Free Burglars Can't Be Choosers by Lawrence Block

police if I showed up there, but I don’t think that makesany sense either. Maybe he just wanted to go through the motions of setting up a meeting. To make the whole thing seem authentic.” I closed my eyes for a moment, running the scene through my mind. “I’ll tell you what’s funny. I have the feeling he kept trying to impress me with how tough he was. Why would he do that?”
    “So you’d be afraid to double-cross him, I suppose.”
    “But why would I cross him in the first place? There’s something funny about the guy. I think he was pretending to be tough because he’s not. Not tough, I mean. He talked the talk but he didn’t walk the walk. I suppose he must have been a con artist of some sort.” I grinned. “He certainly conned me. It’s hard to believe there was no blue box in that apartment. He had me convinced that it was there and that he really didn’t want me to open it.”
    “You don’t remember him from jail. Do you think he’s ever been arrested?”
    “Probably. It sort of comes with the territory. However good you are, sooner or later you step in the wrong place. I told you about my last arrest, didn’t I?”
    “When the bell was out of order.”
    “Right, and I wound up tossing an apartment while the tenants were home. And I had to pick a man with a gun and an air of righteous indignation, and then when I told him how we ought to beable to be reasonable about this and pulled out my walking money, he turned out to be the head of some civic group. I’d have had about as much chance of bribing a rabbi with a ham sandwich. They didn’t just throw the book at me, they threw the whole library.”
    “Poor Bernie,” she said, and put her hand on mine. Our hands took a few minutes to get acquainted. Our eyes met, then slipped away to leave us with our private thoughts.
    And mine turned, not for the first time, to prison. If I gave myself up they’d undoubtedly let me cop a plea to Murder Two, maybe even some degree of manslaughter. I’d most likely be on the street in three or four years with good time and parole and all that. I’d never served that much time before, but my last stretch had been substantial enough, eighteen months, and if you can do eighteen months you can do four years. Either way you straighten up and square your shoulders and do your bit one day at a time.
    Of course I was older now and I’d be crowding forty by the time I got out. But they say it’s easier to do time when you’re older because the months and the years seem to pass more rapidly.
    No women inside. No soft cool hands, no taut rounded bottoms. (There are men inside with taut rounded bottoms, if you happen to like that sort of thing. I don’t happen to like that sort of thing.)
    “Bernie? I could go to the police.”
    “And turn me in? It might make sense if there was a reward, but—”
    “What are you talking about? Why would I turn you in? Are you crazy?”
    “A little. Why else would you go to the cops?”
    “Don’t they have books full of pictures of criminals? I could tell them I was taken by a con man and get them to show me pictures.”
    “And then what?”
    “Well, maybe I’d recognize him.”
    “You’ve never seen him, Ruth.”
    “I feel as though I have from your description.”
    “A mug shot would just show his face. Not his profile.”
    “Oh.”
    “That’s why they call it a mug shot.”
    “Oh.”
    “I don’t think it’s a viable approach.”
    “I guess not, Bernie.”
    I turned her hand over, stroked the palm and the pads of her fingers. She moved her body a little closer to mine. We sat like that for a few minutes while I got myself all prepared to put my arm around her, and just as I was about to make my move she stood up.
    “I just wish we could do something,” she said. “If we knew the name of the man who roped you in we would at least have a place to start.”
    “Or if we knew why somebody wanted to kill Flaxford. Somebody had a reason to want him dead. A