Lawrence Block - Burglars Can’t Be Choosers

I cut in right in the middle of a sentence. “Our fat friend,” I said. “Was he there?”

“No, I don’t think so. Not at the service and not at Pandora’s. That’s a pretty crummy bar, incidentally. It-”

“So you didn’t see him.”

“No, but-”

“Well,” I said. “ I did.”

“An actor!”

“An actor,” I agreed. “I slept through most of the movie. I was just lucky that I woke up for his scene. There he was, looking back over the seat of his cab and asking James Garner where he wanted to go. ‘Where to, Mac?’ I think that was the very line I came in on, word for precious word.”

“And you recognized him just like that?”

“No question about it. It was the same man. The picture was filmed fifteen years ago and he’s not as young as he used to be, but who do you know that is? Same face, same voice, same build. He’s put on a few pounds since then, but who hasn’t? Oh, it’s him, all right. You’d know him if you saw him. As an actor, I mean. I must have watched him in hundreds of movies and TV shows, playing a cabdriver or a bank teller or a minor hoodlum.”

“What’s his name?”

“Who knows? I’m rotten at trivia. And they didn’t run the list of credits at the end of the movie. I sat there waiting, and of course Garner never happened to hail that particular cab a second time, not that I really expected him to, and then there were no credits at the end. I guess they cut them a lot of the time when they show movies on television. And they don’t always have them in the first place, do they?”

“I don’t think so. Would he be listed anyway? If he didn’t say more than ‘Where to, Mac?’ ”

“Oh, he had other lines, Maybe half a dozen lines. You know, talking about the weather and the traffic, doing the typical New York cabbie number. Or at least what Hollywood thinks the typical New York cabbie number ought to be. Did a cabdriver ever say ‘Where to, Mac?’ to you?”

“No, but not that many people call me Mac. It’s funny. You said he seemed familiar to you and you couldn’t figure out where you saw him before.”

“I saw him on the screen. Over and over. That’s why even his voice was familiar.” I frowned. “That’s how I recognized him, Ruth. But how in the hell did he recognize me? I’m not an actor. Except in the sense that all the world’s a stage. Why would an actor happen to know that Bernie Rhodenbarr is a burglar?”

“I don’t know. Maybe-”

“Rodney.”

“Huh?”

“Rod’s an actor.”

“So?”

“Actors know each other, don’t they?”

“Do they? I don’t know. I suppose some of them do. Do burglars know each other?”

“That’s different.”

“Why is it different?”

“Burglary is solitary work. Acting is a whole lot of people on a stage or in front of a camera. Actors work with each other. Maybe he worked with this guy.”

“I suppose it’s possible.”

“And Rodney knows me. From the poker game.”

“But he doesn’t know you’re a burglar.”

“Well, I didn’t think he did. But maybe he does.”

“Only if he’s been reading the New York papers lately. You think Rodney happened to know you were a burglar and then he told this actor, and the other actor decided you’d be just the person to frame for murder, and just to round things out you went from the murder scene to Rodney’s apartment.”

“Oh.”

“Just like that.”

“It does call for more than the usual voluntary suspension of disbelief,” I admitted. “But there are actors all over this thing.”

“Two of them, and only one of them’s all over it.”

“Flaxford was connected with the theater. Maybe that’s the connection between him and the actor who roped me in. He was a producer, and maybe he had a disagreement with this actor-”

“Who decided to kill him and set up a burglar to take a fall for him.”

“I keep blowing up balloons and you keep sticking pins in them.”

“It’s just that I think we should work with what we know, Bernie. It doesn’t matter how this man found you, not right now it doesn’t. What matters is how you and I are going to find him. Did you notice the name of the picture?”

“ The Man in the Middle. And it’s about a corporate takeover, not a homosexual ménage à trois as you might have thought. Starring James Garner and Shan Willson, and I could tell you the names of two or three others but none of them were our friend. It was filmed in 1962 and whoever the droll chap is who does the TV listings in the Times, he thinks the plot is predictable but the performances are spritely. That’s a word you don’t hear much anymore.”

“You wouldn’t want to hear it too often.”

“I guess not,” I said. She picked up the phone book and I told her she’d want the Yellow Pages. “I thought of that,” I said. “Call one of those film rental places and see if they can come up with a print of the picture. But they’ll be closed at this hour, won’t they?”

She gave me a funny look and asked me what channel the movie had been on.

“Channel 9.”

“Is that WPIX?”

“WOR.”

“Right.” She closed the phone book, dialed a number. “You weren’t serious about renting the film just so we could see who was in it, were you?”

“Well, sort of.”

“Someone at the channel should have a cast list. They must get calls like this all the time.”

“Oh.”

“Is there any coffee, Bernie?”

“I’ll get you some.”

It took more than one call. Evidently the people at WOR were used to getting nutty calls from movie buffs, and since such buffs constituted the greater portion of their audience they were prepared to cater to them. But it seemed that the cast list which accompanied the film only concerned itself with featured performers. Our Typical New York Cabdriver, with his half-dozen typical lines, did not come under that heading.

They kept Ruth on the phone for a long time anyway because the fellow she talked to was certain that an associate of his would be sure to know who played the cabdriver in Man in the Middle. The associate in question was evidently a goldmine of such information. But this associate was out grabbing a sandwich, and Ruth was understandably reluctant to supply a callback number, and so they chatted and killed time until the guy came back and got on the line. Of course he didn’t remember who played the cabdriver, although he did remember some bit taking place in a cab, and then Ruth tried to describe the pear-shaped man, which I felt was slightly nervy, since she’d never seen him, either live or on film. But she echoed my description accurately enough and the conversation went on for a bit and she thanked him very much and hung up.

“He says he knows exactly who I mean,” she reported, “but he can’t remember his name.”

“Sensational.”

“But he found out the film was a Paramount release.”

“So?”

Los Angeles Information gave her the number for Paramount Pictures. It was three hours earlier out there so that people were still at their desks, except for the ones who hadn’t come back from lunch yet. Ruth went through channels until she found somebody who told her that the cast list for a picture more than ten years old would be in the inactive files. So Paramount referred her to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and L.A. Information came through with the number, and Ruth placed the call. Someone at the Academy told her the information was on file and she was welcome to drive over and look it up for herself, which would have been a time-consuming process, the drive amounting to some three thousand miles. They gave her a hard time until she mentioned that she was David Merrick’s secretary. I guess that was a good name to mention.