CHAPTER
Two
The first cop through the door was a stranger, and a very young and fresh-faced one at that. But I recognized his partner, a grizzled, gray chap with jowls and a paunch and a long sharp nose. His name was Ray Kirschmann and he’d been with the NYPD since the days when they carried muskets. He’d collared me a few years earlier and had proved to be a reasonable man at the time.
“Son of a gun,” he said, lowering his own gun and putting a calming hand upon the gun of his young associate. “If it ain’t Mrs. Rhodenbarr’s son, Bernard. Put the heat away, Loren. Bernie here is a perfect gentleman.”
Loren bolstered his gun and let out a few cubic feet of air. Burglars are not the only poor souls who tend to tense up when entering doors other than their own. And trust Ray to make sure his young partner cleared the threshold ahead of him.
I said, “Hi, Ray.”
“Nice to see ya, Bernie. Say hello to my new partner, Loren Kramer. Loren, this here is Bernie Rhodenbarr.”
We exchanged hellos and I extended a hand for a shake. This confused Loren, who looked at my hand and then began rumbling with the pair of handcuffs hanging from his gunbelt.
Ray laughed. “For Chrissake,” he said. “Nobody ever puts cuffs on Bernie. This ain’t one of your mad dog punks, Loren. This is a professional burglar you got here.”
“Oh.”
“Close the door, Loren.”
Loren closed the door—he didn’t bother to turn the bolt—and I did a little more relaxing myself. We had thus far attracted no attention. No neighbors milled in the hallways. And so I had every intention of spending what remained of the night beneath my own good roof.
Politely I said, “I wasn’t expecting you, Ray. Do you come here often?”
“You son of a gun, you.” He grinned. “Gettin’ sloppy in your old age, you know that? We’re in the car and we catch a squeal, woman hears suspicious noises. And you was always quiet as a mouse. How old are you, Bernie?”
“Be thirty-five in April. Why?”
“Taurus?” This from Loren.
“The end of May. Gemini.”
“My wife’s a Taurus,” Loren said. He had liberated his nightstick from its clip and was slapping it rhythmically against his palm.
“Why?” I asked again, and there was a moment of confusion with Loren trying to explain that his wife was a Taurus because of when she was born, and me explaining that what I wanted to know was why Ray had asked me my age, and Ray looking sorry he’d brought the whole thing up in the first place. There was something about Loren that seemed to generate confusion.
“Just age making you sloppy,” Ray explained. “Making noises, drawing attention. It’s not like you.”
“I never made a sound.”
“Until tonight.”
“I’m talking about tonight. Anyway, I just got here.”
“When?”
“I don’t know, a few minutes ago. Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes at the outside. Ray? You sure you got the right apartment?”
“We got the one’s got a burglar in it, don’t we?”
“There’s that,” I admitted. “But did they specify this apartment? Three-eleven?”
“Not the number, but they said the right front apartment on the third floor. That’s this one.”
“A lot of people mix up left and right.”
He looked at me, and Loren slapped the nightstick against his palm and managed to drop it. There was a leather thong attaching it to his belt but the thong was long enough so that the nightstick hit the floor. It bounced on the Chinese rug and Loren retrieved it while Ray glowered at him.
“That’s more noise than I made all night,” I said.
“Look, Bernie—”
“Maybe they meant the apartment above this one. Maybe the woman was English. They figure floors differently over there. They call the first floor the ground floor, see, so what they call the third floor would be the floor three flights up, which you and I would call the fourth floor, and—”
“Jesus.”
I looked at Loren, then back at Ray again.
“What are you, crazy? You want me to read you your rights and all so you’ll remember you’re a criminal caught in the act? What the hell’s got into you, Bernie?”
“It’s just that I just got here. And I never made a sound.”
“So maybe a cat knocked a plant off a shelf in the apartment next door and we just got lucky and came here by mistake. It’s still you and us, right?”
“Right.” I smiled what certainly ought to have been a rueful smile. “You got lucky, all right. I’m nice and fat tonight.”
“That so?”
“Very fat.”
“Interesting,” Ray said.
“You got the key from the doorman?”
“Uh-huh. He wanted to come up and let us in but we told him he ought to stay at his post.”
“So nobody actually knows I’m here but you two.”
The two of them looked at each other. They were a nice contrast, Ray in his lived-in uniform, Loren all young and neat and freshly laundered. “That’s true,” Ray said. “Far as it goes.”
“Oh?”
“This’d be a very good collar for us. Me’n Loren, we could use a good collar. Might get a commendation out of it.”
“Oh, come on,” I said.
“Always possible.”
“The hell it is. You didn’t nail me on your own initiative. You followed up a radio squawk. Nobody’s going to pin a medal on you.”
“Well, you got a point there,” Ray said. “What do you think, Loren?”
“Well,” Loren said, slapping the stick against his palm and nibbling thoughtfully on his lower lip. The stick was beat up and scratched in contrast to the rest of his outfit. I had the feeling he dropped it often, and on surfaces more abrasive than Chinese carpets.
“How fat are you, Bernie?”
I didn’t see any point in haggling. I generally carry an even thousand dollars in walkaway money, and that was what I had now. Coincidentally enough, the ten hundreds in my left hip pocket were the very ones I’d taken as an advance on the night’s work, so if I gave it all to my coppish friends I’d break even, with nothing lost but my cab fare and a couple of hours of my time. My shifty-eyed friend would be out a thousand dollars but that was his hard luck and he would just have to write it off.
“A thousand dollars,” I said.
I watched Ray Kirschmann’s face. He considered trying for more but must have decided I’d gone straight to the top. And there was no dodging the fact that it was a satisfactory score since it only had to be cut two ways.
“That’s fat,” he admitted. “On your person right now?”
I took out the money and handed it to him. He fanned the bills and gave them a count with his eyes, trying not to be too obvious about it.
“You pick up anything in here, Bernie? Because if we was to report there was nobody here and then the tenant calls in a burglary complaint, we don’t look too good.”
I shrugged. “You could always claim I left before you got here,” I told him, “but you won’t have to. I couldn’t find anything worth stealing, Ray. I just got here and all I touched is the desk.”
“We could frisk him,” Loren suggested. Ray and I both gave him a look and he turned a deeper pink than his usual shade. “It was just a thought,” he said.
I asked him what sign he was.
“Virgo,” he said.
“Should go well with Taurus.”
“Both earth signs,” he said. “Lots of stability.”
“I would think so.”
“You interested in astrology?”
“Not particularly.”
“I think there’s a lot to be said for it. Ray’s a Sagittarius.”
“Jesus Christ,” Ray said. He looked at the bills again, gave a small shrug, then folded them once and found them a home in his pocket. Loren watched this procedure somewhat wistfully. He knew he’d get his share later, but still…
Ray gnawed a fingernail. “How’d you get in, Bernie? Fire escape?”
“Front door.”
“Right past the clown downstairs? They’re terrific, these doormen.”
“Well, it’s a large building.”
“Not that large. Still, you do look the part. That clean-cut East Side look and those clothes” I live on the West Side myself, and usually wear jeans. “And I suppose you carried a briefcase, right?”
“Not exactly.” I pointed to my Bloomie’s bag. “That.”
“Even better. Well, I guess you can pick it up and walk right out again. Wait a minute.” He frowned. “We’ll leave first. I like it better that way. Otherwise, why are we taking so much time here, et cetera, and et cetera. But don’t get light-fingered after we split, huh?”
“There’s nothing here to take,” I said.
“I want your word on it, Bernie.”
I avoided laughing. “You’ve got it,” I said solemnly.
“Give us three minutes and then go straight out. But don’t hang around no more’n that, Bernie.”
“I won’t.”
“Well,” he said. He turned and reached for the door, and then Loren Kramer said he had to go to the bathroom. “Jesus Christ,” Ray said.
Loren said, “Bernie? Where is it, do you know?”
“Search me,” I said. “Not literally.”
“Huh?”
“I never got past this desk,” I said. “I suppose the john must be back there somewhere.”
Loren went looking for it while Ray stood there shaking his head. I asked him how long Loren had been his partner. “Too long,” he said.
“I know what you mean.”
“He ain’t a bad kid, Bernie.”
“Seems nice enough.”
“But he’s so damn stupid. And the astrology drives me straight up the wall. You figure there’s anything in that crap?”
“Probably.”
“But even so, who gives a shit, right? Who cares if his wife’s a Taurus? She’s a good-looking bitch, I’ll give her that much. But Loren, shit, he was ready to search you. Just now when you said ‘Search me.’ The putz woulda done it.”
“I had that feeling.”
“The one good thing, he’s reasonable. They gave me this straight arrow a while back and you couldn’t do nothing with him. I mean he even paid for his coffee. At least Loren, when somebody puts money in his hand he knows to close his fist around it.”
“Thank God for that.”
“That’s what I say. If anything, he likes the bread too much, but I guess his wife is good at spending it fast as he brings it home. You figure it’s on account of she’s a Taurus?”
“You’d have to ask Loren.”
“He might tell me. But you can put up with a lot of stupidity in exchange for a little reasonableness, I have to say that for him. Just so he don’t kill hisself with that nightstick of his, bouncing it off his knee or something. Bernie? Take the gloves off.”
“Huh?”
“The rubber gloves. You don’t want to wear those on the street.”
“Oh,” I said, and stripped them off. Somewhere in the inner recesses of the apartment Loren coughed and bumped into something. I stuffed my gloves into my pocket. “All the tools of the trade,” Ray said. “Jesus, I’d always rather deal with pros, guys like you. Like even if we had to bag you tonight. Say I had the doorman backing my play and there was no way to cool it off. No money in it that way but at least I’m dealing with a professional.”
Somewhere a toilet flushed. I resisted an impulse to look at my watch.
“You feel comfortable about it,” he went on. “Know what I mean? Like tonight, coming through that door. I didn’t know what we was gonna find on the other side of it.”
“I know the feeling,” I assured him, and started to reach for my shopping bag. I caught a glimpse of Ray’s face that made me turn to see what he was staring at, and what he was staring at was Loren at the far end of the room with a mouth as wide as the Holland Tunnel and a face as white as a surgical mask.
“In…” he said. “In…In…In the bedroom!” And then, all in a rush: “Coming back from the toilet and I turned the wrong way and there’s the bedroom and this guy, he’s dead, this dead guy, head beaten in and there’s blood all over the place, warm blood, the guy’s still warm, you never saw anything like it, Jesus, I knew it, you can never trust a Gemini, I knew it, they lie all the time, oh God—”
And he flopped on the rug. The one that may very well have been a Bokhara.
And Ray and I looked at each other.
Talk about professionalism. We both went promptly insane. He just stood there with his face looming, not going for his gun, not reaching for me, not even moving, just standing flatfooted like the flatfoot he indisputably was. And I, on the other hand, began behaving wholly out of character, in a manner neither of us ever expected I might be capable of.
I sprang at him. He went on gaping at me, too astonished even to react, and I barreled into him and sent him sprawling and bolted without waiting to see where he landed. I shot out the door and found the stairs right where I’d left them, and I raced down two flights and dashed through the lobby at the very pace the word breakneck was coined to describe.
The doorman, obliging as ever, held the door for me. “I’ll take care of you at Christmas!” I sang out. And scurried off without even waiting for a reply.