Lawrence Block: The Burglar In The Closet

“It’s Hegarty, but don’t apologize, for God’s sake. Here I had your name all wrong myself. I was calling you Ken.”

“Mistakes happen.”

“Jesus,” Ray said to me. “You’re the coolest thing since dry ice.”

“I’ve got the guts of a burglar.”

“You said it, fella.”

“No, as a matter of fact you said it. Do you want to read Carson here his rights?”

“The guts of a burglar.”

I let him go on thinking so, but weren’t we all pretty cool? Dennis was positively gelid, identifying Verrill so beautifully when he’d never seen the man before in his life. If I hadn’t introduced him all around, he might just as easily have picked Craig as the elusive Legal Beagle.

And I’m not so sure I had the ice-cold nerves he’d credited me with, either. I have to admit I got pretty shaky when Verrill drew yet another dental scalpel from his jacket pocket while Ray droned on about his right to remain silent. Ray was reading from the Miranda card and didn’t even see what was going on, and my jaw dropped and I froze, and then Carson Verrill gave out with a desperate little yelp and stuck the scalpel straight in his own heart. Then I went back to being cool again.

“The usual thing,” I told Jillian. “He spent more than he earned, he dropped some money in the stock market, he got himself in debt up to his ears, and then he misappropriated funds from a couple of estates he was handling. He needed money, and you’d be surprised what people will do for money. He probably started the deal in motion with the idea of picking up a commission of a few grand. Then he saw a way to get the whole thing. Besides, by this time Crystal was probably more of a liability than an asset. The relationship had dragged on for years and here was a way for him to end it once and for all and pick up a hundred thousand dollars in the process.”

“He seemed so respectable.”

“I guess he didn’t kill Frankie Ackerman. He didn’t mention it and it’s too late to ask him now. I thought she might have called him last night but I guess her death was either an accident or suicide. If he’d killed her he’d have done it with a dental scalpel.”

She shuddered. “I was looking right at him when he did it.”

“So was I. So was everybody but Ray.”

“Every time I close my eyes I see him doing it, stabbing himself in the chest.”

It bothered me, too, but I had an image to maintain and wasn’t about to show it. “It was considerate of him,” I said breezily. “He saved the state the cost of a trial, not to mention the expense of housing and feeding him for a few years. And he gave Craig an opportunity to keep out of the limelight and made Ray Kirschmann a few dollars richer.”

And that was neat, wasn’t it? A few thousand dollars had changed ownership, moving from Craig to Ray, and as a result certain details of the crime would never find their way into the record books. There hadn’t been any burglary, for example. I was never in the place on Gramercy Park. With the right murderer tagged for the murders and nobody in a position to complain, it was easy enough to sweep unpleasant details under the rug.

I leaned back, took a sip of wine. It was nighttime and I was at Jillian’s place and I didn’t have to worry about the police dropping in. Sooner or later Todras and Nyswander would collect some kind of statement from me, but in the meantime I had other things on my mind.

I moved to put an arm around Jillian.

She drew away.

I stretched, forced a yawn. “Well,” I said, “I guess it might not be a bad idea to take a shower, huh? I haven’t had a chance to change my clothes, and-”

“Bernie.”

“What?”

“I, uh, well, the thing is Craig’s coming over soon.”

“Oh.”

“He said he’d be coming over around nine-thirty.”

“I see.”

She turned to look at me, her eyes round and sorrowful. “Well, I have to be practical,” she said. “Don’t I?”

“Sure you do.”

“I was upset with him because of the way he acted, Bernie. Well, it’s certainly true that some people are better under pressure than others. And different people work well under different kinds of pressure. Craig’s a dentist.”

“The World’s Greatest Dentist.”

“When he’s doing some tricky work on a patient, he’s got nerves of steel. But he wasn’t prepared for being arrested and thrown in a jail cell.”

“Few people are.”

“Anyway, he’s serious about me.”

“Right.”

“And he’s a fine man who is well established in a decent profession. He’s respectable.”

“Carson Verrill was respectable.”

“And he’s got security, and that’s important. Bernie, you’re a burglar.”

“True.”

“You don’t save money. You live from one job to the next. You could wind up in jail at any time.”

“No argument.”

“And you probably wouldn’t want to get married anyway.”

“Nope,” I said, “I wouldn’t.”

“So I’d be crazy to throw away something solid with Craig for…for nothing. Wouldn’t I?”

I nodded. “No question about it, Jillian.”

Her lower lip trembled. “Then how come I feel rotten about it? Bernie-”

It was time to reach out and take her in my arms and kiss her. It was definitely time to do just that, but instead I put my wineglass on the coffee table and got to my feet. “Getting late,” I said. “I’m tired, believe it or not. Had a busy day, all that running around and everything. And you want to freshen up so you’ll be at your best when Mr. Thirsty drops in. Me, I want to get on home and hang a couple of new locks on my door and take a shower.”

“Bernie, we could still, uh, see each other. Couldn’t we?”

“No,” I said. “No, I don’t think we could, Jillian.”

“Bernie, am I making a big mistake?”

I gave the question some real thought, and the answer I supplied was the honest one. “No,” I said. “You’re not.”

In the cab heading through the park I had a moment or two where I felt like Sidney Carton. A far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done. And all that crap about how noble it is to lay down one’s life for a friend.

Except crap was what it was, all right. Because the World’s Greatest Dentist wasn’t all that much of a friend, and what was I giving up anyway? She was cute and cuddly and she made good coffee, but lots of women are cute and cuddly and into more interesting things than the polishing of teeth. And I’ve never met one yet who makes better coffee than I make for myself, with my filter pot and my custom-blended mixture of Colombian and Guatemalan beans.

The closest I came to Sidney Carton was that I was showing a little quiet class, which is about what Carson Verrill did when he died neatly instead of doing something gross like taking a header out the window. Because I could have complicated that young woman’s life no end.

I could have told her, for example, who the ardent lover was who’d been with Crystal while I was cooped up in her closet. I could have said it was none other than Craig himself, and the What’s-Her-Name he’d said he had to hurry back to was none other than Jillian herself, and I hadn’t recognized his voice because the closet muffled it. I don’t know if that’s true or not. It would explain some of Craig’s confused behavior, and I really tried not to hear the voice and might not have recognized it if it was Craig. But I never pursued the question, not then and not later on. To this day I don’t know if it was him.

If I’d advanced the theory, though, it certainly could have screwed things up between the two of them.