Lawrence Block - The Burglar In The Closet

“That’s good, because they give me toads. What’s your name?”

Was there any way on earth the cops were going to interrogate this lady? There was not. “Bernie,” I said. “Bernie Rhodenbarr.”

“God, if I married you I’d still have the same initials. I could keep on wearing all my monogrammed blouses. And yet we’ll never meet. We’ll have shared this magic moment over the telephone and we’ll never encounter each other face to face. That’s sad but it’s okay. You told me you loved me and that’s better than anything that happened to me all day yesterday. Gotham Artists’ Guild. Got it?”

“Got it. ’Bye, Denise.”

“’Bye, Bernie. Keep in touch, lover.”

Gotham Artists’ Guild was located on East Fifty-fourth Street between Park and Madison. They told me over the phone to call in person, so I took a bus uptown and walked over to their office. It was two flights up over a Japanese restaurant.

I’d been winging it with Denise Raphaelson, inventing my story as I went along, but now I was prepared and I gave my spiel to an owlish young man without any hesitation. He brought me a half dozen Kodachrome slides and a viewer.

“This is the only Grabow we have,” he said. “See if it looks like the painting you remember.”

It didn’t look anything like the painting I’d described to Denise, and I almost said as much until I remembered that the painting I’d been talking about had never existed in the first place. Grabow’s work turned out to involve bold amorphous splashes of color applied according to some scheme which no doubt made considerable sense to the artist. It wasn’t the kind of thing I usually liked, but I was looking at it in miniature, and maybe it would blow my mind if I saw it life-size.

As if it mattered. “Grabow,” I said positively. “The painting I saw was like these, all right. It’s definitely the same artist.”

I couldn’t get an address or a phone number. When the artist is represented by a gallery that’s all they’ll tell you, and Walter Ignatius Grabow was represented by the Koltnow Gallery on Greene Street. That was also in SoHo, quite possibly no more than a stone’s throw from Denise Raphaelson. And possibly rather more than that; my grasp of geography south of the Village is limited.

I found a pay phone-the Hotel Wedgeworth, Fifty-fifth just east of Park. I called the Koltnow Gallery and nobody answered. I called Jillian’s apartment and nobody answered. I called Craig’s office and nobody answered. I called 411 and asked the Information operator if there was a listing in Manhattan for Walter Ignatius Grabow. She told me there wasn’t. I thanked her and she said I was welcome. I thought of calling Denise back and telling her I’d managed to get in touch with my Grabow, thanks to her good advice, but I restrained myself. I called Koltnow again, and Jillian, and Craig’s office, and nothing happened. Nobody was home. I dialed my own number and established that I wasn’t home either. The whole world was out to lunch.

Ray Kirschmann had staked his claim to half of Crystal’s jewels and I hadn’t even stolen them yet. He’d figured things wrong but he’d come scarily close to the truth. Todras and Nyswander knew the story about my aunt was a lot of crap and that I was a burglar. I had no idea if they knew there was a lot of jewelry involved in the case, and I couldn’t begin to guess what they had told Jillian or what Jillian had said to them. Nor did I know anything much about Craig’s situation. He was probably still in jail, and if Blankenship was any good he’d told his client to button his lip, but how many lawyers are any good? At any moment Craig might decide to start singing a song about Bernie the Burglar, and where would that leave me? I had a ticket stub between me and a homicide charge, and I couldn’t make myself believe it amounted to an impregnable shield.

I walked around. It was a medium-nice fall day. The smog had dimmed the sun somewhat but it was still nice and bright out, the kind of day you don’t take the trouble to appreciate until the only fresh air you get to breathe is out in the exercise yard.

Damn it, who killed the woman? W. I. Grabow? Knobby? Lawyer John? Had the murderer and the lover been one and the same? Or had the murderer killed her because he was jealous of the lover, or for an entirely different reason? And where did the jewels fit in? And where did Craig fit in? And where, damnitall, did I fit in?

What I kept fitting in was phone booths, and the next time I tried the Koltnow Gallery a woman answered on the second ring. She sounded older than Denise Raphaelson, and her conversation was less playful. I said I understood she represented Walter Grabow, that I was an old friend and wanted to get in touch.

“Oh, we used to have some paintings of his, though I can’t remember that we ever made a sale for him. He was trying to get together enough grade-A material for a show and it never materialized. How did you know to call us?”

“Gotham Artists’ Guild.”

“Oh, Gag,” she said. “They’ve still got us listed as Wally’s gallery? I’m surprised. He never really caught on with anybody, you know, and then he got involved with graphics and became more interested in printmaking techniques than anything else. And he stopped painting, and I thought that was insane because his forte was his color sense, and here he was wrapping himself up in a straitjacket of detail work. Are you an artist yourself?”

“Just an old friend.”

“Then you don’t want to hear all this. You just want to know where he’s at, as the children say. Hold on a moment.” I held, and after a little while the operator told me to put in another nickel. I dropped a dime in the slot and told her to keep the change. She didn’t even thank me, and then the woman at Koltnow Gallery read off a number on King Street. I couldn’t remember where King Street was at. As the children say.

“King Street.”

“Oh, I’ll bet you’re from out of town. Are you?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, King Street is in SoHo, but just barely. It’s one block So of Ho.” She laughed mechanically, as if she used this little play on words frequently and was getting sick of it. “South of Houston, that is.”

“Oh,” I said. I now remembered where King Street was, but she went on to explain just what subways I should take to get there, all that crap, none of which I needed to hear.

“This is the most recent address I have for him,” she said. “I couldn’t swear that he’s still there, but we’ve kept him on our mailing list for invitations to gallery openings and the mail doesn’t come back, so if you write to him the Post Office’ll forward it, but-”

She went on and on. She didn’t have a telephone number listed, but I could look in the phone book, unless of course I’d already done so, and maybe he had an unlisted number, and of course if I went to the King Street address and he wasn’t there I could always check with the super, that was occasionally helpful, and all of this stupid advice that any fourth-grader could have figured out by himself.

The operator cut in again to ask for more money. They’re never satisfied. I started to drop yet another dime in the slot, then came abruptly to my senses. And hung up.

I still had the dime in my hand. I started to put it in my pocket. Then, without any real thought involved, I began making a phone call instead. I dialed Jillian’s apartment, and when a male voice answered I said, “Sorry, wrong number,” and hung up. I frowned, checked the number on the card in my wallet, frowned again, fished out another dime-I still had an ample supply-and dialed once more.

“Hello?”

The same voice. A voice I’d heard often over the years, saying not Hello but Open wider, please.