Lawrence Block - Burglars Can’t Be Choosers

The night before I’d wondered idly if the dead man was actually Flaxford. Maybe some other burglar had been working the same side of the street, taking advantage of Flaxford’s scheduled absence and arriving there before me. Then he’d managed to get his head dented and had been there when I showed up.

But who would have killed him? Flaxford himself?

No matter. The corpse was truly Flaxford, a forty-eight-year-old entrepreneur and dabbler in real estate, a producer of off-off-Broadway theatrical ventures, a bon vivant, a man about town. He’d been married and divorced years and years ago, he’d lived alone in his plush East Side apartment, and someone had smashed his skull with an ashtray.

“If you were going to kill somebody,” Ruth said, “you wouldn’t use an ashtray, would you?”

“He liked substantial ashtrays,” I told her. “There was one in the living room that would have felled an ox. A big cut-glass thing, and they say the murder weapon was a cut-glass ashtray, and if it was a mate to the one I saw it would have done the job, all right.” I looked at the Post story again, tapped a fingernail against his picture. “He wasn’t bad-looking,” I said.

“If you like the type.”

He had a good-looking, high-browed face, a mane of dark hair going gray at the temples, a moustache that his barber had taken pains to trim.

“Distinguished,” I said.

“If you say so.”

“Even elegant.”

“Try sneaky and shifty while you’re at it.”

“ De mortuis, remember?”

“Oh, screw de mortuis. As my grandmother used to say, if you’ve got nothing good to say about someone, let’s hear it. I wonder how he really made his money, Bernie. What do you suppose he did for a living?”

“He was an entrepreneur, it says here.”

“That just means he made money. It doesn’t explain how.”

“He dabbled in real estate.”

“That’s something you do with money, like producing plays off-off-Broadway. The real estate may have made money for him and the plays must have lost it, they always do, but he must have done something for a living and I’ll bet it was faintly crooked.”

“You’re probably right.”

“So why isn’t it in the paper?”

“Because nobody cares. As far as everybody’s concerned, he only got killed because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. A mad-dog burglar happened to pick his apartment at random and he happened to be in it, and that was when J. Francis kept his appointment in Samarra. If he’d been wearing ladies’ underwear at the time of his death he’d make better copy and the reporters would take a longer look at his life, but instead he was just wearing a perfectly ordinary Brooks Brothers dressing gown and that made him dull copy.”

“Where does it say he was wearing a Brooks Brothers robe?”

“I made that up. I don’t know where he bought his clothes. It just says he was wearing a dressing gown. The Times says dressing gown. The Post calls it a bathrobe.”

“I had the impression he was naked.”

“Not according to the working press.” I tried to remember if Loren had blurted out anything about his dress or lack of it. If he did, I didn’t remember it. “He’ll probably be naked in tomorrow morning’s Daily News, ” I said. “What difference does it make?”

“It doesn’t.”

We were sitting side by side on the Lawson couch. She folded the paper and put it on the seat beside her. “I just wish we had someplace to start,” she said. “But it’s like trying to untie a knot when both ends of the rope are out of sight. All we’ve got are the dead man and the man who got you mixed up in this in the first place.”

“And we don’t know who he is.”

“Mr. Shmoo. Mr. Chocolate Eyes. A man with narrow shoulders and a large waistline who avoids looking people right in the eye.”

“That’s our man.”

“And he looks vaguely familiar to you.”

“He looks specifically familiar to me. He even sounded familiar.”

“But you never met him before.”

“Never.”

“Damn.” She made fists of her hands, pressed them against her thighs. “Could you have known him in prison?”

“I don’t think so. That would be logical, wouldn’t it? Then of course he would have known I was a burglar. But I can’t think of any area of my life in or out of prison that he fits into. Maybe I’ve seen him on subways, passed him in the street. That sort of thing.”

“Maybe.” She frowned. “He set you up. Either he killed Flaxford himself or he knows who did.”

“I don’t think he killed anybody.”

“But he must know who did.”

“Probably.”

“So if we could just find him. I know you don’t know his name, but did he give you a fake name at least?”

“No. Why?”

“We could try paging him at that bar. I forget the name.”

“Pandora’s. Why page him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you could tell him you had the blue leather box.”

“ What blue leather box?”

“The one you went to-oh.”

“There isn’t any blue leather box.”

“Of course not,” she said. “There never was one in the first place, was there? The blue leather box was nothing but a red herring.” She wrinkled up her forehead in concentration. “But then why did he arrange to meet you at Pandora’s?”

“I don’t know. I’m sure he didn’t bother to show up.”

“Then why arrange it?”

“Beats me. Unless he planned to tip the police if I showed up there, but I don’t think that makes any sense either. Maybe he just wanted to go through the motions of setting up a meeting. To make the whole thing seem authentic.” I closed my eyes for a moment, running the scene through my mind. “I’ll tell you what’s funny. I have the feeling he kept trying to impress me with how tough he was. Why would he do that?”

“So you’d be afraid to double-cross him, I suppose.”

“But why would I cross him in the first place? There’s something funny about the guy. I think he was pretending to be tough because he’s not. Not tough, I mean. He talked the talk but he didn’t walk the walk. I suppose he must have been a con artist of some sort.” I grinned. “He certainly conned me. It’s hard to believe there was no blue box in that apartment. He had me convinced that it was there and that he really didn’t want me to open it.”

“You don’t remember him from jail. Do you think he’s ever been arrested?”

“Probably. It sort of comes with the territory. However good you are, sooner or later you step in the wrong place. I told you about my last arrest, didn’t I?”

“When the bell was out of order.”

“Right, and I wound up tossing an apartment while the tenants were home. And I had to pick a man with a gun and an air of righteous indignation, and then when I told him how we ought to be able to be reasonable about this and pulled out my walking money, he turned out to be the head of some civic group. I’d have had about as much chance of bribing a rabbi with a ham sandwich. They didn’t just throw the book at me, they threw the whole library.”

“Poor Bernie,” she said, and put her hand on mine. Our hands took a few minutes to get acquainted. Our eyes met, then slipped away to leave us with our private thoughts.

And mine turned, not for the first time, to prison. If I gave myself up they’d undoubtedly let me cop a plea to Murder Two, maybe even some degree of manslaughter. I’d most likely be on the street in three or four years with good time and parole and all that. I’d never served that much time before, but my last stretch had been substantial enough, eighteen months, and if you can do eighteen months you can do four years. Either way you straighten up and square your shoulders and do your bit one day at a time.