The Burglar on the Prowl (21 page)

T
he lock on William Johnson’s front door was nothing special, but for some reason it gave me a hard time. Working away at it, I wondered why I hadn’t had the sense to fish his keys out of his pocket while I was rolling him. It certainly would have made things easier.

Once I was inside, my first thought was that I was too late, that someone somehow had beaten me to it. The apartment, a large L-shaped studio, looked as though it had been lately tossed by a team who’d taken the verb literally, picking up everything mobile and flinging it somewhere. It would have been just one more coincidence to add to the string, and it took a few minutes to realize that I was Johnson’s first and only illicit visitor. The place was a mess because that’s the way he kept it. Maybe, I thought, he hadn’t meant any harm when he dumped Barbara’s jewelry drawer on the floor. Maybe he wasn’t vandalizing the place after all. Maybe he was helping her redecorate.

The state of the place made my task harder than it might have been. It’s not easy to look for something when you have to include the floor among the places to be searched. Nor, oddly, is it as easy to leave things as you found them, because how can you tell when they’re back where they belong?

I did the best I could, and didn’t linger. According to Sigrid, he’d wound up with a double dose of Rohypnol, with the capsules intended for both Claire and Audrey somehow winding up in his glass. It had certainly been enough to knock him cold, but who knew how long he’d stay that way? I wanted to be gone before he came back.

On my way out, I took time to pick his lock again, leaving that too as I’d found it. It was quicker the second time, but would have been quicker still with his key. Then again, I consoled myself, if I’d taken his keys he’d have missed them, and might have suspected that whoever had taken them would head straight for his apartment.

I walked for a block or two, buoyant with the heady sensation I get from illegal entry. It was cool enough so that I stuck my hands in my pockets for warmth, and realized I still had his credit cards. I was going to throw them away, but I decided that would be wasteful. Just because I wasn’t inclined to run around charging DVD players and iBooks to Wee Willie Johnson, why should I deprive some other citizen of the pleasure?

I left the cards here and there, out in plain sight, where whoever came along could pick one up and do as he pleased with it. A person with a conscience as overdeveloped as Johnson’s upper body could seek out the card’s owner and return it. One who was merely honest could simply leave it where it lay. And a truly enterprising individual, a passerby with energy and the will to better himself, would max out that card as quickly as possible.

When the cab stopped for me, I would have loved to go straight home and call it a night. Instead I gave the driver an address on Park Avenue that turned out to be between 62nd and 63rd.

The building I wanted was a fully serviced luxury apartment house, with a concierge on the front desk and an attendant in the elevator. The only way to get into a building like that is through subterfuge; ideally, you find a bona fide tenant to invite you in, and make a little detour on your way out. That’s hard to arrange on the spot in the middle of the night, and I hadn’t had time to set anything
up. I was, God help me, on the prowl again, and I didn’t see any way to avoid it if I was going to make this work.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to get past the desk, or take the elevator anywhere. On either side of the building’s entrance was a staircase descending a flight to a suite of basement offices, all of them occupied by members of the medical profession. The one I wanted was on the left, and if I got down the stairs I’d be all right. No one at street level could see me while I worked on the lock, and I couldn’t believe there would be a burglar alarm on the door.

What there was, and I could even see the goddam thing, was a security camera. I didn’t care what wound up on the tape, because no one would look at it unless a crime was committed. I planned on committing one—I’d do so the minute I opened the door, and might even fit the definition of criminal trespass when I went down the stairs for no legitimate reason. But if all went well no one would know I’d been there, so why review the night’s tapes?

The danger lay in being caught in the act, which could happen if the concierge was looking at the closed-circuit TV monitor on his desk while I was passing in front of the camera. They don’t sit there and stare at it by the hour, they’d go nuts if they did, but all it takes is a glance at just the wrong time, and they pick up the phone and call 911, and another hapless burglar gets free room and board as a guest of the governor.

I found a pay phone, made a phone call, and came back to where I could watch the building. When the guy brought the pizza, I made my move, and I was down those stairs in a hurry. The lock was a cinch, and it took me hardly any time to find everything I was looking for. I took a sheet of paper from a desk drawer and wrote down what I needed to know, and I folded it up and put it in my pocket, and that was all I took. Unless they counted the letterhead, no one could possibly know they’d had a visitor.

So I was out of there in a hurry. I was tempted to leave the door unlocked, but I’d done everything else right, and I didn’t want to stop now. I picked it shut and walked quickly up the stairs and away from there. This was the dangerous part, because from where I
stood there was no way I could see if the concierge was busy, but when I was clear of the place and took a look back, it was clear I’d had nothing to worry about. The pizza guy was still there, talking away on his cell phone, while the concierge stood there with his hands on his hips, and it looked as though it might take them a while to sort it all out.

I caught a cab and went home.

I would have loved to stay there. My humble abode had never felt so welcoming, nor had my bed ever looked so inviting. I decided to stretch out for just a minute, and I told myself not to be an idiot. I put some coffee on and took a quick wake-up shower while it brewed, then threw a couple of ice cubes in it so I wouldn’t have to wait for it to cool.

Was there no way I could avoid another trip to Riverdale?

None I could think of. I spent a few minutes preparing the parcel I would take with me, then bit the bullet and got to it. I walked around until I found the Mercury Sable, opened its door, diddled its ignition, and drove it the nine or ten miles to Riverdale, found Devonshire Close without getting lost, and parked the car not in Mapes’s driveway—the unfamiliar noise of a car in their own driveway might wake Mapes or his wife—but two blocks away. I walked the two blocks, well aware of the impossibility of appearing innocent walking residential streets at that hour. I went up the driveway to the side door, and looked longingly at it. I’d set the alarm to bypass that door, and unless someone had noticed, it was still like that. But I couldn’t find out without opening the door, and if they’d changed the setting—well, that was a sentence I didn’t want to finish.

That left the milk chute. Let’s just say I didn’t get stuck this time. Not on the way in, and not on the way out, either.

I drove home, parked the car right where I’d found it—who’d grab a parking space away from me at that hour? I got myself home, exchanged a friendly word with Edgar, and went straight to bed.

B
ern, I hate to say it, but you don’t look so hot.”

“That’s good.”

“It is?”

“I don’t feel so hot, either, and I’d just as soon be consistent. I ran myself ragged until daybreak, and I was tired enough to sleep until nightfall, but I made myself set the alarm and forced myself to get out of bed when it rang. Don’t ask me how.”

“I won’t,” she said. We were at the Poodle Factory. I’d opened up at eleven, having stopped on my way down to pick up a new prepaid cell phone on 23rd Street. I made a few calls with it, then picked up lunch at Two Guys from Kandahar, and brought Carolyn up to date while we ate.

She said she couldn’t believe I’d gotten so much done in one night, and when I thought about it, neither could I. “I kept wanting to call it quits,” I said. “When the poor bastard showed up from Twenty-four/Seven Pizza, I wanted to walk in there, pay him for it, take it home, eat it, and go to bed.”

“Instead you broke into Mapes’s office. Swipe any drugs while you were there?”

“I told you, I didn’t take anything.”

“You went through all that just to look at his appointment book.”

“I had to, in order to schedule things. I couldn’t set up a big showdown at a time when he was going to be busy giving some kid from Larchmont a new nose in time for her Sweet Sixteen party. I needed to know his schedule before I did anything else.”

“And you called him this morning? How did you know what to say?”

“I didn’t. I played it by ear. ‘Mapes? I think you know who this is.’ And evidently he thought so, too, because we went on from there.”

“Was that the voice you used, Bern? Were you trying to sound like anybody in particular?”

I thought about it. “Maybe Broderick Crawford,” I said. “Playing a heavy, not being one of the good guys in
Highway Patrol
. Basically I was trying to sound menacing.”

“Well, you picked a good voice for it. Did you use it for the other calls?”

“No, because I wasn’t sure menacing was the way to go. With some of them I wanted to sound ingratiating, and with others I just wanted to sound like a reasonable man with a reasonable proposition. It was strange, because I was calling people I didn’t know.”

“Telemarketers do that all the time, Bern.”

“ ‘Hello, Mr. Quattrone. How are you today?’ ”

“I know, I can’t figure out why they do that. The only person who ever starts a conversation by asking me how I am is some dimwit on Montserrat trying to sell me a time share in Omaha.”

“Are you sure it’s not the other way around? The thing is, they want you to think they’re having a conversation with you, but most of them have never had one, so they’re at a loss. I was at a loss of my own, because I was cold-calling people without knowing whether they were interested in what I had to sell. If not, I just wanted to move on to somebody else. The hard part was deciding whether they were expressing genuine bafflement or just playing dumb. Anyway, I told them the time and the place, and we’ll see who shows up.”

“How many people are coming?”

I hauled out my list. “The names with a check mark are ones I called this morning. I’ll ask Ray to round up the ones with a star.”

“Hey, I’m on the list. You want me there?”

“Of course.”

“How come I don’t get a check mark or a star?”

“Because I didn’t call you this morning,” I said patiently, “and I didn’t think it would be necessary to have Ray bring you. I figured I’d just tell you about it, and you’d come.”

“No problem,” she said, scanning the list. “ ‘Barbara Creeley.’ I guess you’ll tell her, right? She’s a lawyer, she’s got meetings and closings all the time. Will she be able to come?”

“I hope so. It’s not a dealbreaker if she can’t, but I’d like to have her there.”

“ ‘GurlyGurl.’ You put
Lacey
on the list? And how come you wrote down her screen name?”

“Because I didn’t get much sleep last night and I’m a little rocky this morning and I couldn’t think of her damn name.”

“Don’t bite my head off, Bern.”

“I’m sorry. I thought you might like having her there, and it might be interesting for her. She’s not tied into any of it, but there’s a coincidental connection in that she works with Barbara. I figured it would be up to you to invite her, and it’s your call to make. Personally, I’d just as soon have a lot of people in the room.”

“Should I bring my cats? Just a little joke, Bern.”

“Ha-ha.”

“Man, you’re nicer company when you’ve had a full night’s sleep, aren’t you? This is a long list, isn’t it? Let’s see who else is on it.”

“This here is some list,” Ray Kirschmann said. “How you gonna fit ’em all in this guy’s house?”

Just bring them in through the milk chute, I thought. “It’s a big house,” I said. “Anyway, they’re probably not all going to come. Some of the people I invited sounded as though they didn’t know what I was talking about, and they’ll probably find something else to do tomorrow afternoon.”

“Weather report says there’s a fifty percent chance of rain tomorrow,” he said, “which is a lot like sayin’ they don’t know what the hell it’s gonna do. Rain or shine, that’s a lot of people to send clear up to the Bronx. I never heard of the street. ‘Devonshire Close.’ Close to what, Bernie?”

“Close to Ploughman’s Bush,” I said, “if that helps. They call it a close because it’s closed at one end.”

“You mean like a dead-end street? Why not come out and say so?”

“I suppose they could have,” I said, “but I guess the developers felt it would be harder to sell houses on Devonshire Dead End.”

“Either way, it’s a Roach Motel for cars. They get in but they can’t get out. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

“I don’t either, Ray. I’m starting to have third thoughts about the whole business.”

“You mean second thoughts, don’t you?”

“I already had those. I’ve taken it to the next level. The whole thing could fizzle.”

“You mean you might not come up with a rabbit?”

“I’m not even sure I’ve got a hat.”

He looked troubled, perhaps imagining how he’d come out of it if my magic act fell flat. Then he brightened. “Aw, you’ll pull it off, Bernie. You always do. An’ if you don’t, well, hell, there’s names on this list we could just arrest on general principles.”

I made some more phone calls during the rest of Tuesday afternoon, and even went out to issue a couple of invitations in person. I met Carolyn at the Bum Rap, talked some more about the following day’s agenda, and went straight home. I was in bed by 7:45, and asleep by 7:46. I slept the clock around, waking up a few minutes after eight.

I showered and shaved. I broke some eggs in a bowl, swirled them with a whisk, tossed in some shredded cheese and a pinch of celery salt, added a soupçon of curry powder, and made better scrambled eggs than I could have gotten around the corner. I made coffee, too, and there was nothing wrong with that, either.

Washing up, I caught myself whistling, and was amused to realize the melody was that of “Put on a Happy Face.” I checked the mirror, and damned if I hadn’t followed the song’s advice. If my face looked any happier I could get a job as a village idiot.

I felt, I realized, uncommonly good—rested, of course, but also energized and optimistic. I was in high gear, and I felt as though nothing could stop me.

Of course I hadn’t left the house yet.