The Burglar on the Prowl (14 page)

I
hadn’t heard a car, hadn’t heard so much as a footfall. My head was in the closet, literally if not figuratively, with coats and other outerwear all around it, so that would tend to muffle the sound. And it’s not as though I was listening hard all the while. I was too busy with my wriggling and squirming, not to mention my remembrance of milk chutes past, to have been keeping an ear open. Had Carolyn honked the horn? Three times, I’d told her, loud and long. But would I have heard it if she had? The car was in a closed garage, and I was in a coat closet. Maybe she’d honked and I hadn’t noticed.

The hands on my ankles might as well have been bands of steel. My heart sank, my mind froze, and all I could do was hope Carolyn got out in time, and that she’d think to call Wally Hemphill for me.

Hours passed, or maybe they were only seconds. And a voice said, “It’s me, Bern.”

And that’s all she said. There were any number of other things she could have said, and I’d have had to listen to them, but she didn’t, and that is just one more reason why Carolyn and I will be friends forever. She didn’t say another word, but what she did do was tighten her grip on my ankles and give a little push, and that
was all it took. I landed facedown in a dark closet, and I couldn’t have been happier about it.

Forty minutes later I unlocked the side door, the one adjacent to the milk chute, and let myself out of the house. I’d found the control panel for the alarm system in the entry hall next to the front door—that’s where they usually put it, so the homeowner can punch in his code when he walks in the door. I’d studied the Kilgore system, and knew it had zones; you could set it to bypass certain zones, so that you could open a second-floor window for ventilation without setting off a ton of bells and whistles. I worked out what zone the side door was in, bypassed it, and let myself out of the house.

Like most homemakers, Mrs. Mapes kept extra grocery bags in a kitchen cupboard. I’d helped myself to four, because what I was taking was heavy enough to warrant double-bagging. I tucked each of two shopping bags into each of two others, filled them up with what I’d found in the safe in the master bedroom, added one other item I could hardly leave behind, and carried everything out of the house and up the length of the driveway to the garage, where Carolyn let out a breath she must have been holding for the greater portion of the time I’d been inside.

“I was beginning to worry,” she said. “You were in there for almost an hour.”

“It was forty minutes,” I said.

“That’s almost an hour. Here, let me get the door for you. You want me to push the button for the garage door?”

“After I get these in the car.” There was a release button for the trunk lid, especially convenient if you don’t have a key. I pressed it, put the bags in the trunk, and got behind the wheel. Carolyn pressed the button, and by the time the garage door was up she was in her seat next to me. I started the car and backed all the way out of the garage, leaving the motor running while I pressed the button a final time to lower the garage door. I was still wearing my gloves, and I used my gloved hands to wipe off surfaces she might have touched.

She noticed this, and told me she was pretty sure she hadn’t touched anything. “Well, just in case,” I said, and went back to the side door, using my picks to relock it. Carolyn had closed the milk chute door earlier, after I’d cleared it, and I opened it long enough to wipe it free of prints, then closed it and fastened the latch to leave it as I’d found it. I’d already refastened the catch on the inner door.

I got in the car again, backed the rest of the way out of the driveway. There was no traffic on Devonshire Close, which was good and bad—there were fewer passers-by to notice us, but we were correspondingly more noticeable to anybody who did. Soon, though, we were on another street—Ploughman’s Bush, it must have been—and before long we were on Broadway, heading south toward Manhattan.

We could have gone home the same way we’d come—the Henry Hudson, the West Side Drive—but something kept me on Broadway, moving at a sedate pace, stopping for red lights, resuming our journey when they turned green. It’s a venerable old road, Broadway, running from the foot of Manhattan clear up to Albany. I’d read an article written by a fellow who walked the length of it—not from Albany, but from the Westchester County line. He’d told about what he’d seen, and the history of it all, and I gather you could see quite a bit on a walk like that. You can probably see a fair amount driving, as far as that goes, but I wasn’t paying attention.

“Bern?”

“What?”

“Is something wrong?”

“No. Why?”

“You’re not talking.”

“Oh,” I said. “You’re right, I guess I’m not.”

“So I thought maybe something was wrong.”

“No,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

“Oh.”

“There was a whole lot of money,” I said. “I guess he got paid in cash fairly often, and the trouble with cash is you have to launder it. Either that or declare it, and then you have to pay taxes on it, and then what’s the point? But until you figure out how to launder it,
without paying as much in laundry bills as you’d have had to pay in taxes, well, you can just stow it somewhere.”

“And that’s what he did?”

“He stowed it in his safe, and that’s the wrong word for it, because it wasn’t. I thought I might have to pull it out and take it home where I could work on it in private, and that would have been fine, but once I took the seascape down from the wall and went to work on it, it was about as hard to open as the milk chute.”

“And you didn’t have to crawl through it, either.”

“Aside from the cash,” I said, “he had the usual things you keep in a safe. Stock certificates, the deed to the house, a couple of insurance policies, other important papers. And some of her jewelry. She had a little rosewood chest on top of her dresser, and it was full of jewelry, but she kept some of her better pieces in the safe.”

“I’ll bet they’re not there anymore.”

“You’d lose. I left the papers, and I left all the jewelry.”

“That’s not like you, Bern.”

“All things considered,” I said, “I’d just as soon the police never hear about what we just did. Not that they’re likely to figure out who did it, let alone prove it, but they can’t begin to investigate it if they don’t even know it happened. If I took the jewelry, Mapes would have a reason to report it. It’s probably insured, and they can’t make a claim unless they file a report. But if all I take is cash, and it’s cash he never declared, what sense does it make for him to bring the police into it? He’s not insured for the loss, he can’t logically expect them to recover any of it, and all of a sudden he’s got people from the IRS wondering where the cash came from.”

“So you think he’ll just bite the bullet and keep smiling?”

“He’ll probably piss and moan,” I said, “but he’ll do it in private. He probably thought of the cash as easy come, and now he can think of it as easy go.”

“That’s great,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“It really is. The shitheel’s out a bundle, and he can’t do a thing about it. How much is it going to come to, do you have any idea?”

I shook my head. It was a mix of bills, I told her, from hundreds all the way down to singles, some in rubber-banded stacks, some crammed into envelopes, some loose. I figured it was more than a hundred thousand and less than a million, but I was just guessing.

“Enough so that you can give Marty his finder’s fee and still have a lot for yourself.”

“Don’t forget your cut,” I said.

“It shouldn’t be much. All I did was keep you company.”

“All you did,” I said, “was save my life. If it wasn’t for you I’d still be half in and half out of the closet.”

“I had a girlfriend like that once, Bern. It’s no fun. Okay, I was helpful, but I didn’t take any risks.”

“If you’d been caught, what would you tell them? That you were only keeping me company?”

“No, but—”

“Marty gets fifteen percent off the top. You get a third of what’s left after his fifteen percent comes off.”

She was silent while she did the math. “I don’t have pencil and paper,” she said, “so maybe I got this wrong, but the way I figure it I’m getting something like thirty thousand dollars.”

“It’ll probably come to more than that.”

“Gosh. You know how many dogs I have to wash to make that kind of money?”

“Quite a few.”

“You said it. Bern? What’ll I do with all that cash?”

“Whatever you want. It’s your money.”

“I mean do I have to, you know, launder it?”

I shook my head. “It’s not that much. I know, it’s a fortune, but you’re not looking to buy stocks with it. You just want to be able to live a little better, without worrying whether you can afford an extra blue blazer, or tickets for
The Producers
. So you’ll stick it in a safe-deposit box and draw out what you need when you need it. Believe me, if you’re anything like me, it’ll be gone before you know it.”

“That’s a comfort.”

We stayed on Broadway all the way to my neighborhood, where
we picked up Columbus Avenue and cruised past Lincoln Center. The plaza was crowded with people on their way out, and for a moment I thought
Don Giovanni
was over, but it was too early for that. There was a concert in Avery Fisher Hall tonight, too, and it had just let out, and if I’d stolen a cab instead of the Sable I could have had my pick of fares. I passed them all by and headed for the Village.

“Bern? If I’m in for a minimum of thirty thousand, you’re going to get upwards of sixty. Right?”

“Right. I figured two-to-one was fair, but if you think—”

“No no no,” she said. “It’s more than fair. But that’s not where I was going. The thing is, if you’re getting all that money, and you don’t have to deal with a fence, you don’t have to worry about the cops—”

“So?”

“So how come you’re not happy?”

“I’m happy.”

“Yeah? You don’t seem happy to me. You seem…”

“What?”

“Preoccupied, Bern.”

“Preoccupied,” I said. “Well, I guess maybe I am.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Eventually,” I said. “But here’s what I’m going to do right now. First I’ll drop you and the money at your place. I’ve been getting too many visitors lately and I don’t want to have piles of cash around the apartment, not until the traffic thins out and I have a new cupboard built to hide stuff in. I’ll drop everything, and then I’ll take the car back, and do something about the phone. And then I’ll come down to Arbor Court again. And there’ll be coffee made, and maybe something from the deli, and I’ll sit down with a cup of coffee and put my feet up. And then we can talk about what’s preoccupying me.”

W
hen I got back to Arbor Court, there was a whole buffet arranged on the plywood slab that topped the tub. Beef with orange flavor from Hunan Pan, pumpkin kibbee from the little Syrian joint, cold cuts from the Korean deli. “It occurred to me that neither of us had dinner tonight,” Carolyn said, “and that I was hungry enough to gnaw wood, and you probably were, too. But I didn’t know what you wanted, so I just walked along Hudson Street and bought some of everything.”

We filled plates and emptied them, while her two cats, Archie and Ubi, gazed at us as plaintively as the kids in those Foster Parents Plan ads. It didn’t work. Archie’s a Burmese and Ubi’s a Russian Blue, and neither one looks as though he’s missed a meal since his first victory over a ball of yarn.

We had, however, and ate as if determined to make up for it. There was food left when we’d finished—she’d bought a ton, as one does when one shops while hungry—and some of the leftovers went in the fridge, and the rest went to the cats.

“Look at those drama queens,” she said. “Now that the food’s in their bowls, they stroll over to it as if it’s the last thing on their minds. ‘Oh, what have we here? Food, is it? Well, I’m not terribly hungry, but I’ll just force myself so her feelings aren’t hurt.’ ”

“That’s what I did,” I said. “I forced myself. Now I think I’ll force myself to have a cup of coffee.”

“Well, I made some, because you said to. But won’t it keep you awake?”

“I hope so,” I said.

“Miles to go before you sleep?”

“Miles and miles. I don’t suppose you had time to count the money, did you?”

“Count it? I didn’t even want to look at it. I left the two bags in the closet, right where you put them, and before I went shopping I stuck a chair in front of the closet door. Like that would make a difference.”

“It would have been a bad time for a burglary. Some junkie kicks the door in, hoping to grab a portable radio he can sell on the street for ten bucks, and hello, what have we got here?”

“That’s what was going through my mind.”

“Well, the chair would have stopped him,” I said. “You were clever to think of it.”

I got the bags from the closet and drank two cups of strong coffee while we counted. The dope traffickers don’t bother counting, they just dump the cash on a scale and weigh it, knowing that you get so many bills to a pound. That works when they’re all the same denomination—for those guys, it’s hundreds—but the Mapes haul ran the gamut from singles all the way up, and the only scale in the place was the one in the bathroom, and neither of us knew how many bills made a pound, anyway. So we sorted them by denomination and counted. It took a long time, but counting money is not an unpleasant task, not if you get to keep what you count.

We’d each pick up a stack and count it, then write the total on a sheet of paper, then reach for another stack. When all the stacks were counted I added up the numbers on the sheet of paper and wrote the total at the bottom. I showed it to Carolyn and her eyes got very big.

“Two hundred thirty-seven thousand,” she said. “Even?”

“I rounded it off.”

“That’s almost a quarter of a million.”

“Pretty near.”

“My God, it’s a fortune.”

“Keep it in proportion. It’s the price of a large studio apartment in a good building.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” she allowed. “But since I’m not shopping for a place to live, there’s another way I like better. It’s enough to pay the rent on this place for a thousand months. How many years is that?”

“More than eighty. Of course even with rent control, you’d have some increases over the years. Figure sixty-five years.”

“That’s plenty, Bern. Sixty-five years from now I’ll probably want to move over to the Village Nursing Home, anyway. I just hope they’ll let me bring the cats. Anyway, not all of this is mine. How much have I got coming, can you figure it out for me?”

I could, with pencil and paper, subtracting Marty’s share and dividing the remainder by three. Her end, I was able to tell her, came to $67,150.

“I’m rich, Bern.”

“Well, you’re richer than you were a few hours ago.”

“I’m richer than I ever was. Bern, I’m scared to have the money in the house.”

“It should be safe here. Your locks are good ones. You’re on the ground floor, but you’ve got bars on your window. Most important, no one’s got any reason to think you’ve got anything worth taking.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“You know what I meant. There’s a lot of money here, but you and I are the only ones who know about it, and I don’t plan to tell anyone.”

“Neither do I. And I know it’s safer than your place. But the closet, Bern? Isn’t that the first place they’d look?”

She had a point. I asked her if she needed a bath. “Not desperately,” she said. “Or do I?” She raised an arm, sniffed herself.
“Nothing that would make a billy goat leave the room,” she said. “I’ll have a bath before I go to bed. Why?”

“Have it now.”

“Huh? Oh, I get it.”

“I’ll turn the other way,” I said, “and bury my nose in a book. I wish I had the one I was reading. The new John Sandford.”

“I bought it, Bern. I read it, I finished it a week ago. I was gonna ask if you wanted to borrow it.”

“I would have, if I’d known. A copy came into the store, and I started it the other day. The one where the guy’s killing vegetarians.”

“That’s the one. I wanted to kill one myself once. I had this sweet young thing over for dinner, and I splurged and bought a gorgeous beef Wellington at Ottomanelli’s, and I bring it to the table just in time for her to tell me she doesn’t eat red meat. ‘Take it home with you,’ I wanted to tell her, ‘and leave it out on the counter for a week, and it won’t be red anymore. It’ll be nice and green and you can pretend it’s a vegetable.’ Did you find it yet? I think it’s on the top shelf.”

“I’ve got it.”

“I loved it. I think the best scene’s where he gets the diet doctor, the one who has all his patients eating nothing but bean sprouts and celery.”

I told her I hadn’t gotten that far yet, and she said she’d stop before she spoiled it for me. I got caught up in the book and read until she told me I could turn around now, that she was all bathed and dressed.

“And I took a towel,” she said, “and dried the tub. How’s the book? Enjoying it?”

“Yeah, it’s terrific.”

“I think it may be his best. I even like the title.
Lettuce Prey
. The tub’s all ready, Bern.”

I put the two bags of money in the tub, put the cover on, then took it off again. “It’s a shame your cats know how to use the toilet,” I mused.

“It is? I always thought it was a blessing. Oh! If we covered up the
money with Kitty Litter, anybody who looked would just figure it was one big catbox.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“They’d also figure my cats were cleaner than their owner, because what would I use for bathing? But the hell with the good opinion of burglars. Present company excepted, of course.” She winked. “The deli’s still open. You think one bag’s enough? Or should we get two?”

Two bags did the job. Anybody who took the lid off the bathtub—and why anybody would do that was beyond me—would put it back on in a hurry. We could have upped the verisimilitude quotient by encouraging the cats to use the thing, but Carolyn drew the line at that. It had taken her long enough to teach them to use the toilet, and if they switched to the tub she’d have to put them to sleep and start over with two new kittens.

“I think we’re set,” she said. “Oh, I forgot to ask. His answering machine, that you left a message on. Did you get the tape?”

“It was digital, so all I had to do was erase it. And I got rid of the cell phone. Nowadays it’s the easiest thing in the world for them to find out the source of an incoming call. Even if you don’t have Caller ID, or if it just registers as
Unknown Caller,
the cops can pull the LUDS and know exactly who called and when.”

“I know, they do it on
Law & Order
all the time.”

“But with a prepaid cell phone,” I said, “all they can find out is where the phone was sold, but not who bought it. So I dumped the phone, and that’s the end of that.”

“You just threw it away?”

“I could have, but it seemed wasteful. All of those prepaid minutes. I left it on the subway on my way down here. Somebody’ll find it and call his mother in Santo Domingo for free.”

“That was thoughtful, Bern.”

“I was almost thoughtful enough to top up the gas tank on the Mercury,” I said, “but not quite. I managed to find a parking place
just a few doors down from where it was when I borrowed it. And I put back the ignition cylinder that I’d pulled. The owner won’t know the difference.”

“Except that it’s not where he clearly remembers parking it. So he’ll just think it’s early Alzheimer’s. Bern, what happened?”

“Huh?”

“You were preoccupied,” she said, “and now you’re not. What happened?”

“I’m still preoccupied,” I said. “I just put it on the shelf.”

“You did?”

“Literally,” I said, and went to the closet. I’d taken something besides the money from the Mapes house, had tucked it into one of the bags before I left the house, and had removed it from the bag when I put it and its fellow in the closet. I’d put it on a high shelf, out of harm’s and Carolyn’s way, and now I took it down and handed it to her.

“It’s a book,” she announced. “Hardbound, no dust jacket.” She squinted at the spine. “
The Secret Agent,
by Joseph Conrad. Isn’t that the title of the book you sold to the fat man?”

“For thirteen hundred dollars.”

“And you found a replacement copy in Mapes’s library? That’s handy, Bern. Now you can make that customer happy. What was his name again?”

“Colby Riddle.”

“Right, and how’d I forget it? Ought to be an easy name to remember. Well, you said you had a feeling there was a coincidence waiting to show up, and I’d say this qualifies, wouldn’t you? Or did he have such a huge library the book just about had to be there?”

“He had a very small library.”

“Yeah? Then it was a real coincidence.”

“More than you know,” I said.

“Bern, you’re kidding.”

“Look on the flyleaf. It’s priced at twelve dollars, and you can probably recognize the numerals as mine. And it wasn’t in the bookcase, either. It was downstairs, on the desk in his den.”

“It’s the same book.”

“Right.”

“Not just the same title, but the same book.”

“Right.”

“Bern, that’s more than a coincidence. That’s…Bern, how the hell did it get there?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “but you wanted to know why I was preoccupied. That’s why.”