“Flaxford, right.”

“He says when Flaxford discovered you, you panicked, but I thought about this, Mr. Rhodenbarr, and I don’t know if I can see you killing somebody in a panic. You didn’t do it?”

“Definitely not, Mrs. Hesch. In fact I’m trying to find out who did.”

“If you say so.” She was still keeping an open mind on the subject. “Though to be frank, those momsers on the East Side, what do I care if you did or didn’t? They got it coming is how I look at it. This is good coffee, isn’t it?”

“The best.”

“Coffee’s one thing I make a fuss about. You got to take the trouble or you’re drinking dishwater. Maybe you’re hungry, I didn’t think to ask. You like cinnamon buns?”

“I just had breakfast, Mrs. Hesch, but thanks.”

“Sit anyway. Where are you going? Sit, you’ll have another cup. You don’t have to be in such a hurry. One more cup of coffee ain’t gonna kill you. Sit!”

I sat.

“So you’re a burglar,” she said. “You mind a personal question? You make a pretty decent living at it?”

“I manage.”

She nodded. “Exactly what I told Whatsername in 11-J. I said a bright boy like that, clean-cut and a good dresser, always a smile or a nice word for a person, I said if he ain’t making a living he’ll get into something else. But it’s like talking to a wall, believe me, and then the other one, Gert, she starts in how she’s not safe in her bed. The people in this building, Mr. Rhodenbarr, take it from me, it’s like talking to a wall.”

Chapter Twelve

Most people who checked into the Cumberland had either a suitcase or a girl in tow. I was unusual in that I had one of each with me. My canvas suitcase looked slightly disreputable, but then so did my girl. She was wearing skintight jeans and a bright green sweater a size too small for her with no bra under it. And she’d done something moderately sluttish to her hair, and she was wearing dark lipstick and several pounds of eye shadow. She looked remarkably tawdry.

The clerk looked her over while I registered us as Mr. and Mrs. Ben G. Roper of Kansas City, which might have made more sense had my luggage been monogrammed. I gave him back the registration card along with a pair of ten-dollar bills, and while he was finding my change Ellie slid an envelope onto the counter. The clerk gave me $6.44 or thereabouts, then spotted the envelope with Brill’s name printed on it and blinked. “Where’d this come from?” he wondered.

I shrugged and Ellie said she thought it was there all along. The clerk didn’t seem terribly interested in this or much of anything else. He stuck it in a pigeonhole numbered 305.

Our own key was numbered 507. I grabbed my bag-there was no bellhop at the Cumberland -and Ellie walked with me to the elevator, her behind swaying professionally to and fro. The old man in the elevator cage chewed his cigar and took us up to the fifth floor without a word, then left us to let ourselves into our room.

It wasn’t much of a room. The bed, which took up most of it, looked as though it had had hard use. Ellie sat lightly on the edge of it, removed make-up, did something to her hair to make it as it had been originally.

“A lot of trouble for nothing,” she said.

“You enjoyed the masquerade.”

“I suppose so. I still look like a tramp in this sweater.”

“You certainly look like a mammal, I’ll say that much.”

She glowered at me. I checked my wig and cap in the bathroom mirror. They hadn’t made much of an impression on Mrs. Hesch, who never even noticed that my hair had changed color.

“Let’s go,” I said, then did a Groucho Marx thing with my eyebrows. “Unless you’d like to make a couple of dollars, girlie.”

“Here? Ugh.”

“A bed is a bed is a bed.”

“This one’s no bed of roses. Do people actually have sex in rooms like this?”

“That’s all they do. You don’t think anyone would sleep here, do you?”

She wrinkled her nose and we left, taking our suitcase with us. A call from Childs had established that Wesley Brill was out, and a knock on his door established that he hadn’t come back yet. I could have picked his lock in a couple of seconds but it turned out that I didn’t have to, because I stuck our room key in on a hunch and oddly enough it worked. Quite often the rooms on a particular line will respond to the same key-305 and 405 and 505, for instance-but now and then in older hotels the locks loosen up with age and a surprising number of keys turn out to be interchangeable.

Brill’s room was nicer than the ones they used for the hot sheets trade. It still wasn’t much but at least there was a piece of carpet covering some of the floor and the furniture was only on its penultimate legs. I put my suitcase on a chair, rummaged idly through Brill’s closet and dresser, then took my suitcase off the chair, put it on the floor, and sat on the chair myself. There was another chair with arms, and Ellie had already taken it.

“Well,” she said, “here we are.”

“Here we are indeed.”

“I wonder when he’s coming back.”

“Sooner or later.”

“Good thinking. I don’t suppose you thought to bring along a deck of cards?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Well, I never thought of playing cards as proper equipment for a burglar.”

“You always worked alone.”

“Uh-huh. You’d think he’d have a deck of cards here. You’d think anyone who spent a lot of time in this room would play a lot of solitaire.”

“And cheat.”

“Most likely. I’d pace the floor if there was room. I find myself remembering bad stand-up comics. ‘The room was so small…’ ”

“How small was it, Johnny?”

“The room was so small you had to go out in the hall to close the door.”

“That small, eh?”

“The room was so small the mice were hunchbacked. I have to admit I’ve never understood that line. Why would mice be hunchbacked in a small room?”

“I think you’ve got an overly literal mind.”

“I probably do.”

She smiled. “You’re nice, though. Just the same, literal mind or not, you’re nice.”

We would talk, fall silent, talk some more. At one point she asked me what I would do when it was all over.

“Go to jail,” I said.

“Not once we find the real killer. They’ll drop the other charges, won’t they? I bet they will.”

“They might.”

“Well, what’ll you do then? After it’s all over?”

I thought about it. “Find a new apartment,” I said at length. “I wouldn’t be able to stay where I am, not even if those visitors hadn’t turned it into a slum. All this publicity, the whole building knows about me. I’ll have to move someplace else and take the apartment under another name. It’ll be a nuisance but I guess I can live with it.”

“You’ll stay in New York?”

“Oh, I think so. I think I’d go crazy anywhere else. This is home. Besides, I’m connected here.”

“How do you mean?”

“I know how to operate in New York. When I steal something I know who’ll buy it and how to negotiate the sale. The cops know me, which in the long run does you more good than harm, although you might not think so. Oh, there’s any number of reasons why a burglar is better off operating in territory that he knows in and out. I don’t even like to work outside of Manhattan if I can avoid it. I remember one job I went on up in Harrison, that’s in Westchester -”

“You’re going to go on being a burglar.”

I looked at her.

“I didn’t realize that,” she said. “You’re going to keep on opening locks and stealing things?”

“What else?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ellie, on some level or other I think you think you’re watching all of this on television and I’m going to reform right in time for the final commercial. That may keep the audience happy but it’s not terribly realistic.”

“It isn’t?”

“Not really, no. I’m almost thirty-five years old. Opening locks and stealing things is the only trade I know. There’s a lot of ads in Popular Mechanics telling me about career opportunities in meatcutting and taxidermy but somehow I don’t think they’re being completely honest with me. And I don’t figure I could cut it by raising chinchillas at home or growing ginseng in my backyard, and the only kind of work I’m qualified for pays two dollars an hour and would bore the ass off me before I’d earned ten dollars.”