The Burglar on the Prowl (13 page)

But I didn’t have to know the answer to that one, did I? I had things to do, and it was time to go do them. I drank down most of my Pellegrino, scooped up most of my change, and went home.

B
y 8:45 I was sitting behind the wheel of a bronze-colored Mercury Sable sedan. It was parked with its front bumper about eight feet from the only curbside fire hydrant on Arbor Court. That’s closer than the law allows, but that was the least of my worries, because the car was stolen.

I somehow doubt that too many traffic cops and meter maids work Arbor Court—how many of them even know where it is?—but if one turned up I was ready, parked so that I could see anyone, on wheels or on foot, who happened to turn into the little street. I didn’t have the key in the ignition, because I hadn’t had a key in the first place, but it wouldn’t take me more than a second or two to start the car up, and I’d do that the minute a cop came into view.

For ten minutes no one turned up, cop or civilian, and when someone finally did I started up the Sable and honked the horn, because it was Carolyn. She looked around, saw nothing familiar, and kept walking. I honked again and she spun around, frowning, and I lowered the window and said her name.

“Oh,” she said. “Neat car, Bern. Where’d you get it?”

“Seventy-fourth Street. I borrowed it.”

“Oh yeah? Who from?”

“Beats me.”

“That means you stole it.”

“Only technically,” I said. “I intend to give it back.”

“That’s what embezzlers always say, Bern. They were planning to give the money back. Somehow they never get around to it.”

“Well, I fully intend to give this one back,” I said. “Cars are a pain in the neck in the city. Where would I park it? It costs a fortune to garage them, and if you park them on the street—”

“People ‘borrow’ them,” she said, “and take them to chop shops.”

“You know,” I said, “you’re sounding less and less like a henchperson, and more and more like Ray Kirschmann.”

“That may be the nastiest thing you ever said to me,” she said, “but I think maybe you’re right. I’m sorry, Bern. I got a little confused. I wasn’t sure you were coming.”

“I said I was.”

“I know, but what with everything that happened today I thought you might change your mind. That fat guy getting shot right in front of you.”

“Riverdale’s miles away.”

“I know, but—”

“And I need the money.”

I also needed the psychological lift of winning one for a change. I’d started off hiding under the bed, and things had gone downhill from there. Since then I’d been hassled by the cops, burgled by brutes, and given a supporting role in a drive-by homicide. It was time for me to make something happen instead of waiting to see what happened next. Maybe I couldn’t bomb Iraq, but I could damn well burgle Mapes, and I wouldn’t even have to wait to find out what the premier of France thought of it.

“Wait here,” Carolyn said. “I’ll just be a minute. Don’t you dare go without me.”

I got on the West Side Drive. The Sable rode well and handled nicely, and the traffic was almost light enough for Cruise Control, but not quite. I caught a light at 57th Street and glanced over at Carolyn. “I gather she didn’t stand you up,” I said.

“Not at all, Bern. What I did do is sit up.”

“Sit up?”

“And take notice. I got there first, but only by a minute or two. I walked right into the lobby of the Algonquin, just like Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley before me.”

“And Alexander Woollcott, and George S. Kaufman…”

“And all those guys, right. So I took a table in the lobby, and this waiter straight out of a London men’s club came over and asked me what I wanted to drink, and I didn’t know.”

“That’s a first.”

“Well, there’s a bar off the lobby, where you’d go for a drink, and there’s the lobby, where people meet for tea. Now most of the people having tea were actually having it in martini glasses. Tea’s more or less an expression there. But what if she really intended to have tea, and there I am, looking like a drunk?”

“Didn’t your Date-a-Dyke ad say you love scotch?”

“I know, but I wasn’t sure I should love it on the first date. You know what they say, Bern. You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.”

“Is that what they say?”

“I think so. While I was weighing the pros and consequences, this woman walked in the door and made a beeline for my table. She didn’t even take a minute to scan the room. She zoomed right in on me and came over.”

“She was just passing by, and thought you’d be the perfect person for a serious talk about Amway products.”

“It was GurlyGurl, Bern.”

“And did she live up to her screen name?”

“She’s pretty great looking. Taller than I am, but who do you know that isn’t? Dark hair, real nice figure, peaches and cream complexion, big gray eyes—”

“Gray?”

“She said they used to be blue, but the color faded out of them. Have you ever heard of that happening?”

“With hair.”

“I guess it can happen with eyes, too, and Miss Clairol’s no help if
it does. She’d just come from work, and she said she hoped I hadn’t been waiting long, and I said I just got there myself, I hadn’t even ordered yet, and she said…”

Di dah di dah di dah. She fed me the conversation word for word, and a court reporter couldn’t have done a better job of it. I stopped listening, because I was caught up in the physical description.

Hair, figure, complexion, eyes—granted, it could fit any number of women, but I’d had the feeling for a while now that there was a great big coincidence hovering just out of sight, waiting patiently for the chance to coincide.

I tuned in again, and she was telling how they’d ordered drinks after all. “She asked what I wanted, and I said I’d probably have a cup of tea, and she said she thought I liked scotch, and I said I did, but tea’s nice sometimes, and she said she’s a big tea drinker herself, but after the week she’d just had scotch would sure hit the spot, and I said in that case I didn’t figure one drink would hurt me. Because I know you don’t drink before a job, Bern, and I shouldn’t either, but it would be different if I was going into the house. I’m not, am I?”

“No, I’m on my own for that part.”

“That’s what I thought, so I figured one drink would be fine.”

“So you had a drink.”

“Well, two.”

“I thought you just said—”

“Bern, who has one drink? It’s like one pant or one scissor. They come in pairs. Nobody has just one drink.”

“Somebody must,” I said, “or where would the expression come from? ‘I think I’ll have a drink.’
A
drink. Not two drinks, not six drinks, not ten drinks. ‘I think I’ll have a drink.’ People say it all the time.”

“Uh-huh, and then they say ‘I think I’ll have another.’
A drink
is just the stepping-off point. Anyway, we had two each, and I ate a whole dish of mixed nuts to soak up the alcohol, and I’m fine.”

“You seem okay.”

“That’s because I am okay. And I’m not driving, so I don’t have to worry about a Breathalyzer test, and I’m not going into the house, so what’s the problem?”

“I don’t think there is any. I gather the two of you hit it off.”

“I like her, Bern. And I think she likes me.”

“You made a good impression.”

“And a good thing, because that’s something you only get one crack at.”

“Where does she live?”

“Manhattan. Hey, I knew that going in. I didn’t want to meet her and be crazy about her and then discover she’s GU.”

“Geographically undesirable. It’s a curse, all right. I met a girl once and we hit it off, and she wouldn’t tell me where she lived. She’d always meet me places, or come over to my place.”

“Brooklyn?”

“Way the hell out in Queens,” I said. “You had to take the subway for days, and then you took a bus, and then you walked ten blocks. That was the end of that.”

“But if she was willing to come into the city all the time—”

“When they’re that GU,” I said, “you wind up under all this pressure to live together, because otherwise one person’s spending half their life in transit. I figured it would save a whole lot of aggravation to break up.”

“Wow.”

“Besides,” I said, “she had this whiny voice, and I thought I could get used to it, and then one day I realized I didn’t want to get used to it. In fact what I didn’t want was to hear it long enough to get used to it.” I took the cell phone from my pocket, put through a call to the number I’d programmed in earlier. “So that was that,” I said, while the phone rang in the house on Devonshire Close. It rang four times before a machine picked up, and I listened to what I supposed was the recorded voice of Crandall Rountree Mapes, inviting me to leave a message. I hung up in mid-invitation.

“Well, GG’s not GU,” Carolyn said.

“GG?”

“As in GurlyGurl. In fact she’s pretty desirable all across the board.”

“No whiny voice, huh?”

“A nice voice. Kind of throaty.”

“She could live in Manhattan and still be a long ways away. Washington Heights, say.”

“Washington Heights isn’t that far. I had a girlfriend in Washington Heights.”

“That’s what I was referring to.”

“Well, it was a disaster, but you couldn’t blame it on the neighborhood. It was just a disaster. Anyway, she lives closer than that, because she walks to work, and it only takes her fifteen minutes.”

“Where does she work?”

“Forty-fifth and Madison. That’s why she picked the Algonquin. Why?”

“I just wondered. So if she lives fifteen minutes from there, she could live in the East Sixties.”

“I suppose.”

“Or the West Fifties.”

“So?”

“Or the East Thirties.”

“What are you getting at, Bern?”

“I just want to make sure,” I said.

“You want to make sure of what?”

“That she’s not who I’m afraid she is.”

“Huh?”

“Because it would be a coincidence,” I said, “but coincidences happen all the time, and I’ve had the feeling one’s on its way right about now. And if it turns out that she’s who I think she is—”

“Who do you think she is?”

“This would be a lot easier,” I said, “if the two of you had told each other your names, but as it stands—”

“We did.”

“You did?”

“Of course we did, Bern. You only keep it anonymous until you actually meet. We told each other our names right away. Before the old guy brought the drinks, even.”

“What did you say your name was?”

“I said it was Carolyn, Bern. Carolyn Kaiser. Not very imaginative, I know, but I just went and pulled a name out of the air, and—”

“What did she say?”

“She said, ‘Hi, Carolyn.’ Taking me at my word, not suspecting for a moment that I’d lie about a thing like that, and—”

“What did she say her name was?”

“Lacey Kavinoky,” she said, “which rhymes with okie-dokey.”

“You’re sure?”

“That it rhymes? Positive, Bern. No question in my mind.”

“I mean—”

“I know what you mean. Am I sure it’s her name? I’m sure it’s what she said. Was I supposed to ask to see her driver’s license? Are you gonna tell me who you were afraid she was?”

“Barbara Creeley.”

“Barbara Creeley. The one who got—”

“Burgled and date-raped. Yeah, you don’t have to tell me. I know it’s ridiculous.”

“I think it would have to make a lot more sense,” she said, “in order to be no worse than ridiculous. There are eight million people in New York, Bern. What are the odds?”

“Eight million in the five boroughs,” I said. “Only two million in Manhattan, if that many.”

“One in two million?”

“Half of the two million are male,” I said. “Of the one million left, by the time you cross out the ones who are under twenty and over fifty, and the married ones, and—”

“I see where you’re going with this,” she said, “and you’re still nuts.”

“You’re right.”

“Anyway, forget it. Lacey’s not Barbara.”

“I know.”

“It would not only be a coincidence, it’d be a dumb one.”

“I know.”

“I sound like I’m pissed off, don’t I? I’m not. I’m just sort of incredulous, that’s all.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Her name’s Lacey Kavinoky,” she said, “and she’s cute and bright and genuinely nice. And she’s gay, Bern, and she knows
it. She’s not one of those oh-I-always-thought-it-might-be-interesting-to-try-being-with-a-woman women. She’s not one of those variety’s-the-spice-of-life women, either. She’s like me, she’s got nothing against men, and high on the list of things she doesn’t hold against them is her beautiful body. You remember that song?”

“I remember.”

“ ‘If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?’ Well, if you told her, Bern, she wouldn’t.”

“Great.”

“But she might hold it against me. We’ll see. But there’s one thing I can tell you for sure, and that’s that she’s not Barbara Creeley. She’s Lacey, Lacey Kavinoky, and if anybody date-rapes her it’s gonna be me.”

W
e stayed with the West Side Drive while it became the Henry Hudson Parkway, and we kept going north and crossed the Harlem River into the Bronx. I took the 232nd Street exit and wound up on Palisade Avenue. The long narrow green strip of Riverdale Park was on our left, with the Metro North tracks between the park and the Hudson River.

I’d studied the route on the map, but there were enough one-way streets to get me disoriented, and it took a little while to find Devonshire Close. While I drove around looking for it, I told her about my mission Wednesday night, scouting the terrain and probing the Mapes defenses. The doors were out, I said, because the alarm system was one I couldn’t sabotage from outside, and all the windows were wired into it, and the coal chute, my old ace in the hole, had been trumped by bricks and cement.

“I give up,” she said. “How are you gonna get in?”

I told her I’d show her when we got there, and shortly thereafter we did just that. Before I made the turn into Devonshire Close I got out my cell phone and tried the number again, and got the machine again. This time I waited for the beep and said, “Dr. Mapes? Are you there? Please pick up if you are. It’s pretty important.”

No one did, and I broke the connection. “In case he was screening his calls,” I said.

“That’s great,” she said, “but now your voice is on his answering machine. How smart is that?”

“If it’s still on there when I leave,” I said, “then it could be a problem.”

“You’re going to erase it. That’s fine if it’s digital, but the old machines that use tape don’t really erase anything. When you tell them to, you just program them to record over the old message when somebody leaves a new one. So what if it’s a tape machine?”

“I’ll steal the tape,” I said.

I drove into Devonshire Close and spotted Mapes’s house right away. While I couldn’t have sworn to it, it looked to have the same lights on as it had two nights ago. There was a parking spot open in front of the house, and another across the street, but I did what I’d already decided to do and made the turn into Mapes’s driveway. I drove all the way to the back and parked in front of the garage, leaving the motor running.

Carolyn was saying something, but I ignored her and got out of the car. The garage door was down, and didn’t budge when I tried to lift it. There was a little door on the side of the garage. It hadn’t been locked Wednesday night and it wasn’t locked now, though the kind of lock it was likely to have wouldn’t have delayed me long. Unlocked, it delayed me not at all, and I went inside and found first a light switch and then the button to raise the garage door. I killed the light once the door was up, got back in the car, drove into the garage, pulled up alongside (and felt insignificant next to) the Lexus SUV, and cut the engine.

I started to get out of the car. Carolyn hadn’t moved. She said, “Bern, are you sure about this? We’re in the belly of the beast.”

“Not the belly. The house, where I’m going, that’s the belly.”

“So what’s this? The jaw, and we’re wedged here like a wad of tobacco, with nothing to look forward to but a lot of chewing and spitting. We’re parked in the garage of the house you’re gonna break into. What if somebody comes?”

“Nobody’s going to come.”

“What if somebody passes by and sees the car in here, and knows it’s not their car?”

“Nobody can see anything once the garage door’s closed.”

“You’re gonna close the garage door? Then if anything does happen, we’re trapped.”

“No,” I said. “We’re not trapped. The car is.”

“But that’s where you’re leaving me, the last I heard.”

“You wouldn’t have to stay in the car. You could stand over by the side of the garage, where you could keep an eye on things. The only thing you have to be concerned about is if someone pulls into the driveway.”

“And then what do I do? Start up the engine and let the carbon monoxide solve all my problems?”

“Then you hit the horn,” I said. “Three blasts, loud and long.”

“That’s the signal, huh?”

“That’s the signal. You sound the alarm and then you bail out.”

“How?”

“Through the backyard. There’s a Cyclone fence about five feet high. You can climb a fence, can’t you?”

“Probably, if there’s an irate homeowner coming after me. Then what? I just run away?”

“Discretion,” I said, “is the better part of burglary. Run until you hit the sidewalk on the next street over, then just walk until you get somewhere.”

“Where? I don’t know my way around here.”

“Just sort of drift until you get to Broadway, and then catch the subway. Nobody’s going to be chasing you. And this is all academic, anyway, because they’re not coming home until we’re long gone.”

“Whatever you say, Bern. Only I wish I felt as certain as you sound. Now how are you gonna get in? You were about to tell me.”

“I’ll show you,” I said. She got out of the car and I led her out of the garage, pressing the button to lower the garage door on our way out. We started down the driveway, and when we’d covered almost half the length of the house, I stopped and pointed.

“There!” I said.

“There? That’s the side door, Bern, and you just said it was hooked into the alarm system.”

“To the right of the door.”

“To the right of the door? There’s nothing to the right of the door.”

“Immediately to the right of it,” I said, “at eye level. What do you see?”

“Damned if I know. A white wooden rectangle. If it was closer to the ground I’d say it was a pet door, but the only pet who could jump through it at that height would be a kangaroo, and it’s too small for kangaroos. What the hell is it, anyway?”

“A milk chute,” I said.

“A milk chute? I still don’t know what that is.”

“It’s a sort of a pass-through,” I said. “It’s about the thickness of the wall it’s in, with a door on either side. The milkman opens the outer door and puts the milk in, and the householder opens the inner door and takes it out.”

“People still get milk deliveries?”

“Not that I know of,” I said, “but they did when these houses were built, and a milk chute was pretty much standard equipment. I suppose the houses that got aluminum siding jobs had their milk chutes covered up, but you’re not going to see much aluminum siding in Riverdale, and certainly not on a stone house. Even if you remodel, the way they did when they closed off the chute to the coal cellar, you wouldn’t bother to get rid of the milk chute. It’s not hurting anything, and what else are you going to do with the space, and how could you fill it without making a mess of the exterior wall? Didn’t you have a milk chute when you were a kid?”

“In a twelfth-floor apartment on Eastern Parkway? The milkman would have had to be a human fly.”

“Well, I grew up in a house,” I said, “and we had a milk chute, and one day I came home from school and my mother wasn’t home and the house was locked. And I got in through the milk chute.”

“How old were you, Bern?”

“I don’t know. Eleven? Twelve?”

“You were smaller then.”

“So?”

“So you’ve grown, and the milk chute hasn’t. Look at you. You’ll never fit through that thing.”

“Sure I will,” I said. “I’ve grown some since I was twelve, but that wasn’t the last time I wiggled in through the milk chute. I was still getting in that way when I was seventeen, and I had my full size by then. And even when I was twelve people never believed I could do it, because it looks as though you won’t fit, and then you do.”

“What’s on the other side of the milk chute?”

“I’ll be able to tell you later. But what’s usually there is a closet.”

“Suppose it’s locked?” I gave her a look. “Sorry, Bern, I forgot who I was talking to. If it’s locked you’ll unlock it. Suppose, well, suppose you can’t get through the thing after all?”

“Then I’ll come back out,” I said, “and think of something else, and if there’s nothing else to think of then we’ll go back home and call it a night.”

If you can get your head through an opening, the rest of the body can follow.

That’s a basic guideline, and it’s obviously not universally applicable. If you weigh four hundred pounds, your head is going to slip through apertures that will balk at accepting your hips. (I considered the fat man who’d overpaid so generously for
The Secret Agent
. A camel would fit more easily through the eye of a needle, I thought, than would he through a milk chute.)

It’s a good general principle, however, and newborns prove it every day. Raffles seems to know it instinctively; if his whiskers clear an opening he’ll follow them through, and if they don’t he’ll step back and think of another way to go, or decide he didn’t really want to go there anyway.

The Mapes milk chute was large enough to accommodate my head, whiskers and all. I put on my gloves and got down to business.

The milk chute had a little catch that you turn prior to pulling the door open. It’s not a lock, just a device to keep the thing from swinging open in the wind. The catch didn’t want to turn, though, and then the door didn’t want to open. Time and paint had made them both stuck in their ways, but a little pressure (and the tip of a knife blade) led them to change their attitude.

The chute’s inner door had a catch as well, but it was on the side away from me, to be opened by the person retrieving the milk. I had my tools in hand, and a thin four-inch strip of flexible steel slipped the catch as if it had been designed for that specific purpose. The inner door opened, but when I pushed it I felt resistance before it had swung inward more than a few inches. It was a yielding, spongy sort of resistance; I could force the door farther open, but when I let go it would spring back.

I used my little flashlight, and saw right away what the problem was. The milk chute opened into a closet, as I’d expected, and the resistance was being supplied by an overcoat.

I reached a hand in, shifted things around, and created enough of a space for the door to swing all the way open. I returned my tools and penlight to my pocket, kept the sheer Pliofilm gloves on, and then proceeded to poke my head into the opening and follow it with as much as possible of the rest of me. I drew my shoulders in, making myself as narrow and eel-like as possible, said a quick and urgent prayer to St. Dismas, and commenced wriggling and squirming for all I was worth.

And I have to say it brought it all back. Not just that first magical moment of youth, when I’d thrilled at having discovered a way to get into a house I’d been locked out of. There was nothing illicit or dangerous about that first time, I’d been locked out by sheer accident and had every right and reason to be inside, but the thrill had been there from the beginning, and everything that came after grew out of that initial venture.

In no time at all I was playing with locks and teaching myself how to open them, sending away to the correspondence schools that advertised in
Popular Science
and enrolling in their locksmithing
courses, pressing my mom’s house key in a bar of soap and filing a duplicate to match the impression.

And if I hadn’t been locked out that fateful afternoon, would I have escaped a life of crime? Somehow I doubt it. There are, as far as I know, no felons swiping peaches from the family tree. Both the Grimeses and the Rhodenbarrs boast generations of law-abiding folk, content to play by the rules and trade an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. I, on the other hand, am a born thief, the sort of reprehensible character of whom it is said that he’d rather steal a dollar than earn five. (That’s not literally true, I’m nowhere near that bad, but I’d certainly rather steal five dollars than earn one.) And I do possess an innate knack for getting into places designed to keep me out. I studied locks, I practiced opening them, but the lessons came easy to me. It is, I blush to admit, a gift.

I don’t often think back to those early days, but then I don’t often crawl through milk chutes. So I let all of this go through my mind, and it was a mind that might have been better occupied with the task of getting through the milk chute as quickly as possible. Because, as you can readily appreciate, one is at one’s most vulnerable during the transitional interval when one is neither inside nor outside of the house. If someone were to come along while my head was in the coat closet and my legs suspended above the driveway, I’d be hard put to explain what I was doing there and unable to run off and do it somewhere else.

But I couldn’t hurry through, because I’d somehow reached a point, half in and half out, where I’d achieved an undesirable state of equilibrium, an unwelcome stasis. Wriggling and squirming weren’t getting me anywhere, and I couldn’t grab onto something and pull myself through because, damn it to hell, I’d put my arms at my sides in order to fit my shoulders through, and now my arms were pinned there by the sides of the milk chute.

All I had to do, I told myself, was the right sort of wriggling. If I set about squirming in an ergonomically sound manner, so as to build up a little momentum, why in no time at all…

Hell.

It wasn’t working.

For God’s sake, was this how it was going to end? Half in and half out of somebody else’s house, unable to move in either direction, with nothing to do until Mapes and his wife came home and called the cops? If this had happened when I first tried this stunt, back in my pre-salad days, my whole career in burglary might have ended before it had begun. If it hadn’t happened then, why did it have to happen now?

I might have had further thoughts on the matter, might even have enjoyed the irony of it all, but right about then a pair of hands came along and grabbed me by the ankles.