The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams

by Lawrence Block

  “I can’t wait.”

  “Why’d you call the guy?”

  “What guy, Ray?”

  “ ‘What guy, Ray?’ I don’t even need to check my notebook, because it’s the kind of name tends to stick in your mind. Martin Gilmartin, that’s what guy. Why the hell did you call him on the phone last night?”

  There was suddenly a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, as if I’d somehow got hold of a bad burrito. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  I couldn’t have been very convincing, because Ray Kirschmann didn’t even trouble to roll his eyes. “I won’t ask you why you broke into his place,” he said, “anymore’n I’d ask that cat over there why he catches mice. It’s his nature. He’s a cat, same as you’re a burglar.”

  “I’m retired.”

  “Yeah, right, Bernie. You could no more retire from bein’ a burglar than he could retire from bein’ a cat. It’s your nature, it’s what you are. So you don’t have to explain why you robbed the guy’s apartment. But why did you call him up afterward and taunt him about it?”

  “Who says I did?”

  “He says you did. Are you saying you didn’t?”

  “What else does he say?”

  “That at first he didn’t know what to make of it. Then he took a good look around the apartment, and he found out he’d been robbed.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve used that word,” I said, “and you should know better. You know what robbery is. It’s the taking of money or property through force or violence, or the threat of force or violence.”

  “Here I am,” he said, “back at the Academy, listenin’ to a lecture.”

  “Well, it’s maddening,” I said. “‘He found out he’d been robbed.’ You can’t find out you’ve been robbed because you’re aware of it while it’s going on. Somebody sticks a gun in your face and tells you to give him your money or he’ll blow your head off, that’s robbery. I never robbed anyone in my life.”

  “You done, Bern?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but words mean a lot to me. How did Mr. Gilmartin discover he’d been burglarized?”

  “His property was missing.”

  “What kind of property?”

  “As if you didn’t know.”

  “Humor me, Ray.”

  “His baseball cards.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I said. “What do you bet his mother threw them out?”

  “Bernie—”

  “That’s what happened to mine. I came home from college and they were gone, and when I blew up she stood there and quoted St. Paul at me. Something about putting away childish things.”

  “Mr. Gilmartin had quite the collection.”

  “So did I,” I remembered. “I had a ton of comic books, too. I liked the ones that taught you something about history. Crime Does Not Pay, that was my favorite.”

  “A shame you never got the message.”

  “As far as I could make out,” I said, “the message seemed to be that crime paid just fine until the last frame. She threw out my comic books, too. You know something? It still bothers me.”

  “Bernie—”

  “So I can imagine how Mr. Gilmartin must feel, and I’m not saying it was his mother who did it, but I think he ought to rule out the possibility before he goes around accusing other people. I can tell you one thing for sure, Ray. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “You denyin’ that you called him last night?”

  How could he possibly have known about the phone call?

  “Maybe it’s not a good idea for me to confirm or deny anything,” I said slowly. “Maybe I ought to talk to my lawyer first.”

  “You know,” he said, “that’s probably exactly what you ought to do. Tell you what, Bern. I’ll read you your Miranda rights, an’ then you an’ me’ll head over to Central Bookin’, an’ we’ll see about gettin’ you mugged an’ printed. Then you can give Wally Hemphill a call. If he ain’t doin’ laps around Central Park, maybe he can help you decide what to remember about last night.”

  “Don’t read me my rights.”

  “You remember ’em from last time, huh? It don’t matter, Bern. I gotta go by the book.”

  With the marathon coming up, Wally might not be that easy to get hold of. Who else could I call, Doll Cooper?

  “I guess there’s no reason not to talk,” I said slowly. “Since I didn’t do anything wrong, why not clear the air?”

  He smiled, looking more like a shark than ever.

  First I locked the door and hung the “Back in Ten Minutes” sign in the window. I didn’t want customers to disturb us while I straightened things out with Ray, and I could use a minute or two to get my thoughts in order.

  On the one hand, it was ridiculous to get mugged and printed and thrown in a holding cell for a couple of hours for a crime that I’d had nothing to do with. At the same time, I had to be careful what I said or I’d simply be swapping the Gilmartin skillet for the Nugent bonfire.

  I bought myself a few extra seconds by freshening the water in Raffles’ bowl. I was tempted to feed him again while I was at it, and I don’t suppose he would have given me an argument, but he’d already had one extra meal that day. At this rate his mousing days would soon be over.

  “All right,” I told Ray. “I’m ready to talk now.”

  “You sure you don’t want to take a little time to rearrange the stock on your shelves?”

  I ignored that. “I called Gilmartin,” I said. “I admit it.”

  “Well, hallelujah.”

  “But it had nothing to do with a burglary. I really have retired, Ray, whether you’re prepared to believe it or not. Look, I’d better start at the beginning.”

  “Why not?”

  “Carolyn and I went out after work yesterday,” I said.

  “You always do,” he said. “The Bum Rap, right?”

  I nodded. “I’ve been under a little pressure lately,” I said, “and I guess I let it get to me. The long and short of it is I had more to drink than I usually do.”

  “Hey, it happens.”

  “It does,” I agreed, “but not to me, not that often, and I wasn’t used to it. I got silly.”

  “Silly?”

  “You know. Playful, goofy.”

  “I bet it was somethin’ to see.”

  “You should have been there. Anyway, Carolyn and I spent the whole evening together. From the Bum Rap we went to an Italian restaurant for dinner, and then we went back to her place on Arbor Court. That’s where I was when I called Mr. Gilmartin.”

  He nodded, as if I’d just passed some sort of test.

  “I don’t know how it started,” I went on. “I was still a little drunk, I guess, and I got into this routine where I was finding funny names in the telephone book. I was picking out names and reading them aloud to Carolyn and making jokes.”

  “The two of you were makin’ fun of people’s names, Bern?”

  “It was mostly my doing,” I said, “and I’m not proud of it, but what can I say? It happened. Somehow or other the name Geraldine Fitzgerald came up. Remember her? She was a singer years ago.”

  “Is that a fact.”

  “Anyway, I said her name sounded to me like a recipe for a perfect relationship. Get it? Geraldine fits Gerald.”

  “Geraldine Fitzgerald,” he said. “So?”

  “Geraldine. Fits. Gerald.”

  “That’s what I just said. What the hell’s supposed to be so funny about that?”

  “I guess you had to be there. I couldn’t find a Geraldine Fitzgerald in the phone book, but I found a Gerald Fitzgerald, and I thought that was pretty funny.”

  “Yeah, it’s a riot. Wha’d you do, call the guy up?”

  A little warning bell went off. “I did,” I said, “but nobody was home. So I flipped through the phone book some more, looking for doubled names like that.”

  “William Williams,” he suggested. “John Johnson.”

  “Well, sor
t of, but the ones you just mentioned aren’t particularly funny.”

  “Not real thigh-slappers like Gerald Fitzgerald.”

  “I know it doesn’t seem all that amusing,” I said, “when you’re sober, but I wasn’t. Eventually I found Martin Gilmartin, and for some reason I thought that one was a real screamer. I should have known better, it was too late to call anybody, let alone a total stranger, but I picked up the phone and called him. He answered the phone, and I made some sort of joke about his name, real high-school humor, I’m ashamed to say.”

  “Did he get a good chuckle out of it, Bern?”

  “He seemed a little flustered, so I joked with him some more and then hung up.”

  “Just like that.”

  “Pretty much, yeah.”

  “How’d you know he and his wife went to a play?”

  Jesus. “Is that where they were? I knew he was out somewhere because I tried him a few times before I finally got an answer.”

  “Oh, yeah? Why’d you keep callin’?”

  “Well, they make it easy these days,” I said. “Carolyn’s phone has this button that automatically redials the last number.”

  “A real time-saver.”

  “So when I finally got through,” I said, “I guess I said something about being glad he was home, and I hoped he’d had a good evening. You know, some kind of smartass remark. But I didn’t say anything about a play.”

  He let that pass. “Gilmartin says it was after midnight when you called.”

  “I would have said a few minutes before midnight,” I said, “but I’ll take his word for it. So?”

  “What did you do after that? Call some more people?”

  “No,” I said. “Actually completing a call made me realize what a childish thing I was doing. Besides, it was late and I was tired.”

  “You stay the night at Carolyn’s?”

  “No, I went home.”

  “And you never left your house until morning, right?”

  Uh-oh. “That’s right,” I said.

  “You got home around one, musta been, and then you didn’t set foot outside your apartment until you came down here and opened up earlier today.”

  “Right,” I said. And just as he was about to say something I added, “Except for going to the store.”

  “When would that have been, Bernie?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t remember noticing the time. I put the TV on and watched CNN for a little while, then realized I was out of milk for the morning. I went out and got a few things from the deli. Why?”

  “Just curious.”

  “Well, I’m curious, too,” I said. “According to what you said, Gilmartin got off the phone with me and went looking for his comic books and his Captain Midnight decoder ring.”

  “Just his baseball cards, Bern.”

  “You mean he didn’t keep all his boyhood treasures in the same place? Never mind. Wherever he kept them, he looked for them and they were gone. Correct?”

  “So?”

  “They were gone then, right? At midnight or twelve-thirty or whenever it was, right?”

  “What’s the point, Bern?”

  “The point,” I said, “is that his baseball cards were already gone when I talked to him, so what possible difference could it make if I went to the deli at one or one-thirty in the morning?”

  “If it don’t make no difference,” he said, “why did you have to go and lie about it?”

  “Lie about it?”

  “Well, what else would you call it?” He took out a pocket notebook, consulted a page. “You left your house at one-thirty. You got back at twenty minutes of six. That’s better’n four hours, Bern. Where was this deli, Riverdale?”

  “I guess I must have made another stop,” I said. “On my way home from the deli.”

  “And it slipped your mind until this minute.”

  “No, it’s been on my mind since the questioning started, and I didn’t want to have to talk about it. I’ve been seeing someone, Ray.”

  “Oh, yeah? Anybody I know?”

  “No, and you’re not going to meet her, either. Look, you’re a man of the world, Ray.”

  “This is gonna be a good one, isn’t it?”

  “She’s married,” I said. “We’ve had to sneak around and grab moments when we can. Last night was one of those moments.”

  “I’m ashamed of you, Bernie.”

  “Well, I’m not proud of it myself, Ray, but—”

  “Ashamed of you, trottin’ out an oldie like that. You wouldn’t want to give me her name, would you?”

  “Ray, you know I can’t do that.”

  “Too much of a gentleman, huh?”

  “Ray, common decency requires—”

  He held up a hand. “Spare me,” he said. “You didn’t go visit no woman last night, married or single. What you did, leavin’ your place on the sly in the middle of the night, is you took the baseball cards you already stole from Martin Gilmartin—”

  “See?” I demanded. “It is a silly name, drunk or sober.”

  “—an’ you took ’em to a fence, an’ you sold ’em. As far as when you broke into the Gilmartin place to steal ’em, my guess is it was sometime last night, because it was yesterday you had the argument with your landlord.” He made a face. “Don’t sputter like that, Bernie. If you got somethin’ to say, go ahead an’ say it. You gonna tell me you didn’t have no trouble with the landlord?”

  “We had a heated discussion about books,” I said. “But you expect that sort of thing in a literary saloon. Anyway, his name is Stoppelgard.”

  “Borden Stoppelgard.”

  “So what has he got to do with Marty Gilmartin and baseball cards?”

  “Gilmartin’s married.”

  “Well, I swear it wasn’t his wife I was in bed with last night.”

  “His wife’s name is Edna.”

  “That’s an okay name,” I said. “Edna Gilmartin. Nothing the least bit funny about that.”

  “How about Edna Stoppelgard? What’s that do for your funny bone?”

  When Cornwallis was about to surrender his troops to George Washington at Yorktown, he ordered the band to play a tune called “The World Turned Upside Down.” If I’d had a tape of it lying around I would have played it.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Gilmartin’s wife used to be married to Stoppelgard?”

  “Couldn’t happen,” he said. “There’s a law against it. Although I suppose there’s ways of gettin’ around it, don’t you figure?”

  “Ways of getting around what?”

  “The law against marryin’ your own sister, but why would you want to? The only plus I can see is you wouldn’t be arguin’ every year about do you spend Christmas with your parents or hers.” He shook his head. “Borden Stoppelgard is Martin Gilmartin’s brother-in-law.”

  “You’re making this up.”

  “All news to you, huh, Bernie? Nice try. Here’s more news. Last night the Stoppelgards an’ the Gilmartins all went to the theater together, to see something about wishin’ for horses. Then they all went out for supper, an’ your name came up. Seems Stoppelgard was crowin’ about the good deal he got on a rare book you sold him, an’ how the prices’d be even better when you had your Goin’-Outta-Business sale.”

  “He said that, did he?”

  “Then Gilmartin an’ his wife went home, an’ he got the call from you, but at the time he didn’t know who it was. Even without knowin’ it was you, first thought he had was somebody broke in, and the first thing he went an’ looked for was his baseball card collection, an’ it was gone.”

  “So he called the police.”

  “That’s just what he did, an’ the desk sent a couple of blue uniforms over, an’ they took a report. It landed on my desk this mornin’, an’ I mighta let it lay there except he called up, an’ the call got routed to me, an’ I smelled somethin’ funny.”

  “Somebody got a bad burrito,” I suggested.

  “He told me about t
he phone call,” he said, “an’ I figured any burglar’d be smart enough to make a call like that from a phone where it couldn’t be traced back to him. But you learn to check these things out, because a burglar who’s dumb enough to make that kind of call in the first place might be just stupid enough to make it from a friend’s apartment, especially if the friend in question’s a sawed-off little dyke who spends her life givin’ poodles a shave an’ a haircut.”

  “It’s funny,” I said, “the way you and Carolyn never did get along. Ray, I already admitted I made the phone call, so what’s the big deal?”

  “The big deal is I tried out your name on Gilmartin, an’ he recognized it right away from his talk with his brother-in-law. ‘I know who that is,’ he says. ‘He’s a bookseller, an’ not a very good one, either.’ I tell him I know you, too, an’ that ain’t all you are. ‘He’s also a burglar,’ I say, ‘and there I’d have to say he’s one of the best in the business.’ ”

  “Thanks for the endorsement, Ray.”

  “Well, credit where credit’s due.”

  “But if I’m such a high-level burglar—”

  “One of the best, Bern. You always were.”

  “—then why would I waste my talents on a cigar box full of baseball cards?”

  “More like a shoe box, according to Gilmartin.”

  “I don’t care if it was a packing crate. For God’s sake, Ray, these are little pieces of cardboard smelling of bubble gum. We’re not talking about the Elgin Marbles.”

  “Marbles,” he said. “That’s what my mom got rid of, God rest her soul. I had a huge sack of ’em, too. I don’t know if I had any Elgins, but I had a real nice collection.”

  “Ray—”

  “Baseball cards aren’t kid stuff anymore, Bernie. Grown-ups buy ’em an’ sell ’em. They’re hot with investors these days.”

  “Like Sue Grafton.”

  “Does she collect ’em? I just read one book of hers, an’ it wasn’t bad. It was set on an army base durin’ war game maneuvers.”

  “ ‘K’ Is for Rations.”

  “Somethin’ like that, yeah.”

  “I know some of the scarce cards are worth money,” I said. “There’s one famous one. Honus Wagner, right? And the card’s worth a thousand dollars, maybe more.”