The Burglar in the Closet

  “Well, you don’t go ahead and commit a burglary if you have to step over a corpse to get to the jewels, Ray. And I’m surprised you didn’t know that.”

  “Maybe.”

  “More than maybe.”

  He gave his head a dogged shake. “Nope,” he said. “Maybe’s as far as I’d go on that one. Because you know what you got? You got the guts of a burglar, Bernie. I remember how cool you were when me and that crud Loren Kramer walked in on you over in the East Sixties, and there’s a dead body in the bedroom and you’re actin’ like the apartment’s empty.”

  “That’s because I didn’t know there was a body in the bedroom. Remember?”

  He shrugged. “Same difference. You got the guts of a burglar and all bets are off. Why else would you fix yourself an alibi?”

  “Maybe I actually went to the fights, Ray. Ever think of that?”

  “Not for very long.”

  “And maybe I set up an alibi—which I didn’t because I really was at the fights—”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “—because I was working some other job. I’m not that crazy about jewels. They’re getting tougher and tougher to sell, the fences are turning vicious, you know that. Maybe I was out lifting somebody’s coin collection and I established an alibi just as a matter of course, because I know you people always come knocking on my door when a coin collection walks out of its owner’s house.”

  “I didn’t hear nothin’ about a coin collection stolen the other night.”

  “Maybe the owner was out of town. Maybe he hasn’t missed it yet.”

  “And maybe what you robbed was a kid’s piggy bank and he’s too busy cryin’ to tell the cops about it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe shit don’t stink, Bernie. I think you got the Sheldrake woman’s jewels.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, you gotta say that. That don’t mean I gotta believe it.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Yeah, sure. You spent the night with Sheldrake’s nurse because you didn’t have no better place to stay. I believe everything you tell me, Bernie. That’s why I’m still in a blue uniform.”

  I didn’t answer him and he didn’t say anything more. We drove around for a while. The UPS truck had long since gotten out of the way and we were drifting in the stream of traffic, turning now and then, taking a leisurely ride around the streets of midtown Manhattan. If all you noticed was the weather, then you might have mistaken it for a nice fall day.

  I said, “Ray?”

  “Yeah, Bern?”

  “There’s something you want?”

  “There always is. There’s this book, they ran a hunk of it in the Post. Looking Out for Number One. Here’s a whole book tellin’ people to be selfish and let the other guy watch out for his own ass. Imagine anybody has to buy a book to learn what we all grew up knowin’.”

  “What is it you want, Ray?”

  “You care for a smoke, Bernie? Oh, hell, you already told me you quit. It bother you if I smoke?”

  “I can stand it.”

  He lit a cigarette. “Those jewels,” he said. “Sheldrake’s jewels that you took from her apartment.”

  “I didn’t get them.”

  “Well, let’s suppose you did. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Well,” he said, “I never been greedy, Bern. All I want is half.”

  CHAPTER

  Eleven

  Spyder’s Parlor was dark and empty. The chairs perched on top of the tables. The stools had been inverted and set up on the bar. A menu in the window indicated that they opened for lunch during the week, but today was Saturday and they wouldn’t turn the lights on until mid-afternoon. I stayed with Lexington a block or two uptown to a hole in the wall where the counterman mugged and winked and called his female patrons dear and darling and sweets. They ate it up. I ate up a sandwich, cream cheese on date-nut bread, and drank two cups of so-so coffee.

  Grabow, Grabow, Grabow. In a hotel lobby I went through the Manhattan telephone directory and came up with eight Grabows plus two who spelled it without the final letter. I bought dimes from the cashier and tried all ten numbers. Six of them didn’t answer. The other four didn’t know anything about any artist named Grabow. One woman said her husband’s brother was a painter, exteriors and interiors, but he lived upstate in Orchard Park. “It’s a suburb of Buffalo,” she said. “Anyway he didn’t change his name, it’s still Grabowski. I don’t suppose that helps you.”

  I told her I didn’t see how it could but thanked her anyway. I started to leave the hotel and then something registered in my mind and I went back to the directory and started calling Grabowskis. It would have been cute if it worked but of course it didn’t, it just cost me a lot of dimes, and I called all seventeen Grabowskis and reached I don’t know how many, fourteen or fifteen, and of course none of them painted anything, pictures or interiors or exteriors, none of them even colored in coloring books or painted by number, and that was the end of that particular blind alley.

  The nearest bank was a block east on Third Avenue. I bought a roll of dimes—you can still get fifty of them for five dollars, it’s one of the few remaining bargains—and I carried all fifty of them to another hotel lobby. I passed some outdoor phone booths on the way but they don’t have phone books anymore. I don’t know why. I called Spyder’s Parlor to make sure it was still closed and it was. I hauled out the Yellow Pages and looked up Attorneys. See Lawyers, said the book, so I did. I don’t know what I expected to find. There were eighteen pages of lawyers and plenty of them were named John, but so what? I couldn’t see any reason to call any of them. I sort of flipped through the listings, hoping something would strike me, and a listing for a firm called Carson, Kidder and Diehl made me flip to the V’s. I called Carson Verrill, Craig’s personal attorney, and managed to get through to him. He hadn’t heard anything since he’d referred Craig to Errol Blankenship and he wanted to know who I was and what I wanted. I told him I was a dentist myself and a personal friend of Craig’s. I didn’t bother inventing a name and he didn’t press the point.

  I called Errol Blankenship. He was out, I was told, and would I care to leave a name and a number?

  Grabow, Grabow, Grabow. The listing for artists filled a couple of pages. No Grabow. I looked under art galleries to see if he happened to own his own gallery. If he did, he’d named it something other than Grabow.

  I invested a dime and called Narrowback Gallery, on West Broadway in SoHo. A woman with a sort of scratchy voice answered the phone just when I was about to give up and try somebody else. I said, “Perhaps you’ll be able to help me. I saw a painting about a month ago and I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind. The thing is, I don’t know anything about the artist.”

  “I see. Let me light a cigarette. There. Now let’s see, you saw a painting here at our gallery?”

  “No.”

  “No? Where did you see it?”

  Where indeed? “At an apartment. A friend of a friend, and it turns out they bought it at the Washington Square Outdoor Art Show a year ago, or maybe it was the year before. It’s all sort of vague.”

  “I see.”

  She did? Remarkable. “The only thing I know is the artist’s name,” I said. “Grabow.”

  “Grabow?”

  “Grabow,” I agreed, and spelled it.

  “Is that a first name or a last name?”

  “It’s what he signed on the bottom of the canvas,” I said. “For all I know it’s his cat’s name, but I suppose it’s his last name.”

  “And you want to find him?”

  “Right, I don’t know anything about art—”

  “But I’ll bet you know what you like.”

  “Sometimes. I don’t like that many paintings, but I liked this one, so much so that I can’t get it out of my mind. The owners say they don’t want to sell it, and then it occurred to me that I could find the artist and see what else he’s done, but how would I go
about it? He’s not in the phone book, Grabow that is, and I don’t know how to get hold of him.”

  “So you called us.”

  “Right.”

  “I wish you could have waited until late in the day. No, don’t apologize, I should be up by now anyway. Are you just going through the book and calling every gallery you can find? Because you must own stock in the phone company.”

  “No, I—”

  “Or maybe you’re rich. Are you rich?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “’Cause if you’re rich, or even semi-rich, I could show you no end of pretty pictures even if Mr. Grabow didn’t paint them. Or Ms. Grabow. Why don’t you come on down and see what we’ve got?”

  “Er.”

  “Because we haven’t got any Grabows in stock, I’m afraid. We’ve got a terrific selection of oils and acrylics by Denise Raphaelson. Some of her drawings as well. But you probably never heard of her.”

  “Well, I—”

  “However, you’re talking to her. Impressed?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Really? I can’t imagine why. I don’t think I ever heard of a painter named Grabow. Do you have any idea how many millions of artists there are in this city? Not literally millions, but tons of ’em. Are you calling all the galleries?”

  “No,” I said, and when she failed to interrupt me I added, “You’re the first one I called, actually.”

  “Honest? To what do I owe the honor?”

  “I sort of liked the name. Narrowback Gallery.”

  “I picked it because this loft has a weird shape to it. It skinnies down as you move toward the rear. I was beginning to regret not calling it the Denise Raphaelson Gallery, what the hell, free advertising and all, but calling it Narrowback finally paid off. I got myself a phone call. What kind of stuff does Grabow paint?”

  How the hell did I know? “Sort of modern,” I said.

  “That’s a surprise. I figured he was a sixteenth-century Flemish master.”

  “Well, abstract,” I said. “Sort of geometric.”

  “Hard-line stuff?”

  What did that mean? “Right,” I said.

  “Jesus, that’s what everybody’s doing. Don’t ask me why. You really like that stuff? I mean, once you get past the fact that it’s interesting shapes and colors, then what have you got? As far as I’m concerned it’s waiting-room art. You know what I mean by that?”

  “No,” I said, mystified.

  “I mean you can hang it in a waiting room or a lobby and it’s great, it won’t offend anybody, it goes nice with the décor and it makes everybody happy, but what is it? I don’t mean because it’s not representational, I mean artistically, what the fuck is it? I mean if you want to hang it in a dentist’s office that’s sensational, and maybe you’re a dentist and I just put my foot in my mouth. Are you a dentist?”

  “Christ, no.”

  “You sound like you’re the direct opposite of a dentist, whatever that could be. Maybe you knock people’s teeth out. I’m a little flaky this morning, or is it afternoon already? Jesus, it is, isn’t it?”

  “Just barely.”

  “Gag.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “That’s how you can find your Grabow, though I don’t think you should bother, to tell you the truth. What I think you should do is buy something beautiful by the one and only Denise Raphaelson, but failing that you can try Gag. That’s initials, G-A-G, it’s Gotham Artists’ Guild. They’re a reference service, you go there and they have slides of everybody’s work in their files, plus they have everything indexed by artists’ names, and they can tell you what gallery handles an artist’s work or how to get in touch with him directly if he doesn’t have any gallery affiliation. They’re located somewhere in midtown, I think in the East Fifties. Gotham Artists’ Guild.”

  “I think I love you.”

  “Honest? This is so sudden, sir. All I know about you is you’re not a dentist, which is a point in your favor, truth to tell. I bet you’re married.”

  “I bet you’re wrong.”

  “Yeah? Living with somebody, huh?”

  “Nope.”

  “You weigh three hundred pounds, you’re four-foot-six, and you’ve got warts.”

  “Well, you’re wrong about the warts.”

  “That’s good, because they give me toads. What’s your name?”

  Was there any way on earth the cops were going to interrogate this lady? There was not. “Bernie,” I said. “Bernie Rhodenbarr.”

  “God, if I married you I’d still have the same initials. I could keep on wearing all my monogrammed blouses. And yet we’ll never meet. We’ll have shared this magic moment over the telephone and we’ll never encounter each other face to face. That’s sad but it’s okay. You told me you loved me and that’s better than anything that happened to me all day yesterday. Gotham Artists’ Guild. Got it?”

  “Got it. ’Bye, Denise.”

  “’Bye, Bernie. Keep in touch, lover.”

  Gotham Artists’ Guild was located on East Fifty-fourth Street between Park and Madison. They told me over the phone to call in person, so I took a bus uptown and walked over to their office. It was two flights up over a Japanese restaurant.

  I’d been winging it with Denise Raphaelson, inventing my story as I went along, but now I was prepared and I gave my spiel to an owlish young man without any hesitation. He brought me a half dozen Kodachrome slides and a viewer.

  “This is the only Grabow we have,” he said. “See if it looks like the painting you remember.”

  It didn’t look anything like the painting I’d described to Denise, and I almost said as much until I remembered that the painting I’d been talking about had never existed in the first place. Grabow’s work turned out to involve bold amorphous splashes of color applied according to some scheme which no doubt made considerable sense to the artist. It wasn’t the kind of thing I usually liked, but I was looking at it in miniature, and maybe it would blow my mind if I saw it life-size.

  As if it mattered. “Grabow,” I said positively. “The painting I saw was like these, all right. It’s definitely the same artist.”

  I couldn’t get an address or a phone number. When the artist is represented by a gallery that’s all they’ll tell you, and Walter Ignatius Grabow was represented by the Koltnow Gallery on Greene Street. That was also in SoHo, quite possibly no more than a stone’s throw from Denise Raphaelson. And possibly rather more than that; my grasp of geography south of the Village is limited.

  I found a pay phone—the Hotel Wedgeworth, Fifty-fifth just east of Park. I called the Koltnow Gallery and nobody answered. I called Jillian’s apartment and nobody answered. I called Craig’s office and nobody answered. I called 411 and asked the Information operator if there was a listing in Manhattan for Walter Ignatius Grabow. She told me there wasn’t. I thanked her and she said I was welcome. I thought of calling Denise back and telling her I’d managed to get in touch with my Grabow, thanks to her good advice, but I restrained myself. I called Koltnow again, and Jillian, and Craig’s office, and nothing happened. Nobody was home. I dialed my own number and established that I wasn’t home either. The whole world was out to lunch.

  Ray Kirschmann had staked his claim to half of Crystal’s jewels and I hadn’t even stolen them yet. He’d figured things wrong but he’d come scarily close to the truth. Todras and Nyswander knew the story about my aunt was a lot of crap and that I was a burglar. I had no idea if they knew there was a lot of jewelry involved in the case, and I couldn’t begin to guess what they had told Jillian or what Jillian had said to them. Nor did I know anything much about Craig’s situation. He was probably still in jail, and if Blankenship was any good he’d told his client to button his lip, but how many lawyers are any good? At any moment Craig might decide to start singing a song about Bernie the Burglar, and where would that leave me? I had a ticket stub between me and a homicide charge, and I couldn’t make myself believe it amounted to an impregna
ble shield.

  I walked around. It was a medium-nice fall day. The smog had dimmed the sun somewhat but it was still nice and bright out, the kind of day you don’t take the trouble to appreciate until the only fresh air you get to breathe is out in the exercise yard.

  Damn it, who killed the woman? W. I. Grabow? Knobby? Lawyer John? Had the murderer and the lover been one and the same? Or had the murderer killed her because he was jealous of the lover, or for an entirely different reason? And where did the jewels fit in? And where did Craig fit in? And where, damnitall, did I fit in?

  What I kept fitting in was phone booths, and the next time I tried the Koltnow Gallery a woman answered on the second ring. She sounded older than Denise Raphaelson, and her conversation was less playful. I said I understood she represented Walter Grabow, that I was an old friend and wanted to get in touch.

  “Oh, we used to have some paintings of his, though I can’t remember that we ever made a sale for him. He was trying to get together enough grade-A material for a show and it never materialized. How did you know to call us?”

  “Gotham Artists’ Guild.”

  “Oh, Gag,” she said. “They’ve still got us listed as Wally’s gallery? I’m surprised. He never really caught on with anybody, you know, and then he got involved with graphics and became more interested in printmaking techniques than anything else. And he stopped painting, and I thought that was insane because his forte was his color sense, and here he was wrapping himself up in a straitjacket of detail work. Are you an artist yourself?”

  “Just an old friend.”

  “Then you don’t want to hear all this. You just want to know where he’s at, as the children say. Hold on a moment.” I held, and after a little while the operator told me to put in another nickel. I dropped a dime in the slot and told her to keep the change. She didn’t even thank me, and then the woman at Koltnow Gallery read off a number on King Street. I couldn’t remember where King Street was at. As the children say.

  “King Street.”

  “Oh, I’ll bet you’re from out of town. Are you?”