“Just that one.”
“And I bring it to you, and then what happens?”
“You get twenty thousand dollars.”
“And that’s not counting what you just gave me. That’s twenty more, for a total of twenty-five.”
“I see you’re good at math, too.”
She gave me a look. “Look,” she said, “what I am basically is this slacker drifting through life and not amounting to anything, okay? I keep taking college courses, one or two a year, but I’ll never get a degree, and I don’t want one because it would just make me overqualified.”
“For what?”
“For anything. I could teach yoga, except I hate teaching, and I’m a massage therapist qualified in Swedish and shiatsu and Coblenz reflexology, but I found out I hate touching strangers. You saw what I was doing with the money you gave me?”
“After you counted the bills? Shuffling them, it looked like.”
“I was playing with them,” she said. “I never had anywhere near that much cash before. So if I played with it then it was play money and I didn’t have to be scared of it. What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Whatever you want.”
“Like put it in the bank?”
“You could.”
“But you wouldn’t.”
“Well, somebody someday might want to know where it came from.”
“Got it. So I should keep it in cash, but someplace safe.”
“That’s what I always do.”
Her eyes narrowed, and I could see her mind working. “That was you last night,” she said. “When I got home he was all excited about the book he’d bought. But last night you were using a different name.”
“I was.”
“An alias, I guess they call it.”
“That’s if you use it with some frequency,” I said. “In this instance it was just a name I assumed for the occasion.”
“She thought you were this nebbishy low-rent guy with a store and a cat.”
“Janine.”
“Yeah, alias Janine. ‘You’d have fun with him,’ she said. Like she’s going places, and I’m not, so I could afford to waste my time with a loser.”
“Like me.”
“Uh-huh. Like you, Joe Loser. Meanwhile you’ve got all this cash that you know enough not to keep in a bank.”
“I’m not exactly rolling in it.”
“But when you want some, you find a way to get some.”
“Well, it tends to work out that way.”
“You make money the old-fashioned way. You steal it.” She took a deep breath, let it out. “Okay,” she said.
“Okay? You mean you’ll do it?”
She nodded. “How long am I supposed to think about it? I’ll get it out of the cabinet tonight and bring it to your store tomorrow afternoon. Twenty thousand dollars?”
“I’ll have it ready.”
“Great.” She stood up, hesitated. “Uh, my iced tea . . .”
Joe Loser told her he’d take care of it.
Why buttons?
I’d held off as long as I could, but eventually I’d had to ask.
“Why does anyone collect anything, Mr. Rhodenbarr? I’m familiar with all the theories, as I trust are you. To create the illusion of order in an unordered universe. To accumulate objects which will in some way reflect a flattering image of oneself. To present oneself with a challenge, and rise to it; to get hold of every different kind of stamp or coin or book or widget, to possess the finest specimen, or the rarest sub-variety, or otherwise outdo one’s fellow collectors.
“Many men take up collecting late in life. They’ve been successful, they’ve made all this money, and they want to spend some of it in a gratifying fashion. Why buy another stock certificate when one can buy a painting? ‘My art collection,’ Mr. Puglash can announce, gesturing offhandedly toward what’s on his walls. When he runs out of wall space, he can lend pieces to museums. From the Russell N. Puglash Collection, the little brass plate will state, and he can bask in its reflected glory.”
“But you started collecting early,” I guessed.
“I was born with the impulse,” he said. “I tried on different hobbies, as boys will do. Brought home rolls of pennies from the bank, sorting for different dates and mint marks. Picked up bottle caps off the street, trying to see how many different ones I could find.” He sighed. “And then one day an aunt gave me a handful of buttons. Odd ones that had come off coats and dresses, I suppose. The sort of buttons that accumulate in a corner of a sewing box, never to be either used or discarded. ‘Buttons for you, my little Button.’ ” His eyes met mine. “My name,” he said, “is not actually Smith.”
“I’m shocked.”
“It’s actually Burton Barton the Fifth.” He looked off into the middle distance, remembering. “My great-great-grandfather was the first Burton Barton, having been given his mother’s maiden name for a first name. He liked the name well enough to pass it on to his first-born son, my great-grandfather, who went through life answering to Junior. His only son was my grandfather, Burton Barton the Third, called Burtie in childhood and Burt thereafter, and by the time that gentleman had given the world a son, the family was forever in thrall to tradition. A third Burton Barton could only be followed by a fourth.”
“Your father.”
“Known to one and all as Buster. ‘I’m Buster Brown, I live in a shoe.’ An inane slogan, but one remembers it, so perhaps it sold shoes. My father was more bluster than buster, but he gloried in the nickname, and perhaps it suited him. In any event in the fullness of time he took a wife, and she produced a male heir. I’ve told you the inevitable name I was given, and you can probably guess the nickname that soon followed.
“ ‘He’s just as cute as a button,’ some female relative said, and that was that. I suppose it’s more remarkable that it took five generations of Burton Bartons for that name to pop up. I liked the nickname well enough. I was happy enough to bear it.”
So an aunt’s handful of buttons had grown into a lifelong passion. In due course the penny collection was spent, the bottle caps discarded. Friends and relatives were advised to set aside attractive or unusual buttons for young Button, who sought them for his collection.
And one thing led to another. Political buttons. Benjamin Button.
And Button Gwinnett.
With the devil-may-care attitude I seemed to have acquired, I’d left my bargain table on the sidewalk when I went to meet Chloe. On my way back downtown I wondered if it would still be there. It would make a nice kitchen table, once you got rid of the books.
But it was right where I’d left it, and so, alas, were the books. And there was a note, a mate to the one I’d found before, printed in block capitals on a small sheet of lined notebook paper, but with a longer message this time: GONE AGAIN! I SNUCK OUT OF WORK AND STILL NO LUCK. SOMEBODY LEFT YOU TWO DOLLAR BILLS. GOOD THING I AM HONEST. I PUT THEM WHERE THEY WON’T BLOW AWAY. CZECH AROUND AND SEE.
Huh?
I read it through a second time, noted the spelling of the first word in the last sentence, and reached for a battered copy of the Lonely Planet guide to Czechoslovakia. The depreciation rate for travel books is pretty fierce, and anything more than a year or two old essentially worthless. Still, wouldn’t some passerby be whimsical enough to snap up a guidebook to a country that no longer existed?
Evidently not. I found the promised pair of dollar bills inside the book’s front cover, considered leaving them there to reward whimsy, decided whimsy was its own reward, and gave them a home in my wallet.
Inside, I looked around for the first note, and was comparing it to the second when the bell announced a visitor. “You gotta get that fixed,” Ray Kirschmann said. “Way it is now, it makes that little tinkling noise every time I open the door.”
“It’s not just you,” I told him. “It makes the same noise no matter who walks in.”
“And here I thought I was special, Bernie. Whatcha got there?”
“Two notes,” I said, “written days apart, and left on my bargain table.”
“Looks like the same paper. From one of them little notebooks.”
“It does look the same, doesn’t it?”
“Same pen, too, from the looks of things. Blue felt tip with a fine point. This here was written first.”
“It was,” I said. “How’d you know that?”
“Notice how these letters are thicker? The felt tip’s a little worn down.”
“Right you are, Ray. I hadn’t noticed.”
“Well, I’m a trained investigator, Bernie. I’m supposed to notice things like that. Far as how much earlier this note was written, that I couldn’t tell you.”
“You couldn’t? I’ll bet Sherlock Holmes could.”
“Yeah, and so could those geniuses on CSI. Give ’em fifteen minutes and they can bounce a DNA sample off a data base and tell you how much the writer weighs and what she had for breakfast. Of course that’s TV.”
“And we’re down here in the real world.”
“Where they just this morning finally worked out what killed the old lady.”
“Mrs. Ostermaier.”
He nodded. “It wasn’t a bee flew up her nose,” he said. “It was peanuts.”
“Peanuts flew up her nose?”
“Flyin’ peanuts,” he said. “Nobody ever thought of that. It’d explain it, too.”
“Explain what?”
“Why her blood work showed peanuts but her stomach contents didn’t.”
“How could that be?”
“It couldn’t. We oughta be on television, Bernie. That’d be the clue that broke the case, but we’re here on Planet Earth and all it means is the crime lab missed somethin’. There was peanuts in her stomach, or she had peanut oil in her salad dressing, or some food that was cooked in it.”
“I guess nobody’s perfect.”
“Not in the real world. Anyway, it’s peanuts that killed her.”
“I read up a little on anaphylactic shock,” I said. “Out of curiosity. A surprising number of people die of it, and sometimes there’s no prior history of allergic reaction, or not enough to pay attention to. Maybe you got stung by a bee once, and you had a red bump for a day or two, and then it went away. Then two years later another bee stings you and your heart stops.”
“Well, Mrs. O. was allergic. She had a bunch of allergies when she was a kid, and peanuts was one of ’em. Then she outgrew ’em, the way kids’ll do.”
“And then what? It came back?”
“Two, three years ago. She got shingles, which sounds like it oughta be funny, with a name like that. ‘Oh, you got shingles? What are they, cedar? You gonna paint ’em or leave ’em natural?’ Only my uncle had ’em and there was nothin’ funny about it. But he was fine once he got over it. When she got over the shingles, she had allergies.”
“To peanuts.”
“And a couple of other things, but peanuts was the main one. She carried a little syringe in her purse in case she got a bad attack. I forget what was in it.”
“Epinephrine.”
“I guess you did read up on it. Yeah, that sounds right. It was still in her purse, so I guess she never got a chance to use it.”
“It must have hit her hard all at once.”
“Or she thought it was something else. ‘I’m a little woozy, I’ll just put my coat down, see if I can’t catch my breath.’ ”
“And by the time she realized what was going on—”
“It was too late, assumin’ she ever realized it at all. But you know what this means, don’t you, Bernie?”
“What?”
“It’s not homicide. You already figured out that the burglar got there after the woman was dead. And if the death was from natural causes, and you can’t get much more natural than a peanut, and if it all happened before the burglar was on the scene, then you can forget all about felony murder.”
“Because the death and the felony had nothing to do with one another.”
“Right.”
“It was just a coincidence,” I said, “that an intruder turned up an hour or so after she had one peanut too many.”
He frowned. “A coincidence on TV,” he said, “is a bad sign.”
“While in real life—”
“It still gives me a headache. But there’s got to be such a thing as a coincidence or how would we happen to have a word for it?”
“Like unicorns,” Carolyn said at the Bum Rap. “If they didn’t exist, where did the word come from? Let me see those notes again.”
“For awhile,” I said, “I wondered if the first note might be from Chloe. It didn’t make any sense, but I couldn’t shake the feeling.”
“But when you found the second note—”
“I knew it wasn’t her, because it would have been left while I was sitting across a table from her in Three Guys.”
“After having had lunch with me,” she said, “from Two Guys. How’s that for a unicorn?”
“It’s a nice one.”
“Maybe that’s what the mystery meat was this afternoon.”
“Unicorn? I hope not.”
“So do I. I try to avoid eating endangered species, let alone mythical ones. You thought it was from Chloe because you wanted it to be. You couldn’t get those remarkably soft hands out of your mind.”
“No,” I said. “I got the first note the day before I set foot in Edwin Leopold’s penthouse. I didn’t even know about Miss Miller’s magic fingers, or that they shared an arm with a gecko. I saw the whole tattoo today, by the way. If a person has to have a tattoo, it’s not a bad one.”
“But fortunately,” she said, “a person doesn’t. You could have been thinking about her anyway, Bern. You just saw her the one time, when she bought Frank Norris for her Kindle, but then Janine mentioned her, and that could have got you thinking.”
“I was wondering if she’d ever stop in again,” I admitted.
“And she didn’t, and now she’s gonna steal a spoon for you. Just like that.”
“Unless she chickens out.”
“You think she will?”
“No,” I said. “I think she gave the whole business about twenty seconds of serious thought and made her decision. And she’ll stick with it.”
“She lives with this man—”
“She lives in his house. That’s not the same as living with him.”
“They have a relationship, Bern.”
“He’s her employer. One of the services she performs has a sexual element to it.”
“No kidding.”
“He calls her Miss Miller,” I said, “and she calls him Mr. Leopold. She’s a licensed massage therapist.”
“Who doesn’t like touching strangers.”
“Which he’s not, since she sees the man seven days a week, but neither is he a lover. Once a day he hops off the treadmill, takes a shower, and lies down on the massage table. The massage is therapeutic.”
“So why does she take her top off? To make it more therapeutic?”
My glass was empty, and our conversation was making me thirsty. I guess Maxine somehow sensed this, because she appeared with a fresh drink without my having summoned her. “You’re a mind reader,” I said, and drank deep. To Carolyn I said, “So maybe Chloe’s a little bit of an exhibitionist. Maybe she doesn’t want to get her blouse all sweaty. Maybe she figures it won’t take as long if she gives him something nice to look at. Why are you all hipped on this all of a sudden?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and thought about it. “Maybe I’m jealous, Bern.”
“Of her?”
“Of him, with his daily rubdown and his daily Happy Ending.”
“Is that something you’d want?”
“No,” she said, “it’s not, not at all, and that’s why I’m jealous. Not just that he gets to have it, but that he gets to want it. The son of a bitch, I’m glad she’s stealing his goddam spoon.”
A drink later, she said, “I wonder who l
eft the notes.”
“A stranger. Someone I don’t know, and will evidently never get to meet, since she only comes around when I’m not there.”
“Twice.”
“Probably more than that. Look at the first note. WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS CLOSED? Meaning every time she comes by I’m closed, but this time she could leave a note because my table was on the street.”
“And she saw your table, so that made her come over, and then you were closed, and she was really pissed.”
“Well, disappointed, anyway. And the same thing happened again today, and she left another note.”
She sipped her drink. “We keep saying ‘she,’ ” she said. “How do we know it’s a woman?”
“We don’t, not really. The writing is plain block capitals. There’s nothing gender-specific about it.”
“And yet a woman wrote it, and we both know it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And Ray made the same assumption, come to think of it. He said ‘she,’ and I barely noticed.”
“So she’s a woman, Bern. If all three of us know it, who cares why we know it? She’s a woman. What else do we know about her?”
“She carries a little notebook.”
“And a blue felt-tip pen.”
“And she tears sheets out of it without taking the time to open the three little rings.”
“Why bother? She’s gonna leave the note on your table, not put it back in the notebook. She printed both notes. Maybe her handwriting’s lousy.”
“You think? Her printing’s very neat.”
“Good point. You know what I read somewhere? A lot of kids these days aren’t being taught cursive writing. They’re using a keyboard all the time, so printing’s good enough when they actually have to use a pen or pencil.”
“Goodbye, Palmer Method,” I said. “What about SpeedWriting?”
“I guess it’s SpeedPrinting these days.”
“ ‘F U CN RD THS, U CN GT FKD,’ ” I said. “Remember those ads in the subways?”