by Bill Mason
I went back again about eight o’clock on Saturday night and blinked hard as I looked up at the building. Her lights were off. So were those in every apartment near hers, and nearly every other one in the building. What the hell was this, a flock of rich people all taking off at the same time? I wondered crazily if they had all gone to the same place.
The shock of seeing those lights off after so many months set my head spinning. Just making a mental note of it and moving on made no sense at all. This wasn’t part of any kind of pattern. One Saturday night out of ten or twelve? That told me nothing. So what was the point of even going back there night after night?
I turned around and walked a few steps, shook my head hard a few times and turned back to look again. Still dark up there, and there was no use kidding myself. If I didn’t do this right now, I never would, and suddenly time became my enemy. I had no idea where she was or when she would return. Come to think of it, I wasn’t even completely sure she was out.
I ran back to my car and drove to the building where I’d stashed the tools I’d been setting aside as I’d thought about how to do this job. I dialed the woman’s number and held the phone to my ear with my shoulder as I threw the stuff into a bag. Ten rings, no answer. I dialed again, slowly and carefully, to make sure I’d gotten it right. Nothing.
The tools were all packed and ready to go, but I took the time to dial the numbers of every apartment on either side of hers, upstairs and downstairs as well as on the same level. No answer anywhere. I checked my watch: 8:45. Where the hell could she be? Dinner? But it didn’t really matter, because I had no idea when she’d left and therefore no guess as to when she’d return. Maybe I should wait until another Saturday night and start staking out the building earlier in the day. But I’d been at this for months and this was the first time I’d found her away. It could literally be years before another opportunity arose. And what if at that point I got inside and found nothing but photos of her grandkids and drawers full of fake jewelry?
I already knew there was no way I could turn my back on this one. What the hell would have been the point of all those months of reconnaissance if all I did was abandon the score the one night I found the woman gone? So I could either stand there and argue with myself while precious minutes evaporated forever or just turn my concentration toward getting it done.
Less than fifteen minutes later I was on Farnsleigh Road, a slight jog off Van Aken. My clothes were dark but perfectly respectable as I made my way to the service entrance of the building and used my special tool to get in. A few seconds after that, I came face-to-face with the service entrance of the apartment. I turned away from it, walked to the main door and pressed the doorbell. No answer, so I pressed it again and put my ear to the door. I have to admit that part of me wanted her to answer. I could tell her I was a Bible salesman, fumble around about why I was hawking the Good Book at nine o’clock on a Saturday night and then get the hell out of there, rid of this job once and for all. But nobody answered and I didn’t hear a thing from inside, and rang the bell four more times in quick succession for good measure. Then it was back to the service door.
I examined the lock with a practiced eye, suavely whipped out my butter calfskin wallet and carefully selected a pick from a row of variously sized tools. Once I’d done that, it was simply a matter of inserting the gleaming pick into the lock and jiggling it a few times as I looked away and let my sensitive fingers do their thing. Three or four seconds later I was rewarded with a loud and satisfying click as the lock succumbed to my extraordinary expertise.
Just kidding. In real life, picking a lock is a bitch. Even when it works, which isn’t all that often, it takes a long time to get each of the pins lined up just so, one at a time without disturbing the ones you’ve already worked. There are only two reasons to go through all that trouble in the first place. One is that you save the lock—and if all you did was forget your keys somewhere, that might be worth it. The other is that you can get in and out without anybody knowing you’ve been there.
If neither of those things is relevant, there are faster and surer ways to defeat the lock. You can usually dismantle most of the surrounding and cosmetic hardware from the outside and work the mechanism with a small screwdriver. Or, if a little noise isn’t an issue, you can drill right into the keyhole and straight through the pins, and then the core of the lock will turn freely. Both ways are much faster than picking, if you have the leeway to do it, and no one will notice the slight amount of visible damage while you’re inside.
I didn’t know what kind of leeway I had, so speed was my top priority. Luckily, the lock on the service entrance was an ordinary key-turned Schlage. The easiest way to get through one of those was to grip it with a heavy pair of Channellock pliers and just turn it, like turning a doorknob. It takes a lot of pressure, but eventually the whole lock breaks apart inside the door. When you turn it back to the original position, the latch that holds the door shut releases.
I got the pliers in place and then paused, listening, but got only silence in return. A few seconds of hard twisting and the inside of the lock fell apart with a muffled snap. I held my breath, hoping there’d be no dead bolt on the other side, but the door moved easily. Not unexpectedly, it stopped after three inches, held in check by a security chain. A few vigorous twists with the pliers and it broke apart, scattering loose links on the floor with a clatter. That was it; I was in.
I picked up my tool bag and pushed on the door. One inch later it came to a dead stop. What the hell was that all about? I reached my gloved hand around the edge of the door and felt around. Something big and solid, with a bunch of thin parallel rods . . .
No wonder the door had only a simple lock: There was a refrigerator backed right up to it. Shining a flashlight in and upward, I could tell by the height of the thing that it was a brute.
No way was I going to the front door to wrestle with three separate locks. That would take forever, and the odds were pretty good I’d have to mangle at least one of them so badly, it would be instantly noticeable by anybody passing by. That somebody would pass by while I was inside was a working assumption that I had no intention of abandoning when the chips were down.
I pushed on the door, but it didn’t budge. I put my shoulder to it and shoved harder, and was rewarded by about a half inch of movement. Then I turned around and got my back on the door, inching down a bit to get maximum leverage from my legs. My shoes found good purchase against the carpet in the hallway and I pushed once again.
The noise of that massive fridge scraping along the linoleum as I pushed against the door was horrific, like two cats in a blender. I stopped and listened; surely that must have woken up people a block away. I pushed again, then waited for a good minute. If the first sound had gotten anybody’s attention, they’d be listening for a repeat, and when they got it, they might decide to investigate. But there were no sounds in response, so I leaned into it again and kept it up until there was enough room for me to squeeze through the doorway. Once inside with my tools, I quickly began a canvass of the apartment to make absolutely sure I was alone. After that I’d stop moving and take a breather, prepared to bolt if I heard anything unusual.
The apartment had the unmistakable smell of booze. That was good news, because it confirmed at least one thing Wayne had told me about the old lady. I crossed the living room and stepped into the master bedroom and came as close to a coronary as I ever had in my entire life.
There was a woman in the bed, either sleeping or doing a damned good job of faking it.
There were so many thoughts rocketing around in my head I couldn’t sort them out, but one was so strong it kept pushing its way to the forefront: A simple B&E, Breaking and Entering, which might have meant a couple of years in prison, had suddenly turned into Burglary of an Inhabited Dwelling, which carried a mandatory ten-year sentence in Ohio. Something was screaming at me to split and chalk it off as a learning experience, and I was in no frame of mind to argue. Everything else a
side, I should have known from my background managing apartments that heavy-boozing tenants who drank alone rarely went out. I’d also been dead wrong about her prissy-clean car indicating that she had the attendant take care of it. More likely she just never drove it.
How many other mistakes had I made?
I began stepping backward as quietly as I could, the absurdity of it dawning on me only much later: Did I really think my footsteps would wake a drunk who’d slept through all the racket I’d already raised?
Back in the kitchen I picked up the phone and listened to it. What if she was faking being asleep and tried to call the police? What if she’d done that earlier, and they were already on their way? I got a dial tone and left the phone off the hook. If she hadn’t yet made a call, she couldn’t do it from the bedroom now.
There was so much adrenaline pumping through my veins, I could barely keep my hands steady. If you were watching this on videotape, all you’d see is some guy standing in a room, with nothing else going on and everything quiet. But in my mind the world was moving at ninety miles an hour. The darkness itself seemed to rush around me, and even the floors and walls were vibrating. Despite all of that, I struggled to think rationally, to imagine what I’d look back on later and wish I’d done.
I had to get out, but there was no sense in the old lady ever learning that her apartment had been broken into. I couldn’t leave through the service entrance because there’d be no way to get the refrigerator back in place, so I’d push it back from the inside and then go out through the main door. I was able to move it back into place with much less noise than before by rocking it back and forth as I shoved it toward the door. Once that was done, I thought maybe it would turn out all right. And then it hit me: What if the old lady hadn’t heard me because she was dead! If I got caught, that meant a murder rap, and goddamnit, that was something I didn’t deserve.
I crept back toward the bedroom and paused in the doorway, listening hard. Turned out I didn’t have to strain, because I was greeted with a faint snore from the bed. Not only wasn’t she dead, she wasn’t faking sleep, either, because no lady would purposely snore. It was too unladylike. She was breathing slowly, too, and it’d be awfully tough to fake that if you were scared half to death, as she’d have to be if she was really awake. I knew, because I was breathing so fast I was in danger of hyperventilating, at least if my pounding heart didn’t blow up and kill me first.
All of a sudden things were looking up. No way in hell was this lady going to wake up in the next few minutes, and even if she did, she’d be so whacked out, she probably wouldn’t even realize someone was in her apartment. Maybe I could still make this whole fiasco pay.
I went into the living room, made sure all three locks were locked and opened the window and screen. If the cops should come calling, I’d have some time to get out the window while they fiddled with the door. It was only a three-story drop to the garage roof, a matter of a few seconds for me.
Canvas bag in hand, I got down on all fours and crept back into the bedroom. If she should awaken for a few seconds and happen to glance around, she wouldn’t see me. Once I was through the open door of the walk-in closet, I stood up. Flicking on my penlight, I saw that one panel was filled floor to ceiling with drawers. I pulled the middle one open and was dazzled by an untidy mess of diamond jewelry. Sticking the penlight in my mouth, I emptied the contents of the drawer into the bag as quietly as I could, then turned the light off and stepped out of the closet. There was no movement from the bed, and the rhythm of the woman’s breathing hadn’t changed at all.
Back into the closet and another drawer. Same thing, and into my bag it all went. Back out for another check, then back in to clean out a third drawer. That was it. There was nothing of interest in any of the other drawers.
In the bedroom the woman hadn’t budged, nor had her breathing changed. I noticed by the dim light coming through her half-shuttered window more diamonds lying on the night table. What the hell: I scooped those up as well.
Everything back in my bag, I had a long look through the front-door peephole, a few quiet moments listening for unusual noises, then unlocked the three locks and took off.
I can’t remember ever having been more grateful to hit fresh air. I was so relieved to be out of that apartment that carrying a bag full of stolen jewelry along a street hardly bothered me. I drove to my work locker, watching my speed carefully and resisting the temptation to overdo it, and stashed the bag without looking inside.
Just because I was relieved was not to say I wasn’t still wired. I came out of my building at ten-thirty and started walking, fast, almost at random. I didn’t stop for nearly two hours and felt better by the time I ducked into a bar on Woodland Avenue. Physically wrung out and mentally exhausted, I had a couple of vodkas and went home to my mother’s to try to sleep.
I was up early on Sunday and went to my locker. Opening up the bag in the cold light of day, I gave a silent thanks to Wayne. The stuff was amazing, every piece genuine and high-quality, and far and away the largest haul I’d ever taken. I put it all back and spent the last two days of the holiday weekend with my mom and aunt, barbecuing, going to the movies, drinking in the evenings and generally trying not to think about all the goodies in my work locker.
About three weeks later I was back in Cleveland and went around to Bill Welling’s shop. Despite the late hour, there were plenty of guys working, and Bill had put out a second keg. The Blair House burglary was still the hot topic of conversation among the less savory characters in the shop. There had been endless speculation in the local papers about how the thieves were able to pull off such a spectacular job, cleaning out everything of value without the old lady even having known they were there until she’d woken up and found everything gone. The wiseguys in the shop were coming up with all sorts of crazy theories, and I couldn’t blame them: It was a seemingly impossible score. Obviously, the victim hadn’t said to the police, “I was so snockered, they could have taken the bed with me in it,” so they had no way to know she might as well have not even been there.
Welling didn’t come out and ask me if I was the one who’d pulled it off, but he knew.
“The cops questioned Wayne,” he said without any more preamble than that.
“And . . . ?”
“They let him go. He came by here afterwards.”
It had been months since Wayne and I had met and had our conversation. “Think he remembered telling me about the place?”
Welling shook his head. “What I can tell, he’s told the same damned story to a hundred other guys, anybody who’d buy him a couple beers and sit still long enough to listen to all that bullshit.”
I pointed to the keg Welling had set out. “I didn’t even spend a dime on the guy; it was your beer!”
“Seemed to me he was happy as hell somebody hit the old broad, and not much caring who. Don’t worry about it.”
We had a good laugh about that, because that’s how I thought about her as well, an “old broad,” when I thought about her at all. To me she wasn’t even really a person, just a comical character in a play we were both acting in, an unanticipated obstacle to be overcome so that Act X, Scene Y, could be concluded. It wasn’t until much later, after I’d been through some tough times myself, that I looked back and began to nurse growing remorse for what I’d done. To a lot of people, but to her in particular. Here was a lonely old lady hanging on to inherited money and possessions because she had nobody in her life, and these were the only things left that defined her. She drank herself into a stupor night after night to blot out the awfulness of having nothing that mattered, only a car she never drove and jewels she had no opportunity to wear, so soured on living that she alienated even the few people she had opportunity to interact with, like the window washer and the parking lot attendant.
Then one morning she awakens to find that all her glittering anchors are gone. She was probably so hungover it took her several nauseated hours to try to piece together w
hat she herself might have done with them, and only when the fog finally cleared did she realize they had been taken from her. Then she had to clean herself up, air the apartment out and hide all the booze before calling the police. I had no idea if she’d been insured, or had other means, maybe a bank account so crammed full of cash that her only real loss was that of sentimental value. That wasn’t part of the investigation and planning of a professional thief. But having since come to understand the kind of psychological trauma that being burglarized induces, I have no doubt it was a severe blow, especially considering the nightmares that must have resulted, torturing her with visions of strange men hovering within inches of her as she lay there, inert and vulnerable. For all I knew, it might have even shortened her life, if she boosted her alcohol intake because of it.
I didn’t think about any of these things at the time, and tried not to the whole time I was a thief. I needed to keep a distance from the victims, or it all would have been impossible. I worked at not liking them, at begrudging them the money they had and I didn’t. If I allowed myself to see them as decent and sensitive people, if I gave in to contemplating how, but for accidents of birth, they could have been family to me, my career as a criminal would be over. One time I’d been planning for weeks to rob a condo and happened to catch sight of the owners, an elderly couple, holding hands when they didn’t know anyone was looking, and it did me in. It was so touching, I could no longer convince myself it was just a job and that the victims were unworthy of consideration. I abandoned the plan, then tried to put it behind me and move on.
The jewelry from the Blair House score sat in that locker for over three years. It was only after I’d become a fugitive and needed some money that I finally took steps to cash it in.