The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

29

“He was dead,” Ray said. “I swear to God he was dead.”

I walked over to the gentleman in question. He was seated at my desk, his head thrown back, his arms hanging over the sides of the chair. His silk shirt was bunched up in front, so if there was a bullet hole in his chest I couldn’t see it, but the two in his forehead would have been hard to miss.

“From the looks of him,” I said, “he still is.”

“Don’t touch him, for Christ’s sake.”

“I just wanted to—”

“Check his body temperature? I already touched him, Bernie, and he’s headed toward room temperature but he hasn’t got there yet.” He picked up one of the hands, as if to check for a pulse, then let it fall back. “I seen my share of corpses. If I had to come up with a number, what with the body temp and the beginnings of rigor mortis, I’d say two hours, maybe two and a half.”

He looked at his watch and I looked at mine. “Ten fifty-four,” I said.

“Close enough.”

“So between eight-thirty and nine for time of death?”

“For a guess,” he said. “The Medical Examiner might see it differently, so I can’t say for certain. What I know for sure is he was a whole lot colder and stiffer a couple of hours earlier in a penthouse apartment on East Ninth Street.”

“It can’t be the same guy,” Ray was saying. “The guy I saw was dead as a lox, and a woman from the M.E.’s office confirmed as much, and I saw him go out of there in a body bag. And this bird’s a dead ringer for him, and they both bought their clothes from Izzy’s Big and Tall Shop, but this one’s wearing a different shirt entirely.”

“Maybe he changed it.”

He gave me a look. He’d been rattled at first, but I couldn’t fault him for that. He’d seen what appeared to be the same corpse twice, and if anything I had to give him credit. He’d worked it out a lot quicker than I’d come to terms with my green-and-white SubwayCard.

In my defense, parallel worlds are more of a stretch than parallel people.

“Hell of a resemblance,” he said, “and if they’re not twins they’ve got to be brothers, or cousins at the very least.”

“Or from the same little village in the Balkans,” I suggested, “where they’ve spent the past thousand years humping each other’s sisters.”

“Or their own.” He’d been checking pockets and turned up a wallet. “‘Mason Dilbert.’ That’s Jason Philbert and Mason Dilbert, just in case you figured nobody in the fake ID business has a sense of humor.”

He returned the wallet to the dead man’s pocket. “I better call this in,” he said. “But first I might as well ask. Neither of you’s ever seen this guy before, am I right?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

Not in person, I said, and not all by himself, which was why I hadn’t put it together until I learned that there were two of them. Whereupon it had dawned on me that I’d seen the — ilbert Twins before, on TV, flanking their client.

“They were Vandenbrinck’s bodyguards,” I said, “and he may have referred to them as Heckle and Jeckle, which isn’t that much of a stretch from Mason and Jason. He was showing them off, and his point was that the Kloppmann Diamond was safer with them guarding it than it would be in a bank vault.”

“Bodyguards,” he said. “I guess they look the part, except for bein’ dead. So where’s the body they were supposed to be guardin’?”

“No idea.”

“And the diamond? Same answer?” He gave us each a long look, then treated himself to a sigh and a shrug. “The funny thing is I believe you. You never shot anybody, Bernie. You’re three times as crooked as a corkscrew, but for all these years you’ve never been violent. But I’ve got to take you downtown, and I’m afraid you’re in for a long night.”

No surprise there.

But then he did surprise me. “Shorty,” he said, “I’m cuttin’ you a break. Go home.”

She stared at him.

“Quick,” he said, “before I change my mind. It’s all a lot simpler this way. You were never here.”

He didn’t have to tell her twice.

He called it in, and while we waited for someone to show up he told me it’d be a while before I’d be allowed back in the store. “So if there’s anything you need,” he said, “you better take it with you.”

The only thing I could think of was the paperback on the counter.

“The Screamin’ Mimi,” he read. “I guess this here is Mimi, and she must be screamin’, what with her mouth wide open like that. This is all you’re takin’, Bernie? A book?”

“This is a bookstore, Ray. What else is there to take?”

The question didn’t call for an answer, nor did he offer one. But I could have answered it. There was an envelope in a desk drawer containing $16,000 in used hundreds — unless a visitor had come across it and decided to make it his own.

So the money might be there and it might not, and you could say the same for twenty-one artfully carved jade figurines, formerly (and still legally) the property of one Edgar W. Margate.

At one point I’d wondered if I’d get out of the interrogation room at One Police Plaza before the sun came up, but it wasn’t even close. At that time of year, New Yorkers don’t get their first glimpse of the sun until right around seven o’clock, and I was out the door and on the street a few minutes after four.

One thing I seemed to have in the new universe was good taxi karma. All I had to do was step to a curb and lift a hand. Not too many minutes later I was in Carolyn’s apartment, waiting for my tea to be cool enough to sip. She had a cup of her own, and looked surprisingly fresh.

“I saw it was past four,” I said, “and the first thing I thought was that’s when Paula would close up, so either I’d find you here or I wouldn’t have long to wait.”

“Sometimes she’ll lock the door and dim the lights and break the law by staying open a few extra hours.”

“I never thought of that.”

“And sometimes a person might spend some time there, knocking back the scotch, and when she leaves she might decide not to go back to her own apartment.”

I hadn’t thought of that, either.

“But what I did,” she said, “is I never went anywhere near Paula’s. I walked all the way here from the bookstore, and I passed within a block of the Duchess, but I didn’t even stop to see who was there. I came straight home and got in bed right away, and my head was going a mile a minute, and I thought This is crazy, I’ll never be able to sleep. And the next thing I knew I woke up coming out of a dream.”

“I don’t suppose you dreamed you were behind the counter at the bookstore, did you? With no pants on?”

“I don’t think so, but I couldn’t swear to it, because the whole dream was gone the instant I opened my eyes, and so was any chance I had of getting more sleep. I was out for two hours, and that’s way less than eight, but I have to say it’s a lot better than nothing. I feel pretty good.” She cocked her head. “You, on the other hand, must be exhausted. Especially considering the kind of night you had.”

“No, I’m okay,” I said. “And it was a long night but it wasn’t horrible.”

“He didn’t use a rubber hose on you?”

“No, and I wasn’t booked or printed. He put me in a little room with a cup of coffee.”

“To get your DNA, Bern. From the cup.”

“Why would he do that? He already knows who I am.”

“Oh, right.”

“It’s good I brought The Screaming Mimi. He left me there long enough to get through a couple of chapters, then came back and sat across the table from me and asked me a ton of questions.”

“About Vandenbrinck and the diamond?”

“We barely touched on it. What he did was take me through Friday evening, from when I closed the store to when he turned up and walked in on us.”

“What did you tell him?”

“The truth,” I said. “Not necessarily the whole truth, and certainly not nothing but the truth, but if I’d been hooked up to a polygraph I’d have had a good chance of passing. I said I met you at the Bum Rap, I said we had a couple of drinks, and then I had an appointment so we went our separate ways. I told him where I ate and what I had for dinner.”

“Oh? You didn’t tell me what you had for dinner.”

“Spaghetti puttanesca. I told him when I got to Rocco’s and when I left, and I gave him the address on West Third Street, where I was supposed to meet some professor named Rubisham with an eye toward buying his books.”

“You really did tell him the truth.”

“Except I left out a few things. I didn’t say that the joker who’d made the appointment wasn’t Rubisham, that the real Rubisham moved out months ago and left nothing behind but his name on the mailbox. I left out the Norfolk jacket with the leather elbow patches, because in the telling the guy was just a voice on the phone. I agreed to look at his books because that’s what I do.”

“You left out the part about the Armagnac.”

“Uh-huh. I also left out the way he’d gone out of his way to drop a word into our conversation.”

She looked puzzled.

“Jaded,” I said. “‘One grows jaded, if you know what I mean.’ Well, I hadn’t known what he meant, but at least it was in English and not in Latin, and I let it go. Looking back, I’d say he was just looking for a way to get the word into the conversation.”

“Jaded? Oh.”

“As in jade. Professor Armagnac wanted to let me know he was interested in jade, but something kept him from coming right out and saying as much. And he’s not the only one. Remember the customer I told you about, the one who bought a Tucker Coe first edition without knowing who actually wrote it?”

“You told me she bought it for the title, but I don’t think you mentioned which one it was, and the only one I can think of is Wax Apple.”

I could have said Don’t Lie to Me and launched another Abbott-and-Costello routine. Instead I supplied the title in question.

She echoed it. “A Jade in Aries. And she bought other books, didn’t she?”

“All with jade somewhere in the title. ‘I have a special fondness for jade,’ is how she put it.”

“You didn’t tell me that.”

“It didn’t seem worth mentioning. Remember, this was all before Ray accused me of stealing twenty-one jade carvings from a gallery on Lispenard Street.”

“He was really convinced you did it, Bern.”

“I know.”

“And so was Professor Armagnac, and Tucker Coe’s girlfriend. Does she have a name?”

“She has a phone number,” I said. “She jotted it down, and when I suggested she add her name, what she wrote was the word jade in block capitals.”

“There are women named Jade, and some of them probably have sisters named Ruby and Pearl and Esmeralda, but somehow I don’t think she’s one of them. Bern? What do you figure happened to Mr. Margate’s collection? Who really broke in and stole it, and why does everybody think it was you?”

I finished my tea, got to my feet. Carolyn’s questions hung in the air while I walked over to the stove, filled the kettle, and set it on the burner. If I just kept watching it, I thought, it would never boil, and I would never have to explain the unexplainable.

I said, “This whole business with parallel universes is complicated.”

“No kidding.”

“More complicated than I thought. Look, a SubwayCard is just a Metrocard of another color, and it’s nice to have the neighborhood bowling alley back where it belongs, and my life’s easier all around without a security camera on every building.”

“And?”

I looked at her, and felt an unfamiliar stirring, one with which I was becoming increasingly familiar. I guess the thought showed in my face, because she colored and lowered her eyes.

“And that,” I said, “which is wonderful, even if it scares the crap out of me.”

“You’re not the only one.”

“But what I guess I assumed is that the present would have all these changes, like the ones I’ve just mentioned. And the future would be however it turned out. But I thought we could count on the past to behave itself.”

“Huh?”

“To mind its own business,” I said, “and stay in its own lane.”

“I’m a little confused here, Bern.”

“So am I,” I said, “which may be my point. Never mind. You asked three questions and I haven’t answered them, have I?”

“That’s okay. If you don’t know the answers—”

“I think I do.”

“Really?”

“I think everybody’s right,” I said. “I think it was me. I’m the one who broke into the gallery and walked off with the Margate Collection. I just wish I could remember it.”