Read Online Burglars Can't Be Choosers by Lawrence Block - Free Book Online Page A

not likely to speak up and nobody’s going to take my word for anything, and you can’t do much in the way of proving your case. As a matter of fact, I don’t see why you believe me to begin with.”
    “You have an honest face.”
    “For a burglar, maybe.”
    “And I’m a very intuitive person.”
    “So I’ve been given to understand.”
    “J. Francis Flaxford,” she said.
    “May he rest in peace.”
    “Amen. You know, I can never bring myself to trust men who turn their first name into an initial that way. I always feel they’re leading some sort of secret life. There’s just something devious about the way they perceive themselves and the image they present to the world.”
    “That’s quite a generalization, isn’t it?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. Look at the record. G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt—”
    “Fellow burglars, both of them.”
    “Do you have a middle name, Bernie?”
    I nodded. “Grimes,” I said. “My mother’s maiden name.”
    “Would you ever call yourself B. Grimes Rhodenbarr?”
    “I never have. Somehow I doubt I ever shall. But if I did it wouldn’t mean I was trying to hide something. It would mean I had taken leave of my senses. B. Grimes Rhodenbarr, for God’s sake! Look, plenty of people have first names they’re not nuts about, and they like their middle names, so—”
    “Then they can drop their first names entirely,” she said. “That’s open and aboveboard enough. It’s when they keep that sneaky little initial out in front there that I don’t trust them.” She showed me the tip of her tongue. “Anyway, I like my theory. And I wouldn’t dream of trusting J. Francis Flaxford.”
    “I think you can trust him now. Being dead means never having to do anything sneaky.”
    “I wish we knew more about him. All we really know is that he’s dead.”
    “Well, it’s the most salient fact about him. If he weren’t dead we wouldn’t have to know anything at all about the sonofabitch.”
    “You shouldn’t call him that, Bernie.”
    “I suppose not.”
    “ De mortuis and all that.”
    De mortuis indeed. She gnawed the last of the meat from her chicken bone, then gathered together all of our leavings and carried them to the kitchen. I watched her little bottom as she walked, and when she bent over to deposit the chicken bones in the garbage I got a lump in my throat, among other things. Then she straightened up and set about pouring two cups of coffee and I made myself think about the late Francis Flaxford, with a J. in front of his name and an R.I.P. after it.
    The night before I’d wondered idly if the dead man was actually Flaxford. Maybe some other burglar had been working the same side of the street, taking advantage of Flaxford’s scheduled absence and arriving there before me. Then he’d managed to get his head dented and had been there when I showed up.
    But who would have killed him? Flaxford himself?
    No matter. The corpse was truly Flaxford, a forty-eight-year-old entrepreneur and dabbler in real estate, a producer of off-off-Broadway theatrical ventures, a bon vivant, a man about town. He’d been married and divorced years and years ago, he’d lived alone in his plush East Side apartment,and someone had smashed his skull with an ashtray.
    “If you were going to kill somebody,” Ruth said, “you wouldn’t use an ashtray, would you?”
    “He liked substantial ashtrays,” I told her. “There was one in the living room that would have felled an ox. A big cut-glass thing, and they say the murder weapon was a cut-glass ashtray, and if it was a mate to the one I saw it would have done the job, all right.” I looked at the Post story again, tapped a fingernail against his picture. “He wasn’t bad-looking,” I said.
    “If you like the type.”
    He had a good-looking, high-browed face, a mane of dark hair going gray at the temples, a moustache that his barber had taken pains to trim.
    “Distinguished,” I said.
    “If you say so.”
    “Even