The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart (18 page)

“Wait a minute,” Carolyn said. “What’s this about a woman and a monkey? I want to hear this.”

I closed the door and the cab pulled away. I hailed another, and asked the Vietnamese driver if he knew how to get to Seventy-fourth and Park.

“I’m sure I’ll be able to find it,” he said dryly. His name was Nguyen Trang, and he spoke good English and knew the city cold. As we rode across town he told me what a great city it was. “But the fucking Cambodians are ruining it,” he said.

C
harlie Weeks was waiting in his doorway when the elevator let me out on the twelfth floor. “Ah, Mr. Thompson,” he said. “I’m so glad you could make it.” The elevator operator took this for a sign that I was welcome, and closed his door and descended.

Charlie held the door for me, followed me inside. “I thought I’d give them the same name as last time,” I told him. “It’s less confusing that way.”

“Less confusing for me as well,” he said. “I met you as Bill Thompson, and it’s hard to think of you as anyone else. What do they call you, anyway? Bernard? Bernie? Barney?”

“I’ll answer to almost anything. Bill, if you’d rather.”

“Oh, I can’t call you Bill, now that I know it’s not your name.” He looked me over carefully. “What’s your favorite animal?” he demanded.

“My favorite animal? Gee, I don’t know. I never really thought about it.”

“Never?”

He made me feel I’d wasted a lifetime thinking about relativity and quantum theory and dialectical materialism when I should have been selecting a favorite animal. “Well, I guess I must have given it a little thought,” I admitted.

“What’s your favorite?”

“It depends. For eating I’d go with cows, I guess, or sheep. Tofu’s not an animal, is it? No, of course not. It’s not even a bird. Uh…”

“Not to eat.”

“Right. Well, let’s see. Different animals for different things, I’d have to say. I have a cat working for me in the store, fine mouser. If you’re going to have an animal around a bookshop I don’t see how you could do better than a cat. Rabbits are cute, but a rabbit in a bookstore would be a disaster. They, uh, gnaw things. Books, for instance. Now, for swimming in figure eights, well, you can’t beat the polar bear I was watching the other day. Eight eight eight eight eight, just like a repeating decimal, you’d have sworn he thought he was the square root of minus something-or-other.”

His face held an expression of long-suffering. “The animal you identify with,” he said. “The animal you see yourself as.”

“Oh.” I thought it over. “I guess I’ve always seen myself as a person,” I said.

“If you were an animal, what kind of animal would you be?”

“I guess that would depend on what kind of animal I was. I know, I’m supposed to think hypothetically, but I seem to be having trouble. I’m sorry. Is this important?”

“No, of course not. Let’s just forget it.”

“No, dammit,” I said, “that’s not right. I ought to be able to figure this out.”

“I was the mouse,” he said patiently. “Wood was the woodchuck. Cappy Hoberman was the ram.”

“And Bateman was the rabbit and Renwick was the cat.”

“Rennick.”

“Right, Rennick. So you think I ought to have an animal code name?”

“It’s really not important,” he said. “I was just making conversation.”

“No, I’d be glad to have one,” I said, “but maybe it’s not the sort of thing a person should pick for himself. If you wanted to pick a name for me…”

“Hmmm,” he said, and stroked his chin with his fingertips. “Something in the weasel family, I think.”

“Something in the weasel family?”

“I would think so. An otter?”

“An otter?”

“No,” he said, “I don’t think so. Not an otter. The playful quality is there, to be sure, but the
otter’s altogether too straightforward. I’d say not an otter.”

“Good,” I said. “Tastes of dog, anyway.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing.”

“Something furtive,” he said. He put his palms together in front of his chest and made a sort of side-to-side motion. “Something nocturnal, something devious, something predatory. Something, oh, burglarous.”

“Burglarous,” I said.

“Not a wolverine, that’s altogether too rapacious. Nor a mink, I don’t believe. A badger?” He looked at me. “Not a badger. Perhaps a ferret.”

“A ferret?”

“Not a ferret. You know what? I think a weasel, a plain old garden-variety weasel.”

“Oh,” I said.

“You’re the weasel,” he said. He clapped me on the back. “Come on, weasel. Have a seat, make yourself comfortable. There’s coffee made.”

“Thank God,” I said.

The weasel was in the kitchen for a little over a half hour, passing on some facts and guesses to the mouse, drinking coffee, and listening to some reminiscences of skulduggery in the Balkans, circa 1950. It was absorbing and entertaining, and if not everything he told me was a hundred percent factual, well, that made us even.

It was close to midnight when I put down my
coffee cup, got to my feet, and grabbed up my Braniff bag. “I’d better be going,” I said. “I have a feeling we’re getting somewhere, but maybe we shouldn’t bother. If Candlemas killed Hoberman, we don’t have to worry that he got away with it. He’s dead himself. He wasn’t my partner, and he forfeited any claim on my loyalties when he became a murderer. It might be interesting to know who killed him, but I can’t say it’s vitally important to me.”

“That’s a point.”

“Well, we can just take it a day at a time,” I said, “and see what happens. But I’m beat. I want to get on home.”

“I’ll see you out.”

I told him he didn’t have to go to the trouble, and he assured me it was no trouble. The next thing I knew we were out in the hall, waiting for the elevator I’d been careful not to ring for.

Hell.

I’d thought of having Carolyn call his number at a predetermined time, then contriving to be out in the hall waiting for the elevator at just that moment. But I’d decided it wouldn’t work. For one thing, trying to synchronize something like that is just about impossible. If the phone call comes a minute too early or late, the whole scheme falls flat. For another, his apartment was all the way down the hall, and you probably couldn’t hear his phone if you were standing by the elevator shaft.

“Is that thing not coming?” he said, after we’d waited for a few minutes.

“It may be a while. Look, there’s no reason for you to stand out here in your robe.”

“I’m not going to abandon you,” he said firmly. “You know, the same damned thing happened last time you were here.” He chuckled. “Maybe you don’t know how to ring that thing,” he said, and reached to do it himself.

I caught hold of his wrist. “I’ll level with you,” I said.

“Oh?”

“This is a genuinely difficult building to get into,” I said, “and now that I’m inside it, I hate to see the opportunity go to waste.”

“What do you mean?” He studied me with those see-through-everything eyes of his. “You can’t be planning another visit to that apartment on the eighth floor.”

I shook my head. “Whatever the guy had down there,” I said, “he doesn’t have it anymore, and I didn’t see anything else terribly exciting in his place. But there’s a couple on Nineteen, he’s a muni bond specialist in a big brokerage house downtown, and I think she’s a Vanderbilt on her mother’s side. And I happen to know they’re in Quogue for the weekend.”

“Ha!” he cried, delighted. “You’re the weasel, all right.”

“Of course, if they’re by any chance particular friends of yours…”

“Not at all, weasel, not at all. I don’t know anyone on the nineteenth floor, certainly not a huckster of municipal bonds. But you’ll be careful, won’t you? Isn’t it dangerous?”

“It’s always dangerous,” I said, flashing a raffish grin. “That’s what makes it interesting.”

“Oh, what a weasel! Can’t keep him out of the chicken yard.”

“But I’ll be careful,” I assured him. “I’ll be in and out in an hour, and this”—I patted the flight bag—“should weigh a little more then than it does now.”

“And then you’ll simply head for home?”

“I’ll take the stairs this far,” I said, “for the elevator operator’s benefit. So if you happen to see me in the hallway an hour or so from now, don’t be alarmed.”

“I hope to be sleeping soundly by then,” he said. “I’ll rest easy, secure in the knowledge that the weasel is hard at work six stories above me.” He thrust his hand at me. “Good hunting, weasel.”

“Thank you, mouse.”

“Animal names,” he said with satisfaction. “They serve a purpose. Until tomorrow, my good little weasel.”

“Until tomorrow,” I said, and we shook hands and went our separate ways. His led back to his apartment, mine to the stairwell and, presumably, the nineteenth floor.

Except that’s not where I went.

I did climb two flights of stairs for starters, then
sat at the fifteenth-story landing for a few minutes working things out in my mind. (Yes, I went up two flights and got from Twelve to Fifteen. You read that right. There’s no thirteenth floor at the Boccaccio, which is why the mouse could anticipate my doing the work of a weasel six stories above him.)

He could anticipate it, but that didn’t mean it was going to happen.

After a good long moment of uffish thought on Fifteen, I retraced my steps and kept on going clear down past Twelve, where Charlie Weeks would soon be sleeping peacefully, and past Eight, where Mike Todd would be sleeping or not, with or without the enigmatic Ilona Markova. I went all the way down to the fifth floor, where I satisfied myself that the hallway was clear before traversing most of it en route to apartment 5-D. I rang the bell, remembering how I’d very nearly neglected to do so the last time I’d been to the eighth floor. In the present instance I’d have been astonished if anybody had been home, and nobody was. I set down my flight bag, took out my tools, picked the two locks, and let myself in.

For all I knew there was a bond salesman on Nineteen, married to a Vanderbilt and weekending in Quogue. It was entirely possible. And it was unquestionably the case that there were quite a few apartments in the Boccaccio unoccupied that weekend, their tenants in the Hamptons or Nantucket or Block Island, their valuables left behind,
easy pickings for a weasel, or any reasonably resourceful burglar.

But I didn’t have a clue which apartments they were, or an easy way to find out. What I had managed to learn, by calling a slew of realtors from the Lehrman apartment that afternoon, was that there were at least three Boccaccio apartments currently offered for sale. One of them was occupied at present by its owners. A second was sublet for a handsome monthly fee, and would be available to its purchaser when the sublease expired the end of August.

The third, 5-D, was vacant.

The woman who told me about 5-D was a Ms. Farrante, from the Corcoran Group. As Bill Thompson, I’d made an appointment to see it with her on Wednesday afternoon, but I’d decided I couldn’t wait that long. So here I was now.

Once I’d locked up I took a quick tour of the premises, using my pocket flashlight to supplement what light came in from the windows. The apartment fronted on Park Avenue, and there were no drapes or shades or venetian blinds, nothing to bedim the view of anyone outside who happened to look in my direction. I could have switched the lights on anyway—there’s nothing terribly suspicious about a man pacing around in a completely empty apartment—but you never know what will prompt some busybody to dial 911, or walk across the street and say something to the concierge.

It was as empty as an apartment could be, with
nothing on the floors, nothing on the walls, nothing in the closets or the kitchen cupboards. The walls smelled very faintly of paint, and the parquet floors of wax. The apartment, Ms. Farrante had assured me, was in move-in condition, the owners had relocated to Scottsdale, Arizona, and the price was negotiable, but not
very
negotiable. “They’ve turned down offers,” she said.

They wouldn’t get a chance to turn down mine. I didn’t want their apartment. I didn’t even want to burgle it. My entry had been illegal, sure enough, so I had probably crossed the line into felonious territory, but my intentions were pure enough.

I just wanted a place to sack out for the next seven or eight hours.

But what an unwelcoming abode I’d picked! It would have been nice to sit down in a comfortable chair, but there were no chairs, comfortable or otherwise. It would have been nice to stretch out in a canopied four-poster, or a big brass bed, or a sagging couch, but there was nothing of the sort, not even an old mattress on the floor.

It would have been nice to soak in a tub. There were two well-appointed bathrooms, one with a gleaming modern stall shower, the other with a massive old claw-footed tub. I started drawing myself a bath—the water came out rusty for the first twenty seconds, but then ran nice and clear. Then I realized there weren’t any towels. Somehow I couldn’t see myself having a nice hot bath and then standing around waiting to evaporate to dryness. I
had some useful things in the flight bag, clean clothes for the morning, a razor and toothbrush and comb, but I sure didn’t have a towel.

I pulled the plug and looked around some more. They’d left toilet paper, thank God, but as far as I could tell that was the only thing that hadn’t made the trip to Scottsdale with them.

I didn’t feel very sleepy. I might have, given more comfortable surroundings, because Lord knows I’d had a tiring day. But the way I felt I’d be awake for hours.

At least I had something to read. I’d tucked a P. G. Wodehouse paperback into my bag when I’d originally packed it, and neither I nor Carolyn had had occasion to remove it, so it was still there. I could take it to the bathroom and perch on the throne, and with the door closed I’d be safe in turning on the lights.

I did all that, and when I worked the light switch nothing happened. I tried the other john and got the same result. Well, it figured. Why pay the light bill when nobody was living there? Fortunately I had my pocket flash. It wasn’t the world’s best reading light, any more than the toilet seat was an ideal library chair, but it would do.

And it did, too, until I was somewhere in the middle of Chapter Six, at which point the beam of my flashlight gradually faded down to a soft yellow glow, a fit illumination for lovemaking, say, but nowhere near bright enough to read by. If I’d been genuinely well prepared I’d have had a couple
of replacement batteries in my bag, but I wasn’t and I didn’t, and that was all the reading I was going to do that night.

So much for that. I went out into another room—the living room, one of the bedrooms, who knew, who cared—and stretched out on the floor. I understand that some floors are harder than others, and that I was lucky to be on wood rather than, say, concrete. That must be true, but you couldn’t prove it by me. I can’t imagine how I’d have been any less comfortable on a bed of nails.