tank and nothing but flour in the flour canister and nothing but air in the hollow towel bars I unbolted from the bathroom wall. I pulled out drawers to see what was taped to their backs or bottoms. I went through the closets and checked suit pockets, thrust my hands inside shoes and boots, looked under rugs.
I could go step by step and fill a dozen pages with an explanation of the search I gave those rooms, but what’s the point? Three things I didn’t find were the philosopher’s stone, the Holy Grail, and the golden fleece. A fourth was the Colcannon V-Nickel.
I did find any number of other interesting articles. I found books in several languages ranging in value to over a thousand dollars. It was no great accomplishment finding them; they constituted Abel Crowe’s personal library and were out in the open on his shelves.
I looked behind each book, and I flipped the pages of each book, and I found nineteenth-century postage stamps from Malta and Cyprus in the pages of Hobbes’s Leviathan and five hundred pounds in British currency tucked into a copy of Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle. On a high shelf I found what were probably Sassanian coins tucked behind three leatherbound volumes of the poetry of Byron and Shelley and Keats.
There were two telephones in the bedroom, one on the bedside table, the other across the room on a dresser. That seemed excessive. I checked, and both of them were hooked up to wall plugs, but the one on the dresser didn’t seem to be in working order. So I un-screwed the base plate and discovered that the thing had been gutted, its working parts replaced with a wad of fifties and hundreds. I counted up to $20,000, which brought me close enough to the end of the stock to estimate that it totaled perhaps $23,000 in all. I put the phone back together again, with the money back inside where I’d found it.
That’s enough to give you the idea. I found no end of valuable booty, which is just what you’d expect to find in the home of a civilized and prosperous fence. I found more cash, more stamps, more coins, and a fair amount of jewelry, including the watch and earrings from the Colcannon burglary. (They were in a humidor beneath a layer of cigars. I got excited when I came upon them, thinking the nickel might be nearby, but it wasn’t. I’d never known Abel to smoke a cigar.)
In his kitchen, I helped myself to a piece of dense chocolatey layer cake. I think it was of the sort he called Schwarzwälder kuchen. Black Forest cake. Except for that and the glass of milk I drank along with it, I took nothing whatsoever from Abel Crowe’s apartment.
I thought of it. Every time I hit something really tempting I tried to talk myself into it, and I just couldn’t manage it. You’d think it would have been easy to rationalize. As far as I knew, Abel had no heirs. If an heir did turn up, he’d probably never see half the swag stashed in that apartment. The library would be sold en bloc to a book dealer, who in turn would profit handsomely enough reselling the volumes individually without ever discovering the bonuses that some of them contained. The watch and earrings would wind up the property of the first cigar smoker to wander in, while the $23,000 would stay in the telephone forever. What happens to telephones when somebody dies? Do they go back to the phone company? If they don’t work, does somebody repair them? Whoever repaired this particular one was in for the surprise of his life.
So why didn’t I help myself?
I guess I just plain found out that robbing the dead was not something I was prepared to do. Not the newly dead, anyway. Not a dead friend. All things considered, I’ll be damned if I can think of a single logical argument against robbing the dead. One would think they’d mind it a good deal less than the living. If they can’t take it with them, why should they care where it goes?
And God knows the dead do get robbed. Cops do it all the time. When a derelict dies in a Bowery flophouse, the first thing the officers on the scene do is divvy up whatever cash they find. Admittedly I’ve always set higher standards for myself than those of a policeman, but my standards weren’t