Lawrence Block - The Burglar on the Prowl

"I remember."

" 'If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?' Well, if you told her, Bern, she wouldn't."

"Great."

"But she might hold it against me. We'll see. But there's one thing I can tell you for sure, and that's that she's not Barbara Creeley. She's Lacey, Lacey Kavinoky, and if anybody date-rapes her it's gonna be me."

We stayed with the West Side Drive while it became the Henry Hudson Parkway, and we kept going north and crossed the Harlem River into the Bronx. I took the 232nd Street exit and wound up on Palisade Avenue. The long narrow green strip of Riverdale Park was on our left, with the Metro North tracks between the park and the Hudson River.

I'd studied the route on the map, but there were enough one-way streets to get me disoriented, and it took a little while to find Devonshire Close. While I drove around looking for it, I told her about my mission Wednesday night, scouting the terrain and probing the Mapes defenses. The doors were out, I said, because the alarm system was one I couldn't sabotage from outside, and all the windows were wired into it, and the coal chute, my old ace in the hole, had been trumped by bricks and cement.

"I give up," she said. "How are you gonna get in?"

I told her I'd show her when we got there, and shortly thereafter we did just that. Before I made the turn into Devonshire Close I got out my cell phone and tried the number again, and got the machine again. This time I waited for the beep and said, "Dr. Mapes? Are you there? Please pick up if you are. It's pretty important."

No one did, and I broke the connection. "In case he was screening his calls," I said.

"That's great," she said, "but now your voice is on his answering machine. How smart is that?"

"If it's still on there when I leave," I said, "then it could be a problem."

"You're going to erase it. That's fine if it's digital, but the old machines that use tape don't really erase anything. When you tell them to, you just program them to record over the old message when somebody leaves a new one. So what if it's a tape machine?"

"I'll steal the tape," I said.

I drove into Devonshire Close and spotted Mapes's house right away. While I couldn't have sworn to it, it looked to have the same lights on as it had two nights ago. There was a parking spot open in front of the house, and another across the street, but I did what I'd already decided to do and made the turn into Mapes's driveway. I drove all the way to the back and parked in front of the garage, leaving the motor running.

Carolyn was saying something, but I ignored her and got out of the car. The garage door was down, and didn't budge when I tried to lift it. There was a little door on the side of the garage. It hadn't been locked Wednesday night and it wasn't locked now, though the kind of lock it was likely to have wouldn't have delayed me long. Unlocked, it delayed me not at all, and I went inside and found first a light switch and then the button to raise the garage door. I killed the light once the door was up, got back in the car, drove into the garage, pulled up alongside (and felt insignificant next to) the Lexus SUV, and cut the engine.

I started to get out of the car. Carolyn hadn't moved. She said, " Bern, are you sure about this? We're in the belly of the beast."

"Not the belly. The house, where I'm going, that's the belly."

"So what's this? The jaw, and we're wedged here like a wad of tobacco, with nothing to look forward to but a lot of chewing and spitting. We're parked in the garage of the house you're gonna break into. What if somebody comes?"

"Nobody's going to come."

"What if somebody passes by and sees the car in here, and knows it's not their car?"

"Nobody can see anything once the garage door's closed."

"You're gonna close the garage door? Then if anything does happen, we're trapped."

"No," I said. "We're not trapped. The car is."

"But that's where you're leaving me, the last I heard."

"You wouldn't have to stay in the car. You could stand over by the side of the garage, where you could keep an eye on things. The only thing you have to be concerned about is if someone pulls into the driveway."

"And then what do I do? Start up the engine and let the carbon monoxide solve all my problems?"

"Then you hit the horn," I said. "Three blasts, loud and long."

"That's the signal, huh?"

"That's the signal. You sound the alarm and then you bail out."

"How?"

"Through the backyard. There's a Cyclone fence about five feet high. You can climb a fence, can't you?"

"Probably, if there's an irate homeowner coming after me. Then what? I just run away?"

"Discretion," I said, "is the better part of burglary. Run until you hit the sidewalk on the next street over, then just walk until you get somewhere."

"Where? I don't know my way around here."

"Just sort of drift until you get to Broadway, and then catch the subway. Nobody's going to be chasing you. And this is all academic, anyway, because they're not coming home until we're long gone."

"Whatever you say, Bern. Only I wish I felt as certain as you sound. Now how are you gonna get in? You were about to tell me."

"I'll show you," I said. She got out of the car and I led her out of the garage, pressing the button to lower the garage door on our way out. We started down the driveway, and when we'd covered almost half the length of the house, I stopped and pointed.

"There!" I said.

"There? That's the side door, Bern, and you just said it was hooked into the alarm system."

"To the right of the door."

"To the right of the door? There's nothing to the right of the door."

"Immediately to the right of it," I said, "at eye level. What do you see?"

"Damned if I know. A white wooden rectangle. If it was closer to the ground I'd say it was a pet door, but the only pet who could jump through it at that height would be a kangaroo, and it's too small for kangaroos. What the hell is it, anyway?"

"A milk chute," I said.

"A milk chute? I still don't know what that is."

"It's a sort of a pass-through," I said. "It's about the thickness of the wall it's in, with a door on either side. The milkman opens the outer door and puts the milk in, and the householder opens the inner door and takes it out."

"People still get milk deliveries?"

"Not that I know of," I said, "but they did when these houses were built, and a milk chute was pretty much standard equipment. I suppose the houses that got aluminum siding jobs had their milk chutes covered up, but you're not going to see much aluminum siding in Riverdale, and certainly not on a stone house. Even if you remodel, the way they did when they closed off the chute to the coal cellar, you wouldn't bother to get rid of the milk chute. It's not hurting anything, and what else are you going to do with the space, and how could you fill it without making a mess of the exterior wall? Didn't you have a milk chute when you were a kid?"

"In a twelfth-floor apartment on Eastern Parkway? The milkman would have had to be a human fly."

"Well, I grew up in a house," I said, "and we had a milk chute, and one day I came home from school and my mother wasn't home and the house was locked. And I got in through the milk chute."

"How old were you, Bern?"

"I don't know. Eleven? Twelve?"

"You were smaller then."

"So?"

"So you've grown, and the milk chute hasn't. Look at you. You'll never fit through that thing."

"Sure I will," I said. "I've grown some since I was twelve, but that wasn't the last time I wiggled in through the milk chute. I was still getting in that way when I was seventeen, and I had my full size by then. And even when I was twelve people never believed I could do it, because it looks as though you won't fit, and then you do."