“Let’s go,” I said, then did a Groucho Marx thing with my eyebrows. “Unless you’d like to make a couple of dollars, girlie.”
“Here? Ugh.”
“A bed is a bed is a bed.”
“This one’s no bed of roses. Do people actually have sex in rooms like this?”
“That’s all they do. You don’t think anyone would sleep here, do you?”
She wrinkled her nose and we left, taking our suitcase with us. A call from Childs had established that Wesley Brill was out, and a knock on his door established that he hadn’t come back yet. I could have picked his lock in a couple of seconds but it turned out that I didn’t have to, because I stuck our room key in on a hunch and oddly enough it worked. Quite often the rooms on a particular line will respond to the same key-305 and 405 and 505, for instance-but now and then in older hotels the locks loosen up with age and a surprising number of keys turn out to be interchangeable.
Brill’s room was nicer than the ones they used for the hot sheets trade. It still wasn’t much but at least there was a piece of carpet covering some of the floor and the furniture was only on its penultimate legs. I put my suitcase on a chair, rummaged idly through Brill’s closet and dresser, then took my suitcase off the chair, put it on the floor, and sat on the chair myself. There was another chair with arms, and Ellie had already taken it.
“Well,” she said, “here we are.”
“Here we are indeed.”
“I wonder when he’s coming back.”
“Sooner or later.”
“Good thinking. I don’t suppose you thought to bring along a deck of cards?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Well, I never thought of playing cards as proper equipment for a burglar.”
“You always worked alone.”
“Uh-huh. You’d think he’d have a deck of cards here. You’d think anyone who spent a lot of time in this room would play a lot of solitaire.”
“And cheat.”
“Most likely. I’d pace the floor if there was room. I find myself remembering bad stand-up comics. ‘The room was so small…’ ”
“How small was it, Johnny?”
“The room was so small you had to go out in the hall to close the door.”
“That small, eh?”
“The room was so small the mice were hunchbacked. I have to admit I’ve never understood that line. Why would mice be hunchbacked in a small room?”
“I think you’ve got an overly literal mind.”
“I probably do.”
She smiled. “You’re nice, though. Just the same, literal mind or not, you’re nice.”
We would talk, fall silent, talk some more. At one point she asked me what I would do when it was all over.
“Go to jail,” I said.
“Not once we find the real killer. They’ll drop the other charges, won’t they? I bet they will.”
“They might.”
“Well, what’ll you do then? After it’s all over?”
I thought about it. “Find a new apartment,” I said at length. “I wouldn’t be able to stay where I am, not even if those visitors hadn’t turned it into a slum. All this publicity, the whole building knows about me. I’ll have to move someplace else and take the apartment under another name. It’ll be a nuisance but I guess I can live with it.”
“You’ll stay in New York?”
“Oh, I think so. I think I’d go crazy anywhere else. This is home. Besides, I’m connected here.”
“How do you mean?”
“I know how to operate in New York. When I steal something I know who’ll buy it and how to negotiate the sale. The cops know me, which in the long run does you more good than harm, although you might not think so. Oh, there’s any number of reasons why a burglar is better off operating in territory that he knows in and out. I don’t even like to work outside of Manhattan if I can avoid it. I remember one job I went on up in Harrison, that’s in Westchester -”
“You’re going to go on being a burglar.”
I looked at her.
“I didn’t realize that,” she said. “You’re going to keep on opening locks and stealing things?”
“What else?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ellie, on some level or other I think you think you’re watching all of this on television and I’m going to reform right in time for the final commercial. That may keep the audience happy but it’s not terribly realistic.”
“It isn’t?”
“Not really, no. I’m almost thirty-five years old. Opening locks and stealing things is the only trade I know. There’s a lot of ads in Popular Mechanics telling me about career opportunities in meatcutting and taxidermy but somehow I don’t think they’re being completely honest with me. And I don’t figure I could cut it by raising chinchillas at home or growing ginseng in my backyard, and the only kind of work I’m qualified for pays two dollars an hour and would bore the ass off me before I’d earned ten dollars.”
“You could be a locksmith.”
“Oh, sure. They break their necks running around handing out licenses to convicted burglars. And the bonding companies are just standing in line to do business with locksmiths with criminal records.”
“You must be qualified for something, Bernie.”
“The state taught me how to make license plates and sew mailbags. This is going to stun you but there’s very little call for either of those skills in civilian life.”
“But you’re intelligent, you’re capable, you can think on your feet-”
“All important qualifications that help me make it as a burglar. Ellie, I’ve got a very good life. That’s something you don’t seem to realize. I work a couple of nights a year and I spend the rest of my time taking things easy. Is that such a bad deal?”
“No.”
“I’ve been a burglar for years. Why should I change?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nobody changes.”
We didn’t have too much to say after that exchange. The time passed about as quickly as the Middle Ages. While we waited, the management kept renting out the room next door to us. Several times we heard footsteps in the hallway and sat motionless, thinking it might be Brill, and then the door next to us would open, and before long bedsprings would creak. Soon the bedsprings would cease creaking and shortly thereafter the footsteps would return to the elevator.
“True love,” Ellie said.
“Well, it’s nice the hotel serves a purpose.”
“It does keep them off the streets. That last chap was in rather a hurry, wouldn’t you say?”
“Probably had to get back to his office.”
Then at last footsteps approached from the elevator but did not stop at the room next door. Instead they stopped directly in front of the door behind which we lurked. I drew a quick breath and got to my feet, padding soundlessly into position at the side of the door.
Then his key turned in the lock and the door opened and it was him all right, Wesley Brill, the man with the soft brown eyes that had never quite met mine, and I stood with my hands poised waist-high at my sides, ready to catch him if he fainted, ready to grab him if he tried to bolt, ready to hang a high hard one on his chin if he decided to get violent.
What he did was stare. “Rhodenbarr,” he said. “This is utterly incredible. How on earth did you manage to find me? And they didn’t tell me anyone was waiting for me.”
“They didn’t know it.”
“But how did you-oh, of course. You’re a burglar.”
“Everybody’s got to be something.”
“Indeed.”
His voice and his whole manner of speaking were completely different. The Runyonesque diction was gone and he no longer bit off his words at their final consonants. There was an archness to his inflections, a lilt that was either theatrical or slightly faggoty or both.
“Bernie Rhodenbarr,” he said. Then he caught sight of Ellie, broadened his grin, raised a hand and lifted a brown trilby hat from his head. “Miss,” he said, then turned his attention to me once more. “Just let me close this door,” he said. “No need to share our business with a whole neighborhood of buyers and sellers. There. How on earth did you ever find me, if you don’t mind my asking?”