And that was about the size of it. I had done as thorough a job of shaving as I possibly could, and the only way to invest more time in the process would be to shave my head. It’s an indication of my state of mind that there was a point when I actually considered this, thinking that my wig would fit much better if I had no hair of my own underneath it. Fortunately the notion passed before I could do anything about it.

At one point I did dial my own apartment again, just out of boredom. I got a busy signal and it spooked me until I realized that it didn’t necessarily mean my phone was off the hook. It could mean that the circuits were busy, which happens often enough, or it could mean that someone else was trying to call me and he’d gotten connected first. I tried a few minutes later and the phone rang and no one answered it.

I went back to the television set and hopped around the channels. WOR had some reruns of Highway Patrol and I sat back and watched Broderick Crawford giving somebody hell. He’s always been great at that.

I took out my little ring of keys and picks and weighed it in my hand, while weighing in my head the possibility of giving some of the other apartments in the building a quick shuffle. Just to keep my hand in, say. I could check the buzzers downstairs, get the names, look them up in the phone book, determine over the phone who was home and who wasn’t, and go door to door to see what would turn up. Some clothing in my size, say, or some cat food for Esther and Mordecai.

I never really gave this lunacy serious consideration. But I was so desperate for things to think about that I did give it some thought.

And then somewhere along the line I dozed off in front of the television set, paying token attention to the story until some indeterminate point where it faded out and my own equally uninspired dreams took over. I don’t know exactly when I fell asleep so there’s no way of saying just how long I slept, but I’d guess it was more than an hour and less than two.

Maybe a noise outside woke me. Maybe my nap had simply run its course. But I’ve always thought it was the voice itself; I must have heard and recognized it on some subconscious level.

Whatever the cause, I opened my eyes. And stared. And blinked furiously and stared again.

It was a few minutes after five when Ruth got back. I’d very nearly worn out the rug by then, pacing back and forth across its bare threads, scuttling periodically to the phone, then backing away from it without so much as lifting the receiver. At five o’clock the TV news came on but I was too tautly wired to watch it and could barely pay attention while a beaming chap rattled on and on about something hideous that had just happened in Morocco. (Or Lebanon. One of those places.)

Then Ruth’s step on the stairs and her key in the lock, and I opened the door before she could turn the key and she popped energetically inside and spun around to lock the door, the words already spilling from her lips. She seemed to have no end of things to tell me about the weather outside and the facilities at the public library and the service for J. Francis Flaxford, but she might as well have been speaking whatever they speak in Morocco (or Lebanon) for all the attention I was able to pay her.

I cut in right in the middle of a sentence. “Our fat friend,” I said. “Was he there?”

“No, I don’t think so. Not at the service and not at Pandora’s. That’s a pretty crummy bar, incidentally. It-”

“So you didn’t see him.”

“No, but-”

“Well,” I said. “I did.”

Chapter Nine

“An actor!”

“An actor,” I agreed. “I slept through most of the movie. I was just lucky that I woke up for his scene. There he was, looking back over the seat of his cab and asking James Garner where he wanted to go. ‘Where to, Mac?’ I think that was the very line I came in on, word for precious word.”

“And you recognized him just like that?”

“No question about it. It was the same man. The picture was filmed fifteen years ago and he’s not as young as he used to be, but who do you know that is? Same face, same voice, same build. He’s put on a few pounds since then, but who hasn’t? Oh, it’s him, all right. You’d know him if you saw him. As an actor, I mean. I must have watched him in hundreds of movies and TV shows, playing a cabdriver or a bank teller or a minor hoodlum.”

“What’s his name?”

“Who knows? I’m rotten at trivia. And they didn’t run the list of credits at the end of the movie. I sat there waiting, and of course Garner never happened to hail that particular cab a second time, not that I really expected him to, and then there were no credits at the end. I guess they cut them a lot of the time when they show movies on television. And they don’t always have them in the first place, do they?”

“I don’t think so. Would he be listed anyway? If he didn’t say more than ‘Where to, Mac?’ ”

“Oh, he had other lines, Maybe half a dozen lines. You know, talking about the weather and the traffic, doing the typical New York cabbie number. Or at least what Hollywood thinks the typical New York cabbie number ought to be. Did a cabdriver ever say ‘Where to, Mac?’ to you?”

“No, but not that many people call me Mac. It’s funny. You said he seemed familiar to you and you couldn’t figure out where you saw him before.”

“I saw him on the screen. Over and over. That’s why even his voice was familiar.” I frowned. “That’s how I recognized him, Ruth. But how in the hell did he recognize me? I’m not an actor. Except in the sense that all the world’s a stage. Why would an actor happen to know that Bernie Rhodenbarr is a burglar?”

“I don’t know. Maybe-”

“Rodney.”

“Huh?”

“Rod’s an actor.”

“So?”

“Actors know each other, don’t they?”

“Do they? I don’t know. I suppose some of them do. Do burglars know each other?”

“That’s different.”

“Why is it different?”

“Burglary is solitary work. Acting is a whole lot of people on a stage or in front of a camera. Actors work with each other. Maybe he worked with this guy.”

“I suppose it’s possible.”

“And Rodney knows me. From the poker game.”

“But he doesn’t know you’re a burglar.”

“Well, I didn’t think he did. But maybe he does.”

“Only if he’s been reading the New York papers lately. You think Rodney happened to know you were a burglar and then he told this actor, and the other actor decided you’d be just the person to frame for murder, and just to round things out you went from the murder scene to Rodney’s apartment.”

“Oh.”

“Just like that.”

“It does call for more than the usual voluntary suspension of disbelief,” I admitted. “But there are actors all over this thing.”

“Two of them, and only one of them’s all over it.”

“Flaxford was connected with the theater. Maybe that’s the connection between him and the actor who roped me in. He was a producer, and maybe he had a disagreement with this actor-”

“Who decided to kill him and set up a burglar to take a fall for him.”

“I keep blowing up balloons and you keep sticking pins in them.”

“It’s just that I think we should work with what we know, Bernie. It doesn’t matter how this man found you, not right now it doesn’t. What matters is how you and I are going to find him. Did you notice the name of the picture?”

“The Man in the Middle. And it’s about a corporate takeover, not a homosexual ménage à trois as you might have thought. Starring James Garner and Shan Willson, and I could tell you the names of two or three others but none of them were our friend. It was filmed in 1962 and whoever the droll chap is who does the TV listings in the Times, he thinks the plot is predictable but the performances are spritely. That’s a word you don’t hear much anymore.”