The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

31

The Crime Scene crew must have finished their business while I was downtown at One Police Plaza, answering Ray’s questions in between chapters of The Screaming Mimi. They were long gone by the time I got there, but as far as the NYPD was concerned, Barnegat Books was still a crime scene, and they’d strung enough yellow tape to make their position clear.

They’d also swept up the broken glass and nailed a plywood board over the formerly glassed-in upper portion of the front door. And they’d even locked the door.

I used my key, shunted aside a few strands of CRIME SCENE DO NOT ENTER tape, and fed my cat. Carolyn lingered in the doorway long enough to determine that Raffles hadn’t been hauled off to be booked and paw-printed, then headed off to open her own place of business.

I’d turned on the lights, and now I turned them off and relocked the door. The plywood hid the SORRY — WE’RE CLOSED! sign from public view, but the yellow tape and the darkened room behind it ought to get the point across. While none of it would keep out a sufficiently determined visitor, it was enough to discourage anybody who was just looking for something to read.

And, while it was too dark to read, there was more than enough ambient light to keeping me from bumping into things on my way to the rear of the store, where I found more yellow tape strung across the door to the back room. I dealt with the tape, then closed the door behind me.

I’ve been in rooms after the cops have conducted a thorough search, and they’ll remind you of your attic after a family of squirrels has moved in. All they care about is finding whatever they’re looking for, and they’ll dump drawers and empty bookshelves in the process, and leave the resulting mess for you to sort through on your own time. I wasn’t really expecting that kind of treatment, as the public portion of the store was as I’d left it, but all the same I braced myself as I reached for the light switch.

And relaxed. Everything was just as it should be. My guests had acted like the precise and scientific lab technicians they were, not like a couple of bulls from Manhattan Robbery on a treasure hunt. There was nothing to show that CSI had paid me a visit — aside from the yellow tape on the door, and the comforting absence of a dead body.

The first thing I did was check the drawers of my desk. I wouldn’t have been astonished if my $16,000 had gone missing. I didn’t think somebody with CSI would have pocketed my envelope, or even turned it up in the first place, but I couldn’t absolutely rule it out. Ray Kirschmann, it has been said, would steal a hot stove — but only if he had to. If he’d found the money, he’d look for a way to maneuver me into bribing him with it.

More to the point, Ray never had the chance to open a drawer. He turned on the light, saw all that was left of Mason Dilbert, and seconds later had me and Carolyn for company.

But there were at least two people ahead of him. Mason Dilbert, obviously — and whoever had put the three bullets in him.

And who would that be? My tweedy professor, whose name was neither Rubisham nor Armagnac, had contrived to make sure I wouldn’t be at the bookstore at 8:30. Why do that unless he wanted to drop in himself? And what better reason to visit an unoccupied store than to steal something?

Not the cash in the envelope, and not the Kloppmann Diamond, either; he’d made the appointment Thursday afternoon, before I’d even launched Operation Innisfree. He undoubtedly knew about the diamond, everybody on the planet seemed to know about the diamond and the wretch who’d owned it, but why think any of that had anything to do with me?

He’d have come for the jade. Somebody had made off with the Margate collection, and everybody seemed to think it was me, and who was I to contend otherwise?

I thought about him, pictured him. He was older than I, though on reflection he’d looked a little young for retirement. He was slender and appeared fit, and while I hadn’t seen him drop down and rattle off twenty pushups, I was willing to believe he was capable of it. His manner was professorial enough, and he’d peppered our conversation with Latin phrases and classical names, but all that meant was he’d done his homework.

I’ll be damned, I thought. The sonofabitch was a burglar.

It wasn’t that much of a stretch to put myself in his position. Say he’d scouted the Margate collection, either because he had a passion for jade or, more likely, he knew someone who’d be eager to buy it from him. Then, before he could act, some moonlighting bookseller beat him to it.

So why not burgle the burglar? A phone call or two to guarantee my absence, a little tradecraft to make short work of a couple of locks, and he’d be in and out before I gave up waiting for Godot on West Third Street.

He’d been in the store before, so he’d know his way around. At the very least he’d have had a quick look at the back room, and now the first thing he’d do was check out the desk.

If he’d done so, he’d have found the envelope. And, having found it, he’d have taken it in a hot second.

But he hadn’t. Nobody had, because the envelope was right where I’d stowed it, its flap still sealed, and as far as I could tell no one had touched the thing, or even opened the drawer.

Could he have skipped the desk and gone straight for my hiding place? I turned and looked at the bookcase that stands in front of it. I’d moved it Thursday when I fetched my tools and rubber gloves, and I’d put it back in position, and it appeared to be just as I’d left it.

I returned to the desk, sat in my chair. Like the wooden desk, it had come with the store, and I’d never quite gotten around to switching it out for one of those ergonomic Herman Miller numbers. It had served me well enough, as it had served Mr. Litzauer before me, and I hadn’t heard any complaints from Mason Dilbert.

Who couldn’t have known about the jade, or had any reason to come looking for it.

I closed my eyes and moved pieces on an imaginary chessboard. Three of them, because I’d had a minimum of three visitors. It took me a while, but I came up with a scenario.

Mason Dilbert, determined to avenge his brother/cousin (or to recover his employer’s diamond, or both) was first on the scene. His past was shady enough to have equipped him with some basic skills, enough to force a simple lock with a strip of celluloid, but he’d need to cut his way around the more formidable mechanism that secured my window gates. Once he’d done so, he’d loided the door, closed it, engaged the snaplock, and—

And close behind him was a second man, one who found his way there by tailing Mason. He lurked, presumably in the shadows, while Mason performed his crude business of breaking and entering, then followed him inside. The gates were disabled, but the door was locked, and our second uninvited guest didn’t have a strip of celluloid.

You can’t buy a such an article in your neighborhood hardware store, but for a couple of dollars they’ll be happy to sell you a glass cutter, and at some point some clerk had sold one to Guest Number Two. He’d probably owned it for a while and had a certain amount of practice with it, because he’d inscribed a near-perfect circle and removed the glass disc without shattering it or cutting himself.

He turned the knob, let himself in, found a flat surface and set the piece of glass on it, and made his way to the back room. And then what?

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall, you might be thinking right about now. I’ve had that thought myself, now and again, and I’ve concluded that there’s no point whatsoever in being such a creature. It’s not unlikely that Mason Dilbert was fluent in two or three languages and nearly so in a couple more, but it’s safe to say that House Fly wasn’t one of them. You wouldn’t be able to understand a word, and there was always the chance you’d get swatted.

Which is what happened to Mason Dilbert.

One in the chest and two in the forehead. On our way out of Orrin Vandenbrinck’s apartment, we’d heard the three shots that put an end to Jason Philbert, and not quite twenty-four hours later Mason got the same treatment. Ballistics analysis would determine whether the same gun had fired all six rounds, but you didn’t need to run a test to assume a single shooter had accounted for both of the — ilberts.

And that was what the man who shot Mason wanted you to think.

Look, say you’re him. For one reason or another, you want Jason Philbert dead. So you fire once into Jason’s chest, and if that doesn’t kill him outright it has him circling the drain, and to make assurance doubly sure you give him a double tap, two in the forehead.

But a day later, when you mete out the same treatment to his look-alike colleague, it’s something else. It’s an intentional pattern, an echo.

What it is, in fact, is a signature. An illegible one, because it doesn’t spell out whose finger pulled the trigger, but it lets the world know that it was the same finger both times.

This whole line of thought raised as many questions as it answered, but they could wait.

Back to my scenario, on my imaginary chessboard. Mason’s dead, shot three times. The man who shot him has done what he came to do, so why stick around? I couldn’t be sure what had steered Mason to Barnegat Books, but it almost had to be connected to my own expedition to the Innisfree and its penthouse. Peter-Peter’s description of the counterfeit Istvan Horvath and his much shorter companion had rung a bell for Ray Kirschmann, and maybe the desk attendant had come up with something else to suggest that Jason’s killer could be found in a bookshop on Eleventh Street.

Did Number Two, the man with the glass cutter and the gun, have the same information? Or was he just tagging along in Mason’s Size Thirteen footsteps?

What did it matter? He left his victim behind the desk, the books on their shelves, and the fly on the proverbial wall. He also left the glass disc on whatever flat surface he’d placed it, and he took the gun and the glass cutter with him and went out the door and off into the night.

And that left Number Three, Professor Rubisham or Monsieur Armagnac, call him what you will. If he was the pro I thought him to be, he’d have left the Norfolk jacket home and chosen something dark and unmemorable. His hands would be gloved and his feet sneakered, and in one of his pockets he’d have a set of tools not unlike mine.

Whenever he showed up, he’d know right away what he was looking at. He’d see the vandalized gates, the hole in the glass. If he got there soon enough, he might catch sight of the departing shooter. Sooner still and he might have heard the three gunshots, and waited out of sight until their source had made his exit.

Most likely, though, the fait had already been thoroughly accompli by the time he got there. In his position, what would I have done? Turned around and gone home, I’d prefer to think — but circumstances alter cases. What could he expect to net from Mr. Margate’s jade? How dire was his financial situation? And what effect did the element of risk have on him? Was the fear paralyzing or perversely energizing?

He’d have waited a moment, and listened, and looked around to see who might be watching. And then he’d have turned the knob and walked on in. Maybe he’d have brought a mini flashlight, or maybe he’d have found that the dark was light enough, but either way he’d pad quietly to the rear of the store.

Would the door to the back room be open or shut? Would the light be on or off? Would he be aware of the smell of gunpowder, or would it be the corpse in the desk chair that first got his attention?

At that point he’d have abandoned all thoughts of little green animals. Knowing nothing of Heckle and Jeckle and tense times at the Innisfree, Number Three could only assume that both the man in the chair and the man who had made him incapable of getting out of it had been there with nothing on their minds but the Edgar Margate collection. The one he could see, his arms hanging over the arms of the chair, would be forever disappointed; the other had found the jade and fled with it — if in fact it had been there for the finding.

The one certainty was that there was nothing still there waiting to be found, and every reason for him to get the hell out. So he’d turned off the light and closed the door, and on his way out he did something that made it impossible for me to avoid feeling a kind of kinship with him.

I keep a Scotch tape dispenser on the counter, next to my cash register. When someone buys a single book, I generally slip it along with the receipt into a flat paper bag, and if I remember I seal it with an inch or so of tape. Number Three, God bless him, had picked up the tape dispenser and carried it to the front of the store, where he’d taken precious time to replace the glass disc and tape it in place.

And then he’d put the dispenser back where he found it.