Lawrence Block: The Burglar In The Closet

No urg this time. He was rattling along too well to need encouragement from me.

“I’m just so damn lucky I wound up in this line of work, Bern. I remember my best friend and I were trying to decide what we wanted to do with our lives. I picked dental school and he went into pharmacy school. His educational route looked easier and his potential income was certainly much higher. You own your own store, you branch out and open other stores, hell, you’re a businessman, you can make a ton. For a little while there I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have taken the road he took. But just for a little while. Jesus, can you picture me standing behind a counter selling Kotex and laxatives? I couldn’t be a businessman, Bern. I’d be rotten at it. Hey, open a little wider, huh? Perfect, beautiful. I’d be rotten at it and I’d go out of my bird with boredom. I read somewhere that pharmacists get more action than any other occupational group. Some study out of California. I wonder if it’s true or not? What woman would want to ball a druggist, anyway?”

He went on with this line of thought and my mind drifted off a ways. I was a captive audience if there ever was one, and I had to sit there and take it but I didn’t, by God, have to pay attention.

And then he was saying, “So I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be a pharmacist, and I swear I wouldn’t want to be anything but what I am. Satisfied Sam, huh? True, though.”

“Urg.”

“But I’m normal, Bernie. I have fantasies just like everybody else in this world. I try to think what I’d be if dentistry just didn’t happen to be an option for me. Just asking myself the hypothetical question, like. And because it’s hypothetical and I know it’s hypothetical, why, I can feel free to indulge myself. I can pick something that would call for someone a lot more adventurous than I actually know myself to be.”

“Urg.”

“I try to have fantasies of being a professional athlete, for instance. I play a lot of squash and a fair amount of tennis, and I’m not absolutely lousy, in fact I’m getting so I shape up pretty decent on the squash court, but there’s such an obvious gulf between my game and the pro game that I can’t even fantasize about playing that role. That’s the trouble with reality. It gets in the way of the best fantasies.”

“Urg.”

“So I’ve settled on something I’d like to be, and I can enjoy it on a fantasy level because I know virtually nothing about it.”

“Urg?”

“It’s exciting, it’s adventurous, it’s dangerous, and I can’t say I don’t have the skills or temperament for it because I don’t know exactly what they are. I gather it pays a whole lot and the hours are short and flexible. And you work alone.”

“Urg?” He had me interested by now. It sounded like the sort of thing I might be interested in.

“I was thinking about crime,” he went on. “But nothing where you have to point guns at people or where you wind up with them pointed at you. In fact I’d want a criminal career with no human contact involved in it at all. Something where you work alone and don’t have to be a part of a gang.” Chuckle. “I’ve pretty much narrowed it down, Bernie. If I had it to do all over again, and if dentistry was just out of the picture, I’d be a burglar.”

Silence.

“Like you, Bernie.”

More silence. Lots of it.

Well, of course it rocked me. I’d been set up with considerable skill. Here was ol’ Craig Sheldrake, Mr. Laid Back and World’s Greatest Dentist, just running pleasantly off at the mouth about how much he loved his work, and the next thing I knew he’d dropped this brick into my open mouth and all the Novocaine in the world couldn’t have numbed the shock.

You see, I’ve always kept my personal and professional lives as separate as possible. Except during my blessedly infrequent stays as a guest of the state, at which times one’s freedom of association is severely proscribed, I don’t hang out with known criminals. My friends may swipe stationery from the office or buy a hot color TV. They almost certainly fiddle a bit on their income tax returns. But they don’t make their livings lifting baubles from other people’s apartments, or knocking over liquor stores and filling stations, or writing checks drawn on the Left Bank of the Wabash. Their moral caliber may be no greater than mine but their respectability quotient is infinitely higher.

And as far as any of them know, I’m as respectable as the next fellow. I don’t talk much about my work, and in the sort of casual friendships toward which I gravitate there’s nothing remarkable about that. It’s generally understood that I’m in investments, or living on a small but apparently adequate private income, or doing something dull but earnest in import-export, or whatever. Sometimes I’ll assume a more colorful role to impress a youngish person of the interesting sex, but for the most part I’m just Good Old Bernie, who always has a buck in his pocket but never throws it around recklessly, and you can always count on him for a fifth at poker or a fourth at bridge, and he probably does something like sell insurance but hasn’t thank God tried to sell it to me.

Now my dentist evidently knew I was a burglar. The fact that my cover was blown wasn’t horrible-there were people in my apartment building who knew, and a few other folks around town. But the whole thing was startling, so was the manner in which it had all been brought to my attention.

“Couldn’t resist that,” Craig Sheldrake was saying. “Damn if you didn’t just about drop your lower incisors on my linoleum. Didn’t mean to shake you up but I couldn’t help myself. Hell, Bern, it don’t make no never mind to me. You had your name in the paper when they were trying to hang a murder charge on you a year or so ago and I happened to notice it. Rhodenbarr’s not the most common name in the world, and they even gave your address, which I of course have in the files, so it looked to be you all right. You’ve been in a few times since then and I never said anything because there was never any need.”

“Urg.”

“Right-but there is now. Bernie, how’d you like to rack up a really nice score? I guess different burglars like to steal different things but I never heard of a one who doesn’t like to steal jewelry. I’m not talking about crap from the costume counter at J. C. Penney. I’m talking about the real stuff. Diamonds and emeralds and rubies and lots of fourteen- and eighteen-carat golderoo. Stuff any burglar would be proud to stash in his swag bag.”

I wanted to tell him not to use what he evidently thought was thieves’ argot. But what I said was “Urg.”

“You betcha, Bern. But open a little wider, huh? That’s the ticket. Let me get to the point. You remember Crystal, don’t you? She worked for me, but that was before your time. Then I made the mistake of marrying her and lost a great dental hygienist who put out and gained in return a slovenly wife who also put out-for half the world. But I know I’ve told you my troubles with that bitch. I poured that tale into any ear that would stand still for it.”

How could any ear escape it when it shared a head with a mouth with Mr. Thirsty slurping up the saliva?

“Bought her all the jewelry in the world,” he went on. “Sold myself on the idea that it was a good investment. I couldn’t just hold onto money, Bern. Not built that way. And she gave me this song and dance about investing in jewelry, and I had all this undeclared cash I couldn’t invest in stocks and bonds, it had to go into something where you can pay cash and keep the whole thing off the books. And you can get good bargains in the jewelry line if you’ll do business that way, believe me.”