Burglars Can't Be Choosers Read Free Page B

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.
    “Why?” I asked again, and there was a moment of confusion with Loren trying to explain that his wife was a Taurus because of when she was born, and me explaining that what I wanted to know was why Ray had asked me my age, and Ray looking sorry he’d brought the whole thing up in the first place. There was something about Loren that seemed to generate confusion.
    “Just age making you sloppy,” Ray explained. “Making noises, drawing attention. It’s not like you.”
    “I never made a sound.”
    “Until tonight.”
    “I’m talking about tonight. Anyway, I just got here.”
    “When?”
    “I don’t know, a few minutes ago. Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes at the outside. Ray? You sure you got the right apartment?”
    “We got the one’s got a burglar in it, don’t we?”
    “There’s that,” I admitted. “But did they specify this apartment? Three-eleven?”
    “Not the number, but they said the right front apartment on the third floor. That’s this one.”
    “A lot of people mix up left and right.”
    He looked at me, and Loren slapped the nightstick against his palm and managed to drop it. There was a leather thong attaching it to his belt but the thong was long enough so that the nightstick hit the floor. It bounced on the Chinese rug and Loren retrieved it while Ray glowered at him.
    “That’s more noise than I made all night,” I said.
    “Look, Bernie—”
    “Maybe they meant the apartment above this one. Maybe the woman was English. They figure floors differently over there. They call the first floor the ground floor, see, so what they call the third floor would be the floor three flights up, which you and I would call the fourth floor, and—”
    “Jesus.”
    I looked at Loren, then back at Ray again.
    “What are you, crazy? You want me to read you your rights and all so you’ll remember you’re a criminal caught in the act? What the hell’s got into you, Bernie?”
    “It’s just that I just got here. And I never made a sound.”
    “So maybe a cat knocked a plant off a shelf inthe apartment next door and we just got lucky and came here by mistake. It’s still you and us, right?”
    “Right.” I smiled what certainly ought to have been a rueful smile. “You got lucky, all right. I’m nice and fat tonight.”
    “That so?”
    “Very fat.”
    “Interesting,” Ray said.
    “You got the key from the doorman?”
    “Uh-huh. He wanted to come up and let us in but we told him he ought to stay at his post.”
    “So nobody actually knows I’m here but you two.”
    The two of them looked at each other. They were a nice contrast, Ray in his lived-in uniform, Loren all young and neat and freshly laundered. “That’s true,” Ray said. “Far as it goes.”
    “Oh?”
    “This’d be a very good collar for us. Me’n Loren, we could use a good collar. Might get a commendation out of it.”
    “Oh, come on,” I said.
    “Always possible.”
    “The hell it is. You didn’t nail me on your own initiative. You followed up a radio squawk. Nobody’s going to pin a medal on you.”
    “Well, you got a point there,” Ray said. “What do you think, Loren?”
    “Well,” Loren said, slapping the stick against his palm and nibbling thoughtfully on his lower lip. The stick was beat up and scratched in contrast to the rest of his outfit. I had the feeling he dropped it often, and on surfaces more abrasive than Chinese carpets.
    “How fat are you, Bernie?”
    I didn’t see any point in haggling. I generally carry an even thousand dollars in walkaway money, and that was what I had now. Coincidentally enough, the ten hundreds in my left hip pocket were the very ones I’d taken as an advance on the night’s work, so if I gave it all to my coppish friends I’d break even, with nothing lost but my cab fare and a couple of