"What did you want him for?"
"I thought he might know who the fat man was, or what the Lyles had that the perps wanted. He can't know much less than I do, but I know something he doesn't know, and that's that the Conrad book, the false McGuffin, wound up at Mapes's house."
"You can't tell him about Mapes."
"I can't tell him about Mapes the Burglary Victim, but why can't I clue him in about Mapes the McGuffin Recipient? Besides, if I can give him something, maybe I can get something from him."
"What makes you think he knows anything?"
"Even if he doesn't there's something he can find out for me. But not unless I ask him, and I can't do that until I know where he is. I wish I could get in touch with him. Why are you looking at me like that?"
"I just never thought I'd hear you say that, Bern."
"I hate weekends," I said. "You know what we could do? We could go someplace."
"In this weather? Where would we go?"
"How about Paris?"
"For the weekend?"
"Sure. We'll take the Concorde. A suite at the George Cinq, dinner at Maxim's, a cruise on the Seine, a stroll down the Boul' St. Germain, acaf‚ au lait avec croissant at Les Deux Magots, then back on the plane and we're home again."
"That would cost a fortune."
"As it happens, we've got a fortune. We could swing it. Say fifteen to twenty thousand apiece for round-trip Concorde tickets, a thousand a night for a decent suite, half that for dinner-I'll tell you, for fifty thousand dollars we could have a memorable weekend."
"Uh, it sounds great, Bern, but-"
"But we can't do it," I said, "because the Concorde isn't flying anymore. And anybody who tries to buy any airplane ticket for cash, let alone thirty or forty thousand dollars' worth of cash, is going to spend hours answering questions in a room full of uniforms. Besides, we'd need to take a cab out to JFK, and how would we get a cab on a day like this?"
"And you've got a date tomorrow night with Barbara Creeley."
"She'll never make it back from the island in time, not in this weather. Man, do I hate weekends."
There was one thing I could do, though not without getting wet again. While Carolyn was getting wet herself, picking up dry cleaning around the corner, I made a small withdrawal from the stash of money in her bathtub. I could have done it while she was there, but I wanted to avoid having to explain why I needed it. And not long after she got back I put the Sandford novel aside yet again and walked up to 14th Street and took one bus east to Third Avenue and another bus uptown. I got off at 34th, walked up and over, and let myself into Barbara's brownstone.
I went upstairs, past the Feldmaus apartment, and remembered to open only the two locks she was in the habit of locking, which saved me a little time. I was in and out in under five minutes, and when I hit the street I couldn't think where to go next. Back to Carolyn's? Down to the store? Uptown to my place?
I went around the corner to Parsifal's, wondering what kind of a crowd they'd get on a rainy Saturday afternoon, and found that they got a sort of rainy-Saturday-afternoon crowd. There's something warm and welcoming about a bar on a day like that, but after you get over being warmly welcomed, you notice that everybody there gives off an air of desperation.
I'm sure I was no exception myself. I took a stool at the bar, where Sigrid's role was now being played by a black woman with short curly hair that either she or God had colored red. She was as tall as Sigrid and had the same cheekbones, along with the same subliminal message:Sleep with me and you'll die, but it'll be worth it.
I ordered Laphroaig and took a long time drinking it, meting it out in small sips. I was making progress, or it was; by the fourth sip, it tasted pretty decent.
While I sipped at it, I worked my way around the bar, talking to no one but listening to everybody. I was hoping to hear a particular low-pitched voice, but didn't really expect to. There was no one in the place who looked like my image of the man, and there was no one there who sounded like him, either.
Most of the time I wasn't listening that hard, anyway, because I was busy thinking. You ought to be able to work this out, I told myself. The whole thing was full of coincidences, and when you have that many of them, sooner or later they start fitting together in meaningful ways. That's what I told myself, anyway, but I kept turning the pieces around in my mind, and I couldn't quite make anything out of them. It was like a jigsaw puzzle, I decided, with some pieces missing. If I got hold of the missing pieces I might still be stumped, but at least I'd have a shot at it.
I went to the phone, dropped more coins into it than it used to cost, dialed a string of numbers that I remembered only because I'd dialed them twice already today, and listened to the phone ring in Ray Kirschmann's house. If a phone rings and there's no machine to answer it, does it make a sound? I decided it makes the sound of one hand clapping, which was about as much applause as I was capable of today, anyway. It rang until I was tired of listening to it, and then I hung up and went back to the bar. There'd been a sip or two left in my glass, and there'd been more cash on the bar than I would have left for a tip, but the bartender (whose name I hadn't caught, but I was pretty sure it wasn't Sigrid) had thought I'd left and taken it all away.
I really hate weekends.
Twenty-Seven
The rain stopped sometime after midnight Saturday, too late to do most of the city any good, and started up again before dawn, in plenty of time to ruin Sunday. I went out for breakfast and came home with the paper. I still didn't have either copy ofLettuce Prey at hand, but the SundayTimes was enough to see anybody through a rainy Sunday, and clear into the middle of the week. Even after I'd tossed all the advertising supplements in the recycling bin, and added those sections likeJobs (which I don't want) andAutomobiles (which I don't need), I still had enough paper left to make a person have second thoughts about freedom of the press.
I settled in with it, pausing now and then to try Ray Kirschmann in Sunnyside. Around eleven his wife answered, just home from church. No, she said, Ray wasn't home. He'd had to work, he hadn't even been able to go to services with her. I gave her my name and number, and she said she'd pass them on to him if he called in, but she sounded as though that wasn't likely to happen.
I tried the precinct and left a message there as well, and went back to theReal Estate section, where there was an inspiring story of a couple who'd searched high and low for a place that would accommodate both their hobbies, although they preferred to call them areas of interest. He built elaborate layouts for his model trains, while she collected weathervanes and old farm equipment. For a mere eight million dollars they'd bought an old warehouse in Nolita, which is not, as you might suppose, a Nabokovean tale about a prepubescent girl who won't have anything to do with Humbert Humbert, but a realtors' term for the emerging area north of Little Italy. By acting as their own general contractor and doing most of the work themselves, they'd managed to hold the cost of the gut rehab they'd done to another four million, so-well, you can run the numbers yourself and see what a bargain they'd got, with enough square footage to give him the HO-gauge equivalent of fifty miles of railroad track, while she had plenty of room to show off her treasures, including one of the very first McCormick reapers.
I called Carolyn. "What I want to know," I said, "is where do they find these people?"
"Huh? Where do who find what people?"
"Page four of theReal Estate section."
"I'll call you back," she said.
It was close to fifteen minutes before the phone rang, and I picked it up and said, "Well, it took you long enough. After we finish the remodeling, what do you want to do-play with your trains or go cut the wheat in the back forty?"
There was a long, thoughtful pause, and then a voice not at all like Carolyn's said, "It didn't take me long at all, not once I got your message. An' the rest of what you said must be in English, because I recognize all the words, but I don't know what the hell you're talkin' about."
"Oh, Ray. I thought you were Carolyn."
"I'm a foot taller'n she is an' a lot heavier, an' I got a deeper voice. Not to mention the fact that she's a woman, for all the good it does anybody. Most people don't have a whole lotta trouble tellin' the two of us apart. You called me, Bern. You got somethin'?"
"I might," I said.
"It took a while findin' out who he was, Bernie. He had a wallet with enough cash in it to choke a goat, but not a lick of ID anywhere in it, or anywhere else on him."
"No money belt?"
"Not unless he was wearin' it underneath his skin, because the last I seen him he was bareass naked on a metal table with a doctor diggin' bullets out of him. We ran his prints, of course, but he didn't have none."
"The man had no fingerprints?"
"He had 'em on the tips of his fingers, like everybody else except your occasional visitor from outer space. But he didn't have 'em on file, so when we ran 'em we didn't get nowhere."
He bit into a doughnut, chased it with a gulp of coffee. He'd picked me up in a city car, a Chevrolet Monte Carlo that must have been confiscated from somebody buying or selling low-grade cocaine, and now we were in a restaurant near the Manhattan side of the Williamsburg Bridge. Ray was partial to it, for reasons that remain unclear to me. We'd picked up our coffee and doughnuts at the counter and taken them to a table, on which Ray was now putting his cards.
"So we had nothin' to go on," he said, "an' we ID'd him anyway."
"How?"
"Good police work," he said. "How'd he get to your store? Well, you don't see too many fat guys on the bus or the subway, unless that's all they can afford, an' I already told you about his wallet."
"How much was he carrying?"
"I didn't weigh him, but he had to go over three hundred pounds. Oh, money?" He held his thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. "A wad this thick. Eighty-seven hundred bucks, all in hundreds, an' that's not countin' what he had in euros. That's a man who can afford to take a cab, but I knew right off that's not how he got there."
"How'd you know?"
"What's he gonna do, get a cabby to break a hundred? He didn't have any small bills, Bernie. What that tells me is he's got a car. He drove there, an' he's plannin' to drive straight home, wherever home is." He shrugged. "Course, we checked cabbies, too, lookin' for somebody who dropped a fat guy on your block of East 11th somewhere around lunchtime. You go through the motions, but I knew he drove."
"Unless he walked."
"A guy with his build?"
"I don't know, Ray. The man was light on his feet."
"Every fat man's light on his feet, Bernie. They gotta be or they wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Anyway, even if you had a point, it's a mute one. We found the car."
"Oh."
"He left your place walkin' east, an' he was gettin' ready to cross the street when he got blown away instead. So that tells me to look south an' east of your bookstore, an' what did we find on 10th Street between University an' Fifth?"
"A car?"
"A Buick," he said, "pulled up smack dab alongside a fire hydrant."
"It's good you got there before the traffic squad towed him."
"Couldn't happen, Bern. He had DPL plates. Diplomatic immunity might not keep him from gettin' shot full of holes, but it kept his car from gettin' hauled off to the pound. It mighta kept us from searchin' his car, I'm not too clear on the rules, but as fate would have it I had the car open before I even noticed the DPL tags. Careless of me."
"But convenient."
"Photo ID in the glove compartment, a driver's license plus his credentials from the Latvian embassy. Guy's name is Valdi Berzins, an' accordin' to the embassy he had somethin' to do with the Latvian mission to the UN, but nothin' too important. That was all we got from him outside of his address, which was a hotel, the Blantyre on East 51st Street. He had a room there by the month. Not a bad hotel, but not the Carlyle, either. Only thing we found in the room was a scrapbook of newspaper clippings, an' the last I heard they were lookin' for someone to translate 'em."
"Pardon my Latvian," I said. "I assume that's the language they're in?"
"Some's Russian, goin' by the letters. They're in that alphabet they got, that's like Greek but worse."
"Cyrillic."
"No, I'm pretty sure it's Russian. The others are in our alphabet, for all the good it does. An' there's one in English, speculatin' that the Black Scourge of Riga might be hidin' out here in America."
"The Black Scourge of Riga. Did they give his name?"
"Yeah," he said, "an' it's a whole string of vowels an' consonants. He's some kind of war criminal, would be my guess."
"Another doddering old European who might have been a concentration camp guard. Whatever he did, he probably can't remember doing it." I thought a moment. "How old was Arnold Lyle?"
"I forget. Why?"
"Because he changed his name from something, and it probably had vowels and consonants in it. If the Black Scourge of Riga was a war criminal, he'd have to have been at least twenty-five in 1945, and probably older than that. Otherwise he'd have been the Junior Assistant Black Scourge of Riga. But say he was twenty-five. That would make him what, eighty-four?"
"Forget it. Lyle was fifty tops."
"It was just a thought. There's a connection there, Ray. Not to the clipping about the Black Scourge, but some kind of connection tying Berzins to Lyle."
"They're both Russians."
"Except for Berzins, who's Latvian. But Latvia was part of the Soviet Union back when there was such a thing. Not originally, because it was independent between the two world wars, but then the Russians took it over along with the rest of the Baltics. Ray? How hard would it be to get into the murder apartment? The one at 34th and Third?"
"It's a crime scene, Bernie. It's sealed."
"Oh."
"Why?"
"I'd like to get in there."
"Oh, well, we'll just ask permission from the guys in Major Cases. `Bernie here's a convicted burglar, plus he's an early suspect in the case, an' he'd like to poke around the crime scene. Any of youse got a problem with that?' "
"I thought we could do it off the books."
"Sneak you in, in other words. Why?"
"Two people died in that apartment," I said, "plus the doorman downstairs. They all got killed because someone went there looking for something."
"Which we don't know what it is."
No, but I was beginning to have an idea. "We know they didn't get it."
"Bernie, I saw the safe. It was cleaner'n a whistle."
"So if the McGuffin was in the safe, the perps got it."
"Who the hell's McGuffin, an' where'd he come from?"
"It's a name," I said, "for the thing everybody wants, because we have to call it something and we don't know what it is. If it was in the safe, they got it. But suppose it wasn't?"
He frowned at me. "Why'd they have a safe an' not put the thing inside? Unless they didn't have it in the first place."
"A possibility," I admitted, "but I think they had it, and I think they were planning to sell it, and they bought the safe so they could keep the money in it when they got paid, because they were expecting a lot of money and they'd be getting it in cash. But suppose they kept the McGuffin somewhere else?"
"Then the perps got it. They tortured Lyle an' Schnittke until they handed it over, an'-"
"Did you find evidence of torture?"
"No, just a couple of bullets in their heads."
"That may have hurt," I said, "but it wouldn't have made them talk."
"Then they talked without bein' tortured, or the perps found the stuff on their own, and you know how I know that? Because if it was there an' they missed it, thenwe would have found it."
"I know they didn't find it, Ray. Otherwise they wouldn't have looked for it in my apartment."
He sighed. "It was us tossed your place, Bernie. We had a court order, it was all opened up aboveboard."
I told him a
bout the second search, and when he protested that I hadn't reported it, I told him about Edgar the Doorman and the INS.
He looked hurt. "We wouldn't rat a guy out to those assholes," he said. "Half the guys on the force are Irish, an' half of them got a relative with a fishy Green Card or none at all. All the same, I can see why he'd be worried. But I have to say you're right. Same MO with the doorman means the same bunch of mopes, and if they found it they'd quit lookin'. So you know what I think? I think it wasn't there in the first place."
"Because the murder scene was searched by trained police investigators."
Burglar on the Prowl Page 19