Lawrence Block - Burglars Can’t Be Choosers

“It might eventually be important,” I said, “to know just who Debus sent to the apartment and when they were there.”

“Well, it’s a matter of record.”

“You could find out?”

“Not right this minute, but later on. Sure.”

“It’ll be there anyway,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Nothing.”

I recognized the doorman. But he didn’t recognize me, and I decided that I would definitely have to remember him at Christmas. He held the door for us as he’d held it for me twice before, and while Ray chatted with him he paused twice to challenge people on their way into the building. Evidently he’d been reprimanded for letting me in, but at least they hadn’t taken his job away and I was happy for him.

I didn’t even get a second glance from him. I was wearing a uniform and I was standing there next to Ray, so why should he pay any attention to me?

We rode up on the elevator with a man dressed as a priest. I suppose he probably was a priest, but he looked less like a priest than I looked like a cop, so why should I take anything for granted? It occurred to me that clerical garb would make a good cover for a burglary. It would certainly get you past most doormen in a hurry. Of course it wouldn’t do you too much good in the suburbs where the object was to avoid getting noticed in the first place, but apartment houses were something else.

Now in the suburbs a mailman’s uniform would be ideal. Of course, a lot of people know their route man, but if you could pass yourself off as the guy who delivers parcels or special delivery letters or something like that-

“Something on your mind, Bernie?”

“Just thinking about business,” I said. We got off at the third floor and left the alleged priest to ascend alone. I stood aside while Ray broke the seals on Flaxford’s door. Then, while he was fishing in his pocket for the keys, I extended a finger and poked the doorbell. He gave me a look as the bell sounded within the apartment.

“Just routine,” I explained

“Police seals on the door and you think there’s somebody inside the place?”

“You never know.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Everybody has a routine,” I said. “That’s mine.”

“Jesus,” he said. He found the keys, poked one at the lock. I could see it wasn’t going to fit and it didn’t. He tried the other and it slid in.

“Must seem funny to you,” he said. “Using a key.”

Just a little earlier I’d used Darla’s key and now we were using Flaxford’s. The only place I had to break into these days was the place where I was living.

“Last time I opened this door,” he said, “there was a burglar on the other side of it.”

“Last time I opened it there was a corpse in the bedroom.”

“Let’s hope tonight’s a new experience for both of us.”

He gave the key a half-turn clockwise and pushed the door open. He said something I didn’t catch and went on inside, reaching to flick on the light switch. Then he turned and motioned me inside but I stayed where I was.

“Come on,” he said. “Whattaya waitin’ for?”

“The door wasn’t locked.”

“Of course it was. I unlocked it.”

“Just the snaplock. All you had to do was turn it halfway around and it opened. A lock like that has a deadbolt, too, and if the deadbolt’s engaged you have to turn it one and a half times around to open it.”

“So?”

“So the last person out didn’t bother locking it with the key. He just closed it on his way out.”

“What’s it matter? Maybe his partner’s got the key and he’s halfway to the elevator so he doesn’t bother. Maybe he never thinks to lock it with the key. A lot of people always leave their doors like that. They never take the trouble to use the whatchamacallit, the deadbolt.”

“I know. They make my life a lot easier.”

“So here we got somebody who it’s not his apartment in the first place and he’s gonna be slapping an evidence seal on it anyway, and what does he care about deadbolts? It don’t mean a thing, Bernie.”

“Right,” I said. I poked at my memory, trying to catch something small and quick that kept darting around corners. “ I put the deadbolt on,” I said.

“How’s that?”

“Once I was inside. I closed the door and I turned this gizmo here, this knob. That’s how you engage the deadbolt from inside the apartment.”

“So?”

“And when you and Loren got here with the key from the doorman, you had to turn it around a full turn to undo the bolt and then another half turn to draw back the spring lock.”

“If you say so,” Ray said. He was a little impatient now. “If that’s what you say I’ll take your word for it, Bernie, because I frankly don’t make a point of noticing how many times I turn a key in a lock, especially when I don’t know what the fuck’s on the other side of the door, which I didn’t at the time. None of this makes the slightest fucking difference and I don’t know what the hell you’re rattling on about. I thought you wanted to get into this place, but if all you want is to stand outside talking about bolts like a nut-”

“You’re absolutely right,” I said. I came all the way inside and closed the door behind me. And turned the bolt.

The apartment didn’t look different from when I’d seen it last. If the wrecking crew at my apartment had been Michael Debus’s responsibility, he’d clearly assigned a gentler crowd altogether to the task of searching J. Francis Flaxford’s digs. Of course the search of my place had been unauthorized and unrecorded while the visit here had been made with official permission and was duly noted in some official log. So Flaxford’s books remained on Flaxford’s shelves and Flaxford’s clothes remained in Flaxford’s closets and drawers. No one had slashed open his furniture or taken up his rugs or cast pictures down from his walls.

All of this seemed wildly unfair. Flaxford, who had gone to whatever reward awaits fixers and blackmailers, would never wear these clothes or read these books or inhabit this apartment again, yet everything was shipshape for him. I, on the other hand, had a use for the contents of my apartment. And I had been sorely mistreated.

I tried to put this inequity out of my mind and concentrate instead on searching the place. I began in the bedroom, where chalkmarks on the oriental rug (I’ve no idea what kind) indicated the position of the body. He had been lying just to the left of the foot of his bed, his outspread feet reaching toward the doorway. There were dark brown stains on the carpet where his head had been outlined and similar stains on the unmade bed.

I said, “Blood?” Ray nodded. “You always think of blood as red,” I said.

“Brown when it dries, though.”

“Uh-huh. He must have flopped on the bed when he was hit. And slid down onto the floor.”

“Figures.”

“The paper said he was killed with an ashtray. Where is it?”

“I thought it was a lamp. You sure it was an ashtray?”

“The paper said.”

“A lot they know. Whatever it was, somebody musta tagged it and took it the hell outta here. Murder weapon, you don’t go and leave something like that behind. It gets tagged and run through the lab sixteen different ways and photographed a couple hundred times and then locked up somewhere.” He cleared his throat. “Even if something like that was here, Bernie, there’s no way I could let you do nothin’ about it. No tamperin’ with evidence.”

“I just wondered what happened to it.”

“Just so you understand.”

I brushed past him and moved around the bed to where an oil painting of a ramshackle barn hung in a heavy gilded frame. I realized that if there was a wall safe in the place fifteen people had already gone through it since the murder, but I moved the picture anyway and the only thing behind it was a wall.