The Burglar on the Prowl (3 page)

“What’s her name, the woman you’re meeting?”

“If we hit it off, she’ll probably tell me sooner or later. Right now we’re on a screen name basis. She’s GurlyGurl.”

“She probably won’t show up dressed to go duck hunting.”

“I think the screen name’s partly ironic, actually. She’s not ultra-femme, but she doesn’t drive a Peterbilt semi, either.”

“Somewhere in the middle.”

“Uh-huh.”

“ ‘I’m not a lipstick lesbian, but I play one at the office.’ ”

“Something like that, Bern. She sounds pretty interesting. Even if it’s not a romance, it should make for a fun evening. So I’d have to say I’m looking forward to Friday.”

“Me too,” I said.

I
went back to the bookstore and opened up, and I can’t say my afternoon would have been any less exciting if I’d been, say, a paralegal at a law firm representing lenders in commercial real estate transactions. GurlyGurl must have earned more than I did that day, and I’ll bet she’s got medical coverage, too.

I closed up around six, brought in my bargain table from its place on the sidewalk, made sure Raffles had dried food in his food dish and fresh water in his water bowl, and that the bathroom door was ajar so he could use the toilet. I met Carolyn at the Bum Rap, and we ordered our usual scotches, hers on the rocks, mine with a splash of soda. Maxine brought them and we drank to something—crime, most likely—and worked on our drinks. Somewhere in the middle of our second round, Carolyn asked if I wanted to come over to her place for an evening in front of the television set. It was Wednesday, she pointed out, and that meant
The West Wing
and
Law & Order,
both of which would go perfectly with some take-out Chinese from Hunan Pan.

“Can’t,” I said.

“You’ve got a date?”

“The last date I can remember,” I said, “is 1066.”

“The Battle of Hastings?”

“If I’d been there,” I said, “I’d have been on Harold’s side. That’s how well dating works for me.”

“You could try the computer, you know.”

“Yeah, right.”

“And even if you don’t, Bern, you’ll meet someone. It’s just a question of time.”

“By the time I meet someone,” I said, “I’ll have forgotten what it is you’re supposed to do with them. No, I haven’t got a date tonight. I’ve got to go to work.”

“Tonight? I thought that was Friday.”

“Tonight too.”

“But you’re drinking, Bern.”

“I’m not drinking alone, though, am I?”

She frowned. “Bern, you never have a drop of alcohol before you go out burgling. It’s a firm rule of yours, and just about the only one.”

“I don’t play cards with men named Doc,” I said, “or eat at places called Mom’s.”

“Or drink before you burgle.”

“Or drink before I burgle,” I agreed. “Three sound rules, I’d have to say.”

She thought it over. “You’re working tonight, but it’s not going to involve breaking and entering.”

“I shall not break,” I said. “Neither shall I enter.”

“Are you doing an appraisal?”

My antiquarian book business sometimes has me working evenings, appraising a client’s library for insurance purposes or making an offer to a potential seller. But that wasn’t what I had on tonight’s agenda.

“It’s burglary-related,” I said, “and it demands a reasonably cool head, but not necessarily a sober one. I’m taking the subway up to Riverdale for a look at the Mapes estate.”

“A reconnaissance mission. Do you want company?” She frowned. “But I’d have to be back by nine o’clock. This is gonna sound silly, but I really don’t want to miss
The West Wing
.”

“It doesn’t sound silly. Tonight’ll be boring, anyway. All I’m going to do is look at the house and walk around the neighborhood.”
I picked up my drink, observing its pleasing color. “Friday’s when I could use company, but you’re tied up with GurlyGurl.”

“Wait a minute. I thought Marty was going with you.”

I shook my head. “He’d be willing, but there’s no way I’d want to take him along. Remember, he knows Mapes. If he’s spotted in the area, if there’s anything at all to connect him to the burglary—”

“And you were going to ask me to come with you? Why didn’t you say something?”

“Well, as soon as I found out you had a date…”

“I’d have broken it. I can still break it, I’ll just e-mail GurlyGurl and tell her something came up.”

“No, don’t do that. This’ll be your third connection through Date-a-Dyke, and everybody knows the third time is the charm. Besides, I always feel a little guilty involving you in my crimes.”

“As long as we don’t get caught,” she said, “you’ve got nothing to feel guilty about.”

“That’s not the way they teach it in Sunday school.”

“Too bad.” She frowned. “What time?”

“I really don’t want you breaking your date.”

“I got that part. What time are you gonna be doing it?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t worked that out yet. The Mapeses have tickets for the Met. There’s an eight o’clock curtain, so they’ll most likely leave the house around seven.”

“And that’s when you’ll go?”

“No, that’s a little early for me. I figure I’ll set out around nine. They’re seeing
Don Giovanni,
and that lasts close to four hours, and by the time they get home—”

“I can come,” she said.

“But your date with GurlyGurl—”

“Didn’t I tell you I’d be skipping the Bum Rap Friday? I’m meeting her in the lobby of the Algonquin at 6:15. That gives me plenty of time to run home and put on jeans and sneakers and meet you wherever you say.”

“Suppose the two of you hit it off?”

“Then I’ll probably be a lot better company on the way to Riverdale than if we hate each other. So?”

“I mean really hit it off,” I said, “and decide to have dinner together, and then decide to, uh—”

“To do all the things the fifteen-year-olds dream up in the chat rooms. Relax, Bern. It’s not gonna happen.”

“But if you both really like each other—”

“If that happens,” she said, “and I really hope it does, although God knows the odds are against it. But if it does, we’ll have a second round of drinks, and then we’ll tell each other how much we enjoyed the meeting, and we’ll shake hands, with maybe a significant little squeeze at the end of the handshake. And then we’ll meet again online and arrange a dinner date.”

“That sounds complicated.”

“It’s a lot simpler to go over to the Cubby Hole and drag some drunk home with you,” she allowed, “but most of the time it doesn’t work and you wind up going home alone, and when you do get lucky, who do you wind up with? The kind of woman who lets herself get picked up in dyke bars, that’s who.”

“Oh.”

“What I figured I would do, Bern, is have my drinks with GurlyGurl, and then pick up a barbecued chicken on the way home, and after I shared that with the cats I’d go over to the Cubby Hole and make a night of it. But I’d a whole lot rather go with you to Riverdale. Can you really use the company?”

“Well, I’ll want to drive. The subway’s fine for tonight, but when you’re carrying things that don’t belong to you, public transportation’s not the safest way to go.”

“You need me,” she said firmly. “Suppose you can’t find a parking place?”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“We’re in business,” she said. “I’m your henchperson, just like old times. And of course I won’t breathe a word of it, Bern, but GurlyGurl’s going to notice that I have an air of mystery about me.” She grinned. “So? What could it hurt?”

I
didn’t really have to go home first. I was dressed all right in what I’d worn to work that morning. They haven’t got a dress code in the subway, and I don’t suppose they’ve got one on the streets of Riverdale, but one wants to avoid calling attention to oneself, and the only thing my khakis and polo shirt might call to anyone’s attention was the relative poverty of my sartorial imagination.

It was spring—I may not have mentioned that—and, if the thermometer dropped a few degrees with nightfall, I might feel the chill in a short-sleeved shirt. Even if it didn’t, I’d had a pair of stiff scotches at the Bum Rap, and it wouldn’t hurt me to give them a little extra time to wear off. There was nothing on the agenda that required a sober head or quick reflexes, but my mission, while lawful enough all by itself, was part of a larger campaign that was as felonious as a monk. I’d had a slice of pizza on my way from the Bum Rap to the subway, and I suppose that had a sobering effect, but why not make assurance doubly sure? Why not stop home, and even make myself a cup of coffee while I was at it?

As it turned out, it didn’t cool off that much, but I couldn’t know that ahead of time, when I stopped at my apartment for my windbreaker. It was tan, a shade or two deeper than my slacks, and completed
the costume of an ordinary guy, Mr. Middle of the Road, leading a blameless and certainly law-abiding existence.

My apartment’s in a prewar building on West End and 70th. Much of my life centers in the Village—the bookstore’s there, of course, on East 11th, and Carolyn’s apartment on Arbor Court is less than a mile south and west of our two stores, in the West Village. She walks to work every day, and it’s often occurred to me that it would be nice to be able to do the same. I suppose I could as things stand, but I’d have to allocate two hours to the process, and so far it’s never seemed like a good idea.

Moving to the Village hasn’t seemed like a good idea, either, because it’s just not feasible. My apartment’s rent-stabilized, which means that it costs me around a third of what it would otherwise. If I gave it up I’d have to pay at least three or four times as much for an equivalent apartment downtown. Or, if my nighttime activities brought me a really big score, I could buy a co-op or condo downtown—and then shell out in monthly maintenance about as much as I pay now for rent.

Besides, I’m used to the place. It’s not much, a skimpy one-bedroom with a view of another apartment on the other side of the airshaft, and I’ve never taken the trouble to improve its furnishings or décor.

Well, wait a minute. That’s not entirely true. First thing I did when I moved in was build in bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. (On the rare occasions when I actually have someone over, she invariably asks if the fireplace works. No, I explain, it’s retired.) And the second change I made, a few years later, was to construct a hidden compartment at the rear of the bedroom closet. That’s where stolen goods go, until I manage to figure out how to unload them. It’s also where I keep my Get Out of Dodge kit, which consists of five to ten thousand dollars in cash and a pair of passports, one of them genuine, the other a very decent facsimile.

Plus, of course, the little collection of picks and probes and thingamajigs and whatchamacallits that come under the general heading of burglar’s tools. Unless you’re a licensed locksmith, the
mere possession of such implements is enough to earn you a stretch upstate as the guest of the governor. It’s occasionally occurred to me to pick up a locksmith’s license, just to keep from getting nailed for possession of burglar’s tools, but they’d laugh themselves silly if they saw my name on an application. Or at least I think they would; maybe the people who give out the licenses don’t check the names against a master list of convicted burglars. If not then I’d have to say the system’s flawed, and wouldn’t that be a shock?

I made a cup of coffee and drank it, and I went to the closet for my windbreaker, and somewhere around eight o’clock I went downstairs and walked over to 72nd and Broadway to catch the West Side IRT. I had my hands in the pockets of my windbreaker, and in a trouser pocket I had my burglar’s tools.

And for the life of me I couldn’t tell you why.

I suppose it must have been automatic. I was going to work, even though I knew my work would be strictly limited to reconnaissance. But a man on his way to work takes the tools of his trade along with him, and that was precisely what I did.

Halfway to the subway station, I realized what I’d done. I thought about going home and putting the tools back where they belonged, and I decided it was a fool’s errand. No one was going to put his hand in my pocket, with the possible exception of myself. I wouldn’t be doing anything illegal, so no cop would have a reason to frisk me. And it wasn’t as if I were walking along with a loaded gun on my hip. They were burglar’s tools, that’s all. They weren’t apt to go off on their own.

Riverdale’s a part of the Bronx, but don’t be ashamed of yourself if you hadn’t known that. They’re doing everything they can to keep it a secret. In the classified ads, under
Houses for Sale,
there’s a special section of listings for Riverdale after the Manhattan listings. Then come the Bronx listings, following along after them.

The subway’s elevated by the time it gets to the northern reaches of Manhattan, so you can watch through the window as the train
crosses the Harlem River and presses on through Kingsbridge and into Riverdale. If you do, you won’t spot a billboard that proclaims “RIVERDALE—PART OF THE BRONX AND DAMN PROUD OF IT!” It’d make a nice billboard, but so far no one’s been prompted to put one up.

And, when you get off at the last stop at 242nd Street and make your circuitous way south and west on Manhattan College Parkway, so named because it winds its way around the ivied campus of Manhattan College, you might be excused if you leapt to the conclusion that you were in, uh, Manhattan. Manhattan Community College is in Tribeca, and Marymount Manhattan College is on East 71st Street, and you’ll find the Manhattan School of Music on Broadway and 122nd. They’ve got Manhattan in their names, and they’re in Manhattan, but Manhattan College, curiously enough, is in Riverdale, and Riverdale is in the Bronx.

Ah, well.
The Bronx?/ No, thonx!
wrote Ogden Nash, some seventy or eighty years ago. Even then the borough got no respect, and time has not been kind to its image. Riverdale, with its fine old fieldstone houses and its very preppy Riverdale Country Day School, understandably blanches at being mentioned in the same breath as, say, Fort Apache.

I mused on all of this as I tried to find the Mapes house and found myself wishing I’d brought a map along. I have a Hagstrom atlas of the five boroughs at home, and I’d studied the map of Riverdale and plotted my route, but it would have been handy to have the map in front of me now. The atlas says it’s pocket-size, but only if you’re a kangaroo. I’d thought of tearing out the relevant page, but I’m too much of a bookman to mutilate a useful book on a whim. I have a folding map of Manhattan that I could have taken along, but what good would that do me? Riverdale, despite the likely wishes of its inhabitants, is not to be found thereon. The mapmakers know damn well it’s in the Bronx.

There were a couple of convenience stores on Broadway at the foot of the subway terminal, and one of them would probably have been happy to sell me a map of the Bronx, if I promised not to say
where I got it. But I didn’t even think of that until I’d walked far enough on the winding stretch of Manhattan College Parkway to scramble my mental compass. I was damned if I was going to go back and buy a map and start over, so I kept on going, and took a right on Delafield Avenue and a left on 246th Street, which got me under the Henry Hudson Parkway and within shouting distance of the Hudson River. I kept myself pointed toward the river and hit streets I remembered from the map, and I took a wrong turn here and there but figured it was just part of getting to know the neighborhood, and wasn’t that part of my assignment?

And then I was on Devonshire Close, a dead-end street that ran north a single block from another street with the irresistible name of Ploughman’s Bush. Riverdale is hilly, and Devonshire Close perched on the slope of a rise, with the houses on the east side of the street—Mapes’s was among them—situated at the top of the slope. They were large houses and they stood on good-sized lots, with their lawns angling down to the sidewalk. The lawns looked too steep for easy mowing, and about a third of the homeowners had finessed the problem by substituting a ground cover, ivy or pachysandra, for the usual grass. Mapes had grass, though, and his lawn looked well tended, his shrubbery neatly trimmed. Well, he was a plastic surgeon, wasn’t he, given to reshaping things to their aesthetic betterment? He might not be out there with hedge clippers himself, but he’d damn well make sure the job got done.

You couldn’t see the Hudson from where I was standing, but when I walked up the driveway to where the house began, there was just a sliver of river visible. You’d see more from the first-floor windows, and you’d have a good view from either of the two higher floors. There’s something in the human spirit that longs to look at water, and I think that may explain why so many people have fish tanks in their houses and apartments. It’s not the fish, it’s the water, and I knew that the folks on Devonshire Close didn’t need to stare at tanks full of guppies. They’d be able to see the Hudson.

I returned to the front walk, where all I could see was the baronial manse of Crandall Rountree Mapes, and for the time being that
was plenty. It was quite a house, but then so were all the others on the block. A few were of red brick, and two were of Tudor-style half-timbered stucco, but the rest were made of stone, which you’ll recall is the very same material they build castles out of. The houses on Devonshire Close weren’t castles—I didn’t spot a single moat or drawbridge, and not even a portcullis—but there was nevertheless something distinctly castleish—castlesque? castleine? Castilian?—about them. They felt substantial, which was ideal from my point of view, but they also felt impregnable, which was not.
No one’s getting in here,
roared the lion’s-head brass knocker in the center of the massive oak door.
Go home and start over,
murmured the thick stone walls.
Don’t even think about it,
growled the windows, all so neatly outlined at their borders with metallic tape.

The tape indicated the presence of a burglar alarm system, and an extra escutcheon plate just below the Rabson lock on the front door told me the system was a Kilgore. I’m familiar with the Kilgore, and even bought one to increase my familiarity, and for a change familiarity bred not contempt but grudging respect. I couldn’t bypass it, not without running an electric drill that would draw more attention than the alarm itself. I could turn it off once I was inside the house, I knew how to do that, but first I had to get in, and the Kilgore system was sitting there smugly and telling me I’d have an easier time getting into Fort Knox.

The thing is, you can get in anywhere. I’ve never had a look at Fort Knox, and can’t see why I would want to—I’m not even certain there’s any gold there, are you?—but I’m sure it would be possible to get in. It wouldn’t be easy, but you can sail a long ways from Easy before you reach the shores of Impossible.

And the Mapes house wasn’t Fort Knox. It might be tricky, but there would be a way in. There always was, and the idea was to spot it now so I’d know just what to do come Friday.

First, though, I walked back to Ploughman’s Bush and circled the block. I’d been standing in front of the Mapes house for several minutes, and I didn’t want to attract any attention. If anyone had spotted me, I’d give them a chance to watch me walk away, and while I was at it I could get a fuller picture of the overall neighborhood.

I took five or ten minutes, and when I came back the big stone house with the manicured lawn and shrubbery looked just as I had left it, with the same lights glowing in the same windows. I couldn’t tell if anyone was home or not, because just about everybody with a house leaves lights on routinely, figuring that a darkened house is an invitation to burglars. (To this burglar, a completely unlighted house suggests that the occupants are at home and asleep, though admittedly that doesn’t hold until the late hours.)

Apartment dwellers are more apt to darken the place when they go out, figuring reasonably enough that anyone wishing to kick the door in would do so without being able to tell whether the lights were on or off on the other side of it. The occasional break-in was just a chance you had to take, whereas a high Con Ed bill was a certainty, month in and month out.

But people in houses feel more vulnerable, and also feel they 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.