The Burglar in the Closet

  “You’re not making much sense, Craig.”

  “But why would you use one of my dental scalpels? How come you just happened to have one of them in your pocket?” He was thinking his way along as he spoke and I guess he wasn’t used to the process. “Wait. A. Minute! You had the whole thing planned, burglary and murder rolled into one, with me set up for it. You must have been making a pitch for Jillian, that’s what it was, and you wanted me out of the way so you could have a clear field with her. That’s what it was.”

  “I don’t believe I’m hearing this.”

  “Well, you just better start believing it. Jesus, Bernie. And then you call up here and ask to speak to her. You’re incredible, that’s all I’ve got to say.”

  “I’ve got the guts of a burglar.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “I don’t particularly want to. Craig, I—”

  “I don’t think we should be having this conversation.”

  “Oh, grow up, Craig. I want to—”

  Click!

  He’d hung up on me. First he handed me to the cops and now he had gone and hung up on me. I stood there holding the dead phone and shaking my head at the inhumanity of man to man. Then I fed it another dime and tried him again. It went unanswered for eight rings. I broke the connection, put the dime back in the slot, dialed again. And got a busy signal.

  When Jillian’s number didn’t answer on a second try, I wondered if I’d gotten a couple of digits switched around. I looked through my wallet for the card she’d given me but of course I hadn’t put it back after the go-round with Grabow. I checked my pockets. No luck—it was gone. She’d said the number was unlisted. I tried Information and sure enough, there was no listing for her. I dialed the number again as I remembered it and got no answer, and then I looked up and dialed the number of Craig’s office and while it rang I asked myself why I was wasting my time, and before I could answer myself she picked up the phone.

  She said, “Oh, thank God! I’ve been trying your number for hours.”

  “I haven’t been home.”

  “I know. Listen, everything’s going crazy. Craig’s out of jail. They released him.”

  “I know.”

  “What he did, he gave them your name, told them you probably took Crystal’s jewels or something like that. He sort of glossed over what he told them.”

  “I’ll just bet he did.”

  “That’s why those policemen came up this morning. They must have known he was going to be released and they wanted to talk to me before he did. I guess. Plus they were looking for you. I told them what you said to tell them, at least I tried to get it all right. I was nervous.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “It’s good you were at the boxing matches and can prove it. I think they’re trying to frame you for murder.”

  I swallowed. “Yeah,” I said. “It’s lucky I’ve got an alibi.”

  “Craig says they’ll be looking for witnesses who saw you in Crystal’s neighborhood the night she was killed. But how are they going to find anybody since you weren’t there? I told him he was awful to do what he did but he said his lawyer told him it was the only way to get out of that cell.”

  “Carson Verrill.”

  “Yes, he said the other man wasn’t doing him any good at all.”

  “Well, thank God for old Carson Verrill.”

  “He’s not old. And I’m not very thankful for him, to tell you the truth.”

  “Neither am I, Jillian.”

  “Because I think the whole thing was really rotten all the way down the line. I mean, here you were trying to do him a favor and now look what he’s done in return. I tried to tell him you were after the real killer and I don’t even think he paid any attention to what I was saying. He was over at my apartment and we had a fight about it and he wound up storming out. Actually he didn’t storm exactly. Actually I asked him to leave.”

  “I see.”

  “Because I think it stinks, Bernie.”

  “So do I, Jillian.”

  “And I came here because I wanted to look in the files, but so far all I’ve done is waste time. There’s no patient anywhere in the files named Grabow.”

  “Well, I found Grabow. He may be a hell of a painter but he can’t run worth a damn.”

  “If you’ve learned Knobby’s name I’ll look him up right now. I didn’t happen to see anybody listed as working at Spyder’s Parlor. That’s the name of the place, isn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But I didn’t look at all the cards. I also was looking for people named John and then checking to see if they were lawyers, but that’s really beginning to seem hopeless.”

  “Forget it,” I said. “That’s not how this is going to get solved anyway. Look, I want to check Knobby, and there are a couple of other things I ought to see about. Where are you going to be tonight?”

  “My place, I guess. Why?”

  “Will you be alone?”

  “As far as I know. Craig won’t be coming over, if that’s what you mean. Not if I have anything to say about it.”

  “How about if I come over?”

  A pause, neither pensive nor evasive. Call it provocative. “That sounds nice,” she said. “What time?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You won’t be, uh—?”

  “Drunk? I’m staying away from olive oil tonight.”

  “I think you should stay away from Frankie while you’re at it.”

  “Sounds like a good idea. I don’t know what time I’ll be over because I don’t know how much time everything else is going to take. Should I call first? Yeah, I’ll call first. I lost the card with your number on it. Let me get a pen. Here we go. What’s your number?”

  “Rhinelander seven, eighteen oh two.”

  “One year before the Louisiana Purchase. That’s what I dialed but there was no answer. Oh, of course there wasn’t, you were at the office. In fact you still are, aren’t you?”

  “Bernie—”

  “I’m a little crazy but I’m told I have nerves of steel and that’s something. It looks as though I’m going to need them, too. I’ll call you.”

  “Bernie? Be careful.”

  CHAPTER

  Fourteen

  “Jeez, if it ain’t my old buddy,” Dennis said. “Saturday night and look what a crowd fulla stiffs they get here, will ya? It’s a great place during the week but on weekends everybody’s home with their wife and kids. People don’t have to work, they don’t have to unwind after work, you know what I mean? But the parking garage business, that’s no five-days-a-week operation. You run a garage and they keep you hopping around the clock, and who the hell wants to waste Saturday night on his wife and kids anyway? You’re not in the garage business. You told me your line but it slipped my mind.”

  What had I told him? I’d said I was a burglar, but what else? “Investments,” I said.

  “Right. Jeez, can you believe it, I can’t remember your name? I got it on the tip of my tongue.”

  “It’s Ken. Ken Harris.”

  “Of course it is. Just what I was gonna say. Dennis is mine, I’m in the garage business. One thing I don’t forget, though, I’ll bet I remember your drink. Hey, Knobby, get your ass over here, huh? Make it another of the same for me and bring my friend Kenny here a Cutty Sark on the rocks. Am I right or am I right, Ken?”

  “You’re right but you’re wrong, Dennis.”

  “How’s that?”

  To Knobby I said, “Just make it black coffee for the time being. I got to get sober before I go and get drunk again.”

  I didn’t have to get sober. I’d had nothing alcoholic all day except for that solitary glass of beer on Spring Street, and a couple of hours had passed since then. But what I did have to do was stay sober because I am always sober when I work and I planned to work tonight. I was standing with my old buddy Dennis at the bar of Spyder’s Parlor, and good old Knobby was building the drinks, and straight black coffee was j
ust what the burglar ordered.

  “I guess you been making the rounds, eh, Kenny?”

  Who was Kenny? Oh, right. I was. “I hit a few places, Dennis.”

  “See Frankie anywhere?”

  “No. Not tonight.”

  “She was supposed to drop by here after dinner. Sometimes she’ll put roots down in Joan’s Joynt or one of those gin mills, but she’s generally pretty dependable, you know what I mean? And she’s not at home. I called her a few minutes ago and nobody answered.”

  “She’ll be around,” Knobby said. His head must have earned him his name. He was young, early thirties, but his bald dome made him look older at first glance. He had a fringe of dark brown hair around a prominent and shiny head of skin. His eyebrows were thick and bushy, his jaw underslung, his nose a button and his eyes a warm liquid brown. He had a lean, wiry body and he looked good in the official Spyder’s Parlor T-shirt, a bright-red affair with a design silk-screened in black, a spider’s web, a leering macho spider in one corner, arms extended to welcome a hesitant girlish fly. “Ol’ Frances, she’s got to make her rounds,” he said. “Stick around and you’ll see her before the night’s over.”

  He moved off down the bar. “She’ll show or she won’t,” Dennis said. “Least you’re here, I got a buddy to drink with. I hate to drink alone. You drink alone and you’re just a boozer, know what I mean? Me, I can take the alcohol or leave it alone. I’m here for the companionship.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “I guess Frankie’s got things to drink about these days.”

  “You mean What’s-her-name? That got killed?”

  “Right.”

  “Yeah, hell of a thing. She sounded bad when I talked to her a couple hours ago.”

  “Depressed?”

  He thought it over. “Disturbed,” he said. “She was saying how they let the husband off, the veterinarian or whatever he is.”

  “I think he’s a dentist.”

  “Well, same difference. She said she oughta do something. I dunno, maybe she had a few already. You know how she gets.”

  “Sure.”

  “Women don’t hold it the way you and I do. It’s a physical thing, Ken.”

  Cue or not, I acted on it, waving to Knobby and springing for a drink for Dennis and coffee for myself. When the bartender moved away I said, “Knobby here, a minute ago he called her Frances.”

  “Well, that’s her name, Ken. Frances Ackerman.”

  “Everybody calls her Frankie.”

  “So?”

  “I was, you know, just thinking.” I moved my hand in a vague circle. “What’s Knobby’s name, you happen to know?”

  “Shit, lemme think. I used to know. I think I used to know.”

  “Unless his parents named him Knobby, but what kind of name is that for a little baby?”

  “Naw, they wouldn’t give him a name like that. He musta had hair then. The day his mother dropped him he musta had more hair than he does today.”

  “Here we’ve bought all these drinks from him and neither of us know’s the bastard’s name, Dennis.”

  “It’s funny when you put it that way, Ken.” He lifted his glass, drained it. “What the hell,” he said, “drink up and we’ll buy another round off him and ask him who the hell he is. Or who the hell he thinks he is, right?”

  It took more than one round. It took several, and I had a pretty fair case of coffee nerves building by the time we established that Knobby’s first name was Thomas, that his last name was Corcoran, and that he lived nearby. On a trip to the men’s room I stopped to look up Knobby in the phone book. There was a Thos Corcoran listed on East Twenty-eighth Street between First and Second. I tried the number and let it ring an even dozen times and nobody answered. I looked over my shoulder, saw no one paying attention to me, and tore the page out of the book for future reference.

  Back at the bar Dennis said, “She got a friend?”

  “Huh?”

  “I figured you were on the phone with a broad and I asked if she’s got a friend.”

  “Oh. Well, she hasn’t got any enemies.”

  “Hey, that’s pretty good, Ken. I bet when he was a kid they called him Corky.”

  “Who?”

  “Knobby. Last name’s Corcoran, it figures they’ll call him Corky, right?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Shit,” Dennis said. “Drink up and we’ll ask the bum. Hey, Corky! Get over here, you bum!”

  I put a hand on Dennis’s shoulder. “I’ll pass for now,” I said, sliding a couple of bills across the bar for Knobby. “I’ve got somebody to see.”

  “Yeah, and she’s got no enemies. Well, if she’s got a friend, bring her around later, huh? I’ll be here for a while. Maybe Frankie’ll drop by and have a couple, but either way I’ll be holding the fort.”

  “So maybe I’ll see you later, Dennis.”

  “Oh, I’ll be here,” he said. “Where else am I gonna go?”

  CHAPTER

  Fifteen

  Knobby Corcoran’s building was a twelve-story prewar job with an Art Deco lobby and a doorman who thought he was St. Peter. I lurked across the street watching him make sure every supplicant was both expected and desired by a bona fide tenant. I thought of passing myself off as a tenant unknown to him, but his manner suggested this wouldn’t be a breeze and I wasn’t sure I had self-confidence equal to the chore.

  The building on the right was a five-story brownstone. The building on the left, however, was a fourteen-story building, which, given the curiosities of superstition in the New York real-estate trade, meant it was only one story taller than Knobby’s building. It too had a doorman but he hadn’t been through the same assertiveness-training course as Knobby’s and I could have walked past him wearing convict’s stripes without creating an incident.

  First, though, I had to learn the number of Knobby’s apartment, and I did that by presenting myself as his visitor and watching which buzzer the doorman rang for the intercom. When no one answered I knew two things for certain—Knobby lived in 8-H and nobody was home. I walked to the far corner, came partway back, and breezed past the doorman of the building next door with a nod and a smile and a “Nice night, eh?” He agreed that it was without even looking up from his paper.

  I took the elevator to the top floor and climbed a flight of stairs to the roof. Some Manhattan rooftops feature amateur astronomers and some sport courting couples and still others are given over to roof gardens. This roof, praise be to God, was empty. I walked to its edge and gazed down through the darkness for about twelve feet, which is a much greater distance to fall down than to walk across. It could have been worse—there might have been a gap between the buildings. But then I wouldn’t have been there in the first place.

  I must have wasted a few minutes getting my courage up. But this was nothing I hadn’t done before, and if you can’t contend with acrophobia when there’s no way around it, well, burglary’s not the right trade for you, my boy. I went over there and I jumped, and while I landed with a little pain I did so with my ankles unturned. I did a few shallow kneebends to make sure that my legs still worked, let out the breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding, and made my way over to the door leading back into the building.

  It was locked from the inside, but of course that was the least of my problems.

  Knobby’s lock was no problem, either. I got to his door just as a middle-aged man emerged from a door down the hall and began walking in my direction. I could have sworn I recognized him from one of those Haley’s M-O commercials, asking his pharmacist for some commonsense advice about, uh, irregularity. I knocked on Knobby’s door, frowned, said, “Yeah, it’s me, man. You gonna open the door or what?”

  Silence from within, of course.

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “But hurry it up, huh?” I looked at the approaching gentleman, caught his eye, rolled my own eyes in exasperation. “Taking a shower,” I confided. “So I gotta stand here while he dries off and gets dressed and eve
rything.”

  He nodded sympathetically and hurried on by, hoping no doubt that I’d keep the rest of my sorrows to myself. When he turned the corner I hauled out my ring of tools and popped Knobby’s lock in less time than it takes to announce the fact. He had one of those spring locks that engages automatically when you close the door, and he hadn’t bothered to use the key to engage the deadbolt, so all I had to do was snick the thing back with a strip of spring steel and give the door a push.

  I slipped inside, closed the door, locked it more thoroughly than Knobby had done, and groped around for a light switch. I didn’t have rubber gloves with me and this time I didn’t care, because I didn’t expect to steal anything. All I really wanted was to find some evidence, and once I found it I could leave it there and quick go bring it to the attention of the police. There would probably be some subtle way to do this.

  If I got really lucky, of course, I might just find the caseful of jewels. In which event I would liberate my attaché case with the greater portion of its contents intact, minus a few choice and eminently traceable items which I could hide here and there on the premises where Todras and Nyswander could uncover them at their leisure. But it seemed all too probable that, if Knobby was the killer and thief, the jewels were tucked away someplace where I wouldn’t find them, not left in this apartment behind an imperfectly locked door.

  While I thought all of these things I was already getting busy tossing the place. This was a relatively simple job because of its size. Knobby had a studio apartment not very much bigger than Jillian’s place and a good deal more sparsely furnished. There was a captain’s bed in unpainted birch, a mahogany set of drawers with mismatched drawer pulls, clearly acquired secondhand, a comfortable chair and a pair of straightbacked side chairs. A stove and refrigerator and sink stood at the rear, ineffectively screened from the rest of the room by a beaded curtain.

  The place was sloppy. Bartenders have to be very neat at their work and I’d spent enough hours watching them polish glasses and put things away in their proper places to assume they were just naturally precise individuals. Knobby’s apartment disabused me of this notion. He had scattered dirty clothes here and there around the room, his bed was unmade, and one got the general impression that his cleaning woman had died months ago and had not yet been replaced.