The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr)

by Lawrence Block

“Say twelve, and split it four ways—”

  “More’n enough for a caterer to buy out his partner. His business partner, I mean.”

  “He could probably buy out his husband, too. Three million would let a lawyer pay his girlfriend’s rent and his kid’s school fees, too.”

  “You could start a day care center easy.”

  “If you still wanted to. You could move to a larger apartment, and keep your theater open.”

  “So we got four people sharin’ a hell of a good motive,” he said, “but none of ’em coulda done it. And nothin’ got done to begin with except breakin’ in after the woman was already dead, and what’s the point of that? Bernie? You payin’ attention?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I was thinking of something.”

  “Tryin’ to work out who’s the intruder?”

  “Oh, I already know that,” I said. “I’m trying to figure out who’s the murderer.”

  “She died of peanuts, Bernie. Remember?”

  “I know,” I said. “Don’t put your notebook away yet, Ray. There are a few more things it’d be good to know.”

  After the door closed behind him, and the bell marked the occasion with its usual jingle, I waited before I went to the phone. And it was just as well, because in less than a minute Ray was back, holding a small piece of paper.

  “On your table,” he said. “I read it on the chance it might be a clue.”

  “And was it?”

  “Same blue felt tip,” he said, “but see the thickness of the letters?”

  “I guess the tip’s showing a lot of wear.”

  “What I’d guess,” he said, “is that she pressed really hard on it, just to show you how pissed off she is. You gotta treat your customers right, Bernie, if you expect to make a go of it in a legit business.”

  I said I’d keep that in mind. He left again, and the bell jingled again, and I went and made my phone call.

  “I have to apologize,” I told Burton Barton the Fifth. “Someone came into the store, and I didn’t want our conversation overheard.”

  “I assumed as much. You have the, uh—”

  “Book,” I supplied.

  “Yes, let’s call it that. It’s in your possession?”

  “It is, and I’d rather it were in yours.”

  “As would I. Shall I come to your shop?”

  “I think it may be under observation.”

  “By your earlier visitor? And might he be a government worker?”

  “Yes,” I said, “and yes. Why don’t I bring the, uh, book to you?”

  “To me?”

  “At your residence. Or your place of business, as you prefer.”

  He considered it, or at least paused as if so doing. “No,” he said at length. “No, I wouldn’t want you to put yourself out.”

  “It’s no problem, really.”

  “It would be a problem for me,” he said. “I’ll come to you, as I’ve done in the past. But not to the store, not if it’s being watched. We adjourned to a coffee shop recently.”

  “Yes, and once was enough. Let me think,” I said, and at least paused as if so doing. “There’s an establishment on the corner of Eleventh and Broadway where no one will take undue notice of us. It’s not fancy, but it’s comfortable enough. It’s called the Bum Rap.”

  A few minutes later my store was closed for the night and I was two doors down the street at the Poodle Factory, tapping away at Carolyn’s laptop.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “No luck, Bern?”

  “No.”

  “Bern, your problems are nothing compared to this poor woman’s. ‘CLOSED? WHAT DO YOU MEAN, CLOSED??? YOUR LIGHTS ARE ON AND I KNOW YOU ARE IN THERE! YOU HAVE A BOOK I NEED!! BUT YOU ARE NEVER OPEN!! JUST FOR THAT I AM STEALING CZECHOSLOVAKIA!!! TOMORROW I WILL COME BACK FOR LONELY PLANET GUIDE TO ATLANTIS!!!’ All those exclamation points, Bern.”

  “I know. She probably wants me to sell her a Robert Ludlum novel.”

  “The Lonely Planet Guide to Atlantis. Did she actually take Czechoslovakia?”

  “Somebody did.”

  “She’s enjoying this, Bern. She’s frustrated that you’re always closed, but she’s making the most of it. When did she leave this? Not during lunch.”

  “When Chloe came over.”

  “You locked up?”

  “Chloe did. She wanted to spend a few minutes in the back room.”

  “Oh?”

  “She was expressing her gratitude.”

  “I’ll just bet she was. And did her expression have a happy ending?”

  “Carolyn, I’m trying to concentrate.”

  “Always a problem,” she said, “when one has been recently drained of one’s precious bodily fluids. I’ll let you be.”

  She let me be, but I couldn’t get anywhere. I gave up and used her phone. Two miracles happened in quick succession: I remembered Ray’s cell phone number, and he answered it.

  “I have a phone number,” I said, “and I need an address. And I know they’ve got reverse directories online, and I tried them all and got nowhere.”

  He told me to give him the number, and I did. “I’ll call you back,” he said. “You’re at Carolyn’s, right?”

  Jesus, was he watching me after all?

  “How did you know that, Ray?”

  “A secret cop trick,” he said. “My phone rang, and I looked at it, and it said ‘Poodle Factory’ on it.”

  “Oh, right. You want the number?”

  “That popped up, too. Gimme a minute, I’ll check that other number for you.”

  It was more like five minutes, and he came back with a blank. “It’s a burner,” he said. “You buy a phone for cash and use it until the minutes are up. Then I suppose you could burn it, but it’d make a hell of a stink, so you’d most likely just toss it. No name, no address, not that we can get hold of, anyway.”

  I thanked him and ended the call, and Carolyn asked me what it all meant.

  “It means I need your help,” I said. “I’ve got a meeting at six at the Bum Rap.”

  “With the button man?”

  I nodded.

  “And you want me there?”

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  I was a thoughtful seven minutes early. I took a table and seated myself so that I could watch the door, and I’d barely settled in my chair when Maxine glided over with two glasses on her tray. One was tall, one short, and both held an amber liquid, a bit paler in the tall glass.

  “Carolyn won’t be coming,” I said.

  “She won’t?”

  “As a matter of fact she may be along later,” I said, “but she won’t be joining me.”

  Maxine’s face clouded. “You two okay?”

  “We’re fine,” I said, “but I have a business meeting. A gentleman will be meeting me here in a few minutes.”

  “Got it,” she said, and began to place the taller of the two glasses in front of me, but I waved it off.

  “Perrier for you, huh?”

  “Right.”

  “And your friend?”

  “He’ll have to let you know,” I said.

  It means something to Carolyn when I pass up scotch for Perrier, but I don’t think Maxine attaches any significance to it beyond its demonstration of my charming eccentricity. She took the booze away and returned with the soda water, and when I raised it I was looking over the brim of my glass at my client. He was honoring the season in a blue and white seersucker suit, and carrying a slim briefcase.

  When Maxine appeared, he asked me what I was drinking, raised an eyebrow, and told her what he’d like was a very dry martini, straight up, made with Gray Goose vodka and garnished with a lemon twist. That’s a little more specific than most drink orders at the Bum Rap, and I wasn’t sure what he’d get, but what showed up was the right color and served in a martini glass, and if it was Georgi instead of Gray Goose, I don’t think he noticed the difference.

  Our business took hardly any time at all. He had a long look at
the spoon, turned it over to examine the mark (MM in a narrow rectangle), ran his thumb over the low relief effigy of Gwinnett and the eponymous button, drew a breath and let it out in a soundless whistle.

  “It looks just like him,” he said.

  Button Gwinnett is depicted in the classic engraving of the signing, but the artist hadn’t been there for the event, and did his work long after the fact, often basing his likenesses on portraits. He may have had a look at a portrait of Gwinnett by one J. Chancelling, of whom little is known, including what the J. may have stood for. He was evidently a Charleston native, painted a few portraits in South Carolina and Georgia, and vanished.

  And so did his portrait of Gwinnett, which had long since disappeared before the rarity of the man’s signature moved a lot of people to wonder what he looked like.

  So how could my illustrious client say that Myer Myers had done well by his subject? Well, I once heard a woman make the very same observation about a painting of Jesus Christ. Perhaps his obsessive interest in the man had blessed my Button with a comparable mental image of that earlier Button.

  Of course there was another explanation that I liked even better . . .

  “Triumph,” he was saying, “is tragedy. I know how Alexander felt.”

  “When Aaron Burr shot him?”

  “Alexander the Great, when he looked around and realized there were no lands left to conquer. It is every collector’s fate, and it happens over and over and over.”

  “You can’t have run out of things to collect.”

  “No, hardly that. There are always more items to find and acquire. Buttons, for heaven’s sake. Human civilization has produced an essentially endless quantity, and one keeps finding new examples.”

  “The one on your jacket—”

  He touched it, a small brass disc with an American eagle as its central figure.

  “A fairly recent acquisition,” he said. “I don’t know if you can make out the lettering. The top line is Harrison, the lower Morton.”

  “The Log Cabin guy?”

  “Tippecanoe’s grandson, Benjamin Harrison, who interrupted Grover Cleveland’s two terms by beating him in 1888, though without winning the popular vote. Levi P. Morton was his running mate.”

  He told me more about Morton, who’d been an unsuccessful candidate for his party’s nomination in 1896. And, wouldn’t you know it, he had a lapel button from the fellow’s campaign. I said something encouraging, and he got back to Alexander the Great.

  “The more you want something,” he said, “and the harder it is to get your hands on it, the greater the sense of accomplishment. But then you’ve achieved your goal, and for months or even years you’ve been in part defined by it.” He patted the pocket with the spoon. “I’m glad to have it. But I’m sorry I can no longer aspire to it. Want implies lack, doesn’t it? One can only want what one does not have. I can treasure the spoon, and I shall. But I can’t yearn for it, I can’t seek it, I can’t move heaven and earth to lay hands on it. And it’s hard not to suspect that I’ve lost as much as I’ve gained. If not more.”

  “There must be other objects you want just as keenly. Gwinnett’s signature, for instance.”

  He beamed.

  “You already have it?”

  “And not on some index card thrust upon him on his death bed, as you were going on about earlier. I was very fortunate several years ago. I won’t go into details, but a curator at a small museum in—well, never mind where. It was an institution that made inadequate provision for a gentleman’s retirement, and, ah, we came to a private arrangement. I treasure it, I cherish it. But I no longer have it to stalk through the corridors of space and time.”

  He fell silent for a moment, and I kept him company. Then he straightened in his chair and put the briefcase on the table. It was full of envelopes, similar in size and shape to the others I’d received from him—and, come to think of it, to the ones I’d handed to Chloe Miller. I reached in, lifted the flap of one of the envelopes, and confirmed that Benjamin Franklin was once again well represented.

  He told me I was welcome to count the money. “You know,” I said, “let me just examine one envelope.” I glanced quickly around the room. “But without an audience. I’ll take it to the men’s room. I won’t be long.”

  “I’ll be right here,” he said.

  A moment ago Carolyn had appeared in the doorway. Our eyes met, and she’d given me a nod and slipped outside again. I rose, holding that one envelope casually at my side, and headed for a door at the rear. The sign on it said GENTLEMEN, but I didn’t let that stop me.

  I locked myself in a stall and took the time to count the envelope’s contents. It came to an even five thousand dollars; should the briefcase hold nine more just like it, then his count would be correct. But I didn’t know how many other envelopes there were, and I had a feeling it wasn’t going to matter much.

  After I’d counted the bills a second time I waited a few minutes, and before I left I used the squalid little room for its intended purpose. It was likely to be a long night, and Perrier goes through one’s system so rapidly it barely has time to lose the bubbles.

  When I got back to my table, Burton Barton V was gone. And so was the briefcase.

  When I asked for the check, Maxine told me my friend had taken care of it. “Left me a big tip, too,” she said. “Classy guy, but I knew that when I saw the suit he was wearing.”

  “He’s a real seersucker,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, “I have to say it shows.”

  Okay. No time to waste.

  I bought a cell phone on Fourteenth Street, a burner that might have been the twin to my buttoned-down client’s. It came with a hundred minutes, and I couldn’t imagine that I’d use more than ten of them.

  Then I went home and tended to my hidey hole, stowing $5000 where $20,000 had been that morning. I wondered idly why we’re not supposed to cry over spilled milk. What else is it good for? And then I set about provisioning myself for a night of felonious activity.

  Tool kit. Disposable gloves. Flashlight. Duct tape.

  And my own personal cell phone, its setting switched from Ring to Vibrate. And my new phone, the burner; nobody could call it on purpose, but wrong numbers are always a possibility, so it too was set on Vibrate.

  Still okay. And still no time to waste.

  Outside, the rush hour traffic had thinned enough to make a cab seem sensible, and I wasn’t worried about leaving a trail. The driver’s radio was blaring in a language I didn’t recognize, and he was yammering into a no-hands cell phone in what may have been the same language, and the smoke in the cab’s interior was thick enough to skate on, and only some of it was tobacco. This guy wasn’t going to remember our meeting, and if I took a couple of deep breaths, neither would I.

  I had him go through the park and drop me at 90th and Lexington, more out of habit than real concern; he hadn’t made a note on his trip sheet when I got in, and was unlikely to do so now. I walked two blocks uptown and spotted the Ostermaier house right off, still wearing its garland of crime-scene tape.

  I remember how Ray had approached the place on our earlier visit, mounting the steps and unfastening the tape as if he had every right in the world to be there. There’s a way cops have of walking, and I figured I’d look bogus if I set out to imitate it, but I took a couple of deep breaths and tried at least for an aura of confident nonchalance, or perhaps nonchalant confidence.

  The padlock was as easy as I thought it would be, and once I’d opened it I was in. I brought the padlock inside with me, put on my gloves, bolted the door from within, and got busy.

  It took me a little longer than I’d have preferred. It was 7:18 when I cracked the padlock, 7:41 when I snapped it in place and reattached the yellow tape. I was still wearing gloves, but that fit the image, and now that I’d had my look at the crime scene I peeled them off the way any cop would and stuffed them back in my pocket.

  I guess I looked a little bit like a cop,
because a young guy walking a dog gave me the sort of wave designed to assure me that he too was on the side of the law. I decided he had to be holding some form of mood-altering substance, probably of vegetable origin, because why else would he bother?

  I stayed in character. I dismissed him with a glance I’d seen often enough on Ray’s face, and walked off confidently and nonchalantly in the other direction.

  My phone had vibrated while I was in the Ostermaier house, but I’d been in too much of a hurry to check it. I did so as I rounded the corner at Third Avenue. It was Carolyn, and I called her back.

  “Hello,” she said. “Bern, I’ve been waiting all my life for a chance to say that.”

  “Oh, please,” I said. “You say it all the time.”

  “Huh?”

  “‘Hello.’ You say it every time you pick up a telephone.”

  “I was waiting on the corner,” she said, “and I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for, on account of I never saw the guy before. I was hoping he’d be wearing the English jacket with all the pearl buttons, because that would pretty much give him away.”

  “He was wearing a seersucker suit.”

  “No kidding. I thought it was him when a cab pulled up smack in front of the Bum Rap and he got out of it, because most of their customers don’t get there in a taxi.”

  “With most of them,” I said, “it’s a wonder that they get there at all.”

  “And there’s apt to be a certain amount of staggering involved. Anyway, I had a feeling it was him when he got out of the cab, and I was pretty sure when he looked around furtively before going inside.”

  “And then you saw me sharing a table with him, and that cinched it.”

  “Not right away. First I flagged a cab of my own, and got him to wait. Then I saw the two of you, and you gave me a nod, and I went outside again and got in the cab. ‘Just wait a minute,’ I told him. And he did, and the guy came out with his seersucker suit and his briefcase and started walking down Broadway, and I got my guy to creep along so we could keep him in sight, but without catching up to him. I have to say it’s no mean trick to follow somebody in a seersucker suit. It sort of stands out in a crowd, and the street wasn’t even crowded to begin with.”