Lawrence Block - The Burglar on the Prowl

It struck Edgar as an unusual way to earn a tip, but then America was an unusual country, with ways he hadn't entirely figured out yet. So he got the parcel room key from the drawer of the lobby desk, and led the man into the corridor beyond the bank of elevators and unlocked the parcel room door.

He'd no sooner accomplished this task than the man reached around and slapped him across the face, which seemed wholly gratuitous but turned out to have a purpose behind it, as he learned when he tried to cry out and discovered that his mouth was taped shut. The man gave him a shove, and he stumbled into the parcel room, and moments later another man came in, and the next thing he knew he was as I'd found him, secured to the chair with his hands taped behind his back. Well, not quite as I'd found him, because the chair was still upright at that point, and remained so until his efforts to escape sent it crashing to the floor a while later.

And that was that.

A team of cops might have found more questions to ask him. At the very least, they'd have asked him the same questions over and over. But they'd have wanted to make sure he wasn't hiding anything, and I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I was also willing to give him coffee, of which he drank three cups in less time than it took me to drink one, and the use of my bathroom, which seemed only fair after I'd loaded him up with all that coffee.

After a few minutes I heard a little cry of shock and dismay, and a moment later he came out of the bathroom looking absolutely horrorstruck. I wondered if there was another of those damned water-bugs in the bathtub. They come up through the pipes, and they're huge and disgusting, but he'd grown up in a tropical country, for God's sake. He must have seen worse.

Then, shaking, he touched his finger to his upper lip.

"Oh, right," I said. "I didn't realize you hadn't seen it yet. I can't see any way to save it, Edgar. Let me lend you a razor and you can shave it off."

He looked questioningly at me, and I mimed the act, scraping away the mustache I didn't have with the razor I wasn't holding. He looked crestfallen, and rattled off a burst of rapid-fire Spanish. I don't know what it meant, but if I had to guess it would have been something along the lines ofBut then I will resemble an idiot child and no one will ever take me seriously.

I shook my head firmly. "You're better off without it," I insisted. "You can always grow it back, but the first step is to shave it."

I gave him a fresh disposable razor and a can of shaving cream, and he closed the door, and when he opened it again he looked about seventeen years old, which was only about six months younger than he'd looked before any of this happened.

I told him he looked fine and asked him if there was anything else he could use-an aspirin, a bite to eat, maybe a quick shower-but all he wanted was to get back downstairs and resume his post. He'd been away from it for far too long, he said, and it would be bad if he got reported to the super, who, while married to Edgar's sister's husband's cousin, could only cut him so much slack.

Besides, he said, the lobby was unattended, and that wasn't safe. Anyone could walk right in. The tenants paid a lot of rent, and they had a right to have him on duty, watching out for their interests.

And off he went, grateful for the coffee, grateful I hadn't insisted on calling the cops, and eager in spite of all he'd been through to get back to work. You can see why the INS would want to send a guy like that back where he came from.

Since my clean-shaven doorman had put himself back to work, I felt I could do no less myself, and resumed work on my apartment. While I was at it I called a twenty-four-hour locksmith and told him what replacement parts he'd need to make my lock sound again. While he was at it, I said, he could bring an extra Rabson cylinder and a Fox police lock. It took him fifteen minutes to get there and the better part of two hours to install everything, and the price he charged me added a little more injury to the insult and injury I'd already sustained. I wrote him a check and went to bed, fully expecting to sleep until noon, but at eight o'clock my eyes popped open of their own accord and I started a day I didn't have a great deal of hope for.

But a shower and a shave helped, and breakfast didn't hurt, either, and by the time I opened up the bookstore I felt almost human. I fed Raffles and flushed the toilet for him-he uses it, but not even Carolyn can figure out how to teach him to flush it-and dragged my bargain table outside, and sat behind the counter waiting for the world to beat a path to my door. When it failed to do so, I looked around for something to do, and remembered I had a box of books in the back room that needed to be shelved.

I walked halfway there, then spun around and returned to my stool behind the counter. I'd done enough shelving lately, I decided, and I picked up a book that had come in with the others, but that I'd set aside to read first before I gave my customers a crack at it. It was the new John Sandford novel, and I was about fifty pages into it, and with minimal interruptions I figured I could manage another fifty pages by lunchtime.

The cops in Sandford's books are apt to tell each other jokes, and one of them was funny enough so that I was chuckling over it when the phone rang. I picked it up and said, "Barnegat Books," and a voice that I recognized but couldn't place wished me a good morning, and asked if I happened to have a copy ofThe Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad.

"Hold on," I said. "I think so, but let me check."

I went to the fiction section, and there was the book, right where the miracle of alphabetical order had led me to place it. I carried it to the counter and told my caller I did indeed have a copy.

"It's not a first," I said, "but it's a nice clean reading copy. Twelve dollars takes it home."

"Put it aside," he said. "I'll pick it up sometime today."

I could have asked his name, but that might have been awkward, since there was something in his manner that led me to believe he thought I already knew who he was. Besides, what difference did it make? If he didn't show up, I'd put the book back on the shelf in a day or two. I had a lot more to worry about than a twelve-dollar sale.

"I've got a lot more to worry about," I told Carolyn, "than a twelve-dollar sale."

"I'll say."

"I wonder what they were looking for. They took my money, but that's not what brought them there in the first place. What do you suppose they wanted?"

"I don't know, Bern. What have you got?"

"Eight thousand dollars less than I used to have. Closer to nine thousand, if you count what I had to pay the locksmith. Aside from that, nothing. If these are the same jokers who robbed the Rogovins, and they'd pretty much have to be, then I don't get it at all. There's nothing on earth that connects me to the Rogovins. I never even heard of the Rogovins until…"

"Until Ray walked in and arrested you."

I nodded slowly. "That's got to be the connection," I said. "They committed a crime, and I was arrested for it. The cops made a mistake when they arrested me, but the newspaper story didn't mention that part, so the guys who committed the crime don't know that."

"They don't know they committed the crime? What do you figure their problem is, Bern? Short-term memory loss?"

"They know what they did," I said. "What they don't know is that I didn't do anything, that I was picked up because I happened to be lurking in the neighborhood for another purpose altogether. All they know is I got picked up, and that means there may be a connection between me and the Rogovins."

"Like what?"

"Like somehow I got to the Rogovins' safe before they did, and whatever they were looking for and didn't find, well, maybe I've got it."