The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

33

It was a good five hours later when I heard a familiar voice.

“Here he comes now,” Maxine said.

She pointed at me — unnecessarily, I’d say, as the two people she was addressing had already turned to look at me. They were filling two chairs at what had become a table for three, and they looked glad to see me. Relieved, even.

“Carolyn,” I said. “Ray.” I took the available chair and told Maxine I’d have a beer. She named three brands, and I told her to surprise me.

“A beer,” Carolyn said. “When did you ever order a beer?”

“Just now.”

“No kidding. And when’s the last time before that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. An hour ago, maybe an hour and a half, and it was one of two that I had this afternoon, so the one I just ordered will be my third. But I think that’ll be all right, as I don’t plan on driving or operating machinery. Ray, what are you doing here, and what’s that you’re drinking?”

He said it was a Cosmopolitan, and it looked the part, filling a stemmed glass, garnished with a lime wheel, and blushing like a martini with an embarrassing secret.

“In a sensible universe,” I said, “you’d be the one having the beer, but never mind. Oh, thanks, Maxine.”

She’d brought me a bottle of Amstel and a glass, and I poured and sipped. Ray asked me if I was okay.

“Last I checked,” I said, “I was fine. Why?”

“I was a little worried about you,” he said. “I went over to your store. Middle of the afternoon, and the lights were out and the door was locked.”

“I opened up when I got back from lunch,” I said, “and I got two or three phone calls and sold about that many books, and then I said the hell with it and closed for the day. That’s something you get to do when you own the joint.”

“You left the bargain table out on the sidewalk.”

“So?”

“And the sign that used to say five bucks a book, three for ten dollars? All that was crossed out, and somebody had changed it to ‘All Books Free, Help Yourself!’”

“I probably should have made that ‘Help Yourselves,’” I said. “Or maybe not. I’m addressing each reader individually, not collectively, so—”

“You own the store,” he said, “and all the books in it, so nobody’s questionin’ your right to run the business any way you want. But you got to admit it’s unusual.”

“So?”

“So where’d you go, Bernie?”

I took a moment, and a sip of beer. “Well, it’s no big deal,” I said. “I’ve been feeling a little confused lately, you know? There’s so much going on, and such a tremendous amount of sense that nothing makes.”

“Including that last sentence,” Carolyn put in.

“So what I wanted to do,” I said, “was clear my head. I enjoy running a bookstore, I really do, but it’s all mental, all things to think about and people with questions. And the phone ringing, and more questions. I wanted something physical.”

Ray nodded. “You went for a long walk,” he said.

“A short walk.”

“Oh.”

“Just half a block, really. I went bowling.”

“Bowling,” Ray said.

“Right.”

“Around the corner at Bowl-Mor?”

“Where else?”

“Some years back,” he said, “I used to bowl once a week. I was on a team, and the league was all cops and firemen.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“The bowling part,” he said, “was somethin’ I could take or leave. The fellowship, that was okay. How often do you get the chance to see cops and firemen and they aren’t wishin’ they could kill each other? And that explains the two beers you had, because what else do you do at a bowlin’ alley?”

“It’s no place for a Cosmopolitan.”

“But you went there all by yourself, Bernie. Or were you meetin’ somebody there?”

“No, I was alone.”

“A grown man,” he said, “all by his lonesome in the middle of the afternoon, tryin’ to keep the ball out of the gutter, and maybe even knock down some pins. Did you keep score?”

“Of course I kept score.”

“Did you cheat?”

“Did I cheat? Why on earth—”

“Just yankin’ your chain, Bernie. Why’d you make the books free?”

“The books? Oh, on the bargain table.” I shrugged. “I didn’t want to haul it inside.”

“You had to save your strength for Bowl-Mor.”

“And if some of the books disappeared, well, I was okay with that. And if I changed the sign and made the books free—”

“Nobody would feel guilty,” Carolyn said.

“Exactly.”

“Well, if there was ever anything you’d know about,” Ray said, “it’s takin’ other people’s goods without feelin’ guilty. You’re a master at it.”

I gave him a look.

“So maybe this is your way of givin’ back, Bernie, and with a gift that keeps on givin’. How’s it go, anyway? ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to steal a fish—’”

I sipped my beer. It was okay, but would never be my first choice for a drink to signal the welcome end of the workday. Still, it could have been worse. I could have been holding a stemmed cocktail glass and sipping a Cosmopolitan.

Ray had shifted conversational gears, but only slightly. He was going on about his early days in the NYPD, and the efforts of an old-time Hell’s Kitchen gang to unload a van’s worth of stolen carp and whitefish. “You can say a television set fell off a truck,” he said, “but it’s harder to make that case for a flounder. And if it takes you a month to move those hot TVs, well, you’re in no rush, are you? But with the fish—”

I told him I got the picture.

“It’s not so much a picture,” he said, “as it is an aroma. Speakin’ of things that don’t smell right, I can’t help thinking’ about the Kloppmann Diamond, which I know you didn’t steal, and those little green guys, which I know you did.”

My first thought was of extraterrestrials, but of course he meant Mr. Margate’s jade figurines. I’d have denied responsibility, but why bother?

“And it’s not just a couple of burglaries,” he went on. “There’s two dead muscleheads, Stumblebum and Stumblebee, one in a penthouse and the other in a bookstore and each with three bullets in him. If we could clear up those homicides, it’d take a lot of the heat off.”

“And I suppose that’s a consummation devoutly to be wished.”

“We’d be doin’ our parts in the fight against global warming, Bernie. Be a feather in both our caps.”

“That’s what I was thinking earlier,” I said, “though I can’t recall that climate change entered into the equation. One thing about bowling, it frees the mind to wander off in other directions.”

“Like a bowling ball,” Carolyn said. “Before it winds up in the gutter.”

I said, “What day is it? Wednesday?”

“Try Tuesday, Bern.”

“Tuesday,” I said. It seemed to me that we’d already had one Tuesday that week, but I couldn’t swear to it. “Okay, give me a minute.”

I found a pen, and started scribbling on the paper placemat. When I was done, Ray had a look.

“Names,” he said. “Some I know and some I don’t. Who the hell is Peter-Peter?”

“A notorious consumer of pumpkins,” I said. “I’ll explain who everybody is, and I have some phone numbers, along with a few ideas on how you can round them up.”

“Round ’em up? Why would I do that?” He thought for a moment and his eyes widened. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “You’re gonna do it, aren’t you? You’re actually gonna do it.”

“Well—”

“Same old Bernie. Life hands you a lemon and you pull a rabbit out of it.”

“No guarantees this time, Ray.”

“That’s what you always say, and you never fail to come up with that rabbit. I suppose you want to do this at your store, right?”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“Might as well stay with the tried and true. When do you want to do this?”

“Today’s Tuesday,” I said.

Carolyn: “We established that, Bern.”

“I was just making sure. I’d say Thursday, the day after tomorrow, because you want to strike while the iron is hot.” I tapped the sheet of paper. “But some of these people may be hard to find, plus there are things I have to do before showtime.”

“And most of them,” Ray said, “are probably things I don’t want to know about.”

“Monday would give us both plenty of time,” I went on, “to look before we leap. But a lot can happen in five days.”

The table buzzed with clichés. Haste makes waste. There’s no time like the present. Time takes time. He who hesitates is lost.

“One if by land,” I said, “and hook if by crook. We’ll do it Saturday. Early evening, say half past six. At Barnegat Books.”

“You’re gonna do it,” Ray said. “I don’t know how I’m gonna get my hands on all these people, but that’s nothin’ compared to what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna make heads and tails out of all of this, and when all is said and done—”

“There’ll be nothing left to say or do,” Carolyn said.

“You said it, Shorty. When all is said and done, Bernie here’s gonna be standin’ in front of everybody with a squeezed-up lemon in one hand and a rabbit in the other. You’ll pull it off, Bernie, and I got no idea how the hell you’re gonna do it.”

“What he’s got,” Carolyn said, “is faith.”

“I guess.”

“In you, Bern. And it’s not hard to understand why. How many times has Ray rounded up the unusual suspects and lined them all up at Barnegat Books?”

“I guess it’s been a few times over the years.”

“More than a few times, and more than a few years. It’s been a whole pattern in your life.”

“If you say so.”

“In your life and mine, Bern. You know, if you look at it a certain way—”

“If you look at what?”

“Our lives,” she said. “Yours and mine. If you step back and take the long view and look at our lives.”

We’d been stepping forward, not back, walking west along certain half-deserted streets on our way to Arbor Court. And now we weren’t stepping at all, because we’d stopped for slices of pizza at a hole in the wall on Carmine Street.

“The long view,” I said.

“Right.”

“Of our lives.”

“Uh-huh. On the one hand you’re a burglar, you’ve got mixed feelings about it but it’s something you’ve been doing pretty much all your adult life. And at the same time you’re a literate guy and you like to read and have people around, so you’ve got this bookstore.”

“And?”

“And that’s your life, stealing things and running a bookshop. And I wash dogs for a living, and when I’m not doing that I’m bouncing around the dyke bars. The bouncing’s been limited now that lesbian bars are on the endangered species list, and I’m not as bouncy as when I was younger, but I can still get back and forth between Henrietta’s and the Cubby, and I probably drink too much, but doesn’t everybody?”

“Just about. And that’s your life?”

A nod. “And we both of us have our relationships, falling in lust with unsuitable partners and breaking up and starting over. And we’re best friends, and we spend a lot of time together, and I’d be lost without you, Bern, and I like to think you’d be lost without me.”

“Utterly.”

“Those are our lives,” she said, “and I’d say that makes us pretty lucky, both of us. But there’s another way of looking at it.”

“There is?”

“Uh-huh.” She looked at her empty plate. “You know, this pizza’s not bad. I don’t know if it’s as good as Two Boots, but it’s got one great advantage. It exists, and Two Boots—”

“Is out of this world.”

“Literally, now that the Duchess is back in business. Bern, part of me wants another slice, and part of me thinks I’m full.”

“We could split one.”

“Perfect,” she said. “Brilliant.”

And, after the slice of pizza arrived: “So what’s the other way?”

“What other way, Bern?”

“Of looking at our lives. You were saying—”

“Oh, right. Well, looking at it a certain way, you’re sort of a real-life fictional character.”

“I am?”

“I guess we both are, but especially you. Like if you were in a book, you’d be a series character.”

“Wouldn’t I have to be in a whole series of books?”

She nodded. “Mysteries. Because you have this whole life, like I was saying, but if you just focus on certain episodes in your life, you’re a detective.”

“A detective? What, like Sam Spade?”

“No, not like him.”

“Good, because he was only in one book, and if you’re putting me in a whole series—”

“You’d be more of an amateur sleuth, Bern. You sell a few books, you break into a couple of houses. You live your life, you meet a girl and go to the movies, you drink scotch except when you drink Perrier—”

“Or beer, if I happen to be wearing bowling shoes.”

“Whatever. You live your life and mind your own business, and every now and then you get in a jam and there’s a dead body and it’s up to you to do something about it.”

“We’re back to Sam Spade,” I said. “‘When your partner gets killed, you’re supposed to do something about it.’”

“Sometimes the police think you did it, and you find the real killer in order to get out from under suspicion. Or you’ll have some other reason to get involved. But there’s a reason Ray expects you to pick a murderer out of a hat, and that’s because he’s watched you do it so many times before.”

I frowned. “It’s not really something I do,” I said. “It’s something that happens.”

“Repeatedly, Bern.”

“But sometimes years go by,” I said. “Yes, there have been incidents, a handful of them over the years—”

“It’s gotta be ten or a dozen times, Bern.”

“That many?”

“I could tick them off.”

“You’d be ticking me off in the process. Ten times?”

“I bet it’s more like a dozen.”

“So this series could be ten or twelve books long.”

“With each book centered on a time when you were playing detective.”

“And the rest of my life, the great majority of my time, when I’m just out there doing what I do—”

“Nobody’d know about it, Bern. Because there’d be no reason to write about what you were doing between books.”

The subject changed, and not a moment too soon. We headed for Arbor Court, and don’t ask me what we were talking about, because my head was still in the earlier conversation. Something was troubling me, and I couldn’t pin it down.

While we waited for a light to change, I said, “An amateur sleuth.”

“Huh?”

“It’s that word,” I said. “As an antiquarian bookseller, I’m a professional. I haven’t been hugely successful at it, but it’s a field where keeping the doors open and the lights on is success enough.”

“And?”

“I take a certain amount of pride in that. And I’m a professional burglar, too, and if I’m not completely proud of that, I give myself credit for being a cut above the clowns who kick doors in.”

“So the idea of being an amateur sleuth—”

“Rankles,” I said. “Makes me sound like a dabbler, a dilettante, an idler.”

“I get it, Bern. But I don’t know what else you would call it.”

“There ought to be something.”

“Maybe an extra word would take the sting out. ‘A master amateur sleuth.’ How’s that?”

“Better, but—”

“‘A virtuoso performer in the world of amateur sleuthery.’”

“I guess,” I said. “I may be overthinking this.”