn’t find it, why the head shots? I can see doin’ one of ’em, to show the other one you’re serious, but why cap ’em both?”

  “Head shots,” I said.

  “That can’t be news to you, Bernie. I told you, an’ even if I didn’t you’da got it from TV or the papers. They were both shot in the head, and with the same gun. And no, before you ask, it wasn’t the same gun as killed Berzins. That was a Lindbauer TDK on full auto. Lyle and the lady were shot with a .22 caliber pistol.”

  “Your crew searched the place.”

  “I told you that.”

  “But neatly,” I said, looking around. “You put things back where you found them.”

  “It’s a crime scene, Bernie. You don’t touch it until the forensics guys are done, an’ then you do what you have to do an’ put everything back where you found it.”

  “That’s what you did at my place,” I said. “But it’s not what they did.”

  “They made a mess? Yeah, you said they did.”

  “But they didn’t make a mess here. Aside from a pair of dead bodies in the living room, I’d say they left the place pretty much as they found it. Which means they didn’t search it, and what does that tell you?”

  “That they got the damn thing outta the safe, just like I told you right from the beginning.”

  “But I already explained why they couldn’t have. So that leaves another possibility, and it’s the only one I can think of.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “They got something,” I said, “and they thought it was the McGuffin, and at that stage they had no reason to leave the Lyles breathing.”

  “Bang bang.”

  “And away they went, and it wasn’t until hours later that they found out they didn’t have what they wanted. Because it’s still here.”

  He took his time thinking it over. “Okay,” he said at length. “I can’t find the holes in that, so all you gotta do is prove the pudding. If it’s here, show it to me.”

  Twenty minutes later, we stood looking down at four photos which I’d laid out on the dining room table. They were color prints, four inches by five inches, and looked to have been taken by the same camera. All four were framed with Scotch tape that held them to pages recently torn from a book. If you looked closely, you could see another thickness of tape, half as wide, which suggested that they’d been mounted somewhere else, then cut loose and mounted anew. The book from which they’d been most recently removed was QB VII, by Leon Uris. I’d read the book years ago and remembered it fondly, and it had bothered me to rip out the pages, especially with the author having died not long ago. But it was a book club edition and its dust jacket was missing, so it could have been worse. I’d put it on the table next to the photos, where it sat looking deceptively intact.

  The photographs showed two faces, full-face and profile. Both faces, stern and expressionless, were those of middle-aged white men, and they filled the photos; if anything of either man existed below the chin, you couldn’t have told from these pictures. Madame Defarge might have just plucked them from the basket at the base of the guillotine.

  “There,” I said, triumphantly. “Head shots.”

  Twenty-Eight

  I give up, Bern. Who the hell are these guys?”

  “That’s what Ray wanted to know,” I said. “He also wanted to hang on to the photos, but I pointed out they might be evidence someday, so he couldn’t just come up with them. He had to find them somewhere, in the right time and the right place, when finding them was something he was legally authorized to do. This way, I said, he had plausible deniability. I think he liked the sound of it.”

  “I don’t blame him. I like the sound of it myself. You got any idea who these bozos are? Because I wouldn’t know where to start guessing. You look at them and at first glance they look like brothers, or maybe cousins, and then you look again and see how different they are. The noses are different, the mouths are completely different, this one’s jowly, this one’s got a higher forehead, the other’s got a scar, they’re different around the eyes—you know, when you add it all up, they’re barely members of the same species, but there’s a similarity about them, and I don’t know what it is.”

  “Same pose, for one thing. Same expression, or lack of expression.”

  She nodded. “Same overall shape of the head, too.”

  “Ray said they were brothers, but with different parents.”

  “Ike and Mike, they look alike. Except they don’t. Ike here looks older, doesn’t he?”

  “Well, he’s a blond. They’re supposed to have more fun.”

  “Mike’s definitely younger. If he were a woman you’d say his hair was mouse-colored, but you don’t hear that with guys. What would you call his hair color, sandy?”

  “I guess.”

  “It’s funny,” she said. “He’s got less hair than Ike, but he looks years younger. I wonder why.”

  “Maybe he was born ten years later than the blond guy.”

  “That would explain it, Bern. Or maybe it’s clean living. A healthier diet. More vegetables. Plenty of exercise, regular dental checkups. Assuming either one of them even has teeth. They’ve both got this cold closemouthed stare, and I think that’s what makes them look alike, even though they don
’t. Bern, how’d you know where to look for the photos?”

  “I gave Berzins a book,” I said, “and he was happy to pay thirteen hundred dollars for it, and I suppose he’d have gone as high as ten thousand, because that’s what he’d brought along with him. He didn’t care about the title or author, and when I said the title he must have thought I was talking about him, because that’s what he was, a secret agent of some sort.”

  “And then they shot him and took the book from him—”

  “And took it to Mapes’s house in Riverdale. Or to Mapes, anyway, for him to take home. They didn’t say, ‘A book? We don’t need no stinking books,’ and throw it in the garbage. They figured it might be what they were after, so I thought about that, and I decided it might be something you could hide in a book. And then I realized it was probably photos, which you can definitely hide in a book. Then you stick the book in the middle of a bookcase, and nobody thinks to look for it.”

  “Like the Poe story.”

  “ ‘The Purloined Letter.’ Yes, the same idea. The apartment was a sublet, remember, and the original tenants had left the books in the bookcase. They were readers, too, so there were plenty of books. Ray said he and his buddies lifted them out a handful at a time and checked to make sure nothing was hidden behind them. That was reasonable if you didn’t know what you were looking for, but it was just a waste of effort in this case. Some cop had that copy of QB VII in his hand and didn’t have a clue what he was holding.”

  “So you went through them a book at a time.”

  “It didn’t take long. You just open the book and riffle the pages. If there’s anything in there, you know right away. The hard part was finding the right book, which happened fairly early on, and then checking all the others to make sure it was the only one like that.”

  “I don’t know if I would have had the patience to do that, Bern.”

  “I didn’t get to think about it, because Ray just kept going, picking up books and riffling them, showing me what painstaking police work looks like. The least I could do was follow his example. And of course there were no more books with photos taped to their pages, but that way we were positive.”