The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No, I didn’t. Instead, I laid the groundwork for the commission of a felony. You can’t imagine what that felt like. Oh, for heaven’s sake, what’s the matter with me? Of course you can.”

  “I’ve laid a little groundwork in my time.”

  “Indeed. Bernard, I don’t ordinarily have a brandy after luncheon. After dinner, yes, but not after luncheon. But if I could persuade you to join me—”

  “What a nice idea,” I said.

  “I don’t know that I would have gone through with it. You see, I’ve always been an honest man. In my business dealings I’ve always tried to be a step ahead of the next fellow, but I’ve been law-abiding throughout. Still, there’s an emotional difference between defrauding an insurance company and stealing the pencils from a blind man’s cup.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “I wasn’t sure how best to proceed. It seemed to me that the cards couldn’t simply disappear. There ought to be the appearance of a burglary. We live in a building with exemplary security, and I understand the locks are on an order that would keep most housebreakers out.”

  “Most of them,” I said.

  “So how to create the appearance of a burglary? If I’d known you I might have asked for your professional advice on the matter. I thought I could just leave the door unlocked after having pretended to lock it. But I wasn’t sure that would set the stage sufficiently. Oughtn’t the premises to look as though they’d been ransacked? What does a house look like after you’ve been through it?”

  “About the same as it did when I arrived.”

  “Really? Perhaps I was trying to be too thorough, perhaps out of a reluctance to commit myself. The point turned out to be moot. I went to the humidor one day and found it unlocked. I lifted the lid and found it empty.”

  “When was this?”

  “Monday afternoon. I had luncheon here and got home between three and four. I couldn’t guess when I’d last looked at the cards. There was little reason to examine them, now that all the decent material was gone. I can’t tell you what went through my mind when I looked into that empty box.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “I wonder if you can. I began to doubt my own soundness of mind. Had I disposed of the cards and somehow forgotten the episode? Because, you see, I’d planned to get rid of them.”

  “Who was going to hold them for you?”

  He looked puzzled. “No one, for heaven’s sake. I certainly wasn’t going to let anybody know what I was doing. And why would I want anyone to hold them, anyway? As soon as they were out of my house, I intended for them to disappear from the face of the planet. They’d wind up in an incinerator or a Dumpster, I suppose. I hadn’t worked out the details at that point.”

  “And instead they vanished into thin air.”

  “Someone had taken them,” he said, “but who and why? And what was I to do? Report them stolen? There was certainly not the slightest evidence of a burglary. My policy covers mysterious disappearance as well as theft, and no disappearance was ever more mysterious than this one, but did I dare report it? I was in a quandary. It seemed to me as though I still ought to try to make it look like a burglary, even though the cards were already out of the house.” He sighed. “And then we spent the evening with Edna’s awful brother, and he was crowing over his triumph in having bought a rare book for a fraction of its current value.”

  “ ‘B’ Is for Burglar.”

  “Exactly. All I heard was the last word. So burglary was very much on my mind, and we came home and the telephone rang, and it was you. Though of course I didn’t know who you were or what you did for a living. You didn’t mention your name—”

  “Impolite of me.”

  “—and if you had I’d have thought of you as Borden’s tenant, if indeed I chanced to recognize the name at all. I might have, because it’s an unusual name, Rhodenbarr. What’s the derivation?”

  “It was my father’s.”

  “Ah, I see.” He lifted his glass of brandy and admired in turn its color, its bouquet, and its taste. “As I was saying, I knew nothing about the identity of my late-night caller, but the opportunity seemed heaven-sent. Edna asked me what was so disturbing. I’m no actor, my membership here notwithstanding, but I had only to be myself. I rushed into the study, I unlocked the humidor, I ‘discovered’ the loss of its contents, and I called the police.”

  “Who promptly traced the call.”

  “I didn’t even know they could do that. In the movies and on television they’re forever trying to keep criminals on the phone while they trace the call. Now I gather computers keep a record of everything. They did indeed trace the call, and remarkably enough traced it to a known burglar, who turned out to be the very bookstore owner Borden had boasted of outwitting. Ironic, eh? But horribly inconvenient for you, and for that I apologize. Did they go so far as to arrest you?”

  I nodded. “I spent a night in a cell.”

  “No!”

  “Not your fault,” I said. “Hazards of the game.”

  “How sporting of you to see it that way. But you hadn’t done anything to deserve it, had you?”

  “Well,” I said, “actually, when you come right down to it, that’s not entirely true.”

  More coffee, more brandy. “When you called this morning,” Martin Gilmartin was saying, “I was utterly confounded.”

  That had been my intention. I’d told him I had been fortunate enough to recover his cards, and wondered if he could let me know the name of his insurance company so that I could see about turning them in for a reward. Unless he thought there might be a mutually advantageous way to handle the matter between ourselves. There had been a strangled pause, then a remarkably graceful invitation to lunch.

  “Then I gave it some thought,” he went on, “and my position seemed a little less dire. After all, suppose you did go to the insurance company. One of two things would happen. They might look at the cards, assess their value, compare them to the inventory I’d supplied when I arranged the coverage, and conclude that you were trying to pull a fast one. Either you’d already skimmed off the cream of the collection or you’d never taken it in the first place, but in any event they certainly would refuse to have any further dealings with you.”

  “Possible.”

  “Or they might have the cards appraised. They’re not worthless, after all. The Chalmers Mustard set is worth a couple of thousand, and there are some other Ted Williams items I held on to as well. Say the whole batch is worth ten thousand dollars. I don’t think it is, but we’ll use that as a figure. After they’ve run the numbers, they negotiate with you and arrange to acquire the cards. Then they present them to me. ‘Here you are, Mr. Gilmartin,’ they say. ‘We were ever so fortunate as to recover your collection intact. Have a nice day.’ ‘I beg your pardon,’ I reply, ‘but these are not my cards at all.’ ‘Our position is that they are, and that you misrepresented them when you applied for the policy, which we are accordingly canceling as of this moment. If you institute a lawsuit, we’ll respond by having you charged with misrepresentation and fraud, but do have a nice day.’ ”

  “They might try that.”

  “In which case I’d be stuck with a box of junk instead of a six-figure settlement. I could always bring suit, hoping they’d be willing to split the difference, but I might decide it wasn’t worth the trouble, not to mention the negative publicity.” He furrowed his brow, working it all out. “The best thing to do would be to pay you a finder’s fee. What did I just say the cards were worth? Ten thousand at the outside? Well, let’s double that. Twenty thousand dollars.”

  I looked at him.

  “No, I didn’t really think that would fly. I’m low on cash at the moment, and it would be a strain to pay you even that much. I’ll have cash when the insurance company pays up, but they can be sluggish when it comes to settling a claim. Besides, I’m going to need that money. If I hadn’t needed it I wouldn’t have put in a fra
udulent claim in the first place. In a year’s time I ought to have more money than I’ll know what to do with. Now if you were willing to take a promissory note—”

  “You know, I wish I could. But you’re not the only one with a cash-flow problem.”

  “It’s the economy,” he said with feeling. “Everybody’s up against it. But may I say something?”

  “Please.”

  “This may sound like the brandy talking, and perhaps that’s exactly what it is, but I can’t dismiss the feeling that you and I have the opportunity to do ourselves and each other a great deal of good.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “It’s ridiculous on the face of it, and yet—”

  “I know.”

  “Well,” he said. “That doesn’t change the situation of the moment. Perhaps it would help clarify things if you could tell me just what it is that you want.”

  “That’s easy,” I said. “I want to keep my store.”

  CHAPTER

  Eighteen

  When I went out for lunch with Martin Gilmartin I left a little cardboard sign hanging in the door. Back at, it says, and there’s a clock face. I had set the hands at two-thirty, and when I got back there was a customer waiting. I had never seen her before, although she looked something like my eighth-grade civics teacher. As I was unlocking the door she made one of those throat-clearing sounds that generally gets rendered in print as “harrumph.” I looked at her and she pointed first at her wristwatch, then at my cardboard clock face.

  “It’s three o’clock,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “That thing’s been running slow lately. I’m going to have to get it repaired.” I took the sign from the door, moved the big hand to the three and the little hand to the twelve. “There,” I said. “How’s that?”

  For a minute there I thought she was going to send me to the principal’s office, but then Raffles rubbed against her ankle and charmed her, and by the time she left she’d picked out a couple of novels to go with the picture book of American folk rugs that had caught her eye in the window, and kept her waiting a half hour. It was a decent sale, and the first of several such. By the time I closed up again at six, I’d punched the old cash register a dozen times. Even better, I’d bought two big shopping bags full of paperbacks from an occasional customer who informed me he was moving to Australia. I took his count and made the deal without even looking at the books, and half of them turned out to be eminently collectible—Ace double volumes, Dell map-backs, and other goodies to gladden the heart of a paperback collector. There were half a dozen spicy novels from the sixties, too, and I knew a vest-pocket dealer in Wetumpka, Alabama, who’d pay me more for those than I’d shelled out for the lot.

  Not a bad afternoon at all, and it ended with a phone call from a woman who told me she’d had to put her mother in a nursing home, and would I like to come have a look at the library? From her description it sounded promising, and I made an appointment to see it.

  What with one thing and another, I was whistling by the time I got to the Bum Rap. I ordered a Perrier and got a quizzical look from Carolyn.

  “It’s not what you think,” I said. “I had a couple of brandies at lunch. They’ve just about worn off, and I’d just as soon not add fuel to a dying fire. I had a good day, Carolyn. I bought some books, I sold some books.”

  “Well, that’s the whole idea with bookstores, Bern. How was lunch?”

  “Lunch was great,” I said. “As a matter of fact, lunch was terrific. I think I’m going to be able to keep the store.”

  “It’s very confusing,” she said.

  “What’s so confusing? It’s a perfectly good way for me to wind up with the bookstore.”

  “Not that, Bern. The whole business with what happened to the baseball cards. According to Doll—”

  “I don’t think ‘according to Doll’ is ever going to have the authority of, say, ‘according to Hoyle,’ or ‘according to Emily Post.’ ”

  “I understand that, Bern. But even so, if she’s Marty’s girlfriend—”

  “She’s not.”

  “But—”

  “I had a feeling she was making that up. I was pretty sure before I went up to her apartment, but that clinched it. I couldn’t imagine why a man crowding sixty would want to climb all those stairs to visit his mistress. A fifth-floor walk-up with a single bed, that’s some love nest.”

  “Then where does she fit in?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And how did the cards wind up in Luke’s apartment? And how did she and Luke know each other?”

  “Good question.”

  “Which one?”

  “Both of them.”

  “And what about the Nugents, Bern? How do they fit into the picture? What was Luke doing in their apartment? Who killed him?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Don’t you care?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “You’ve got some ideas, though. Right?”

  “Nope.”

  “But you can’t just—uh-oh.”

  “What’s the matter?” I turned and saw the answer to that question, looming over our table like bad weather in the western sky. “Oh,” I said. “Hi, Ray.”

  “Don’t mind me,” he said, pulling up a chair from another table. “I just thought I’d stop by an’ pass the time of day. Had a real funny thing yesterday in your neighborhood, an’ I was wonderin’ if you had any ideas on the subject.”

  “Something happened in the Village, Ray?”

  “I’m sure plenty of things did,” he said, “but the neighborhood I was referrin’ to is the one where you live. As opposed to down here, where you got your store, say, or the East Side, where you do the bulk of your stealin’.” He turned to favor the waitress with a smile. “Oh, hiya, Maxine,” he said. “Make it a glass of plain ginger ale. You know the way I like it.”

  “How’s that, Ray?” Carolyn asked him.

  “How’s what?”

  “How do you like your plain ginger ale?”

  “With about two an’ a half ounces of rye in it,” he said, “if it’s any of your business.”

  “So why not order it that way?”

  “Because it don’t look good for a cop to be drinkin’ spirits in public.”

  “But you’re not in uniform, Ray. Who’s gonna know you’re a cop?”

  “Anybody who looks at him,” I told her. “You were telling a story, Ray. Something happened uptown?”

  “Yeah,” he said levelly. “An’ you’re involved, an’ I don’t know how I know that, but I know it all the same. They got a call on 911 about a bad smell, an’ you know what that means. It’s never once turned out to be somebody forgot to put the Limburger cheese back in the icebox. So a couple of blues went over, an’ nobody in the buildin’ knew nothin’ about it, an’ you couldn’t smell nothin’ in the hall. The doorman got hold of the super, an’ he had keys to the place, an’ he let ’em in.”

  “I think I know what they found,” I said, hoping to save us all some time. “There was something on the news last night. There was a man dead in the bathroom, right?”

  “That’s where the smell was comin’ from. The door was jammed so they had to kick it in, an’ there he was. Been dead since the middle of last week, accordin’ to the doc.”

  “Had a Spanish name, if I remember correctly.”

  “Santangelo,” he said. “Spanish or Italian, which is pretty much the same thing. Marginal.”

  “Marginal?”

  He nodded. “Like you wouldn’t want your sister to marry one, but it’d be okay for your cousin. Marginal. What you prolly don’t know, on account of we just learned it ourselves, is he lived right there in the building. What you also don’t know, on account of we been holdin’ it back, is he was burglarizin’ the place.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Well, somebody was,” he said, “an’ it sure as shit wasn’t me. Was it you, Bernie?”

  “Ray—”
/>
  “Drawers pulled out an’ overturned in the master bedroom. A couple of pieces of jewelry in the tub with him. A bullet hole in the guy’s forehead, an’ no gun to be found anywhere in the apartment. What’s it sound like to you, Bernie?”

  “Foul play,” I suggested.

  “He was no straight arrow, this Santangelo. We got a sheet on him. Mostly drug stuff, but people change, right? Say he’s upstairs knockin’ off the apartment. Say you’re Nugent.”

  “Come again?”

  “Nugent, the guy who lives there. You’re Nugent an’ you come home, an’ there’s this spic or guinea, whatever he is, helpin’ hisself to a fistful of bracelets an’ earrings. So you grab your gun an’ blow him away, which is your right in a free country, him bein’ a burglar an’ all. What’s the matter, Bernie, did I say something?”

  “I get nervous when people talk about blowing away burglars.”

  “I can see where you would. Anyway, here’s my question. Say you’re a burglar.”

  “You’ve been saying that for years, Ray.”

  “Say you’re a burglar, an’ you’re knockin’ off this apartment. Why would you take off your clothes?”

  “Huh?”

  “He was bareass naked. Didn’t that make the news?” I couldn’t remember if it had or not. “Naked and dead as the day he was born,” he said, “an’ I heard of women who do their housecleanin’ in the nude, an’ I heard of burglars leavin’ all kinds of disgustin’ souvenirs behind, but did you ever hear of one took all his clothes off before he started huntin’ for the valuables?”

  “Never.”

  “Me neither. I can’t picture him climbin’ two flights of stairs in the buff, either, or ridin’ in the elevator that way. But what did he do with his clothes? He wasn’t wearin’ ’em, an’ they weren’t in a pile, so what did he do, fold ’em up an’ put ’em in the drawers? If you’re Nugent an’ you shoot the guy, why do you run off with his clothes?”

  “If I’m Nugent,” Carolyn said, “and I kill him, which I would never do myself because I’m basically nonviolent—”