The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,11

ought to be able to do something about it. For a while you could spot the empty houses by the lights that stayed on all night, blazing away at four in the morning to announce their owners’ absence, but nowadays everybody has lights on timers, winking on and off in realistic fashion.

It’s all part of the eternal game, a domestic version of the arms race. They keep coming up with better locks and more sophisticated alarm systems, and reprobates like me keep finding ways to get past the locks and around the alarm systems. The same technology that reinforces a door provides me with a new way to get through it.

Were the Mapeses home? There were ways to find out no matter how clever they were with their lights. I could call them on the phone and see if they answered. Voice mail and answering machines muddy the waters some, and when a machine picks up there’s no guarantee there’s nobody home. The next step is to ring the doorbell. Even if they don’t come to the door—and why should they, if it’s the middle of the night?—you almost always get some indication of occupancy. They switch on a light, they walk around, they make noise, and the painstaking burglar slinks away, and lives to steal another day.

And, finally, there’s something else, an instinct you tend to develop, a sense you get just standing outside of a door as to whether or not there’s someone with a pulse on the other side of it. It’s not infallible, that instinct, and it’s subject to influence by such forces as impatience and wishful thinking, but it’s there, and you get to a point where you learn to rely on it.

And what did it tell me?

It told me I was standing in front of an empty house. There was no evidence pointing me toward this conclusion, no logical argument against their presence. It was just a feeling I had.

But what difference could it possibly make? I wasn’t here to break and enter. There would be plenty of time for that on Friday, when I wouldn’t need my intuition to let me know the place was empty because Don Giovanni would guarantee it. And I’d have a helper along, and a car to carry me and my helper and our well-gotten gains quickly and safely away. All I had to do now was figure out how, come Friday, I was going to get inside of the goddam place.

The first thing I did was check the windows. I’d already spotted the metallic tape on the first-floor windows (which a burglar from Britain or the Continent would call the ground-floor windows, due to a cultural predisposition to begin counting at the top of a flight of stairs rather than at the bottom). Sometimes, though, a homeowner will save time and money by wiring the more accessible windows into the alarm system but leaving out those he figures are too remote for a burglar to get to. After all, does he really want to have to close every window in the house before he sets the alarm? He might want to leave the odd upstairs window open for ventilation. Simpler, isn’t it, to leave the upper windows untaped? And just as safe, too, right?

Simpler, perhaps; safe, perhaps not. If a window a flight up would provide Kilgore-free access, how hard would it be to bring along a telescoping aluminum ladder long enough to get me up and in? And, if that turned out to be the sesame that would open the Mapes house, I could pop into the garage tonight and see if they might not have a ladder I could borrow. I’d put it back when I was finished, and in the same condition I found it.

I took a good look, and knew I didn’t have to break into the garage because a ladder wouldn’t do me any good. The windows on the second floor had metallic tape on them. (There was a chance, slim but real, that the tape on the upstairs windows was just for show, just as there’s a chance that a 100-to-1 shot will sweep the Triple Crown. It’s possible, sure, but you wouldn’t want to bet the rent money on it.)

How about the basement windows? They’re small, and their panes get broken and aren’t always replaced right away, and basements are dirty and cluttered and yucky, home to spiders and centipedes and things that go slither in the night, and you