The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams (24 page)

He looked at me. “You can open a lock without a key?”

“Sometimes,” I said.

“Then for God’s sake do it,” he started to say, and then I think he finally got it, and that made it perfect. “Wait a moment,” he said. “Of course you have no legal right.”

“No, sir,” I said. “We’d need your permission.”

“Which if we don’t get it, the next step’d be a court order,” Ray added.

The big shoulders sagged. “There can’t be…I can’t imagine…go ahead, damn you, open the fucking thing.”

Guess what we found?

“I completely lost my head,” Harlan Nugent said. “Just as you said, I came home that Tuesday afternoon and found Joan sprawled naked on the daybed in her studio. She was unconscious, and in an awkward, unnatural position. I took one look at her and thought she was dead.”

“Oh, darling!”

“And there were these clothes piled on the floor, as if they’d been removed in a great hurry. Her clothes, and some male clothing as well. And my eye was drawn to the bathroom door, which was closed. It’s usually open when she paints.”

“When I use acrylics, I wash my brushes in the sink.”

“I tried the door, and of course I couldn’t open it. I shouted for whoever was inside to open the door. Of course he didn’t. If he had, I think I might have torn him limb from limb.”

“So you got your gun.”

“From the locked drawer. If I’d misplaced the key a little earlier, Santangelo might be alive.” He thought about it. “No,” he decided, “I’d have broken down the door and killed him. I was completely beside myself.”

“But you remembered a way into the bathroom.”

“The switch plate, yes. And I shot him. I don’t think I even knew who he was when I pulled the trigger. I didn’t care. He’d killed the only woman I ever loved, and he was damn well going to die for it. Then I would call the police and let them take over.”

“Instead, she came back to life.”

“Thank God,” he said. “She moved an arm, she was breathing, she was alive. I didn’t know what he’d done, whether he’d knocked her unconscious or drugged her or what—”

“He sometimes gave me these pills,” she said, “that made colors a lot richer. They had a very stimulating effect on my painting, but sometimes I would get very tired and have to lie down and take a nap.”

“The swine,” Nugent said. “I can’t say I’m sorry he’s dead. It’s hard to believe the world’s a poorer place for his having left it. But I wish I hadn’t killed him. It shook me badly.”

“That’s why you were so moody in London, darling.”

“I tidied up and tried to figure out what to do next. Then Joan awoke smiling and still a little groggy, asking when I’d come in and where Luke had gone. I said I just got in and he must have let himself out. When she turned in for the night I went out and draped his clothes on the gate of the church on Amsterdam Avenue. People leave clothing there all the time, and homeless people help themselves to it. I’ve left things there before, shirts with frayed collars, trousers that have gone shiny in the seat. I must say I’ve given away things of my own that were in better shape than what I hung on the gate that night. Dirty jeans gone at the knee, a sweater rank enough to gag a billy goat—”

“Luke was never a dresser,” Doll put in. “And he could get a little lax in the personal hygiene area.”

“I got rid of the gun as well. I’d bought it to protect our home from prowlers, and, in a manner of speaking, it had done its job. I dropped it down a storm drain.”

“An’ then you burglarized yourself,” Ray said, “an’ lit out for London.”

Nugent frowned. “I swear I don’t remember that part,” he said. “Is it possible for a man to do a thing like that and forget it entirely?”

“Darling, you were under a strain,” his wife said.

“I’ve always prided myself on my memory,” he said. “And it’s not like forgetting a telephone number.”

“You did bring two of the bags down, Harlan. And then you went up for the other two, while I waited in the lobby.”

“That’s when I must have done it,” he said. “I could have sworn—”

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. And what earthly difference does it make? I’ve already admitted to murder. That’s a far more serious offense than making a false report of a crime.” He heaved a great sigh. “Well,” he said, “I suppose I’ll call my attorney now. And then you’ll want to follow the form and read me my rights, won’t you?”

There was a silence, and I started counting to myself. One. Two. Three. Four….

“Let’s not be too hasty here,” Ray Kirschmann said. “Before we get all caught up in anythin’ official, let’s see what we’re lookin’ at here.”

Someone asked him what he meant.

“Well, where’s our evidence? You made an admission just now in front of a roomful of people, but none of that’s admissible in court. Any lawyer’d just tell you to retract it, an’ that’s the end of it. Far as physical evidence goes, what we got’s a lot of nothin’. There’s a switch plate with no switch box behind it, provin’ somebody coulda been shot in a locked room, but so what?

“An’ as for you, young lady,” he said to Doll Cooper, “we got no doubt in my mind, an’ prolly not a lot in anybody else’s either, that you had somethin’ to do with the disappearance of those baseball cards. But we ain’t got the cards, an’ you ain’t got ’em either, an’ my best guess is they been sold an’ split up an’ changed hands three times already, an’ nobody’s ever gonna see ’em again. This gentleman here, Mr. Gilmartin, he might have a bone to pick with you, on account of it’s his cards you walked off with. If he insists on pressin’ charges, well, I think it’ll get kicked for lack of evidence, but I’d have to take you in.”

“I don’t want to press charges,” Marty said. “I just hope Miss Cooper might narrow her range in the future and limit her acting to stage and screen. She would seem to have a considerable talent, and it would be a shame to see it diluted.”

“You know,” Doll said, “you’re a gentleman, you really are. I’m sorry I took the cards from you. I
was
playing a part, that’s exactly what I was doing, and I think I fooled myself into thinking it gave me a dramatic license to steal. It’s corny to say this, but I may have actually learned a lesson tonight.”

Carolyn gave me a “get her” look, but the speech seemed to go over well with everybody else.

“So that’s that,” Ray said. “Brings us back to you, Mr. Nugent. What we keep comin’ back to is there’s no evidence, an’ I also gotta say the deceased don’t sound like no great loss. Of course there’s also the matter of makin’ a false report to an insurance company, claimin’ a loss when there was no loss.”

“That bothered me,” Nugent admitted. “The idea of making an actual profit on the man’s death. But once the burglary was a matter of record I could hardly fail to put in a claim.” He thought for a moment. “I could tell them I made a mistake. The jewelry actually turned up.”

“You sure you want to do that, Mr. Nugent? You sorta call attention to yourself that way. You’re in this deep, the shortest way’s straight ahead.” He put a companionable hand on the big man’s shoulder. “Far as makin’ a profit on all of this, believe me, sir, you got nothin’ to worry about. The rest of you folks, I’m thinkin’ maybe you all oughta clear outta here about now. The show’s over, an’ me an’ Mr. Nugent here need a little privacy to work out some of the details on how we’re gonna keep this whole matter private an’ personal.”

I
had a lunch date the following day, so I didn’t get a chance to sit down and talk with Carolyn until we met after work at the Bum Rap. I was a little late closing—a customer, a devout G. T. Henty collector, may his tribe increase—and by the time I got over there she was already at work on a scotch and soda. I asked Maxine to bring me a beer, and Carolyn told me that was a load off her mind.

“You’ve been working up a storm lately, Bern,” she said. “I was starting to worry about you.”

“Not to worry,” I said.

“I went on home by myself last night,” she said, “because I had the feeling you and Patience might want to creep off into the night.”

“On little iambic feet?” I shook my head. “I bought her a cup of coffee,” I said, “and put her in a cab.”

“I was wondering what she was doing there, Bern. I was trying to figure out how she could have stolen the cards or shot Luke Santangelo, and I came up with a couple of real winners. Why’d you have Ray bring her?”

“To save going through the whole thing another time,” I said. “I kind of owed her an explanation, after all the dates I broke and the fibs I told.”

“Lies, Bern. Once you’re past seven years old, you don’t get to call them fibs anymore.”

“Besides, I suppose I was showing off a little. And I thought it might cheer her up. She’s a nice woman, but she’s depressed all the time. She’ll come out of it for a minute or two to sing haiku to the tune of ‘Moonlight in Vermont,’ but then she’s off again, sinking into the Slough of Despond.”

She frowned. “Isn’t that what they called Babe Ruth?”

“That was the Sultan of Swat.”

“Right. It’s hard keeping them all straight. Bern, you gotta remember that Patience is a poet.”

“Who else would sing haiku?”

“And they’re all moody like that, especially the women. It’s a good thing most of ’em have to live in basement apartments or they’d be jumping out the window all the time. As it stands they kill themselves left and right.”

“Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton.”

“That’s just the tip of the ice cube, Bern. It’s a known phenomenon, poetic depression in women. There’s even a name for it.”

“The Edna St. Vincent Malaise,” I said. “I’ve heard of it, but this is the first time I ever encountered it in person. And I think Patience and I have had a parting of the ways. Still, it didn’t hurt having her there. There were enough chairs to go around.”

She took a sip of her drink and asked me what had happened after the rest of them left.

“What you’d expect,” I said. “Ray’s instincts are pretty good sometimes, I have to say that for him. He had a hunch I could clear it all up, and that there’d be something in it for him. He was right on both counts. You were there to watch me clear it up, and after you left he got his share.”

“Harlan Nugent paid him off?”

“That’s not the way Ray phrased it. According to him, some money had to be spread around to make sure the investigation didn’t go any further. Well, he can make sure of that simply by keeping his mouth shut and not filing a report, so there’s not a lot of spreading that has to be done. Ray’s idea of sharing is to divide the dough up and put it in different pockets.”

“How much did he get?”

“Eighty-three fifty for openers. That’s what cash Nugent had on hand. There’ll be more when the insurance company pays off on the Nugents’ jewelry. My guess is Ray’ll pick up another twenty or twenty-five.”

“Eighty-three fifty.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s a familiar number.”

“Isn’t it,” I said sourly.

“It’s the money you took from Nugent’s desk the first time you went there, isn’t it?”

“To the penny,” I said. “I swear that’s the stupidest job I ever pulled in my life. I went in three times. The first time I took some money and jewelry and put back the jewelry. The second time I kept the money and went back for the jewelry. Then the night before last I went in for the last time and put the money back where I found it, and put the jewelry in the same drawer with it. It’s like that logic problem with cannibals and Christians.”

“I wouldn’t trust either of them, Bern. What did you do, go in in the middle of the night?”

“Around four in the morning. Not a Nugent was stirring. I came as Young Dr. Rhodenbarr, with my stethoscope in my pocket. It would have been pretty awful to get caught the one time I was making a delivery instead of a pickup, but I figured I had to set the stage.”

“You stole the key, right?”

I nodded. “You’d be surprised how often people keep the key to a locked drawer in one of the neighboring unlocked drawers. Well, it makes sense. Where else would you keep it? I don’t usually hunt for the key, because those locks are so easy to open, but I happened to come across it the other night and I figured it would be better theater if Nugent had to say he couldn’t open the drawer. It made it look as though he had something to hide. And, much to his own surprise, he did.”

“Why put back the eighty-three fifty?”

“I figured there could only be so many jokers in the deck. By the time we left last night, Nugent was beginning to recall moving the jewelry from his wife’s dresser to the desk. Since there was no other possible explanation, his memory was obligingly filling in the gaps. Poor bastard.”

“Well, he killed a guy, Bern.”

“And Doll stole a man’s baseball card collection, and how can we let such actions go unpunished? Well, the fact of the matter is that they
did
go unpunished. It didn’t cost either of them a dime. Doll walked out of there with her head held high, and Nugent gets to pay off Ray with money from an insurance company.”

“It was his money originally, Bern.”

“Right, and then it was mine for a while.” I shrugged. “I knew there was no point to this. That’s why I tried to get out of it. But between Ray’s nudging and your nagging, what chance did I have?”

“That wasn’t nagging, Bern. That was the advice of a caring friend.”

“Well, it had all the earmarks of nagging,” I said, “and it worked, so you can take the credit.”

“It wasn’t me, Bern. It was Raffles.”

I looked at her.

“Remember, Bern? Raffles leaped up in the air and arched his back and did all those weird things that he did, and it came to you in a flash.”

“Oh, right.”

“I mean, let’s give credit where it’s due, huh?” She waved to Maxine for another round. “Couple of things I’m not completely clear on, Bern. How’d you know Joan Nugent was drugged and unconscious when her husband came home? I never would have thought of that.”

“Neither would I.”

“Huh?”

“What I thought,” I said, “was that she and Luke were having an affair, and that they were going at it when Harlan stuck his key in the door. But wouldn’t they have been in the master bedroom? And if so, wouldn’t Luke have gone in the other bathroom?”

“Unless they started out posing, and one thing led to another, and they got carried away.”

“Or unless she had some compunctions about committing adultery in the very bed she shared with her husband. Still, it became clear that she didn’t have a clue how that corpse wound up in her bathroom. And Luke had a whole storehouse of pills in his apartment, and she had the abstracted air of someone who just might have ingested a mood-altering substance sometime or other in the course of her life, and it all came together.”

“What a scumbag Luke must have been.”

“Well, I don’t think he was ever on the short list for the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award,” I said, “but he wasn’t here to give us his side of the story, either. The incident came out sounding like the next best thing to necrophilia, but maybe it didn’t start out that way. Maybe he got her stoned and they started necking, and she took off her clothes and they were, uh, embracing, and then the full force of the drug kicked in and she slipped out of consciousness.”

“And it didn’t occur to him to stop? I suppose he thought she was English. Believe me, Bern, the man was an insect. Look how he betrayed Doll Cooper. She left Marty’s cards with him, and he lifted them out from under her.”

“That was me, Carolyn. The attaché case full of cards was still under the bed when Luke got shot upstairs.”

“Oh, right,” she said. “So you’re the insect.”

“I guess so.”

“There was something else I was wondering about. Oh, right. The gun. Couldn’t they ever recover it?”

“From a storm drain? Have you got any idea how many guns get tossed down storm drains?”

“Lots, huh?”

“Put it this way,” I said. “If there really are alligators in the New York sewers, half of them are armed. Want to get rid of a gun? Just slip it down a storm drain. It’s like hiding a needle in a haystack.”

“I’d never hide a needle in a haystack,” she said. “It’s the first place they would look. Bern, why didn’t he leave the gun with Luke? I know he couldn’t get his arm through, but what if he tossed the gun so it landed in the tub?”

“And it would look like suicide.”

“Right.”

“Except it wouldn’t,” I said. “Not if you looked closely. Even if he managed to get his own prints off the gun, how was he going to get Luke’s on it? And if they ran a paraffin test on Luke they wouldn’t find any nitrate particles on his hand, nothing to indicate he’d fired a gun.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t know what kind of gun it was, so I can’t say whether it would have fit through the hole. Even if it would, if I’d just shot a guy and he’d fallen where I couldn’t get a good look at him and I had no way of knowing for sure whether he was alive or dead, I don’t think I’d be in a big rush to throw him a loaded gun.”

“I guess it was a bad idea,” she said. “Oh, well. Gotta drink up and go, Bern.”

“Already?”

“Got a date.”

“Oh? Anybody I know?”

“It’s no big deal,” she said defensively. “Just a quick drink, a little conversation.”

“That’s how Borden Stoppelgard described his pursuit of Doll.” I looked at her. “It
is
somebody I know, isn’t it? Who is it, Carolyn?”

“Somebody I just met the other night.”

“Not Doll,” I said. “It can’t be.”

“Jesus, no. Marty would kill me.”

“He did seem quite taken with her, now that you mention it. Considering that she stole his baseball cards. Well, he’s a patron of the theater. Maybe he’ll wind up taking a fatherly interest in her career.”

“Or a sugar daddily interest, Bern. Anyway, she’s not my type.”

“Not Patience. Joan Nugent? What are you going to do, have her paint a portrait of you in a clown suit?”

“Nice, Bern.”

“Well—”

“As a matter of fact,” she said, “it’s Lolly Stoppelgard.”

“Lolly Stoppelgard.”

“Didn’t you think she was nice?”

“Very nice, but—”

“But she’s married. That’s what you were going to say, isn’t it?”

“Something like that.”

“You didn’t see the looks she was giving me, Bern.”

“No, that’s true.”

“And you didn’t hear what she said to me on the way downstairs. ‘Call me,’ she said.”

“So you called her.”

“Uh-huh, and in the long run I’ll get my heart broken, but that’s what hearts are for, and mine’s getting used to it. She’s really nice, isn’t she? Pretty and sharp and funny.”

“It’s a shame to think of all that wasted on Borden Stoppelgard.”

“Well, I look at it this way,” she said. “I figure he’ll be an easy act to follow.”