And what do they do with the clippings? Stow ’em in a pigeonhole, I suppose.
The blue leather box wasn’t under the rolltop, and my pear-shaped client had so positioned his little hands as to indicate a box far too large for any of the pigeonholes and little drawers, so I opened the other lock and released the catches on all the lower drawers. I started with the top right drawer because that’s where most people tend to put their most important possessions-I’ve no idea why-and I worked my way from drawer to drawer looking for a blue box and not finding one.
I went through the drawers quickly, but not too quickly. I wanted to get out of the apartment as soon as possible because that’s always a good idea, but I had not committed myself to pass up any other goodies the apartment might contain. A great many people keep cash around the house, and others keep traveler’s checks, and still others keep coin collections and readily salable jewelry and any number of interesting things which fit neatly enough into a Bloomingdale’s shopping bag. I wanted the four thousand dollars due me upon delivery of the blue box-the thousand I’d received in advance bulged reassuringly in my hip pocket-but I also wanted whatever else might come my way. I was standing in the apartment of a man who did not evidently have to worry about the source of his next meal, and if I got lucky I might very well turn a five-thousand-dollar sure thing into a score big enough to buy my groceries for the next year or so.
Because I no longer like to work any more than I have to. It’s a thrill, no question about it, but the more you work the worse the odds get. Crack enough doors and sooner or later you are going to fall down. Every once in a while you’ll get arrested and a certain number of arrests will stick. Four, five, six jobs a year-that ought to be plenty. I didn’t think so a few years ago when I still had things to prove to myself. Well, you live and you learn, and generally in that order.
I gave those drawers a fast shuffle, down one side and up the other, and I found papers and photograph albums and account ledgers and rings full of keys that probably didn’t fit anything and a booklet half-full of three-cent stamps (remember them?) and one of a pair of fur-lined kid gloves and one of a pair of unlined pigskin gloves and one ear-muff of the sort that your mother made you wear and a perpetual calendar issued in 1949 by the Marine Trust Company of Buffalo, New York, and a Bible, King James version, no larger than a pack of playing cards, and a pack of playing cards, Tally-Ho version, no larger than the Bible, and a lot of envelopes which probably still had letters in them, but who cared, and stacks of canceled checks bearing various dates over the past two decades, held together by desiccated rubber bands, and enough loose paper clips to make a chain that would serve as a jump rope for a child, or perhaps even for an adult, and a postcard from Watkins Glen, and some fountain pens and some ball pens and some felt pens and no end of pencils, all with broken tips, and…
And no coin collections, no cash, no traveler’s checks, no bearer bonds, no stock certificates, no rings, no watches, no cut or uncut precious stones (although there was a rather nice chunk of petrified wood with felt glued to the bottom so it could be used as a paperweight), no gold bars, no silver ingots, no stamps more precious than the three-cent jobs in the booklet, and, by all the saints in heaven, no blue box, leather or otherwise.
Hell.
This didn’t make me happy, but neither did it make me throw up. What it made me do was straighten up and sigh a little, and it made me wonder idly where old Flaxford kept the Scotch until I reminded myself that I never drink on a job, and it made me think about the cigarettes in the silver dish until I recalled that I’d given up the nasty things years ago. So I sighed again and got ready to give the drawers another look-see, because it’s very easy to miss something when you’re dealing with a desk that is such a reservoir of clutter, even something as substantial as a cigar box, and I looked at my watch and noted that it was twenty-three minutes of ten, and decided that I would really prefer to be on my way by ten, or ten-thirty at the very latest. Once more through the desk, then, to be followed if necessary by a circuit of other logical hiding places in the living room, and then if need be a tour of the apartment’s other rooms, however many there might be of them, and then adieu, adieu. And so I blew on my hands to cool them as they were beginning to sweat a bit, not that blowing on them did much good, encased in rubber gloves as they were, and this may well have led me to sigh a third time, and then I heard a key in the lock and froze.
The apartment’s tenant, J. Francis Flaxford, was supposed to be off the premises until midnight at the very least.
By the same token, the blue box was supposed to be in the desk.
I stood facing the door, my hip braced against the desk. I listened as the key turned in the lock, easing back the deadbolt, then turning farther to draw back the spring lock. There was an instant of dead silence. Then the door flew inward and two boys in blue burst through it, guns in their hands, the muzzles trained on me.
“Easy,” I said. “Relax. It’s only me.”
Chapter Two
The first cop through the door was a stranger, and a very young and fresh-faced one at that. But I recognized his partner, a grizzled, gray chap with jowls and a paunch and a long sharp nose. His name was Ray Kirschmann and he’d been with the NYPD since the days when they carried muskets. He’d collared me a few years earlier and had proved to be a reasonable man at the time.
“Son of a gun,” he said, lowering his own gun and putting a calming hand upon the gun of his young associate. “If it ain’t Mrs. Rhodenbarr’s son, Bernard. Put the heat away, Loren. Bernie here is a perfect gentleman.”
Loren bolstered his gun and let out a few cubic feet of air. Burglars are not the only poor souls who tend to tense up when entering doors other than their own. And trust Ray to make sure his young partner cleared the threshold ahead of him.
I said, “Hi, Ray.”
“Nice to see ya, Bernie. Say hello to my new partner, Loren Kramer. Loren, this here is Bernie Rhodenbarr.”
We exchanged hellos and I extended a hand for a shake. This confused Loren, who looked at my hand and then began rumbling with the pair of handcuffs hanging from his gunbelt.
Ray laughed. “For Chrissake,” he said. “Nobody ever puts cuffs on Bernie. This ain’t one of your mad dog punks, Loren. This is a professional burglar you got here.”
“Oh.”
“Close the door, Loren.”
Loren closed the door-he didn’t bother to turn the bolt-and I did a little more relaxing myself. We had thus far attracted no attention. No neighbors milled in the hallways. And so I had every intention of spending what remained of the night beneath my own good roof.
Politely I said, “I wasn’t expecting you, Ray. Do you come here often?”
“You son of a gun, you.” He grinned. “Gettin’ sloppy in your old age, you know that? We’re in the car and we catch a squeal, woman hears suspicious noises. And you was always quiet as a mouse. How old are you, Bernie?”
“Be thirty-five in April. Why?”
“Taurus?” This from Loren.
“The end of May. Gemini.”
“My wife’s a Taurus,” Loren said. He had liberated his nightstick from its clip and was slapping it rhythmically against his palm.