The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams (22 page)

“If pond scum had a lawyer,” Lolly Stoppelgard said, “pond scum could sue for libel.”

“Say, Bernie,” Ray Kirschmann said, “this here ain’t
Divorce Court,
if you take my meanin’. Whether or not he’s been puttin’ her away—”

“One miserable drink, dammit!”

“—don’t really constitute police business. You were startin’ to say somethin’ about how she took the cards. He didn’t give ’em to her, did he?”

Borden Stoppelgard looked as though he might turn apoplectic at the very thought.

“No,” I said, “but he gave her the idea to steal them. Borden’s the sort of fellow who likes to brag about what he has. He started out that way with Wendy”—I’d almost called her Doll—“but before he knew it he was off on his favorite theme, his brother-in-law’s great collection and how he kept it right out in plain sight instead of tucking it away in a safe deposit vault where it belonged.”

Doll raised her eyebrows. She said, “You sound as though you must have been at the next table, Bernie. It’s funny, but I don’t remember any conversation like that. Do you, Mr. Stoppelgard?”

“Jesus,” Borden said, and turned to his left. “Wendy,” he said, “what the hell’s the matter with you? Tell the truth. Did I ever say anything to you about stealing Marty’s cards?”

“Never,” Doll said.

“I said he had some valuable material and he ought to take better care of it. I said there was stuff of his I’d love to get my hands on but he wouldn’t sell it to me. I said—”

Doll looked at him, and I guess looks can’t kill, because he didn’t die. She rolled her eyes, then aimed them at me. “Tell us more, Bernie,” she said. “How did I get my greedy little hands on the cards?”

“You found an excuse to go over to the Gilmartin apartment on York Avenue,” I said. “My guess is you turned up on the doorstep during business hours with some papers for Marty to sign. It wouldn’t have been all that hard for you to hold out an envelope and deliver it yourself instead of giving it to one of the firm’s messengers. And then—”

“I knew she looked familiar,” Marty said. “I couldn’t think why.”

“You must have seen me at the office, Mr. Gilmartin.”

“No,” he said with conviction. “You came over to the apartment.”

“Suppose I did,” said Doll.

Gotcha!

“As it happens,” she went on, “I didn’t. But suppose I did. Then what?”

“You took the cards,” I said. “One way or another you contrived to be in Marty’s den long enough to transfer the cards into whatever you’d brought along for the purpose, a tote bag or briefcase, something like that. You were out the door and gone without arousing any suspicions, and you had a half million dollars’ worth of cardboard in your kick. But you also had a problem.”

“Oh?”

“You’d met Marty face to face. Suppose he looked in his rosewood humidor an hour after you left. He could hardly fail to remember the cheerfully efficient visitor from Haber, Haber & Crowell. Even if he didn’t miss the cards for days, there was no way to be sure your name and face wouldn’t come to mind when he tried to think who might have taken them. So you had to do two things. You had to stash the cards where they wouldn’t be found while you made arrangements to sell them, and you had to develop some way to misdirect suspicion so it would fall on somebody else.

“The first part was easy. You knew a fellow actor named Luke Santangelo. He wasn’t exactly a boyfriend of yours, but he wasn’t pond scum either, and you’d been over to his apartment a couple of times. Luke was a shady guy, which was ideal for your purposes. You told him you wanted to leave a briefcase with him for a few days. That way if the police searched your apartment they’d come up empty. You figured you could stand up well enough under questioning, as long as there wasn’t any physical evidence to drag you down.

“But you still needed a patsy, and that’s where I came in. What put you on to me, Doll?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I can’t be sure how my name came up,” I said. “My guess would be that Luke mentioned me, and perhaps even pointed me out on the street. I had a little trouble with the law some years back, and I still live in the same neighborhood, so there must be plenty of people around who remember what I used to do for a living.”

“Before you saw the error of your ways,” Ray Kirschmann drawled.

“In any event, the name registered. And you may have heard it again from Borden Stoppelgard. I know he must have said something about the bookseller he was planning to evict. Did he mention the poor jerk by name?”

Borden started to say that he’d bought the young lady one drink on one occasion, for God’s sake, and here I was making a federal case out of it. Lolly said he was just making it worse every time he opened his mouth, whereupon he closed it.

“I think you came to my store once. It would have been after you took Marty’s cards but before he found out about it. I can’t be sure about the timetable, but I’ll try to ballpark it, okay? My guess is you grabbed the cards on Monday and dropped them in Luke’s apartment later the same day. Tuesday or Wednesday you came to my store and had a quick look around. Borden had mentioned the books he was buying, so you called him and told him you’d seen something at Barnegat Books that was right up his alley. If he hadn’t already told you that was one of the buildings he owned, he told you now.

“Meanwhile, Luke disappeared. You tried to reach him and you couldn’t. He didn’t answer his phone, and when you went over and pounded on his door, all you got was a sore hand. You started to get nervous. Maybe he’d skipped with the cards. But that didn’t seem likely, because the briefcase you gave him was locked and you’d described the contents in a way that wouldn’t set dollar signs blinking in his head. Maybe you said they were legal papers with blackmail value, something like that. It would give you a reason to hide them, but there’d be no way for him to cash in on them by himself.

“So he’d probably left the cards behind, but he himself was gone, and this wasn’t good. Suppose he got arrested on a dope charge and the police searched his apartment and found the cards while they were at it? Suppose he actually got work out of town and didn’t come back for two or three months? Suddenly stowing the cards on West End Avenue didn’t seem like such a good idea.

“Now you had more use for me than ever. If I was a burglar, maybe I could do something useful for a change. Maybe I could open his door for you.

“That fateful Thursday night,” I said, “I made that silly call to the Gilmartin house. One explanation for my conduct was I had had far too much to drink, and one reason I drank so much is Borden Stoppelgard had just bought a Sue Grafton novel from me for a fraction of its value.”

“You’re the one priced the book,” that gentleman pointed out.

“That’s true,” I said, “but you didn’t have to crow about it. You bragged to the Gilmartins when the four of you went to the theater together that night. Did you do a little boasting to Wendy, too? I’ll bet you did. She tipped you off about the book, so it would be only natural for you to call her up and thank her. While you were at it, you could suggest spending some of the money she’d saved you on a nice dinner for two.”

That was a shot in the dark, but judging from the expression on his face it struck home. His wife shrank away from him and told him he was disgusting, and all around the room people lowered their eyes in embarrassment.

“You needed me,” I told Doll. “You weren’t sure what you needed me for, but you needed me. So after you heard from Borden you came downtown looking for me. And you found me, but I had company. I was with Carolyn.”

“At the Bum Rap,” Carolyn recalled, “and then at the Italian restaurant, and then we wound up at my place.”

“And then I kept calling Marty until I reached him around midnight. I don’t suppose you stood around on Arbor Court waiting for me to come out. Maybe you gave up, stopped for a cup of coffee on Hudson Street, and got lucky when I turned up. Either way, you must have seen me fail to get a cab and stalk off to the subway, and you knew where I had to be going. All you had to do was jump in a cab and wait for me to come out of the subway entrance at Seventy-second and Broadway.”

“This is fascinating,” she said. “I had no idea I was such a resourceful woman.”

“And a hell of a liar, Doll. I’m going to call you Doll instead of Wendy from now on because that’s what I called you that night, once we got around to names. All you wanted me to do was walk you home. You spent a few blocks setting things up so you could make use of me later on, and when we got to the entrance downstairs you decided to float a trial balloon. You made a point of asking the doorman about the Nugents.”

“About us?” Joan Nugent demanded. “But how did this young woman even know us?”

“She didn’t,” I said, “but Luke must have mentioned you. That he used to pose for you, and that you were out of town. So, in the guise of an idle question to the doorman, she let a known burglar know that the tenants in 9-G were out of town.”

“Why would I do that, Bernie?”

“I don’t know for sure,” I admitted. “Maybe you thought Luke was holing up in chez Nugent and you were hoping I’d smoke him out. Maybe you figured I’d get caught burgling their place and you could hang the baseball card theft on me at the same time.”

“It was spiritual. Blood was calling to blood.”

It was Patience who said this, and all of us stopped what we were doing and stared at her.

She put her hand to her mouth. “Maybe I spoke too soon,” she said. “Was Luke already in this apartment?” I said he was. “And he was, uh, dead?” Quite dead, I said. “Then that must have been it,” she said. “There must have been a strong psychic connection between Luke and…I’m sorry, Bernie, is her name Wendy or Doll?”

“Actually, most people call me Gwen,” Doll said, “but at this point I don’t honestly give a damn what anybody calls me. Could we get on with this?”

“A strong connection,” Patience said. “His spirit, freed from his body, was in communication with her. But she didn’t know that’s what it was, she only felt a sense of urgency relating to this apartment.” She held out both hands, the fingers spaced an inch or so apart. “This apartment is psychically charged,” she told Joan Nugent. “I don’t know how you can possibly live here.”

“It’s intense,” Mrs. Nugent agreed, with a toss of her braids. “But I think the energy is good for my creative work.”

“I never thought of that,” Patience said. “I’ll bet you’re right.”

I felt like a backseat passenger trying to get a grip on the steering wheel. “Whatever it was,” I said, “she baited the trap, bade me good night—”

“With a kiss,” Doll reminded me.

“With a kiss,” I agreed, “and then you scooted past the doorman and disappeared into the building.”

“It was probably Eddie,” Harlan Nugent murmured to his wife. “That incompetent.”

“Maybe you went upstairs and banged on Luke’s door some more,” I went on. “Maybe you stationed yourself where you could keep an eye on the lobby to see if I took the bait. Eventually you gave up and went home, which is what I’d already done. I slept off a larger intake of scotch than is my custom, went downtown to open up the store, and the next thing I knew I was under arrest.”

“It was a legitimate collar,” Ray Kirschmann said. “The phone call you made, your priors—”

“I’m not complaining,” I said. “It was a shock, that’s all. I spent Friday night in a cell, and Saturday night all I wanted to do was sleep in my own bed. But I got a late-night phone call from you, Doll. You had a brand-new collection of lies to tell me, and this time you knew just what you wanted me to do. Luke was your boyfriend, you said, and you broke up with him and threw his keys in his face, and you just knew he’d retaliated by stealing your good friend Marty’s baseball cards. And all I had to do was open Luke’s door for you and we could return Marty’s baseball cards and clear my name.”

“Hang on a sec,” Ray said. “She took the cards an’ now she wants to give ’em back?”

“I have a feeling the program would have changed again once she got her hands on the cards,” I said, “but it made a good story for the time being. I knew something was fishy, but I figured I’d play out the string and see where it led. One of the first things it did was catch you in a lie, Doll. You’d said you couldn’t call me earlier because you didn’t know the name of the store or where it was located. So when we split up Saturday night I said I’d meet you the following afternoon at the bookshop, and you said fine. You didn’t have to ask where it was or how to find it.”

“You had told me earlier.”

“Nope. You already knew. And you were there in plenty of time, and we came uptown and I opened Luke’s door.”

“Breaking and entering,” Ray intoned.

“I’ll cop to entering,” I said, “but we didn’t break anything. Didn’t find much of anything, either. Some pills, and what looked like marijuana. A couple of dollars in a jelly jar.”

“We found the drugs when we searched the place,” Ray said, “but I don’t remember no cash in no jam jar.”

“Gee,” I said, “I wonder what could have happened to it. Oh, and there was one other thing. We found a baseball card. ‘A Stand-up Triple!’ it was called, and it showed Ted Williams with his hands on his hips.”

“From the mustard set,” Borden Stoppelgard said. “That was one of Marty’s cards, all right. It’s a great picture of Williams, too.”

“If you like that sort of thing,” I said. “Much of its charm was lost on Doll and me. The message I got from it was that the cards had been there and now they were gone. Doll already knew they’d been there, and now she knew that Luke must have forced the lock on the briefcase. Then he’d started to transfer the cards to a backpack, and then he’d evidently changed his mind, but the one card he overlooked in a compartment of the backpack made it clear what he’d done. So that meant he was making a move on his own, and either he’d sold the cards already or he was in the process of doing so, and either way Doll could kiss the money goodbye, at least until Luke turned up again and she got another shot at him.”

“But that wasn’t going to happen,” Carolyn said helpfully, “because Luke was dead in the bathroom.”