Lawrence Block - Burglars Can’t Be Choosers

Of course I was older now and I’d be crowding forty by the time I got out. But they say it’s easier to do time when you’re older because the months and the years seem to pass more rapidly.

No women inside. No soft cool hands, no taut rounded bottoms. (There are men inside with taut rounded bottoms, if you happen to like that sort of thing. I don’t happen to like that sort of thing.)

“Bernie? I could go to the police.”

“And turn me in? It might make sense if there was a reward, but-”

“What are you talking about? Why would I turn you in? Are you crazy?”

“A little. Why else would you go to the cops?”

“Don’t they have books full of pictures of criminals? I could tell them I was taken by a con man and get them to show me pictures.”

“And then what?”

“Well, maybe I’d recognize him.”

“You’ve never seen him, Ruth.”

“I feel as though I have from your description.”

“A mug shot would just show his face. Not his profile.”

“Oh.”

“That’s why they call it a mug shot.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t think it’s a viable approach.”

“I guess not, Bernie.”

I turned her hand over, stroked the palm and the pads of her fingers. She moved her body a little closer to mine. We sat like that for a few minutes while I got myself all prepared to put my arm around her, and just as I was about to make my move she stood up.

“I just wish we could do something,” she said. “If we knew the name of the man who roped you in we would at least have a place to start.”

“Or if we knew why somebody wanted to kill Flaxford. Somebody had a reason to want him dead. A motive. If we knew more about him we might know what to look for.”

“Don’t the police-”

“The police already know who killed him. There won’t ever be any investigation, Ruth, because as far as they’re concerned I’m guilty and the case is closed. All they have to do is get their hands on me. That’s why the frame works so perfectly. It may be that there’s only one person in the world with a motive for killing Flaxford, but no one will ever know about it because Flaxford’s murder is all wrapped up and tied with a ribbon and the card has my name on it.”

“I could go to the library tomorrow. I’ll check The New York Times Index. Maybe they ran something on him years ago and I can read all about it in the microfilm room.”

I shook my head. “If there was anything juicy they’d have dug it up and run it in his obit.”

“There might be something that would make some kind of connection for us. It’s worth a try, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so.”

She walked half a dozen steps in one direction, then retraced them, then turned and began the process anew. It was a reasonably good Caged Lion impression. “I can’t just sit around,” she said. “I get stir crazy.”

“You’d hate prison.”

“God! How do people stand it?”

“A day at a time,” I said. “I’d take you out for a night on the town, Ruth, but-”

“No, you have to stay here,” she said. “I realize that.” She picked up one of the papers, turned pages. “Maybe there’s something on television,” she said, and it turned out that there was a Warner Brothers gangster thing on WPIX. The whole crew was in it-Robinson, Lorre, Greenstreet, and a ton of great old character actors whose names I’ve never bothered to learn but whose faces I’d never forget. She sat on the couch next to me and we watched the whole thing, and eventually I did manage to put an arm around her and we sort of cuddled, doing a little low-level necking during the commercials.

When the last villain got his and they rolled the final credits she said, “See? The bad guys always lose in the end. We’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“Life,” I announced, “is not a B picture.”

“Well, it ain’t no De Mille epic either, boss. Things’ll work out, Bernie.”

“Maybe.”

The eleven o’clock news came on and we watched it until they got to the part we were interested in. There were no new developments in the Flaxford murder, and the report they gave was just an abbreviated version of what we’d seen a few hours earlier. When they cut to an item about a drug bust in Hunts Point Ruth went over to the set and turned it off.

“I guess I’ll go now,” she said.

“Go?”

“Home.”

“Where’s that?”

“ Bank Street. Not far from here.”

“You could stick around,” I suggested. “There’s probably something watchable on the tube.”

“I’m pretty tired, actually. I was up early this morning.”

“Well, you could, uh, sleep here,” I said. “As far as that goes.”

“I don’t think so, Bernie.”

“I hate to think of you walking home alone. At this hour and in this neighborhood-”

“It’s not even midnight yet. And this is the safest neighborhood in the city.”

“It’s sort of nice having you around,” I said.

She smiled. “I really want to go home tonight,” she said. “I want to shower and get out of these clothes-”

“So?”

“-and I have to feed my cats. The poor little things must be starving.”

“Can’t they open a can?”

“No, they’re hopelessly spoiled. Their names are Esther and Mordecai. They’re Abyssinians.”

“Then why did you give them Hebrew names?”

“What else would I call them, Haile and Selassie?”

“That’s a point.”

I followed her to the door. She turned with one hand on the knob and we kissed, and it was very nice. I really wanted her to stay, and she made a rather encouraging sound down deep in her throat and ground herself against me a little.

Then I let go of her and she opened the door and said, “See you tomorrow, Bernie.”

And left.

The subway wasn’t doing much business by the time I got onto it. I caught an uptown Eighth Avenue local at Fourteenth Street and there was only one other person in the car with me. That was the good news. The bad news is that he was a Transit Authority cop with an enormous revolver on his hip. He kept looking at me because there was nobody else for him to look at, and I just knew that he was going to figure out why I looked familiar. At any moment a light bulb would form in the air over his head and he would spring into action.

Except he never did. At Times Square we picked up some fellow travelers-a pair of off-duty nurses, an utterly wasted junkie-and that gave the cop someplace else to focus his eyes. Then at Fifty-ninth Street he got off, and a stop later it was my turn. I climbed the stairs and emerged into the early morning air at Seventy-second and Central Park West and wondered what the hell I thought I was doing.

Earlier that evening I’d been completely comfortable sitting around Rod’s apartment with my eyes on the television set and my arm around Ruth. But once she was gone I began finding the place unbearable. I couldn’t sit still, couldn’t watch the tube, kept pacing around and getting increasingly twitchy. A little after midnight I took a shower, and when the prospect of putting on the same clothes seemed as appalling as you might imagine it would, I went through Rod’s closet and dresser to see what he’d left behind.

There wasn’t much I could use. Either he tended to take an awful lot of clothing on the road with him or he didn’t own much in the first place. I found a shirt I could wear, although I didn’t much want to, and a pair of navy blue stretch socks, but that was about the extent of it.

Then I came across the wig.

It was a blondish wig, long but not quite hippie in style. I put it on and checked myself out in the mirror and I was astonished at the transformation. The only problem was that it was a little too garish and drew a little too much attention, but that problem was solved when I found a cloth cap on a shelf in the closet. The cap softened the effect of the wig and made it less of an attention-getter.