Lawrence Block - The Burglar in the Rye

And now someone was pounding on my door-well, Ms. Landau’s door-and calling out “Police!” and “Open up in there!” I knew it was the police, and opening up was the last thing I wanted to do.

I drew the curtains, looked out the window. No fire escape, and the street was a long way down.

I heard a key in the lock, Carl’s passkey, and the lock turned. By the time the door opened a crack I was in the bedroom, and the chain lock kept them out while I fumbled behind the drawn curtains. I flung open the window, and, thank God and St. Dismas, there was a fire escape out there.

I climbed out onto it, and I was just shutting the window behind me when I heard them crashing through the door.

Ididn’t bide my time on the fire escape. I passed nothing but lighted windows on the fourth and fifth floors. A lighted room is not necessarily an occupied room, but I didn’t want to waste time on a closer look. I kept going until I found a dark room on the third floor. The window was closed but not locked, and I opened it and clambered over the sill and pulled it shut behind me.

I drew the curtain, turned on the light, and took a moment to catch my breath. The room had been rented-to either a woman or a male transvestite, judging from the array of cosmetics on the dresser top-and whoever it was had gone out for a night on the town. Unless a sudden fit of homesickness sent her straight to the airport, she’d be back sooner or later. So I couldn’t stay indefinitely, but for the time being I was perfectly safe.

Perfectly safe, and in somebody else’s abode. Under such circumstances it’s second nature for me to look around for something to steal. I had entered the premises illegally. I was where I clearly did not belong. While I was there, why not take something?

The necklace and earrings, for example.

If I wasn’t supposed to take them, what the hell were they doing out in plain sight? I mean, there they were, in a palm-sized jewelry case tucked underneath the bras and panties in the second drawer of the dresser. Well, maybe that’s not exactly in plain sight, but still…

Each earring sported a ruby of about a carat, ringed with diamond chips. The necklace’s ruby was larger-three or four carats, at a guess. There are, alas, a lot of fake rubies around, and I didn’t have a jeweler’s loupe with me, or time for a good look, but my guess was that these were the real thing. Good color, no obvious inclusions. And the settings were gold, at least eighteen-karat and probably twenty-two.

If they were fakes, they’d be larger. And who’d set fake rubies in solid twenty-two-karat gold? They looked real to me, and if so they were worth enough to put the evening in the plus column.

After all, I had an investment to protect. I was out better than six hundred dollars for my room. Gully Fairborn ’s letters were gone. Someone else had beat me to them, and killed a woman to get them. I’d had a bad night, and it wasn’t over yet, and why not grab at an opportunity to turn a small profit?

Still, I was going to be walking through a lobby crawling with cops. I was a registered guest, and there was nothing inherently suspicious in my dropping the key at the desk and walking out of the lobby. My belongings could stay in Room 415 until the chambermaid collected them and cleaned up after me. I’d probably left a few fingerprints there, along with my socks and underwear, but so what? No one was going to bother dusting an empty room for prints. Given the Paddington’s casual approach to housekeeping, they’d probably find a whole collection, all the way back to Stephen Crane.

So what was I supposed to do? Just put the rubies back where I’d found them? Just abandon them?

I took a last look at them, sighed, and closed the case with a snap. It was the sort of case that would slip right into your pocket, and wasn’t that a sign?

I thought so.

I went out the door to a blissfully empty hallway, then passed up the elevator in favor of the stairs. At the bottom of the last flight I walked through an unlocked door into a lobby full of people, a good number of them wearing blue uniforms. Others were citizens, trying to loiter long enough to determine what all the fuss was about, while some of the uniforms urged them to get on about their business. And that’s what I was planning to do, and the business I planned to get on about was escape.

I didn’t slink and I didn’t scamper. I did my best to saunter, room key in hand, passing the desk on my way out, and-

“That’s him!”

The last time I’d heard that voice, low-pitched and husky, it had been at once irritating and inviting. Now it was considerably elevated in volume, and urgent in tone. And the voice’s owner, a vision in bold primary colors, was just a few yards away, and she was pointing a finger and the finger was aimed at me.

“He’s the man I saw,” she went on. “He was prowling around on the sixth floor, and he’d just come through a locked door, and he couldn’t give a good account of himself. He told one lie after another.”

And you walked into the lobby this afternoon, I thought, with a man old enough to be your father, though I have reason to believe he wasn’t. But did I say anything?

Her blue eyes flashed. “His name is Peter Jeffries,” she said. “At least that’s what he told me. I rather doubt that’s his real name.”

“It’s close,” Carl Pillsbury said. He had a faint Southern accent I hadn’t noticed before, and I realized he’d put it on for the occasion, as if he was playing a part. “He’s a registered guest,” he continued, the accent quite convincing, and by no means overdone. “He’s in Room 415, and his name is Jeffrey Peters.”

You dye your hair, I thought, and it couldn’t be more obvious. But do I say a word?

“You’re both wrong,” said a voice I recognized. “This here’s somebody else altogether, an’ if he’s registered here it’s suspicious all by itself, on account of he’s got a perfectly good place of his own on West End Avenue. This here is nobody but Mrs. Rhodenbarr’s son Bernard. What’s the matter with you, Bernie? Aren’t you gonna say hello?”

“Hello, Ray.”

“‘Hello, Ray.’ Say it like you mean it, why don’t you?”

“I did.”

“Yeah, well, I guess you did at that. You can’t be too happy to see me, an’ I can understand that, but better me than someone who doesn’t know you in the first place. We’ll go downtown an’ book you an’ print you, an’ you can call up Wally Hemphill to come down an’ bail you out, an’ sooner or later we’ll get things sorted out. We always do, don’t we?”

“Ray,” I said. “You’ve got no reason to take me downtown.”

“You gotta be kiddin’, Bern.”

“Miss Gauthier says I didn’t give a good account of myself,” I said. “Well, no law says I have to, not to her. I didn’t ask her what she was doing on the sixth floor, so what gave her the right to ask me?”

“I live there,” Isis said.

There was something familiar about the color scheme of her outfit, beyond the fact that I’d seen it a little while ago in the sixth-floor hallway. I realized what it was when I glanced at the Horvath painting over the fireplace. Her skirt was the same blue as his hat, and her bolero jacket matched his little jacket, and her blouse was as brilliantly yellow as his Wellington boots. It was uncanny, and while her skin tone was not the exact tan of his fur, it was close.

“Because of my past history,” I said, “and because you’ve never been able to believe I’ve changed my ways-”

“Which you haven’t,” Ray said, “not for a minute.”

“-you think I was prowling around looking for something to steal. Well, even if that was what I had in mind, you can’t hang a man for his thoughts, or jail him, either. I didn’t take anything, and I’m not carrying burglar’s tools. You don’t have to take my word for it. You can search me.”