Lawrence Block: The Burglar In The Closet

Crystal Sheldrake’s door had not one but two new locks, both of them Rabsons. The Rabson’s a good lock to begin with, and one of these was equipped with their new pickproof cylinder. It’s not as pickproof as they’d like you to think but it’s not a plate of chopped liver either, and the damn thing took me a while to get past. It would have taken even longer except that I have a pair of locks just like it at home. One’s in my living room, where I can practice picking it with my eyes closed while I listen to records. The other’s on my own door, keeping out burglars less industrious than I.

I picked my way in, albeit with my eyes open, and before I even locked the door behind me I took a quick tour of the apartment. Once upon a time I didn’t bother to do this, and it later turned out that there was a dead person in the apartment, and the situation proved an embarrassment of the rankest order. Experience is as effective a teacher as she is because one does tend to remember her lessons.

No dead bodies. No live bodies except my own. I went back and locked both locks, plopped my attaché case upon a Victorian rosewood love seat, slipped my hands into a pair of skintight sheer rubber gloves, and went to work.

The name of the game I was playing was Treasure Hunt. “I’d like to see you strip the place to the four walls,” Craig had said, and I was going to do my best to oblige him. There seemed to be more than four walls-the living room I’d entered, a full dining room, a large bedroom, a small bedroom that had been set up as a sort of den and television parlor, and a kitchen with a fake brick floor and real brick walls and a lot of copper pots and pans hanging from iron hooks. The kitchen was my favorite room. The bedroom was all chintzy and virginal, the den angular and uninspired, and the living room an eclectic triumph featuring examples of bad taste down through the centuries. So I started in the kitchen and found six hundred dollars in the butter compartment of the refrigerator door.

Now the refrigerator’s always a good place to look. A surprising number of people keep money in the kitchen, and many of them tuck it into the fridge. Cold cash, I suppose. But I didn’t pick up the six hundred by playing the averages. I had inside information.

“The slut keeps money in the refrigerator,” Craig had told me. “Usually has a couple hundred stashed in the butter keeper. Keeps the bread with the butter.”

“Clever.”

“Isn’t it just? She used to keep marijuana in the tea canister. If she lived where people have lawns she’d probably store it with the grass seed.”

I didn’t look in the tea canister so I don’t know what kind of tea it contained. I put the cash in my wallet and returned to the living room to have a shot at the desk. There was more money in the top right-hand drawer, maybe two hundred dollars at most in fives and tens and twenties. It wasn’t enough to get excited about but I was getting excited anyway, the automatic tickle of excitement that starts working the instant I let myself into someone else’s abode, the excitement that builds every time I lay hands on someone else’s property and make it my own. I know this is all morally reprehensible and there are days when it bothers me, but there’s no getting around it. My name is Bernie Rhodenbarr and I’m a thief and I love to steal. I just plain love it.

The money went in my pocket and became my money, and I started slamming through the other drawers in the little kneehole desk, and several in a row contained nothing noteworthy and then I opened another and right on top were three cases of the sort that good watches come in. The first one was empty. The second and third were not. One of them was an Omega and the other was a Patek Philippe and they were both gorgeous. I closed the cases and placed them in my attaché case where they belonged.

The watches were choice but that was it for the living room and it was actually more than I’d expected. Because the living room like the kitchen was just a warm-up. Crystal Sheldrake lived alone, although she often had overnight guests, and she was a woman with a lot of valuable jewelry, and women keep their jewelry in the bedroom. I’m sure they think they do it so it’s handy when they’re getting dressed, but I think the real reason is that they sleep better surrounded by gold and diamonds. It makes them feel secure.

“It used to drive me crazy,” Craig had said. “Sometimes she left things lying out in plain sight. Or she’d just toss a bracelet and a necklace in the top drawer of the bedside table. She had the bedside table on the left-hand side, but I suppose they’re both hers now so check ’ em both.” No kidding. “I useta beg her to keep some of that stuff in a safe-deposit box. She said it’s too much trouble. She wouldn’t listen to me.”

“Let’s hope she didn’t start listening recently.”

“Not Crystal. She never listened to anybody.”

I took my attaché case into the bedroom with me and had a look for myself. Earrings, finger rings, bracelets, necklaces. Brooches, pendants, watches. Modern jewelry and antique jewelry. Fair stuff, good stuff, and a couple things that looked, to my reasonably professional eye, to be very good indeed. Dentists take in a certain amount of cash along with the checks, and hard as it may be to believe this, some of that cash doesn’t get reported to the Internal Revenue people. Some of it gets turned quietly into jewelry, and that jewelry could now get turned just as quietly right back into cash again. It wouldn’t bring in what it had cost in the first place, since your average fence is a rather more careful customer than your average dentist, but it would still amount to a fairly impressive sum when you consider that it all started out with nothing but a whole lot of toothaches and root-canal work.

I searched very carefully, not wanting to miss anything. Crystal Sheldrake kept a very neat apartment on the surface, but the interiors of her drawers were a scandal, with baubles and beads forced to keep company with rumpled panty hose and half-full make-up jars. So I took my time, and my attaché case grew heavier as my fingers grew lighter. There was plenty of time. She had left the house at seven-fifteen and would probably not return until after midnight, if indeed she returned before dawn. Her standard operating procedure, according to Craig, called for a drink or two at each of several neighborhood watering holes, a bite of dinner somewhere along the way, and then a few hours devoted to a combination of serious drinking and even more serious cruising. Of course there were nights that got planned in advance, dinner engagements and theater dates, but she’d left the house dressed for a casual night’s entertainment.

That meant she’d either bring home a stranger or go to a stranger’s home, and either way I’d be long gone before she recrossed her own threshold. If they settled on his place, the jewels might be fenced before she knew they were missing. If she brought the guy home and they were both too sloshed to notice anything was missing, and if he in turn let himself out before she woke up, she might just tag the crime on him. Either way I looked to be in the clear, and enough thousands of dollars ahead so that I could coast for the next eight or ten months, even after I gave Craig his share. Of course it was hard to tell just what the attaché case contained, and it’s a long, long way from jewelry to cash, but things were looking good for Mrs. Rhodenbarr’s boy Bernard, no question about it.

I remember having that thought. I can’t begin to tell you what a comfort it was a little later when Crystal Sheldrake locked me in the bedroom closet.

The problem, of course, derived from an offshoot of Parkinson’s Law. A person, be he bureaucrat or burglar, tends to take for a task as much time as is available for it. Because I knew Crystal Sheldrake would be absent from her apartment for hours on end, I was inclined to spend several of those hours divesting her of her possessions. I’ve always known that burglars should observe the old Playboy Philosophy-i.e., Get In and Get Out-but there’s something to be said for making use of the available time. You can miss things if your work is rushed. You can leave incriminating evidence behind. And it’s a kick, going through another person’s things, participating vicariously (and perhaps neurotically) in that person’s life. The kicks involved are one of the attractions of burglary for me. I can admit that, even if I can’t do anything much about it.