by Otto Penzler
“Like larceny.”
“Something along those lines. Let’s see now. Elaine Halder leaves the office, having placed on her boss’s desk a letter of resignation. Elaine Halder returns in the small hours of the morning. A subtle pattern begins to emerge, my dear.”
“Oh?”
“Of course. You’ve had second thoughts and you want to retrieve the letter before himself gets a chance to read it. Not a bad idea, given some of the choice things you had to say about him. Just let me open up for you, all right? I’m the tidy type and I locked up after I was through in there.”
“Did you find anything to steal?”
“Eighty-five bucks and a pair of gold cuff links.” He bent over the lock, probing its innards with a splinter of spring steel. “Nothing to write home about, but every little bit helps. I’m sure you have a key that fits this door—you had to in order to leave the resignation in the first place, didn’t you? But how many chances do I get to show off? Not that a lock like this one presents much of a challenge, not to the nimble digits of Bernie the Burglar, and—ah, there we are!”
“Extraordinary.”
“It’s so seldom I have an audience.”
He stood aside, held the door for her. On the threshold she was struck by the notion that there would be a dead body in the private office. George Tavistock himself, slumped over his desk with the figured hilt of a letter opener protruding from his back.
But of course there was no such thing. The office was devoid of clutter, let alone corpses, nor was there any sign that it had been lately burglarized.
A single sheet of paper lay on top of the desk blotter. She walked over, picked it up. Her eyes scanned its half dozen sentences as if she were reading them for the first time, then dropped to the elaborately styled signature, a far cry from the loose scrawl with which she’d signed the register in the lobby.
She read the note through again, then put it back where it had been.
“Not changing your mind again?”
She shook her head. “I never changed it in the first place. That’s not why I came back here tonight.”
“You couldn’t have dropped in just for the pleasure of my company.”
“I might have, if I’d known you were going to be here. No, I came back because—” She paused, drew a deliberate breath. “You might say I wanted to clean out my desk.”
“Didn’t you already do that? Isn’t your desk right across there? The one with your name plate on it? Forward of me, I know, but I already had a peek, and the drawers bore a striking resemblance to the cupboard of one Ms. Hubbard.”
“You went through my desk.”
He spread his hands apologetically. “I meant nothing personal,” he said. “At the time, I didn’t even know you.”
“That’s a point.”
“And searching an empty desk isn’t that great a violation of privacy, is it? Nothing to be seen beyond paper clips and rubber bands and the odd felt-tipped pen. So if you’ve come to clean out that lot—”
“I meant it metaphorically,” she explained. “There are things in this office that belong to me. Projects I worked on that I ought to have copies of to show to prospective employers.”
“And won’t Mr. Tavistock see to it that you get copies?”
She laughed sharply. “You don’t know the man,” she said.
“And thank God for that. I couldn’t rob someone I knew.”
“He would think I intended to divulge corporate secrets to the competition. The minute he reads my letter of resignation I’ll be persona non grata in this office. I probably won’t even be able to get into the building. I didn’t even realize any of this until I’d gotten home tonight, and I didn’t really know what to do, and then—”
“Then you decided to try a little burglary.”
“Hardly that.”
“Oh?”
“I have a key.”
“And I have a cunning little piece of spring steel, and they both perform the signal function of admitting us where we have no right to be.”
“But I work here!”
“Worked.”
“My resignation hasn’t been accepted yet. I’m still an employee.”
“Technically. Still, you’ve come like a thief in the night. You may have signed in downstairs and let yourself in with a key, and you’re not wearing gloves or padding around in crepe-soled shoes, but we’re not all that different, you and I, are we?”
She set her jaw. “I have a right to the fruits of my labor,” she said.
“And so have I, and heaven help the person whose property rights get in our way.”
She walked around him to the three-drawer filing cabinet to the right of Tavistock’s desk. It was locked.
She turned, but Bernie was already at her elbow. “Allow me,” he said, and in no time at all he had tickled the locking mechanism and was drawing the top drawer open.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Oh, don’t thank me,” he said. “Professional courtesy. No thanks required.”
—
She was busy for the next thirty minutes, selecting documents from the filing cabinet and from Tavistock’s desk, as well as a few items from the unlocked cabinets in the outer office. She ran everything through the Xerox copier and replaced the originals where she’d found them. While she was doing all this, her burglar friend worked his way through the office’s remaining desks. He was in no evident hurry, and it struck her that he was deliberately dawdling so as not to finish before her.
Now and then she would look up from what she was doing to observe him at his work. Once she caught him looking at her, and when their eyes met he winked and smiled, and she felt her cheeks burning.
He was attractive, certainly. And unquestionably likable, and in no way intimidating. Nor did he come across like a criminal. His speech was that of an educated person, he had an eye for clothes, his manners were impeccable—
What on earth was she thinking of?
—
By the time she had finished she had an inch-thick sheaf of paper in a manila file folder. She slipped her coat on, tucked the folder under her arm.
“You’re certainly neat,” he said. “A place for everything and everything right back in its place. I like that.”
“Well, you’re that way yourself, aren’t you? You even take the trouble to lock up after yourself.”
“It’s not that much trouble. And there’s a point to it. If one doesn’t leave a mess, sometimes it takes them weeks to realize they’ve been robbed. The longer it takes, the less chance anybody’ll figure out whodunit.”
“And here I thought you were just naturally neat.”
“As it happens I am, but it’s a professional asset. Of course your neatness has much the same purpose, doesn’t it? They’ll never know you’ve been here tonight, especially since you haven’t actually taken anything away with you. Just copies.”
“That’s right.”
“Speaking of which, would you care to put them in my attaché case? So that you aren’t noticed leaving the building with them in hand? I’ll grant you the chap downstairs wouldn’t notice an earthquake if it registered less than seven-point-four on the Richter scale, but it’s that seemingly pointless attention to detail that enables me to persist in my chosen occupation instead of making license plates and sewing mail sacks as a guest of the governor. Are you ready, Elaine? Or would you like to take one last look around for auld lang syne?”
“I’ve had my last look around. And I’m not much on auld lang syne.”
He held the door for her, switched off the overhead lights, drew the door shut. While she locked it with her key he stripped off his rubber gloves and put them in the attaché case where her papers reposed. Then, side by side, they walked the length of the corridor to the elevator. Her footsteps echoed. His, cushioned by his crepe soles, were quite soundless.
Hers stopped, too, when they reached the elevator, and they waited in silence. They had met, she thought, as
thieves in the night, and now they were going to pass like ships in the night.
The elevator came, floated them down to the lobby. The lobby guard looked up at them, neither recognition nor interest showing in his eyes. She said, “Hi, Eddie. Everything going all right?”
“Hey, how ya doin’,” he said.
There were only three entries below hers on the register sheet, three persons who’d arrived after her. She signed herself out, listing the time after a glance at her watch: 1:56. She’d been upstairs for better than an hour and a half.
Outside, the wind had an edge to it. She turned to him, glanced at his attaché case, suddenly remembered the first schoolboy who’d carried her books. She could surely have carried her own books, just as she could have safely carried the folder of papers past Eagle-eye Eddie.
Still, it was not unpleasant to have one’s books carried.
“Well,” she began, “I’d better take my papers, and—”
“Where are you headed?”
“Seventy-sixth Street.”
“East or west?”
“East. But—”
“We’ll share a cab,” he said. “Compliments of petty cash.” And he was at the curb, a hand raised, and a cab appeared as if conjured up and then he was holding the door for her.
She got in.
“Seventy-sixth,” he told the driver. “And what?”
“Lexington,” she said.
“Lexington,” he said.
Her mind raced during the taxi ride. It was all over the place and she couldn’t keep up with it. She felt in turn like a schoolgirl, like a damsel in peril, like Grace Kelly in a Hitchcock film. When the cab reached her corner she indicated her building, and he leaned forward to relay the information to the driver.
“Would you like to come up for coffee?”
The line had run through her mind like a mantra in the course of the ride. Yet she couldn’t believe she was actually speaking the words.
“Yes,” he said. “I’d like that.”
—
She steeled herself as they approached her doorman, but the man was discretion personified. He didn’t even greet her by name, merely holding the door for her and her escort and wishing them a good night. Upstairs, she thought of demanding that Bernie open her door without the keys, but decided she didn’t want any demonstrations just then of her essential vulnerability. She unlocked the several locks herself.
“I’ll make coffee,” she said. “Or would you just as soon have a drink?”
“Sounds good.”
“Scotch? Or cognac?”
“Cognac.”
While she was pouring the drinks he walked around her living room, looking at the pictures on the walls and the books on the shelves. Guests did this sort of thing all the time, but this particular guest was a criminal, after all, and so she imagined him taking a burglar’s inventory of her possessions. That Chagall aquatint he was studying—she’d paid five hundred for it at auction and it was probably worth close to three times that by now.
Surely he’d have better luck foraging in her apartment than in a suite of deserted offices.
Surely he’d realize as much himself.
She handed him his brandy. “To criminal enterprise,” he said, and she raised her glass in response.
“I’ll give you those papers. Before I forget.”
“All right.”
He opened the attaché case, handed them over. She placed the folder on the LaVerne coffee table and carried her brandy across to the window. The deep carpet muffled her footsteps as effectively as if she’d been wearing crepe-soled shoes.
You have nothing to be afraid of, she told herself. And you’re not afraid, and—
“An impressive view,” he said, close behind her.
“Yes.”
“You could see your office from here. If that building weren’t in the way.”
“I was thinking that earlier.”
“Beautiful,” he said, softly, and then his arms were encircling her from behind and his lips were on the nape of her neck.
“ ‘Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable,’ ” he quoted. “ ‘Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat.’ ” His lips nuzzled her ear. “But you must hear that all the time.”
She smiled. “Oh, not so often,” she said. “Less often than you’d think.”
—
The sky was just growing light when he left. She lay alone for a few minutes, then went to lock up after him.
And laughed aloud when she found that he’d locked up after himself, without a key.
It was late but she didn’t think she’d ever been less tired. She put up a fresh pot of coffee, poured a cup when it was ready and sat at the kitchen table reading through the papers she’d taken from the office. She wouldn’t have had half of them without Bernie’s assistance, she realized. She could never have opened the file cabinet in Tavistock’s office.
“Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable. Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat.”
She smiled.
A few minutes after nine, when she was sure Jennings Colliard would be at his desk, she dialed his private number.
“It’s Andrea,” she told him. “I succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. I’ve got copies of Tavistock’s complete marketing plan for fall and winter, along with a couple of dozen test and survey reports and a lot of other documents you’ll want a chance to analyze. And I put all the originals back where they came from, so nobody at Tavistock’ll ever know what happened.”
“Remarkable.”
“I thought you’d approve. Having a key to their office helped, and knowing the doorman’s name didn’t hurt any. Oh, and I also have some news that’s worth knowing. I don’t know if George Tavistock is in his office yet, but if so he’s reading a letter of resignation even as we speak. The Lily Maid of Astolat has had it.”
“What are you talking about, Andrea?”
“Elaine Halder. She cleaned out her desk and left him a note saying bye-bye. I thought you’d like to be the first kid on your block to know that.”
“And of course you’re right.”
“I’d come in now but I’m exhausted. Do you want to send a messenger over?”
“Right away. And you get some sleep.”
“I intend to.”
“You’ve done spectacularly well, Andrea. There will be something extra in your stocking.”
“I thought there might be,” she said.
She hung up the phone and stood once again at the window, looking out at the city, reviewing the night’s events. It had been quite perfect, she decided, and if there was the slightest flaw it was that she’d missed the Cary Grant movie.
But it would be on again soon. They ran it frequently. People evidently liked that sort of thing.
Rogue: Dortmunder
Too Many Crooks
DONALD E. WESTLAKE
WHEN WRITERS OF HUMOROUS CRIME fiction are judged, it is inevitable that they will be compared to Donald Edwin Westlake (1933–2008), inarguably the most consistently funny producer of laughs in the history of mystery fiction.
In Two Much (1975), the protagonist pretends to be twins in order to marry both twin heiresses; God Save the Mark (1967), winner of the Edgar for best novel, tells of the many people who try to cheat a man who wins a fortune; in Jimmy the Kid (1974), a gang tries to get rid of a monster child it kidnapped (much like O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief”); in Dancing Aztecs (1976), a large cast of criminals compete to learn which of sixteen statues is the real treasure. But it is with The Hot Rock (1970) that Westlake assured immortality, producing the first book about John Dortmunder, a mastermind thief for whom everything goes wrong—through no fault of his own. In the debut novel, he and his gang are hired to steal a priceless gem, and then are forced to steal it again. And again. They even have to break into prison. It was memorably released on film in 1972, starring Robert Redford and with a screenplay by William Goldman.
Westlake produced about a hundred books,
both under his own name and as Richard Stark (very tough crime novels about Parker, a remorseless professional criminal); Tucker Coe (highly sensitive, Ross Macdonald–inspired novels about disgraced ex-cop Mitch Tobin); Curt Clark (science fiction); Alan Marshall (early soft-core sex stories); Samuel Holt (about an ex-actor named Samuel Holt, now so typecast from a popular television series that he can’t find work and turns to solving crimes), Timothy J. Culver (political thriller); Judson Jack Carmichael (a complex caper); and several others.
More than twenty of his books have been adapted for feature films, and he won an Edgar for writing the screenplay for The Grifters (1990), for which he was also nominated for an Academy Award. The Mystery Writers of America named him a Grand Master in 1993.
“Too Many Crooks” was originally published in the August 1989 issue of Playboy; it was first collected in Horse Laugh and Other Stories (Helsinki, Finland, Eurographica, 1990). It won the Edgar for best short story in 1990.
TOO MANY CROOKS
Donald E. Westlake
DID YOU HEAR SOMETHING?” Dortmunder whispered.
“The wind,” Kelp said.
Dortmunder twisted around in his seated position and deliberately shone the flashlight in the kneeling Kelp’s eyes. “What wind? We’re in a tunnel.”
“There’s underground rivers,” Kelp said, squinting, “so maybe there’s underground winds. Are you through the wall there?”
“Two more whacks,” Dortmunder told him. Relenting, he aimed the flashlight past Kelp back down the empty tunnel, a meandering, messy gullet, most of it less than three feet in diameter, wriggling its way through rocks and rubble and ancient middens, traversing 40 tough feet from the rear of the basement of the out-of-business shoe store to the wall of the bank on the corner. According to the maps Dortmunder had gotten from the water department by claiming to be with the sewer department, and the maps he’d gotten from the sewer department by claiming to be with the water department, just the other side of this wall was the bank’s main vault. Two more whacks and this large, irregular square of concrete that Dortmunder and Kelp had been scoring and scratching at for some time now would at last fall away onto the floor inside, and there would be the vault.