The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart (13 page)

“I
feel good about this,” Charlie Weeks said. “A man needs a purpose in life. He needs a reason to get out of bed in the morning. I think we’ll make a good team.”

“I think you’re right, Charlie.”

“I don’t understand what’s taking so long,” he said, and extended a hand toward the elevator call button. I beat him to it. “Give it a good poke this time,” he urged. “Maybe the connection’s worn.”

“He’s probably stuck on another floor,” I said, “helping someone with luggage or a key that’s stuck in a lock. Listen, there’s no reason for you to stand out here in the hall. I’m sure he’ll be along in a few minutes.”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” he assured me. But when a few more minutes passed without the elevator’s appearing, he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, clearly impatient. “I suppose I could get to
work on our project,” he said. “If you’re sure you won’t feel I’ve abandoned you.”

“Please,” I said. “I feel guilty wasting your time like this.”

The elevator still hadn’t come by the time he disappeared into his own apartment and drew the door shut. I wasn’t greatly surprised; the attendant would have had to be psychic to stop on our floor, as I’d faked pressing the button. I gave Charlie Weeks another minute, just in case he might remember one last thing that would send him darting into the hallway again. When he failed to reappear, I took the stairs down to the eighth floor.

Well, why not? I had my picks with me, never having returned home to unload them the previous evening. When I arranged to drop in on Weeks, I’d had it in the back of my mind to pay a call downstairs after I’d ended my visit. I hadn’t really expected much from my conversation with Weeks, and was counting on him as much for entrée to the Boccaccio as for what he could tell me about Hoberman.

It turned out he’d been able to tell me a lot, and had wound up enlisting as my partner. And it did seem like the start of a beautiful friendship, and I suppose I could have told him I wanted to pay another visit to the fellow four flights below, but I decided to keep it to myself. Otherwise the beautiful friendship might turn out to be stillborn. Because I was in Charlie’s building, after all, and people with a very cavalier attitude toward burglary are apt to
turn into law-and-order hard-liners as soon as a burglar starts operating close to home. After all, I’d met Charlie the first time under false pretenses, in order to knock off 8-B, and I’d turned up today flying the same false colors and with the same goal in mind. I’d been almost out the door before I’d gotten around to telling him that I was Bernie Rhodenbarr and not Bill Thompson.

So I’d keep this little venture to myself for the time being. If I came up with some important information, I could pick a convenient moment to tell him when and where I got it. And if I left 8-B as clueless as I entered it, nobody ever had to know I’d been there.

I moved quickly but quietly down the stairs, eased the door open at the eighth-floor landing, assured myself with a glance that the hallway was happily deserted, and walked along it to 8-B.

I didn’t have gloves, and I wasn’t much concerned about that. I wasn’t likely to leave prints, nor was anyone likely to go looking for them. I had my flashlight, although I couldn’t see what need I’d have of it in the middle of a bright sunshiny day. I had my picks, too, and I knew they’d open 8-B’s locks because they’d done so almost effortlessly the other night.

I didn’t need them, either, as it turned out.

But I didn’t know that, and I had them in hand as I stood before the door of the apartment in question. I remembered how I’d had the portfolio in hand, only to lose it, and I remembered the time
I’d spent in the closet, and the musty smell of the coats. I didn’t figure I was going to get another crack at the portfolio, but maybe I could at least find out who lived there, and maybe get another look at the photo while I was there and make sure it was really King Vlados.

I had my hand on the doorknob and the tip of one of my picks a quarter-inch into the top lock when it occurred to me to ring the bell. I was sure no one was home, I just took that for granted, but I reminded myself that this was one of those little professional procedures I never neglected to perform, and I might as well play this one by the book.

So I rang, and I waited for a moment because that too is part of the way you do it, and you can just imagine my surprise when I heard the footsteps approaching the door.

I just had time to get the incriminating evidence out of the lock and back in my pocket when the door opened to reveal a young man standing about six-two, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist and a handsome, square-jawed, open countenance. He had a big smile on his face; he may not have had the faintest idea who I was, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t glad to see me.

“Hello,” he said heartily. “A beautiful day, yes?”

“Gorgeous,” I agreed.

“And how may I help you?”

Good question. “Ah,” I said. “I’m Bill Thomp
son, and I’m the building’s representative for the American Hip Dysplasia Association.”

“You are from the building?”

“I live in the building,” I explained. “On another floor. I work on Wall Street, but I volunteered to collect for this charity. Very good cause, as I’m sure you know.”

“Yes,” he said, one hand dipping into a pocket of his jeans. He was wearing black Levi’s and a polo shirt that I’d call blue-green, but that the Lands’ End catalog probably calls teal. “Well, of course I would like to make a donation.”

Jesus, maybe I was in the wrong business. “I don’t even have my receipt book with me,” I said. “That’s not what I came to see you about. Let’s see now, you’d be James Driscoll, have I got that right?”

He smiled and shook his head.

“No? How can that be?” I dug out my wallet, consulted a slip of paper—one I’d be well advised to hang on to, if I ever wanted to get my shirts back from the Chinese laundry—and looked up at him again. “O’Driscoll,” I said. “You’re either James O’Driscoll or Elliott Bookspan. Or else I’ve got the wrong apartment.”

“It would seem you have the wrong apartment.”

“Well, I’ll be. This is Eight-B?”

“It is.”

“And your name is—?”

“Not O’Driscoll, I assure you. Or the other either. What was the second name you said?”

What indeed? I had to think a moment myself. “Bookspan,” I said.

“Bookspan,” he agreed. “No, not that either.”

“Well, hell,” I said, and shook my head and clucked my tongue. “I guess you’d be a better judge of that than I. Man’s a good bet to know his own name. Obviously I copied down the apartment number wrong, and I’m sorry to bother you.”

“It’s no trouble.”

What did I have to do to get a name out of him? Or a look around his apartment? Tentatively I said, “I don’t suppose I could use your phone?”

Another smile, another shake of the head. “I’m so sorry,” he said, “but that would be awkward. I have company.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Ordinarily it would be my pleasure, but—”

“I understand. Say no more.”

“Well,” he said.

“Well,” I said. “Again, my name’s Bill Thompson”—and what’s yours, you idiot?—“and I’m very sorry to have disturbed you.”

“Please. There is no need for apology.”

“That’s damned decent of you,” I said, “and I hope you’ll be just as gracious a couple of days from now when I come around again to ask you for a donation.”

“Ah,” he said, and went for his pocket again, this time coming up with a black morocco billfold. He reached in and drew out a twenty.

“That’s damned generous of you,” I said, “but I wasn’t planning on collection today. I don’t have my receipts with me.”

“I won’t need a receipt. And this will save you a visit next week.” And would save him an interruption, but that he left unsaid.

“Well…”

“Please,” he said.

I reached for the bill but did not let my fingers close around it. “I’m supposed to give you a receipt,” I said. “I suppose I could put it in the mail. At any rate, I need your name for the records.”

“Of course,” he said. “It’s Todd.”

“Good to meet you, Todd. And your last name?”

“No, no. Todd is the last name.”

“Well, it’s certainly not O’Driscoll or Bookspan, is it?” We chuckled at that one, and I asked him his first name.

“Michael,” he said.

“Michael Todd. The same name as—”

“As the filmmaker, yes.”

“I bet you get that all the time, jokers asking you what it was like being married to Elizabeth Taylor.”

“Not so much,” he said. “After all, it is not an uncommon name.”

“Hell, neither’s mine. When I think of the number of Bill Thompsons in the world—”

“Yes,” he said, “and now I really must not keep you any longer, Mr. Thompson.”

“Michael,” a woman called from deep within the apartment. “What is taking so long? Is anything the matter?”

“One moment,” he called to her. He gave me a smile that was not so much sheepish as goaty. “You see?” he said. “I really must say good day now. Thank you again.”

For what? But I nodded and smiled while he closed the door, and then stood there for another few seconds, taking it all in, thinking it all over. Then I walked to the nearest stairwell and headed up to the twelfth floor again. It struck me that it would be just my luck to run into Charlie Weeks in the hallway, and I tried to figure out what to tell him. I couldn’t pretend I’d spent all that time waiting for the elevator, or he’d be on the phone in a flash, wanting to know what the hell had gone wrong with the Boccaccio’s vaunted white-glove service.

I’d tell him the truth, I decided, but I’d amend it a little. I’d say that I did spend a long time waiting for the elevator, and at length decided to have a look-see on Eight. And should I tell him the fellow had been home? No, I’d say nobody was home, and that I’d decided against letting myself in. Or maybe I should say—

But I didn’t have to say anything. The elevator came, the doors opened, the attendant and I beamed at each other, and I went down and out.

It was a beautiful day, by God, just as Michael Todd—not the film producer—had said it was. I
walked two blocks west to the park, bought a hot dog and a kasha knish from a vendor, and found a bench to sit on. It seemed like a good enough venue for thought, and I had some things to think about.

First of all, the woman hadn’t called him Michael. She’d said something that sounded more like
Mikhail.

Second, I’d recognized her voice.

I walked across Central Park, pausing at the zoo to watch the polar bear. He’d had a lot of press recently because someone had noticed that he was swimming an endless series of figure eights in his pool. This made a lot of people anxious, and there was speculation that his behavior was neurotic at best, and possibly cause for considerable concern. Various experts blamed various elements—his close confinement, his diet, his yearning for female companionship, his irritation at being observed so closely, his sense of alienation at not being observed closely enough, his lack of engaging reading material. The immediate result of all of this media attention was that the bear got visitors like never before, and pleased everybody by continuing to put four and four together. “He’s doing it,” they would announce, and he’d keep on doing it, and finally they’d go away and others would take their place. “He’s doing it!” the new ones would cry, whereupon he’d do it some more.

I watched, and sure enough, he was doing it. I
felt he was making a hell of a good job of it, too. If you were going to swim a number, it seemed to me that eight was definitely the one to go with. Two and four and five were altogether too tricky, and even seven was getting complicated these days, with so many people crossing it in the European fashion. For day-in-day-out swimming, the only real alternative to eight was zero, and then you’d just be going around in circles.

So I didn’t know what the hell they wanted from the poor bear. In an easier town—Decatur, say—people would be proud of a bear that could swim any number at all. But New Yorkers are a demanding lot. If our bear started churning out 3.14159, people would wonder what kind of a moron he was, unable to work out π beyond five decimal places.

Across the park, I stopped at a phone booth and tried Carolyn twice, first at her apartment, then at the Poodle Factory. No answer. I walked on across to West End and Seventy-first, and I got the same prickly feeling on the nape of my neck that I’d had the night before. Then it had kept me from getting out of Max Fiddler’s taxi. Now it led me to stand under an awning on the far corner, doing what I could to observe without being observed.

After ten minutes I was fairly certain my place was staked out, although I couldn’t absolutely swear to it. There was a car parked some fifty feet from the front entrance with two men in it, and in
side the lobby, where I couldn’t see too clearly, there was what might be a man sitting in a chair reading a newspaper. But it could also have been a shadow, and if it was a man that didn’t mean he was waiting for me.

Still, why take chances? I circled the block and wound up at the service entrance, which was locked and unattended. Mine is not a high-security building. The doorman, handy for receiving packages and discouraging low-level muggers and prowlers, is hardly the Maginot Line. There’s no closed-circuit TV, no electronic security system, and the locks, while decent enough, are a far cry from state-of-the-art. I had opened this one on several occasions, most recently during a stretch when I wasn’t getting along with one of the doormen and refused to use the front entrance when he was on duty. That lasted for a couple of weeks, by which time enough other tenants had complained about him that he’d been let go, and good riddance. But the point is that I was pretty good at zipping through that particular lock, and my sang could hardly have been froider at the prospect of opening it, and why not? A cop who caught me in the act might have given me an awkward moment, but not much more than that; after all, it’s not illegal entry when you live there.

I took the elevator to the floor above mine out of an excess of paranoia, walked down a flight, and had a look at my own door. It’s not the Maginot Line, either, but I’ve replaced the original
locks and added some refinements over the years, so it’s reasonably secure.