Lawrence Block - The Burglar who thought he was Bogart

I just knew he was frowning. I could picture it. “Something smells,” he announced. “They’re both in your store, they both introduce themselves to you, and they both wind up dead, only miles apart. An’ the one who isn’t Candlemas winds up in Candlemas’s apartment, an’ the other one winds up on Pitt Street with three different fake passports on him. An’ one of these Candlemases bought a book from you, an’ on the stren’th of that you gave him your touché case to carry it home in. Bernie, I don’t know whether to be insulted you think I’d believe such a load of crap or honored you’d take the trouble.”

Time to take another tack. “Ray,” I said, “when your wife answered earlier, I found myself remembering the time I helped you get a coat for her. Remember?”

“That’s changing the subject all to hell an’ gone,” he said, “but it’s a funny thing you should mention it, because I was thinkin’ earlier about it myself.”

“Really.”

“She was sayin’ as to how the coat has seen better days, which who hasn’t, herself included, only you don’t want to try tellin’ her somethin’ like that. It seems as though they don’t last forever, which they damn well ought to, the prices they get for them. Personally I think the only thing the matter with hers is she’d like a new one, but this is gonna be a bitch because she’s got a particular style an’ color in mind. One of these days, Bernie, the two of us’ll have to sit ourselves down an’ talk about it.”

“Maybe we won’t have to,” I said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Maybe Mrs. Kirschmann will be able to walk into some place nice, like Arvin Tannenbaum’s, say, and buy her own coat.”

“Very funny,” he said. “The only reason the coat she’s got is from Tannenbaum’s is that’s where you hooked it for her. You think I can let her walk into their showroom an’ pick somethin’ out? Where am I gonna come up with that kind of dough?”

“Ah,” I said. “I thought you’d never ask.”

That left me with a couple more phone calls to make, and I made them. Then I got on the East Side IRT and rode uptown once again, riding one stop past Hunter College this time and emerging at Seventy-seventh Street. I walked down a block and found the building where the whole thing started, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to call it that. It seemed clear that this business started a long while before the previous Wednesday night, and a long ways away.

But it was Hugo Candlemas’s building I was standing in front of now, and he had been more my employer than my partner, but he was dead, too, and it looked as though I was supposed to do something about it. I wasn’t sure just where he’d been killed, but there was no question as to where Cappy Hoberman had been stabbed to death, and I felt it was about time for me to return to the scene of the crime.

In the entrance hall, I studied the four buzzers before pushing the top one, marked CANDLEMAS, to save me the embarrassment of walking in on some police lab technicians, themselves returned to the crime scene in the wake of the second murder. I didn’t really expect there’d be anybody around, and there wasn’t, and when I’d waited long enough to establish that I took out my ring of tools and let myself into the building.

You’d have thought they were my American Express card, the way I never left home without them.

Up on the fourth floor, the door to Candlemas’s apartment was secured by a whole lot of that yellow crime scene tape, along with a couple of large handbills proclaiming the premises to be off-limits to unauthorized persons, sealed by order of the New York Police Department. To add a little muscle, someone-probably the yutz of a locksmith who’d opened up for the cops-had mounted a hinged hasp on the outside of the door and jamb and fastened it with a shiny new padlock.

None of this looked to be inexpungable. The stoutest padlock is no match for a brute armed with a can of freon and a hammer; spray it with the one and swat it with the other and you’ve unfastened the Gordian knot. I had neither of those precision instruments, but I wouldn’t need them; I knew this brand of lock, and it’s notoriously easy to pick.

I was more concerned with the paper and plastic. Anyone could get past them, but not without leaving traces of one’s passage. The ideal, of course, would be to have a roll of crime scene tape and a couple of handbills in your hip pocket; instead of trying to restore the originals on your way out, you could simply replace them.

But I was not so equipped. I filed the thought away for future reference, cast a wistful glance at the padlock, and trotted downstairs.

On my way, I remembered Ray’s review of the building’s other tenants-the gay couple in the basement, the blind woman on the ground floor, a businessman from Singapore in the Lehrmans’ apartment on two, and an unidentified tenant or tenants on the third floor. “The hell with who lives on the third floor,” Ray had said. “They’re like everybody else, they don’t know shit.”

In the front hall, I found their buzzer, marked GEARHARDT. I tried them first, hoping that they knew at least to get out of town on a holiday weekend. But no, not long after I poked their buzzer a male voice came over the intercom, asking me who I was.

“My name is Roger,” I said cheerfully, “and my friend’s name is Mary Beth, and we’d like to talk to you about the state of your immortal soul.”

“Whyntcha shove it up your ass?” he suggested.

“Oh!” I said, trying to sound shocked, but I think it was a waste of time, because he’d already broken the connection. I moved on to the buzzer immediately below it, deciding on a different approach for the fellow from Singapore. I couldn’t take the chance that he might welcome a visit from a couple of urban missionaries, or be too polite to let on otherwise. I could just pretend I was looking for the Lehrmans.

But I didn’t have to, because he didn’t answer the bell. I reentered the building-no lockpicking this time, I’d kept my foot in the door-and went up a flight, to confront a door equipped with two excellent locks, one your basic Segal, the other a police lock fitted with one of the new pickproof Poulard cylinders.

Pickproof indeed.

The Lehrmans had a nice place, furnished with a little too much of everything-too many rugs on the floor, too many paintings on the walls, too much furniture crowded together in the rooms. Too many knickknacks on the marble mantel over the fireplace, too many on the whatnot shelf in the corner by the window. A minimalist decorator would have shuddered, and I don’t know what a Chinese businessman from Singapore would have made of it, but from a professional standpoint I have to say I was thrilled.

It was a decorative scheme to gladden the heart of a burglar. You’ll never catch a burglar proclaiming that less is more. A burglar knows that less is less, and more is more. People who cram their apartment full of stuff, assuming they’re not the Collier brothers and the stuff is not old newspapers, are people who like things. They’re a lot more likely to have something worth taking than a guy who beds down on a futon in a room with nothing else in it but the track lighting on the ceiling.

It would have been fun to have a look around, but who had the time? I walked straight through the apartment to the large bedroom at the rear, moved a bookcase and a large jade plant in a pot that looked like Rockwood, unlocked and raised the bedroom window, and crawled out onto the fire escape. I climbed two flights, past the sullen Mr. Gearhardt and his imperiled soul, and wasted close to ten minutes trying to find a benign way to open the late Mr. Candlemas’s bedroom window. He had casement windows, secured by a lever that you raised and lowered from within. But you couldn’t reach it from outside, naturally enough, not unless you could pry the window back from the frame and get the right sort of gizmo in that way. It’s not that hard if you’ve got the tools for it. Just watch an enterprising teenager open a locked automobile in the wink of an eye and you’ll get the idea.