The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams

by Lawrence Block

  “What about the window?”

  “Forget the window. The idea of some Human Fly slipping through that tiny bathroom window and rappelling down the side of the building—well, I’d rather believe he shot himself and then ate the gun for dessert. No, the murderer went out the door, but the door was locked.”

  “The murderer was a ghost?”

  “Either that or there was some way to get around the lock. The more I thought about it, the more I figured that had to be the answer. The last time I flushed the toilet for Raffles, I thought about installing one of those pet ports. You know, you put some sort of hinged flap at the bottom of the door, and that way an animal can get in and out even if the doors closed. If I had one of those, I wouldn’t have to remember to leave the bathroom door open.”

  “Did the Nugents have one of those?”

  “No.”

  “Because I can’t believe a cat killed him, Bernie. I draw the line at that.”

  “No,” I said, “although a dog or cat could have moved the gun so that a suicide would wind up looking like murder. But they don’t have any pets, and it wouldn’t matter if they did because there was no pet port in the bathroom door in the first place. But there had to be something, and then I just happened to think of the light switch.”

  “Just happened.”

  “What triggered it,” I said, “was flicking a switch in my own bathroom. The light didn’t go on.”

  “Because it was a dummy switch?”

  “No, because the bulb had burned out.”

  “How many burglars did it take to change it?”

  “Just one, but while I was changing it I remembered the switch at the Nugent apartment. Now it’s not unusual to have a switch that no longer turns anything on or off. A lot of people remove ceiling fixtures when they redecorate, and it’s easier to leave the switch plate than plaster over the hole in the wall. Still, I got to wondering what I’d find underneath the switch plate.”

  “And what you found was a hole in the wall.”

  “Right.”

  “And that meant somebody could shoot Luke Santangelo, go out the door, pull it shut, unscrew the switch plate, reach in through the opening, and lock the door.”

  “Barely,” I said. “If my arm had been any shorter I couldn’t have reached. And if it had been any fatter it wouldn’t have gotten through.”

  “So we can look for somebody with long skinny arms. But why would anybody go through all that? I don’t get it.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “So that it would look like suicide? But if you were gonna fake a locked-room suicide, wouldn’t you leave the gun behind?”

  “Ah, zair you have eet,” I said. “No matter how clevair ze criminal, he makes ze leetle mistake.”

  “But—”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I agreed, “but so what? It’s not my problem.”

  “It’s not?”

  I shook my head. “I’m glad I found out about the dummy switch plate, because the impossible-crime element bothered me. I wanted to know how it was done. But I don’t have to know why it was done, or by whom.”

  “Or what Luke was doing in that apartment.”

  “None of that. I put a couple of pieces of jewelry in the tub with him, and I rifled some drawers in the bedroom and took some other jewelry away with me. That was to give the cops an easy answer to some of those questions. He was committing a burglary, he had a partner, the partner killed him. And no, I don’t think that’s what happened, but I don’t honestly care what happened.”

  “You don’t?”

  “I’ve got enough things to worry about,” I said. “Like making sure they drop the charges against me. And finding a way to keep from losing the store.”

  “The store,” she said. “I forgot about that, with everything that’s been going on. Bernie, your problems are over!”

  “They are?”

  “You’ve got the cards, haven’t you? All you have to do is give them to Borden Stoppelgard in exchange for a long-term extension of your lease. Wasn’t that the deal he offered you?”

  “More or less.”

  “That’s why you’re all dressed up. You’re having lunch with Borden Stoppelgard, aren’t you?”

  “No, but you’re close.”

  “I’m close? I don’t know what that means. Who’s close to Borden Stoppelgard?”

  “Nobody who can help it.”

  “But—”

  “I’d better get going,” I said. “I don’t want to keep Marty waiting.”

  “Marty? Marty Gilmartin?”

  “At his club,” I said. “Pretty fancy, huh? I’ll tell you all about it.”

  The Pretenders have as their clubhouse a five-story Greek Revival mansion facing Gramercy Park. I walked up Irving Place and arrived no more than three minutes late for my one o’clock lunch date. I gave my name to the liveried attendant at the desk and he informed me that Mr. Gilmartin was awaiting me in the lounge.

  I walked down a half flight of carpeted stairs and into a cozy wood-paneled room with a bar at one end and a pool table at the other. Two men stood, cues in hand, while a third took aim at a shot that didn’t look terribly promising. Several stood at the bar, and eight or ten others were grouped in twos and threes at dark wooden tables. They were all over thirty-five, they all wore jackets and ties, and one of them was Martin Gilmartin.

  Truth to tell, he wasn’t terribly hard to find. He was seated by himself with a newspaper and a drink, and he looked up with interest when I entered the room. I approached him and said, “Mr. Gilmartin?” and he got to his feet and said, “Mr. Rhodenbarr?” and we shook hands. I apologized for my late arrival and he assured me that was nonsense, I wasn’t late at all. He was an elegant man, tall and slender and silver-haired, splendidly turned out in a tan suit, a deep blue shirt with a contrasting white collar, and a light blue tie. His shoes were cap toes, and looked remarkably like the pair I’d worn home from Harlan Nugent’s the previous morning, although those had been black. Gilmartin’s were a rich walnut brown.

  “I’m awfully sorry,” he said. “I told you that you’d need a jacket here, but I didn’t think to mention we’re stuffy enough to require a tie as well. I see they made you put on one of those horrors they’ve got hanging in the cloakroom.”

  “Actually, it’s my own tie.”

  “And a very nice one, too,” he said smoothly. “We could eat down here, but it’s quieter and a bit more private upstairs in the dining room. Does that sound all right to you?”

  I said it was fine and he led me up the stairs and down a hallway to the dining room, pointing out various objects of interest along the way. The ceilings were high, the floors deeply carpeted, and the furniture ran to a lot of dark wood and red leather. The walls were thickly hung with portraits, all of them elaborately framed and almost all of them of actors and actresses.

  “Notice the two portraits on either side of the fireplace,” he said. “They’re in matching frames, although they’re the work of two different artists. I don’t suppose you recognize the subjects?” I didn’t. “We refer to them affectionately as the honorary founders of the club. The chap on the left is James Stuart, and on the right we have his son, Charles Stuart. You may remember him as Bonnie Prince Charlie.”

  “Pretenders to the English throne.”

  “Very good. James called himself James III, but history has called him the Old Pretender, and his son the Young Pretender. And so, although the Stuarts are not actors, they seem unquestionably qualified to be of our company. With a single exception, all the other portraits depict members of the Profession.”

  “Who’s the other nonactor?”

  “There are four of them, actually, but they’re together in the painting. You may have noticed it as you came in, hanging right opposite the cloakroom.”

  “The four young black men standing around a microphone.”

  “I don’t believe any of them ever trod the boards,” he said, “although they’d have
been eligible for membership here in that they were unquestionably show-business professionals. They called themselves the Platters, and one of their biggest hits was a song called ‘The Great Pretender.’ ” He smiled, shook out his napkin, and placed it upon his lap. “Well,” he said, “what will you have to drink? And then we probably ought to have a look at the menu.”

  We had a remarkably civilized conversation through drinks and appetizers. When the waiter had served our entrees, a lull settled in. I thought we might get to the business at hand, but after a moment he began talking about a play he’d seen, and that carried us through to coffee. Then it was clearly time, and it was evidently up to me to begin.

  “I’m sorry I called you at home this morning,” I said, “but I didn’t have your office number.”

  “My home is my office,” he said, “although I have more than one telephone line. Here, let me give you a card.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Here, have one of mine.”

  “Ah,” he said, taking it, turning it over in his hand. “Rabbit Maranville. From the Diamond Stars set of the mid-thirties. I can’t recall whether or not he’s in the Hall of Fame. Nor can I claim to have seen him play. I’m not quite old enough.”

  “I was thinking you might recognize the card.”

  He nodded. “The years haven’t dealt kindly with it, have they? I hope they were easier on the Rabbit himself. The card’s been folded, one corner’s completely gone, and well, it’s a mess, isn’t it?”

  “It would be worth about two hundred dollars in near mint condition,” I said. “But in the shape it’s in—”

  “No more than five or ten dollars. Assuming someone wanted such a poor specimen.” He handed it back, inhaled deeply, exhaled thoroughly. “How on earth did you get hold of this? But I suppose that’s a professional secret.”

  “Sort of.”

  He sipped his coffee. “Cash,” he said.

  “You needed some.”

  “I needed to get some without looking as though I needed it. I have a lot of assets, but none that I could convert to cash invisibly. If I sold paintings off the walls, the sale would be a matter of record and there’d be a blank spot on the wall where the painting had hung. If I sold real estate…well, in this market you have to give it away, and the only way to unload anything is to take back mortgages. I wouldn’t wind up with anything in the way of cash. And, as you’ve observed, I needed cash.”

  “How much?”

  “Ideally, a million dollars.”

  I wondered what it would be like to need a million dollars. I knew people who wanted a million dollars, but that’s not the same thing.

  I said, “So you thought of your baseball cards.”

  “I’ve been collecting them for years. My occupation is buying and selling, you know. I began acquiring the cards as a hobby, something to take my mind off weightier matters. Can you believe I’ve had a higher annual return on them than on stocks or paintings? And don’t even mention commercial real estate.”

  “I won’t.”

  “But what’s truly remarkable about the cards,” he said, “is the ease with which they can be sold. You walk in with a box of cards, you walk out with a fistful of cash.”

  “Like stamps or coins.”

  “I would suppose so, although I think that cards are if anything a little more anonymous. I can tell you this much. In a matter of weeks, without anyone’s knowing what I was doing, I had liquidated virtually my entire holdings and raised close to six hundred thousand dollars.” He leaned forward. “I should emphasize that there was nothing the slightest bit illegal or immoral or unethical about what I had done. I owned those cards outright. I had bought them, and they were mine to sell.”

  “And nobody had to know about it.”

  “And no one did. My collection was housed in a rosewood humidor in my study. The cedar lining that once protected fine cigars from deteriorating is equally efficacious at preserving cardboard rectangles from insect damage. I kept the most valuable cards in acetate sleeves. The rest were loose.” He raised a hand, and a waiter hurried over to pour us more coffee. “I would take twenty or fifty or a hundred cards at a time from the box. After I’d sold them, I would stop at another card store and buy late-date commons to replace what I’d sold. Or earlier material in very poor condition, like that unfortunate Rabbit Maranville specimen you brought along.”

  “So the humidor stayed full.”

  “That’s right. I took a few dozen cards from the box in the morning, and I put back that many or more at night. Nowadays, you know, a full set includes a card for every player in the major leagues. It hasn’t always been like that. The 1933 DeLong set had only twenty-four cards in total. The key to it’s the Lou Gehrig card. It’s worth a little more than the other twenty-three cards combined.”

  “Did you have one?”

  “In VG. In the Goudey set of the same year there were two hundred forty cards, but substantially fewer than two hundred forty different players. The most popular athletes had more than one card. Gehrig had two, and Babe Ruth had four different cards. I owned three of the four Babe Ruth cards, and one day last summer I sold them for a total of twenty-eight thousand dollars. I replaced the Babe with Zane Smith, Kevin McReynolds, and Bucky Pizzarelli.” He shook his head. “Babe Ruth started out with the Boston Red Sox, you may recall. He was the best pitcher in baseball, but you couldn’t keep a hitter like the Babe on the bench three days out of four, so they had him play the outfield. And the owner of the Red Sox sold him outright to New York. He wanted the money so he could back a Broadway show. Yankee Stadium became the House That Ruth Built, and the Boston fans never forgave that damn fool of an owner, and who could blame them? But I think I know how he may have felt, selling the Babe three times over and filling his slot with the likes of Zane Smith, Kevin McReynolds, and Bucky Pizzarelli.”

  “And did you use the money to back a Broadway show?”

  He smiled at the very thought. “That would be rather like trading the family cow for some magic beans, wouldn’t it? No, the stage is many things to me, but not a commercial arena. My wife and I believe in patronage, and I suppose you could say that we err on the side of generosity in our support of the theater. Sometimes our contribution takes the form of an investment, but it’s made without much hope of return.”

  “I see.”

  “So I gradually sold off my holdings,” he said, “deliberately replacing the wheat with chaff and constructing a sort of Potemkin Village of worthless cards in my humidor. Everything good was gone.”

  “Except Ted Williams.”

  “You spotted those, did you?” His eyes twinkled. “Couldn’t trade Ted Williams. The Red Sox fans would hang me in effigy.”

  “That’s not why you kept them.”

  “No, of course not. They were identifiable. The set’s scarce, all out of proportion to the price it would bring. And you know my brother-in-law.”

  “He’s my landlord.”

  “And presumably you know of his passion for the Splendid Splinter. If I sold those cards, there was a fair chance they’d wind up in the hands of a dealer who’d offer them to Borden. One thinks of baseball cards as interchangeable, but Borden’s seen my Williams cards enough to recognize them. At the very least, he’d buy the set and then want to compare it to mine. When I couldn’t produce them, he’d know I’d sold them. Which is to say he’d know I’d been forced to sell them in order to raise cash.”

  “Which is what you didn’t want to get around.”

  “Precisely. Easier and safer all around to hang on to the Ted Williams material. But I sold off everything else of value. And, as I’ve said, what I’d done was entirely within my rights. It was secretive, but one’s allowed to have secrets.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I got a telephone call in the middle of the night,” he said. “I’d spent an evening with my brother-in-law, always an exhausting experience—”

  “I can imagine.”

  “—and yo
u called, and it was late and I was tired, and something made me go directly to my study and lift the lid of my humidor. And the cards were gone.”

  “No,” I said.

  “I didn’t go to my study? I didn’t open the humidor? The cards were not gone?”

  “You already knew they were gone,” I said. “Say my call spooked you and you jumped to the conclusion you’d been burglarized. It’s an odd reaction to a late-night nuisance call, but it’s not inconceivable. Maybe you’d scout around to make sure your valuables were intact, but your valuables were long gone from the rosewood humidor because you’d already taken them out and sold them. Why would you dash into the study to check on Zane Smith and Bucky Pizzarelli?”

  He bought time with a sip of coffee. “You’re a very perceptive young man,” he said.

  “Not that perceptive,” I said, “or that young, either, but it’s pretty clear what was going on. You already knew the humidor was empty. My phone call was a perfect opportunity for you to go public with the information. You could scoot into the study, open the celebrated rosewood humidor, and discover the cards were gone.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “To collect the insurance. You had sold the cards, but I don’t suppose you canceled your insurance coverage, did you?”

  He was silent for a long moment, gazing off at some dead actor’s portrait, gathering his thoughts. Then he said, “It’s not like murder, is it? Premeditation’s immaterial. Insurance fraud isn’t considered a less serious offense if you do it on the spur of the moment.”

  “No.”

  “I have to say I didn’t plan it from the very beginning. My original intention was merely to sell the cards quietly for the best possible price. And I did a good job of that.”

  “And?”

  “When I’d disposed of perhaps a third of my holdings, the insurance premium came due. A floater on that sort of collection isn’t terribly expensive, and I couldn’t have saved all that much by asking them to lower my coverage to reflect the diminished nature of the collection. So I paid the premium in full, telling myself that I’d notify the company when I’d sold off the remainder.”