THE CASE OF THE HUNGRY BURGLAR : Or, a Tale of Felony Food Criticism

THE HUNGRY BURGLAR is now part of our lives.

Although my husband and I wish it were not so, we were his intended victims in the middle of a recent night. Had we all behaved the way we were supposed to, he would have gotten away. But I woke up (even though the Hungry Burglar was wearing soundless sneakers, warmly referred to in some circles as “felony shoes”) and woke Larry, who got out of bed and came upon the intruder, who had made the fatal tactical error of having a snack in our kitchen, instead of taking the food to go. He overstayed his welcome--and, in an indefensible if unprosecutable aside, he insulted my cooking. He will suffer very real consequences having to do with an enforced stay in unpleasant surroundings. Larry will probably have a few more bad dreams about the incident. And I will be plagued, forever, by the question: What exactly was wrong with the Italian potato torta ?

AT 18-AND-CHANGE, Greta the cat tends to wander the house at night, musing loudly on the state of the universe, so when I am awakened by noises at 1:40 one morning, I dismiss them as cat sounds. She makes her usual journey through the kitchen, into the living room, and then into my office--and though her footsteps sound a bit heavier than usual, I blame my overactive imagination, which tends to rev particularly high in the dead of night. We live in an unremarkable older section of Santa Monica. It is Greta. I instruct myself to go back to sleep.

But the noise persists: It sounds as if Greta is doing a soft-shoe on top of the papers on my desk. I decide to give in to my childish fear and wake Larry. I’ll apologize; I’ll say that I know I am being crazy, that it is just the cat, but would he please go out there with me and turn on all the lights? Then I’ll feel better and be able to sleep.

So I reach behind myself for his shoulder, and my hand lands (the gasp comes right here) on Greta’s slumbering head.

I have never been more frightened in my life.

I nudge Larry and--ever the optimist--suggest that either there is another animal in the house, or we have an intruder. Clearly sharing my hope for a wayward cat, Larry gets out of bed, grabs the big flashlight that stands next to his nightstand, and marches into the living room.

His fantasy of a rogue feline lasts about five seconds, until he sees the light at the back of the house, coming from the open refrigerator. Then, just as his brain starts to form the question, “What kind of animal could open a refrigerator door? A possum?” he realizes that the refrigerator door has grown a set of human legs. He yells. “Get the hell out of here!”

When Larry yells, I hit the little red alarm button on the wall next to the bed, and a siren (which sounds too much like a car alarm to alarm anyone) splits the air. And then I have a vision. I see Bette Midler in the party scene in “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” shrieking, “Call 911! Call 911!” The security company is supposed to call the police, but the extra precaution can’t hurt and might help; ask any man who wears both a belt and suspenders. So I call 911.

A woman’s voice answers.

“There’s someone in our house,” I say.

“Are you in your house?” she asks.

“Yes.”

That gets her attention.

Meanwhile, the Hungry Burglar has stepped from behind the refrigerator door, in medias brew, and, without bothering to finish his beer, decides to call it a night. Maybe he thinks Larry’s flashlight is a gun. Maybe he thinks anybody brash enough to confront him will keep coming. He runs outside, kicks down our wooden gate and takes off.

The 911 lady keeps me on the line while she talks to the police. I call out to Larry to make sure that he is all right; he calls back that the burglar is running up the alley; I peek out the bedroom window and tell Ms. 911 that I see a man running up the alley; and she tells me that an officer will be at our house at any moment.

At which point the doorbell rings. Neither of us is what you might call dressed for company, so we throw on our clothes and allow Officer D. Thomas, who is reassuringly well-groomed for 2 in the morning, into our house. He feeds Larry’s description of the intruder into his two-way radio to other cops in the neighborhood. Are we interested in a guy in a ski jacket? No. Our visitor wore a camouflage jacket. While we wait, we take a tour of the house to try to figure out what happened.

It seems that the burglar entered through the dog door (it was an easy in, since the dog whose door it was died last year; only the cat uses it now). He tried to untangle a Medusa’s head of wires from the stereo in the living room, and, failing, decided to hit the refrigerator. A trail of mozzarella crumbs made the rest of his route easy to track. He checked out the back bedroom and worked his way through my office, where he unhooked a tape player and amplifier, packed them into an old nylon bag of mine and rifled at leisure through my purses. He took the one I was using at the moment and returned to the kitchen, where he examined its contents and appropriated all the cash.

And then he tempted fate: He had a meal. He followed the mozzarella with a chicken breast. He opened a beer. He hung around five minutes longer than he should have; he gave us time to see him, and to act.

Taboo food has meant trouble since Adam and the apple, and it was the Hungry Burglar’s downfall. Over Officer Thomas’ radio, we can hear a suspect in the process of being apprehended. A breathless officer gives chase, and then a calmer voice asks if the witnesses could please come to the Lucky supermarket parking lot and take a look at the suspect.

Officer Thomas reads us a warning to witnesses, sort of a flip side of the Miranda rights, reminding us that we have as much a responsibility to exonerate the wrong suspect as we do to incriminate the right one, and then he drives us over to the parking lot, where our burglar awaits, bathed in a harsh pool of squad car headlights. Larry identifies him, we take the bag with my tape player and amplifier back, and are joined at home by ID Technician Alferos, an absolutely imperturbable fellow who apologetically dusts the house for fingerprints and jokes about how he’s not going to hang around because we don’t have any leftovers left.

Around 4, after all our house guests are gone, we try to restore order: Larry scrubs off the greasy fingerprint-dust residue, and I clean up the refrigerator. That’s when I see it--the bite mark in a wedge of potato torta that has fallen off the platter. The burglar tried it and put it back. Somehow this is more of an affront than the pinched property and missing cash. I worked hard on that torta , a big, round, baked concoction of potatoes, cheese, salami, tomatoes and garlic. Everybody who ate it two nights before liked it; people had seconds. Who is this guy to turn his nose up at my cooking, when he wasn’t even invited in the first place?

I am furious. Sleep is out of the question. We crawl back into bed and Larry turns on the TV. I would not have been surprised to see Charles Bronson, Arnold Schwarzenegger or even Bernie Goetz on the screen, but we are luckier than that: We stumble into the middle of “A Sunday in the Country,” the story of an elderly French painter whose stodgy son and mercurial daughter visit him one weekend. There are no cat burglars in that part of France. Just a sweet old man and his kids and his grandkids and his erstwhile cook, who strings beans while the shallow daughter-in-law says stupid things to her.

Whenever I see that scene I always think about how much I like to cook. And now, slowly, I start to calm down. I come up with a perfect, if revisionist, rationale: Clearly the burglar was looking for dessert, after the cheese and the chicken. He must have thought the torta was a cheesecake. He didn’t put it back because it was bad--he put it back because it wasn’t what he had in mind.

In 10 minutes I am asleep. Larry sits up until 6:30, though; the dawn patrol.

That wasn’t the end of it, of course. Our nightly sign-off (“Good night.” “Sweet dreams”) was expanded to include, “Did you set the house alarm?” and we have installed metal bars across the dog door. We dwell, too often, on the fact that all three of us were incredibly lucky: We got an unarmed burglar whose instinct was to flee; he got a couple who didn’t own a famished Rottweiler or a handgun. But we’re back to some semblance of a normal life. Forget the goods and cash: At least I have my self-respect back. We can still have people over for a home-cooked meal--as long as we remember to lock the door after the last guest leaves.

(THE HUNGRY BURGLAR--SO named in deference to my lingering paranoia and his mother’s feelings--is a 40-year-old transient who pleaded guilty to first-degree burglary and was sentenced to two years in state prison. The probation report indicated that he had been a journeyman electrician at the studios, but had been unemployed for 18 months, used cocaine and needed money. His mother, who spoke on his behalf at the sentencing, expressed her wish that whatever the sentence, her son might come back and make a better life. As for the rejected potato torta, the police seem to have had the same problem with it as the burglar did: A victim of mistaken identity, it is listed in the police report as a piece of cherry cheesecake.)