Lawrence Block - Burglars Can’t Be Choosers

This time I hadn’t bothered locking the door, and when she knocked I went over and opened it for her. She handed me a paper bag containing a razor, a small package of blades, shaving cream, a toothbrush and a small tube of toothpaste. She also gave me forty-seven cents change from my ten-dollar bill. Every once in a while something like that comes along to demonstrate that all this talk about inflation is not entirely unwarranted.

“I’ll be going out in a few minutes,” she said. “You can shave then.”

“Out? You just got here.”

“I know. I want to go to the library. And check the Times Index -we talked about that last night. I don’t know how else we’re going to learn anything about Flaxford unless I go track down his ex-wife and talk to her.”

“That sounds like more trouble than it’s likely to be worth.”

“The Times? I just go to Forty-second and Fifth-”

“I know where the library is. I mean the ex-wife.”

“Well, it might not be any trouble at all, actually. Do ex-wives come to memorial services for their ex-husbands? Because that’s where I’m going this afternoon. There’s a memorial service for him at two-thirty. What’s the difference between a memorial service and a funeral?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think it’s whether or not you have the body around. I guess the police are probably hanging onto the body for an autopsy or something. To make sure he’s really dead.”

“They already established cause and time of death.”

“Well, maybe they just aren’t releasing the body, or maybe it’s being shipped somewhere. I don’t know. But that’s the difference, isn’t it? You can’t have a funeral without a corpse, can you?”

“Tell that to Tom Sawyer.”

“Funny. Maybe I’ll go over to that bar. Pandora’s Box.”

“Just Pandora’s. Why would you go there?”

“I don’t know. The same reason I’m going to the memorial service, I suppose. On the chance that I might run into the little man who wasn’t there.”

“I don’t see why he would be at the memorial service.”

She shrugged. “I don’t either. But if he’s a business acquaintance of Flaxford’s he might have to go, and anything’s possible, isn’t it? And if he’s not at the service he might be drowning his sorrows at Pandora’s.”

And she went on to explain her reasons for thinking Pandora’s might be our friend’s regular hangout, and they were pretty much the same reasons which had led me to drop in there for a beer the night before. If he was at the bar or the memorial chapel, she felt certain she’d recognize him from my description.

We sat around talking about this and other things for perhaps another hour before she decided it was time for her to head uptown. Several times I was on the point of mentioning that I’d gone to Pandora’s myself just a matter of hours ago, but for one reason or another I never did get around to it.

Once she was gone, the day sagged. She was out doing things, pointless or otherwise, and all I had to do was hang around and kill time. I decided I should have put on the wig and the cap and tagged along after her, and I decided that would have been pretty stupid, since the cops would certainly have a man on duty at the service just as a matter of routine. I found myself wondering if Ruth was aware of this possibility, and if she knew enough not to attract attention there or to be followed when she left.

When you have nothing better to worry about, you make do with what you’ve got. I decided I ought to let her know about this danger. But I couldn’t call her because I didn’t have her number and anyway she was going straight to the library. Of course I could call the library and have her paged, except I was by no means certain that they would page people, although I could always claim it was a matter of life and death…

No, all that would do was draw attention. So I could put on the wig and the cap and go up to the library and tell her, and no doubt I would corner her in a room where three cops were browsing at the moment, and she’d call me by name, and my cap and wig would fall off.

So instead I went and shaved. I took as much time as possible doing this, soaping and rinsing my face four or five times first, then shaving very carefully and deliberately. I treated myself to the closest shave I’d had in years-unless you count my departure from the Flaxford apartment, heh heh-and I left my moustache unshaven, figuring that it might become a useful part of my disguise, no doubt combining nicely with wig and cap.

Then I dragged the cap and the yellow wig out of the closet and tried them on, and I scrutinized the patch of eighth-of-an-inch fur on my upper lip, and I returned wig and cap to closet shelf and lathered up again and erased the attempted moustache altogether.

And that was about the size of it. I had done as thorough a job of shaving as I possibly could, and the only way to invest more time in the process would be to shave my head. It’s an indication of my state of mind that there was a point when I actually considered this, thinking that my wig would fit much better if I had no hair of my own underneath it. Fortunately the notion passed before I could do anything about it.

At one point I did dial my own apartment again, just out of boredom. I got a busy signal and it spooked me until I realized that it didn’t necessarily mean my phone was off the hook. It could mean that the circuits were busy, which happens often enough, or it could mean that someone else was trying to call me and he’d gotten connected first. I tried a few minutes later and the phone rang and no one answered it.

I went back to the television set and hopped around the channels. WOR had some reruns of Highway Patrol and I sat back and watched Broderick Crawford giving somebody hell. He’s always been great at that.

I took out my little ring of keys and picks and weighed it in my hand, while weighing in my head the possibility of giving some of the other apartments in the building a quick shuffle. Just to keep my hand in, say. I could check the buzzers downstairs, get the names, look them up in the phone book, determine over the phone who was home and who wasn’t, and go door to door to see what would turn up. Some clothing in my size, say, or some cat food for Esther and Mordecai.

I never really gave this lunacy serious consideration. But I was so desperate for things to think about that I did give it some thought.

And then somewhere along the line I dozed off in front of the television set, paying token attention to the story until some indeterminate point where it faded out and my own equally uninspired dreams took over. I don’t know exactly when I fell asleep so there’s no way of saying just how long I slept, but I’d guess it was more than an hour and less than two.

Maybe a noise outside woke me. Maybe my nap had simply run its course. But I’ve always thought it was the voice itself; I must have heard and recognized it on some subconscious level.

Whatever the cause, I opened my eyes. And stared. And blinked furiously and stared again.

It was a few minutes after five when Ruth got back. I’d very nearly worn out the rug by then, pacing back and forth across its bare threads, scuttling periodically to the phone, then backing away from it without so much as lifting the receiver. At five o’clock the TV news came on but I was too tautly wired to watch it and could barely pay attention while a beaming chap rattled on and on about something hideous that had just happened in Morocco. (Or Lebanon. One of those places.)

Then Ruth’s step on the stairs and her key in the lock, and I opened the door before she could turn the key and she popped energetically inside and spun around to lock the door, the words already spilling from her lips. She seemed to have no end of things to tell me about the weather outside and the facilities at the public library and the service for J. Francis Flaxford, but she might as well have been speaking whatever they speak in Morocco (or Lebanon) for all the attention I was able to pay her.