“Thank God for that.”
“That’s what I say. If anything, he likes the bread too much, but I guess his wife is good at spending it fast as he brings it home. You figure it’s on account of she’s a Taurus?”
“You’d have to ask Loren.”
“He might tell me. But you can put up with a lot of stupidity in exchange for a little reasonableness, I have to say that for him. Just so he don’t kill hisself with that nightstick of his, bouncing it off his knee or something. Bernie? Take the gloves off.”
“Huh?”
“The rubber gloves. You don’t want to wear those on the street.”
“Oh,” I said, and stripped them off. Somewhere in the inner recesses of the apartment Loren coughed and bumped into something. I stuffed my gloves into my pocket. “All the tools of the trade,” Ray said. “Jesus, I’d always rather deal with pros, guys like you. Like even if we had to bag you tonight. Say I had the doorman backing my play and there was no way to cool it off. No money in it that way but at least I’m dealing with a professional.”
Somewhere a toilet flushed. I resisted an impulse to look at my watch.
“You feel comfortable about it,” he went on. “Know what I mean? Like tonight, coming through that door. I didn’t know what we was gonna find on the other side of it.”
“I know the feeling,” I assured him, and started to reach for my shopping bag. I caught a glimpse of Ray’s face that made me turn to see what he was staring at, and what he was staring at was Loren at the far end of the room with a mouth as wide as the Holland Tunnel and a face as white as a surgical mask.
“In…” he said. “In…In…In the bedroom!” And then, all in a rush: “Coming back from the toilet and I turned the wrong way and there’s the bedroom and this guy, he’s dead, this dead guy, head beaten in and there’s blood all over the place, warm blood, the guy’s still warm, you never saw anything like it, Jesus, I knew it, you can never trust a Gemini, I knew it, they lie all the time, oh God-”
And he flopped on the rug. The one that may very well have been a Bokhara.
And Ray and I looked at each other.
Talk about professionalism. We both went promptly insane. He just stood there with his face looming, not going for his gun, not reaching for me, not even moving, just standing flatfooted like the flatfoot he indisputably was. And I, on the other hand, began behaving wholly out of character, in a manner neither of us ever expected I might be capable of.
I sprang at him. He went on gaping at me, too astonished even to react, and I barreled into him and sent him sprawling and bolted without waiting to see where he landed. I shot out the door and found the stairs right where I’d left them, and I raced down two flights and dashed through the lobby at the very pace the word breakneck was coined to describe.
The doorman, obliging as ever, held the door for me. “I’ll take care of you at Christmas!” I sang out. And scurried off without even waiting for a reply.
Chapter Three
It’s a good thing the sidewalks were fairly clear. Otherwise I probably would have run straight into somebody. As it was, I managed to reach the corner with a simple stretch of broken-field running, and by the time I took a left at Second Avenue, logic and shortness of breath combined to take the edge off my panic. No one seemed to be pelting down the street behind me. I slowed to a rapid walk. Even in New York people tend to stare at you if you run. It may not occur to them to do anything about it, but it gets on my nerves when people stare at me.
After a block and a half of rapid walking I stuck out a hand and attracted the attention of a southbound cab. I gave him my address and he turned a couple of corners to transform himself into a northbound cab, but by that time I’d changed my mind. My apartment was nestled high atop a relatively new high-rise at West End and Seventy-first, and on a clear day (which comes up now and then) you can see, if not forever, at least the World Trade Center and selected parts of New Jersey. And it’s a perfect refuge from the cares of the city, not to mention the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, which is why I automatically spoke the address to the driver.
But it was also the first place Ray Kirschmann and his fellows would come looking for me. All they had to do was check the phone book, for God’s sake.
I pressed myself back into my seat and patted my left breast pocket in a reflexive hunt for the pack of cigarettes that hadn’t been there in several years. If I lived in that apartment on East Sixty-seventh, I thought, I could sit in the green leather chair and knock dottle from my pipe into the cut-glass ashtray. But as things stood…
Relax, Bernard. Think!
There were several things to think about. Like, just who had invested a thousand dollars in setting me up for a murder charge, and just why the oddly familiar pear-shaped man had chosen me for the role of imbecile. But I didn’t really have time for that sort of long-range thinking. I’d gotten a break-one cop collapsing in a providential faint, the other reacting slowly even as I was reacting with uncharacteristic speed. That break had given me a head start, but the head start probably didn’t amount to more than a handful of minutes. It could vanish before I knew it.
I had to go to ground. Had to find a bolt hole. I’d shaken the hounds from my trail for a moment or two and it was up to me to regain the safety of my burrow before they recaptured the scent. (It didn’t thrill me that all the phrases that came to me were from the language of fox hunting, incidentally.)
I shrugged off the thought and tried to get specific. My own apartment was out; it would be full of cops within the hour. I needed a place to go, some safe and sound place with four walls and a ceiling and a floor, all of them reasonably close together. It had to be a place that no one would think to connect with me and one where I could not be readily discovered or observed. And it had to be in New York, because I’d be a lot easier to run down once I was off my home ground.
A friend’s apartment.
The cab cruised northward while I reviewed my list of friends and acquaintances and established that there was not a single one of them whom I could drop in on. (In on whom I could drop? No matter.) My problem, you see, was that I had always tended to avoid bad company. Outside of prison-and I prefer to be outside of prison as often as possible-I never associate with other burglars, hold-up men, con artists, swindlers or miscellaneous thieves and grifters. When one is within stone walls one’s ability to pick and choose is circumscribed, certainly, but on the outside I limit myself to people who are, if not strictly honest, at least not the felonious sort. My boon companions may pilfer office supplies from their employers, fabricate income tax deductions out of the whole cloth, file parking tickets in the incinerator, and bend various commandments perilously close to the breaking point. But they are none of them jail-birds, at least as far as I know, and as far as they know neither am I.
It should consequently not surprise you to learn that I have no particularly close friends. With none of them knowing the full truth about me, no intimacy has ever really developed. There are chaps I play chess with and chaps I play poker with. There are a couple of lads with whom I’ll take in a fight or a ball game. There are women with whom I dine, women with whom I may see a play or hear a concert, and with some of these ladies fair I’ll now and then share a pillow. But it’s been quite a while since there was a male companion in my life whom I’d call a real friend, and almost as long since I’d been involved with a woman on more than a casual basis. That modern disease of detachment, I suppose, augmented by the solitary nature of the secretive burglar.
I’d never had occasion to regret all of this before, except on those once-in-a-while bad nights everybody has when your own company is the worst company in the world and there’s nobody you know well enough to call at three in the morning. Now, though, what it all meant was there was no one on earth I could ask to hide me. And if there was it wouldn’t help, because if I had a close friend or a lover that’s the first place the cops would look, and they’d be on the doorstep an hour or two after I was through the door.