The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams

by Lawrence Block

  “Indeed. And a profitable one. Get some sleep, Bernie. I’ve a feeling the next few days are going to be busy ones.”

  CHAPTER

  Twenty

  He was right. It was a busy week.

  Tuesday night, while an eminent cardiologist and his wife were at the Met oohing and ahing over David Hockney’s sets for Die Zauberflöte, Marty and I were on the way to their house in Port Washington. A security patrol watched over the neighborhood according to a strict schedule; armed with that schedule, we synchronized our own movements accordingly.

  There was no alarm this time, just a formidable door with a brass lion’s-head knocker and one of those legendary Poulard locks, to which I laid a successful siege. Inside, I dumped a couple of drawers without bothering to see what hit the floor, hurrying directly to the master bedroom, where the doctor’s wife kept her jewelry in a handsome dresser-top chest with five inch-deep drawers and a mirrored lid. I grabbed a pillow off one of the twin beds, stripped it of its pillowcase, and scooped all of the jewelry into the pillowcase. I dumped a drawer or two, knocked over a lamp, and hurried downstairs. I was right on schedule, and so were the security forces; I hunkered down by the living-room picture window and watched in admiration as they slowed their prowl car in front of the house and beamed their pivoting spotlight here and there. Then, satisfied that all was well, they pressed on.

  For variety’s sake, I left the Poulard’s pickproof reputation unsullied, picking it shut behind me and scuttling around to the side of the house, where I kicked in a basement window and made a mess of a flower bed. Then I swung the pillowcase over my shoulder, checked my watch, and met the Lincoln out front.

  “Poor Alex,” Marty said. “A couple of wrong moves in the commodities market put his back against the wall. Unfortunately, frozen pork bellies aren’t like stamps and coins and baseball cards. You can’t cash them in when times get tough.”

  “Or arrange to have them stolen.”

  “Quite. He swallowed his pride and went to Frieda, told her the situation. Pointed out that they had a substantial amount of money invested in her jewelry, and that it could see them through a tight spot. Perhaps they might sell some of the pieces she never wore anyway.” He shook his head. “The woman wouldn’t hear of it. Well, he suggested, it was only a temporary difficulty. A few triple-bypass operations would set them right again, but in the meantime suppose they pledged the odd tiara as collateral with Provident Loan.” He chuckled. “Alex said she was aghast. Pawn her jewelry? Hock her bracelets at some corner pawnshop? Not a chance.”

  I told him I’d barely had time to look at what I was taking, but the quality looked good.

  “The insurance coverage is close to two hundred thousand,” he said. “Of course one dresses for the opera, so whatever she wore tonight will have escaped us.” I said it was a shame they couldn’t have gone square dancing instead, and he smiled at the very idea. “One thing, Bernie. There should be a jade-and-diamond necklace with matching earrings. Everything else is ours to sell, but Alex would like that back.”

  “No problem,” I said, “but how’s he going to manage that? Won’t it tip her off that he staged the whole thing?”

  “Oh, it’s not for Frieda,” he said. “But Alex is especially fond of that particular ensemble. He wants to give it to his girlfriend.”

  Wednesday I didn’t need the Lincoln, or Marty’s company either. I closed the store in the middle of the afternoon, hung the clock face in the window, and told Raffles to take messages if anybody called. I caught a cab and got out half a block from a four-story townhouse in Murray Hill. On the parlor floor, I found what I was looking for in a place of honor over the living-room fireplace. It was an oil painting about twelve inches high and sixteen inches wide, a rural landscape showing some fat cattle taking shelter beneath an enormous tree.

  I cut it from its frame and rolled the canvas so that it would fit wrapped around my forearm between my shirtsleeve and my jacket. Minutes later I was on Third Avenue, my hand raised to summon a taxi that took me uptown to Marty’s apartment. His eyes widened when I walked in empty-handed. Then I took off my jacket and he smiled and reached for the canvas.

  “Here we are,” he said, unrolling it. “Many’s the time I’ve admired this little beauty over the years. ‘Best investment I ever made,’ George Hanley always said. ‘Gave ten thousand dollars for it to a little mustachioed froggy art dealer on the Boulevard Haussmann. Barb thought I was crazy, but we both liked it and it made a nice souvenir of the trip. I’ll be honest with you, I never even heard of the artist at the time. Courbet? I didn’t know Courbet from Beaujolais.’ He never tired of that phrase, Bernie. ‘I didn’t know Courbet from Beaujolais.’ ”

  “Well, it has a nice ring to it.”

  “It turned out to be worth two or three times what he paid for it, and that was twenty years ago. When the art market went crazy, the value of the little Courbet just kept climbing. A few months ago George realized he had a painting worth several hundred thousand dollars, and that he could use the money and they could hang something else over the fireplace.”

  “But his wife didn’t want to sell it?”

  “It was her idea in the first place. George had a chap from Christie’s look at it, and that’s when he got the bad news. The little Frenchman with the mustache had been the screwer, not the screwee. George had paid ten thousand dollars for a fake. He felt so abashed he couldn’t even tell his wife. ‘Oh, we can’t sell our Courbet,’ he told Barbara. ‘It would be like auctioning off a member of the family. And it just keeps going up in value. We’d be crazy to sell.’ What he said to me, one afternoon at the club when some single-malt scotch had loosened his tongue, was that the most infuriating thing was what he’d paid over the years for insurance. ‘The premium kept going up,’ he said, ‘to reflect the steady increases in value. Turns out I’ve just been throwing good money after bad. I’ll never see a dime of it back.’ The other day I took him aside and reminded him of our conversation. What you said about never seeing any of the money back,’ I said. ‘You know, George, that’s not necessarily so.’ ”

  “The insurance company won’t know it’s a fake.”

  “Of course not. The man from Christie’s wouldn’t have run off and told them. But if they did know, they’d refuse to honor the claim.”

  “Obviously.”

  “But suppose George had told them the truth as soon as he’d learned it. Unwittingly, he’d been insuring a worthless painting for twenty years. That being the case, the company had been taking his premiums without assuming any actual risk. So, now that the actual circumstances had become known, would they agree to refund the premiums he had paid?”

  “Obviously not.”

  “That’s why I see nothing wrong with defrauding the sons of bitches,” he said with feeling. “They’ve taken larceny and institutionalized it.” He clucked his tongue at the faux Courbet and carried it over to the fireplace.

  “Wait,” I said.

  “George never wants to see the thing again,” he said, “and I don’t suppose you could find a customer for it, do you?”

  “I wouldn’t know how to sell it even if it were real.”

  “I shouldn’t think so, not without provenance. George gave me ten thousand dollars on signature, as it were, as an advance against half the settlement from the insurance company. The painting’s currently insured for $320,000, but they’ll very likely stall, and they may even try to chisel.” He shook his head. “The swine. If they live up to their part of the deal, you and I walk away with eighty thousand apiece.”

  “That would be great,” I said.

  “So I guess we can afford to consign this canvas to the flames.”

  “We can afford to,” I said, “but do we have to? The guy from Christie’s could be wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time. And even if it is a fake Courbet, so what? It’s a real something, even if it’s only a real fake. I’ll tell you this, it’d look great in my apartment.”

  �
��And I imagine it would make a good souvenir.”

  “That too,” I said.

  It was a full week, what with the appointments Marty arranged and the follow-up visits I had to make to various gentlemen who would buy choice material even if one couldn’t show clear title to it. Coins, jewelry, postage stamps, a Matisse litho, all passed through my hands. The weekend was busy, too, and when I opened up the following Monday I spent most of the morning on the telephone. I had a whole series of conversations with Wally Hemphill, and after the last of these I called time out and looked around for the cat. When I couldn’t find him I started crumpling a sheet of paper, and the sound drew him. He knew it was time for another training session.

  I had the floor nicely littered with paper balls when Carolyn showed up. “Look at that!” I cried. “Did you see what he just did?”

  “What he always does,” she said. “He killed a piece of crumpled-up paper. Bern, I went to the Russian deli. I got an Alexander Zinoviev for you and a Lavrenti Beria for myself, but I can’t remember which is which. What do you say we each have half of each?”

  “That’ll be fine,” I said. “Look! I swear the training’s making a difference. His reflexes are getting sharper every day.”

  “If you say so, Bern.”

  “The son of a gun could play shortstop,” I said. “Did you see the way he went to his left on that one? Rabbit Maranville, eat your heart out.”

  “Whatever you say, Bern.” She pulled up a chair. “Bern, we have to talk.”

  “Eat first,” I said. “Then we’ll talk.”

  “Bern, I’m serious. Ray stopped by this morning. I was vacuuming a bull mastiff and there was Ray, standing there with his dewlaps hanging out.”

  “You should report him.”

  “Bern, it’s a sign of how desperate he is. You know how Ray and I get along.”

  “Like oil and water.”

  “Like Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bern, but he came into the Poodle Factory because he’s concerned about you. And he’s convinced you could clear up this case for him if you put your mind to it.”

  I chewed thoughtfully. “This must be the Lavrenti Beria,” I said. “With the raw garlic and the horseradish.”

  “And I have to tell you I agree with him.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “It’s even better that garlic agrees with me, because the Zinoviev seems to be laced with it, too. It’s probably just as well that I don’t have a date tonight.”

  “He says the Nugents are back. He’s been to see them a couple of times. He’s really investigating in a big way. It’s not like him, Bern.”

  “He must smell money.”

  “I don’t know what he smells. Not Luke Santangelo, because they must have aired out the place by now. Bern—”

  I tossed the Zinoviev wrapper and watched Raffles make his move. He was on it like a pike on a minnow. “He likes sandwich wrappings from the deli best of all,” I told Carolyn. “The smell makes him nuts.”

  “You should get him a catnip mouse, Bern. He’d play with it by the hour.”

  “You don’t get it, do you? I don’t want to buy toys for him, Carolyn. He’s not a pet.”

  “He’s on staff.”

  “That’s right. The last thing I want to do is play with him. These are training sessions, they’re for his reflexes.”

  “I keep forgetting. I look at the two of you and it looks for all the world like you’re having fun, so I forget that the relationship is essentially serious.”

  “Work can be fun,” I said, “if you’re goal-oriented.”

  “Like you and Raffles.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “There’s something else you should know, besides the fact that Raffles is not a pet, and that’s that I’m no Kinsey Millhone.”

  “You think I don’t know that, Bern? You’ve been a lot of things in your life, but you’ve never been a lesbian.”

  “What I mean,” I said, “is that I’m not a detective. I don’t solve crimes.”

  “You have in the past, Bern.”

  “Once or twice.”

  “More than that.”

  “A few times,” I conceded. “But it just happened. One way or another I wound up in a jam and in the course of getting out of it I happened to stumble on the solution to a homicide. It was serendipity, that’s all. I was looking for one thing and I found something else.”

  “And that’s what happened here, Bern. You were looking for something to steal and you found a dead body.”

  “And I went home, remember?”

  “But you went back.”

  “Only to go home again. Thomas Wolfe was wrong, you can go home again, and I did. I’m out of it, Carolyn. They dropped the charges, did I tell you that? For me the case is over.” I flipped a paper ball, but Raffles was still busy killing the last one. “If you want somebody to solve it,” I said, “why don’t you try the cat?”

  “The cat?”

  “Raffles,” I said. “Maybe he’ll figure it out for you, like in those books by What’s-her-name.”

  “Lillian Jackson Braun.”

  “That’s the one. Everybody’s stymied, and then the genius cat breaks a T’ang vase or coughs up a hairball, and that provides the vital clue that nails another killer. I forget his name, this crime-solving cat.”

  “It’s Ko-Ko. He’s Siamese.”

  “Good for him. He’s been doing this forever, hasn’t he? Ko-Ko must be getting a little long in the fang by now. She ought to call the next one The Cat Who Lived Forever. I can’t believe some Siamese is that much sharper than old Raffles here. Go ahead, ask him who did it. Maybe he’ll knock a book off the shelves and answer all your questions.”

  “You think you’re pretty funny, don’t you, Bern?”

  “Well…”

  “Well, what the hell,” she said. “Raffles, what’s the solution to the mystery of the stiff in the tub?”

  Raffles stopped what he was doing, which was the systematic demolition of one of the sandwich-wrapper mice. He backed away from it, extended his front paws, stretched, extended his back paws, stretched again, and then arched his back, looking like something that belonged on a Halloween card. Then he wagged the tail he didn’t have—I can’t think of another way to say it—and leaped straight up in the air, grabbing at something only he could see. He landed on all fours, in the manner of his tribe, and turned slowly around, settled on his haunches, and stared at us.

  I said, “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  “We all will, Bern, but what’s that got to do with the price of Meow Mix? What was all that about, anyway?”

  “Call Ray Kirschmann,” I said. “You’re the one who won’t stop hounding me, so you can be the one to call him.” I grabbed a pencil and retrieved a sheet of paper from the floor, uncrumpling it as best I could. I started making a list. “All of these people,” I said. “Tell him I want him to have them all at the Nugent apartment tomorrow evening at half past seven.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. How did you—what do you plan to—what did the cat do that—”

  “You’re not making sentences,” I said, “Or sense. Tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-one

  At exactly seven-thirty the following evening I presented myself to the Haitian doorman at 304 West End Avenue. “Bernard Rhodenbarr,” I said. “Mr. and Mrs. Nugent are expecting me.” I looked over his shoulder while he consulted a little list. I was pleased to note that there was a check mark next to every name but mine.

  “Rhodenbarr,” I prompted, and he found my name and checked it off, turning to me with a cheering little smile. He pointed my way to the elevator, which was considerate if hardly necessary.

  I rode upward to nine, walked the length of the hallway to G. I looked at the two locks, the Poulard, the Rabson.

  I knocked on the door, and it was opened unto me.

  The doorman’s list was accurate. They were all on hand. I didn’t know how Ray had managed it, but he had everybody presen
t and accounted for.

  They were in the living room. The room’s chairs and sofas were ranged in a circle, its circumference swelled by a few chairs brought in from the dining room. It was Ray who had opened the door for me, and he led me through the foyer into the center of things, whereupon whatever conversations had been limping along came to a gratifying halt.

  “This here is Bernie Rhodenbarr,” Ray announced. “Bernie, I guess you know all these people.”

  I didn’t really, but I nodded and smiled all the same, working my way around the circle with my eyes. As I said, everybody was there, and here’s how they lined up.

  First was Carolyn Kaiser, my chief friend and poodle washer. Like me, she had gone home and changed after work; like me, she had selected gray flannel slacks and a blue blazer. It was no great trick to tell us apart, however, because there was a silver pin in the shape of a cat on the lapel of her blazer, and she was wearing a green turtleneck. (I had a shirt and tie, in case somebody invited me to the Pretenders.)

  On Carolyn’s right was the one man present who could have invited me to the Pretenders, but I wasn’t sure we’d be speaking by the end of the evening. Marty Gilmartin, sharing a Victorian love seat with his wife, Edna, was wearing a gray suit, a white shirt, and a Jerry Garcia tie, along with a facial expression that hovered somewhere between bemused and noncommittal.

  Edna Gilmartin looked more youthful and less formidable than I seemed to remember her from the ticket line at the Cort Theater. I barely noticed the dress she was wearing; what caught my eye was the necklace around her throat. It would have caught anybody’s eye, that was the whole point of it, but it had special impact on me because I thought I recognized it as part of the loot from Alex and Frieda’s place in Port Washington. A second glance put my mind to rest, but for a moment there it gave me a turn.

  Alongside Mrs. Gilmartin, looking long and lean and country casual in boots and jeans and a sweatshirt with the legend GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT, was Patience Tremaine. She looked as though she didn’t have a clue what she was doing here, but was determined to be a good sport about it. I knew the feeling. I’d felt pretty much like that myself in the bat cave at Cafè Villanelle.