The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr)

by Lawrence Block

  “Sure,” she said. “I told him.”

  “You told him.”

  “Yeah, I told him right away. That was the first thing I did. Well, not the first thing, but almost.”

  Was this a set-up? Was she wearing a wire? Was there a white van parked across the street, bearing on its side panels the name and address of some nonexistent construction firm in Maspeth? And were its occupants even now listening to our conversation and laughing hysterically?

  “I waited until I heard him on the treadmill,” she said, “and I got my key and unlocked the cupboard and took the spoon and locked up again and tucked the spoon away in my bag. Hey, I hope I got the right one. Gwinnett, the signer from Georgia? With the button on it?”

  I just nodded. Let the cops in the truck make what they wanted out of a silent nod.

  “So I was all set,” she went on, “and he was still getting his five miles in. Then when he got out of the shower and dried off I went in and gave him his massage. That always puts him in a good mood.”

  “I’m sure it does.”

  “And then I said, ‘Say, I was wondering. Did you loan out one of the Signer spoons? Because I looked in the log book and I couldn’t find a notation.’ See, sometimes he’ll lend a piece for a museum show, and there’ll be a note to that effect in the records of the collection, along with the letter from the institution, thanks for letting us display this exceptional specimen, di dah di dah di dah.

  “And he said no, all four spoons were in the living room cabinet where they belong. And I said the last time I polished them I noticed there were only three, and I meant to mention it to him, but I kept forgetting. So we went in and checked, and Button Gwinnett was missing, and he said that was funny, he could have sworn they were all there the other night, and I said no, it must have been a good week since I noticed one wasn’t there, and I really meant to mention it, but I wasn’t really worried because I took it for granted he’d let his buddy at the Historical Society borrow it, or the other museum up the block, or there’s a lady in Philadelphia at Independence Hall who’s always bugging us about stuff related to the signers. By the time I left for my class, we’d pretty much agreed that he must have let somebody borrow it, and it was a matter of figuring out who it was. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I’m in awe.”

  “Yeah? I don’t know how stuff like this is supposed to work, but I thought I better be the one who notices it’s missing. If he spots it first, who’s the first person he looks at?”

  “It makes perfect sense.”

  “Plus I didn’t want him thinking it was you that took it, even if he doesn’t know who you are. ‘There was a fellow here the other night, a Mr. Lederman.’ He said Lederman, but that wasn’t quite right, was it?”

  “Lederer.”

  “So he remembered it wrong, which is even better. ‘A nice fellow, brought me the Culloden book. But I made sure he was never out of my sight.’ ”

  “All that coffee,” I remembered, “and he never once went to the bathroom. His back teeth must have been floating by the time I got out of there.”

  “So he knew you couldn’t have taken it, but now he knows it went missing before you came over. So you’re clear, and so’s Lederer, and Lederman, too, as far as that goes.”

  “I’ll let them both know,” I said. “It’ll be a load off their minds.”

  “He’ll have me write letters,” she said, “to a couple of museums. And then something else’ll go missing, and when it turns up he’ll realize he misplaced it, and he’ll decide that must have been what happened to the spoon. And he’ll wait for it to turn up.”

  “But without any great sense of urgency.”

  “No, because it’s not like he needs it to stir his oatmeal.” She took a deep breath. “Well,” she said. “I guess you’d like to see the spoon.”

  “That would be good.”

  “And I’d just as soon get it out of my purse.”

  She passed it to me, swathed in tissue paper. I unswathed it, and it wasn’t Ben Franklin with his key or Caesar Rodney with his horse. I wrapped it up again, slipped it in a pocket.

  “Um,” she said.

  “Oh, right.” I fetched envelopes from my cash box. “You’ll want to count these. It’ll be more private in back.”

  She disappeared into my back room. I took one more look at the spoon, ran my thumb over the refined features of the gentleman from Georgia and his eponymous Button.

  Then, the spoon back in my pocket, I went to the window and looked outside. No white van, no van of any sort.

  Not that I expected one. But you can’t be too paranoid, can you?

  “Twenty thousand dollars,” she said.

  “I gather it was all there?”

  She nodded. She seemed perfectly calm, but there was excitement in her eyes. “Plus the five thousand you already gave me.”

  “Yes, we don’t want to forget that.”

  “I’ll say. It’s as much as I earn in a year.”

  “Twenty-five thousand?”

  “Five thousand,” she said. “Well, fifty-two hundred, to be exact. I get a hundred a week.”

  I found myself computing the average cost of a Happy Ending, and some of that may have shown on my face.

  “It’s not much money,” she said, “but I’ve got a better deal than a whole lot of people. I have my own room in an amazing Upper Fifth Avenue apartment, and I have my meals, and my hours are very flexible. But it’s hard to put any money aside, you know?”

  “I can imagine.”

  “What I want to do,” she said, “is go to Europe. I had it worked out that ten thousand dollars would give me a year in Europe. You don’t think so? I couldn’t have a real job over there, but I don’t have a real job here, do I? I could find ways to make money. I could teach ESL. You know, English as a Second Language? Which never made sense to me, calling it that, because if English is your first language, nobody has to teach it to you. You just pick it up from your parents.”

  “I never thought of it that way.”

  “Or something else’ll turn up. Something always does, and it’s always an education, you know? I mean, I didn’t know anything about silver until I started working for Mr. L. And now look at all I’ve learned about silver, and about American history.”

  “And now you can learn all about European history.”

  “I was going to take a course in the fall. Europe Since 1815. In other words, after Napoleon. Then later on I guess I’d have to go back and learn something about Napoleon.”

  “Before you know it,” I said, “you’ll be back in ancient Rome.”

  “That’s on my list of places to go. Rome, I mean. Ancient Rome, I’d need a time machine. But for modern Rome, I could go tomorrow.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Oh, I know! I’ll stay right where I am, at the very least until the end of August.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  “And I won’t spend one dime of this money, and if I see something in a shop window that I’ll just die if I don’t buy it, I’ll do what I do now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I won’t buy it,” she said, “and I won’t die, either.” She patted her handbag. “I’ll keep this until it’s time to go. I’m not stupid.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Except I am, in a way, because until yesterday it never occurred to me that I could make money this way.”

  “By stealing,” I said, partly to see if she recoiled at the word.

  “Right. I mean, I had the thought that this stuff was worth money, and it wouldn’t be hard to get out the door with it. But then what? So that’s as far as the thought ever went, until you came along.”

  “In shining armor.”

  “Yeah. Um, this works out to be a good deal for both of us, right? You’ll make money, too, won’t you?”

  “About the same amount as you. And without the risk.”

  “What about the risk that I’
d chicken out and go whining to the police? No, you took a chance. We both did, and we both get a payoff, and I think that’s really neat. I owe you a lot, really. You opened up a whole world for me.”

  “Well—”

  “I wish there was something I could do, and do you know what? There is.” She walked to the door, threw the bolt, and turned the sign in the window from OPEN to CLOSED. “You’re not exactly packed with customers,” she said, “and I saw you’ve got a couch in the back room, and I’m a trained masseuse. So why don’t you let me give you the best massage you ever had in your life?”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  And what did I know about Button Gwinnett?

  A good deal more than I’d known a month ago. Back then all I knew was what most people know—he’d been one of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, and he’d written his name infrequently enough to make his signature far and away the rarest of the lot. The signers have always been a popular topic for autograph collectors, and it’s not hard to understand why; signing their names, after all, was the source of fame for these men, and if you could manage to get all fifty-six—

  Well, see, you couldn’t. Not without Button Gwinnett, and that’s what made his signature hugely expensive.

  That’s about all I knew. Since then I’d learned, from my client and from my good buddies Google and Wikipedia, a fair amount more. For one thing, I learned that he’d come by his first name honestly. He’d been born in 1735 in England to Welsh parents, and his mother’s maiden name was Button. He went to school in Gloucester, where his name may have gotten him teased by the other boys, but maybe not. Maybe the kids were nicer there than the ones I knew in Ohio.

  He set up as a merchant, got married, emigrated to the colonies, and moved from Charleston to Georgia, where he bought land and started a plantation. He was politically active, and became the bitter rival of another Georgian, one Lachlan McIntosh.

  John Hancock of Massachusetts was the first man to sign the Declaration of Independence, and we all learned how he wielded his quill pen with a bold flourish while announcing that King George wouldn’t need his spectacles to read it. And everybody recognizes that signature, although the man himself has about as much connection to the insurance company as Ethan Allen has to the furniture. What you don’t know (or at least I didn’t) is that Button Gwinnett was the second person to put his name on the Declaration.

  Remember Lachlan McIntosh? Gwinnett was in line for the command of the First Regiment of the Continental Army, but McIntosh beat him out. This didn’t sit well with Gwinnett, and the possibility exists that he didn’t handle disappointment well. And, on the 16th of May in 1777, less than a year after he’d made himself immortal by signing his name, he proved his mortality on the physical plane by losing a duel to that same Lachlan McIntosh. He died of his wounds three days later, on the 19th of May.

  Or it may have been eleven days later, on the 27th of May. Sources, as they say, differ.

  “Whenever the man died,” I told my client, “he lingered for a minimum of three days.”

  “Not uncommon at the time, you know. A wound we’d nowadays regard as superficial would lead as often as not to an untreatable infection.”

  “But he’d have been conscious in the days before he died, wouldn’t he?”

  “For the most part, I’d think. Why?”

  “Well, it’s too late now,” I said, “but it occurred to me that someone with a little foresight could have handed him a pen and a stack of index cards.”

  There was a long pause. “I suppose that’s an interesting area for speculation.” His tone was the careful sort one uses when speaking with someone who’s off his meds. “Was there anything else?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.” My bell jingled, and my cat perked up his ears, and I looked up at my visitor and shifted conversational gears abruptly. “Some good news, Mrs. Hawkins. I’ve got a lead on a nice copy of his first novel. Let me check and get back to you.”

  I rang off and looked up at Ray Kirschmann. “Now I’ll duck around the corner and buy the book at the Strand,” I said, “and I’ll call her back tomorrow and tell her she’s in luck.”

  “It’s nice to see you makin’ an honest livin’, Bernie. And all you got to do is walk around the corner, instead of chasin’ all over town.”

  “You talked to the Ostermaier children.”

  “Yeah, and I gotta say I don’t see any of ’em lookin’ good for the intruder.” He pulled a notebook from his back pocket. “Let’s see now. Meredith, that’s the older daughter, lives in Alphabet City.”

  “With her husband.”

  “Right. The two of them head up a little theater company, what you call off-off-Broadway.” He frowned. “Isn’t that a double negative, Bernie? If somethin’s off-off-Broadway, doesn’t that put it back on Broadway?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, you’d know better’n me. He’s a producer-director and she’s some kind of manager, and they’re in rehearsals for a new play by a guy whose name I couldn’t write down without askin’ how to spell it, which I didn’t want to bother. They were both at the theater from late afternoon until one or two in the mornin’, with a whole cast of actors who could swear to it, not to mention the playwright.”

  “And the son in Chelsea was busy passing hors d’oeuvres at a party in Tribeca.”

  “What’d you do, talk to him yourself? That’d be Boyd, and it wasn’t Tribeca, it was Murray Hill. He and his partner were catering a company dinner. That’d be his business partner.”

  “And it ran late?”

  “Past ten, and it was close to eleven by the time he got out of there. His other partner picked him up, and they went to a club and had some drinks, and then they went to the gym and buffed their lats and their pecs and their quads, and then shared a bench in the steam room until the sun came up.”

  “Better them than me.”

  “My thought exactly, Bernie. His brother’s the tax lawyer in Park Slope.”

  “Jackson.”

  “You got a good memory. Jackson Ostermaier. He didn’t get home until around the time his mother was bailin’ out on Wagner, but once he did he was in Brooklyn for the rest of the night. He’d been workin’ late at the office, but not as late as he told his wife.”

  “He’s got a girlfriend?”

  “He took this drawin’ class, and she was the model. Now he pays the rent on her two rooms in Boerum Hill, and he’s the only one who gets to see her naked.”

  “At least as far as he knows.”

  “Right. Anyway, she’s in Brooklyn, like two subway stops from him. It’s a regular thing for him to stop for an hour or so on the way home, and that’s what he did the other night.”

  “I guess that leaves Deirdre.”

  “The younger daughter,” he said, “and she coulda been the intruder, but we already got her at the scene discoverin’ the body a little after two o’clock. And she was home from midnight on, because she made all those calls to her mother before she went over there.”

  “That’s all four,” I said. “Meredith, Boyd, Jackson, and Deirdre.”

  “And none of ’em’s the intruder.” He looked at me. “And you’re not surprised, are you? You already figured as much. So why’d I waste my time checkin’ ’em out?”

  “Suppose they didn’t have alibis, Ray. Suppose each of them had the opportunity to sneak into the Ostermaier house late that night. Who’d have a reason?”

  “All of ’em. It was drivin’ me crazy, all those solid alibis, because all four of ’em have plenty of motive, and it’s the best motive there is.”

  “Money,” I guessed.

  “There you go, Bernie. You ever happen to notice how nobody’s ever got enough? First glance, everybody’s doin’ okay for theirselves. Take a closer look and you see four serious cases of the shorts.”

  “Catering business isn’t going so well?”

  “No, and the partners don’t get along too great. What Boyd wa
nts to do is buy his partner out. That’d be his business partner, not—”

  “Not his life partner. I get it, Ray.”

  “Well it’s confusin’, the same word croppin’ up all over the place. Best thing about gay marriage is we can stop callin’ ’em partners all the time. The caterin’ business is him and his partner, the steam room is him and his husband. Which also sounds strange, him and his husband, but I figure I’ll get used to it.”

  “In time.”

  “Anyway, that’s Boyd. Next up is Meredith. The off-off-Broadway theater keeps losin’ money.”

  “There’s a surprise.”

  “Ready for another one? The landlord wants to raise their rent. Plus their apartment’s gonna be too small when the baby comes.”

  “She’s pregnant?”

  “That you could work your way around, you know? Keep the kid in a dresser drawer for a few months. No, they got an adoption in process, and the agency says their apartment’s not big enough. Anyway, same story. Not enough money.”

  “And Jackson’s got a wife and a girlfriend.”

  “And kids in private school, and last year’s bonus wasn’t so hot, and two other guys want him to join them and start their own firm.”

  “And Deirdre?”

  “Keeps spendin’ more’n she brings in. She’s out of work, and the work she’s out of don’t pay much anyway. Workin’ part-time at day care centers is a slow way to get rich, and her credit cards are pretty much maxed out at this point.”

  “All four of them need money,” I said, “or want it, anyhow. And there’s this big house on Ninety-second Street with just one person living in it.”

  “No mortgage on it, either. Mr. Ostermaier paid it off years ago.”

  “And left it outright to Mrs. Ostermaier?”

  “Nope. Didn’t have to. He was in the kind of business where you play it safe by putting things in your wife’s name. So it was all hers, free and clear.”

  “A house like that, in today’s market—”

  “Gotta be ten, Bernie. Might go fifteen.”

  “Million.”

  “Well, yeah.”