Burglars Can't Be Choosers Read Free

track of what bit of trivia you stowed in what arcane hiding place than it would be to keep everything in a single steamer trunk and just rummage through it when there was something you needed. But I suppose there are plenty of people who get enormously turned on by the notion of a place for everything and everything in its place. They’re the people who line up their shoes in the closet according to height. And they remember to rotate their tires every three months, and they set aside one day a week for clipping their fingernails.
    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 todrawer 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. Ididn’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