The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza

by Lawrence Block

  I skipped to another marked passage. “This is from Leviathan,” I said. “‘In the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrels. First, competition; second, diffidence; thirdly, glory. The first maketh man invade for gain, the second for safety, and the third for reputation.’”

  I placed Hobbes with Spinoza. “Abel Crowe was killed for gain,” I announced. “The person who killed him is right here. In this room.”

  It was not without effect. The whole crowd seemed to draw breath at once. I fixed my eyes for the moment on Carolyn and Denise. They’d known what was coming but my announcement had gotten to them just the same, and they’d drawn a little closer together as if the drama of the moment had obscured their loathing for one another.

  “Abel was murdered for a nickel,” I went on. “People are killed every day for trifling sums, but this particular nickel was no trifle. It was worth something like a quarter of a million dollars.” Another collective gasp from the crowd. “Tuesday night Abel came into possession of that coin. Twelve hours later he was dead.”

  I went on to tell them a little about the history of the five legendary 1913 V-Nickels. “One of these nickels wound up in the safe of a man who lived in a carriage house in Chelsea. The man and his wife had left town and weren’t expected back until the following day. Tuesday evening, while they were gone, a pair of burglars broke through the skylight and ransacked the carriage house.”

  “We didn’t take no nickel!” Heads swiveled and eyes stared at Rabbit Margate. “We never took no nickel,” he said again, “and we never opened no safe. We found the safe, sure, but we couldn’t punch it or peel it or nothing. I don’t know shit about no nickel.”

  “No.”

  “And we didn’t kill nobody. We didn’t hurt nothing. Wasn’t nobody home when we went in, and we went out again before nobody came home. I don’t know shit about no murders and no nickels.”

  He slumped in his seat. Ray Kirschmann turned to whisper something to him, and Rabbit’s shoulders sagged in dejection. I don’t know what Ray said, probably pointed out Rabbit had just admitted the burglary in front of God and everybody.

  “That’s true,” I said. “The first burglars. Rabbit Margate and Harlan Reese”—and didn’t Harlan look startled to hear his name spoken aloud—“contented themselves with burglary and vandalism. Not long after they left, a second burglary took place. This burglar, a considerably more sophisticated and accomplished individual than Margate and Reese, went directly to the wall safe, opened it, and removed a pair of earrings, a valuable wristwatch, and the 1913 nickel. He took them directly to Abel’s apartment, where he left them on consignment.”

  No point, really, in mentioning we’d obtained some cash for the watch and earrings. No need to tell these people every last detail.

  “While the second burglar was delivering the safe’s contents to Abel Crowe, the nickel’s owner and his wife were returning to their home. They’d had a change of plans that none of the burglars had any reason to be aware of, and so they walked in on a house that looked like Rome after the Goths sacked it. They also walked in on another burglary in progress, and this third burglary was the charm. The man and woman were knocked out and tied up, and when the man regained consciousness and worked free of his bonds he discovered that his wife was dead.”

  I looked at Colcannon. He returned my glance, his face quite expressionless. I had the feeling he’d have preferred to be almost anywhere else, and I don’t suppose he figured he was going to have the chance to buy his coin back, not this afternoon. He looked like a man who wanted to walk out of a bad movie but had to stay to find out what happened next.

  “The nickel’s owner called the police, of course. He was given the opportunity to look at the perpetrator of the second burglary but couldn’t identify him. Subsequently he did make a positive identification of one of the participants in the first burglary.”

  “That was a frame,” Rabbit Margate called out. “He never saw me. That was a setup.”

  “Let’s just call it a mistake,” I suggested. “The gentleman was under a lot of stress. He’d lost his wife, his house had been cruelly looted, and a coin worth a fortune was missing.

  “And here’s something interesting,” I said, glancing again at Colcannon. “He never mentioned the coin to the police. He never said a word about it. You have to report losses to the police in order to make an insurance claim, but that didn’t mean anything in this instance because the coin wasn’t insured. And it wasn’t insured for a very good reason. The gentleman didn’t have title to it.”

  “This has gone far enough.” It was Colcannon who spoke, and he managed to surprise me, not to mention the rest of the crowd. He got to his feet and glared at me. “I don’t know how I let myself be gulled into coming here. I never knew the late Mr. Crowe. I was brought here on a false pretext. I never reported the loss of a 1913 V-Nickel and never carried insurance coverage on such a coin for a much better reason than the one you’ve advanced. I never had such a coin in my possession.”

  “I almost believed that for a while myself,” I admitted. “Oh, I knew you had one, but I thought it might be a counterfeit. I ran a check on the five V-Nickels to find out which one you bought, and it turned out that they were all accounted for. Four were in museum collections and the fifth was privately owned, and the private specimen was lightly circulated and easily distinguishable from the others, and certainly not the specimen I took from your safe.”

  Another collective gasp—I’d gone and blown my anonymity, and now all and sundry knew who the perpetrator of the Second Burglary was. Ah, well. These things happen.

  “But I had a good close look at that coin,” I went on, “and I couldn’t believe it was a counterfeit. So I did a little more checking and I invited some museum people to take a close look at their coins, and three of the four told me their coins looked just fine, thank you.

  “The fourth museum had a counterfeit in the case.”

  I looked at the three men in dark suits. The one seated on the aisle, the little button-nosed guy with the thick glasses, was Milo Hracec, and he recognized his cue. “It was not a bad counterfeit,” he said. “It was made from a proof 1903 nickel. The zero was removed and a one soldered in place. It was good work, and no one glancing into our display case would be likely to think twice about it, but you could never sell it to anyone as genuine.”

  The white-haired man cleared his throat. “I’m Gordon Ruslander,” he announced. “When Mr. Hracec reported his discovery to me I went immediately to see for myself. He’s right—the coin’s not a bad counterfeit, but neither is it terribly deceptive at close glance. It’s certainly not the coin I received when I traded a painting to the Baltimore Historical Society. That was a genuine specimen. I knew they wouldn’t palm off a counterfeit on me, but as a matter of course I had it xrayed anyway, and it was authentic. The coin that had been substituted for it didn’t have to be x-rayed. It was visibly fraudulent.”

  “What did you do after you’d seen the coin?”

  “I went to my curator’s home and confronted him,” he said. The man on Ruslander’s other side, the balding chap with the long nose, seemed to shrink in his seat. “I knew Howard Pitterman had been having his troubles,” Ruslander went on. “He went through a difficult divorce and had some investment reverses. I didn’t realize just how hard his circumstances had been or I would certainly have offered help.” He frowned. “Instead he took matters into his own hands a couple of months ago. He substituted a counterfeit for the 1913 nickel, then sold off our most important rarity for a fraction of its value.”

  “I got twenty thousand dollars for it,” Howard Pitterman said, his voice trembling. “I must have been insane.”

  “I don’t know who that man is,” Colcannon said, “but I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

  “If that’s the man who bought the coin,” Pitterman said, “he didn’t buy it from me. I sold it to a dealer in Philadelphia, a man with a shady reputation. Maybe
he sold it to this Mr. Colcannon, or maybe it went through another pair of hands first. I wouldn’t know. I could give you the name of that dealer, although I’d rather not, but I don’t think he’d admit to anything, and I can’t prove he bought the coin from me.” His voice broke. “I’d like to help,” he said, “but I don’t see that there’s anything I can do.”

  “I’ll say it again,” Colcannon said. “I don’t know any disreputable coin dealers in Philadelphia. I scarcely know any reputable ones. I know Mr. Ruslander by reputation, of course, as the founder of the Gallery of American and International Numismatics as well as proprietor of the Liberty Bell Mint, but I’ve never met him or his employees.”

  “Then why did you call Samuel Wilkes yesterday?”

  “I never heard of Samuel Wilkes.”

  “He has an office near Rittenhouse Square,” I said, “and he deals in coins and medals, and shady’s the word for him. You called him yesterday at his home and left your name, and you called his office, and you also put in a call to the Gallery of American and International Numismatics. You made those calls from your home telephone, and since they’re long distance there’ll be a record of them.”

  There would be a record, all right. Colcannon was staring at me, trying to figure out how there would be a record of calls he had never made. Any minute now he’d recall that he’d been lured away from his house and hustled off to Madison and Seventy-ninth, and he might even figure out that he’d had company in his absence, but right now he seemed content to deny the whole thing.

  “I never heard of this Wilkes,” he said, “and I never called him, and I certainly didn’t call the gallery.”

  “What’s it matter anyway, Bern?” It was Ray Kirschmann, and I wasn’t sure how much of this he was following. “If Crowe got killed for this nickel, all right, that makes sense, but who cares how the nickel got into the safe? Crowe got killed after it got outta the safe.”

  “Ah,” I said. “What’s significant is that nobody knew it was in the safe in the first place. Except for the Third Burglar.”

  “The who?”

  “Rabbit Margate and Harlan Reese didn’t know about the nickel,” I went on. “All they knew was that the Colcannons were going to be out of town overnight. They knew that because Wanda Colcannon got her hair done at a beauty shop called Hair Apparent, where Rabbit’s sister Marilyn was one of the operators. And she was quite an operator. Among her customers in the past year and a half, eight of them got burglarized while they were out of town on vacation. All eight of those burglaries had the same modus operandi. A crude break-in, a completely messy burglary, and a pattern of vandalism that was almost deliberate in nature. Marilyn just kept her ears open when her customers talked about going out of town, and she passed on the information to her brother, and that was all it took. What good does it do to stop the milk and mail and leave the lights on a timer if the sweet young thing who does your hair has a burglar for a brother?”

  I avoided looking in Marilyn’s direction while I said all this. Now I caught Carolyn’s eye. “Wanda used to stop in my bookstore when she brought her dog for grooming at a place down the street.” Might as well keep Carolyn out of it. “The last time I saw her, she happened to mention she was taking the animal out of town to be bred. So, like Rabbit and Harlan, I had inside information. I knew the Colcannons would be away overnight, and they knew the same thing.

  “But the Third Burglar knew no such thing. The Third Burglar was waiting for the Colcannons to come home. Ever since I realized there was a third burglar involved, I’ve tended to think of him in capital letters, like the Third Murderer in Macbeth. Shakespearean scholars have a lot of fun with the Third Murderer, you know. Shakespeare didn’t give him all that much to say, so the evidence is pretty sketchy, but one school of thought holds that the Third Murderer was actually Macbeth himself.”

  A hush went over the room. It was, all things considered, one of your better hushes.

  “That was a clue from my subconscious,” I said, “but it took me a while to put it together. No one with inside information could have been the Third Burglar, because then he’d have known not to expect the Colcannons that night. And for someone to have dropped in through the skylight just by chance and then hanging around to commit homicide—well, it seemed to be stretching coincidence pretty thin. But my subconscious was trying to tell me something, and ultimately I managed to piece it together. Whether or not Shakespeare meant the Third Murderer to be Macbeth, the Third Burglar was Herbert Franklin Colcannon.”

  He was on his feet. “You’re crazy,” he said. “You’re a raving maniac. Are you trying to say I staged a burglary of my own house? That I stole this nonexistent coin from myself?”

  “No.”

  “Then—”

  “There was no third burglary,” I said. “Rabbit and Harlan stole everything they could find, and I took the three items from your safe, and that’s as much burglary as you had that night. There was no third burglary and there was no Third Burglar, and there was nobody hanging around to hit you over the head and tie you up. You killed your own wife.”

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-two

  For a moment no one said anything. Then Colcannon told them that I was out of my mind. “Why are we listening to him?” he demanded. “This man is a self-confessed burglar and we’re sitting here while he hands around accusations of larceny and homicide. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve had enough of this. I’m leaving.”

  “You’ll miss the refreshments if you leave now.”

  His nostrils flared and he stepped away from his seat. Then a hand took him by the elbow and he spun around to meet the eyes of Ray Kirschmann.

  “Easy,” Ray told him. “Whyn’t we have a listen to what Bern there has to say? Maybe he’ll come up with somethin’ interestin’.”

  “Take your hand off me,” Colcannon barked. His bark was less reminiscent of a Bouvier than, say, a mini-poodle. “Who do you think you are?”

  “I think I’m a cop,” Ray said agreeably, “and Bern thinks you’re a murderer, and when he has thoughts along those lines they tend to pan out. Long as he’s got the ball, let’s just see where he runs with it.”

  And where would that be? “Mr. Colcannon’s right about one thing,” I said. “I’m a burglar. More accurately, I’m a bookseller who’s trying to break himself of the habit of burglary. But one thing I’m not is a policeman, and it’s going to be the job of the police to put together a case against Colcannon for murdering his wife.

  “But maybe I can tell them where to look. His finances wouldn’t be a bad place to start. The Colcannons lived well and they owned a lot of valuable things, but the rich get into financial difficulties the same as the rest of us.

  “One thing that made me suspicious was the emptiness of that wall safe when I opened it. One watch, one pair of earrings, one rare coin, plus a handful of papers—people who own wall safes generally utilize them more, especially people with attack dogs who believe their premises are impregnable. I made a few telephone calls yesterday, and I learned that Mr. Colcannon has been selling off some of the coins he’s bought in recent years.”

  “That proves nothing,” Colcannon said. “One’s interest changes. One sells one article to buy another.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think so. I think you took a couple of major gambles recently—your safe contains some stock certificates that represent securities you’ve taken a heavy loss on. And I think you paid a damn sight more for the 1913 V-Nickel than the twenty grand Mr. Pitterman received for it. You probably couldn’t afford that nickel when it came available, but you had to have it because you’re an avaricious man, and unless Spinoza was off base, avarice is a species of madness, and not an endangered one, either.

  “You bought the nickel, shelled out for it at a time when you were trying to raise cash to meet your other obligations. Then you took your dog to be bred—another damned expense, although it would pay off when Astrid had her pups—and you rushed b
ack to New York rather than stay overnight in Pennsylvania, and maybe you and your wife had an argument at the theater or during dinner afterward. That’s something the police can find out if they do a little legwork.

  “It hardly matters. The two of you walked into your house to find the unmistakable evidence of a burglary. Maybe you’d been planning on selling various valuables that they’d walked off with. Maybe you were underinsured. You probably didn’t ever think to raise the insurance coverage on your silver, hardly anybody does, and now the nice windfall you’d had during the sharp rise in silver was wiped out by thieves in the night.

  “And maybe your wife made some smartass remark right about then, and maybe it was the last straw. Or did it just remind you that one of the few things remaining in your wall safe was an insurance policy on both your lives? If either of you died, the other collected half a million dollars. And there’s a double indemnity clause for accidental death, and the companies consider murder an accident, although it’s generally undertaken on purpose, which is a contradiction, don’t you think? Maybe the first time you hit her was out of rage, and then the possibility of gain suggested itself to you. Maybe you took one look at the looted rooms of your house and saw instantly that the burglary would make a good smoke screen for murder. We probably won’t know the answer to that one until you confess, and you probably will confess, Mr. Colcannon, because amateurs generally do. And you’re an amateur. You’re an absolute pro at avarice, sir, but you’re an amateur at homicide.”

  I meant he’d most likely confess at the police station, not in front of the lot of us. But a shadow passed over his face right about then and I decided to shut up for a minute and give him room. Or rope, if you like.