“Don’t tell me they described him for you.”
“He has a New York agent. That’s all they would do is give me the agents’ names and numbers, and Couhig’s represented by the West Coast William Morris office and Brill has an agent named Peter Alan Martin.”
“And Martin’s here in New York?”
“Uh-huh. He has an Oregon 5 telephone number.”
“I suppose actors would tend to be on the same coast as their agents.”
“It does sound logical,” she agreed. She began dialing, listened for a few minutes, then blew a raspberry into the phone and hung up. “He’s gone for the day,” she said. “I got one of those answering machines. I hate the damn things.”
“Everyone does.”
“If my agent had a machine instead of a service I’d get a new agent.”
“I didn’t know you had an agent.”
She colored. “If I had one. If we had some ham we could have ham and eggs if we had some eggs.”
“We’ve still got some eggs. In the fridge.”
“Bernie-”
“I know.” I looked again in the phone book. No Wesley Brill, but there were a couple of Brill, W’s. The first two numbers answered and reported that there was no Wesley there. The third and last went unanswered, but it was in Harlem and it seemed unlikely that he’d live there. And telephone listings with initials are almost always women trying to avoid obscene calls.
“We can find out if he has an unlisted number,” Ruth suggested. “Information’ll tell you that.”
“An actor with an unlisted number? I suppose it’s possible. But even if we find out that he does, what good will it do us?”
“None, I suppose.”
“Then the hell with it.”
“Right.”
“We know who he is,” I said. “That’s the important thing. In the morning we can call his agent and find out where he lives. What’s really significant is that we’ve found a place to start. That’s the one thing we didn’t have before. If the police kick the door in an hour from now it’d be a slightly different story from if they’d kicked it in two hours ago. I wouldn’t be at a complete dead end, see. I’d have more than a cockeyed story about a round-shouldered fat man with brown eyes. I’d have a name to go with the description.”
“And then what would happen?”
“They’d put me in jail and throw the key away,” I said. “But nobody’s going to kick the door in. Don’t worry about a thing, Ruth.”
She went around the corner to a deli and picked up sandwiches and beer, stopped at a liquor store for a bottle of Teacher’s. I’d asked her to pick up the booze, but by the time she came back with everything I’d decided not to have any. I had one beer with dinner and nothing else.
Afterward we sat on the couch and drank coffee. She had a little Scotch in hers. I didn’t. She asked to see my burglar tools and I showed them to her, and she asked the name and function of each item.
“Burglar tools,” she said. “It’s illegal to have them in your possession, isn’t it?”
“You can go to jail for it.”
“Which ones did you use to open the locks for this apartment?” I showed her and explained the process. “I think it’s remarkable,” she said, and gave a delicious little shiver. “Who taught you how to do it?”
“Taught myself.”
“Really?”
“More or less. Oh, once I was really into it I got books on locksmithing, and then I took a mail-order course in it from an outfit in Ohio. You know, I wonder if anybody but burglars ever sign up for those courses. I knew a guy in prison who took one of those courses with a correspondence college and they sent him a different lock every month by mail with complete instructions on how to open it. He would just sit there in his cell and practice with the lock for hours on end.”
“And the prison authorities let him do this?”
“Well, the idea was that he was learning a trade. They’re supposed to encourage that sort of thing in prison. Actually the trade he was learning was burglary, of course, and it was a big step up for him from holding up filling stations, which was his original field of endeavor.”
“I guess there’s more money in burglary.”
“There often is, but the main consideration was violence. Not that he ever shot anybody but somebody took a shot at him once and he decided that stealing was a safer and saner proposition if you did it when nobody was home.”
“So he took a course and became an expert.”
I shrugged. “Let’s just say he took the course. I don’t know if he became an expert or not. There’s only so much you can teach a person, through the mails or face to face. The rest has to be inside him.”
“In the hands?”
“In the hands and in the heart.” I felt myself blushing at the phrase. “Well, it’s true. When I was twelve years old I taught myself how to open the bathroom door. You could lock it from inside by pressing this button on the doorknob and then the door could be opened from the inside but not from the outside. So that nobody would walk in on you while you were on the toilet or in the tub. The usual privacy lock. But of course you can press the button on the inside and then close the door from the outside and then you’ve locked yourself out of it.”
“So?”
“So my kid sister did something along those lines, except what she did was lock herself in and then just sit there and cry because she couldn’t turn the knob. My mother called the Fire Department and they took the lock apart and rescued her. What’s so funny?”
“Any other kid who went through that would decide to become a fireman. But you decided to become a burglar.”
“All I decided was I wanted to know how to open that lock. I tried using a screwdriver blade to get a purchase on the bolt and snick it back, but it didn’t have the flexibility. I could almost manage it with a table knife, and then I thought to use one of those plastic calendars insurance men pass out that you keep in your wallet, you know, all twelve months at a glance, and it was perfect. I figured out how to loid that lock without even having heard of the principle involved.”
“Loid?”
“As in celluloid. Any time you’ve got a lock that you can lock without a key, you know, just by drawing the door shut, then you’ve got a lock that can be loided. It may be hard or easy depending on how the door and jamb fit together, but it’s not going to be impossible.”
“It’s fascinating,” she said, and she gave that little shivery shudder again. I went on talking about my earliest experiences with locks and the special thrill I’d always found in opening them, and she seemed as eager to hear all this as I was to talk about it. I told her about the first time I let myself into a neighbor’s apartment, going in one afternoon when nobody was home, taking some cold cuts from the refrigerator and bread from the bread drawer, making a sandwich and eating it and putting everything back the way I’d found it before letting myself out.
“The big thing for you was opening locks,” she said.
“Opening locks and sneaking inside. Right.”
“The stealing came later, then.”
“Unless you count sandwiches. But it didn’t take long before I was stealing. Once you’re inside a place it’s a short step to figuring out that it might make sense to leave with more money than you brought with you. Opening doors is a kick, but part of the kick comes from the possibility of profit on the other side of the door.”
“And the danger?”
“I suppose that’s part of it.”
“Bernie? Tell me what it’s like.”
“Burglary?”
“Uh-huh.” Her face was quite intense now, especially around the eyes, and there was a thin film of perspiration on her upper lip. I put a hand on her leg. A muscle in her upper thigh twitched like a plucked string.