The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams (17 page)

The first uptown train to come along was an express, and I rode it one stop to Ninety-sixth Street. I went out through the turnstile and started walking down Broadway. The first panhandler I met was a woman, the second a large man. I gave each of them a dollar. The third was a man about my size, and I gave him my two shopping bags. “What’s this?” he demanded. “Hey, what’s this?”

“Wear it in good health,” I told him, and turned around and went back to the subway.

By ten o’clock I was in the store, helping Raffles develop his mousing skills. A few hours later I was back in Luke’s apartment, trying to look as though I was there for the first time. I’d been careful to leave his $240 in the jelly jar earlier. This time I took it, but you’ll recall that I split it down the middle with Doll.

That’s called ethics.

By the time I got home my half of the $240 was largely depleted. I’d spent twenty bucks for a baseball card encyclopedia and fifty for a blanket, and as the night wore on I kept shelling out for cabs and coffee. And now it was two in the morning, and I’d been awake for twenty hours, and was I bedded down with my head on my pillow? I was not. Instead, I was sitting on my couch examining baseball cards and looking them up in the encyclopedia.

Some kids never grow up.

“T
his is an interesting combination,” Carolynsaid, inspecting her sandwich. “Corned beef, pastrami, turkey and—”

“Smoked whitefish.”

“And cole slaw and Russian dressing, all on a seeded roll. Nice. I don’t think I ever had it before. Is it named for anybody?”

“They call it the Pyotr Kropotkin,” I said. “Don’t ask me why. Normally it comes on rye bread, but I thought—”

“Much better on a roll. Where’s your sandwich, Bernie?”

“I’m just having coffee,” I said. “I’ve got a lunch date in an hour.”

“You didn’t have to bring me a sandwich, Bern. You could have just called and I’d have gone somewhere on my own. But I’m glad you came by, because I never got out of the house yesterday. It’s a funny thing, but every time I spend four or five hours at Pandora’s or the Fat Cat, I’m a complete wreck the next day.”

“I wonder why that is.”

“Well, the rooms are very smoky,” she said. “A lot of the regulars smoke, and the ventilation’s not good at all.”

“That must be it.”

“And in the course of a long evening I’ll almost always have a piece of pie or a candy bar, something sweet like that. And you know how I’m subject to sugar hangovers.”

“I know.”

“So I spent the day at home. I reread a Kinsey Millhone. The one about the high school kid who has an affair with his gym teacher’s wife, and then she gets him to kill her husband. I just gave away the ending, so I hope it’s one you already read.”

“
‘T’ Is for Sympathy?
I read it when it first came out.”

“You remember the scene where Kinsey’s shooting baskets with the girls’ gym teacher?” She rolled her eyes. “Case closed, Bern. So how’d it go yesterday? You sell any books?”

“Well, it’s a long story,” I said.

“Wow,” she said. “Its real complicated, isn’t it? Did you know the dead guy would turn out to be Luke?”

“I knew there had to be a connection,” I said. “There were too many ‘just-happeneds’ from the beginning. When a corpse just happened to be in the apartment Doll Cooper just happened to mention, I figured he wasn’t some guy who dropped in to wash his hands. Besides, he looked familiar.”

“I remember you saying that.”

“I thought I might have seen him around the neighborhood, but I’d seen him more recently than that, and not from a distance, either. He was the harlequin.”

“Huh?”

“On Joan Nugent’s easel. A bell went off when Doll talked about posing for Mrs. Nugent. I immediately thought of the harlequin, but all I could remember for certain about him was that he looked sad.”

“You’d look sad, too, with a bullet hole in your forehead.”

“The harlequin looked sad,” I said, “but beyond that I couldn’t picture what he looked like. When they’re dressed like that all you see is the costume.”

“So you went back for a second look.”

“I went back for the baseball cards,” I said, “or whatever Doll was hoping to find in Luke’s apartment.”

“And you didn’t want her along when you went in.”

“No, I figured one’s company and two’s a crowd. From Luke’s place it was easy enough to go back to the Nugents’. I was already in the building, and I knew the locks wouldn’t be a problem.”

“Except for the one in the bathroom.”

“That was still bothering me,” I admitted. “The fact that it was clearly impossible. There were two scenarios I could come up with and neither of them made any sense. One, he broke into the apartment, took off all his clothes, locked himself in the bathroom, twisted his arm into a knot to shoot himself in the middle of the forehead, and then ate the gun.”

“Couldn’t he have dropped it and fallen on it?”

“Sure, why not? Or he could have opened the window, stuck the gun on a ledge, closed the window, then slumped down in the tub and expired. The thing is, nothing about suicide makes sense, even if you manage to figure out a way he could have done it.”

“So that leaves murder.”

“And that was impossible, too, because the door’s locked from the inside. Whoever killed him had to leave the bathroom through the door.”

“What about the window?”

“Forget the window. The idea of some Human Fly slipping through that tiny bathroom window and rappelling down the side of the building—well, I’d rather believe he shot himself and then ate the gun for dessert. No, the murderer went out the door, but the door was locked.”

“The murderer was a ghost?”

“Either that or there was some way to get around the lock. The more I thought about it, the more I figured that had to be the answer. The last time I flushed the toilet for Raffles, I thought about installing one of those pet ports. You know, you put some sort of hinged flap at the bottom of the door, and that way an animal can get in and out even if the doors closed. If I had one of those, I wouldn’t have to remember to leave the bathroom door open.”

“Did the Nugents have one of those?”

“No.”

“Because I can’t believe a cat killed him, Bernie. I draw the line at that.”

“No,” I said, “although a dog or cat could have moved the gun so that a suicide would wind up looking like murder. But they don’t have any pets, and it wouldn’t matter if they did because there was no pet port in the bathroom door in the first place. But there had to be something, and then I just happened to think of the light switch.”

“Just happened.”

“What triggered it,” I said, “was flicking a switch in my own bathroom. The light didn’t go on.”

“Because it was a dummy switch?”

“No, because the bulb had burned out.”

“How many burglars did it take to change it?”

“Just one, but while I was changing it I remembered the switch at the Nugent apartment. Now it’s not unusual to have a switch that no longer turns anything on or off. A lot of people remove ceiling fixtures when they redecorate, and it’s easier to leave the switch plate than plaster over the hole in the wall. Still, I got to wondering what I’d find underneath the switch plate.”

“And what you found was a hole in the wall.”

“Right.”

“And that meant somebody could shoot Luke Santangelo, go out the door, pull it shut, unscrew the switch plate, reach in through the opening, and lock the door.”

“Barely,” I said. “If my arm had been any shorter I couldn’t have reached. And if it had been any fatter it wouldn’t have gotten through.”

“So we can look for somebody with long skinny arms. But why would anybody go through all that? I don’t get it.”

“Neither do I.”

“So that it would look like suicide? But if you were gonna fake a locked-room suicide, wouldn’t you leave the gun behind?”

“Ah, zair you have eet,” I said. “No matter how clevair ze criminal, he makes ze leetle mistake.”

“But—”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I agreed, “but so what? It’s not my problem.”

“It’s not?”

I shook my head. “I’m glad I found out about the dummy switch plate, because the impossible-crime element bothered me. I wanted to know how it was done. But I don’t have to know
why
it was done, or by whom.”

“Or what Luke was doing in that apartment.”

“None of that. I put a couple of pieces of jewelry in the tub with him, and I rifled some drawers in the bedroom and took some other jewelry away with me. That was to give the cops an easy answer to some of those questions. He was committing a burglary, he had a partner, the partner killed him. And no, I don’t think that’s what happened, but I don’t honestly care what happened.”

“You don’t?”

“I’ve got enough things to worry about,” I said. “Like making sure they drop the charges against me. And finding a way to keep from losing the store.”

“The store,” she said. “I forgot about that, with everything that’s been going on. Bernie, your problems are over!”

“They are?”

“You’ve got the cards, haven’t you? All you have to do is give them to Borden Stoppelgard in exchange for a long-term extension of your lease. Wasn’t that the deal he offered you?”

“More or less.”

“That’s why you’re all dressed up. You’re having lunch with Borden Stoppelgard, aren’t you?”

“No, but you’re close.”

“I’m close? I don’t know what that means. Who’s close to Borden Stoppelgard?”

“Nobody who can help it.”

“But—”

“I’d better get going,” I said. “I don’t want to keep Marty waiting.”

“Marty? Marty Gilmartin?”

“At his club,” I said. “Pretty fancy, huh? I’ll tell you all about it.”

The Pretenders have as their clubhouse a five-story Greek Revival mansion facing Gramercy Park. I walked up Irving Place and arrived no more than three minutes late for my one o’clock lunch date. I gave my name to the liveried attendant at the desk and he informed me that Mr. Gilmartin was awaiting me in the lounge.

I walked down a half flight of carpeted stairs and into a cozy wood-paneled room with a bar at one end and a pool table at the other. Two men stood, cues in hand, while a third took aim at a shot that didn’t look terribly promising. Several stood at the bar, and eight or ten others were grouped in twos and threes at dark wooden tables. They were all over thirty-five, they all wore jackets and ties, and one of them was Martin Gilmartin.

Truth to tell, he wasn’t terribly hard to find. He was seated by himself with a newspaper and a drink, and he looked up with interest when I entered the room. I approached him and said, “Mr. Gilmartin?” and he got to his feet and said, “Mr. Rhodenbarr?” and we shook hands. I apologized for my late arrival and he assured me that was nonsense, I wasn’t late at all. He was an elegant man, tall and slender and silver-haired, splendidly turned out in a tan suit, a deep blue shirt with a contrasting white collar, and a light blue tie. His shoes were cap toes, and looked remarkably like the pair I’d worn home from Harlan Nugent’s the previous morning, although those had been black. Gilmartin’s were a rich walnut brown.

“I’m awfully sorry,” he said. “I told you that you’d need a jacket here, but I didn’t think to mention we’re stuffy enough to require a tie as well. I see they made you put on one of those horrors they’ve got hanging in the cloakroom.”

“Actually, it’s my own tie.”

“And a very nice one, too,” he said smoothly. “We could eat down here, but it’s quieter and a bit more private upstairs in the dining room. Does that sound all right to you?”

I said it was fine and he led me up the stairs and down a hallway to the dining room, pointing out various objects of interest along the way. The ceilings were high, the floors deeply carpeted, and the furniture ran to a lot of dark wood and red leather. The walls were thickly hung with portraits, all of them elaborately framed and almost all of them of actors and actresses.

“Notice the two portraits on either side of the fireplace,” he said. “They’re in matching frames, although they’re the work of two different artists. I don’t suppose you recognize the subjects?” I didn’t. “We refer to them affectionately as the honorary founders of the club. The chap on the left is James Stuart, and on the right we have his son, Charles Stuart. You may remember him as Bonnie Prince Charlie.”

“Pretenders to the English throne.”

“Very good. James called himself James III, but history has called him the Old Pretender, and his son the Young Pretender. And so, although the Stuarts are not actors, they seem unquestionably qualified to be of our company. With a single exception, all the other portraits depict members of the Profession.”

“Who’s the other nonactor?”

“There are four of them, actually, but they’re together in the painting. You may have noticed it as you came in, hanging right opposite the cloakroom.”

“The four young black men standing around a microphone.”

“I don’t believe any of them ever trod the boards,” he said, “although they’d have been eligible for membership here in that they were unquestionably show-business professionals. They called themselves the Platters, and one of their biggest hits was a song called ‘The Great Pretender.’ ” He smiled, shook out his napkin, and placed it upon his lap. “Well,” he said, “what will you have to drink? And then we probably ought to have a look at the menu.”

We had a remarkably civilized conversation through drinks and appetizers. When the waiter had served our entrees, a lull settled in. I thought we might get to the business at hand, but after a moment he began talking about a play he’d seen, and that carried us through to coffee. Then it was clearly time, and it was evidently up to me to begin.

“I’m sorry I called you at home this morning,” I said, “but I didn’t have your office number.”

“My home is my office,” he said, “although I have more than one telephone line. Here, let me give you a card.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Here, have one of mine.”

“Ah,” he said, taking it, turning it over in his hand. “Rabbit Maranville. From the Diamond Stars set of the mid-thirties. I can’t recall whether or not he’s in the Hall of Fame. Nor can I claim to have seen him play. I’m not quite old enough.”

“I was thinking you might recognize the card.”

He nodded. “The years haven’t dealt kindly with it, have they? I hope they were easier on the Rabbit himself. The card’s been folded, one corner’s completely gone, and well, it’s a mess, isn’t it?”

“It would be worth about two hundred dollars in near mint condition,” I said. “But in the shape it’s in—”

“No more than five or ten dollars. Assuming someone wanted such a poor specimen.” He handed it back, inhaled deeply, exhaled thoroughly. “How on earth did you get hold of this? But I suppose that’s a professional secret.”

“Sort of.”

He sipped his coffee. “Cash,” he said.

“You needed some.”

“I needed to get some without looking as though I needed it. I have a lot of assets, but none that I could convert to cash invisibly. If I sold paintings off the walls, the sale would be a matter of record and there’d be a blank spot on the wall where the painting had hung. If I sold real estate…well, in this market you have to give it away, and the only way to unload anything is to take back mortgages. I wouldn’t wind up with anything in the way of cash. And, as you’ve observed, I needed cash.”