The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams (11 page)

“So you took them away from your kid.”

“I borrowed a book from Marty,” he said, “and I checked the lad’s cards, and not too surprisingly there was nothing rare or valuable in the lot. They were in terrible condition, Scotch tape on some of them, others all beat up and scuffed and folded. But there was one, if it hadn’t been in such bad condition, it would have been worth fifty bucks.”

“Wow.”

“What could I have paid for it? It seems to me you used to get a whole pack for a quarter, and that included the gum. They don’t bother giving you the gum anymore, you know. They found out the kids just threw it away. Anyway, say I paid a nickel for that card, and now it was worth fifty bucks. Or at least it would have been if I’d taken decent care of it.”

“Next time you’ll know.”

“Exactly what I told myself. ‘This time,’ I said, ‘you take good care of your cards.’ And I started collecting. I let my kid keep my old junk and I started right in buying quality, and…”

And the phone rang.

“Barnegat Books,” I said.

“Hello, Bernie.”

A woman’s voice, familiar but hard to place. Then I reached out and nailed it.

“Well, hello, Doll. I didn’t expect to hear from you.”

“What a greeting! But you’re the doll, Bernie. They’re absolutely gorgeous.”

“They are?”

“The roses are spectacular.”

Oh, I thought. Wrong woman. “Patience,” I said.

“And the African violet is the sweetest thing, but I have to warn you, I have a brown thumb. I can never keep plants alive.”

“It’s supposed to help if you talk to them.”

“I know, but I never know what to say. Do you suppose this one likes poetry? I could read to it.” She sighed. “I don’t know what to say to you, either. Two nights in a row, two broken dates in a row, two different friends breaking them for you—or do you do voices, too?”

“Just Jimmy Stewart.”

“I can hardly wait. Two different excuses, first a burrito and then a burglary. Both words are on the same page of the dictionary, but of course you know that. That’s the page you break all your dates from, isn’t it?”

“Patience—”

“We could make another date,” she said, “but I’d only get a phone call advising me that you wouldn’t be able to make it because you’d been eaten by a bugbear. Or bummed out, or bumped off, or some bumptious buckaroo had burst your bubble. The roses are truly beautiful.”

“I’m glad.”

“I was feeling terribly depressed. I get that way a lot. Most poets do, it’s sort of an occupational illness. But then the flowers came and cheered me right up. So it’s hard for me to stay mad at you. Are you really a burglar?”

“I can explain,” I said.

“Whenever people say that, they can’t. But I’ll give you a chance. Tomorrow night there’s going to be a poetry reading at the Café Villanelle on Ludlow Street. Do you know where that is?”

“Sort of.”

“Two of my clients will be reading, and I promised I’d go. I may read something myself, I’m not sure. The readings scheduled to start at ten o’clock, but it’s all right to come early. It’s all right to come late, too. It’s even okay not to come at all.”

“Patience—”

“What’s not okay,” she said, “is to have any of your legion of friends call with an excuse, no matter what letter it starts with. So maybe I’ll see you tomorrow night, Bernie, and maybe I won’t.”

“You will.”

“But if you don’t come,” she said, “do me a favor. Don’t send flowers.”

“So I started off small,” he said. “Same as when I first got into real estate. You make some mistakes, but how else are you going to get the feel for what you’re doing? You have to be willing to go in there and get your feet wet. You take your medicine, you pull up your socks, and you get right back up on the horse.” He frowned, and who could blame him? “Bernie,” he said, “you don’t need to listen to all this crap.”

“It’s interesting.”

“It’s nice of you to say that, but let’s cut to the chase, huh? We can do each other some good here. Each of us has something the other wants. I’ve got a storefront I can let you have for thirty years at half the price of a rooftop pigeon coop in Bensonhurst. And we both know what you’ve got.”

“What?”

He grinned. “Marty’s baseball cards.”

“I
n 1950,” I told Carolyn, “the Chalmers Mustard Company got up a special promotion. Every time you bought a jar of their mustard, you got a free coupon. If you mailed it in, they sent you three baseball cards.”

“I never heard of Chalmers Mustard.”

“You didn’t grow up in Boston. Chalmers was strictly local, and I gather a major corporation acquired the company a few years ago, but back then it must have been hot stuff. If you bought a frankfurter at Fenway Park, you got Chalmers Mustard on it.”

“Unless you said, ‘Hold the mustard.’ ”

“There were forty of these cards,” I went on, “and they all showed the same player, Ted Williams, who was the one thing in Boston hotter than Chalmers Mustard. They showed him in different poses and doing different things. Mostly hitting, of course, because that was what he was so good at, but also catching fly balls and trotting around the bases, and holding his cap in his hands while they played the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ and signing autographs for little kids.”

“I think I get the idea.”

“In order to get all forty cards, you’d have had to buy a ton of mustard.”

“Fourteen jars,” she said. “And then you’d have two extras to trade for Dwight Gooden.”

“He wasn’t even born then. The thing is, you wouldn’t necessarily get different cards every time you sent in a coupon, any more than you do nowadays when you buy a pack of baseball cards at the candy store. I gather they made more of some cards than others, and the high-numbered cards weren’t distributed until late in the promotion. The idea was to make you buy as much mustard as possible.”

“Sneaky.”

“And not terribly effective, as it turned out, because kids got pretty tired of getting the same pictures of Williams every time the mailman showed up. And I guess their parents got tired of buying endless jars of mustard. There were no investors around at the time, either. So the whole thing sort of died out, with relatively few of cards #31 through #40 ever reaching the hands of collectors. That makes complete sets pretty hard to come by.”

“And very valuable, I suppose.”

“Not really,” I said, “because this was strictly a regional issue, all of it tied to a single player, so it’s not something you absolutely have to have in order to consider your collection complete. Most of the card encyclopedias don’t even list it. And the cards themselves are pretty ugly, according to Stoppelgard. The photos are all black-and-white and the printing job leaves a lot to be desired. And the series is just too long. A dozen cards devoted to one player might be interesting, but forty is too many. So the series was never popular.”

“What’s it worth?”

“Hard to say. If you want a complete set, you pretty much have to hunt around and pick it up a card or two at a time. And you have to be careful about condition, because a lot of cards were poorly printed. I pressed Stoppelgard for a number, and he said that card #40 is genuinely rare, and would probably bring a thousand dollars. The common cards in the series bring anywhere from ten to twenty dollars, and cards #31 through #39 might go for a hundred apiece.”

“So the whole set would be worth—”

“Something in the neighborhood of three thousand dollars. Pocket change, from Borden Stoppelgard’s point of view, but that’s not the point. The point is that Marty Gilmartin had the set and Stoppelgard didn’t.”

“And Stoppelgard wanted it?”

“Desperately. And Gilmartin wouldn’t sell it to him. Gilmartin didn’t give a hoot about Ted Williams, but he still insisted on holding on to the set, which struck Stoppelgard as a real dog-in-the-manger attitude.”

“So he wants you to give him the set.”

“Along with the rest of Gilmartin’s baseball cards, in return for which I get a sweetheart deal on the store lease. I wish I’d had the damn cards. I’d have done the deal in a hot second.”

“Really, Bern? I thought Gilmartin’s collection was worth a million dollars.”

“That’s according to Gilmartin. It’s only insured for half that, which means the insurance company would probably pay twenty or twenty-five percent of half a million to avoid having to pay the claim. If I let Ray be the go-between, he’d wind up with half, so what would that leave me? Fifty, sixty thousand dollars?”

“If you say so.”

“I might do better fencing the cards myself,” I said. “That might boost the take up into the low six figures. Well, as Stoppelgard pointed out, the new lease would be worth almost that much to me in the first year. You bet I’d have taken the deal.”

“I don’t suppose he believed you when you told him you didn’t have the cards.”

“I’m not sure.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t even think he cared,” I said. “If I want to extend my lease, all I have to do is bring him half a million dollars’ worth of baseball cards. It doesn’t matter to him if they’re Marty’s cards. It doesn’t even matter if the Chalmers Mustard set is part of the package, although that would certainly be a sweetener. But he doesn’t care where they come from, and I don’t suppose he really cares if they’re baseball cards. He’d settle for Sue Grafton first editions if they added up to half a mil. You know what Scott Fitzgerald said.”

“Was he Geraldine’s brother?”

“ ‘The very rich are different from you and me,’ Well, so are the very greedy. When he thought I was a poor but honest bookseller, all Stoppelgard wanted to do was get me out of his building. As soon as he found out I was a convicted felon, he was in a rush to be friends. Because he figures he can use me.”

“Can he?”

“I hope so,” I said. “Because what I want is to save the store, and for the first time in weeks I have hope.”

I also had Perrier. We were at the Bum Rap, and I didn’t want to drink anything that might slow my reflexes or blur my already questionable judgment. “It’s not that I have anything planned beyond a quiet evening at home,” I explained, “but I want to keep my options open.”

“I understand, Bern.”

“There’s something about spending a night in a cell,” I said, “that throws off your timing. When Patience phoned me at the store, I called her Doll. I got away with it. She thought I was being breezily affectionate.”

“It never would have worked if you’d called her Gwendolyn.”

“No.”

“Bern? How come you thought it was Doll?”

“I don’t know.”

“Were you thinking about her?”

“Not consciously. I was in the middle of a conversation with Borden Stoppelgard. If I was thinking of anybody, it was probably Ted Williams.”

“You don’t suppose—”

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

“You didn’t let me finish the question.”

“ ‘You don’t suppose they’re both the same person?’ That was the question, wasn’t it? And the answer is no, I don’t.”

“Think about it, Bern.”

“I don’t want to think about it,” I said, “because it’s out of the question. They’re two different women.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I saw them, Carolyn.”

“Yeah, but did you ever see them both at the same time?”

“No,” I said, “and I probably never will, but if I ever do it won’t be hard to tell them apart. For starters, Doll’s a brunette and Patience is a dishwater blonde.”

“Ever hear of wigs, Bern?”

“Patience is a good four inches taller than Doll.”

“High heels, Bern.”

“Cut it out, will you? Patience looks as though she could have stepped out of a painting by Grant Wood or Harvey Dunn. She’s tall and slender and she has a long
O, Pioneers!
face and angular features. Doll has a heart-shaped face and very regular features and—”

“Hey, it was just a thought, Bern.”

“They’re two different women.”

“Whatever you say. Just don’t jump down my throat, okay? I had a rough day.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I was up half the night worrying about you, and then I had to give a wash and set to a puli with dreadlocks. Do you know what a challenge that is? Pulis and komondors, the Rastafarians of the dog world.” She picked up her glass, found it empty, and gave it a look. “It’s either have another of these or go home. I think I’ll go home.”

I rode uptown on the subway. I didn’t pick up the paper, and nobody picked me up, either. I looked around, sort of hoping I’d see Doll Cooper lurking in a doorway somewhere, but I didn’t. I walked home and nodded to my doorman, who nodded right back at me. Was he the same nodding acquaintance who’d reported my movements to the cops? I decided he was, and I decided his Christmas envelope was going to be a little light this year.

My apartment was as I’d left it. I’d been hoping that elves might have come in and cleaned during my absence, and they hadn’t, but neither had Ray Kirschmann come to give the place another toss. I put the TV on, and during the second set of commercials I called the Hunan Miracle and ordered dinner. In no time at all the kid was at my door with a bag full of sesame noodles and moo shu pork. After I’d paid and tipped him he smiled hugely and rushed off to shove menus under all my neighbors’ doors.

I settled in for a quiet evening at home.

It was almost eleven when the phone rang.

I answered it. A woman’s voice said, “Mr. Rhodenbarr?”

“Yes?”

“I’m not even sure you’ll remember me, but you did me a huge favor the night before last.”

“It wasn’t such a huge favor. All I did was walk you home.”

“You remember.”

“You’d be hard to forget, Doll.”

“That’s right, you created a new name for me. I’d forgotten, because nobody’s called me that since. When you said it just now it came out sounding like a line from Mickey Spillane. ‘You’d be hard to forget, Doll.’ You should be smoking an unfiltered cigarette and wearing a slouch hat, and there should be something bluesy playing in the background.”

“A girl singer,” I said, “working her way through ‘Stormy Weather.’ ”

“Or ‘Easy to Love.’ Just as you’re saying, ‘You’d be…hard to forget,’ you hear her in the background, singing, ‘You’d be…so easy to love.’ Nice touch, don’t you think?”

“Very nice.”

“I’m sorry. You know what I’m doing? I’m stalling. I have to ask you for another favor and I’m afraid you’ll say no. Could I talk with you?”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing?”

“I mean face to face. I’m at the coffee shop at West End and Seventy-second. If you come down I’ll buy you a cup of coffee. Or I could come up to your place.”

I glanced around. The elves hadn’t come, nor had I done their work for them. “I’ll be right down,” I said. “How will I recognize you?”

“Well, I still look basically the same,” she said. “I haven’t aged that much in the past two days. My outfit’s different. I’m wearing—”

“Red vinyl hot pants and a Grateful Dead T-shirt.”

“I’ll be in a booth in the back,” she said. “Come see for yourself.”