The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams (15 page)

O
nce, briefly, there was a Second Avenue subway. Back in the seventies they dug up the street for miles. Then they ran out of money, so they left everything just long enough for most of the retailers to go out of business. Then they filled in all the tunnels they’d dug, and then they went home. By taxi.

Which is how I went downtown. A subway would have been quicker and cheaper, but then I’d have missed my chance to tell Hashmat Tuktee how to find Ludlow Street when I wasn’t all that certain myself. He was newly arrived from Tajikistan, was Hashmat Tuktee, and he grinned at everything as if he still couldn’t believe his good fortune. “I am Tajik,” he told me. “You probably think I am Uzbek.”

“Not in a million years.”

“You know my country?”

“I know it when I see it on a map. It’s the one that’s shaped like a rabbit.”

This may not have been the right thing to say, although it’s perfectly true. “We are a proud people,” he said, grinning furiously. “Very proud.” He stamped down on the accelerator and we flew for eight or ten blocks. Then we caught a light and he stamped down just as hard on the pedal. He swung around and grinned at me. “Tell me,” he said. “What is rabbit?”

“An animal of great power and wisdom.”

“Ah,” he said.

I knew Ludlow Street crossed Delancey, so that meant it ran north and south. I figured it probably started or ended at Houston, having ended or started at Canal, but I wasn’t exactly sure—

You don’t have to know all this. We took Second Avenue to Houston and found Ludlow and crept along it until I spotted Café Villanelle, a dim little storefront tucked in between a burned-out building and an empty lot. Hashmat Tuktee beamed at the sight of it.

“Like my city,” he said. “Like Dushanbe.”

“Really?”

“Have fighting there now. Burn buildings, break windows. We are a proud people.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“Great fighters,” he said, showing his teeth. “Fight like rabbits.”

A villanelle, as you probably recall, is an old French verse form in which two lines take turns ending all of the stanzas, and then wind up as the last couplet of the final stanza. (There’s got to be a better way to explain it, but I’m obviously incapable of it.) Dylan Thomas wrote a couple of villanelles, including “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” More recently, Marilyn Hacker has made interesting use of the form.

I didn’t hear any villanelles that night at the eponymous café, or anything with much in the way of traditional form. There were some arresting images (“I’ll paint the roof of your mouth with menstrual blood!”), some noteworthy rhymes (“Mother, your ovaries / Are nothing next to Madame Bovary’s”), and now and then something with a faintly familiar ring to it (‘‘How do I hate you? Let me fucking count…”).

The room itself was small and dark. The walls and ceilings were black, and the sole illumination was provided by black candles set in empty cat food cans. There wasn’t much of a crowd, so I had no trouble finding Patience and getting a seat next to her.

I don’t know how long we were there. I looked at my watch a couple of times. If the light had been better, I might have reached for my wallet and looked at my calendar. Some of the poets recited their work in a deliberately uninflected monotone. Others declaimed and emoted. One fellow with a high forehead and lank shoulder-length hair sang some poems, accompanying himself on the guitar. He only knew a couple of chords, but then he was only using two melodies, ‘‘The Yellow Rose of Texas” and ‘‘Moonlight in Vermont.”

Nothing lasts forever. Eventually the woman who seemed to be in charge of the proceedings announced that the evenings program was concluded, but that those who were up for it were welcome to hang around for an informal session. My heart sank at the prospect, but Patience was already getting to her feet, and I followed her out to the street.

An empty cab came along just as we cleared the Villanelle’s doorway. God knows what he was doing there. My guess is he was lost. I stuck out a hand and found him, and we got in and Patience gave him her address.

She lived on Twenty-fifth Street between Park and Madison, two flights above a shop that trades in reconditioned sewing machines. We didn’t say much on the way there. She seemed detached, shut down. In her apartment she made a pot of herbal tea and filled two cups. It tasted as though it could cure just about anything.

‘‘I’m sorry, Bernie,” she said, standing at her window and gazing out at a blank wall. ‘‘You were sweet to come, but I never should have dragged you all the way down there. It was awful, wasn’t it?”

‘‘It wasn’t so bad. I thought you were going to read.”

“I didn’t feel up to it. That’s not a great room to read in.”

“Well, black candles.”

“It’s funny, but I always expect a black candle to have a black flame. But of course they never do.”

“No.”

“The poems were ghastly, weren’t they?”

“Well—”

“They’re good therapy,” she said. “It’s wonderful that they’re able to bring all that emotion to the surface. And having them perform is a very valuable part of the process. They really put themselves out there that way. Some of those people won’t be the same after a night like this.”

“I can believe it.”

“But the poems themselves,” she said, “are enough to make you weep.”

“They weren’t all that bad. The guy with the guitar—”

“Not all of those poems were his. A lot of them were Emily Dickinson’s. You can sing almost anything of hers to the tune of ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas.’ And you can sing any and all haiku to ‘Moonlight in Vermont.’ ”

“Really?”

“Sure. ‘Haiku’s such a bore / Sheer pretentious balderdash / Stick it in your hat.’ Try it yourself, Bernie.”

“ ‘Wonder why the Japs / Think they’re writing poetry / They’re just marking time.’ ”

“That’s the idea. Nothing to it, really. ‘Pomp and circumstance / Prairie dogs and cauliflower / Moonlight in Vermont.’ ”

“I kind of like that one, Patience. ‘Prairie dogs and cauliflower.’ ”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I should write it down.”

I took a cab home from Patience’s loft. When I got to my door I heard the phone ringing, but by the time I was inside it had stopped. I hung up my blazer. I’d taken off my tie earlier, at the Villanelle, where even without it I’d felt more than a little overdressed. I got it from my pocket and frowned at it, wondering if the wrinkles would hang out. I hung it up to give them a chance and the phone rang.

It was Doll. “Thank God,” she said. “I’ve been calling and calling.”

“What’s the matter?”

“ ‘Film at eleven.’ You must not have seen the news.”

“No.”

“Turn it on now. You have cable, don’t you? Turn it on. Right now, I’ll hold on.”

“What am I supposed to turn on? CNN? Headline News?”

“Channel One. You know, the twenty-four-hour local news channel. Turn it
on.
”

“Hold on,” I said.

First I had to watch as a professionally sympathetic reporter interviewed survivors at a tenement fire off Boston Road in the Morrisania section of the Bronx. Then they cut to a light-skinned black woman doing a stand-up in front of a building that looked familiar. She reported that the nude corpse found as the result of an anonymous tip in a luxurious Upper West Side apartment had been identified as that of Lucas Santangelo, thirty-four, of 411 West Forty-sixth Street. The dead man, an unemployed actor, had no known connection to the owner-occupants of the apartment, a Mr. and Mrs. Harlan Nugent, who were in any case out of the country, according to neighbors in the building.

“Death appears to have been the result of a single gunshot wound,” she said, “but whether it may have been self-inflicted seems to be an open question at this stage. My hunch is that there’s more to come on this one, Chuck.”

“Thanks, Norma, and now for a look at tomorrow’s weather—”

I killed the set and went back to the phone. “Wow,” I said.

“When we went there,” she said, “they must have already hauled him out in a body bag.”

“Are you sure?”

“Don’t you remember what the old lady was saying about cops in the hallways? What do you think she was talking about?”

“I thought she said some woman killed her husband.”

“So she got it wrong. They hadn’t identified him yet.”

“The address they gave—”

“Way west on Forty-sixth Street. It’s a rooming house. He stayed there for a couple of weeks when he first moved to New York years ago. The thing is, the apartment on West End was never in his name. It was one of those things where he was subletting it from a rent-controlled tenant. That’s how he could afford to live there. Bernie, what are we going to do?”

“I don’t know about you,” I said, “but I’m going to go to sleep. I was going to shower first, but I think I’ll let that go until morning.”

“But—”

“You’re upset,” I said, “because he was your boyfriend. But I never even met the guy.”

“My fingerprints are all over his apartment.”

“You just said the apartment’s in somebody else’s name. Maybe they’ll never get there.”

“They’ll get there,” she said. “They’ll talk to the right person at the rooming house and find out he didn’t live there anymore, and then they’ll call the Actors Equity office and get the right address. Shit, all they really have to do is look in the phone book. Lucas Santangelo, 304 West End. Even the cops ought to be able to figure that out.”

I wasn’t so sure of that, but I let it pass. I told her that she might get drawn into the case, if anybody happened to volunteer the information that she had been romantically involved with the dead man. If that happened, all she had to do was tell them an abbreviated version of the truth. “You didn’t know him that well,” I said. “He was one of several men that you were friendly with—”

“God, that makes me sound like a tramp.”

“—and you broke up with him recently, and saw him for the last time a week ago. If you left fingerprints in his apartment, well, so what? I’d be surprised if they gave his apartment a second look. I gather they think he may have killed himself.”

“Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know why anybody would do it,” I said, “but it’s something people seem to do all the time. Maybe it just struck him that his life wasn’t working out.”

“Right, he had half a million dollars’ worth of baseball cards in his attaché case and it depressed him so badly that he shot himself. Where would he get a gun?”

“Maybe he had one all along.”

“You searched his apartment top to bottom this afternoon,” she said. “Did you see a gun?”

“No, I didn’t,” I said. “On the other hand, you couldn’t really expect him to put it back in his sock drawer after shooting himself upstairs in 9-G.”

“I didn’t think of that,” she said softly.

“No, because you’re too upset to think clearly. I’m not upset, but I’m certainly exhausted. It’s been a long day.”

“It’s been almost twelve hours since I met you at your bookstore.”

“And I’d already put in half a day by then. I opened up around ten.”

“So you’ve been up since what, eight o’clock?”

“Something like that.”

“I should let you go to sleep,” she said. “I guess I just want to be reassured that there’s nothing I have to worry about.”

“Is that all? That’s easy. There’s nothing you have to worry about, Doll. Get some sleep yourself. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

I got undressed and decided I wanted a shower after all, no matter how late it was or how long I’d been up. Afterward I put on a robe and checked the pocket of my blazer for “A Stand-up Triple!” The back of the card enumerated all the three-base hits Ted Williams had had in the years through 1949, and told which years he’d had them in, and whether he’d secured them in Fenway or on the road. There was no indication, though, as to how many had been stand-up triples of the sort illustrated on the card’s face and how many times he’d had to slide.

Damn, I thought. Inquiring Minds Want to Know…

I sighed, and got out the step stool, and stood on it while I removed the little screws that held the panel that makes the back wall of my closet appear to start a few inches sooner than it does. I could have put my picks and probes to bed in the compartment I thus opened, but I decided not to. I’d gotten used to having them on my person lately. I don’t know that I’d have felt naked without them, but I decided to go on providing pocket space for them for the next little while.

I could have helped myself to all or part of Harlan Nugent’s $8,350, too. It was still there, where I’d tucked it away Friday morning. Sooner or later I’d want to relocate it to Carolyn’s hidey-hole, in case she had to bail me out again. But that could wait.

So what I did instead was take out a tan attaché case of Hartmann’s best belting leather, its corners reinforced in brass. The case sported matching brass hardware, including a pair of clasps, each with its own three-number combination lock.

I carried it into the living room and sat down on the couch with it. Luggage locks in general are more for show than security. Anyone with enough brute strength to pull the ring top off a can of Dr Pepper can knock them loose with a hammer, or pry them off with a screwdriver. A gentler soul can simply run the numbers. There are, after all, only a thousand possibilities, and how long can it take? It’s tedious, starting with 0–0–0 and 0–0–1 and 0–0–2, but once you get going there’s not much to it. If you worked at a positive snail’s pace of five seconds per combination, you’d run twelve in a minute, 120 in ten minutes, and you’d be all the way to 9–9–9 in what, an hour and a half?

Since the mechanisms are pretty simple, they’re also easy to pick, which is what I’d done. Having done so, I’d reset both combinations to 4–2–2, which was the house number of my boyhood home. (That’s where
my
baseball cards used to be, once upon a time.) I opened them now so that I could put “A Stand-up Triple!” with its companions.

I know, I know. You’re wondering where the attaché case came from. Didn’t Doll and I just spend part of the afternoon searching fruitlessly for it?