Lawrence Block - Burglars Can’t Be Choosers

“Who knows?”

“Just super-efficient.”

“Bernie, we’re runnin’ outta time.”

“I know.”

“And you didn’t find what you were lookin’ for.”

“I found something.”

“In the desk?”

“In the bedroom.”

“What?” I hesitated and he didn’t press. “Not what you’re lookin’ for, anyway. What are you lookin’ for? Maybe I seen it myself.”

“It’s not very likely.”

“You never know.”

“A blue box,” I said. “A blue leather-covered box.”

“How big?”

“Jesus,” I said. “Either you saw it or you didn’t, Ray. What’s the difference how big it is?”

“You say a box, hell, it could be the size of a pack of cigarettes or the size of a steamer trunk.”

“About so big,” I said, moving my hands in the air. “About the size of a book.” I remembered Darla’s words. “The size of a hard-cover novel. Or maybe as large as a dictionary. Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m an idiot,” I said. “Aside from that, nothing’s wrong.”

It took perhaps three minutes to find it, another five minutes to establish that all the other leather-bound volumes were what they purported to be. Flaxford’s blue leather-covered box was nothing but a dummy book, a neat wooden lockbox that had been passing itself off as Darwin ’s Origin of Species. When it was open it wouldn’t have looked like a book at all, just like a rather elaborate box which one might keep on a dresser top as a repository for tie tacks and cuff links and that sort of thing. Closed and locked and tucked away on a lower shelf, it looked no different from all of the real books which surrounded it.

The goons who went through my apartment would have found the box. When they shook each book in turn they would have found one that didn’t flip open, and that would have been that. But Flaxford’s apartment never got that kind of a search.

“Aren’t you gonna open it, Bernie?”

I glanced pointedly at Ray. I was in the green wing chair again and he was hovering beside me, gazing down over my shoulder. “You go back to your book,” I said, “and I’ll concentrate on mine.”

“I guess that’s right,” he said, returning to his own chair and book. I kept my eyes on him and saw him peek over his porn at me, then resume the charade of reading.

“Back in a minute,” I said. “Nature calls.”

I walked right on past the bathroom and into Flaxford’s bedroom, blue box in hand. Whether they look like books or not, those little home strongboxes are about as hard to get into as a stoned nymphomaniac. This one had a combination lock concealed behind a leather flap. You lined up the three ten-digit dials and you were home free. You pried the thing open with a chisel.

I wasn’t in quite that much of a hurry and I did want the box to look as though it hadn’t been opened, so I did a little poking and probing for a few seconds until the lock yielded. I had a look at everything that was in the box, then transferred all of it to my own person. My uniform had enough room in the pockets so that none of them wound up sporting an unseemly bulge.

When the box was properly empty I took hold of the bed and tugged it an inch or two away from the wall. The small rectangle that had caught my eye earlier was where I had left it, and it was a good deal more visible now that I had moved the bed. I used Loren’s nightstick to coax it out into the open, then took it ever so carefully between thumb and forefinger, holding it by its edges and placing it into the legendary blue box.

And closed the box, and locked it.

On my way back to the living room I encouraged history to repeat itself, giving the toilet a convincing flush. Ray looked up when I returned to where I’d left him. “Nervous stomach?”

“Guess so.”

“Nervous myself,” he said. “What say we get outta here?”

“Fine. I can open this back at my place.”

“I’d think you’d be in a hurry.”

“Not that much of a hurry,” I said. “I’m more anxious to get out of here. And Loren was unhappy about missing out on all this, so let’s give him a chance to see what’s in the box. I already have a pretty good idea what we’ll find.”

“And you think it’ll get you off the hook?”

“It’ll get me off,” I said, “and it’ll get somebody else on.”

We gave the place a lightning once-over to make sure we’d left everything more or less as we’d found it. The internal damage I’d done to the beautiful old desk didn’t show, and the bookshelves looked quite undisturbed. Outside, Kirschmann affixed a seal to the door, noted date and time and added his signature. Then he gave me a deliberate smile and used the key to turn the deadbolt.

And, as the lock turned, the last piece fitted into place for me.

By the time we got back to Darla Sandoval’s little love nest, Loren Kramer was a nervous wreck. I let us in with my key and when we came through the door Loren was behind it. Since we hadn’t thought he might have chosen that spot for himself, we inadvertently hit him with the door. When he groaned Ray yanked the door forward and stared unhappily at his partner. “I don’t believe this,” he said. “I thought I told you to stay on the couch.”

“I didn’t know it was you, Ray.”

“Hiding behind doors. Jesus.”

“I got nervous, that’s all. You were gone a long time and I started worrying about it.”

“Well, Bernie here had to look for a box that wasn’t there. It was sort of fun to watch him. He took a desk apart and everything. Then the box he was looking for turned up on a bookshelf. That’s it right there. It was pretendin’ to be a book.”

“The Purloined Letter,” Loren said.

“Huh?”

“Edgar Allan Poe,” I said. “A short story. But that’s not exactly right, Loren. Now if you were to hide a book on a bookshelf, that would be like the story. Except this was a box that was disguised as a book.”

“It sounds like pretty much the same thing to me,” Loren said. He sounded sulky about it.

While we puzzled over all of this, Ray went to the kitchen and made himself a drink. He came back, took a large swallow of it, and suggested that it was time to open the box.

“And time I had my gun back,” Loren said. “And my stick and my badge and my cuffs and my cap, the whole works. Nothing against you, Bernie, but it bothers me seeing them on someone who’s not really a cop.”

“That’s understandable, Loren.”

“Plus I don’t feel dressed without them. The gun, we even have to carry them off-duty, you know. When you think of all the holdups foiled by off-duty patrolmen you understand the reason behind the regulation.”

What I mostly thought of was all the off-duty cops who tended to shoot one another in the course of serious discussions of the relative merits of the Knicks and the Nets, but I decided not to raise this point. I didn’t think it would go over too well.

“The box,” Ray said.

“Couldn’t I get my stuff back and then he opens the box?”

“Jesus,” Ray said.

I hefted the box in my hands. “Surprisingly enough,” I said, “this box isn’t all that important.”

Ray stared at me. “It was worth ten thousand dollars to you, Bernie. That sounds pretty important. And it’s supposed to get you off a murder charge, though I’ll be damned if I see how it’s gonna do that. For the sake of argument I’ll buy that you didn’t kill Flaxford. But I don’t see you comin’ up with a dime’s worth of proof in that direction, let alone ten grand’s worth.”

“It must look that way,” I admitted.

“Unless the proof’s in the box.”