wasn’t even Jewish.
This was always the most dangerous time, going in. Well, comingoutwas no picnic, either, but then you could march right through the front door, say you’d been there to fix the toilet or the sink, nice day, ain’t it? Somebody saw you going in, though, that was another story. Specially when you were going in through a window on a fire escape, nowthat was a little difficult to explain.
He’d been watching the apartment from the roof across the way for the better part of a week now, knew when the lady came and went, even had an opportunity once to see her in the altogether, though inadvertently, he wasn’t no damn Peeping Tom. Redheaded as a cardinal, she was, carpet matching the drapes, a fair sight to behold and a rarity in this day and age. He always so-called cased a joint, he hated criminal jargon, for at least a week before he went in, sometimes two or three, because the one yearning he did not have was to spend any more time behind bars.
Lady was putting on a short red fox jacket now, which meant maybe there were more furs in there than he’d figured. Thing that had first attracted him to her when he was scopingall the apartments across the way was a sable coat came down to the floor, had to be worth fifty large at least. You could always tell a woman with a new fur coat, she pranced in front of the mirror with it all day long. He decided that going into the apartment for just the sable alone might be worth it, plus whatever other little goodies he might find in there. The building was on South Ealey Street in a section of Isola called Silvermine. It was a doorman building, which usually meant any other kind of security was lacking. The lady was heading for the front door now—
“There we go,” Will said out loud.
He still spoke with a Texas twang he should’ve lost after thirty-seven years on this planet, especially since he’d left the state when he was eighteen and never did go back except for his mother’s funeral. He was still a sophomore at UCLA when she died. He guessed maybe her death had something to do with him flunking out the very next year. Her dying so young and all. He sometimes wondered if his life might’ve turned out different if she hadn’t died and he hadn’t flunked out of college. He wondered if he’d’ve become a burglar, anyway. He guessed maybe he would’ve.
Will gave her ten minutes to get clear.
Then he jumped the airshaft to the roof of her building, and came down the fire escape to the ninth floor. He wasn’t expecting any kind of burglar alarm, and there wasn’t any. He jimmied the turnbolt lock on the window, and was inside the apartment in ten seconds flat. No need for a flashlight here in the living room at ten in the morning. Anyway, there was nothing to steal in this room but a TV set and a stereo and he wasn’t any junkie burglar, thank you. He went into the bedroom, went to the windows first to pull down the shades so nobody would look in and see a guy six feet tall at a buck-ninety roaming a bedroom where a lady lived alone. Only when the shades were down did he go to the wall switch and snap on the overhead lights. Bed nicely made, he surely did appreciate neat people. He yanked back the cover, stripped both pillows of their pillow cases, and then went to the closet. The door was closed. He opened it and found—well, oh my stars—not only the long sable coat but a mink stole as well, the lady reallyhad been on a shopping spree. Both were too bulky to fit inside the pillow cases, he tossed them on the bed for now, and went to the dresser.
Everything neatly laid out here, too, rolled nylons and pantyhose in one drawer, tank tops and cotton panties in another, T-shirts and sweaters, all precisely put away as if they were color-coded or something, he figured all at once that either the lady was a nurse or else she’d been in the military. In the top drawer, there was a jewelry box. He opened it. Nothing in it but a bunch of cheap costume jewelry and a long white business envelope with a rubber band around it. He slid the rubber band off, opened the envelope. What he was looking at was a whole big bunch of U.S. currency. He fished in his jacket pocket for his eyeglass case, slipped the glasses out of it, hung them on his nose and his ears, and looked into the envelope again.
The money in there was hundred-dollar bills.
HE DIDN’T STOP TO COUNT THEM till he was safe at home again in his apartment on South Twelfth Street, just off Stemmler Avenue. This was now close to twelve noon, and it had begun snowing outside. He sat in an easy chair under a lamp with a lamp shade that somehow had ketchup stains on it, and took the white envelope out of his jacket pocket, and then took the rubber band off the envelope again, and took out the bills and began counting them.
What it turned out to be was $8,500 in hundred-dollar bills.
Will hadn’t expected such a big haul, and the very idea of sitting alone here four days before Christmas, in an apartment even he admitted was dingy, seemed illogical for a suddenly wealthy individual. He took $500 from the stack of hundreds, put on his coat, and went out whistling.
IT WAS SNOWING QUITE HEAVILY by the time Cass got back to the apartment at two-thirty that afternoon. She went into the living room, tossed the red fox jacket over the arm of the sofa, turned on the Christmas tree lights, and then poured herself a Courvoisier on the rocks. Sitting alone in a chair by the window, she sipped the cognac and basked in the winking glow of the Christmas tree, thinking how lucky she was to have a nice apartment like this one in this wonderful city at this very special time of the year. She wondered what she might like to buy next. Or should she wait till after Christmas, when she could get everything on sale? Today was the twenty-first. Christmas wasn’t too far off.
She eased out of her pumps, $400 at Bruno Magli, stretched her legs, and suddenly realized just how tired she was. Rising, carrying the shoes in one hand and the brandy snifter in the other, she walked into the bedroom, snapped on the light switch, and almost spilled cognac all over her brand-new dress, $2,100 at Romeo Gigli. The closet door was open. She saw in a single eye swipe that the sable and the mink were gone. All the dresser drawers were open, too. Her envelope with what was left of the Mexican tip money was gone. She felt an immediate sense of violation, someone had been in here, someone had taken her things, gone through her private possessions, taken her goddamnthings! She felt as angry as she had when some twerps in Basic pissed in her footlocker, felt like rushing to the still-open window and screaming at the top of her lungs, “You goddamnthief!,”a lot of good that would do. Calming herself slightly, but only slightly, she checked the closet and the dresser more closely, trying to ascertain if he’d taken anything more than the obvious. It seemed that was it. Hadn’t bothered with the Angela Cummings bracelet she’d bought last week, all shiny and bright in its aqua blue box. Hadn’t been lured by the Hermes scarf, or the cashmere sweater, or the pre-Hellenic winged Eros pendant from an antiques shop on Jefferson, had satisfied himself merely—merely!—with the sable and the mink and what was $8,500 in cash the last time she’d counted it, the son of a bitch!
She actually pounded the dresser top in anger, pounded it again and again with her closed fist, screaming, “You mother-fucking son of a bitch bastard!,” obscenities she hadn’t used since the war, and then calmed down just a little bit and went to the phone and dialed 911.
WILL WAS TELLING THE BLONDE that he’d been born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, but that he hadn’t been back there in quite a while.
“What’s the Will for?” she asked. “William?”
