The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

40

“So I’m still a lesbian,” Carolyn announced.

“Alert the media.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That your news flash isn’t going to get anybody a Pulitzer. You never stopped being a lesbian. You made a point of declaring yourself as such several times a day.”

“While you and I,” she said, “were ducking each other’s brains out.”

“And the credit or blame for that,” I said, “belongs to the world we were in at the time. But you never stopped being a lesbian, and I never stopped being your best friend.”

She thought about this, nodded. It was something like twenty-two hours since she’d sent me home with instructions to avoid reading anything, and we’d each put in a full day’s work and were back at the Bum Rap thanking God that it was Friday. She’d prefaced her earth-shattering news with an account of the previous evening, which had begun at the Cubby Hole and concluded in a suite at the Carlyle, with a woman whose half of a Silicon Valley software business was worth more than the Kloppmann Diamond.

And her husband owned the other half. They’d started the business together, and as it was becoming successful they got married, not exactly ignoring the fact that he liked boys and she liked girls, but deciding that was beside the point. And they had two kids in high school — “a boy and a girl, or maybe it’s the other way around” — and they looked for all the world like a happily heterosexual couple, and he had his discreet same-sex affairs, and so did she.

And once or twice a year they’d leave the kids in Cupertino and fly somewhere, New York or London or Paris or Rio, and go discreetly crazy.

“So I had a good time,” Carolyn said, “and confirmed my sexual identity. Not that it needed it, but still.”

“Are you going to see her again?”

“What for?” She drank some scotch. “Bern, when I wasn’t awash in Sapphic excess, I was thinking about Edgar Margate and Katrina Beckwith and Byron Fleegler.”

“I can’t believe you remembered all their names.”

“I was paying attention,” she said, “until I couldn’t. And when I thought about it afterward, it sort of made sense. Except when it didn’t.”

“Oh?”

“Byron showed up at your store, and Mason or Jason was dead—”

“I think it was Mason.”

“Like it matters. Mason was dead, and the person who killed him, whose name I can’t remember—”

“I never gave it.”

“Well, that explains it. Mason was dead and the killer was gone, and Byron poked around until he found Margate’s jade carvings and carried them off with him.”

“And took the time to tape the glass circle in place, establishing himself as the ultimate gentleman burglar.”

“Right,” she said. “But I thought you found the jade carvings untouched in your hiding place, where you must have stashed them after the burglary you don’t remember committing.”

“Ah,” I said.

“But if Byron found them in your desk drawer, and took them with him when he left—”

“I made that part up.”

“You made it up?”

“I made up all of it,” I said, “but part of what I made up was what actually happened. But not all of it.”

I explained. Byron Fleegler got close enough to my desk to see the dead man sitting there, and that was as much as he needed to see. He never opened a desk drawer, never found my $16,000, and never even looked for my hidey-hole. So he didn’t come close to finding the carvings, and at that point his only real concern was getting away from a murder scene without doing anything that might implicate himself.

But by Saturday evening, when Ray and his helpers had filled my store with suspects and hangers-on, I’d been busy. I’d retrieved the carvings from where I’d stashed them, and I’d done a decent job of redistributing them.

“In Katrina’s bedside table,” I said, “and in Margate’s office safe, and in the pocket of a belted jacket hanging in Byron Fleegler’s closet. It was a hectic couple of days and nights, with a lot of locks to pick, and it would only have been possible in the universe we’d created.”

“One without security cameras and pickproof locks?”

“That was a big part of it. Luck was another factor.”

“Luck?”

“In that universe,” I said, “I was just plain lucky. Like with cabs.”

“You stepped to the curb and raised your hand, and a cab would appear.”

“Every time. Well, I had a few days and nights where I took a lot of risks. And there were some close shaves, like ducking into a closet or a bathroom and holding my breath.”

“That must have been scary.”

“Exciting,” I allowed, “but not all that scary. Because I somehow knew I was going to get away with it. And it worked. I put the carvings where they would do the most good.”

“Saturday night,” she said, “when you explained it all, Edgar Margate said it was all nonsense, and any carvings that turned up in any of those places had obviously been planted to frame him.”

“He wasn’t entirely wrong.”

“But then Ray asked him to turn out his pockets, and Margate put his hand in his pocket, and his eyes bulged.”

“They did, didn’t they? Poor old Mr. Pennybags, with his eyes halfway out of his head.”

“And he took his hand out of his pocket, and he couldn’t believe what he was holding.”

“A little green squirrel,” I recalled, “with both his paws clutching a nut.”

“You must have planted it on him. When you walked through the crowd, being the genial host.”

“A little sleight of hand,” I said.

“If he’d felt anything—”

“But he didn’t.”

“Or if he’d just idly put his hand in his pocket. But he didn’t do that either, did he?”

“No,” I said. “And when everybody saw him standing there holding the squirrel, it didn’t help him make the case that he’d been framed. And he had, of course, but he’d been framed for something he’d actually done.”

“And that’s true of everybody, right? Not just Margate and Katrina and Byron, but all of the others?”

“Ah,” I said, and reached for my own drink. “Not exactly.”

“There were two other big questions,” I said. “Who killed the Tweedle twins, Jason and Mason? And who wound up with the Kloppmann Diamond?”

“Abel Crowe wound up with the diamond, Bern. We sold it to him. But that’s not how you explained it.”

“While you and I were riding up to the twenty-ninth floor,” I said, “with the admittedly felonious intention of burgling the apartment of the absent Istvan Horvath—”

“There was nothing there to steal.”

“If we’d known as much, we could have stayed home. But we rode up to Twenty-Nine, and Peter Tompkins saw an opportunity.”

“Peter-Peter?”

“He’d met Istvan Horvath, he knew I wasn’t Istvan Horvath, and if I was there under false colors I was probably looking to commit a crime. He watched the floor indicator and saw that we got off at Horvath’s floor, so we were probably looking to burgle Horvath or one of his neighbors, so that meant I was on the premises and available to take the fall for anything that might get stolen that night from anybody in the Innisfree.”

“Like Orrin Vandenbrinck.”

“The man himself,” I agreed. “Peter knew he was away, he’d watched the whole party pile into the limousine on their way to the theater. He’d have to leave the lobby unattended for a few minutes, but the building was mostly unoccupied and nonresident visitors were few and far between. The risk seemed minimal.

“The hard part was proving the publisher wrong and actually being able to put down a Lee Child novel. The rest was easy, because Peter’s master key would let him use the private penthouse elevator. He rode it to its only destination, the Vandenbrinck penthouse, and he stepped out of it and into the living room.”

“And just down the hall the television set was making a racket, and two men were having an argument, and—”

“No such thing,” I said. “All was quiet, and some unerring instinct led him to the master bedroom, where he opened the right drawer and found what could only be the Kloppmann Diamond.”

“How was that possible, Bern?”

“It wasn’t.”

“Oh. But you just said—”

“I made all this up,” I said. “When did anybody ever voluntarily stop reading one of the Reacher novels? He stayed at the desk, eyes glued to the page, and he was right there when we left, and as far as he was concerned I was Istvan Horvath coming and going.”

“Oh.”

“Now do you want to hear—”

“Yes, of course. I’ll try not to interrupt.”

I drew a breath. “He found the diamond,” I said, “and immediately headed for the elevator. But when he passed what I guess was the den, something got his attention. Maybe he smelled gunpowder, maybe the TV was on, maybe the door was ajar and something caught his eye. He took a moment to investigate, and what he saw was one of the bodyguards. Evidently only one of them had accompanied Vandenbrinck to the theater. The other had stayed behind, and someone had kept him company and shot him dead.”

“So Peter—”

“Kept a cool head, and went back to the desk, determined to finish his shift. He was there when the first cops showed up, and he escorted them upstairs to the penthouse and let them discover the body for themselves. And when Ray Kirschmann came around to ask questions, he remembered the self-designated Istvan Horvath and gave Ray my description.

“Then his shift ended, finally, and he went home to his studio apartment in the Bronx. He probably took a little time to admire the Kloppmann Diamond, and to try to work out what the hell he was going to do with it, but the first order of business was to tuck it away, and he did so in a reasonably inventive manner. He rolled it up in a pair of socks and let it keep company with the other pairs in his sock drawer.

“And that’s right where Ray found it.”

“He knew where to look?”

“Someone may have given Ray the idea,” I said. “Someone may have remarked idly that the first place an amateur hides something is where he keeps his socks.”

“Someone may have said that?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me.”

Long silence.

“Bern? That’s the scenario, right? The way you laid it out the other night.”

“Right.”

“But Peter-Peter didn’t go to the penthouse. He went there when the cops came, he took them up there, but until then—”

“Unless he had to pee, which is certainly possible, I’d say he never left the desk.”

“You found out where he lived.”

“Which wasn’t terribly hard, actually. What with Google and social media. He lives just a few blocks from Arthur Avenue, and wouldn’t you know he posts pictures of his food?”

“You went there,” she said, “and rolled up the diamond in his socks.”

“Just like an amateur,” I said.

“But how did you get your hands on a fake diamond, one that could pass itself off as the Kloppmann stone? It’s not like a Mondrian, you couldn’t sit down and paint it yourself.”

“No.”

“Then—”

“It wasn’t a fake.”

“It was a real diamond?”

“It was the genuine article,” I said. “A diamond, and not just any diamond. The Kloppmann Diamond.”

“Abel gave it to you?”

“Abel was already in his stateroom, on his way to one exotic port of call after another.”

She looked at me. “I don’t believe it,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Except I do. You actually broke into your friend Abel’s apartment.”

“There wasn’t really any breaking involved,” I said. “I couldn’t have opened the locks any more gently if I’d had his keys.”

“You picked his locks. You cracked his safe.”

“Again, cracking’s not exactly le mot juste. It’s true that I opened the safe, but there was no force involved. Just, you know, a certain amount of ingenuity and innate skill, polished by years of experience, and—”

“Our good friend Abel bought the diamond from us, and you stole it back.”

“You know,” I said, “when you put it that way—”

“When I put it that way,” she said, “it sounds terrible, but what other way is there to put it? You did business with the only receiver of stolen goods who happens to be decent and honorable—”

“The only one I know. There could be others.”

“You sold him a priceless diamond, Bern, and then you stole it back.”

“I took it back.”

“Without permission. It think that counts as stealing.”

“If he hadn’t already left on his cruise,” I said, “I could have gone to him and explained the situation, and he’d have given me the diamond. But he wasn’t where I could reach him, so I had to take his consent for granted.”

“If you’d explained it to him—”

“He’d have understood, and cooperated.”

“‘Ve vill chust undo our deal, Bernard. You are velcome to ze diamond.’”

“Something like that, but the accent’s a little heavy.”

“‘And of course you vill return ze money I paid you, you and ze beautiful Carolyn.’”

“Oh.”

“But you didn’t, did you, Bern?”

“No.”

“So do you want to explain to me how it wasn’t stealing? Keeping the money and taking back the diamond?”

“Half the money was yours. I didn’t have the right—”

“I’d have given it back to you in a heartbeat, Bern. You had to talk me into taking it in the first place, remember?”

“I thought about returning the money,” I admitted.

“So what stopped you?”

“It was just a thought. My next thought was that I might have a need for the money, and that Abel wouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“He’ll take that cruise,” I said, “and he’ll go from one cruise ship to another, and eventually he’ll get what he’s decided he wants.”

It took her a minute. “Oh,” she said at length.

“Right.”

“Burial at sea.”

“When he talked about it,” I said, “he made it sound as though it was something he found very appealing.”

“That’s so sad, Bern.”

“Is it? What happened to Abel in this universe is what’s sad. He was brutally murdered by a podiatrist, and that was a lot of years ago. In the universe where we sold him the Kloppmann Diamond, he got the chance to go on living, and to an overripe old age at that. He survived a concentration camp, remember?”

“He must have been—”

“He was around thirty in 1945 when the war ended. You want to do the math?”

She did, and her eyes widened.

“That universe we conjured up has been good to Abel,” I said. “He gets to be well over a hundred, and his health is okay and he still has all his marbles. And, right up until they’re ready to play the bagpipes for him and put him overboard, he’ll be able to pride himself in owning the most famous gemstone in the world.”