Lawrence Block - Burglars Can’t Be Choosers

I said, “Funny. You’d think he’d have a safe. A man like him would have cash around the house frequently. Maybe he just didn’t worry.”

“What cash? He owned property and he was in the theater, Bernie. Where does cash come into it? The only thing is the theater receipts and nobody brings those home nowadays. They go straight into the bank’s night depository. Plus the little theaters he messed around with, how much money’d be involved in the first place?”

I thought, Why bother going into it? But all the same I said, “He was mixed up with a lot of characters. I think he operated as some kind of bagman or fixer. I know he was tied into some political heavies, but whether he just free-lanced for them I can’t be sure. Plus he screwed around with blackmail and extortion.”

“I thought you didn’t know him?”

“I didn’t.”

“Then where do you get off knowing all this?”

“The Shadow knows,” I said. “The Department must know something about it, too, as far as that goes. Didn’t you hear anything about Flaxford’s secret life?”

“Not a word. But I don’t guess anybody looked to find out. Seein’ we knew who killed him and we got an airtight case, why futz around with details? What’s the percentage?”

“Airtight,” I said hollowly.

“Bernie, if you want to tell me what we’re looking for-”

“ We are not looking for anything I am looking for something.”

“Yeah, but what?”

“I’ll know it when I see it.”

“Suppose I see it?”

I made my way past him again, stepping gingerly over the chalkmarks as if the body itself were still there, an ectoplasmic presence hovering just above the carpet. I walked down the hallway, stopping to check out the bathroom. It was large in proportion to the rest of the apartment, suggesting the building had been divided into smaller rental units somewhere along the line. There was a massive claw-footed tub, an antique survivor that contrasted with the modern sink and toilet. I ran water in the sink, gave the toilet a flush, turned to see Ray looking at me with his eyebrows raised.

“Just remembering,” I said. “If Loren hadn’t taken a wrong turn after he flushed the toilet we’d have all been on our way.”

“It’s a fact. Who knows when somebody’d have finally discovered the poor sonofabitch?”

“Not for days, maybe.”

“You’da been clear, Bernie. Even if we make the connection, what the hell can we do? Walk in with our caps in our hands and say we had you but we let you go? Besides, by the time it all comes together we wouldn’t know if you were there the same night he got it, because with all that time gone you can’t fix the time of death all that close.”

“But Loren walked right in on him.”

I stood for a moment in the bathroom doorway, turned toward the bedroom, then turned again and went back to the living room. I could check Flaxford’s closet for false backs and bottoms but that just didn’t seem like his style.

The desk.

I went over and stood next to it, started tapping it here and there. Darla Sandoval had seen him take the blue box from this desk and put it back in the desk when he was done showing its contents to her. And the desk had still been locked after Flaxford lay dead in his bedroom. I’d been through it once but those old fossils were loaded with secret compartments, drawers lurking behind drawers, pigeonholes in back of pigeonholes. The desk was where I’d been told to look in the very beginning, and it was where I was looking when Ray and Loren walked in on me, and it was where I would look now.

I got out my ring of burglar tools. “Sit down,” I told Ray. “This may take a while.”

It took close to an hour. I removed each drawer in turn, checked behind them, turned them upside down and very nearly inside out. I rolled up the rolltop and probed within and I found more secret compartments than you could advertise on the back of a cereal box. Most of them were empty, but one held a collection of raunchy Victorian pornography which had evidently been secreted there by a raunchy Victorian. I passed the half-dozen booklets to Ray, who’d complained earlier that Flaxford’s shelves contained nothing more salacious than Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic in two leather-bound volumes.

“This is better,” he reported. “But I wish to hell they could write it in plain English. By the time you figure out exactly what the guy’s doing to the broad you could lose interest.”

I went on performing exploratory surgery on the desk. Now and then I removed an interior panel knowing I’d never be able to put it back later, and I felt sorry about this, but not sorry enough to cry about it. Eventually I realized that, however more secret compartments the desk might contain, Flaxford wouldn’t have used any of them for the blue box. It would have taken him too long to put it away and get it out again.

I stepped back and looked down at the desk and wanted to wash my hands of the whole damned thing. The thought of washing my hands made me think of running water, which led me back to the bathroom in short order. While I stood there doing my Niagara Falls impression I found myself studying the elaborately inlaid tile floor beneath my feet. Old-fashioned clay tiles about an inch square, most of them white, with a geometric pattern traced in light blue tiles. When I got to where I was actually toying with the idea of taking up the floor I knew I was skating dangerously close to the edge. I gave the toilet a flush, rinsed my hands, looked without success for a towel, dried my hands on my blue pants, took Loren’s nightstick from its clasp, slapped it briskly against my palm, and got out of there.

And turned left instead of right, tracing Loren’s route into the bedroom. I went over to the closet and went through it very quickly, knowing I’d find nothing but clothes, and that was all I did find.

I was on my way out of the room when I happened to see it out of the corner of my eye, just a little scrap of something that had wedged itself between the bedpost and the wall.

I got down on one knee and examined it. I took a very careful look and I did some thinking, and it all fit with some thoughts I’d already had. I got up and left it where it was and went back to the living room.

I was sliding the final drawer back into the desk when Ray said, “What in the hell does gama-houche mean?”

I made him spell it, then took the book away from him and looked for myself. “I think it means to go down on a girl,” I said.

“That’s what I figured. Why the fuck can’t they just say that?”

“Other times, other customs.”

“Shit.”

I left him squinting at antique filth and did some pacing, then dropped into the green wing chair where I’d planted myself before tackling the desk in the first place. I swung my feet onto the hassock, took a deep breath, and again tried to put myself into the mood of the apartment. Your name is J. Francis Flaxford, I told myself, and you’re sitting here comfortably in your bathrobe, except it’s such a nice one you call it a dressing gown. You’re supposed to be at the theater but you’re hanging around with a drink at your elbow and a book in your lap and a cigar in your mouth and…

“That’s weird,” I said.

“What is?”

“They must have taken both ashtrays.”

“Huh?”

“There used to be a heavy cut-glass ashtray on this table.”

“They found it in the bedroom. The one he was killed with, I told you they’d take that along and lock it up.”

“No, there was a second ashtray,” I said. “It was on this table here. I suppose it was a mate to the murder weapon. Why would they take both ashtrays?”