The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams (21 page)

“Call Ray Kirschmann,” I said. “You’re the one who won’t stop hounding me, so you can be the one to call him.” I grabbed a pencil and retrieved a sheet of paper from the floor, uncrumpling it as best I could. I started making a list. “All of these people,” I said. “Tell him I want him to have them all at the Nugent apartment tomorrow evening at half past seven.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. How did you—what do you plan to—what did the cat do that—”

“You’re not making sentences,” I said, “Or sense. Tomorrow.”

A
t exactly seven-thirty the following evening I presented myself to the Haitian doorman at 304 West End Avenue. “Bernard Rhodenbarr,” I said. “Mr. and Mrs. Nugent are expecting me.” I looked over his shoulder while he consulted a little list. I was pleased to note that there was a check mark next to every name but mine.

“Rhodenbarr,” I prompted, and he found my name and checked it off, turning to me with a cheering little smile. He pointed my way to the elevator, which was considerate if hardly necessary.

I rode upward to nine, walked the length of the hallway to G. I looked at the two locks, the Poulard, the Rabson.

I knocked on the door, and it was opened unto me.

The doorman’s list was accurate. They were all on hand. I didn’t know how Ray had managed it, but he had everybody present and accounted for.

They were in the living room. The room’s chairs and sofas were ranged in a circle, its circumference swelled by a few chairs brought in from the dining room. It was Ray who had opened the door for me, and he led me through the foyer into the center of things, whereupon whatever conversations had been limping along came to a gratifying halt.

“This here is Bernie Rhodenbarr,” Ray announced. “Bernie, I guess you know all these people.”

I didn’t really, but I nodded and smiled all the same, working my way around the circle with my eyes. As I said, everybody was there, and here’s how they lined up.

First was Carolyn Kaiser, my chief friend and poodle washer. Like me, she had gone home and changed after work; like me, she had selected gray flannel slacks and a blue blazer. It was no great trick to tell us apart, however, because there was a silver pin in the shape of a cat on the lapel of her blazer, and she was wearing a green turtleneck. (I had a shirt and tie, in case somebody invited me to the Pretenders.)

On Carolyn’s right was the one man present who could have invited me to the Pretenders, but I wasn’t sure we’d be speaking by the end of the evening. Marty Gilmartin, sharing a Victorian love seat with his wife, Edna, was wearing a gray suit, a white shirt, and a Jerry Garcia tie, along with a facial expression that hovered somewhere between bemused and noncommittal.

Edna Gilmartin looked more youthful and less formidable than I seemed to remember her from the ticket line at the Cort Theater. I barely noticed the dress she was wearing; what caught my eye was the necklace around her throat. It would have caught anybody’s eye, that was the whole point of it, but it had special impact on me because I thought I recognized it as part of the loot from Alex and Frieda’s place in Port Washington. A second glance put my mind to rest, but for a moment there it gave me a turn.

Alongside Mrs. Gilmartin, looking long and lean and country casual in boots and jeans and a sweatshirt with the legend
GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT
, was Patience Tremaine. She looked as though she didn’t have a clue what she was doing here, but was determined to be a good sport about it. I knew the feeling. I’d felt pretty much like that myself in the bat cave at Cafè Villanelle.

Patience was in an armchair. At her right, in one of the dining-room chairs relocated for the occasion, sat our host, Harlan Nugent. I was meeting him for the first time, although it seemed to me as though we had known each other for years. In any case, I recognized him from his photos. He was a big bear of a man, well over six feet tall and perilously close to three hundred pounds. No wonder his shoes had been too big for me. Tonight he wore a black-and-white houndstooth jacket over a black turtleneck, but I couldn’t keep from looking at his feet. He was wearing a very attractive pair of black tassel loafers. If they’d been in his closet on my last visit, I must have missed them. I had a feeling they’d made the trip to Europe with him.

Joan Nugent sat beside him. Some of her photographs showed her with graying hair, but evidently she’d had some sort of shock that had turned it black overnight, because there wasn’t a drop of gray in evidence at present. She had a long oval face and an olive complexion, and her hair was parted in the middle and gathered into a braid on either side. A Navajo squash-blossom necklace and a couple of silver-and-turquoise rings heightened the American Indian effect.

Ray Kirschmann was next to Joan Nugent, and there’s no real need to describe him. As usual, he was wearing a dark suit; as usual, it looked to have been custom-tailored for someone else. He was waiting for me to pull a rabbit out of a hat, and hoping to come out of the evening with something for his troubles. Either the rabbit or the hat, I suppose.

Doll Cooper was seated next to him, at one end of a long couch. She was wearing the very outfit she’d worn the night I first saw her—the dark business suit, the red beret. The only expression on her face was one of keen attention. Her body language reinforced the impression. One sensed that she was poised to cut and run at any moment, but in the meantime she would wait and see.

Borden Stoppelgard had the center of the couch, but he was keeping his distance from Doll and had positioned himself all the way at the other edge of the middle cushion. Borden was wearing a brown suit and a tie with alternating inch-wide stripes of red and green. He was sitting knee-to-knee with a woman with stylish blond hair and eyes the color of a putting green. The process of elimination, along with the fact that Borden was practically sitting in her lap, brought me to the conclusion that she was Lolly Stoppelgard.

There was a chair for me, too, one from the dining room, but I didn’t figure to get much use out of it. It was time for me to be on my feet. On my toes, if I could manage it.

“Well, now,” I said. “I suppose you’re wondering why I summoned you all here.”

I’ll tell you, no matter how many times you deliver that line, it never fails to quicken the pulse. The game, by God, was afoot.

“Once upon a time,” I said, “there were two men, and one of them married the other’s sister. That made them brothers-in-law, and they had something else in common. They were both businessmen, they both bought and sold real estate, and they both dabbled in other investments. Martin Gilmartin sometimes took a flier in show business. Borden Stoppelgard stockpiled first-edition crime fiction. And both of them had a passion for baseball cards.”

“As far as I know, Borden Stoppelgard still has every baseball card he ever bought or traded for. A week ago this past Thursday, Marty Gilmartin received a telephone call just minutes after he and his wife returned from an evening at the theater. The anonymous caller had evidently paid a lot of attention to Marty’s recent movements, and that made him suspicious. He hung up the phone, hurried to his den, and opened the box where he kept his card collection.”

“We know all this,” Borden Stoppelgard interrupted. “He lifted the lid and the box was empty. Anyway, you took ’em, right?”

“Wrong,” I said. “But it’s not a farfetched notion, in view of the fact that I was the mysterious caller. The police traced the call to Carolyn Kaiser’s apartment, and Officer Kirschmann knew Ms. Kaiser as a close friend of mine. And, much as it pains me to admit it, there was a time years ago when I made occasional forays into, uh, burglary.”

“You went away for it once,” Ray said helpfully, “an’ got away with it hundreds of times.”

“Excuse me,” Joan Nugent said. “I’m sorry for Mr. Gilmartin, but I don’t quite see his connection with our apartment. We had a break-in while we were away. Are you suggesting that the same burglar broke into both his apartment and ours?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh.”

“There was no burglar.”

“No burglar here?” This from Harlan Nugent. “We had a break-in, you know. It’s a matter of record.”

“No burglar here,” I said, “and no burglar at the Gilmartin residence. No break-in at either location.”

I caught a glimpse of Marty’s face, and he did not look terribly happy at the direction the discussion was taking.

“We’ll let that pass for the moment,” I said smoothly. “Let’s just note that the Gilmartin cards had disappeared. That’s one of the reasons we’re here. The other phenomenon that has drawn us together is not a disappearance but an appearance, and an astonishing manifestation it was. A man turned up in one of the Nugent bathrooms. He didn’t have any clothes on, and he didn’t have a pulse, either. He’d been shot, and he was dead.”

“Who was he?” Patience wanted to know.

“His name was Luke Santangelo,” I said, “and he lived two floors below the Nugents in this very building. Like half the waiters and a third of the moving men in this city, he’d come here to be an actor. Well,
de mortuis
and all that, but I’m afraid Luke was something of a bad actor, and that’s irrespective of how he may have acquitted himself on stage. He was a small-time drug dealer and a petty criminal.”

“I was so shocked to learn that,” Joan Nugent put in. “I knew him, you see. He posed for me, as it happens, in this very apartment.” She hazarded a smile. “I paint, you know. He was happy to pose for me, even though I couldn’t afford to pay him very much.”

Her husband snorted. “While you were painting him,” he said, “he was figuring out how to break in.”

“Two incidents,” I said. “On Thursday, Mr. Gilmartin finds his cards are missing. On Sunday, the police find a dead man in the Nugents’ bathroom. But what’s the connection?”

“No connection,” Borden Stoppelgard said. “Case closed. Can we all go home now?”

“There has to be a connection,” Carolyn told him. “You’re the one who collects mystery novels, aren’t you? It’s a shame you don’t take the trouble to read them. If you did, you’d know that whenever there are two crimes in the same story, they’re related. The connection may not turn up until the last chapter, but it’s always there.”

“There’s a connection,” I agreed. “And you’re part of it, Mr. Stoppelgard.”

“Huh?”

“We’ll start with the cards,” I said. “Your brother-in-law owned them. And you coveted them.”

“If you’re trying to say I took ’em—”

“I’m not.”

“Oh. But you just said—”

“That you coveted them,” I said. “Didn’t you?”

He looked at Marty, then at me. “No secret he had some nice material there,” he said.

“You wanted the Ted Williams cards.”

“I admired them. I wouldn’t have minded having a set of them myself. But I didn’t want ’em bad enough to steal ’em.”

“You thought I stole them.”

“Well, yes,” he said. “That’s what the police were saying, and I didn’t have any reason to think they were wrong.”

“And, thinking that I’d stolen them, you came to my shop and offered me a deal. If I gave you your brother-in-law’s baseball cards, you’d cut me a sweetheart deal on an extension of the store lease.”

“Borden,” Marty Gilmartin said, his tone one of bottomless disappointment. “Borden, Borden, Borden.”

“Marty, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

“Oh, Borden,” Marty said. “I’m surprised at you.”

And he sounded it, all right. I have to tell you, I was impressed with Marty. I’d told him days ago about his brother-in-law’s offer, and what he’d said at the time was along the lines of “That’s typical of the avaricious son of a bitch.” The Pretenders would have been proud of the show he was putting on.

“I was testing the waters,” Borden said now. “Trying to find out for certain if you were the burglar, and laying a little trap for you if you were. Obviously it didn’t work, because you never had the cards in the first place, but all it proves now is that I didn’t have them either. So I’ll ask you again—can we go home now?”

“I think you might want to stick around,” I said. “You didn’t take them, and it’s also true that you didn’t know who took them. But the person who did take them got the idea from you.”

“Oh, yeah? You want to tell me who that was?”

“You’re sitting next to her,” I said.

Logically enough, everybody turned to stare at Lolly Stoppelgard, who looked understandably puzzled.
Not that one,
I wanted to cry.
The other one.
But they all figured it out for themselves, and eyes turned to the woman sitting on the other side of Borden Stoppelgard.

“Gwendolyn Beatrice Cooper,” I said. “Like Luke Santangelo, she came to New York hoping for acting success. In the meantime, though, she got a job at a law firm called Haber, Haber & Crowell.”

“My attorneys,” Marty said.

“And your brother-in-law’s as well. Ms. Cooper worked there, doing general office work, sometimes filling in as the relief receptionist. She was a natural choice for the front desk because she’s personable and eye-catching, and two of the eyes she caught belonged to Borden Stoppelgard. He was a happily married man. She was a young working woman going about her business. So he did the natural thing under the circumstances. He hit on her.”

“Oh, Borden,” said Lolly Stoppelgard.

“He’s full of crap,” her husband said. “I may have passed the time of day with Wendy.” Wendy! “I’m a friendly guy. But that’s as far as it went, believe me.”

“You asked her to meet you for a drink,” I said. “Then lunch, and then another lunch, and—”

“One drink,” he said, “to be sociable. On one occasion, and that’s it, total, the end. No lunches. Ask her, for God’s sake. Wendy—”

“Oh, Borden…”

“Lolly, who are you gonna believe, some convicted felon or your own loving husband?”

“I’m certainly not going to believe you. That’s just the way you hit on me, Borden.”

“Lolly—”

“You met me when I was working reception, you passed the time of day, you invited me out for a drink, you asked could we have lunch—”

“Lolly, that was completely different.”

“I know.”

“I was single then. I’m married now.”

“Exactly,” she said. “Which is why it was okay then, and why it’s not okay now, you dirty cheating son of a bitch.”

There was nothing much to say to that, and nobody did. I let the moment stretch—rather enjoying it, I have to admit—and then I said that I didn’t think it had gone very far.

“One occasion,” Borden cried. “One drink, for God’s sake!”

“Perhaps a little farther than that,” I said, “but I don’t think your husband made a very favorable impression on Miss Cooper. I’ve heard her compare him to pond scum.”