The Burglar in the Closet - By Lawrence Block Page 0,70

but instead I put my wineglass on the coffee table and got to my feet. “Getting late,” I said. “I’m tired, believe it or not. Had a busy day, all that running around and everything. And you want to freshen up so you’ll be at your best when Mr. Thirsty drops in. Me, I want to get on home and hang a couple of new locks on my door and take a shower.”

“Bernie, we could still, uh, see each other. Couldn’t we?”

“No,” I said. “No, I don’t think we could, Jillian.”

“Bernie, am I making a big mistake?”

I gave the question some real thought, and the answer I supplied was the honest one. “No,” I said. “You’re not.”

In the cab heading through the park I had a moment or two where I felt like Sidney Carton. A far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done. And all that crap about how noble it is to lay down one’s life for a friend.

Except crap was what it was, all right. Because the World’s Greatest Dentist wasn’t all that much of a friend, and what was I giving up anyway? She was cute and cuddly and she made good coffee, but lots of women are cute and cuddly and into more interesting things than the polishing of teeth. And I’ve never met one yet who makes better coffee than I make for myself, with my filter pot and my custom-blended mixture of Colombian and Guatemalan beans.

The closest I came to Sidney Carton was that I was showing a little quiet class, which is about what Carson Verrill did when he died neatly instead of doing something gross like taking a header out the window. Because I could have complicated that young woman’s life no end.

I could have told her, for example, who the ardent lover was who’d been with Crystal while I was cooped up in her closet. I could have said it was none other than Craig himself, and the What’s-Her-Name he’d said he had to hurry back to was none other than Jillian herself, and I hadn’t recognized his voice because the closet muffled it. I don’t know if that’s true or not. It would explain some of Craig’s confused behavior, and I really tried not to hear the voice and might not have recognized it if it was Craig. But I never pursued the question, not then and not later on. To this day I don’t know if it was him.

If I’d advanced the theory, though, it certainly could have screwed things up between the two of them.

But why play dog in the manger?

Or I could have told her that burglary wasn’t quite the dead-end profession it might appear to be, and that this case, for all the mess it had been, was by no means leaving me destitute. I might have alluded to the quarter of a million dollars’ worth of queer twenties which, but for a couple thousand planted in Verrill’s desk, still reposed in a locker at Port Authority. They hadn’t gone anywhere with Knobby, of course, all that double-talk notwithstanding. Knobby’d gotten his ass out of town the minute he saw they were gone, because he knew some mob heavies were going to expect him to turn up with either fifty grand in cash or five times that amount in counterfeit, and since he couldn’t do either New York was a lousy place to be.

So I’d find somebody who knew somebody, and if I couldn’t get twenty or thirty grand as my end of the transaction, well, I’d be surprised. Of course I could always decide to do it Grabow’s way and pass the bills myself one at a time, but for that occupation you don’t need the guts of a burglar. You have to have the gall of a con man and the patience of a saint, and that’s a hell of a combination.

For that matter, I could have told her Crystal’s jewels still existed somewhere, that Verrill couldn’t have sold them yet and certainly hadn’t stashed them where the police would trip over them. When things cooled down a little I might have a go at turning them up. So there might not be a future in burglary, and God knows there’s no pension plan and no retirement benefits, but if there’s no future there’s a pretty good present with it, and I was coming out with fair compensation for what had been admittedly a pretty rough couple of days.

So