“He didn’t know I was just waiting to say, ‘Follow that cab!’ ”
“Why should he? He thought I bought his Burton Barton story. And I did, until I let Google have a go at his name. You couldn’t be the fifth of a long line of Burton Bartons without showing up in an online search. And of course the phone book never heard of him either, or the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the Bureau of Vital Statistics. Maybe I didn’t know his name, but I knew it wasn’t what he said it was, and that was reason enough to put you on his tail.”
“Where I stuck like a burr,” she said proudly. “But if you didn’t go to the men’s room—”
“He’d have been happy enough to pay the full price for the spoon.”
“But you gave him a chance to cheat you.”
“I did, didn’t I?”
“And you knew he would.”
“I didn’t see why he wouldn’t.”
“Why, Bern? Not so he’d have cash on hand to pay off Ray.”
“No.”
“So?”
“This is going to sound stupid,” I said. “But you asked. Smith and I had a deal. We’d already done business—the Fitzgerald manuscript—and it had worked out well. We conspired in the commission of a felony, so it was a long way from legal, but given who we were, it was an ethical transaction.”
“Okay, I guess I follow you.”
“Meanwhile, I knew what he’d done over on East Ninety-second Street. I wanted to set him up and expose him, but what moral right did I have to do that?”
“So you set him up. You baited the trap with his forty-five thousand dollars, and he went for the bait, and now you had an excuse to go after him.”
“And an excuse to steal the spoon back from him. That part bothered me, too.”
“Stealing the spoon back?”
I shook my head. “Stealing it in the first place. Edwin Leopold was a nice fellow. Mad as a hatter, but a gentleman. If I hadn’t met him I could have stolen spoons from him without turning a hair, but we sat together and had coffee and talked, and I liked him.”
“And how can you rob someone you like?”
“Well, there’s a way to rationalize these things,” I explained. “I never would have come to know him in the first place if I hadn’t intended to steal his spoon. So any feeling of friendship was an illusion, and a result of a plan already in motion.”
“I guess I understand.”
“I also tried to tell myself he was a dirty old man, exploiting an innocent young girl sexually. But in point of fact he was the best boss she ever had, and all she was doing was providing a daily massage, and what was wrong with a happy ending? Anyway, when I had a chance to get the spoon back where it belonged, I took it.”
“And Chloe got to keep the money.”
“Well, sure. She did her part.”
“Wow,” she said. “I better get back, I got somebody bringing in a Keeshond any minute. There’s something else I was wondering about, but I can’t think what it was.”
“Not to worry,” I said. “It’ll come to you.”
And it did, a couple of hours later at the Bum Rap.
“I was thinking,” she said, “how it just seems wrong that Smith got off scot-free.”
“You think?”
“He had to bribe his way out, but that didn’t cost him anything, because that was money he was supposed to pay you for the spoon.”
“But he didn’t wind up with the spoon,” I pointed out.
“Oh. Right, but—”
“And of course he didn’t wind up with the Chancelling portrait of Button Gwinnett. That’s once again hanging on a wall on Ninety-second Street.”
“What’ll happen to it?”
“I imagine the Ostermaier heirs will sell it,” I said. “And, since there’s one man who wants it more than anybody else I can think of, I can guess where it’ll wind up.”
“Smith will buy it?”
“Why not? But it’ll cost him. For awhile there he had it for nothing, but he didn’t get to keep it, same as he didn’t get to keep the spoon. Or the manuscript.”
“The Benjamin Button manuscript? You stole it for him.”
“And I stole it back from him. It was right there in his study, and it came home with me when I left.”
“Where is it now? Your apartment or the bookstore?”
“Neither one,” I said. “I put it in the mail.”
“You’re kidding. You sent it back to the Galtonbrook?”
“Why on earth would I do that? So they can lose it in the basement a second time? I sent it to Princeton.”
“Princeton?”
“The university,” I said. “In New Jersey.”
“I know that, Bern. What I don’t know is why.”
“Well, isn’t that the logical place for it? That’s where the rest of Fitzgerald’s manuscripts are, and where scholars can examine them, though why they’d want to do so is something I’ve never really grasped. Still, that’s where the manuscript belongs, so I sent it.”
“Just by itself?”
“I included an unsigned note. ‘My late father, a very private man, left this among his effects. I know he’d have wanted you to have it.’ ”
She thought about that, took a breath, and raised her hand to summon Maxine.
“So Juneau Lock,” she said a little later. “Except that’s not her name, it’s just what we call her, and it’s probably time we stopped. Her name’s Katie, but I don’t remember her last name.”
“Huang,” I said, and spelled it. “Not to be confused with Wang or Wong, all of which round-eyed foreign devils like you and me pronounce the same. But Chinese say them differently, and that’s why there are different spellings.”
“This may be more than I need to know, Bern. How about if I just call her Katie?”
“That’ll work.”
“So you had a good time, huh?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Alice Tully Hall, Café Luxembourg, that’s all right in your neighborhood. Just a few blocks from your apartment.”
“Right.”
“Did you, uh, go back to your place afterward?”
“Yes.”
“No kidding?”
“And she went back to hers.”
“Oh.”
“It was a first date, Carolyn.”
“Right. You gonna see her again soon?”
“Saturday night,” I said.
“Not until then?”
“Well, I’ll pick up lunch tomorrow, and probably Thursday, too, and it would be hard to do that without seeing her. But if you mean seeing her away from work, that’ll have to wait until Saturday. She works long hours, and she has a heavy schedule at Juilliard, and the rest of the time she’s practicing her music.”
“The flute.”
“Right.”
“But you like her, right?”
“A lot,” I said. “And it might last a while, too, because we won’t get to see that much of each other.”
“That’s a good thing, Bern. Remember that married woman I was seeing? Not gay-married, regular-married.”
“She lived in Ronkonkoma.”
“Mamaroneck,” she said, “but Ronkonkoma’s close enough. She could barely sneak away once a month, and she was crazy and inappropriate and not really gay to begin with, and we had an affair that lasted for two and a half years. Do you remember?”
“I do.”
“I didn’t even like her. And I was in and out of a couple of monogamous relationships during those two and a half years.”
“Monogamous?”
“Well, not if you count cheating, which I did with her whenever she came to town. I might still be doing her once a month if she’d stayed married.”
“She split with her husband?”
“Yep. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Bye,’ I said. I mean, what else could I do? Bern, Katie sounds perfect for you. Barely available, and yet she’s not cheating on anybody.” She raised her glass. “I’m happy for you.”
And, when we had another round of drinks in front of us:
“Bern, I was thinking.”
“Uh-oh.”
“No, seriously. You made an awful lot of illegal entries in a short amount of time. But what you were really doing wasn’t stealing.”
“It wasn’t?”
“You were detecting, Bern. You were helping out an officer of the law. You were solving a crime.”
“Well,” I said.
“And you were good at it, too. You’re always good at it, but most of the time it’s because you got yourself in some jam and the only way out of it is to catch the real killer.”
“Well.”
“And this time,” she said, “you and Ray really worked well together. A lot of the time he suspects you, and it’s a sort of adversarial relationship, but this time he knew you weren’t involved and sought you out for the benefit of your expertise.”
“Well.”
“So here’s what I was thinking.”
I held up a hand. “I know what you were thinking,” I said, “and the answer is no.”
“But—”
“You were thinking that I could reform,” I said, “and stop breaking into people’s houses and apartments, and stop stealing things. You were thinking that I could become some sort of a private detective, or an unofficial consultant to the NYPD, and divide my time between running that lame excuse for a bookstore and solving crimes that have the police baffled. That’s what you were thinking, isn’t it?”
“Well, yeah,” she said, deflated. “What’s so bad about it, Bern? I think you’d be good at it. I think you’d enjoy it. And I could still be your henchperson, even if it was legit. Couldn’t I?”
I drank off half my drink. “I have two words to say to you, Carolyn. Earl Drake.”
“Earl Drake.”
“Exactly.”
“Who the hell is Earl Drake?”
“He’s a character,” I said, “in a series of novels by a man named Dan Marlowe. He makes his first appearance in a book called The Name of the Game is Death. Drake is a heist man, a guy who knocks over banks and armored cars, a really hardcore heavy-duty criminal.”
“Like Parker,” she said, “in the Richard Stark books.”
“Like that,” I said, “except nobody’s like Parker, not really. But Drake’s pretty good.”
“So?”
“And then, a book or two later, the son of a bitch reforms. He goes to work for some government agency, the CIA or somebody, and he works on the side of the law.”
“And?”
“And from that point on,” I said, “there’s no real reason to read another word about Earl Drake, because who gives a rat’s ass about him if he’s not being his real self anymore? I’ll tell you, nothing like that’s going to happen to me.”
“But Bern—”
“I’m a burglar,” I said, “and I’m going to stay a burglar, and if I don’t make a lot of money at it, well, so what? I don’t make a lot of money selling books, either, but it’s who I am and what I do.”
“Okay,” she said. “Don’t bite my head off.”
“Sorry.”
“I get it,” she said. “I really do. I just thought—well, never mind what I thought.”
“No problem,” I said, and picked up my glass. “Besides,” I said, “I didn’t exactly come out of this whole deal empty-handed.”
“You didn’t? What did you get?”
“Well, this,” I said, and reached into my pocket. “I picked it up at my first stop Thursday night, at the Ostermaier house on Ninety-second Street.”
“You mentioned this,” she said, and took it carefully in her hand. “It’s ivory, isn’t it? And it looks old to me, but what do I know? The carving’s really beautiful, Bern. I can see why you wanted it.”
“The first time, Ray told me to help myself, that nobody would miss it. When I went back the second time, I decided to take him up on it. You like it?”
“I love it.”
“Good,” I said, “because I took it for you. I figured the little guy would look good on your little shelf.”
“Bern, I can’t—”
“Of course you can. And you’d better, because that’s the only reason I took it, Carolyn. So I could give it to you.”
She stared at me. “Well, thank you,” she said, “but you’re too much, Bern. You really are. You worked your behind off and you didn’t wind up with anything for yourself.”
“That’s what you think.”
“Oh? What did you get, besides a feeling of accomplishment?”
I smiled. “Something worth, oh, somewhere in the low six figures.”
“You’re kidding.”
“A letter,” I said, “written in 1777, concerning proposed wording in the original draft of the Georgia State Constitution. Just a single paragraph running to a dozen lines. Would you care to guess who wrote and signed it?”
“It could only be one person. Is this the letter that belonged to Smith?”
“I don’t know that it belonged to him. He bribed a museum official to get it, so he never had legal title. And I’m sure he knows who took it, but I don’t see what he can do about it.”
“And it’s worth—”
“A whole lot of money,” I said. “If I could sell it, but of course I can’t. And you know what?”
“That doesn’t bother you.”
“It doesn’t,” I said. “I kind of like the idea of owning it. It’s nicely framed, and I’ve got the perfect place for it, right next to my Mondrian.”
“You’re right,” she said. “It’ll look super there.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lawrence Block has been writing award-winning mystery and suspense fiction for half a century. His most recent novels are Hit Me, featuring Keller, and A Drop of the Hard Stuff, featuring Matthew Scudder, who will be played by Liam Neeson in the forthcoming film, A Walk Among the Tombstones. Several of his other books have been filmed, although not terribly well. He’s well known for his books for writers, including the classic Telling Lies for Fun & Profit, and The Liar’s Bible. In addition to prose works, he has written episodic television (Tilt!) and the Wong Kar-wai film, My Blueberry Nights. He is a modest and humble fellow, although you would never guess as much from this biographical note.
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @LawrenceBlock
Website: LB’s Blog
Facebook: lawrence.block
Website: lawrenceblock.com
* * *
THE LATEST FROM LAWRENCE BLOCK
THE BURGLAR WHO COUNTED THE SPOONS
CATCH AND RELEASE
HIT ME
For a list of all my available fiction, go to About LB’s Fiction.
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Lawrence Block
The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr) Page 27