The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,61

I worked out what zone the side door was in, bypassed it, and let myself out of the house.

Like most homemakers, Mrs. Mapes kept extra grocery bags in a kitchen cupboard. I’d helped myself to four, because what I was taking was heavy enough to warrant double-bagging. I tucked each of two shopping bags into each of two others, filled them up with what I’d found in the safe in the master bedroom, added one other item I could hardly leave behind, and carried everything out of the house and up the length of the driveway to the garage, where Carolyn let out a breath she must have been holding for the greater portion of the time I’d been inside.

“I was beginning to worry,” she said. “You were in there for almost an hour.”

“It was forty minutes,” I said.

“That’s almost an hour. Here, let me get the door for you. You want me to push the button for the garage door?”

“After I get these in the car.” There was a release button for the trunk lid, especially convenient if you don’t have a key. I pressed it, put the bags in the trunk, and got behind the wheel. Carolyn pressed the button, and by the time the garage door was up she was in her seat next to me. I started the car and backed all the way out of the garage, leaving the motor running while I pressed the button a final time to lower the garage door. I was still wearing my gloves, and I used my gloved hands to wipe off surfaces she might have touched.

She noticed this, and told me she was pretty sure she hadn’t touched anything. “Well, just in case,” I said, and went back to the side door, using my picks to relock it. Carolyn had closed the milk chute door earlier, after I’d cleared it, and I opened it long enough to wipe it free of prints, then closed it and fastened the latch to leave it as I’d found it. I’d already refastened the catch on the inner door.

I got in the car again, backed the rest of the way out of the driveway. There was no traffic on Devonshire Close, which was good and bad—there were fewer passers-by to notice us, but we were correspondingly more noticeable to anybody who did. Soon, though, we were on another street—Ploughman’s Bush, it must have been—and before long we were on Broadway, heading south toward Manhattan.

We could have gone home the same way we’d come—the Henry Hudson, the West Side Drive—but something kept me on Broadway, moving at a sedate pace, stopping for red lights, resuming our journey when they turned green. It’s a venerable old road, Broadway, running from the foot of Manhattan clear up to Albany. I’d read an article written by a fellow who walked the length of it—not from Albany, but from the Westchester County line. He’d told about what he’d seen, and the history of it all, and I gather you could see quite a bit on a walk like that. You can probably see a fair amount driving, as far as that goes, but I wasn’t paying attention.

“Bern?”

“What?”

“Is something wrong?”

“No. Why?”

“You’re not talking.”

“Oh,” I said. “You’re right, I guess I’m not.”

“So I thought maybe something was wrong.”

“No,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

“Oh.”

“There was a whole lot of money,” I said. “I guess he got paid in cash fairly often, and the trouble with cash is you have to launder it. Either that or declare it, and then you have to pay taxes on it, and then what’s the point? But until you figure out how to launder it, without paying as much in laundry bills as you’d have had to pay in taxes, well, you can just stow it somewhere.”

“And that’s what he did?”

“He stowed it in his safe, and that’s the wrong word for it, because it wasn’t. I thought I might have to pull it out and take it home where I could work on it in private, and that would have been fine, but once I took the seascape down from the wall and went to work on it, it was about as hard to open as the milk chute.”

“And you didn’t have to crawl through it, either.”

“Aside from the cash,” I said, “he had the usual things you keep in a safe. Stock certificates, the deed to the house, a couple of insurance policies, other important papers. And some of her jewelry. She had