The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

26

Paula’s windows were dark, but not because the place was closed. The glass was deeply tinted, like a gangster’s Cadillac.

Inside, the lighting was still on the dim side, but I could see the bartender and the patrons, even as they could see me. When they did the conversation died down, and on the jukebox Anne Murray went on letting us know she was “Just Another Woman in Love.”

Carolyn saw me before I spotted her. “Hey, Bern! Glad you could make it. C’mere, let me buy you a drink.”

Her voice carried, letting the world know that I was All Right, and the tension went out of the room. I joined her at the bar, where she greeted me with an air kiss, introduced me to three women whose names I promptly forgot, and ordered a drink for me and a refill for herself.

Minutes later the two of us and our drinks were at a candle-lit table against the far wall. A few minutes more and I’d brought her up to date.

“That’s really weird,” she said. “You’re sure you had the right address?”

“I wrote it down.” I showed her the slip of paper, with the time and the address and apartment number. “And the building was definitely faculty housing. Most of the buzzers just had last names on their nameplates, but a fair number of the names were preceded by D-R or P-R-O-F.”

“But not 4-G.”

“No, all it said was Rubisham. I checked, and it was the same way on the mailbox in the hall.”

“Roobisham.”

“I’m guessing at the pronunciation. I suppose the first syllable could just as easily be Rub, but what difference does it make? There’s no such person.”

“Then who called you, Bern? He wasn’t just a voice on the phone, was he?”

“No, we were face to face yesterday morning. He bought a mystery set in Ancient Rome.” I frowned. “We had a whole conversation. If he wasn’t a classics professor, he went to a lot of trouble to sound like one.”

“And the library you went over to appraise—”

“Was gone. There were built-in bookcases in the living room and what I suppose was the den, but they were as empty as the closets and dresser drawers.”

“Empty bookshelves?”

“Except for a slight coating of dust. An empty dresser looks perfectly normal until you open a drawer, and it’s the same with a closet. But an empty bookcase is empty in a whole nother way.”

“I always look at a person’s bookshelves to get an idea of who they are.”

“I know. ‘Do I really want to go to bed with a woman who owns every book Danielle Steele ever wrote?’”

“Self-help books,” she said, “are the big Red Alert for me. But empty bookcases — what do they tell us about this bird?”

“About Professor Rubisham?” I’d had time to think about this on my way to Paula’s. “My guess is he retired and moved away, possibly to the Outer Banks, but most likely that was Mr. Armagnac’s invention.”

“Mr. Armagnac?”

“We might as well call him something. The actual Rubisham retired, or got the boot for sleeping with students, which used to be a perk back in the day. Or for all I know he upgraded his Ph.D. to an R.I.P. and left his apartment in a body bag. Whatever happened to him, it happened long enough ago for the dust to settle.”

“On his empty shelves.”

“Once he was out of there,” I said, “a cleaning crew erased any lingering traces of his presence and got the apartment ready for the next tenant, whoever he may be, and whenever he may be scheduled to move in.”

“Where does Mr. Armagnac come in?”

“That’s a good question.”

“When I say that, Bern, it generally means I haven’t got a clue.”

“There you go. I never laid eyes on him before yesterday morning, when he was just one more component of an antiquarian bookseller’s perfect day.”

“So he was never a part of the Metrocard universe.”

“No.”

I picked up my glass and looked into it, as if it had the psychic properties of a crystal ball. I do that a lot, with not much to show for it, but only when there’s something authoritative to gaze into. When I’m drinking Perrier I might allow myself a glimpse of the bubbles, but I wouldn’t be looking for the secrets of the universe.

I said, “Why lure me to an empty apartment? Whatever he had in mind, he must have hatched his plan between his time in the store yesterday morning and his phone call later in the day. Was he looking to rob me?”

“Why would he do that?”

“For money, I suppose. I show up, he pulls a gun—”

“Really, Bern?”

“Who knows? Or he pours me an Armagnac with an added ingredient and I drink it and pass out, and then he goes through my pockets.”

“And what does he find? Your SubwayCard?”

“For a while,” I said, “I was walking around with sixteen grand in an envelope. But when I saw Mr. A., the closest I’d come to the Kloppmann Diamond was looking at pictures of it online. Even if he knew about my secondary career, he couldn’t have guessed I was going to take a shot at the Kloppmann, or that I’d be successful. In fact—”

“What?”

“His first call was yesterday afternoon,” I said, “and his initial suggestion was that I come over that night. But I pushed it a day because I was planning to go to the Innisfree.”

“So he couldn’t have known anything about the Kloppmann Diamond. Maybe he just thought you were the type to carry a lot of cash on your person. If you were looking to buy a library—”

“I was,” I said. “That’s why I showed up, not because I was jonesing for a pretentious glass of brandy. I didn’t bring a lot of cash with me. I never do. And here’s the thing, Carolyn. Even if he was sufficiently out of touch to think I might be worth robbing, he never showed up.”

“That’s a point.”

“He invited me to the apartment, and called again this afternoon to make sure we were still on. And then, a couple of hours later, I showed up and he didn’t.”

“Why?”

“That’s my question. Why?”

She looked at me, and her face showed an expression I’d only seen on it when she was reading Stephen King. I asked her what was the matter.

“Just a thought,” she said. “Maybe he was luring you.”

“Luring me to what?”

“An empty apartment,” she said. “An apartment where nobody was likely to set foot until the next semester starts, which would be sometime after the first of the year. Bern, if he wanted to kill a person, and leave the person where he wouldn’t be found for months—”

“Why would he want to kill me?”

“Maybe he’s one of those paths.”

“Huh?”

“A psychopath, a sociopath. A serial killer.”

“Who goes from one used bookstore to another, hunting for victims.”

“I guess it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“Nothing does, so don’t apologize. But what I keep coming back to is he did what he could to make sure I was coming, and then he didn’t show up.”

“Maybe he chickened out.”

“Or he grew a conscience and decided not to kill me after all. No, none of it adds up. He baits the trap, takes this empty apartment and furnishes it with an imaginary library, puts out an imaginary bottle and a couple of imaginary glasses, and leaves me stranded out on the sidewalk, ringing a bell that nobody’s around to answer.”

“He must have figured you’d let yourself in.”

“Why would he assume that? Even if he suspects I’m not averse to a little illegal entry, why think I’d try to get into this particular apartment? What I’d think, in his position, is that I’d ring the bell long enough to know it wasn’t going to get me anywhere, and then I’d utter a few colorful curses and go home.” I picked up my drink, finished it. “Which, incidentally, is what I almost did. If I hadn’t had my tools with me, I’d have called it a night.”

“You’d have never known it was an empty apartment.”

“I would have thought I’d been stood up, and I’d decide to give him a piece of my mind next time he walked into the shop. But he never would, and I’d forget about it.”

“So what was in it for him?”

“That’s my question,” I said, “and if you can come up with an answer, I’d love to hear it.”

She thought about it. Then she said, “Oh.”

“Oh?”

“Shit on toast.”

“Well, that clears things up. On the other hand—”

“Bern,” she said. “If you were on West Third Street, ringing a doorbell, that’s where you would be.”

“Huh?”

“You wouldn’t be anywhere else.”

“No, because I haven’t yet mastered the esoteric art of bilocation. What are you talking about?”

On the jukebox, Patsy Cline was singing “I Fall to Pieces.”

“If you were on West Third,” she said, “then he’d know for sure that you weren’t on East Eleventh Street.”

We reached the curb just as a cab pulled up to disgorge two women, one of whom gave my companion a big hello while the other pouted. “No time, Mags,” Carolyn said, and steered me with a little push and hopped into the cab after me.

“Maggie Birnbaum,” she told me. “Don’t ask.”

“I won’t.”

She leaned forward. “Eleventh and University,” she told the driver, and sat back. To me she said, “It’s quicker to walk half a block than deal with the one-way streets. And if something’s going on—”

“We might not want to pull up right in front of it. You know, you don’t have to come with me.”

“Didn’t we already have this argument?”

We had, while she settled her bar tab. I’d made my point, stressing that the world’s most absentminded professor would have no reason to break into a secondhand bookstore, that a couple of hours ago I’d locked both the door and the window gates, and that you didn’t need more than one person to have a wild goose chase. And she’d made hers, by telling me to shut up and get real.

The cab dropped us on the corner. Across the street, some sporty folk were leaving Bowl-Mor even as others were arriving. When the store turned out to be exactly as I’d left it, I told Carolyn, we’d catch another cab right back to Paula’s. Or she could go on her own. Whatever she preferred.

What she preferred, she said, was for me to give it a rest. Paula’s would still be there tomorrow. Or it wouldn’t, if the universe did that backflip. She was good either way.

“False alarm,” I said a few minutes and half a block later. “Lights out, door closed, window gates locked. Just the way I left it, and—”

I don’t know how I intended to finish that sentence. Because I could see that the first part of the sentence was inaccurate, and that Barnegat Books was not exactly the way I’d left it.

The window gates were in the right position, but someone had made some surgical cuts in all the right places, as if with a laser that ate case-hardened steel for breakfast. The lock was still sound, but it was no longer securing anything, and with one hand and very little effort I drew the gates open.

The door itself has a window, so there’s never been any reason to beef up its security; upgrading the lock or reinforcing the door itself wouldn’t stop a brute armed with a brick.

But the door was locked, and its window was unbroken.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Did they have a key? Because I don’t see any scratches on the metal, and you could tell if they forced the door. My lock’s the one Litzauer left me, and I can’t believe it stopped somebody who had already severed the steel gates in three places. If you already swallowed the camel, why would you strain at the gnat?”

“Bern.”

She was pointing to the section of the window closest to the doorknob. Someone with a glass cutter had inscribed a near-perfect circle five inches in diameter. The glass disc was still there, with an addition that was almost invisible in the half-light.

“Scotch tape,” she said. “They cut the glass, they took it out without dropping it and breaking it. How’d they do that?”

“Suction cups.”

“And then they put it back,” she said, “and taped it in place. Did you ever do anything like that, Bern?”

I shook my head. I took my set of tools from my pocket, and knelt down, and Carolyn reminded me that I had a key. “Oh, for God’s sake,” I said, and put the tools away and found my key ring and opened the door.