The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza

by Lawrence Block

  “Huh?”

  “The doors were locked. Remember the police locks with the sliding bolts? The killer locked up after. Now I tend to do that after a burglary, picking the locks all over again, but who else do you know who does? And what passionate numismatist would think to do it, let alone have the ability?”

  “Why wouldn’t he just lock the door with Abel’s keys?”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Did I say something wrong, Bern?”

  “I would have thought of it myself sooner or later,” I said sullenly. “In another minute I would have thought of it.”

  “It’s just that you’re not used to the idea of locking and unlocking doors with a key.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Anyway, it’s interesting he thought of it. Most people would just get out of there and be satisfied with the lock that locks when you close the door.”

  “The spring lock.”

  “Right, the spring lock. But he must have wanted to keep the body from being discovered for as long as possible, and that mattered enough to him to make him take the trouble to find Abel’s keys.”

  “Maybe he didn’t have to look for them.”

  “Maybe. Even so—”

  “Right,” I said. “But so what? We still don’t know anything much about him that we didn’t know before we went through all this, except that he’s reasonably clever and that he doesn’t let a little thing like murder throw him off-stride. I can’t see any reason to suspect either set of Colcannon burglars. The ones that got there before we did were slobs. They would never know about Abel and they never would have been capable of getting into his apartment. They evidently stole a ton of stuff from the Colcannon house and they’ll have to fence it somewhere or other, but I can’t believe they tried to use Abel. Even if burglers like that knew him, he’d be all wrong for what they stole. They must have loaded up on silver and furs, all the things Colcannon didn’t keep in the safe, and Abel pretty much limited himself to stamps and coins and jewelry.”

  “And the ones who got there after we did?”

  “The ones who killed Wanda Colcannon? We have to assume they just dropped in because the broken skylight looked like an engraved invitation. What quirk of fate do you figure got them all the way to Riverside Drive?”

  “I guess they’re out.”

  “I guess so. And I guess the cops’ll have to work this one out for themselves, because I’m stumped. The best thing we’ve come up with so far is a homicidal numismatist who locks up after himself, and how many of those have you known in your life? I figure they’re in the same category as hen’s teeth and 1913 V-Nickels. I’m sorry he’s dead, dammit. I liked him.”

  “So did I.”

  “And I’m sorry Wanda Colcannon’s dead, even though I never met her. I’m sorry we got involved in this mess in the first place, and if I’m glad of anything it’s that we’re out of it. I think it’s time I unlocked my own door again and tried selling a few books.”

  “I better get back myself. I got a dog to wash.”

  “Catch you later?”

  “Sure.”

  Five hours later we were continuing our conversation at the Bum Rap, she with a martini, I with Scotch and water. I’d had a long slow afternoon, the store full of customers who browsed endlessly without buying anything. On days like that it’s murder trying to keep up with the shoplifters, and I’m pretty sure a studious lank-haired young woman got away with a copy of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. If she reads it, I figure that’s punishment enough.

  “I just hope the police wrap up both killers in a hurry,” I told Carolyn. “We’re out of it for the moment, and if they close both cases we’ll stay out of it, and that would be fine with me.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “Well, we were at Abel’s place the night before last, and if they really dig they might try showing my picture to the doorman, and he might remember me. I told Ray I haven’t been over there since July. There’s no law against telling a lie to a policeman, but it doesn’t make them look on you with favor. I’ve got an alibi, but I don’t know how well it’ll hold up.”

  “What alibi?”

  “Denise.”

  “That’s for last night, Bern. We were at Abel’s the night before.”

  “Denise is my alibi for both nights.”

  “I hope she knows it.”

  “We talked about it.”

  “She knows about the Colcannon job?”

  “She knows they suspected me. I told her I had nothing to do with the murder. I didn’t mention that I happened to burgle the place earlier.”

  “Because she thinks you’re retired.”

  “Something like that. At least she tells herself she thinks I’m retired. God knows what women think.”

  “So the bony blabbermouth is your alibi. I wondered why you were seeing her last night.”

  “That’s not why.”

  “It’s not?”

  “It’s not the only reason. I don’t know what you’ve got against Denise. She always speaks well of you.”

  “The hell she does. She can’t stand me.”

  “Well—”

  “I don’t know what kind of an alibi she’ll make. She doesn’t strike me as the type to lie convincingly. I hope you won’t need her.”

  “So do I.”

  She signaled for another round of drinks. The waitress brought them to our table, and Carolyn’s eyes followed her as she walked away. “She’s new,” she said. “What’s her name, did you happen to notice?”

  “I think someone called her Angela.”

  “Pretty name.”

  “I suppose.”

  “She’s pretty, too. Don’t you think?”

  “She’s all right.”

  “Probably straight.” She drank some of her martini. “What do you think?”

  “About the waitress?”

  “Yeah. Angela.”

  “What about her? Whether she’s straight or gay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How should I know?”

  “Well, you could have an impression.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “All I’ve noticed is what she plays on the jukebox. Fall in love with her and you’ll spend the rest of your life listening to country and western. You’ll have Barbara Mandrell coming out of your ears. Could we forget about Angela for a minute?”

  “You could. I’m not sure I can. Yeah, sure, Bern. What is it?”

  “Well, I was thinking about Abel. About the murderous coin collector who did him in.”

  “And?”

  “And I don’t believe it,” I said. “The timing’s no good. Say he goes to sleep right after we leave, gets up first thing in the morning and calls a collector. The guy comes over almost immediately, kills Abel and leaves. That’s about how it would have had to happen, and Abel wouldn’t work it that way. He’d have wanted to turn it over quickly, but not that quickly. First he’d want to convince himself the coin was genuine, and didn’t he say something about x-raying it? He’d have done that first, and he’d have waited to see what kind of heat the Colcannon job generated, and if the theft of the V-Nickel was reported in the press. That would help determine the price he could charge for it, so he wouldn’t sell it until he had the information. I don’t think his murder had a damned thing to do with that coin, because I don’t think anyone in the world outside of you and me had the slightest idea that he had it. Nobody followed us there. Nobody saw us walk in. And we didn’t tell anybody anything. At least I didn’t.”

  “Who would I tell? You’re the only person who knows I ever do anything besides groom dogs.”

  “Then someone had another reason for killing Abel. Maybe it was a straight and simple robbery. Maybe somebody else tried to sell him something and they argued. Or maybe it was someone from his past.”

  “You mean Dachau? Someone he knew in the concentration camp?”

  “It’s possible, or maybe someone from his more recent past. I don’t know much
about him. I know Crowe’s not the name he was born with. He told me once that his name was originally Amsel, which means blackbird in German. From blackbird to crow is a simple leap. But another time he told me the same story except the name wasn’t Amsel, it was Schwarzvogel. That means blackbird, too, but you’d think he’d remember which one of the words was his original name. Unless neither was.”

  “He was Jewish, wasn’t he?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then what was he doing in Dachau?”

  “You know the rye-bread ads? ‘You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s.’ Well, you didn’t have to be Jewish to go to Dachau. Abel told me he was a political prisoner, a Social Democrat. That may have been the truth, or he could have landed there for some ordinary crime—receiving stolen goods, for instance. Or maybe he was gay. That was another good way to get to Dachau.”

  She shuddered.

  “The thing is,” I went on, “I don’t know a hell of a lot about Abel’s past. It’s possible nobody does. But he could have made an enemy along the way. Or it could have been a robbery or a disagreement or any damned thing. If he was gay, for example, maybe he brought a hustler home and got killed out of simple meanness, or for the money in his wallet.”

  “It happens all the time. Do you really think he could have been gay, Bern? He kept trying to marry the two of us off. If he was gay himself, wouldn’t he have been quicker to pick up on the fact that I’m not your standard marriage material?” She finished her drink. “And isn’t the whole thing too much of a coincidence? His death and Wanda’s death, one right after the other?”

  “Only because we’re the link between them. But we’re not connected with their deaths, and we’re the only link between them otherwise, you and I and the nickel. And that’s no link at all.”

  “I guess not.”

  I made interlocking rings on the tabletop with the wet bottom of my Scotch glass. “Maybe I’m just telling myself this because it’s what I want to believe,” I said. “Except that I’m not altogether sure I want to believe it anyway, because of where it leads.”

  “You just lost me.”

  “The nickel,” I said. “The 1913 V-Nickel, the Colcannon nickel, the one we could have taken $17,500 for if we hadn’t picked pie in the sky instead.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “If he wasn’t killed for the nickel,” I said, “and if he was murdered by some clown who didn’t even know about the nickel, don’t you see what that means?”

  “Oh.”

  “Right. The nickel’s still there.”

  I spent the evening at home. Dinner was a can of chili with some extra cumin and cayenne stirred in to pep it up. I ate it in front of the television set and kept it company with a bottle of Carta Blanca. I caught the tail end of the local news while the chili was heating. There was a brief and uninformative item about Abel, nothing about the Colcannon burglary. I watched John Chancellor while I ate, and I sat through half of Family Feud before I overcame inertia sufficiently to get up and turn it off.

  I tidied up, stacked a mix of jazz and classical music on the record player, settled in with the latest Antiquarian Bookman, a magazine consisting almost exclusively of dealers’ lists of books they wish to acquire for resale. I scanned the ads lazily, making a mark now and then when I found something I remembered having in stock. Several of the marks I made were for books presently reposing on my bargain table, and if I could sell them to someone who was actively seeking them I could certainly get more than forty cents apiece for them.

  If I took the trouble to write to the advertisers and wait for their orders and wrap the books and ship them. That was the trouble with the used-book business. There were so many niggling things you had to attend to, so much watching the pence in hope that the pounds would take care of themselves. I didn’t make a decent living from Barnegat Books, didn’t even make a profit at it, but I probably could have if I’d had that infinite capacity for taking pains that success seems to demand.

  The thing is, I love the book business. But I like to do it my way, which is to say in a distinctly casual fashion. Burglary spoils one. When you’ve grown accustomed to turning a big dollar in a few hours by means of illegal entry, it’s hard to work up much enthusiasm for a lot of routine work that won’t yield more than the price of a movie ticket.

  Still, it was fun reading through the ads and checking off titles. Even if I’d probably never follow it up.

  I called Denise around nine. Jared answered, told me Babel-17 was all he’d hoped it would be, then summoned his mother to the phone. We talked for a few minutes about nothing in particular. Carolyn’s name came up, I don’t remember how, and Denise referred to her as “that lesbian dwarf, the fat little one who always smells of Wet Dog.”

  “Funny,” I said, “she always speaks well of you.”

  Carolyn called a little later. “I was thinking about what we were talking about,” she said. “You’re not going to do anything about it, are you?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Because it’s impossible, Bern. Remember the conversation we had with Abel? The fire escape’s on the front of the building and he’s got gates on the window anyway. And the doorman takes his job twice as seriously as Saint Peter, and there are those police locks on the doors—”

  “There used to be,” I said, “but the cops got a locksmith to open one of them.”

  “What’s the difference? You still can’t get into the building.”

  “I know.”

  “And it’s driving you crazy, isn’t it?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  “Because it’s driving me crazy, too. Bernie, if we hadn’t already stolen the damned coin once, and all you knew about it was that it was probably somewhere in that apartment, an apartment the police have probably sealed off because someone was killed in it yesterday, and you knew what kind of security they have in the building and all, and you knew that the coin was probably hidden somewhere in the apartment and that you wouldn’t even know where to start looking for it, assuming it was there in the first place, which you can’t be positive of—”

  “I get the picture, Carolyn.”

  “Well, assuming all that, would you even think twice about stealing the coin?”

  “Of course not.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “But we already stole it once.”

  “I know.”

  “And that makes me tend to think of it as my coin,” I explained. “They say thieves don’t respect private property. Well, I have a very strongly developed sense of private property, as long as it’s my property we’re talking about. And it’s not just the money, either. I had a great rarity in my hands and now I’ve got nothing. Think what a blow that is to the old self-esteem.”

  “So what are you going to do about it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Because there’s nothing I can do.”

  “Right. That’s what I wanted to check, Bern. I’m on my way over to the Duchess. Maybe I’ll get lucky and meet somebody sensational.”

  “Good luck.”

  “I’m so goddamn restless lately. Must be a full moon. Maybe I’ll run into Angela. She’ll be feeding the jukebox and playing all the Anne Murray records. I guess she must be straight, huh?”

  “Anne Murray?”

  “Angela. Figure she’s straight?”

  “Probably.”

  “If she’s straight and Abel was gay they could have raised poodles together.”

  “And you could have clipped them.”

  “I could have clipped the poodles, too. Jesus, how do I get out of this conversation?”

  “I don’t know. Which way did you get in?”

  “Bye, Bern.”

  The eleven o’clock news brought no fresh revelations, and who wants a stale one? I turned the set off as soon as they’d announced who Johnny’s guests were, grabbed a jacket and went out. I hiked up West End Avenu
e, took a left at Eighty-sixth, walked the rest of the way on Riverside Drive.

  The air was cooler now, and heavy with impending rain. You couldn’t see any stars but you hardly ever can in New York, even on cloudless nights. The pollution’s always thick enough to obscure them. I did see a moon, about half full with a haze around it. That means something, either that it’s going to rain or it isn’t, but I can never remember which.

  There were a surprising number of people on the street—joggers plodding around Riverside Park, dog owners walking their pets, other people bringing home a quart of milk and the early edition of the Times. I crossed the street for a better view and looked up at Abel’s building, counting floors to find his window. It was dark, naturally enough. I let my eyes travel around the corner and noted the fire escape on the Eighty-ninth Street side. It looked substantial enough, but it was right out there in plain view and you couldn’t reach the bottom rungs from the sidewalk unless you had a long ladder.

  Pointless anyway. As Carolyn had made quite clear.

  I walked toward Ninetieth Street. The building immediately adjacent to Abel’s stood three stories taller, which meant I couldn’t get from its roof to Abel’s unless I was prepared to lower myself on a rope. I wasn’t, nor did I have any reason to assume security there would be any less rigid than at its neighbor. I returned to Eighty-ninth Street and walked a few doors past Abel’s building. It was bounded on that side by a long row of late-nineteenth-century brownstones, all of them four stories tall. The windows in Abel’s building that looked out over the brownstones were too high to be readily accessible from the rooftop, and there were steel guards over them anyway.

  I started walking toward West End Avenue again, then doubled back for another look, feeling like an addled criminal drawn irresistibly back to the scene of someone else’s crime. The doorman was the same stiff-spined black man who’d been on duty during our previous visit, and he looked as formidable as ever. I watched him from across the street. Waste of time, I told myself. I wasn’t accomplishing anything. I was as restless as Carolyn and instead of going to the Duchess I was going through the motions.

  I crossed the street, approached the entrance. The building was a massive old pile of brick, safe as a fortress and solid as the Bank of England. Engaged columns of a dull red marble flanked the double entrance doors. Bronze plaques on either side announced the professional tenants within. I noted three shrinks, a dentist, an ophthalmologist, a podiatrist and a pediatrician, a fairly representative Upper West Side mix.