It wasn’t the money. What really troubled me was that I’d been driving around unwittingly with an empty tank. The thing is, I don’t steal cars very often. I don’t even drive them all that frequently, and when I do go and rent one for a weekend in the country, the Olins people give it to me with the tank full. I can be halfway to Vermont before I even have to think about gasoline.
I wasn’t going to Vermont tonight, just to Forest Hills, and I could have gone there easily enough on the E train. That’s how I’d made the trip a few days earlier when I did some basic reconnaissance. But I hadn’t felt like coming home by subway, preferring as I do to avoid public transportation when my arms are full of somebody else’s belongings.
And when I found the Pontiac on Seventy-fourth Street, I’d figured it for a sign from on high. GM cars are the easiest for me to get into and the simplest to start, and this one had Jersey plates, so no one would be surprised if I drove it eccentrically. Finally, the owner was unlikely to report it stolen. He’d parked it next to a fire hydrant, so he’d have to assume the cops had towed it away.
Jesse Arkwright lived in Forest Hills Gardens. Now Forest Hills itself is a nice solid middle-class neighborhood set south of Flushing Meadows in the very center of the Borough of Queens. Three out of four houses there contain at least one woman who plays mah-jongg when she’s not at a Weight Watchers meeting. But Forest Hills Gardens is an enclave within an enclave, a little pocket of haute bourgeoise respectability. Every house is three stories tall, with gables and a tile roof. All of the lawns are manicured, all of the shrubbery under tight discipline. A neighborhood association owns the very streets themselves, keeping them in good repair and restricting on-street parking to neighborhood residents.
Cars from underprivileged neighborhoods make frequent forays into the quiet streets of Forest Hills Gardens, their occupants darting out to knock down matrons and make off with alligator handbags. And private police cruisers patrol those same streets twenty-four hours a day to keep that sort of thing to a minimum. It’s not Beverly Hills, say, where every pedestrian is perforce a suspicious character, but the security’s pretty tight.
It’s even tighter on Copperwood Crescent, an elegant semicircle where massive piles of stone and brick sprawl on spacious wooded lots. The residents of Copperwood Crescent include a shipping-line heir, two upper-echelon mafiosi, the owner of a chain of budget funeral parlors, and two to three dozen similarly well-heeled citizens. One private cop car has as its sole responsibility the safeguarding of Copperwood Crescent, along with four adjoining and similarly exclusive streets-Ironwood Place, Silverwood Place, Pewterwood Place, and Chancery Drive.
If Forest Hills Gardens is the soft underbelly of Queens, Copperwood Crescent is the ruby in its navel.
I didn’t have any trouble finding the ruby. On my earlier trip I’d walked all around the neighborhood armed with pocket atlas and clipboard-a man with a clipboard never looks out of place. I’d found Copperwood Crescent then and I found it now, barely slowing the Pontiac as I rolled past Jesse Arkwright’s house, an enormous beamed Tudor number. On each of the three floors a light burned in a mullioned window.
At the end of Copperwood Crescent I took a sharp left into Bellnap Court, a quiet block-long cul-de-sac that was out of bounds for the Copperwood-Ironwood-Silverwood-Pewterwood-Chancery patrol car. I parked at the curb between a couple of sizable oaks and cut the engine, removing my jumper wire from the ignition.
You need a sticker to park on the street, but that’s to keep commuters from cluttering the area during daylight hours. Nobody gets towed at night. I left the car there and walked back to Copperwood Crescent. If the patrol car was on the job, I didn’t see it, nor did I notice anyone else walking about.
The same three lights were lit in the Arkwright house. Without hesitation I walked the length of the driveway at the right of the house. I shined my pencil-beam flashlight through a garage window. A gleaming Jaguar sedan crouched on one side of the garage. The other stall was quite empty.
Good.
I went to the side door. Below the bell on the doorjamb was an inch-square metal plate slotted for a key. A red light glowed within, indicating that the burglar alarm was set. If I were Mr. Arkwright, equipped with the proper key, I could insert it in the slot and turn off the alarm. If, on the other hand, I were to insert anything other than the proper key, sirens would commence to sound and some signal would go off in the nearest police station.
Fine.
I rang the doorbell. The car was gone and the alarm was set, but you just never know, and the burglar least likely to wind up in the slam is the sort of chap who wears suspenders and a belt, just in case. I’d rung this bell before, when I’d come calling with my clipboard, asking meaningless questions in aid of a nonexistent sewer survey. As then, I listened to the four-note chime sound within the huge old house. I pressed my ear to the heavy door and listened carefully, and when the chimes quit echoing I heard nothing at all. No footsteps, no sign of human life. I rang again, and again I heard nothing.
Good.
I walked around to the rear of the house again. For a moment I just stood there. It was pleasant enough, the air uncharacteristically clear and clean. The moon wasn’t visible from where I stood but I could see a scattering of stars overhead. What really awed me was the silence. Queens Boulevard was only blocks away but I couldn’t hear any of its traffic. I suppose the trees kept the noise at bay.
I felt hundreds of miles from New York. The Arkwright house belonged in a Gothic novel, brooding over windswept moors.
Myself, I had no time for brooding. I put on my rubber gloves-skintight, their palms cut out for comfort’s sake-and went to have a look at the kitchen door.
Thank God for burglar alarms and pickproof locks and tight security systems. They all help discourage the amateurs even as they give the citizenry a nice sense of safety and well-being. Without them, everybody would stash all the good stuff in safe-deposit boxes. Beyond that, they help make burglary the challenging occupation I’ve always found it. If any splay-fingered oaf could do as well, what fun would it be?
The Arkwright home had a first-rate burglar alarm, Fischer Systems’ model NCN-30. I could see for myself that it was wired to all the ground-floor doors and windows. It might or might not have been connected to higher windows-most people don’t take the trouble-but I didn’t want to walk up a wall to find out one way or the other. It was simpler to rewire the system.
There are a few ways to beat a burglar alarm. One brutally direct method calls for cutting the lines supplying power to the house. This does lack subtlety-all the lights go out, for openers-and it’s counter-productive when you’re dealing with a good system like the NCN-30, because they have fail-safe devices that trigger them under such circumstances. (This can have interesting ramifications during a power failure, incidentally.)
Ah, well. I used some wires of my own, splicing them neatly into the picture, wrapping their ends ever so neatly with electrical tape, and by the time I was done the alarm was working as well as it had ever worked, but for the fact that it no longer covered the kitchen door. A regiment of cavalry could parade through that door without NCN-30 kicking up a fuss. The whole operation was more than your average burglar could do, and isn’t it lucky that I’m not your average burglar?
With the alarm hors de combat, I turned my attention to the thick oak door, an hors of another color. A skeleton key opened its original lock, but there were two others, a Segal and a Rabson. I held my little flashlight in one hand and my ring of picks and probes in the other and went to work, pausing now and again to press an ear against the thick wood. (It’s like seashells; if you listen carefully you can hear the forest.) When the last tumbler tumbled I turned the knob and tugged and shoved and nothing happened.