Burglars Can't Be Choosers

by Lawrence Block

  But by the time I returned to the living room I felt enough like a cop to tell someone to move on, or hold up traffic, or get a free meal at a lunch counter. And I guess Ray noticed the difference. He looked me over from cap to shoes and back again and gave a slow nod. “You’ll pass,” he said.

  Even Loren had to agree. “They’re natural actors,” he said.

  “Burglars?”

  “Geminis.”

  “Jesus,” Ray said. “Let’s get the hell outta here.”

  In the black-and-white he said, “We’re cleared to enter the apartment. It’s sealed as evidence but what we do is break those seals and affix new ones when we leave. It’ll all be recorded that way so nothing’ll be screwed up.”

  “Is that standard?”

  “Oh, sure. The seals are to prevent unauthorized entry. They can’t really keep anybody out who wants in but you can’t go through the door without you break the seal. This particular apartment, it’s been opened up and resealed a couple times already. I saw the sheet on it.”

  “Oh? Who’s been inside?”

  “The usual. The photographer and the lab crew went through it before it was sealed up in the first place, but then the photographer went back for seconds later on. Maybe some of his pictures didn’t turn out or maybe somebody from the D.A.’s office wanted him to get establishing shots of the other rooms. You never know what those monkeys’ll want to show to a jury and label it Exhibit A. Then there was another visit from an Assistant D.A., probably to get the feel of the place firsthand, and there were a couple of bulls from Homicide, even though this is the precinct’s case all the way and we’re not letting those pricks from Homicide take it away from us, but of course they have to get a look all the same, maybe figuring the M.O.’ll fit a case they’re already carryin’ on the books. Then, and it musta been the same kind of thing, there was a visit from another D.A.’s office, not even Manhattan but some clowns from across the river—”

  “When was that?”

  “I dunno. What’s the difference?”

  “Which office was it? Brooklyn? Queens?”

  “Brooklyn.”

  “Who’s the Brooklyn DA?”

  “Kings County D.A. is—shit, I forget the name.”

  “Is it Michael Debus?”

  “That’s it. Yeah, Debus. Why?”

  “When were his men there?”

  “Sometime between the murder and tonight. What’s it matter?” He looked at me thoughtfully, almost sideswiping a parked car in the process. “They park right in the middle of the fuckin’ street,” he complained. “How do you connect up with this Debus character, Bernie?”

  “I don’t. I think Flaxford did.”

  “How?”

  I thought for a moment. If I knew precisely when my own apartment had been visited, and precisely when Debus had had the Flaxford apartment searched, then…Then what? Then nothing. It might help my theory in my own mind if I could establish that Debus had sent men to East Sixty-seventh Street before he sent them to West End Avenue, but it wouldn’t really prove anything, nor would it demolish my theory if the timing was the other way around.

  When all was said and done, the only really important variable was the box. Either I could find it or I couldn’t.

  “It might eventually be important,” I said, “to know just who Debus sent to the apartment and when they were there.”

  “Well, it’s a matter of record.”

  “You could find out?”

  “Not right this minute, but later on. Sure.”

  “It’ll be there anyway,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing.”

  I recognized the doorman. But he didn’t recognize me, and I decided that I would definitely have to remember him at Christmas. He held the door for us as he’d held it for me twice before, and while Ray chatted with him he paused twice to challenge people on their way into the building. Evidently he’d been reprimanded for letting me in, but at least they hadn’t taken his job away and I was happy for him.

  I didn’t even get a second glance from him. I was wearing a uniform and I was standing there next to Ray, so why should he pay any attention to me?

  We rode up on the elevator with a man dressed as a priest. I suppose he probably was a priest, but he looked less like a priest than I looked like a cop, so why should I take anything for granted? It occurred to me that clerical garb would make a good cover for a burglary. It would certainly get you past most doormen in a hurry. Of course it wouldn’t do you too much good in the suburbs where the object was to avoid getting noticed in the first place, but apartment houses were something else.

  Now in the suburbs a mailman’s uniform would be ideal. Of course, a lot of people know their route man, but if you could pass yourself off as the guy who delivers parcels or special delivery letters or something like that—

  “Something on your mind, Bernie?”

  “Just thinking about business,” I said. We got off at the third floor and left the alleged priest to ascend alone. I stood aside while Ray broke the seals on Flaxford’s door. Then, while he was fishing in his pocket for the keys, I extended a finger and poked the doorbell. He gave me a look as the bell sounded within the apartment.

  “Just routine,” I explained

  “Police seals on the door and you think there’s somebody inside the place?”

  “You never know.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Everybody has a routine,” I said. “That’s mine.”

  “Jesus,” he said. He found the keys, poked one at the lock. I could see it wasn’t going to fit and it didn’t. He tried the other and it slid in.

  “Must seem funny to you,” he said. “Using a key.”

  Just a little earlier I’d used Darla’s key and now we were using Flaxford’s. The only place I had to break into these days was the place where I was living.

  “Last time I opened this door,” he said, “there was a burglar on the other side of it.”

  “Last time I opened it there was a corpse in the bedroom.”

  “Let’s hope tonight’s a new experience for both of us.”

  He gave the key a half-turn clockwise and pushed the door open. He said something I didn’t catch and went on inside, reaching to flick on the light switch. Then he turned and motioned me inside but I stayed where I was.

  “Come on,” he said. “Whattaya waitin’ for?”

  “The door wasn’t locked.”

  “Of course it was. I unlocked it.”

  “Just the snaplock. All you had to do was turn it halfway around and it opened. A lock like that has a deadbolt, too, and if the deadbolt’s engaged you have to turn it one and a half times around to open it.”

  “So?”

  “So the last person out didn’t bother locking it with the key. He just closed it on his way out.”

  “What’s it matter? Maybe his partner’s got the key and he’s halfway to the elevator so he doesn’t bother. Maybe he never thinks to lock it with the key. A lot of people always leave their doors like that. They never take the trouble to use the whatchamacallit, the deadbolt.”

  “I know. They make my life a lot easier.”

  “So here we got somebody who it’s not his apartment in the first place and he’s gonna be slapping an evidence seal on it anyway, and what does he care about deadbolts? It don’t mean a thing, Bernie.”

  “Right,” I said. I poked at my memory, trying to catch something small and quick that kept darting around corners. “I put the deadbolt on,” I said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Once I was inside. I closed the door and I turned this gizmo here, this knob. That’s how you engage the deadbolt from inside the apartment.”

  “So?”

  “And when you and Loren got here with the key from the doorman, you had to turn it around a full turn to undo the bolt and then another half turn to draw back the spring lock.”

  “If you say so,” Ray said. He was a little impatient
now. “If that’s what you say I’ll take your word for it, Bernie, because I frankly don’t make a point of noticing how many times I turn a key in a lock, especially when I don’t know what the fuck’s on the other side of the door, which I didn’t at the time. None of this makes the slightest fucking difference and I don’t know what the hell you’re rattling on about. I thought you wanted to get into this place, but if all you want is to stand outside talking about bolts like a nut—”

  “You’re absolutely right,” I said. I came all the way inside and closed the door behind me. And turned the bolt.

  The apartment didn’t look different from when I’d seen it last. If the wrecking crew at my apartment had been Michael Debus’s responsibility, he’d clearly assigned a gentler crowd altogether to the task of searching J. Francis Flaxford’s digs. Of course the search of my place had been unauthorized and unrecorded while the visit here had been made with official permission and was duly noted in some official log. So Flaxford’s books remained on Flaxford’s shelves and Flaxford’s clothes remained in Flaxford’s closets and drawers. No one had slashed open his furniture or taken up his rugs or cast pictures down from his walls.

  All of this seemed wildly unfair. Flaxford, who had gone to whatever reward awaits fixers and blackmailers, would never wear these clothes or read these books or inhabit this apartment again, yet everything was shipshape for him. I, on the other hand, had a use for the contents of my apartment. And I had been sorely mistreated.

  I tried to put this inequity out of my mind and concentrate instead on searching the place. I began in the bedroom, where chalkmarks on the oriental rug (I’ve no idea what kind) indicated the position of the body. He had been lying just to the left of the foot of his bed, his outspread feet reaching toward the doorway. There were dark brown stains on the carpet where his head had been outlined and similar stains on the unmade bed.

  I said, “Blood?” Ray nodded. “You always think of blood as red,” I said.

  “Brown when it dries, though.”

  “Uh-huh. He must have flopped on the bed when he was hit. And slid down onto the floor.”

  “Figures.”

  “The paper said he was killed with an ashtray. Where is it?”

  “I thought it was a lamp. You sure it was an ashtray?”

  “The paper said.”

  “A lot they know. Whatever it was, somebody musta tagged it and took it the hell outta here. Murder weapon, you don’t go and leave something like that behind. It gets tagged and run through the lab sixteen different ways and photographed a couple hundred times and then locked up somewhere.” He cleared his throat. “Even if something like that was here, Bernie, there’s no way I could let you do nothin’ about it. No tamperin’ with evidence.”

  “I just wondered what happened to it.”

  “Just so you understand.”

  I brushed past him and moved around the bed to where an oil painting of a ramshackle barn hung in a heavy gilded frame. I realized that if there was a wall safe in the place fifteen people had already gone through it since the murder, but I moved the picture anyway and the only thing behind it was a wall.

  I said, “Funny. You’d think he’d have a safe. A man like him would have cash around the house frequently. Maybe he just didn’t worry.”

  “What cash? He owned property and he was in the theater, Bernie. Where does cash come into it? The only thing is the theater receipts and nobody brings those home nowadays. They go straight into the bank’s night depository. Plus the little theaters he messed around with, how much money’d be involved in the first place?”

  I thought, Why bother going into it? But all the same I said, “He was mixed up with a lot of characters. I think he operated as some kind of bagman or fixer. I know he was tied into some political heavies, but whether he just free-lanced for them I can’t be sure. Plus he screwed around with blackmail and extortion.”

  “I thought you didn’t know him?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then where do you get off knowing all this?”

  “The Shadow knows,” I said. “The Department must know something about it, too, as far as that goes. Didn’t you hear anything about Flaxford’s secret life?”

  “Not a word. But I don’t guess anybody looked to find out. Seein’ we knew who killed him and we got an airtight case, why futz around with details? What’s the percentage?”

  “Airtight,” I said hollowly.

  “Bernie, if you want to tell me what we’re looking for—”

  “We are not looking for anything I am looking for something.”

  “Yeah, but what?”

  “I’ll know it when I see it.”

  “Suppose I see it?”

  I made my way past him again, stepping gingerly over the chalkmarks as if the body itself were still there, an ectoplasmic presence hovering just above the carpet. I walked down the hallway, stopping to check out the bathroom. It was large in proportion to the rest of the apartment, suggesting the building had been divided into smaller rental units somewhere along the line. There was a massive claw-footed tub, an antique survivor that contrasted with the modern sink and toilet. I ran water in the sink, gave the toilet a flush, turned to see Ray looking at me with his eyebrows raised.

  “Just remembering,” I said. “If Loren hadn’t taken a wrong turn after he flushed the toilet we’d have all been on our way.”

  “It’s a fact. Who knows when somebody’d have finally discovered the poor sonofabitch?”

  “Not for days, maybe.”

  “You’da been clear, Bernie. Even if we make the connection, what the hell can we do? Walk in with our caps in our hands and say we had you but we let you go? Besides, by the time it all comes together we wouldn’t know if you were there the same night he got it, because with all that time gone you can’t fix the time of death all that close.”

  “But Loren walked right in on him.”

  I stood for a moment in the bathroom doorway, turned toward the bedroom, then turned again and went back to the living room. I could check Flaxford’s closet for false backs and bottoms but that just didn’t seem like his style.

  The desk.

  I went over and stood next to it, started tapping it here and there. Darla Sandoval had seen him take the blue box from this desk and put it back in the desk when he was done showing its contents to her. And the desk had still been locked after Flaxford lay dead in his bedroom. I’d been through it once but those old fossils were loaded with secret compartments, drawers lurking behind drawers, pigeonholes in back of pigeonholes. The desk was where I’d been told to look in the very beginning, and it was where I was looking when Ray and Loren walked in on me, and it was where I would look now.

  I got out my ring of burglar tools. “Sit down,” I told Ray. “This may take a while.”

  It took close to an hour. I removed each drawer in turn, checked behind them, turned them upside down and very nearly inside out. I rolled up the rolltop and probed within and I found more secret compartments than you could advertise on the back of a cereal box. Most of them were empty, but one held a collection of raunchy Victorian pornography which had evidently been secreted there by a raunchy Victorian. I passed the half-dozen booklets to Ray, who’d complained earlier that Flaxford’s shelves contained nothing more salacious than Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic in two leather-bound volumes.

  “This is better,” he reported. “But I wish to hell they could write it in plain English. By the time you figure out exactly what the guy’s doing to the broad you could lose interest.”

  I went on performing exploratory surgery on the desk. Now and then I removed an interior panel knowing I’d never be able to put it back later, and I felt sorry about this, but not sorry enough to cry about it. Eventually I realized that, however more secret compartments the desk might contain, Flaxford wouldn’t have used any of them for the blue box. It would have taken him too long to put it away and get it out again.

  I stepped back and lo
oked down at the desk and wanted to wash my hands of the whole damned thing. The thought of washing my hands made me think of running water, which led me back to the bathroom in short order. While I stood there doing my Niagara Falls impression I found myself studying the elaborately inlaid tile floor beneath my feet. Old-fashioned clay tiles about an inch square, most of them white, with a geometric pattern traced in light blue tiles. When I got to where I was actually toying with the idea of taking up the floor I knew I was skating dangerously close to the edge. I gave the toilet a flush, rinsed my hands, looked without success for a towel, dried my hands on my blue pants, took Loren’s nightstick from its clasp, slapped it briskly against my palm, and got out of there.

  And turned left instead of right, tracing Loren’s route into the bedroom. I went over to the closet and went through it very quickly, knowing I’d find nothing but clothes, and that was all I did find.

  I was on my way out of the room when I happened to see it out of the corner of my eye, just a little scrap of something that had wedged itself between the bedpost and the wall.

  I got down on one knee and examined it. I took a very careful look and I did some thinking, and it all fit with some thoughts I’d already had. I got up and left it where it was and went back to the living room.

  I was sliding the final drawer back into the desk when Ray said, “What in the hell does gama-houche mean?”

  I made him spell it, then took the book away from him and looked for myself. “I think it means to go down on a girl,” I said.

  “That’s what I figured. Why the fuck can’t they just say that?”

  “Other times, other customs.”

  “Shit.”

  I left him squinting at antique filth and did some pacing, then dropped into the green wing chair where I’d planted myself before tackling the desk in the first place. I swung my feet onto the hassock, took a deep breath, and again tried to put myself into the mood of the apartment. Your name is J. Francis Flaxford, I told myself, and you’re sitting here comfortably in your bathrobe, except it’s such a nice one you call it a dressing gown. You’re supposed to be at the theater but you’re hanging around with a drink at your elbow and a book in your lap and a cigar in your mouth and…