The Burglar in the Closet - By Lawrence Block Page 0,57
a routine search. As far as that goes, I found a safe-deposit key among his other stuff. It’s possible the jewels are already in the bank. He could have gone Friday before the banks closed and stashed them in his safe-deposit box. Or he might even have fenced them. That’s not inconceivable. As a counterfeiter, the odds are he knows somebody who knows somebody who fences stolen gems. It’s no harder to find a fence in this town than it is to place a football bet or buy a number or score drugs. But there’s really no reason to speculate about the jewels. There’s already enough evidence against Grabow to put him away for years.”
“You mean the dental tools?”
“That’s a start,” I said. “I moved things around at his place, just in case he decides to get rid of the evidence. I put some of the twenties where you’d have to search to find them. Same with a few dental instruments. If he panics and throws out the instruments, there’ll be a few he won’t find that the police would turn up easily on a search. And I hid the printing plates. That might make him panic if he goes looking for them, but the way I left things he’ll never believe a burglar set foot in the place. I even picked the lock on my way out to relock it, and that’s a service relatively few burglars perform for you. I left his loft empty-handed, you know. In fact I walked out of there with less than I brought, since I planted those fake twenties on him. If I did that all the time I’d have a problem coming up with the rent every month.”
She giggled. “My mother used to say that if burglars came to our house they’d leave something. But you’re the only one I ever heard of who actually did.”
“Well, I’m not going to make a habit of it.”
“Have you been a burglar all your life, Bernie?”
“Well, not all my life. I started out as a little kid, just like everybody else. I love the way you giggle, incidentally. It’s very becoming. I guess I’ve been a burglar since I got done being a kid.”
“I don’t think you ever did get done being a kid, Bernie.”
“I sometimes have that feeling myself, Jillian.”
And I got to talking about myself and my crazy criminous career, how I’d started out sneaking into other people’s houses for the sheer thrill of it and learned before long that the thrill was all the keener if you stole something while you were at it. I talked and she listened, and somewhere in the course of things we finished the coffee and she broke out a perfectly respectable bottle of Soave. We drank the chilled white wine out of stemmed glasses and sat side-by-side on the couch, and I went on talking and wished the couch would do its trick of converting into a bed. She was lovely, Jillian was, and she was a most attentive listener, and her hair smelled of early spring flowers.
Around the time the bottle became empty she said, “What are you going to do now, Bernie? Now that you know who the killer is.”
“Find a way to get information to the cops. I suppose I’ll run the play through Ray Kirschmann. It’s not his case but he smells money and that’ll make him bend procedures like pretzels. I don’t know how he’s going to make a dollar out of this one. If the jewels turn up they’ll be impounded as evidence. But if there’s a buck in it he’ll find it, and that’ll be his problem not mine.”
“I know he wants you to call him.”
“Uh-huh. But not now, I’m afraid. It’s the middle of the night.”
“What time is it? Oh, it really is the middle of the night. I didn’t realize it was so late.”
“I’ll have to find someplace to stay. I’m afraid my own apartment’s no good for the time being. They probably don’t have it staked out but I’m not going to risk it now, not if they’ve got a pickup order out on me. I can get a hotel room.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You figure that might be ridiculous? I suppose you’re right. Hotels don’t get that many check-ins at this hour and it might look suspicious. Well, there’s something else I could always try. Just scout an empty apartment, one where the tenants are gone for the weekend, and make myself right at home. That worked