The Burglar Read online

  She saw the flashlight beams moving along below her, flitting from side to side. Now and then one of them would switch off for a few seconds and then switch back on as though to fool someone who would think the police had gone away. At least two cops reached the rear of the building. They spent some time sneaking up on a tall pile of lumber, with guns drawn, but nobody was hiding there. Next they moved to the house and she heard them doing the predictable thing, which was to try the doors and the first-floor windows to be sure none of them was unlocked or broken.

  There was more radio traffic, and then she heard two of the cops moving past the scaffold. When she could, she looked through the crack between the boards of her scaffold and saw the cops prowling around the house next door, checking its doors and windows too. She could see that they were not just going through the motions because they were here anyway. Somehow they had come to know that the house was either at risk or already being hit.

  Time passed, and she had to let it pass. One of the best strategies for hide-and-seek was to outlast the opponent, to simply remain silent and motionless longer than he thought you would. She didn’t like it much. It occurred to her that she also had a date tonight. She was supposed to go to dinner with a guy who wasn’t exactly fascinating, but she believed in keeping her word and being fair to men who asked her out. She didn’t want somebody with a legitimate grievance going around repeating it to every other guy and making her seem horrible. She had gone out with this one three times, so he would probably be madder if she stood him up now, because it would seem personal.

  The police should have left by now, and she was beginning to get uneasy. She had never been arrested for anything, and the prospect of arrest terrified her. If she got caught with a set of bump keys, a big razor-sharp knife, a lockpick, a tension wrench, and what looked like half a million bucks in jewelry, she would be in prison until she was ninety.

  And then one of the cops found a way in. She could see the beams of their flashlights inside the house next door. In a few minutes they’d be upstairs. That meant they’d be able to look out the window and see her up here on the scaffold.

  Elle grasped the vertical pipe frame of the scaffold, held on loosely, and slid downward to the second level. She heard a radio voice again, and this time it seemed to be coming from two places at once. Then she heard footsteps, this time running, and she went down on her belly on the second level and froze. She saw the other two policemen running across the driveway to the house next door, the one she had robbed. She held on to the vertical support and slid to the ground.

  As soon as her feet touched, she ran toward the street. She turned the corner of the house to the gate, lifted herself up, stepped on the chain and padlock, and slipped between the sides. Two cop cars were parked at angles so their snouts nearly touched at the gate, so she could barely get down without touching them. As she passed the open driver’s-side door of one, she heard the sound of the car’s engine, a quiet reassuring purr.

  In an instant she sensed this was the way. It was as though she were on a circus platform and a trapeze was swinging through the air toward her. If she jumped for it and caught it, she could swing to the other side. If she waited, thought, and decided, the trapeze would swing away from her, and the next time it swung back it would be out of her reach and her jump would propel her into the empty air and death.

  She slid onto the seat, shifted into reverse, grasped the steering wheel, and tugged the door toward her. She knew enough not to slam the door and enough not to drive past the house she had robbed. She swung the car around and gradually accelerated up the street. She turned the first corner, accelerated some more, and then made the next left. She parked the car at the curb near the third corner, turned it off, and took the keys. She ran around the corner to the street where she had left her own car. She had not wanted to drive right up to it and let the cop car’s automatic plate reader record her license plate, or let whatever dashboard device it might have see her or her car. She got out and never looked back, just ran as fast as she could to her car.

  As she drove, she noticed that she was breathing heavily. She wasn’t winded, and she wasn’t tired. As soon as she was a mile or so away, she began to shiver, and it lasted until she was home with her car in the garage and the doors locked. It took her over an hour before she felt calm enough to shower and dress for her date.

  At dawn the next morning, Elle Stowell was out running again. She had been dumped last night, and the guy wasn’t even her boyfriend. She had gone out with him three times—four if you included the breakup date. That part was astounding when she thought about it. While she had still looked like a prospect to him, he’d acted so broke that she’d wanted to pay for herself, him, a limo for each of them, and some food for whatever starving relatives and pets he had at home. But on the night he dumped her, he bought her a fancy dinner. Was she supposed to go home and console herself with the thought that she had been let down and cast off, but at least she’d ingested four thousand calories doing it?

  This one had been handsome but dense. She had spent three evenings listening for any indication that something was going on behind his eyes. Nothing ever peeked out. And his farewell speech was a variation on the theme that the problem wasn’t her—meaning the shape of her body and the features of her face—but him. He just didn’t feel he understood women.

  It was interesting to her how often men said they didn’t understand women. They were right that they didn’t, but it wasn’t because women were uncommunicative. Plenty of women she knew talked almost continuously. The problem was that men thought of themselves as being more similar to anything else on the planet—male horses or wildebeests or chipmunks—than to female human beings. Women were their opposite. To them, a thirty-two-year-old male physicist was more similar to a billy goat than to a thirty-two-year-old female physicist.

  Not that Elle was thirty-two or a physicist. She was twenty-four and a burglar, a sneak thief. This wasn’t a fact that she ever brought up with men, so it hadn’t been a factor in her rejection, but it was an important part of her existence, since it was the part that paid the bills. So once again she was running. She was jogging along a beautiful road south of Sunset that wound around in Beverly Hills and offered the occasional view of the Los Angeles Basin, and her purpose wasn’t to burn the calories from her valedictory dinner. She was casing houses along the route, looking for her next score.

  There was esoteric knowledge involved in being a burglar—broad areas that took some thought and skill. There was choosing the house, entering the house, and finding the items that were worth taking. Elle Stowell was good at all three.

  Elle was strong but small, so she couldn’t carry a seven-foot television out of a house if she’d wanted to. It didn’t matter because the real prizes were all small and dense—money, watches, jewelry, gold, guns, and collections—and usually they were to be found in or near the master bedroom suite. Some of the things she found in bedroom hiding places that fitted this description were revealing but not for her to take: secret cell phones for calling lovers, second sets of identification, bugout kits, or drugs.

  Her small size helped her. She looked like a person who would be out running at dawn in a rich neighborhood, so she didn’t worry people who saw her. There was a certain irony in this, because the same qualities made her a fearsome burglar. She could enter a house in dozens of ways that were impossible for a large man. She could easily crawl into a house through a dog door or take the glass slats out of a louvered window and slither inside. Both openings were common and neither was ever wired for an alarm.

  Elle had seen practically everything that made homes vulnerable. Spare keys were hidden in or under pots, on top of lintels, inside hollow imitation stones, or hanging on small-headed nails on the sides of two-by-fours in garages or outbuildings. These were good places to look anyway, because if there was no key, there would still be tools that would get her into a house. She always looked to see where these buildings were and whet
her they were easy to enter.

  She was also cautious. Before she committed herself she looked for a small, cheap car or two near the house, because these belonged to maids and nannies. Pickup trucks belonged to pool men and gardeners.

  Elle knew that a burglar was a sorry, selfish thing to be, but she had gotten started at a time when she was too young to be on her own and had to eat. She had known even then that burglary deprived rich people of stuff their insurance companies would pay to replace. It also shook their confidence and made them feel violated. That was bad, but it also made the act a little bit sexual, which all the most tempting crimes were. A burglar saw everything they’d hidden and learned a great many of their secrets, and even when Elle didn’t have time to accomplish that, they thought she had. They knew they had been exposed and, in a way, used for someone’s pleasure.

  Rich people felt the humiliation and loss more keenly than poor people did, because all those possessions and luxuries were dear to them, in some cases were them. Poor people had already been ripped off a thousand times and knew their possessions were crap. They had never invested anything useful in them, like their self-esteem or their souls. By adulthood the poor had been beaten into wisdom and detachment. Elle had known all about being poor by the time she was ten. Everything ever provided to her was cheap, worn, mismatched, and inferior. Even the name Elle had been a handicap.

  She wasn’t really sure why her mother named her Elle. She had once hoped it had been a naive feminist gesture, but suspected she was probably just named after the magazine or a person in a movie. When most people heard her name they asked her what the “L” stood for. Usually she just made something up—Lilith, Lorelei, Lamia.

  Elle had spent her childhood in South Pasadena, in an old house that was teeming with cousins. Her grandmother had raised three daughters and then raised their children too. Her mother had been the middle one, the girl who had been universally recognized as the most beautiful of three beautiful girls, but also the stupidest. Elle’s grandmother had admitted this freely in front of Elle. She had said, “Like a little china doll, and her head was just as hollow.” Elle gathered over time that her mother had been in a car with a boyfriend when he had driven the car into a concrete viaduct. Nobody had ever told her whether the boyfriend was her father, which led her to believe he wasn’t. No other candidates were ever mentioned to Elle.

  Growing up in the big old house didn’t take her as long as it took the others. She was out on her own at fourteen. Now and then she had brought back sums of money for her aunts and grandmother. For a time she had the notion that she would come back one day and live with the family again, bringing with her enough money to get the cousins educated. When concocting this plan she had assumed that everything would stay the same long enough for her to return before any big changes occurred, so they would happen right. They didn’t.

  Her grandmother died, and the aunts emptied the house and split up their nine children. Then the aunts went off with men, never for a second misleading anyone into thinking these would be permanent men; they were only the men for now. Men had never been members of the family. They were like the stepping-stones in the back garden, hard surfaces where you put one light foot while the other was already in motion toward the next.

  Elle had started out thinking of her family’s name, Stowell, as aristocratic. The old house was big, and the chimney had a metal “S” built into it. She was already fifteen and a novice burglar when she realized that the S-iron was common, not really the letter, but a support that masons used to strengthen the brick structure of a chimney. She also learned that the name Stowell was not a relic of faded grandeur, just a name her grandmother had assumed because she thought it sounded like a good one for an imaginary husband. It combined two historic New England names, Stowe and Lowell.

  Elle had studied her profession. She had taken enough night classes in locksmithing, electronics, and other skills to wonder if the community colleges were mostly packed with studious thieves. She had recognized a few while she was there.

  She had also learned what she could from other thieves she met when she was selling her prizes. An older man who called himself Shadrack taught her that carrying a gun was a bad idea. In California the sentence was worse for using a gun in the commission of a crime than for burglary. And besides, he said, when you carried one, it seemed the gun itself was trying to get you to use it. In her years working after that she had learned he was right. There had been a few times when she would certainly have shot somebody if she’d had a gun, but she had not.

  As she ran she was feeling hopeful. She knew that Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were the best times to fly out of LAX, so they were the best times to look for an empty house. The tickets were cheaper then than on Friday or Saturday, and Sunday was the day everybody’s bosses wanted him to fly out on business, a way of getting a free day from an employee by placing him at some advantageous spot for the opening of business on Monday morning. This made Monday unpredictable, combining the passengers coming home from those Monday morning meetings and the vacationers who had decided to stay an extra day to avoid the late Sunday crowds. She avoided Monday altogether.

  Morning was best because a person going to the East Coast had to go early in the morning or arrive too late in the evening to accomplish much other than paying for an extra night in an overpriced hotel. There was also the fact that strange things happened in the fall, winter, and spring in the parts of the country that had weather. When they happened, the whole airline system became increasingly backed up late in the day.

  Everything was right this morning. Her outfit and exact way of carrying herself were calculated to convey the right impression at a glance. There was no point in staring at her, because that glance told a person everything. She had to run hard, because that was the universal way of the innumerable young women who ran in Los Angeles. They were serious year-round runners, and they ran as though they were in a race. And part of her disguise was driving the right car, so this morning she had parked a small rented Mercedes at the edge of the neighborhood.

  Elle searched for the signs as she ran—people carrying suitcases to put into waiting limousines; houses where the morning newspaper landed on yesterday’s edition, which still lay in the driveway; houses where the wrong lights were on at the wrong time of day.

  She didn’t stop right away at any house this morning. She picked out the most promising place and circled back later to make sure there was nobody at a window or standing outside one of the neighboring houses who might notice her.

  At the house she picked she saw there was a fresh sheaf of printed ads for local services stuck in the mail slot at the front door. The door was at least sixty feet from the front gate, where ads were commonly left. She saw the ads as a good sign. About a third of the people who delivered the ads were doorknob rattlers looking for an unlocked door so they could slip in and take something. She wasn’t the only one who thought this owner wasn’t at home.

  The place she had picked was a large green house with a complicated arrangement of gables and peaks that featured a great deal of roof covered with composite shingles. It looked as though it had been inspired by a country house in England that was roughly the shape of a haystack. There were some eccentric details—tall, thick natural-wood doors under rounded arches, gardens hemmed by stucco walls with bougainvillea growing along the tops, old-fashioned windows that opened on hinges.

  As she came up the driveway, she searched for her own way in and found it at the back. At the top of the slope of the overhanging second-floor roof there was an inch opening between a dormer window and the sill. Maybe that was supposed to air out the hot attic, or maybe somebody had neglected to shut it completely. Not only did it look like an easy way in for Elle, but it presented a possible shortcut to the second floor, where the master bedroom suite was almost certain to be. Best of all, the fact that it was partially open meant that there weren’t contacts on the window and sill that connected to a live alarm cir
cuit.

  She wheeled the black garbage bin, which was heavier than the blue recycling one or the green one for trimmings, under the lowest edge of the awning over the patio, pulled herself onto the awning, crawled to the roof, stepped to the attic window, sliced two inches of the screen with her knife, unhooked it, and climbed inside.

  The attic was dusty and hot even at dawn, and the floor consisted of two-by-fours with insulation laid between them. She tightrope-walked a two-by-four to an elaborate trapdoor with steps. She had seen these contraptions before. They included the trapdoor, the steps, and a weighted counterbalance that kept the steps from swinging down freely and hitting hard and loud, and made the steps easy to raise again. This system was a piece of good design and workmanship, so with a minimum of effort she made the steps sink quietly to the middle of the second-floor hallway and stay there while she descended.

  She froze and listened for a full minute in case she had misinterpreted the signs of absence and someone was in the house. There was a difference between the sort of silence that meant a house was occupied but quiet and the sort that meant it was empty. When people were around, there were tiny hums from things that a person would turn off if he was leaving for weeks, and open interior doors expanded the space and absorbed echoes. This sounded like an empty building.

  She began to look for the bedrooms. There was a length of hall behind her, another length ahead of her, and a turn to the left just off the landing of the swirling staircase from the foyer. The upstairs landing had a few white marble sculptures along the walls, but it was the paintings that distracted her.

  They were eighteenth-century English portraits in the realistic grand style of Joshua Reynolds and his followers. All the subjects were male and unfamiliar to her except in type, but their painting was masterful. She didn’t want to waste time on them, because she considered stealing art to be like volunteering for prison. There was no way to move fine art in the United States except famous paintings, and they were recognizable by definition.