The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling, Page 2

  “How nice for the minks. It must be like going to the dentist.”

  “Far as the color, I’d say she’s not gonna be too fussy. Just so it’s one of your up-to-date colors. Your platinum, your champagne. Not the old dark-brown shades.”

  I nodded, conjuring up an image of Mrs. Kirschmann draped in fur. I didn’t know what she looked like, so I allowed myself to picture a sort of stout Edith Bunker.

  “Oh,” I said suddenly. “There’s a reason you’re telling me this.”

  “Well, I was thinkin’, Bern.”

  “I’m out of the business, Ray.”

  “What I was thinkin’, you might run into a coat in the course of things, know what I mean? I was thinkin’ that you and me, we go back a ways, we been through a lot, the two of us, and—”

  “I’m not a burglar anymore, Ray.”

  “I wasn’t countin’ on a freebie, Bernie. Just a bargain.”

  “I don’t steal anymore, Ray.”

  “I hear you talkin’, Bern.”

  “I’m not as young as I used to be. Nobody ever is but these days I’m starting to feel it. When you’re young nothing scares you. When you get older everything does. I don’t ever want to go inside again, Ray. I don’t like prisons.”

  “These days they’re country clubs.”

  “Then they changed a whole hell of a lot in the past few years, because I swear I never cared for them myself. You meet a better class of people on the D train.”

  “Guy like you, you could get a nice job in the prison library.”

  “They still lock you in at night.”

  “So you’re straight, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I been here how long? All that time you haven’t had a single person walk in the store.”

  “Maybe the uniform keeps ’em away, Ray.”

  “Maybe business ain’t what it might be. You been in the business how long, Bern? Six months?”

  “Closer to seven.”

  “Bet you don’t even make the rent.”

  “I do all right.” I marked my place in Soldiers Three, closed the book, put it on the shelf behind the counter. “I made a forty-dollar profit from one customer earlier this afternoon and I swear it was easier than stealing.”

  “Is that a fact. You’re a guy made twenty grand in an hour and a half when things fell right.”

  “And went to jail when they didn’t.”

  “Forty bucks. I can see where that’d really have you turning handsprings.”

  “There’s a difference between honest money and the other kind.”

  “Yeah, and the difference comes to somethin’ like $19,960. This here, Bern, this is nickels and dimes. Let’s be honest. You can’t live on this.”

  “I never stole that much, Ray. I never lived that high. I got a small apartment on the Upper West Side, I stay out of night clubs, I do my own wash in the machines in the basement. The store’s steady. You want to give me a hand with this?”

  He helped me drag the bargain table in from the sidewalk. He said, “Look at this. A cop and a burglar both doin’ physical work. Somebody should take a picture. What do you get for these? Forty cents, three for a buck? And that’s keepin’ you in shirts and socks, huh?”

  “I’m a careful shopper.”

  “Look, Bern, if there’s some reason you don’t wanna help me out on this coat thing—”

  “Cops,” I said.

  “What about cops?”

  “A guy rehabilitates himself and you refuse to believe it. You talk yourselves hoarse telling me to go straight—”

  “When the hell did I ever tell you to go straight? You’re a first-class burglar. Why would I tell you to change?”

  He let go of it while I filled a shopping bag with hardcover mysteries and began shutting down for the night. He told me about his partner, a clean-cut and soft-spoken young fellow with a fondness for horses and a wee amphetamine habit.

  “All he does is lose and bitch about it,” Ray complained, “until this past week when he starts pickin’ the ponies with x-ray vision. Now all he does is win, and I swear I liked him better when he was losin’.”

  “His luck can’t last forever, Ray.”

  “That’s what I been tellin’ myself. What’s that, steel gates across the windows? You don’t take chances, do you?”

  I drew the gates shut, locked them. “Well, they were already here,” I said stiffly. “Seems silly not to use them.”

  “No sense makin’ it easy for another burglar, huh? No honor among thieves, isn’t that what they say? What happens if you forget the key, huh, Bern?”

  He didn’t get an answer, nor do I suppose he expected one. He chuckled instead and laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. “I guess you’d just call a locksmith,” he said. “You couldn’t pick the lock, not bein’ a burglar anymore. All you are is a guy who sells books.”

  Barnegat Books is on East Eleventh Street between Broadway and University Place. When I’d finished locking up I carried my shopping bag two doors east to a dog-grooming salon called the Poodle Factory. Carolyn Kaiser had a skittish Yorkie up on the grooming table and was buffing its little nails. She said, “Hey, is it that time already? Just let me finish with Prince Philip here and I’ll be ready to go. If I don’t get a drink in me soon I’ll start yipping like a chihuahua.”

  I got comfortable on the pillow sofa while Carolyn put the final touches on the terrier’s pedicure and popped him back in his cage. During the course of this she complained at length about her lover’s misbehavior. Randy had come home late the previous night, drunk and disheveled and marginally disorderly, and Carolyn was sick of it.

  “I think it’s time to end the relationship,” she told me, “but the question is how do I feel about ending the relationship? And the answer is I don’t know how I feel because I can’t get in touch with my feelings, and I figure if I can’t get in touch with them I might as well not feel them altogether, so let’s go someplace with a liquor license, because all I want to feel right now is better. And how was your day, Bernie?”

  “A little long.”

  “Yeah, you do look faintly tuckered. Let’s go, huh? I’m so sick of the smell of this place. I feel like I’m wearing Wet Dog perfume.”

  We ducked around the corner to a rather tired saloon called the Bum Rap. The jukebox leaned toward country and western, and Barbara Mandrell was singing about adultery as we took stools at the long dark bar. Carolyn ordered a vodka martini on the rocks. I asked for club soda with lime and got a nod from the bartender and a puzzled stare from Carolyn.

  “It’s October,” she said.

  “So?”

  “Lent’s in the spring.”

  “Right.”

  “Doctor’s orders or something? Giving the old liver a rest?”

  “Just don’t feel like a drink tonight.”

  “Fair enough. Well, here’s to crime. Hey, did I just say something wrong?”

  So that got me onto the subject of Ray Kirschmann and his mink-loving wife, and it became Carolyn’s turn to make sympathetic noises. We’ve become good at playing that role for one another. She’s crowding thirty, with Dutch-cut dark-brown hair and remarkably clear blue eyes. She stands five-one in high heels and never wears them, and she’s built like a fire hydrant, which is dangerous in her line of work.

  I met her around the time I took over the bookshop. I didn’t know Randy as well because I didn’t see as much of her; the Poodle Factory was a solo venture of Carolyn’s. Randy’s a stewardess, or was until she got grounded for biting a passenger. She’s taller and thinner than Carolyn, and a year or two younger, and faintly flighty. Randy and I are friends, I suppose, but Carolyn and I are soulmates.

  My soulmate clucked sympathetically. “Cops are a pain,” she said. “Randy had an affair with a cop once. I ever tell you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “She had this phase she went through, three months or so of panic before she was ready to come out as a lesbian
. I think it was some kind of denial mechanism. She slept with dozens of men. This one cop was impotent and she made fun of him and he held his gun to her head and she thought he was going to kill her. Which somebody ought to, and why the hell am I talking about her again, will you tell me that?”

  “Beats me.”

  “You got anything on tonight? You still seeing the woman from the art gallery?”

  “We decided to go our separate ways.”

  “What about the crazy poet?”

  “We never really hit it off.”

  “Then why don’t you come by for dinner? I got something sensational working in the slow cooker. I put it in this morning before I remembered how mad I was. It’s this Flemish beef stew with beer and shallots and mushrooms and all kinds of good things. I got plenty of Amstel for us to wash it down with, plus some Perrier if you’re serious about this temperance bit.”

  I sipped my club soda. “I wish I could,” I said. “But not tonight.”

  “Something on?”

  “Just that I’m beat. I’m going straight home, and the most active thing I intend to do is say a quick prayer to St. John of God.”

  “Is he somebody I should know about?”

  “He’s the patron saint of booksellers.”

  “Yeah? Who’s the patron saint of dog groomers?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “I hope we’ve got one. I’ve been bitten and scratched and peed on and I ought to have someplace to turn. As far as that goes, I wonder if there’s a patron saint of lesbians. All those cloistered nuns, there damn well ought to be. Seriously, do you suppose there is?”

  I shrugged. “I could probably find out. I only know about St. John of God because Mr. Litzauer had a framed picture of him in the back room of the shop. But there must be books with lists of the patron saints. I’ve probably got something in the store, as far as that goes.”

  “It must be great, having that shop. Like living in a library.”

  “Sort of.”

  “The Poodle Factory’s like living in a kennel. You going? Hey, have a nice night, Bern.”

  “Thanks. And I’ll check out St. Sappho tomorrow.”

  “If you get a chance. Hey, is there a patron saint of burglars?”

  “I’ll check that, too.”

  I rode three different subway trains to Broadway and Eighty-sixth and walked a block to Murder Ink, where I sold my shopping bag full of books to Carol Bremer. She got all my vintage mysteries; I could do better wholesaling them to her than waiting for somebody to pick them off my shelves.

  She said, “Charlie Chan, Philo Vance—this is wonderful, Bernie. I’ve got want-list customers for all this stuff. Buy you a drink?”

  For a change everybody wanted to buy me a drink. I told her I’d take a rain check, left her shop just in time to miss a bus on West End Avenue, and walked the sixteen blocks downtown to my apartment. It was a nice crisp fall afternoon and I figured I could use the walk. You don’t get all that much fresh air and exercise in a bookstore.

  There was mail in my box. I carried it upstairs and put it in the wastebasket. I was half-undressed when the phone rang. It was a woman I know who runs a day-care center in Chelsea, and the parent of one of her charges had just given her two tickets to the ballet, and wasn’t that terrific? I agreed that it was but explained I couldn’t make it. “I’m bushed,” I said. “I’ve ordered myself to go to bed without supper. I was just about to take the phone off the hook when it rang.”

  “Well, drink some coffee instead. What’s-his-name’s dancing. You know, the Russian.”

  “They’re all Russians. I’d fall asleep in the middle. Sorry.”

  She wished me pleasant dreams and broke the connection. I left the phone off the hook. I’d have enjoyed eating Carolyn’s beef stew and I’d also have enjoyed watching the Russian hop around the stage, and I didn’t want the phone to let me know what else I was missing. It made an eerie sound for a while, then fell into a sullen silence. I finished undressing and turned off the lights and got into bed, and I lay there on my back with my arms at my sides and my eyes closed, breathing slowly and rhythmically and letting my mind go here and there. I either dreamed or daydreamed, and I was in some sort of doze when the alarm went off at nine o’clock. I got up, took a quick shower and shave, put on some clean clothes, and made myself a nice cup of tea. At a quarter after nine I put the phone back on the hook. At precisely nine-twenty it rang.

  I picked it up and said hello. My caller said, “There’s been no change.”

  “Good.”

  “Things are as planned at your end?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” he said, and rang off. No names, no pack drill. I looked at the telephone receiver for a moment, then hung it up, then thought better of it and took it off the hook once again. It whined for a while, but by the time I was done with my tea it was quiet.

  I finished dressing. I was wearing a three-piece navy pinstripe suit, a Wedgwood-blue shirt, a tie with narrow green and gold diagonal stripes on a navy field. My shoes combined black calfskin moccasin-toe uppers and thick crepe soles. Wearing them, I made no sound as I scurried around the apartment, gathering up one thing and another, making my final preparations.

  While my shoes were silent, my stomach was rumbling a bit. I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch some nine hours earlier. But I didn’t want to eat, and I knew better than to drink anything.

  Not now.

  I checked, made sure I had everything. I went out into the hall, double-locked my own door, then rode the elevator past the lobby to the basement, letting myself out via the service entrance to avoid passing my doorman.

  The air had an edge to it. It wasn’t cold enough for mink, but it was certainly topcoat weather. I had mine over my arm, and I took a moment to put it on.

  Was there a patron saint of burglars? If so, I didn’t know his name. I murmured a quick prayer, addressed it to whom it might concern, and set off to resume my life of crime.

  CHAPTER

  Three

  Halfway across the Queensboro Bridge, I happened to glance at the fuel gauge. The needle was all the way over to the left, way past the big E, and I had what suddenly looked like a mile of bridge stretching out in front of me. I could see myself running out of gas smack in the middle of the East River. Horns would blare all around me, and when horns blare, can cops be far behind? They’d be understanding at first, because motorists do get stranded all the time, but their sympathy would fade when they learned I was driving a stolen car. And why, they might wonder, had I stolen a car without checking the gas?

  I was wondering much the same thing myself. I stayed in lane and let my foot rest easy on the accelerator, trying to remember what the ecology commercials were always telling me about ways to conserve gasoline. No fast starts, no jamming on the brakes, and don’t spend too much time warming up on cold mornings. Sound advice, all of it, but I couldn’t see how it applied, and I clutched the steering wheel and waited for the engine to cut out and the world to cave in.

  Neither of these things happened. I found a Chevron station a block from the bridge and told the attendant to fill the tank. The car was a sprawling old Pontiac with an engine that never heard about fuel crises, and I sat there and watched it drink twenty-two gallons of high-test. I wondered what the tank’s capacity might be. Twenty gallons, I decided, figuring the pumps were crooked. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there.

  The tab came to fifteen dollars and change. I gave the kid a twenty and he gave me a smile in return and pointed to a sign on a pillar between the two pumps. You had to have exact change or a credit card after 8 P.M. Help us thwart crime, the sign urged. I don’t know that they were thwarting anything, but they were certainly taking the profit out of it.

  I have a couple of credit cards. I’ve even opened doors with them, although it’s not the cinch TV shows might lead you to believe. But I didn’t want a record of my presence in Queens, nor did I want anyone copying down the Pontiac’s
license number. So I let the little snot keep the change, which got me a mean grin, and I drove east on Queens Boulevard mumbling to myself.

  It wasn’t the money. What really troubled me was that I’d been driving around unwittingly with an empty tank. The thing is, I don’t steal cars very often. I don’t even drive them all that frequently, and when I do go and rent one for a weekend in the country, the Olins people give it to me with the tank full. I can be halfway to Vermont before I even have to think about gasoline.

  I wasn’t going to Vermont tonight, just to Forest Hills, and I could have gone there easily enough on the E train. That’s how I’d made the trip a few days earlier when I did some basic reconnaissance. But I hadn’t felt like coming home by subway, preferring as I do to avoid public transportation when my arms are full of somebody else’s belongings.

  And when I found the Pontiac on Seventy-fourth Street, I’d figured it for a sign from on high. GM cars are the easiest for me to get into and the simplest to start, and this one had Jersey plates, so no one would be surprised if I drove it eccentrically. Finally, the owner was unlikely to report it stolen. He’d parked it next to a fire hydrant, so he’d have to assume the cops had towed it away.

  Jesse Arkwright lived in Forest Hills Gardens. Now Forest Hills itself is a nice solid middle-class neighborhood set south of Flushing Meadows in the very center of the Borough of Queens. Three out of four houses there contain at least one woman who plays mah-jongg when she’s not at a Weight Watchers meeting. But Forest Hills Gardens is an enclave within an enclave, a little pocket of haute bourgeoise respectability. Every house is three stories tall, with gables and a tile roof. All of the lawns are manicured, all of the shrubbery under tight discipline. A neighborhood association owns the very streets themselves, keeping them in good repair and restricting on-street parking to neighborhood residents.

  Cars from underprivileged neighborhoods make frequent forays into the quiet streets of Forest Hills Gardens, their occupants darting out to knock down matrons and make off with alligator handbags. And private police cruisers patrol those same streets twenty-four hours a day to keep that sort of thing to a minimum. It’s not Beverly Hills, say, where every pedestrian is perforce a suspicious character, but the security’s pretty tight.