The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams

CHAPTER Ten

I could have gone straight to the store and opened up, but not after a night in a cell. I went home and showered and shaved and put on clean clothes. So it was past noon by the time I got downtown again, and despite the act he put on I figured Raffles had already been fed. A note on the counter removed all doubt.

I dragged the bargain table outside and called the Poodle Factory. “I just opened up,” I told Carolyn. “Thanks for feeding Raffles. And while I’m at it, thanks for calling Wally, and for getting the bail money to him, and for being a generally good scout.”

“It’s nothing, Bern.”

“And thanks for calling Patience.”

“Matter of fact,” she said, “I got Wally to call her.”

“How come?”

“I figured it would look better. Remember, I already called her once to break a date for you. If she gets two calls in a row from some woman she never met, what’s she gonna think?”

“I see what you mean,” I said, and explained the particular fashion in which Wally had canceled my presumed shrink appointment. “I’m not blaming you,” I assured her. “You had the right idea, and so did Wally. It’s just that something got lost in translation.”

“You’d think I’d have enough to do,” she said, “keeping my own love life constantly screwed up. You wouldn’t think I’d have the time or the energy to ruin somebody else’s. What can I say? I blew it, Bern.”

“You broke even,” I said. “You fed one cat and let another one out of the bag.”

“What are you gonna say to her?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet. In the meantime I sent flowers.”

“Why would you do something like that?”

“Wally suggested it.”

“He did? Well, what’s the point of having a lawyer if you’re not gonna take his advice?”

“That’s what I figured.”

“What kind did you send? An assortment?”

“No,” I said. “I couldn’t decide between cut flowers and a living plant. You know, something that would last.”

“Something she’ll still have long after she’s forgotten ever having known you.”

“That’s the idea. I wound up springing for a dozen roses and a plant, an African violet in a nice little pot.”

“Red roses, I hope.”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, but why?”

“And blue violets, right? Did you enclose a poem?”

“Oh.”

“Listen, I gotta go, a woman just came in with a puli. You’ll be there all afternoon, won’t you?”

“Sure,” I said. “Unless I get arrested again.”

An hour later it looked as though I’d spoken too soon. I was ringing up a sale for one of my regular customers, an emergency-room physician at St. Vincent’s. She drops in every Saturday and buys a dozen books at a time, all mysteries, all by hard-boiled male writers. “There’s nothing so relaxing,” she told me once, “as blood and gore that’s someone else’s responsibility.”

We were chatting about some of her favorites when Ray Kirschmann came into the shop. Normally he knows how to behave, biding his time when I’ve got a customer, but today he had a little snot from the DA’s office for company, and he bulled his way right into the middle of our transaction and slapped a piece of paper on the counter.

“ ’Scuse me, ma’am,” he said, “but this here’s a warrant authorizin’ an’ empowerin’ me to search the premises.”

“If you let me know what you’re looking for,” I said evenly, “perhaps I can save you some time.”

“Now that’s real considerate of you,” he said, “but I know what I want an’ I know where to find it, on account of I saw it here yesterday.” He led the assistant DA to the Sports section, where he pulled one book off the shelf right away, then took his time selecting two more volumes. He handed all three books to his young companion, who brought them to the counter and set them down while he wrote out a receipt in perfect parochial-school penmanship.

“ ‘Received of Bernard Grimes Rhodenbarr,’ ” Ray read aloud. “ ‘Three books as follows. Mr. Mint’s Insider’s Guide to Investing in Baseball Cards and Collectibles. Encyclopedia of Sports Card Values, third edition. Getting Started with Baseball Cards.’ I only saw the one yesterday, the Mr. Mint. You had the others stuck on the shelf below.”

“That was to confuse you, Ray. Look, if you wanted the books, wouldn’t it have been simpler to buy them? It strikes me as less trouble than getting a warrant. Price guides like that I practically give away, because by the time they get to my store they’re apt to be seriously out of date. Now if you want something a little more current, I’d recommend the Barnes & Noble at Fifth Avenue and Eighteenth Street. They even discount their stock, although I know it’s not quite the same as getting it for free, but—”

“These are evidence,” the young fellow said. His name, according to the receipt he handed me, was J. Philip Flynn.

“Evidence,” I said.

“Of prior knowledge,” J. Philip Flynn said. He hefted the books. “You got something to put these in?”

I suppressed an impulse and handed him a shopping bag. Ray said, “Pretendin’ you didn’t know baseball cards was worth stealin’, Bern. An’ here you got not one but three books on the subject.” He shook his head, awed by the perfidy of human nature.

“I’ve got half a shelf full of books on unarmed combat,” I said, “but I don’t know the first thing about taking a cop and a lawyer and knocking their heads together. I know this’ll come as a shock to you, Ray, but there are actually a couple of books in the store that I haven’t had time to read.”

“Well, you’ll have time soon,” he said. “Plenty of time, way it looks to me.”

And out he went, with J. Philip Flynn following in his wake. I turned to my customer and apologized for the interruption.

“Cops,” she said with feeling. “It’s Saturday. Twelve hours from now we’ll be up to our clavicles in stabbings and gunshot wounds, and those two heroes are confiscating books. I thought at first they must be looking for kiddie porn, but those were books about baseball cards, weren’t they?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I didn’t know they were illegal,” she said. “What is it, some carcinogen in the gum?” She raised a hand and waved the thought aside. “It’s all crazy,” she said. “Oh, hi, Raffles. Were you hiding from the nasty old policemen? Oh, you are a sweetie pie. Yes, you are! Yes, you are!”

“Miaow,” said Raffles.

When the store’s empty, or when the browsers strike me as trustworthy types, I’m apt to pick up a book and read. There’s a little bell that tinkles when someone opens the door, but if I’m really caught up in my reading I don’t always hear it.

Which is what happened around four-thirty. I was back in prehistory, sharing the heroine’s dismay that those Neanderthals just didn’t understand her, when the deliberate clearing of a throat just across the counter from me yanked me back to present time. I looked up from the primitive brutes on the page and into the swinish little eyes of Borden Stoppelgard.

“I suppose you want your change,” I said.

“What, from the day before yesterday? No, of course not. You offered it to me then and I didn’t take it. You think I’d make a special trip here for it?”

“Probably not,” I said. “Unless you had to be in the neighborhood anyway to evict some widows and orphans.”

“You’ve got me wrong, Rhodenbarr.”

“Oh?”

“All wrong. What kind of man evicts widows and orphans in September? Christmas Eve, that’s the time for it.”

“‘Hark, the City Marshals Sing.’”

“My favorite Christmas carol,” he said, with a hearty chuckle. He stepped closer to the counter. “As a matter of fact, I did make a special trip here this afternoon, but not to buy books. What I really want to do is apologize. We got off on the wrong foot the other day and it was my fault. I had the wrong idea about you.”

“You did?”

“It’s a constant hazard in my business, Rhodenbarr. I have to make snap judgments, and as a rule I’m pretty good at it. But nobody’s a hundred percent, and every once in a while I put my foot in it.”

“These things happen.”

“Here’s what I did,” he said. “I walked in here, I checked out the store, I checked you out, and I jumped to a conclusion. I said to myself, Here’s this poor sap busting his hump trying to clear twenty grand a year in a dead business. Be a good thing for him and everybody, I said to myself, when his lease is up and the laws of the marketplace put him out of his misery.”

“Economic euthanasia,” I suggested.

“That’s a good way of putting it. But here’s where I went wrong. I went strictly by appearances. And then I find out you’re not an earnest nebbish of a bookseller after all. What you really are is a burglar.”

“Uh, Mr. Stoppelgard—”

“Please,” he said. “Borden.”

“Uh.”

“And what shall I call you? Bernard?”

Call me a taxi, I thought. I said, “Well, uh, people generally call me Bernie.”

“Bernie,” he said. “Bernie. I like that.”

“Then I’ll keep it.”

“A burglar,” he said, pronouncing the phrase the way a grandmother in Miami Beach might say “a doctor” or “a lawyer” or “a specialist.” “This,” he said, with a dismissive wave around him, “this is not the run-down mess it appears to be. On the contrary, it’s a brilliantly executed false front. My congratulations, Bernie.”

“Well, thanks,” I said, “but—”

“The way I hear it, you’re not just a garden-variety burglar, either. It seems you’re something of a genius at what you do. The lock that can stop you hasn’t been invented yet, according to that policeman, and there was more than a little grudging admiration in his voice, I have to tell you.”

I was being buttered up. But why?

“So naturally you were upset at the thought of a rent increase. The store works for you because it’s a subsistence enterprise with a very low overhead. Once the rent jumps anywhere near market value, you can’t operate anywhere near the break-even point, not without changing your operation dramatically. The alternative is to shove money into the business from an outside source, and if you do that somebody’s going to want to know where the money came from. And that’s no good, is it?”

“No.”

“What you need,” he said, “is a renewal of your lease at the present rent for a substantial period of time. You don’t have any kids, do you?”

“Not that I know of.”

“ ‘Not that I know of.’ I’ll have to remember that one. No kids, then there’s nobody you’re going to have to leave the business to. You figure thirty more years is enough time to spend in the book business?”

“I would think that would be enough for anybody.”

“Okay,” he said. “Here’s the deal. I’ll renew your lease for thirty years at $875 a month. How does that sound to you?”

“Too good to be true. What’s the catch?”

“Baseball cards.”

“Baseball cards?”

“Better than coins and stamps. Better than French Impressionists. Better than Manhattan real estate, and a whole lot better than the New York Stock Exchange.”

“Even better than women mystery writers?”

“You know it. Oh, it’s volatile. You have to know what you’re doing. Buy garbage, and ten years from now all you’ve got is old garbage. Buy speculative stuff and you can make a killing or get killed, depending which way the wind blows. Say you had a big position in Bo Jackson rookie cards. Then he sustains what looks to be a career-ending injury. Where are you?”

“Where?”

“Up the well-known creek, Bernie, without the proverbial paddle. Bo’s got the charisma, but he needs five or ten years in the bigs to put up the kind of numbers that will make him a superstar in the card market. Or say you bought Nolan Ryan during what was supposed to be his last season. Instead he decides to hang around for one more year, and while he’s at it he throws another no-hitter. That wouldn’t hurt the value of your portfolio, would it?”

“I guess not.”

“Then there are the blue chips,” he said. “Safer than T-bonds and a whole lot more profitable. Babe Ruth. Mickey Mantle. Joe DiMaggio. Or my own personal favorite, Ted Williams.”

“You couldn’t have seen him play,” I said. “Unless you’re a lot older than you look.”

“No, he was before my time. But I don’t have to see him swing a bat. All I need to do is look at his numbers. He was the last man ever to hit over.400 in major league ball.” He followed this factoid with a blur of statistics—career batting and slugging averages, home runs, runs batted in, all the way to intentional walks. If you need to know this, check a baseball encyclopedia. “Teddy Baseball,” he said reverently. “The Splendid Splinter. We’ll never see his like again.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“He spent four years in the service, you know. During the Second World War. Think what it cost him.”

“Think what it cost England.”

“Four of the prime years of his playing career. Imagine what his numbers would look like if he’d been swinging away in Fenway Park all that time instead of serving his country. But it shows you the kind of a guy he was.”

“A patriot?”

“A sap. But that’s all water over the bridge, or under the dam, or wherever it goes.”

“Up the creek,” I suggested.

“Whatever. If he’d had those years, well…”

“I guess his cards would be worth more.”

“His cards are seriously underpriced,” he said flatly. “They go for a fraction of Mantle’s cards, and for my money Williams was twice the ballplayer. Mantle’s rookie card from the 1952 Topps set will cost you thirty thousand dollars in near-mint condition. All right, let’s look at the Splendid Splinter’s rookie card from the 1939 Play Ball set. Thirteen years older, and an infinitely scarcer set, and you can pick that card up in top condition for under five grand. But don’t get me started.”

“I won’t.”

“I collected baseball cards as a kid.”

“So did I, until my mother threw them out.”

“Mine knew better than to touch any of my possessions. Well, I grew up, I went into business, I put the cards away and forgot about them. Eventually I got married and we had a kid. Meanwhile my sister Edna got married.”

“To Martin Gilmartin.”

“When my kid was old enough to be interested, I gave him my old baseball cards to play with. I mentioned this to Marty, and it turned out he was a big collector himself. And that’s when I found out about the investment potential of these cards.”

“So you took them away from your kid.”

“I borrowed a book from Marty,” he said, “and I checked the lad’s cards, and not too surprisingly there was nothing rare or valuable in the lot. They were in terrible condition, Scotch tape on some of them, others all beat up and scuffed and folded. But there was one, if it hadn’t been in such bad condition, it would have been worth fifty bucks.”

“Wow.”

“What could I have paid for it? It seems to me you used to get a whole pack for a quarter, and that included the gum. They don’t bother giving you the gum anymore, you know. They found out the kids just threw it away. Anyway, say I paid a nickel for that card, and now it was worth fifty bucks. Or at least it would have been if I’d taken decent care of it.”

“Next time you’ll know.”

“Exactly what I told myself. ‘This time,’ I said, ‘you take good care of your cards.’ And I started collecting. I let my kid keep my old junk and I started right in buying quality, and…”

And the phone rang.

“Barnegat Books,” I said.

“Hello, Bernie.”

A woman’s voice, familiar but hard to place. Then I reached out and nailed it.

“Well, hello, Doll. I didn’t expect to hear from you.”

“What a greeting! But you’re the doll, Bernie. They’re absolutely gorgeous.”

“They are?”

“The roses are spectacular.”

Oh, I thought. Wrong woman. “Patience,” I said.

“And the African violet is the sweetest thing, but I have to warn you, I have a brown thumb. I can never keep plants alive.”

“It’s supposed to help if you talk to them.”

“I know, but I never know what to say. Do you suppose this one likes poetry? I could read to it.” She sighed. “I don’t know what to say to you, either. Two nights in a row, two broken dates in a row, two different friends breaking them for you—or do you do voices, too?”

“Just Jimmy Stewart.”

“I can hardly wait. Two different excuses, first a burrito and then a burglary. Both words are on the same page of the dictionary, but of course you know that. That’s the page you break all your dates from, isn’t it?”

“Patience—”

“We could make another date,” she said, “but I’d only get a phone call advising me that you wouldn’t be able to make it because you’d been eaten by a bugbear. Or bummed out, or bumped off, or some bumptious buckaroo had burst your bubble. The roses are truly beautiful.”

“I’m glad.”

“I was feeling terribly depressed. I get that way a lot. Most poets do, it’s sort of an occupational illness. But then the flowers came and cheered me right up. So it’s hard for me to stay mad at you. Are you really a burglar?”

“I can explain,” I said.

“Whenever people say that, they can’t. But I’ll give you a chance. Tomorrow night there’s going to be a poetry reading at the Café Villanelle on Ludlow Street. Do you know where that is?”

“Sort of.”

“Two of my clients will be reading, and I promised I’d go. I may read something myself, I’m not sure. The readings scheduled to start at ten o’clock, but it’s all right to come early. It’s all right to come late, too. It’s even okay not to come at all.”

“Patience—”

“What’s not okay,” she said, “is to have any of your legion of friends call with an excuse, no matter what letter it starts with. So maybe I’ll see you tomorrow night, Bernie, and maybe I won’t.”

“You will.”

“But if you don’t come,” she said, “do me a favor. Don’t send flowers.”

“So I started off small,” he said. “Same as when I first got into real estate. You make some mistakes, but how else are you going to get the feel for what you’re doing? You have to be willing to go in there and get your feet wet. You take your medicine, you pull up your socks, and you get right back up on the horse.” He frowned, and who could blame him? “Bernie,” he said, “you don’t need to listen to all this crap.”

“It’s interesting.”

“It’s nice of you to say that, but let’s cut to the chase, huh? We can do each other some good here. Each of us has something the other wants. I’ve got a storefront I can let you have for thirty years at half the price of a rooftop pigeon coop in Bensonhurst. And we both know what you’ve got.”

“What?”

He grinned. “Marty’s baseball cards.”