Lawrence Block: The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza

Carolyn lives on Arbor Court, one of those oblique little streets in a part of the West Village that must have been laid out by someone on something stronger than Perrier. Until a couple of months ago she had been sort of living with another woman named Randy Messinger, but they'd had the last of a series of notable battles in early February and Randy had moved everything to her own place on Morton Street. It was May now, late May, and every evening the sun took a little longer to get over the yardarm, and the breach showed no signs of healing. Every now and then Carolyn would meet somebody terrific at Paula's or the Duchess, but true love had not yet bloomed, and she didn't seem to mind.

She put some coffee up, tossed a salad, warmed up a couple wedges of leftover quiche. We both ate sparingly and drank a lot of the coffee. The cats polished off their own food and rubbed against our ankles until they got the unfinished quiche, which they promptly finished. Ubi, the Russian Blue, settled in my lap and got into some serious purring. Archie, his Burmese buddy, stalked around and did some basic stretching to show off his muscles.

Around eight the phone rang. Carolyn answered it and settled into a long gossipy conversation. I got a paperback and turned its pages, but the words didn't really register. I might as well have been reading the phone book.

When Carolyn hung up I did read the phone book, long enough to look up a number, anyway. I dialed, and Abel Crowe picked up midway through the fourth ring. "Bernie," I said. "I turned up a book I think you might like. Wondered if you'd be home tonight."

"I have no plans."

"I thought I might stop by around eleven, twelve o'clock."

"Excellent. I keep late hours these days." You could hear the Mittel Europa accent over the phone. Face to face, it was barely detectable. "Will your charming friend be with you?"

"Probably."

"I'll provide accordingly. Be well, Bernard."

I hung up. Carolyn was sitting on the bed, one foot tucked beneath her, dutifully cutting the palms out of her own pair of rubber gloves. "Abel's expecting us," I told her.

"He knows I'm coming?"

"He asked specifically. I told him you'd probably show up."

"What's this probably? I love Abel."

She got up from the bed, stuffed the gloves in a back pocket. She was wearing slate-gray brushed-denim jeans and a green velour top, and now she added her navy blazer. She looked terrific, and I told her as much.

She thanked me, then turned to the cats. "Hang in there, guys," she told them. "Just write down the names if anybody calls. Tell 'em I'll get back to 'em."

Herbert and Wanda Colcannon lived on West Eighteenth Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. Until fairly recently that was a great neighborhood to visit if you were looking to get mugged, but somewhere along the line Chelsea became a desirable neighborhood. People commenced buying the old brownstones and sprucing them up, converting rooming houses into floor-through apartment buildings and apartment buildings into single-family houses. The streets were lined with newly planted ginkgo and oak and sycamore, and it was getting so that you couldn't see the muggers for the trees.

No. 442 West Eighteenth was an attractive four-story brownstone house with a mansard roof and a bay window on the parlor floor. No. 444, immediately to its left, was the same thing all over again, distinguishable only by a few minor architectural details and the pair of brass carriage lamps that flanked the entrance. But between the two houses there was an archway and a heavy iron gate, and above the gate was the number 422 1/2. There was a bell alongside, and a blue plastic strip with the name Colcannon embossed on it beneath the bell.

I'd called the Colcannon house earlier from a pay phone on Ninth Avenue. An answering machine had invited me to leave my name and number, an invitation I'd failed to accept. Now I rang the doorbell, giving it a good long poke and waiting a full minute for a response. Beside me, Carolyn stood with her hands in her pockets and her shoulders drawn inward, shifting her weight from foot to foot.

I could imagine how she felt. This was only her third time. She'd been with me once in Forest Hills Gardens, a ritzy enclave in darkest Queens, and more recently when we hit an apartment in the East Seventies. I was an old hand at this sort of thing, I'd grown up letting myself into other people's houses, but even so the edgy anxious thrill had not worn off. I have a hunch it never will.

I shifted the attaché case to my left hand and dug out a ring of keys with my right. The iron gate was a formidable affair. It could be opened electrically by someone in the carriage house pushing a button, or it would yield to a key. And it was the type of old-fashioned lock that accepted a skeleton-type key, and there are only so many types, and I had a ringful of them. I'd looked the lock over some days ago and it had looked easy enough at the time, and easy it was; the third key I tried was a near miss, and the fourth one turned in the lock as if it had been placed on earth to do precisely that.

I wiped my prints off the lock and the surrounding metal, shouldered the gate open. Carolyn followed me into the covered passageway and drew the gate shut behind her. We were in a long narrow tunnel, all brick-lined and with a damp feel to it, but there was a light at the end of it and we homed in on it like moths. We came out into a garden that nestled between the brownstone in front and the Colcannons' carriage house. The light that had drawn us did a fair job of showing off the garden, with its flower beds bordering a central flagstone patio. Late daffodils and early tulips put on a good show, and I suppose when the roses bloomed the place might look fairly spectacular.

There was a semicircular bench next to what looked to be a fish pond fed by a little fountain. I wondered how they could keep fish there without their being wiped out by the local cats, and I would have enjoyed passing a few minutes on the bench, peering into the pond for signs of fish while listening to the tranquil gurgle of the fountain. But the setting was a trifle exposed for that sort of behavior.

Besides, time was a-wasting. It was twenty to ten-I'd checked my watch before unlocking the iron gate. In a sense we had all night, but the less of it we used the happier I'd be, and the sooner we'd be out of there and on our way to Abel Crowe's.

"Lit up like a Christmas tree," Carolyn said.

I looked. I hadn't paid much attention to the carriage house, intent as I was on checking out flowers and fish, and if it didn't look like a Christmas tree neither did it look like your standard empty house. It stood three stories tall, and I suppose it had once had horses on the ground floor and servants overhead before someone converted it for human occupancy throughout. Now there were lights burning on all three floors. They weren't the only source of illumination in the garden-there was also an electrified lantern mounted a few steps from the fountain-but they were probably responsible for most of the light that had reached us in the passageway.

Most people leave a light or two for the burglar, that brave little beacon that shines away at four in the morning, announcing to all the world that nobody's home. Some people improve on this with cunning little timing devices that turn the lights on and off. But Herbert and Wanda seemed to me to have gone overboard. Maybe they had overreacted to the notion of leaving the place unprotected by the noble Astrid. Maybe Herb had a ton of Con Ed stock and Wanda had overdosed on those five-year light bulbs blind people sell you over the telephone.

Maybe they were home.

I mounted the stoop and put my ear to the door. There was noise inside, radio or television, but nothing that sounded like live conversation. I rang the doorbell and listened carefully, and there was no change in the sounds within the house. I set down my attaché case and pulled on my rubber gloves while Carolyn put hers on. I said a silent prayer that the house wasn't hooked into a burglar alarm that I didn't know about, addressing the prayer to Saint Dismas. He's the patron saint of thieves, and he must get to hear a lot of prayers these days.