The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza

by Lawrence Block

  His lip quivered. Then a muscle worked in his temple. “I didn’t mean to kill her,” he said.

  I looked at Ray and Ray looked at me, and a smile blossomed on Ray’s lips.

  “I hit her once. It was an accident, really. She was railing at me, nagging me. She could be such a shrew. She’d married me for my money, of course. That was no secret. But now that money was tight—” He sighed. “I swung at her. I could never have done that if the dog had been around. The bitch would have taken my arm off. I swung and she fell and she must have hit her head on something when she reached the floor.”

  It was nice embroidery. I’d seen those pictures, and the woman had been systematically beaten to death, but let Colcannon put the best face on it for the time being. This was the opening wedge. Later on they’d crack him like a coconut.

  “Then I tried to find her pulse and she was dead,” he went on, “and I thought that my life was over, too, and then I thought, well, let the burglars take the blame for this one. So I tied her up and I struck myself over the head, it was hard to make myself do that hard enough to inflict damage but I steeled myself, and then after I’d set the stage I called the police. I thought they’d question me and break me down, but they took one look around and knew the house had been looted by burglars, and that evidently satisfied them.”

  Ray rolled his eyes at the ceiling. Some members of the department, I suspected, were going to hear about this one.

  “But I never killed Abel Crowe!” Colcannon was bristling suddenly with righteous indignation. “That’s what all this was supposed to be about, isn’t it? The murder of a receiver of stolen goods? I never met Abel Crowe, I never even heard of Abel Crowe, and I certainly didn’t kill him.”

  “No,” I agreed. “You didn’t.”

  “I didn’t know he had my coin. I thought you had my coin.”

  “So you did.”

  “I thought you still had it. That’s why I came here today in the first place, God damn it to hell. So how can you accuse me of killing Crowe?”

  “I can’t.”

  “But—”

  I sent my eyes on a tour of my audience. I had their attention, all right. I looked straight at the murderer and saw nothing there but the same rapt interest that was evident on all their faces.

  “I think you would have killed Abel,” I told Colcannon, “if you had thought it would get you the coin back. For all I know you were planning to kill me this afternoon rather than pay me the twelve thousand dollars for the coin. But you didn’t know he had the coin, and there was no way you could know.”

  “Unless Abel told him,” Carolyn piped up. “Maybe Abel tried to sell the coin back to him.”

  I shook my head. “Not at that stage,” I said. “He might have tried to work a deal with the insurance company, after the loss was reported. But it was too early for Abel to know that the loss wasn’t covered by insurance, and far too early for him to think about selling the coin back to its presumptive owner.

  “My first thought was that Abel had invited a prospective buyer to view the coin, and that he’d sufficiently misjudged the man’s character to get murdered for his troubles. But was that the first thing Abel would do?”

  I shook my head. “It wasn’t,” I answered myself. “Abel had just received a coin with a six-figure price tag. It had come from the hands of a thief who in turn had taken it from the house of a man who was not known to have possession of it. Before Abel did anything with the coin he had to determine whether or not it was genuine. Even though he could approach certainty by examining it closely, one doesn’t take chances. Mr. Ruslander obtained the coin from a reputable museum, but even so he took the normal precaution of having it x-rayed to determine its authenticity, and Abel would do no less when dealing with a coin of doubtful provenance.

  “Abel said at the time that such a determination was his first order of business. ‘At a more favorable hour,’ he said, he could verify the coin’s legitimacy without leaving the building. I took this to mean that he could have an expert numismatist drop by to look at the coin and authenticate it, but experts of that sort don’t habitually make house calls in the middle of the night.

  “But that wasn’t what he meant at all.

  “He meant that there was someone in his building who could provide verification of the coin’s bona fides. I thought there might be a numismatic expert in residence, and then I stopped to think about it and realized that Abel wouldn’t want an expert to know that he had the coin. The 1913 V-Nickel’s too rare and too celebrated, and the real experts in the coin field are highly ethical men who would balk at authenticating a stolen coin and being expected to keep quiet about it.

  “No, what Abel required was not an opinion. He wanted an X ray.”

  I scanned my audience. The murderer remained quite expressionless, so much so that I almost doubted my conclusion. But not really. I glanced at Carolyn and saw her nodding intently. She had it figured now.

  “Where do you go for an X ray? A lab? A hospital emergency room? A radiologist? You couldn’t manage that without leaving Abel’s building. A dentist? There’s a dentist in the building, a Dr. Grieg. I believe he specializes in root canal work.”

  “He does,” Mrs. Pomerance confirmed. “He doesn’t hurt you, either, but he charges a fortune.”

  “They all charge a fortune,” someone else said. “Grieg’s no worse than the rest of them.”

  “Abel had false teeth,” I said, “so I doubt he’d have needed Dr. Grieg’s services, reasonable or otherwise. He might have become friendly with the man regardless and have used his X-ray equipment for examining rare coins and jewelry, but he wasn’t a patient, and Abel doesn’t seem to have developed intimate relationships with his neighbors.

  “Anyway, Abel had a professional relationship with someone in the building who also had X-ray equipment. You see, Abel had trouble with his feet. I don’t know if he had Morton’s Foot or not, let alone chondromalacia, but he had bad feet and the weight he carried put an extra load on them. The shoes in his closet are all prescription items, with built-up arches and various oddities you can’t buy in your friendly neighborhood Florsheims.”

  I looked at the murderer. His face was no longer expressionless. I saw something in his eyes that looked like alarm. The goatee and mustache kept me from seeing if he was keeping a stiff upper lip, but I tended to doubt it.

  “Abel was a frequent patient of Murray Feinsinger’s,” I went on. “He must have been quite a contrast to all those runners and dancers, but his chart shows that he turned up in that office a great deal. He had an appointment the morning of the day he was killed.”

  “That’s crazy!” Feinsinger was outraged. “He had no such appointment. He was my patient, it’s true, and he was also my friend. That is why I am here at what I was told was to be a service for him, not an inquisition. He had no appointment with me on the day of his death.”

  “Funny. It’s listed in your appointment book and on his chart.” It hadn’t been until early that morning, but why stress the point? “It wasn’t the first time he used your X-ray equipment for nonpodiatric purposes, was it?”

  Feinsinger shrugged. “Perhaps not. He would drop in occasionally and ask if he could use the machine. What did I care? He was a friend and a patient, so I let him use it. But he didn’t come in that morning, or if he did I paid no attention. I certainly didn’t kill him.”

  “Not then, no. You waited until your waiting room was clear during your lunch break. Then you went upstairs, and of course he let you in without a second thought. You asked for a look at the coin, and he showed it to you, and you killed him and took it.”

  “Why would I do that? I don’t need money. My practice is better than it’s ever been. I’m no coin collector, either. Why would I kill the man?”

  “Avarice,” I said. “No more and no less. You’re no coin collector but you don’t have to be one to know about the 1913 V-Nickel. Everybody knows about it. And the improvement in your practice just se
rved to give you a taste for the good life—you told me that much yourself when you measured me for orthotics.” And what would become of those orthotics now, I wondered. They’d already been ordered from the lab, but how could they find their way to me if my podiatrist was booked for homicide and jugged like a hare?

  Never mind. “Spinoza had the answer,” I said, opening the book to a place I’d marked. “‘From the mere fact of our conceiving that another person takes delight in a thing, we shall ourselves love that thing and desire to take delight therein. But we assumed that the pleasure in question would be prevented by another’s delight in its object; we shall, therefore, endeavor to prevent his possession thereof.’” I closed the book. “In other words, you saw how much Abel appreciated the coin and that made you hot for it yourself. You killed him and you took it, which is endeavoring to prevent his possession thereof if I ever heard of it.”

  “You can’t prove this,” he said. “You can’t prove a thing.”

  “It’s up to the police to prove things. But I don’t think they’ll have much trouble in this instance. You didn’t just take the nickel. You also took the other articles I stole from Colcannon’s safe—the emerald earrings and the Piaget watch. I wouldn’t be surprised if they turn up somewhere in your office. In the locked center drawer of your desk, for instance.”

  He stared. “You put them there.”

  “How could I do a thing like that? That’s not all you took from Abel. You also took his keys so that you could lock up after you left. That delayed the discovery of the body and helped you cover your tracks. I would have thought you’d have the sense to get rid of the keys.”

  “I did,” he said, then caught himself and shook his head violently. “I did not take any keys,” he said, trying to cover. “I did not kill him, I did not take the coin, I did not take any jewelry, and I most certainly did not take any keys.”

  “You certainly didn’t get rid of them. They’re in the drawer with the earrings and the watch.” And they were, too. Not the set he’d taken with him, but who was to know that?

  Well, he knew it. “You’ve framed me,” he said. “You planted those things.”

  “Did I plant the nickel, too?”

  “You won’t find the nickel in my possession.”

  “Are you sure of that? When the police search the place thoroughly? When they turn it upside down and know what they’re looking for? Are you absolutely certain they won’t find it? Think it over.”

  He thought about it, and I guess I was convincing and evidently he had a higher opinion of the cops’ ability to find a needle in a haystack than I did, because before anybody knew what was happening he pushed his chair back and shoved past the woman seated beside him and was on his way to the door.

  Ray had his gun out almost immediately, but he was in the wrong position and there were too many people between him and Feinsinger, all of them on their feet and making noise. I could have let him go—how far was he going to run, orthotics or no?

  Instead I reached under my jacket and got my gun, yelled for him to stop, and when he didn’t I tranquilized the son of a bitch.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-three

  “What we want is Irish coffee,” Carolyn said, “and where we want to go for it is McBell’s.”

  McBell’s is in the Village, on Sixth Avenue a couple of blocks below Eighth Street, and we went there by cab. It’s not terribly hard to find a Brooklyn cabbie willing to go to Manhattan, although it can be quite a trick convincing a Manhattan cabbie to go to Brooklyn, which just proves once again that we live in an inequitable universe, and when was that ever news?

  By this time the tumult and the shouting had died and the captives and the kings had departed, the kings in this case being Ray Kirschmann and a couple of stalwarts from the local precinct whom he’d called to help him with the captives. There were enough of the latter to go around—Murray Feinsinger, Herbert Franklin Colcannon, George Edward “Rabbit” Margate, and, lest we forget, Marilyn Margate and Harlon Reese.

  Jessica and Clay invited us back to their place, along with most of the crowd from the service, but I said we’d take a rain check. Nor did we spend much time talking with the three-man delegation from Philadelphia. It looked as though no charges would be pressed against Howard Pitterman, who was evidently a good curator when he wasn’t rustling his employer’s cattle. I had the feeling Milo Hracec was in for a bonus, and arrangements had already been made for Ray Kirschmann to put a ten-thousand-dollar reward in his pocket the day the coin found its way back to its rightful owner. Normal procedure would call for the nickel to be impounded as evidence, but normal procedure can sometimes be short-circuited when the right cop is properly motivated, and Gordon Ruslander had agreed to provide the proper motivation.

  The cabbie took us over the Brooklyn Bridge, and it was a glorious view on a glorious Sunday. I sat in the middle, Denise on my right and Carolyn on my left and thought how fortunate a man I was. I’d solved two murders, one of them a friend’s. I’d admitted to burglary in front of a roomful of people and didn’t have to worry about being charged with it. And I was riding into Manhattan with my girlfriend on one side of me and my best buddy on the other, and they’d even left off sniping at each other, and who could ask for anything more?

  Carolyn was right about the Irish coffee. It was what we wanted, all right, and it was as it ought to be, the coffee rich and dark and sweet with brown sugar, the Irish whiskey generously supplied, and the whole topped not with some glop out of a shaving-cream dispenser but real handwhipped heavy cream. We had one round, and then we had a second round, and I started making noises about eventually rounding off the day with a celebratory dinner, all three of us, unless of course somebody had other plans, in which case—

  “Shit,” Denise said. We were sitting, all three of us, around a tiny table that had room for our three stemmed glasses and one big ashtray, and she’d almost filled the ashtray already, smoking one Virginia Slim after another. She ground one out now and pushed her chair back. “I can’t take any more of this,” she said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m coming unglued, that’s all. You two talk, huh? I’m going home so my kid doesn’t forget what I look like. The two of you can kick it around, and then you’ll come over to my place later, all right?”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  But she wasn’t talking to me. She was talking to Carolyn, who hesitated, then gave a quick nod.

  “Well,” Denise said. She grabbed up her purse, drew a breath, then put a palm on the table for support and leaned over to kiss Carolyn lightly on the mouth. Then, cheeks scarlet, she turned and strode out of the place.

  For a few minutes nobody said anything. Then Carolyn managed to catch the waiter’s eye and ordered a martini. I thought about having one myself but didn’t really feel like it. I still had half of my second Irish coffee in front of me and I didn’t much feel like finishing that, either.

  Carolyn said, “Couple of things, Bern. How’d you know Marilyn Margate set up all those burglaries?”

  “I figured she knew Mrs. Colcannon. When she turned up with a gun in her purse and accused me of murder, she called the woman Wanda. I figured they were friends, but what kind of friend gets her brother to knock off a friend’s house? And it couldn’t have been coincidence that Rabbit and Harlan found their way to Eighteenth Street, any more than it was coincidence they picked a time when nobody was home.

  “Then when I dropped in at Hair Apparent I overheard a woman talking about something personal, and I realized women tell their hairdressers everything, and I got a list of similar burglaries committed in the immediate area of the beauty parlor.”

  “And you found some of the names in their appointment book when you went there this morning. Bern? Wasn’t that doing it the hard way? Couldn’t you have just called the burglary victims and asked where they got their hair done?”

  “I thought of that. But that wouldn’t prove Wanda got her hair do
ne at Hair Apparent. Besides, if I couldn’t find any of the other names in the appointment book, I could always write them in myself.”

  “Falsify evidence, you mean.”

  “I think of it more as supplying evidence than falsifying it. For another thing, I could have wound up spending hours on the phone without reaching anybody. People tend to go out on Saturday night. But maybe the most important reason, aside from the fact that I’m a burglar and it’s natural for a burglar to take a burglaristic approach to problems, is that I wanted to see about the gun.”

  “The gun?”

  “The one Marilyn brought to my apartment. I was relieved to find it in a drawer. She’d said she had put it back, but if I didn’t find it I was going to assume it was still in her purse, and that would have meant tipping off Ray so that she didn’t get a chance to pull it when I exposed her role in the burglaries.”

  “I see.”

  “Uh, Carolyn—”

  “Shit. You probably want to talk about Denise.”

  “I don’t know what I want to. But I think we have to. Don’t we?”

  “Double shit. Yeah, I guess we probably do.” She finished her martini, looked around in vain for the waiter, then gave up and put her glass down. “Well, I’ll be damned if I know how it happened, Bern. God knows I didn’t plan it.”

  “You didn’t even like her.”

  “Like her? I couldn’t stand her.”

  “And she wasn’t crazy about you.”

  “She despised me. Detested me. Thought of me as a dwarf who smelled like a wet dog.”

  “And you thought she was bony and gawky.”

  “Well, I was wrong, wasn’t I?”

  “How did it—”

  “I don’t know, Bern.” The waiter sailed by and she caught him by the hem of his jacket and pressed her empty glass into his hand. “It’s an emergency,” she told him, and to me she said, “I swear I don’t know how it happened. I guess there must have been an attraction all along and our hostility was a cover-up for it.”