Lawrence Block - Burglars Can’t Be Choosers

I checked my watch. Nine thirty-six.

Martin’s office was shabby and cluttered. One entire wall was covered with dark brown cork tiles, which had been inexpertly cemented to it. Thumbtacks and pushpins held glossy photographs in place. The greater portion of these photos showed women, who in turn showed the greater portion of themselves. Most of them showed their legs, many showed their breasts, and every one of them flashed a savage mechanical smile. I thought of Peter Alan Martin sitting at his cluttered desk and gazing up at all those teeth and I felt a little sorry for him.

There were a few head and shoulders shots in among the sea of tits and legs, a couple of male faces in the crowd. But I didn’t see the face I was looking for.

Next to the white touchtone phone on the desk stood a Rolodex wheel of phone numbers and addresses. I flipped through it and found Wesley Brill’s card. This didn’t really come as a surprise, but all the same I felt a little thrill when I actually located what I was looking for. I tried a couple of Martin’s Flair pens, finally found one that worked, and copied down Wesley Brill, Hotel Cumberland, 326 West 58th, 541-7255. (I don’t know why I wrote down his name. I don’t know why I wrote down anything, come to think of it, because all I had to do was remember the name of the hotel and the rest would be in the phone book. Listen, nobody’s perfect.)

I put my rubber gloves on at about this point and wiped the surfaces I remembered touching, not that any of them seemed likely to take a print and not that anyone would be looking for prints in the first place. I checked the Rolodex for Flaxford, not really expecting to find his name, and was not vastly surprised when it wasn’t there.

There were three old green metal filing cabinets on the opposite side of the window from the cork wall. I gave them a quick look-through and found Brill’s file. All it held was a sheaf of several dozen 8 by 10 glossies. If Martin had any correspondence with or about Brill he either threw it out or kept it elsewhere.

But it was the pictures that interested me. Only when I saw them did I know for certain that Wesley Brill was the man who had set me up for a murder rap. Until then there was still some room for doubt. All those long-distance phone calls had had us operating in something of a vacuum, but here was Brill in living black and white and there was no doubt about it. I flipped through the pictures and picked out a composite shot, half a dozen head-and-shoulders pics arranged to show various facial expressions and attitudes. I knew it wouldn’t be missed-mostly likely the whole file wouldn’t have been missed, and possibly the entire filing cabinet that contained it-and I folded it twice and put it in a pocket.

Martin’s desk wasn’t locked. I went through it quickly, mechanically, without finding anything to tell me much about Wesley Brill. I did come upon a mostly-full pint of blended whiskey in the bottom drawer and an unopened half-pint of Old Mr. Boston mint-flavored gin snuggled up next to it. Both of these were infinitely resistible. In the wide center drawer I found an envelope with some cash in it, eighty-five dollars in fives and tens. I took a five and two tens to cover expenses, put the rest back, closed the drawer, then changed my mind and opened it again and scooped up the rest of the money, leaving the empty envelope in the drawer. Now if I left any evidence of my presence, if the clutter I left behind struck him as different from the clutter he’d left there himself, he’d simply think it was the work of some hot-prowl artist who’d made off with his mad money.

(Then why was I disguising my presence in every other respect? Ah, you’ve spotted an inconsistency, haven’t you? All right, I’ll tell you why I took the eighty-five bucks. I’ve never believed in overlooking cash. That’s why.)

But I was careful to overlook what I found in the top left-hand drawer. It was a tiny little revolver with a two-inch barrel and pearlized grips, and tiny or not it looked very menacing. I leaned into the drawer to sniff intelligently at the barrel the way they’re always doing on television. Then they state whether or not the gun’s been fired recently. All I could state was that I smelled metal and mineral oil and what you usually smell in a musty desk drawer, a drawer which I was now very happy to close once I got my nose out of it.

Guns make me nervous, and you’d be surprised how many times a burglar will run across one. I only once had one pointed at me and that was one I’ve mentioned, the gun of good old Carter Sandoval, but I’ve found them in drawers and on night tables and, more than once, tucked beneath a pillow. People buy the hateful things to shoot burglars with, or at least that’s what they tell themselves, and then they wind up shooting themselves or each other accidentally or on purpose.

A lot of burglars steal guns automatically, either because they have a use for them or because it’s a cinch to get fifty or a hundred dollars for a nice un-traceable handgun. And I knew one fellow who specialized in suburban homes who always took guns with him so that the next burglar to hit that place wouldn’t be risking a bullet. He took every gun he encountered and always dropped them down the nearest sewer. “We have to look out for each other,” he told me.

I’ve never stolen a gun and I didn’t even contemplate stealing Martin’s. I don’t even like to touch the damned things and I closed the drawer without touching this one.

At nine fifty-seven I let myself out of the office. The corridor was empty. Faint strains of Mozart wafted my way from the Notions Unlimited office. I wasted a minute relocking the door, though I could have let him figure he’d forgotten to lock up. Anybody with Peter Alan Martin’s taste in booze probably greeted the dawn with a fairly spotty memory of the previous day.

I even walked down to the fourth floor before I rang for the elevator. Nobody was home at Hubbell Corp. I rode the elevator to the lobby, found my name in the ledger-three people had come in since my arrival, and one of them had left already. I penciled in 10 P.M. under Time Out and wished the old man in the wine-colored uniform a pleasant evening.

“They all the same,” he said. “Good nights and bad nights, all one and the same to me.”

I caught Ruth’s eye from Riker’s doorway. The place was fairly deserted, a couple of cabbies at the counter, two off-duty hookers in the back booth. Ruth put some coins on her table next to her coffee cup and hurried to join me. “I was starting to worry,” she said.

“Not to worry.”

“You were gone a long time.”

“Half an hour.”

“Forty minutes. Anyway, it seemed like hours. What happened?”

She took my arm and I told her about it as we walked. I was feeling very good. I hadn’t accomplished anything that remarkable but I felt a great sense of exhilaration. Everything was starting to go right now, I could feel it, and it was a nice feeling.

“He’s in a hotel in the West Fifties,” I told her. “Just off Columbus Circle, near the Coliseum. That’s why he didn’t have a listed phone. I never heard of the hotel and I have a feeling it’s not in the same class with the Sherry-Netherland. In fact I think our Mr. Brill has had hard times lately. He’s got a loser for an agent, that’s for sure. Most of Peter Alan Martin’s clients are ladies who came in third in a county-wide beauty contest a whole lot of years ago. I think he’s the kind of agent you call when you want someone to come out of the cake at a bachelor party. Do they still have that sort of thing?”

“What sort of thing?”

“Girls popping out of cakes.”

“You’re asking me? How would I know?”