Lawrence Block - Burglars Can’t Be Choosers

“Seven-four-one-nine,” a soft female voice said, and my risen gorge sank and I calmed down. Because just as actors have listed phones so do they have services to answer them, and that was what this voice represented; the number which had been spoken to me was nothing other than the last four digits of Rodney’s phone number. I cleared my throat and asked when Rodney would be back in town, and the lady with the dulcet tones obligingly informed me that he would be on tour for another fifteen weeks, that he was in St. Louis at the moment, and that she could supply me with the number of his hotel there if I wished. I didn’t wish. I suppressed an infantile urge to leave a comic message and returned the phone to its cradle.

It took a little doing but I managed to find Bethune Street and walked west on it until I located Rod’s building. It was half a block west of Washington Street in a neighborhood that was half brownstones and the other half warehouses. The building I wanted was a poor but honest five-story brownstone indistinguishable from its neighbors on either side but for the rusty numerals alongside the front door. I stayed on the street a moment to make sure there was no one taking obvious notice of me, then slipped into the front vestibule. I scanned the row of buttons on the wall, looking for names of illustrious actors and actresses, but Helen Hayes wasn’t listed and neither were the Lunts. Rod was, however; one R. Hart was inked in as occupying Apartment 5 – R. Since there were five floors and two apartments to a floor, that meant he was on the top floor at the rear of the building, and what could be less obtrusive than that?

Because old habits die hard, I gave his bell a good ringing and waited for anyone who might be in his apartment to buzz me back. Happily no one did. I then thought of ringing other bells at random. This is what I would do on a job. People buzz you on through the locked front door without a qualm, and if they happen to pop out into the hallway to see who you are you just smile apologetically and say that you forgot your key. Works like a charm. But Rod lived on the top floor, which meant I’d have to walk past all the other floors, and anyone who noticed me might notice again when the papers saw fit to print my picture, and I might be holed up here for a while, if not forever, and…

Didn’t seem worth the risk, small though the risk might be. Especially since it took me less than fifteen seconds to let myself through that front door. A strong wind could have opened that lock.

I scampered up four flights to the top floor and took deep breaths until my heartbeat returned to normal. Rod’s door had 5-R on it and I went and stood in front of it and listened. The door at the other end of the hallway, 5-F, had no light shining underneath it. I knocked on Rod’s door and waited, and knocked again, and then I took out my burglar’s tools.

Rod had three locks on his door. Sometime in the past an amateur had dug at the frame around one of them with a chisel or screwdriver, but it didn’t look as though he’d accomplished anything. Rod’s locks included a fancy Medeco cylinder, a Segal police lock with a steel bar wedged against the door from within, and a cheap piece of junk that was just there for nuisance value. I knocked off the third lock first to get it out of the way, then tackled the Segal. It’s good insurance against a junkie kicking the door in and it’s not easy to pick but I had the tools and the touch and it didn’t keep me waiting long. The tumblers fell into place and the steel bar slid aside in its channel and that left the Medeco.

The Medeco’s the one they advertise as pick-proof and of course that’s errant nonsense, there is no such thing, but it’s a pardonable exaggeration. What it meant was that I had to do two jobs at once. Suppose you’re a cryptographer and you’re given a message which was encoded from an original in Serbo-Croat, a language you don’t happen to speak. Now you have to crack the cypher and learn the language at the same time. That’s not exactly what I had to do with the Medeco but it’s as close an explanation as I can give you.

It was tricky and I made some mistakes. At one point I heard a door open and I almost had a seizure but the door was on the floor below and I relaxed again. Sort of. Then I tried again and screwed up again, and then I just plain hit it right and the message turned out to be “Open sesame.” I popped inside and locked all three locks, just like the old maid in all the stories.

The first thing I did was walk through the whole apartment and make sure there weren’t any bodies in it but my own. This wasn’t that much of a chore. There was one large room with a bookcase set up as a sort of room divider screening off a sleeping alcove. The kitchen was small and uninviting. The bathroom was smaller and less inviting, and roaches scampered when I turned the light on. I turned it off again and went back to the living room.

A homey place, I decided. Well-worn furniture, probably purchased secondhand, but it was all comfortable enough. A scattering of plants, palms and philodendrons and others whose names I did not know. Posters on the walls, not pop posters of Bogart and Che but the sort printed to herald gallery openings, Miró and Chagall and a few others as unknown to me as some of the plants. I decided, all in all, that Rod had fairly good taste for an actor.

The rug was a ratty maroon carpet remnant about twelve feet square, its binding coming loose on one side and entirely absent on another, its threads quite bare in spots and patches, its overall appearance decidedly unwholesome. Next time, I thought, I’ll bring along the bloody Bokhara.

And then I started to shake.

The Bokhara wasn’t bloody, of course. Loren had merely fainted upon it. But the rug, in the bedroom I had not seen, presumably was. Bloody, that is.

Who had killed the man in the bedroom? For that matter, who was the man in the bedroom? J. Francis Flaxford himself? According to my information he was supposed to be away from home from eight-thirty at the latest to midnight at the earliest. But if the whole point of that information had been to put me on the spot where I could get tagged for homicide, well, I couldn’t really put too much stock in it.

A man. Dead. In the bedroom. And someone had beaten his head in, and he was still warm to the touch.

Terrific.

If I’d only had the sense to give the whole apartment a looksee the minute I went into it, then it would have been an entirely different story. One quick reconnaissance mission and I’d have seen the late lamented and been on my way. By the time the illustrious team of Kirschmann and Kramer made their entrance I’d have been back in my own little tower of steel and glass, sipping Scotch and smiling southward at the World Trade Center. Instead I was a fugitive from what passes for justice these days, the very obvious murderer of a murderee I’d never even met in the first place. And, because my presence of mind had been conspicuous by its absence, I’d reacted to things by (a) using brute force and (b) scramming. So that if there’d ever been any chance of convincing people I’d never killed anything more biologically advanced than cockroaches and mosquitoes, that chance had vanished without a trace.

I paced. I opened cupboards looking for liquor and found none. I went back, tested another chair, decided the one I’d already sat in was more comfortable, then rejected both chairs and stretched out on the couch.

And thought about the curious little man who’d gotten me into this mess in the first place.

He was a thick-bodied man built rather like a bloated bowling pin. While he wasn’t terribly stout, they’d been out of waists when he reached the front of the line that day. He must have had to guess where to put his belt each morning.