The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams (8 page)

“What do you mean?”

I reached out a hand and ruffled Alison’s coat. She made that whimpering sound again. “I kept the money,” I said.

“Bern.”

“Well, I was going to put it back,” I said, “and then I remembered that I’d taken off my gloves to count it, because if I was taking the money it hardly mattered if I got my prints on it. So I would have had to wipe off every single bill, and I’d have had to be thorough about it, and then I’d have had to pick the lock on the desk drawer, once to open it and a second time to close it again.”

“So you took it.”

“Well, I’d already taken it. What I did was keep it.”

“Eight thousand dollars?”

“Close enough. Eighty-three fifty.”

“And how long were you in there? Four hours? Call it two thousand dollars an hour. That sure beats minimum wage.”

“Believe me,” I said, “it wasn’t worth it. I only kept the money because it was less trouble than putting it back. And it was pretty close to untraceable. The watches and the jewelry might lead back to the Nugent apartment, but money’s just money.” I shrugged. “I suppose I should have put it back, even if it meant wiping off each and every bill. But it was late and all I wanted to do was get out of there.”

“But you took time to pick the locks. The ones on the outer door I can understand, but why lock up the bathroom? It took you forever to open that lock, and it must have been just as much trouble to relock it.”

“Not quite. Locking’s easier than unlocking with that particular mechanism, and I’d already made some surface grooves in the bolt the first time around. But it still took some time, I’ll say that much.”

“Then why bother?”

“Think about it,” I said. “Say the cops come and they have to break the door down. They find a corpse in the tub with a gun alongside him. One little window, and it’s locked, and so was the door until they forced it. If you’re one of the cops, what conclusion do you draw?”

“Suicide,” she said. “It couldn’t be anything else. Bern? Wait a minute.”

“I’m waiting.”

“Suppose there’s no gun.”

“So?”

“Then it’s not suicide, is it?”

I shook my head. “It’s not,” I said, “and what you’ve got is a locked-room homicide straight out of John Dickson Carr, and I’ll be damned if I can figure out how the killer could have worked it. Now, I don’t honestly think that’s what happened, because it would have been impossible. I think the gun must have been out of sight somewhere, behind the body or underneath it. If it was suicide, I’d just as soon leave it as open-and-shut as possible. And if it was murder, some physically impossible kind of locked-room murder, why should I be the one to screw it up? Because if the door’s open when the cops get there, then it’s just another naked corpse in the bathtub. There’s nothing special about it at all.”

“I see what you mean.”

“So that’s why I locked up,” I said, “and there may well be a flaw in my logic, but I was too worn out to spot it. The bathroom lock was easier to manipulate the second time around, but it was still a real pain in the neck, and it took time. Do you want to know something? I felt justified keeping the eighty-three fifty. I worked hard for it. I figure I earned it.”

I chased the last bite of my sandwich with the last swallow of coffee and put the wrappings and the empty cup in the trash. Then I returned to watch Carolyn put the finishing touches on Alison Wanda’s coiffure. “You must be exhausted after a night like that,” she said. “I’m surprised you bothered to open up today.”

“Well, Patience called, and that woke me up. And I had to come down and feed Raffles.”

“Don’t bother,” she said. “When I saw you hadn’t opened, I used my set of keys and gave him food and fresh water.”

“When was that?”

“I don’t know, eleven o’clock, something like that. Why?”

“Because he gave a damn good imitation of a cat on the brink of starvation when I opened up a little after twelve.”

“You fed him again?”

“Of course I fed him again. His dish was spotless and he was wearing a hole in my sock.”

“You’re not supposed to overfeed them, Bern.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

I went back to Barnegat Books and opened up again. Raffles was rubbing against my ankle the minute my foot cleared the threshold.

“Yeah, right,” I told him. “In your dreams, pal.”

I hauled my bargain table outside and propped up the cardboard three-books-for-a-buck sign. Sometimes passersby lifted the odd volume, but at that price how much harm were they doing me? I’d have been more dismayed if one of them walked off with the sign.

I perched on my stool behind the counter and picked up my current book,
Clan of the Cave Bear.
(I’d read it once years ago, but if you don’t think books are worth reading more than once you’ve got no business running a used-book store.) I still hadn’t read the paper I’d bought when I got off the subway the night before, but neither had I brought it along when I left the apartment. That was just as well, because I didn’t much want to know what was happening in the world. I was a lot more comfortable reading about a Cro-Magnon child being brought up by a couple of Neanderthals, which wasn’t all that different from the way I remembered my own childhood.

Around two o’clock I made my first sale. It was only a buck but it broke the ice, and by three I’d rung up something like fifty dollars on the cash register. You don’t get rich that way, you don’t even break even that way, but at least I was selling books. And I suppose the cat could take credit for those sales, because if I hadn’t had to feed him I wouldn’t have bothered opening up.

And, like it or not, I was $8,350 ahead for having dropped in on the Nugents. And I could do what I wanted with the money and forget what I’d gone through to earn it, because that chapter was over forever and I was in the clear.

Yeah, right. In your dreams, Bernie.

T
rade picked up as the afternoon wore on, with a steady stream of people finding their way in and out of the shop. A number of them were just browsing, but I’m used to that; it is, after all, part of what a secondhand bookstore is all about. So is chitchat, and I got involved in a little of that, including a spirited discussion of what modern New York might have been like if the Dutch had retained their footing in the New World. My partner in that particular conversation was an elderly gentleman with a neat white beard and piercing blue eyes who had been browsing in the Old New York section, and damned if he didn’t wind up spending close to two hundred dollars before he left.

As soon as he was out the door, a big man in a dark gray sharkskin suit drifted over to the counter and rested a meaty forearm on it. “Well, now,” he said. “I got to hand it to you, Bernie. This place is turnin’ into a regular literary saloon.”

“Hello, Ray,” I said. “Always a pleasure.”

“That was real interestin’,” he said. “What you an’ Santa Claus there were talkin’ about.”

“Don’t you think he was a little thin for Santa?”

“He’ll fill out, same as everybody else. An’ there’s plenty of time. How many shoppin’ days until Christmas?”

“I can never keep track.”

“How about burglin’ days, Bernie? How many of those between now an’ when Santa pops in through the skylight?”

“Don’t you mean down the chimney?”

“Whatever, Bernie. You’d be the expert on that, wouldn’t you?” He flashed a grin that made the sharkskin suit seem singularly appropriate. “But it makes you think, what you an’ the old guy were talkin’ about. We could be standin’ here, the both of us, an’ we could be talkin’ back an’ forth in Dutch.”

“We could.”

“All these books’d be in Dutch, huh? I couldn’t read a one of ’em. Of course, if I was talkin’ Dutch with you, I guess I’d be able to read it, too. I’d have to if I was studyin’ for the Sergeant’s Exam, say, because all the questions’d be in Dutch.” He frowned. “An’ instead of cabdrivers who can’t understand English, you’d get cabdrivers who couldn’t understand Dutch, an’ either way nine out of ten of ’em wouldn’t know how to get to Penn Station. Be a whole new ball game, wouldn’t it?”

“It would.”

“But it sure is interestin’, Bern. I was this close to hornin’ in on your conversation, but then I figured why louse up a sale for you? You’re a bookseller, you’re well on your way to becomin’ a literary saloon keeper, what do you need with a cop buttin’ in and crampin’ your style?”

“What indeed?”

He propped an elbow on the counter, placed his chin in his cupped hand. “You know, Bernie,” he said, “you were talkin’ a blue streak with Santa, an’ now it’s all you can do to hold up your end of the conversation. I see you got yourself a cat, stretched out in the window there tryin’ to get hisself a tan. He got your tongue or somethin’?”

“No.”

“Then how come I can’t get a thing out of you but yes, no, an’ maybe?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe it’s because I’m trying to figure out what you’re doing here, Ray.”

“Bern,” he said, looking hurt. “I thought we were friends.”

“I suppose we are, but your friendly visits tend to have an ulterior motive.”

He nodded. “‘Ulterior.’ I always liked that word. You never hear it without hearin’ ‘motive’ right after it. What’s it mean, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted, and reached for the dictionary. There’s a three-foot shelf of them in the Reference section, but I keep one close at hand, and I flipped through it now. “‘Ulterior,’” I read. “‘One: lying beyond or on the farther side.’”

“Like the cat,” he suggested. “Lyin’ on the farther side of that row of shelves.”

“‘Two: later, subsequent, or future. Three: further; more remote; esp., beyond what is expressed, implied, or evident; undisclosed, as an ulterior motive.’”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “That sounds about right. Anyway, that’s what you think, huh? That I got one of those?”

“Don’t you?”

“Maybe I do,” he said, “an’ then again maybe I don’t. It all depends how you answer a question.”

“What’s the question?”

“What the hell’s the matter with you, Bernie? Are you losin’ it?”

“That’s the question?”

“No,” he said, “that ain’t the question. It’s just the kind of thoughts go through the mind of a guy that’s known you a long time, an’ never yet knew you to make a habit of steppin’ on your own dick. So that ain’t the question. Here’s the question.”

“I can’t wait.”

“Why’d you call the guy?”

“What guy, Ray?”

“ ‘What guy, Ray?’ I don’t even need to check my notebook, because it’s the kind of name tends to stick in your mind. Martin Gilmartin, that’s what guy. Why the hell did you call him on the phone last night?”

There was suddenly a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, as if I’d somehow got hold of a bad burrito. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

I couldn’t have been very convincing, because Ray Kirschmann didn’t even trouble to roll his eyes. “I won’t ask you why you broke into his place,” he said, “anymore’n I’d ask that cat over there why he catches mice. It’s his nature. He’s a cat, same as you’re a burglar.”

“I’m retired.”

“Yeah, right, Bernie. You could no more retire from bein’ a burglar than he could retire from bein’ a cat. It’s your nature, it’s what you are. So you don’t have to explain why you robbed the guy’s apartment. But why did you call him up afterward and taunt him about it?”

“Who says I did?”

“
He
says you did. Are you saying you didn’t?”

“What else does he say?”

“That at first he didn’t know what to make of it. Then he took a good look around the apartment, and he found out he’d been robbed.”

“That’s the second time you’ve used that word,” I said, “and you should know better. You know what robbery is. It’s the taking of money or property through force or violence, or the threat of force or violence.”

“Here I am,” he said, “back at the Academy, listenin’ to a lecture.”

“Well, it’s maddening,” I said. “‘He found out he’d been robbed.’ You can’t find out you’ve been robbed because you’re aware of it while it’s going on. Somebody sticks a gun in your face and tells you to give him your money or he’ll blow your head off,
that’s
robbery. I never robbed anyone in my life.”

“You done, Bern?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but words mean a lot to me. How did Mr. Gilmartin discover he’d been burglarized?”

“His property was missing.”

“What kind of property?”

“As if you didn’t know.”

“Humor me, Ray.”

“His baseball cards.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said. “What do you bet his mother threw them out?”

“Bernie—”

“That’s what happened to mine. I came home from college and they were gone, and when I blew up she stood there and quoted St. Paul at me. Something about putting away childish things.”

“Mr. Gilmartin had quite the collection.”

“So did I,” I remembered. “I had a ton of comic books, too. I liked the ones that taught you something about history.
Crime Does Not Pay,
that was my favorite.”

“A shame you never got the message.”

“As far as I could make out,” I said, “the message seemed to be that crime paid just fine until the last frame. She threw out my comic books, too. You know something? It still bothers me.”

“Bernie—”

“So I can imagine how Mr. Gilmartin must feel, and I’m not saying it was his mother who did it, but I think he ought to rule out the possibility before he goes around accusing other people. I can tell you one thing for sure, Ray. I had nothing to do with it.”

“You denyin’ that you called him last night?”

How could he possibly have known about the phone call?

“Maybe it’s not a good idea for me to confirm or deny anything,” I said slowly. “Maybe I ought to talk to my lawyer first.”

“You know,” he said, “that’s probably exactly what you ought to do. Tell you what, Bern. I’ll read you your Miranda rights, an’ then you an’ me’ll head over to Central Bookin’, an’ we’ll see about gettin’ you mugged an’ printed. Then you can give Wally Hemphill a call. If he ain’t doin’ laps around Central Park, maybe he can help you decide what to remember about last night.”

“Don’t read me my rights.”

“You remember ’em from last time, huh? It don’t matter, Bern. I gotta go by the book.”

With the marathon coming up, Wally might not be that easy to get hold of. Who else could I call, Doll Cooper?

“I guess there’s no reason not to talk,” I said slowly. “Since I didn’t do anything wrong, why not clear the air?”

He smiled, looking more like a shark than ever.

First I locked the door and hung the “Back in Ten Minutes” sign in the window. I didn’t want customers to disturb us while I straightened things out with Ray, and I could use a minute or two to get my thoughts in order.

On the one hand, it was ridiculous to get mugged and printed and thrown in a holding cell for a couple of hours for a crime that I’d had nothing to do with. At the same time, I had to be careful what I said or I’d simply be swapping the Gilmartin skillet for the Nugent bonfire.

I bought myself a few extra seconds by freshening the water in Raffles’ bowl. I was tempted to feed him again while I was at it, and I don’t suppose he would have given me an argument, but he’d already had one extra meal that day. At this rate his mousing days would soon be over.

“All right,” I told Ray. “I’m ready to talk now.”

“You sure you don’t want to take a little time to rearrange the stock on your shelves?”

I ignored that. “I called Gilmartin,” I said. “I admit it.”

“Well, hallelujah.”

“But it had nothing to do with a burglary. I really have retired, Ray, whether you’re prepared to believe it or not. Look, I’d better start at the beginning.”

“Why not?”

“Carolyn and I went out after work yesterday,” I said.

“You always do,” he said. “The Bum Rap, right?”

I nodded. “I’ve been under a little pressure lately,” I said, “and I guess I let it get to me. The long and short of it is I had more to drink than I usually do.”

“Hey, it happens.”

“It does,” I agreed, “but not to me, not that often, and I wasn’t used to it. I got silly.”

“Silly?”

“You know. Playful, goofy.”

“I bet it was somethin’ to see.”

“You should have been there. Anyway, Carolyn and I spent the whole evening together. From the Bum Rap we went to an Italian restaurant for dinner, and then we went back to her place on Arbor Court. That’s where I was when I called Mr. Gilmartin.”

He nodded, as if I’d just passed some sort of test.

“I don’t know how it started,” I went on. “I was still a little drunk, I guess, and I got into this routine where I was finding funny names in the telephone book. I was picking out names and reading them aloud to Carolyn and making jokes.”

“The two of you were makin’ fun of people’s names, Bern?”

“It was mostly my doing,” I said, “and I’m not proud of it, but what can I say? It happened. Somehow or other the name Geraldine Fitzgerald came up. Remember her? She was a singer years ago.”

“Is that a fact.”

“Anyway, I said her name sounded to me like a recipe for a perfect relationship. Get it? Geraldine fits Gerald.”

“Geraldine Fitzgerald,” he said. “So?”

“Geraldine. Fits. Gerald.”

“That’s what I just said. What the hell’s supposed to be so funny about that?”

“I guess you had to be there. I couldn’t find a Geraldine Fitzgerald in the phone book, but I found a Gerald Fitzgerald, and I thought that was pretty funny.”

“Yeah, it’s a riot. Wha’d you do, call the guy up?”

A little warning bell went off. “I did,” I said, “but nobody was home. So I flipped through the phone book some more, looking for doubled names like that.”

“William Williams,” he suggested. “John Johnson.”

“Well, sort of, but the ones you just mentioned aren’t particularly funny.”

“Not real thigh-slappers like Gerald Fitzgerald.”

“I know it doesn’t seem all that amusing,” I said, “when you’re sober, but I wasn’t. Eventually I found Martin Gilmartin, and for some reason I thought that one was a real screamer. I should have known better, it was too late to call anybody, let alone a total stranger, but I picked up the phone and called him. He answered the phone, and I made some sort of joke about his name, real high-school humor, I’m ashamed to say.”

“Did he get a good chuckle out of it, Bern?”

“He seemed a little flustered, so I joked with him some more and then hung up.”

“Just like that.”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“How’d you know he and his wife went to a play?”

Jesus. “Is that where they were? I knew he was out somewhere because I tried him a few times before I finally got an answer.”

“Oh, yeah? Why’d you keep callin’?”

“Well, they make it easy these days,” I said. “Carolyn’s phone has this button that automatically redials the last number.”

“A real time-saver.”

“So when I finally got through,” I said, “I guess I said something about being glad he was home, and I hoped he’d had a good evening. You know, some kind of smartass remark. But I didn’t say anything about a play.”

He let that pass. “Gilmartin says it was after midnight when you called.”

“I would have said a few minutes before midnight,” I said, “but I’ll take his word for it. So?”

“What did you do after that? Call some more people?”

“No,” I said. “Actually completing a call made me realize what a childish thing I was doing. Besides, it was late and I was tired.”

“You stay the night at Carolyn’s?”

“No, I went home.”

“And you never left your house until morning, right?”

Uh-oh. “That’s right,” I said.

“You got home around one, musta been, and then you didn’t set foot outside your apartment until you came down here and opened up earlier today.”

“Right,” I said. And just as he was about to say something I added, “Except for going to the store.”

“When would that have been, Bernie?”