Read Burglars Can't Be Choosers for Free Online

a bookcase set up as a sort of room divider screening off a sleeping alcove. The kitchen was small and uninviting. The bathroom was smaller and less inviting, and roaches scampered when I turned the light on. I turned it off again and went back to the living room.
    A homey place, I decided. Well-worn furniture, probably purchased secondhand, but it was all comfortable enough. A scattering of plants, palms and philodendrons and others whose names I did not know. Posters on the walls, not pop posters of Bogart and Che but the sort printed to herald gallery openings, Miró and Chagall and a few others as unknown to me as some of the plants. I decided, all in all, that Rod had fairly good taste for an actor.
    The rug was a ratty maroon carpet remnant about twelve feet square, its binding coming loose on one side and entirely absent on another, its threads quite bare in spots and patches, its overall appearance decidedly unwholesome. Next time, I thought, I’ll bring along the bloody Bokhara.
    And then I started to shake.
    The Bokhara wasn’t bloody, of course. Lorenhad merely fainted upon it. But the rug, in the bedroom I had not seen, presumably was. Bloody, that is.
    Who had killed the man in the bedroom? For that matter, who was the man in the bedroom? J. Francis Flaxford himself? According to my information he was supposed to be away from home from eight-thirty at the latest to midnight at the earliest. But if the whole point of that information had been to put me on the spot where I could get tagged for homicide, well, I couldn’t really put too much stock in it.
    A man. Dead. In the bedroom. And someone had beaten his head in, and he was still warm to the touch.
    Terrific.
    If I’d only had the sense to give the whole apartment a looksee the minute I went into it, then it would have been an entirely different story. One quick reconnaissance mission and I’d have seen the late lamented and been on my way. By the time the illustrious team of Kirschmann and Kramer made their entrance I’d have been back in my own little tower of steel and glass, sipping Scotch and smiling southward at the World Trade Center. Instead I was a fugitive from what passes for justice these days, the very obvious murderer of a murderee I’d never even met in the first place. And, because my presence of mind had been conspicuous by its absence,I’d reacted to things by (a) using brute force and (b) scramming. So that if there’d ever been any chance of convincing people I’d never killed anything more biologically advanced than cockroaches and mosquitoes, that chance had vanished without a trace.
    I paced. I opened cupboards looking for liquor and found none. I went back, tested another chair, decided the one I’d already sat in was more comfortable, then rejected both chairs and stretched out on the couch.
    And thought about the curious little man who’d gotten me into this mess in the first place.

Chapter
Four
    H e was a thick-bodied man built rather like a bloated bowling pin. While he wasn’t terribly stout, they’d been out of waists when he reached the front of the line that day. He must have had to guess where to put his belt each morning.
    His face was round and jowly, with most of its features generally subdued. His eyes came closer to prominence than anything else. They were large and watchful and put me in mind of a pair of Hershey’s Chocolate Kisses. (With the foil removed.) They were just that shade of brown. His hair was flat black and perfectly straight and he was balding in the middle, his hairline receding almost to the top of his skull. I suppose he was in his late forties. It’s good I’m a burglar; I could never make a living guessing age and weight at a carnival.
    I first met him on a Thursday night in a drinkingestablishment called The Watering Whole. (I’m sure whoever named it took great pride in his accomplishment.) The Whole, which in this instance is rather less than the sum of its parts, is a singles