The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams

by Lawrence Block

  “To set you up.”

  “To set me up to do what? Carolyn, any other night of my life I would have gone home and stayed home. Never mind that I’ve given up burglary. Say I was still an active burglar, even a hyperactive one. It’s the middle of the night, and a mysterious stranger has just managed to let me know that the occupants of a particular apartment are out of town. What am I going to do?”

  “You tell me.”

  “At the very least,” I said, “I’m going to sleep on it. In the cold light of dawn I might do a little research, and if it looks extremely promising I might knock it off a day or two down the line. Probably in the early afternoon, when visitors look a whole lot less suspicious. Most likely, though, I’d wake up and decide to forget the whole thing. But the one thing I would never do is go in that very night.”

  “But you did.”

  “But I did,” I acknowledged, “but how could she know I would?”

  “Maybe she reads minds, Bern.”

  “Maybe she does. Maybe she read mine and saw that I was out of it. So she set me up, and I went for it. What’s in it for her?”

  “I don’t know, Bern.”

  “Was I supposed to get caught in the Nugent apartment? God knows I was a sitting duck. Ordinarily I get in and out of a place as quickly as I can, but not this time. If I’d stayed there much longer I could have claimed squatter’s rights. If she’d tipped the police, they’d have had me dead to rights. The state troopers could have come on foot from Albany and got there before I left.”

  “Maybe you were supposed to do something inside the apartment.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I. Whatever it was, I didn’t do it. All I did in Apartment 9-G was kill time. I brought some groceries in and I took some groceries out.”

  “And gave your groceries a shake-shake-shake and turned yourself about.”

  “Turned myself inside out is more like it. When I saw the corpse in the bathtub—”

  “Who was he, Bern?”

  “Not Harlan or Joan.”

  “Well, I didn’t think he was Joan.”

  “In this day and age,” I said, “you never know. But there was a picture of the Nugents in Harlan’s study, and the dead guy wasn’t either of them. There were other pictures around the house, Nugent children and grandchildren, and he didn’t turn up in any of the pictures. Probably not a long-lost relative, either, because I couldn’t detect any family resemblance.” I frowned. “There was something vaguely familiar about him, but I couldn’t tell you what it was.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Mostly he looked naked and dead.”

  “Well, that explains it. You must have recognized him from a Norman Mailer novel.”

  I gave her a look. “I’d guess he was in his thirties,” I said. “Dark hair, cut short and combed forward like Julius Caesar.”

  “No stab wounds, though.”

  “No, just a bullet hole in the forehead.” I closed my eyes, trying to picture him. “He was thin,” I said, “but muscular. A lot of dark body hair. His eyes were wide open, but I can’t remember what color they were. I didn’t really spend a lot of time looking at him.”

  “What was he doing there, Bern?”

  “By the time I saw him,” I said, “he wasn’t doing much of anything.”

  “Maybe he was just looking for a place to kill himself,” she said, “and he didn’t have the price of a hotel room. So he broke in—”

  “Through a Poulard lock?”

  “It didn’t stop you. All right, say he had a key. He got in, he took off all his clothes…Where were his clothes, Bern?”

  “I guess he must have given them to the Goodwill. I certainly didn’t run across them.”

  “Well, forget the clothes. He took ’em off, we know that much, and then he got in the tub. Why the tub?”

  “Who knows?”

  “He got in the tub and shot himself. No, first he locked the bathroom door, and then he got in the tub, and then he drew the shower curtain shut, and then he shot himself.”

  “High time, too.”

  “But why, Bern?”

  “That’s the least of it. My question is, how did he do it? I suppose you could shoot yourself in the middle of the forehead if you put your mind to it. You could always use your thumb on the trigger. But wouldn’t it be more natural to put the gun to your temple or stick it in your mouth?”

  “The natural thing,” she said, “would be to go on living.”

  “The thing is,” I said, “I didn’t see a gun. Now, I didn’t go looking for one, either, and if he was standing up when he shot himself it’s entirely possible that he dropped the gun inside the tub and then fell so that his body was concealing it. But it’s also possible that there was no gun in the tub, or anywhere in the room.”

  “If there was no gun—”

  “Then somebody else shot him.”

  “Doll Cooper?”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but there are eight million other people in town who could just as easily have done it. Either of the Nugents, for example, which would have given them a good reason to get on a plane.”

  “You think they did it?”

  “I don’t have a clue who did it,” I told her. “It could have been anybody.”

  “Not you or me, Bern. We can alibi each other. We were together all evening.”

  “Except I don’t know when he was killed. I don’t know any of that forensic stuff about rigor mortis and lividity, and I didn’t want to touch him to find out how cold he felt. He didn’t smell too great, but corpses don’t, even if they’re fairly fresh. Remember the time a guy died in my store?”

  “How could I forget? That was in the john, too.”

  “So it was.”

  “And we moved the body in a wheelchair. Yeah, I remember. He hadn’t been dead long at all, and he wasn’t too fragrant, was he?”

  “No.”

  “So we can’t alibi each other,” she said. “That’s a hell of a thing. How do you know we didn’t do it?”

  “Well, I know I didn’t. It’s the sort of thing I would remember. And I know you didn’t because you’re not the type.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  “And that’s all I have to know,” I said, “because it’s not my problem. Because I was never there.”

  “Huh?”

  “I took no snapshots and left no footprints,” I said. “Or fingerprints. Or cereal boxes. Nobody saw me enter and nobody saw me leave, unless you count Steady Eddie, and I don’t. I took away everything I brought with me and put back everything I took. I even locked up after myself.”

  “You always do.”

  “Well, how much trouble is it? If I can pick a lock open, I ought to be able to pick it shut. And it’s good policy. The longer it takes people to realize they’ve been burgled, the harder it is to catch the guy who did it.”

  “So you left everything exactly as you found it.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Bern? You left everything exactly as you found it, right?”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘everything,’ ” I said. “I wouldn’t say ‘exactly.’ ”

  “What do you mean?”

  I reached out a hand and ruffled Alison’s coat. She made that whimpering sound again. “I kept the money,” I said.

  “Bern.”

  “Well, I was going to put it back,” I said, “and then I remembered that I’d taken off my gloves to count it, because if I was taking the money it hardly mattered if I got my prints on it. So I would have had to wipe off every single bill, and I’d have had to be thorough about it, and then I’d have had to pick the lock on the desk drawer, once to open it and a second time to close it again.”

  “So you took it.”

  “Well, I’d already taken it. What I did was keep it.”

  “Eight thousand dollars?”

  “Close enough. Eighty-three fifty.”

  “And
how long were you in there? Four hours? Call it two thousand dollars an hour. That sure beats minimum wage.”

  “Believe me,” I said, “it wasn’t worth it. I only kept the money because it was less trouble than putting it back. And it was pretty close to untraceable. The watches and the jewelry might lead back to the Nugent apartment, but money’s just money.” I shrugged. “I suppose I should have put it back, even if it meant wiping off each and every bill. But it was late and all I wanted to do was get out of there.”

  “But you took time to pick the locks. The ones on the outer door I can understand, but why lock up the bathroom? It took you forever to open that lock, and it must have been just as much trouble to relock it.”

  “Not quite. Locking’s easier than unlocking with that particular mechanism, and I’d already made some surface grooves in the bolt the first time around. But it still took some time, I’ll say that much.”

  “Then why bother?”

  “Think about it,” I said. “Say the cops come and they have to break the door down. They find a corpse in the tub with a gun alongside him. One little window, and it’s locked, and so was the door until they forced it. If you’re one of the cops, what conclusion do you draw?”

  “Suicide,” she said. “It couldn’t be anything else. Bern? Wait a minute.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  “Suppose there’s no gun.”

  “So?”

  “Then it’s not suicide, is it?”

  I shook my head. “It’s not,” I said, “and what you’ve got is a locked-room homicide straight out of John Dickson Carr, and I’ll be damned if I can figure out how the killer could have worked it. Now, I don’t honestly think that’s what happened, because it would have been impossible. I think the gun must have been out of sight somewhere, behind the body or underneath it. If it was suicide, I’d just as soon leave it as open-and-shut as possible. And if it was murder, some physically impossible kind of locked-room murder, why should I be the one to screw it up? Because if the door’s open when the cops get there, then it’s just another naked corpse in the bathtub. There’s nothing special about it at all.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “So that’s why I locked up,” I said, “and there may well be a flaw in my logic, but I was too worn out to spot it. The bathroom lock was easier to manipulate the second time around, but it was still a real pain in the neck, and it took time. Do you want to know something? I felt justified keeping the eighty-three fifty. I worked hard for it. I figure I earned it.”

  I chased the last bite of my sandwich with the last swallow of coffee and put the wrappings and the empty cup in the trash. Then I returned to watch Carolyn put the finishing touches on Alison Wanda’s coiffure. “You must be exhausted after a night like that,” she said. “I’m surprised you bothered to open up today.”

  “Well, Patience called, and that woke me up. And I had to come down and feed Raffles.”

  “Don’t bother,” she said. “When I saw you hadn’t opened, I used my set of keys and gave him food and fresh water.”

  “When was that?”

  “I don’t know, eleven o’clock, something like that. Why?”

  “Because he gave a damn good imitation of a cat on the brink of starvation when I opened up a little after twelve.”

  “You fed him again?”

  “Of course I fed him again. His dish was spotless and he was wearing a hole in my sock.”

  “You’re not supposed to overfeed them, Bern.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  I went back to Barnegat Books and opened up again. Raffles was rubbing against my ankle the minute my foot cleared the threshold.

  “Yeah, right,” I told him. “In your dreams, pal.”

  I hauled my bargain table outside and propped up the cardboard three-books-for-a-buck sign. Sometimes passersby lifted the odd volume, but at that price how much harm were they doing me? I’d have been more dismayed if one of them walked off with the sign.

  I perched on my stool behind the counter and picked up my current book, Clan of the Cave Bear. (I’d read it once years ago, but if you don’t think books are worth reading more than once you’ve got no business running a used-book store.) I still hadn’t read the paper I’d bought when I got off the subway the night before, but neither had I brought it along when I left the apartment. That was just as well, because I didn’t much want to know what was happening in the world. I was a lot more comfortable reading about a Cro-Magnon child being brought up by a couple of Neanderthals, which wasn’t all that different from the way I remembered my own childhood.

  Around two o’clock I made my first sale. It was only a buck but it broke the ice, and by three I’d rung up something like fifty dollars on the cash register. You don’t get rich that way, you don’t even break even that way, but at least I was selling books. And I suppose the cat could take credit for those sales, because if I hadn’t had to feed him I wouldn’t have bothered opening up.

  And, like it or not, I was $8,350 ahead for having dropped in on the Nugents. And I could do what I wanted with the money and forget what I’d gone through to earn it, because that chapter was over forever and I was in the clear.

  Yeah, right. In your dreams, Bernie.

  CHAPTER

  Eight

  Trade picked up as the afternoon wore on, with a steady stream of people finding their way in and out of the shop. A number of them were just browsing, but I’m used to that; it is, after all, part of what a secondhand bookstore is all about. So is chitchat, and I got involved in a little of that, including a spirited discussion of what modern New York might have been like if the Dutch had retained their footing in the New World. My partner in that particular conversation was an elderly gentleman with a neat white beard and piercing blue eyes who had been browsing in the Old New York section, and damned if he didn’t wind up spending close to two hundred dollars before he left.

  As soon as he was out the door, a big man in a dark gray sharkskin suit drifted over to the counter and rested a meaty forearm on it. “Well, now,” he said. “I got to hand it to you, Bernie. This place is turnin’ into a regular literary saloon.”

  “Hello, Ray,” I said. “Always a pleasure.”

  “That was real interestin’,” he said. “What you an’ Santa Claus there were talkin’ about.”

  “Don’t you think he was a little thin for Santa?”

  “He’ll fill out, same as everybody else. An’ there’s plenty of time. How many shoppin’ days until Christmas?”

  “I can never keep track.”

  “How about burglin’ days, Bernie? How many of those between now an’ when Santa pops in through the skylight?”

  “Don’t you mean down the chimney?”

  “Whatever, Bernie. You’d be the expert on that, wouldn’t you?” He flashed a grin that made the sharkskin suit seem singularly appropriate. “But it makes you think, what you an’ the old guy were talkin’ about. We could be standin’ here, the both of us, an’ we could be talkin’ back an’ forth in Dutch.”

  “We could.”

  “All these books’d be in Dutch, huh? I couldn’t read a one of ’em. Of course, if I was talkin’ Dutch with you, I guess I’d be able to read it, too. I’d have to if I was studyin’ for the Sergeant’s Exam, say, because all the questions’d be in Dutch.” He frowned. “An’ instead of cabdrivers who can’t understand English, you’d get cabdrivers who couldn’t understand Dutch, an’ either way nine out of ten of ’em wouldn’t know how to get to Penn Station. Be a whole new ball game, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would.”

  “But it sure is interestin’, Bern. I was this close to hornin’ in on your conversation, but then I figured why louse up a sale for you? You’re a bookseller, you’re well on your way to becomin’ a literary saloon keeper, what do you need with a cop buttin’ in and crampin’ your style?”

  “What indeed?”

  He propped an elbow on the count
er, placed his chin in his cupped hand. “You know, Bernie,” he said, “you were talkin’ a blue streak with Santa, an’ now it’s all you can do to hold up your end of the conversation. I see you got yourself a cat, stretched out in the window there tryin’ to get hisself a tan. He got your tongue or somethin’?”

  “No.”

  “Then how come I can’t get a thing out of you but yes, no, an’ maybe?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe it’s because I’m trying to figure out what you’re doing here, Ray.”

  “Bern,” he said, looking hurt. “I thought we were friends.”

  “I suppose we are, but your friendly visits tend to have an ulterior motive.”

  He nodded. “‘Ulterior.’ I always liked that word. You never hear it without hearin’ ‘motive’ right after it. What’s it mean, anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted, and reached for the dictionary. There’s a three-foot shelf of them in the Reference section, but I keep one close at hand, and I flipped through it now. “‘Ulterior,’” I read. “‘One: lying beyond or on the farther side.’”

  “Like the cat,” he suggested. “Lyin’ on the farther side of that row of shelves.”

  “‘Two: later, subsequent, or future. Three: further; more remote; esp., beyond what is expressed, implied, or evident; undisclosed, as an ulterior motive.’”

  “Yeah,” he said, nodding. “That sounds about right. Anyway, that’s what you think, huh? That I got one of those?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Maybe I do,” he said, “an’ then again maybe I don’t. It all depends how you answer a question.”

  “What’s the question?”

  “What the hell’s the matter with you, Bernie? Are you losin’ it?”

  “That’s the question?”

  “No,” he said, “that ain’t the question. It’s just the kind of thoughts go through the mind of a guy that’s known you a long time, an’ never yet knew you to make a habit of steppin’ on your own dick. So that ain’t the question. Here’s the question.”