I don't often think back to those early days, but then I don't often crawl through milk chutes. So I let all of this go through my mind, and it was a mind that might have been better occupied with the task of getting through the milk chute as quickly as possible. Because, as you can readily appreciate, one is at one's most vulnerable during the transitional interval when one is neither inside nor outside of the house. If someone were to come along while my head was in the coat closet and my legs suspended above the driveway, I'd be hard put to explain what I was doing there and unable to run off and do it somewhere else.

But I couldn't hurry through, because I'd somehow reached a point, half in and half out, where I'd achieved an undesirable state of equilibrium, an unwelcome stasis. Wriggling and squirming weren't getting me anywhere, and I couldn't grab onto something and pull myself through because, damn it to hell, I'd put my arms at my sides in order to fit my shoulders through, and now my arms were pinned there by the sides of the milk chute.

All I had to do, I told myself, was the right sort of wriggling. If I set about squirming in an ergonomically sound manner, so as to build up a little momentum, why in no time at all…

Hell.

It wasn't working.

For God's sake, was this how it was going to end? Half in and half out of somebody else's house, unable to move in either direction, with nothing to do until Mapes and his wife came home and called the cops? If this had happened when I first tried this stunt, back in my pre-salad days, my whole career in burglary might have ended before it had begun. If it hadn't happened then, why did it have to happen now?

I might have had further thoughts on the matter, might even have enjoyed the irony of it all, but right about then a pair of hands came along and grabbed me by the ankles.

Twenty-Two

I hadn't heard a car, hadn't heard so much as a footfall. My head was in the closet, literally if not figuratively, with coats and other outerwear all around it, so that would tend to muffle the sound. And it's not as though I was listening hard all the while. I was too busy with my wriggling and squirming, not to mention my remembrance of milk chutes past, to have been keeping an ear open. Had Carolyn honked the horn? Three times, I'd told her, loud and long. But would I have heard it if she had? The car was in a closed garage, and I was in a coat closet. Maybe she'd honked and I hadn't noticed.

The hands on my ankles might as well have been bands of steel. My heart sank, my mind froze, and all I could do was hope Carolyn got out in time, and that she'd think to call Wally Hemphill for me.

Hours passed, or maybe they were only seconds. And a voice said, "It's me, Bern."

And that's all she said. There were any number of other things she could have said, and I'd have had to listen to them, but she didn't, and that is just one more reason why Carolyn and I will be friends forever. She didn't say another word, but what she did do was tighten her grip on my ankles and give a little push, and that was all it took. I landed facedown in a dark closet, and I couldn't have been happier about it.

Forty minutes later I unlocked the side door, the one adjacent to the milk chute, and let myself out of the house. I'd found the control panel for the alarm system in the entry hall next to the front door-that's where they usually put it, so the homeowner can punch in his code when he walks in the door. I'd studied the Kilgore system, and knew it had zones; you could set it to bypass certain zones, so that you could open a second-floor window for ventilation without setting off a ton of bells and whistles. I worked out what zone the side door was in, bypassed it, and let myself out of the house.

Like most homemakers, Mrs. Mapes kept extra grocery bags in a kitchen cupboard. I'd helped myself to four, because what I was taking was heavy enough to warrant double-bagging. I tucked each of two shopping bags into each of two others, filled them up with what I'd found in the safe in the master bedroom, added one other item I could hardly leave behind, and carried everything out of the house and up the length of the driveway to the garage, where Carolyn let out a breath she must have been holding for the greater portion of the time I'd been inside.

"I was beginning to worry," she said. "You were in there for almost an hour."

"It was forty minutes," I said.

"That's almost an hour. Here, let me get the door for you. You want me to push the button for the garage door?"

"After I get these in the car." There was a release button for the trunk lid, especially convenient if you don't have a key. I pressed it, put the bags in the trunk, and got behind the wheel. Carolyn pressed the button, and by the time the garage door was up she was in her seat next to me. I started the car and backed all the way out of the garage, leaving the motor running while I pressed the button a final time to lower the garage door. I was still wearing my gloves, and I used my gloved hands to wipe off surfaces she might have touched.

She noticed this, and told me she was pretty sure she hadn't touched anything. "Well, just in case," I said, and went back to the side door, using my picks to relock it. Carolyn had closed the milk chute door earlier, after I'd cleared it, and I opened it long enough to wipe it free of prints, then closed it and fastened the latch to leave it as I'd found it. I'd already refastened the catch on the inner door.

I got in the car again, backed the rest of the way out of the driveway. There was no traffic on Devonshire Close, which was good and bad-there were fewer passers-by to notice us, but we were correspondingly more noticeable to anybody who did. Soon, though, we were on another street-Ploughman's Bush, it must have been-and before long we were on Broadway, heading south toward Manhattan.

We could have gone home the same way we'd come-the Henry Hudson, the West Side Drive-but something kept me on Broadway, moving at a sedate pace, stopping for red lights, resuming our journey when they turned green. It's a venerable old road, Broadway, running from the foot of Manhattan clear up to Albany. I'd read an article written by a fellow who walked the length of it-not from Albany, but from the Westchester County line. He'd told about what he'd seen, and the history of it all, and I gather you could see quite a bit on a walk like that. You can probably see a fair amount driving, as far as that goes, but I wasn't paying attention.

" Bern?"

"What?"

"Is something wrong?"

"No. Why?"

"You're not talking."

"Oh," I said. "You're right, I guess I'm not."

"So I thought maybe something was wrong."

"No," I said. "Everything's fine."

"Oh."

"There was a whole lot of money," I said. "I guess he got paid in cash fairly often, and the trouble with cash is you have to launder it. Either that or declare it, and then you have to pay taxes on it, and then what's the point? But until you figure out how to launder it, without paying as much in laundry bills as you'd have had to pay in taxes, well, you can just stow it somewhere."

"And that's what he did?"

"He stowed it in his safe, and that's the wrong word for it, because it wasn't. I thought I might have to pull it out and take it home where I could work on it in private, and that would have been fine, but once I took the seascape down from the wall and went to work on it, it was about as hard to open as the milk chute."

"And you didn't have to crawl through it, either."

"Aside from the cash," I said, "he had the usual things you keep in a safe. Stock certificates, the deed to the house, a couple of insurance policies, other important papers. And some of her jewelry. She had a little rosewood chest on top of her dresser, and it was full of jewelry, but she kept some of her better pieces in the safe."