Burglars Can't Be Choosers

by Lawrence Block

  “That’s weird,” I said.

  “What is?”

  “They must have taken both ashtrays.”

  “Huh?”

  “There used to be a heavy cut-glass ashtray on this table.”

  “They found it in the bedroom. The one he was killed with, I told you they’d take that along and lock it up.”

  “No, there was a second ashtray,” I said. “It was on this table here. I suppose it was a mate to the murder weapon. Why would they take both ashtrays?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Just super-efficient.”

  “Bernie, we’re runnin’ outta time.”

  “I know.”

  “And you didn’t find what you were lookin’ for.”

  “I found something.”

  “In the desk?”

  “In the bedroom.”

  “What?” I hesitated and he didn’t press. “Not what you’re lookin’ for, anyway. What are you lookin’ for? Maybe I seen it myself.”

  “It’s not very likely.”

  “You never know.”

  “A blue box,” I said. “A blue leather-covered box.”

  “How big?”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Either you saw it or you didn’t, Ray. What’s the difference how big it is?”

  “You say a box, hell, it could be the size of a pack of cigarettes or the size of a steamer trunk.”

  “About so big,” I said, moving my hands in the air. “About the size of a book.” I remembered Darla’s words. “The size of a hard-cover novel. Or maybe as large as a dictionary. Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m an idiot,” I said. “Aside from that, nothing’s wrong.”

  It took perhaps three minutes to find it, another five minutes to establish that all the other leather-bound volumes were what they purported to be. Flaxford’s blue leather-covered box was nothing but a dummy book, a neat wooden lockbox that had been passing itself off as Darwin’s Origin of Species. When it was open it wouldn’t have looked like a book at all, just like a rather elaborate box which one might keep on a dresser top as a repository for tie tacks and cuff links and that sort of thing. Closed and locked and tucked away on a lower shelf, it looked no different from all of the real books which surrounded it.

  The goons who went through my apartment would have found the box. When they shook each book in turn they would have found one that didn’t flip open, and that would have been that. But Flaxford’s apartment never got that kind of a search.

  “Aren’t you gonna open it, Bernie?”

  I glanced pointedly at Ray. I was in the green wing chair again and he was hovering beside me, gazing down over my shoulder. “You go back to your book,” I said, “and I’ll concentrate on mine.”

  “I guess that’s right,” he said, returning to his own chair and book. I kept my eyes on him and saw him peek over his porn at me, then resume the charade of reading.

  “Back in a minute,” I said. “Nature calls.”

  I walked right on past the bathroom and into Flaxford’s bedroom, blue box in hand. Whether they look like books or not, those little home strongboxes are about as hard to get into as a stoned nymphomaniac. This one had a combination lock concealed behind a leather flap. You lined up the three ten-digit dials and you were home free. You pried the thing open with a chisel.

  I wasn’t in quite that much of a hurry and I did want the box to look as though it hadn’t been opened, so I did a little poking and probing for a few seconds until the lock yielded. I had a look at everything that was in the box, then transferred all of it to my own person. My uniform had enough room in the pockets so that none of them wound up sporting an unseemly bulge.

  When the box was properly empty I took hold of the bed and tugged it an inch or two away from the wall. The small rectangle that had caught my eye earlier was where I had left it, and it was a good deal more visible now that I had moved the bed. I used Loren’s nightstick to coax it out into the open, then took it ever so carefully between thumb and forefinger, holding it by its edges and placing it into the legendary blue box.

  And closed the box, and locked it.

  On my way back to the living room I encouraged history to repeat itself, giving the toilet a convincing flush. Ray looked up when I returned to where I’d left him. “Nervous stomach?”

  “Guess so.”

  “Nervous myself,” he said. “What say we get outta here?”

  “Fine. I can open this back at my place.”

  “I’d think you’d be in a hurry.”

  “Not that much of a hurry,” I said. “I’m more anxious to get out of here. And Loren was unhappy about missing out on all this, so let’s give him a chance to see what’s in the box. I already have a pretty good idea what we’ll find.”

  “And you think it’ll get you off the hook?”

  “It’ll get me off,” I said, “and it’ll get somebody else on.”

  We gave the place a lightning once-over to make sure we’d left everything more or less as we’d found it. The internal damage I’d done to the beautiful old desk didn’t show, and the bookshelves looked quite undisturbed. Outside, Kirschmann affixed a seal to the door, noted date and time and added his signature. Then he gave me a deliberate smile and used the key to turn the deadbolt.

  And, as the lock turned, the last piece fitted into place for me.

  Chapter

  Sixteen

  By the time we got back to Darla Sandoval’s little love nest, Loren Kramer was a nervous wreck. I let us in with my key and when we came through the door Loren was behind it. Since we hadn’t thought he might have chosen that spot for himself, we inadvertently hit him with the door. When he groaned Ray yanked the door forward and stared unhappily at his partner. “I don’t believe this,” he said. “I thought I told you to stay on the couch.”

  “I didn’t know it was you, Ray.”

  “Hiding behind doors. Jesus.”

  “I got nervous, that’s all. You were gone a long time and I started worrying about it.”

  “Well, Bernie here had to look for a box that wasn’t there. It was sort of fun to watch him. He took a desk apart and everything. Then the box he was looking for turned up on a bookshelf. That’s it right there. It was pretendin’ to be a book.”

  “The Purloined Letter,” Loren said.

  “Huh?”

  “Edgar Allan Poe,” I said. “A short story. But that’s not exactly right, Loren. Now if you were to hide a book on a bookshelf, that would be like the story. Except this was a box that was disguised as a book.”

  “It sounds like pretty much the same thing to me,” Loren said. He sounded sulky about it.

  While we puzzled over all of this, Ray went to the kitchen and made himself a drink. He came back, took a large swallow of it, and suggested that it was time to open the box.

  “And time I had my gun back,” Loren said. “And my stick and my badge and my cuffs and my cap, the whole works. Nothing against you, Bernie, but it bothers me seeing them on someone who’s not really a cop.”

  “That’s understandable, Loren.”

  “Plus I don’t feel dressed without them. The gun, we even have to carry them off-duty, you know. When you think of all the holdups foiled by off-duty patrolmen you understand the reason behind the regulation.”

  What I mostly thought of was all the off-duty cops who tended to shoot one another in the course of serious discussions of the relative merits of the Knicks and the Nets, but I decided not to raise this point. I didn’t think it would go over too well.

  “The box,” Ray said.

  “Couldn’t I get my stuff back and then he opens the box?”

  “Jesus,” Ray said.

  I hefted the box in my hands. “Surprisingly enough,” I said, “this box isn’t all that important.”

  Ray stared at me. “It was worth ten thousand dollars to you, Bernie. That sounds pretty important. And it’s supposed to get you off a murder charge, thou
gh I’ll be damned if I see how it’s gonna do that. For the sake of argument I’ll buy that you didn’t kill Flaxford. But I don’t see you comin’ up with a dime’s worth of proof in that direction, let alone ten grand’s worth.”

  “It must look that way,” I admitted.

  “Unless the proof’s in the box.”

  “The box was a personal matter,” I said. “Call it a favor for a friend. The important thing was for me to get into the apartment, Ray. I didn’t even realize it at the time, in fact I actually thought that the box was the important thing, but just being in the apartment told me what I wanted to know.”

  “I don’t get it,” Loren said. He looked as though he expected a trick, as though when I opened the blue box I’d be likely to extract a white rabbit. “What did you find in the apartment, Bernie?”

  “For openers, the door wasn’t locked completely. The deadbolt wasn’t on.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Ray said. “I told you some cop just shut the door and didn’t bother locking it. What’s it matter?”

  “It doesn’t. What does matter is that the deadbolt was locked when I let myself into Flaxford’s apartment the other night. If it had just been the spring lock I’d have opened it faster, but that’s a good Rabson lock and I had to work the cylinder around for one and a half turns. It didn’t take me too long because I happen to be outstanding in my chosen field—”

  “Jesus, what we gotta listen to.”

  “—but I had to turn the bolt first, then go on to knock off the spring lock. Which I did.”

  “So?”

  “So either the murderer happened to take a key with him on his way out of the apartment and then happened to take the time to use the key to lock Flaxford’s corpse inside, or else Flaxford engaged that deadbolt himself by turning the knob from the inside. And I somehow can’t see the murderer having the key in the first place or bothering to use it if he did.”

  I had their attention now but they didn’t know quite what to make of it. Slowly Ray said, “You’re sayin’ Flaxford locked hisself in, right?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Jesus, Bernie, all you’re puttin’ is your own neck in the noose. If he locked hisself in and the door’s locked when you get there, then the bastard was alive when you let yourself in.”

  “That’s absolutely right.”

  “Then you killed him.”

  “Wrong.” I slapped Loren’s stick against the palm of my hand. “See, I have an advantage here,” I went on. “I happen to know for a fact that I didn’t kill Flaxford. So knowing he was alive when I got there means something different to me. It means I know who killed him.”

  “Who?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it?” I pointed with the nightstick. “Loren killed him. Who else?”

  I watched Loren’s right hand. Interestingly enough, it went to where his gun would have been if I hadn’t been wearing it at the time. He dropped his hand to his side and saw me looking at him and blushed.

  “You’re out of your mind,” he said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “If that’s not typical for Gemini I don’t know what is. Just try on any kind of a wild lie and see how it goes over. Ray, I think we better take him in. This time put cuffs on him, will you? He already escaped from us once.”

  Ray was silent for a moment. Then to me he said, “Are you just snowballing this one, Bernie? Puttin’ it together as you go along?”

  “No, I think it’s fairly solid, Ray.”

  “You want to run it by me once just for curiosity?”

  “Ray, you’re not going to listen to this maniac—”

  “Shut up,” Ray Kirschmann said. And to me he added, “Go ahead, Bernie, you got me interested. Go through it once for me.”

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s pretty simple, actually. J. Francis Flaxford was supposed to go to the opening of a play that night. It was all set. That’s why I picked that particular time to hit his apartment. I had inside information and my source knew for a fact he’d be out.

  “Well, he was all set to go. He was in his dressing gown, ready to get dressed, and then he had an accident. I don’t know if it was a stroke or a fainting spell or a minor heart attack or an accidental fall or what, but the upshot of it is he wound up passed out on his bed wearing his robe. Somewhere along the line he probably knocked the lamp off the bedside table or bumped into something and maybe that was the noise that prompted some neighbor to call the cops. It doesn’t matter. The significant thing is that he was unconscious in his bedroom with the door locked from inside when I entered the apartment.”

  “This is crazy,” Loren said.

  “Let him talk.” Ray’s voice was neutral. “So far you’re just spinnin’ your wheels, Bernie.”

  “All right. I got into the apartment and went right to work. I never left the living room and did nothing but go through the desk because that was where the box was supposed to be. My informant didn’t know the box was disguised as a book. I was still playing around with the desk when you arrived. We had our conversation, made our financial arrangements, and we were all set to leave when Loren got a call of nature.”

  “So?”

  “So according to his story, he went to the bathroom, used the toilet, then made a wrong turn on his way back and walked to the bedroom by mistake. There he discovered Flaxford’s corpse. So he turned and rushed all the way back to the living room where we were waiting for him, finally sounded the alarm far and wide, turned a little green around the gills and flopped over in a faint.”

  “Well, we both saw him do that, Bernie. And then you sandbagged me and took off like a bat outta hell.”

  I shrugged off that last charge. “Loren saw Flaxford right off the bat,” I said, “speaking of bats. He had to. That’s a short hallway. If you walk toward the bathroom from the living room you can see those chalkmarks on the bedroom carpet before you reach the bathroom door. Of course there were no chalkmarks at the time. But there was a body there, sprawled out on the bed, and that was interesting enough so that Loren passed right by the john and checked out the bedroom.”

  “And?”

  “He was in there for a few minutes. Then the body—Flaxford, that is—came to life. I don’t know whether Loren originally thought he was dead or unconscious, but either way the man was suddenly alive and awake and staring at him, and Loren reacted automatically. He swung his trusty nightstick and cracked Flaxford over the head.”

  “Crazy,” Loren said. His voice was trembling but that might have been rage and indignation as easily as guilt. “He’s out of his mind. Why would I do anything like that?”

  “For money.”

  “What money?”

  “The money you were filling your pockets with when Flaxford blinked his baby blues at you. There was money all over his lap and all over the floor when you found him.” To Ray I said, “Look, Flaxford was a fixer, a bagman, a guy with a lot of angles going for himself. He may have bank accounts and safe deposit boxes and secret stashes but he also would have had cash on hand. Every operator like that does, whether his operations are legal or not. Look, I’m just a small-time burglar myself but I was able to put my hands on ten grand tonight.” I saw no point in adding that only half of it had been mine.

  “Now the one thing that never turned up in Flaxford’s apartment was money. Not in his drawer or closets, not in any wall safe, not in that fantastic desk. With all the searches that place got, including the search I gave it tonight, the one thing that never turned up was cash.”

  “So you’re saying that because there was no cash Loren here must have taken it?”

  “It’s crazy,” Loren said.

  “It’s not crazy,” I said. “Whatever knocked Flaxford unconscious, it got him suddenly. A fall, a stroke, whatever—all of a sudden he was unconscious. It’s my guess he had a recent visitor bringing him a payoff that he was supposed to transfer from one person to another. The payoff was big enough to make him delay his trip to th
e theater. He got the cash, his visitor left, and he took it to his bedroom to count it before he passed out. Loren walked in and found this unconscious man in a room full of hundred-dollar bills.”

  “You’re guessing.”

  “Am I? My apartment got ransacked, Ray. Every drawer turned upside down, every book shaken open, the most complete search you can imagine. There’s nothing in the blue box that could inspire that kind of a search. But somebody knew Flaxford had a lot of money on him when he was killed, and the person who would have made that assumption was the person who gave him the money. I think it was probably Michael Debus or someone associated with him. Either the money was being channeled to Debus or Debus was spreading it through Flaxford to head off an investigation into his office. But that explains why Flaxford’s visitor couldn’t have killed him, in addition to the business with the locks. That person—say Debus for convenience—left Flaxford alive and left the money with him. And the sum was large enough so that Debus wasn’t willing to write it off after Flaxford was killed. It was even large enough so that Loren thought it was worth killing for.”

  “Ray, he’s crazy. This man is crazy.”

  “I don’t know, Loren,” Ray said.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I don’t know. You always liked money.”

  “You sound like you’re starting to believe this fairy story.”

  “You always took what was handed to you, Loren. As green as you were I was a little surprised. Usually it’ll take a while before a guy learns to stick his hand out. Then he sees how it’s part of the system and he gets hardnosed in various ways, and little by little he develops an appetite. But you, Loren, you were hungry right outta the box. You were hungry without ever gettin’ hip. You’re still mopin’ around with your moon in fuckin’ Capricorn or whatever it is and you’re the hungriest sonofabitch I ever saw.”

  “Ray, you know I’d never kill anybody.”