“That’s right.”
“Why didn’t you just tell them the truth? That you were home watching TV?”
“I tend to lie to cops.”
“Oh?”
“Old habits die hard.”
“I guess.” She leaned over to stub out her cigarette in the ashtray on the bedside table. In that position the curve of her pendant breast was particularly appealing, and I reached out a hand and stroked her. Bony? Gawky?
“I feel manipulated,” she said lazily. “And as though I’ve been lied to a little.”
“Maybe a very little,” I conceded.
“Well, nobody’s perfect.”
“That’s the prevailing opinion, anyway.”
“And I’m a little sleepy and the least bit horny, and isn’t Duke Ellington divine? Thief that you are, why don’t you steal a little kiss?”
“God knows where that might lead.”
“He’s not the only one.”
CHAPTER
Nine
I woke up around seven to let her out. I have several locks on the door in addition to the police lock, and she was having a hell of a time getting them all lined up. I unlocked everything and told her I’d call her, and she said that would be nice, and we gave each other one of those near-miss kisses you exchange when one or more of you has not recently employed a toothbrush.
I locked up after her and went to the bathroom, where I employed a toothbrush and swallowed a couple of aspirin. I thought about breakfast, thought better of it, and decided to lie down for a minute to give the aspirins a chance to work.
Next thing I knew, someone was pummeling my door. I thought first that it was Denise, come to retrieve something. But it didn’t sound like her. Nor did it sound like little Mrs. Hesch, my one friend in that soulless building. Mrs. Hesch drops by now and again to pour me a cup of great coffee and bitch about the building management’s failure to keep the washers and dryers in good repair. But Mrs. Hesch is a little bird of a woman, not much given to pounding on one’s door.
More knocking. I had my feet on the floor now and some of the fog was starting to lift from my brain. It was cops, of course, as I realized as soon as I was awake enough to be capable of things like realization. Nobody else knocks like that, as if you should have been expecting them and ought to have met them at the door.
I went to the door and asked who it was. “Well, it ain’t Santy Claus,” said a recognizable voice. “Open up, Bern.”
“Oh, hell.”
“What kind of attitude is that?”
“You picked a bad time,” I said. “Why don’t I meet you in the lobby in say five minutes?”
“Why don’t you open the door in say ten seconds?”
“The thing is,” I said, “I’m not dressed.”
“So?”
“Give me a minute.”
What time was it, anyway? I found my watch and learned it was a few minutes past nine, which meant I was going to be late opening up the store. I might miss selling a few three-for-a-buck books as a result, and while that’s hard to take seriously when you’ve just stolen something with a six-figure price tag, standards must be maintained.
I got into some clothes, splashed a handful of cold water on my face, and opened a window to air the place out a little. Then I unlocked all my locks for the second time that morning, and Ray Kirschmann shook his head at them as he lumbered across my threshold.
“Look at that,” he said. “Figure you got enough security devices there, Bern?”
Security devices, yet. Anybody but a cop would have called the damn things locks. “They say you can’t be too careful,” I said.
“That’s what they say, all right. Police lock’s new, isn’t it? You gettin’ paranoid in your old age?”
“Well, we’ve had a rash of burglaries in the neighborhood. Four or five right in this building.”
“Even with the doorman on the job?”
“He’s not exactly the Secret Service,” I said. “Incidentally, I must not have heard him ring to announce you.”
“I sort of told him not to take the trouble, Bern. I said I’d just make things easy and go straight up.”
“Did you tell him you were Santa Claus?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because that’s who’s going to have to take care of him at Christmas. I’m not even putting coal in his stocking.”
“Funny. What did you have, company last night?”
“You didn’t get that from the doorman.”
He looked pleased. “I’m a detective,” he said. “What I did, I detected it. Well, look around, Bern. Ashtray full of cigarette butts and you don’t smoke. Two glasses, one on each of the bedside tables. If she’s hidin’ in the bathroom, tell her to come join the party.”
“She already went home, but I’m sure she’d appreciate the invitation.”
“She’s not here?”
“No. You missed her by a couple hours.”
“Well, thank God for small favors.”
“Huh?”
“Now I can use your bathroom.”
When he emerged from it I was sipping a glass of orange juice and feeling more alert, if not altogether on top of things. “You just dropped in to use the John,” I said. “Right?”
“You kiddin’, Bern? I came by to see you. We don’t see each other that often.”
“I know. It’s been ages.”
“It seems I only see you when somebody gets killed. You had overnight company, huh? That’s not bad, two nights in a row.”
“The other night I was at her place.”
“Same lady, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“Handy.”
“Ray, it’s always wonderful to see you,” I said, “but I overslept and I’m late getting to the store as it is, and—”
“Business comes first, right?”
“Something like that.”
“Sure, I know how it is, Bern. I wouldn’t be here myself if it wasn’t business. Who’s got the time for social calls, right?”
“Right.”
“So I guess you got yourself an alibi for last night. The little lady who smoked all the cigarettes.”
“She’s not so little. There are those who would call her gawky. And I already told Richler all that. I’ll give her name if I absolutely have to, if I’m charged and booked, but until then—”
“That’s the night before last, Bern. The Colcannon job, I’m talkin’ about last night.”
“What about last night?”
“Tell me about it. Matter of fact, take it from when I dropped you off at the store yesterday around noon. Run it down for me.”
“What’s last night got to do with anything?”
“You first, Bern.”
He listened attentively, and I could almost see wheels turning behind his forehead. Just because his integrity’s for sale doesn’t change the fact that Ray Kirschmann’s a pretty good cop. It is not for nothing that he is known as the best cop money can buy.
When I was finished he frowned, sucked at his teeth, clucked his tongue, yawned, and allowed as to how my alibi sounded pretty good.
“It’s not an alibi,” I said. “It’s what I did yesterday. An alibi’s when something happened and you have to prove you didn’t do it.”
“Right.”
“What happened?”
“Friend of yours got hisself killed. Least he used to be a friend of yours. Before you went straight and gave up burgling for books.”
I felt a chill. He could have meant anyone but I knew without a moment’s doubt just who it was that he was talking about.
“A top fence. What the papers’ll call a notorious receiver of stolen goods, except they better say alleged because he never took a fall for it. Somebody got into his apartment yesterday and beat him to death.”
CHAPTER
Ten
“You’re not a suspect,” Ray assured me. “Nobody on the case even gave a thought to you. Then I went
in this morning and I got the word on Crowe and the first person I thought of was you. ‘Here I just saw my old friend Bernie Rhodenbarr yesterday,’ I said to myself, ‘and here’s an old friend of his that turns up murdered, and one thing Crowe and the Colcannon woman got in common is they both died from a beatin’. ’So what I thought is you might know somethin’. What do you know, Bern?”
“Nothing.”
“Yeah. But what do you know besides that?”
We were in the same car we’d ridden in a day ago, and once again he was driving me to my store. I told him I hadn’t seen Abel Crowe since a friend and I had watched the fireworks from his living-room window almost a year ago.
“Yeah, that’s some view,” he said. “I dropped by on my way to your place just to see what I could see. What I could see was half of Jersey from the living-room window. That’s where they found the body, over by the window, all crumpled in a heap. You never saw him since the Fourth of July?”
“We may have talked a few times on the phone, but not recently. And I haven’t seen him since last July.”
“Yeah. What happened yesterday, a neighbor rang his bell around six, six-thirty in the afternoon. When he didn’t answer she got concerned and checked with the doorman, and he didn’t remember Crowe leavin’ the buildin’. An old man like that, you worry about his heart or maybe he had a fall, things like that. The guy was seventy-one.”
“I didn’t realize he was that old.”
“Yeah, seventy-one. So the doorman went upstairs, or more likely he sent somebody, the elevator operator or a porter or somebody, and they tried the door. But that didn’t do ’em any good because he had police locks like you got on your door. A different model, the kind with the bolt that slides across.”
“I know.”
“Oh, yeah? You remember his locks clear from last July?”
“Now that you mention it I do. The business I was in, you tend to pay attention to locks.”
“I’ll bet you do. What they did, they banged on the door and tried to get an answer, and then they called the precinct and a patrolman was sent up, and what could he do? He tried to force the door and you can’t with a lock like that, and finally someone got the bright idea to call a locksmith, and by the time they found someone who would come and he finally got there and managed to open the lock it must have been close to ten o’clock.”
Indeed it must have. It wasn’t too much earlier than that when I last tried Abel’s number, and if they’d gotten in earlier some cop would have answered Abel’s telephone.
“They almost expected to find the old man lyin’ dead there,” he went on. “What they didn’t expect was to find him murdered.”
“There’s no question it was murder?”
“No question at all. The Medical Examiner on the scene said so, although you didn’t have to be a doctor to see it. It wasn’t one blow. Somebody hit him a lot of times in the face and over the head.”
“God.”
“Time of death’s a guess at this stage, but the ballpark figure is early afternoon yesterday. So you could have raced up there after I dropped you at the store, killed the old man, then raced back down to open up for business. Just a little lunch-hour homicide. Except that’s not your style an’ we both know it, plus I got a look at your face when I told you about Crowe bein’ dead, Bern, and you were learnin’ it for the first time.”
We caught a light at Thirty-seventh Street and he braked the car. “The thing is,” he said, “it’s a coincidence, isn’t it? Colcannon and now this, both hit on the head and both dead and not twenty-four hours apart. More like twelve hours.”
“Was Crowe’s apartment robbed?”
“It wasn’t taken apart. If anybody stole anything it didn’t show. I got there long after the lab crew came and went, but even so there wasn’t much of a mess. But maybe the killer knew where to look. Did Crowe keep large sums of cash around the apartment?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Sure you would, but we’ll let it pass. Maybe it was straight robbery and murder, with the killer forcing the old man to fork over the money, then killing him. Or maybe it was somebody with a reason to kill him, a motive. He have any enemies?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Maybe he cheated somebody and yesterday it caught up with him. He had a long life. You can make a lot of enemies in seventy-one years.”
“He was a nice man. He ate pastries and quoted Spinoza.”
“And bought things from people who didn’t own them.”
I shrugged.
“Who did the Colcannon job?”
“How would I know?”
“You had some connection there, Bern. And one way or another Colcannon ties into Abel Crowe.”
“How?”
“Maybe the old man set it up. Fences do that all the time, set up a place and get a burglar to knock it off. Maybe he did that and then there was an argument over the payoff. When Wanda Colcannon got killed maybe he decided there was more heat than he wanted to handle and he refused to buy whatever they stole, or wouldn’t pay the price that was set in advance. Something like that.”
“I suppose it’s possible.”
We batted it around until we were at the curb in front of Barnegat Books. I’d glanced at the Poodle Factory as we drove by and Carolyn was open for business. I started to thank Ray for the ride but he interrupted me with a heavy hand on my shoulder.
“You know more than you’re lettin’ on, Bern.”
“I know it’s hard enough to make a living selling used books. It’s impossible if you never open the store.”
“There’s a killer out there,” he said. “Maybe that’s somethin’ you oughta remember. He killed the Colcannon woman and he killed Crowe, and I’d say that’s beginnin’ to make him look like one dangerous son of a bitch.”
“So?”
“So we’ll pick him up before too long. Meanwhile, there’s that Colcannon loot floatin’ around, and who knows what else is up for grabs? And you always did have itchy fingers, Bern.”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
“’Course you don’t. Just a couple of suggestions. If you know who did the killin’, or if you happen to get wind of it, I’m the person you tell. Got that?”
“Fair enough.”
“I’d like to bag whoever did it. Crowe was a nice old gentleman. The two times I met him, we never had anythin’ we could make stick, nothin’ that even came close, but he was a gentleman all the same. What he was, he was generous.” Free with a bribe, in other words. “And there’s another thing.”
“Oh?”
“There’s money in this, Bern. I keep gettin’ this sense of money, you know what I mean? I’d say I smell it, but that’s not it because it ain’t a smell, it’s a feel in the air. You know what I mean?”
“I know what you mean.”
“Like the feel right before it rains. So the thing is, Bern, if you’re out there and it starts rainin’ money, don’t forget you got a partner.”
CHAPTER
Eleven
Carolyn came over around twelve-fifteen with a sack of carry-out from Mamoun’s. We had a felafel sandwich apiece and split a side order of roasted peppers. They made a nice mint tea there and we each drank a container of it. The stuff comes with the sugar already in it, and that reminded Carolyn of the sugar hangover she’d had the day before, and that reminded her of Abel, and she wondered aloud what he was having for lunch, what sort of yummy good he was ingesting even as we spoke.
“He’s not,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“He’s dead,” I said, and while she sat staring at me I told her what I had learned from Ray Kirschmann. He had told me to remember I had a partner, and I had indeed remembered, but somehow I hadn’t had the heart to go straight to the Poodle Factory and ruin Carolyn’s day. So I’d opened the store instead, and dawdled in it, figuring it would be time enough when I saw her. Then she’d appeared with lunch and I had po
stponed the revelation so as to avoid ruining our appetites, and then, once the subject had come up, I’d blurted.
She listened all the way through, her frown deepening all the while. When I’d finished, and after we had spent a few minutes telling each other what a fine man Abel was and how obscene it was that he’d been murdered, she asked me who did it.
“No idea.”
“You think it was the same ones who murdered Wanda Colcannon?”
“I don’t see how. The police don’t suspect a link between the Colcannon burglary and Abel’s death. Ray does. He’s positive there’s a connection. But the only thing that connects Colcannon and Abel is us, and we’re not connected with either one of the murders. So there’s no real link between the house on West Eighteenth Street and the apartment on Riverside Drive, except that we took something from one place and left it at the other.”
“Maybe that’s the link.”
“The coin?”
She nodded. “Twelve hours after we left it with him he was dead. Maybe someone killed him for it.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who would even know he had it?”
“Somebody he was trying to sell it to.”
I thought it over. “Maybe. Say he got up yesterday morning and called somebody to come over and have a look at the coin. Guy comes over, has a look, likes what he sees. More than that—one look and he knows he has to own the coin.”
“But he can’t afford it.”
“Right. He can’t afford it but he has to have it, and he gets carried away and picks up something heavy. Like what?”
“Who knows? A bookend, maybe.”
A natural object for her to think of, given our surroundings. And, in those very surroundings, she had once picked up a bronze bust of Immanuel Kant which I’d been using as a bookend in the philosophy and religion section, only to bounce it off the skull of a murderer who’d been holding a gun on me at the time.
“Maybe a bookend,” I agreed. “He gets carried away, brains Abel with the bookend, puts the 1913 V-Nickel in his pocket, and away he goes. And on his way he locks up after himself.”
The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza Page 8