Lawrence Block: Chip Harrison Scores Again

At first i didn’t pay very much attention to the guy. I was washing my hands in the men’s room of a movie theater on Forty-second Street, and in a place like that it’s not an especially good idea to pay too much attention to anybody or you could wind up getting more involved than you might want to. It’s not that everybody is a faggot. But everybody figures everybody else is a faggot, so if you let your eyes roam around you could get (a) groped by someone who’s interested or (b) punched in the mouth by someone who’s not interested or (c) arrested by someone who’s a cop.

If any of these things happened I would have had to leave the theatre, probably, and I didn’t want to. I had already seen both movies, one of them twice, but I still didn’t want to leave. It was warm in the theater. Outside it was cold, with day-old snow turning from gray to black, and once I went out there I would have to stay out there, because I had no other place to go.

(Which is not entirely true. There was this apartment on East Fifth Street between Avenues B and C where I could stay if I really had to. Some friends of mine lived there, and while it wasn’t exactly a crash pad they would always let me have a section of floor to sleep on and a plate of brown rice to eat. They were into this macrobiotic thing and all they ever ate was brown rice, which is very nourishing and very healthy and very boring after not very long. I could go there and eat and sleep and even talk to people, although most of the people you found there were usually too stoned to say very much, but the thing was that I only had a quarter, which is a nickel less than the subway costs. It was too cold to walk that far, and it was just about as cold inside that place as it was outside, because there was no heat. My friends had been using the stove to heat the place. That hadn’t worked too well in the first place, and it worked less well when Con Ed turned off the gas and electricity for nonpayment. They burned candles for light and cooked the rice over little cans of sterno. A couple of times Robbo had burned old furniture in the bathtub for heat, but he had more or less given this up, partly because heating the bathroom didn’t do much for the rest of the apartment, and partly because there was a good chance the whole building would go up sooner or later.)

The point of this is just that I was washing my hands and not paying much attention to anything else until I happened to notice this guy take a wallet out of his pocket and start going through it. He was sort of hunched toward me, screening the wallet with his body from the washroom attendant, who I think existed to make sure that if anybody did anything dirty, they did it in one of the pay toilets. The guy with the wallet went through all the compartments of the thing, taking out money and plastic cards and things, and jamming everything into his pockets. Then he put the wallet in another pocket, took out a comb, combed his long dark hair back into a d.a., and left.

I turned and watched him, and on the way out his hand dipped into a pocket and came up with the wallet and dropped it into the wastebasket. There was this huge wastebasket on the opposite side of the door from the washroom attendant, and the guy with the d.a. did this whole number in one graceful motion, and the attendant never saw what happened.

I have to admit that it took me a minute to figure this out. Why would a guy throw his wallet away? And why be so slick about it? I mean, if you grow tired of your wallet, you have a perfect right to throw it away, right?

Oh. It wasn’t his wallet. He was a pickpocket or a mugger or something, and he had emptied the wallet, and now he wanted to get rid of it because it was Incriminating Evidence.

How about that.

My first reaction was just general excitement. Not that I had been an eyewitness to the most spectacular crime since the Brink’s robbery. I would guess they get more wallets in those wastebaskets than they get paper towels. In fact, if you ever want a used wallet, that’s probably the best place to go looking for one. But my own life hadn’t been that thrilling lately, and it didn’t take much to make my day.

The next thing that struck me was that I, Chip Harrison, had just been presented with an opportunity. A small one, perhaps, but I was as low on opportunities as I was on excitement. And that wallet was an opportunity.

It might hold important papers, for example. You might argue that people with important papers in their wallets don’t spend all that much time in Forty-second Street movie houses, but one never knows for sure. Perhaps the owner would pay a reward for the return of the wallet. (Perhaps he’d call the police and have me arrested as a pickpocket.) Or perhaps there was some small change in the change compartment, if there was a change compartment. Or a subway token. Or a postage stamp. The Post Office won’t redeem unused stamps, but at least I could mail a letter, if there was someone I wanted to write to. Or perhaps — Well, there were endless possibilities. I mulled them over in my mind while I was drying my hands on a paper towel, and I looked at the attendant and at the wastebasket, and then I went out and combed my hair again. I had just done this before washing my hands in the first place and while my hair tends to need combing frequently it didn’t really need it now. But I was about to Take Advantage of Opportunity, and thus I had to Think On My Feet.

I dried my hands again, and I carried the used paper towel over to the wastebasket, keeping the comb in the same hand with it, and I dropped them both into the basket.

Then I took a step or two toward the door, stopped abruptly, made a fist of one hand and hit the palm of the other hand with it.

“Oh, shit,” I said. “I dropped my comb in the wastebasket.”

“I seen you,” the attendant said.

“All the stupid things.”

“You want another comb, there’s a machine over on the side.”

“I want that comb,” I said.

“Prob’ly dirty by now. You wouldn’t believe the crap they throw in those baskets.”

“I think I can get it.” I was leaning into the basket and pawing around through old Kleenex and paper towels. The wallet had plummeted through them to the bottom, and I was having a hell of a time finding it.

“Over there,” the clown said helpfully. “You see it?”

I did, damn him. I pawed at some paper towels and made the comb slip away. “Almost had it,” I said, and went diving for it again. I had my feet off the ground and was balanced rather precariously, with the edge of the can pushing my belt buckle through my stomach. I had visions of losing my balance and winding up headfirst in the trashcan, which might provide some people with some laughs but which wouldn’t provide me with the wallet, the comb, or much in the way of self-respect.

And self-respect, at that point of time, was as hard to come by as excitement, opportunity, and money.

I kept my balance and after another few shots I got the wallet. I can’t swear that it’s the same wallet I saw go in. For all I know there were a dozen of them somewhere down there. I got a wallet, palmed it off, and slipped it inside my shirt, and then I had to go through the charade of getting the fucking comb. It just didn’t seem right to leave it there.

On my way through the lobby I dumped the comb in yet another wastebasket. And did it very surreptitiously, as if I were, well, a pickpocket ditching a wallet. Which is nothing but stupid.

I went outside and walked down to Broadway and watched the news flashing on the Allied Chemical Tower. It was cold, and there was a miserable wind blowing off the Hudson. I stood there shivering. I was out in the cold with no way of getting back into the warm, and I had traded a perfectly adequate pocket comb for a wallet that someone else had already gone through once, and I wasn’t entirely certain I had come out ahead on the deal.