The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams

CHAPTER Seven

Well, it seemed to be working out. I’d had plenty of misgivings early on. I was sure I’d be tripping over the animal all the time, but he was remarkably good at keeping out of the way. He did his ankle-rubbing routine every morning when I opened up, but that was just his way of making sure I fed him. The rest of the time I hardly knew he was there. He walked around on little cat feet, appropriately enough, and he didn’t bump into things. Sometimes he would catch a few rays in the front window, and now and then he’d make a silent spring onto a high shelf and ease himself into the gap between James Carroll and Rachel Carson, but most of the time he kept a low profile.

Few customers ever saw him, and those who did seemed generally unsurprised at the presence of a cat in a bookstore. “What a pretty cat!” they might say, or “What happened to his tail?” He seemed most inclined to display himself when the customer was an attractive woman, which made him something of an asset, functioning as a sort of icebreaker. I don’t know that he earned his keep in that capacity, but I’d have to list it as a plus on his résumé.

What paid the Tender Vittles tab, as far as I was concerned, was what he’d been hired for in the first place. Since Carolyn brought him into the shop, I hadn’t found a single book with a nibbled spine. The rodent damage had ceased so abruptly and permanently I had to wonder if it had ever happened in the first place. Maybe, I sometimes thought, I’d never had a mouse in the store. Maybe the Waugh and Glasgow volumes had been like that when I got them. Or maybe Carolyn had snuck in herself and gnawed at the books, just so she could find a permanent home for the Third Cat.

I wouldn’t put it past her.

Once I’d filled his dinner bowl and his water dish, I locked up again and went over to Carolyn’s place. “I already ate,” she said. “I didn’t think you were going to open up today.”

“That’s what I figured,” I said, “but I wanted to check. Let me grab something around the corner and I’ll be right back. We have to talk.”

“Sure,” she said.

I went to the nearest deli and came back with a ham sandwich and a large container of coffee. Carolyn had a small brown dog on the grooming table. It kept making a sort of whimpering noise.

“Make yourself comfortable,” she told me. “And is it all right if I finish up Alison while we talk? I’d like to be done with her.”

“Go right ahead,” I said. “Why’s she making that noise?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I wish she’d stop. If she does it while the judge is looking her over, I think her owner can forget about Best of Breed.”

“And what breed would that be?”

“She’s either a Norfolk terrier or a Norwich terrier, and I can never remember which is which.”

“And her name’s Alison? No clue there.”

“That’s her call name,” she said. “The name on her papers is Alison Wanda Land.”

“I think I know why she’s whimpering.”

“Maybe it’s because she misses her littermate, who didn’t come in today because she’s not scheduled to be shown this weekend. Her call name just happens to be Trudy, so do you want to guess what it says on her AKC registration?”

“It can’t be Trudy Logan Glass.”

“Wanna bet?”

I shuddered, then straightened up in my seat. “Look,” I said, “go on fluffing Alison, but while you do I want to tell you what happened last night.”

“No need, Bern.”

“Huh?”

“Really,” she said, “what makes you think you have to do that? You were the one who was doing all the drinking at the Bum Rap. I know I’m apt to have a blackout once in a while, but last night I didn’t have enough booze to feel a glow, much less wipe out a few thousand brain cells. I remember everything up until the time you left, and there’s nothing to remember after that because all I did was go to sleep.”

“I want to tell you what happened to me.”

“You went straight home.”

“Right. And then I went out again.”

“Oh, no. Bern—”

“Look, just let me tell it all the way through,” I said. “Then we’ll talk.”

“I just don’t get it,” she said. “You worked so hard, Bern. You did everything possible to keep from breaking into the Gilmartin apartment.”

“I know.”

“And then, purely on the spur of the moment—”

“I know.”

“It’s not as if you had any reason to think there’d be anything there worth stealing. For all you knew, the Nugents didn’t have a pot or a window.”

“I know.”

“And you were already through for the night. You were home safe in your own apartment.”

“I know.”

“ ‘I know, I know, I know.’ So why did you do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Bern—”

“Call it a character defect,” I said, “or a mental lapse, or temporary insanity. Maybe I was still a little bit drunk and all that coffee kept me from feeling it. All I can say is it seemed like a gift from the gods. I’d been a good boy, I’d resisted irresistible temptation, and they’d repaid me by sending a beautiful woman to lead me to an apartment just there for the taking.”

“Figure she set you up?”

“First thing I thought of. Matter of fact, the possibility occurred to me before I even put my picks in my pocket.”

“But you went anyway.”

“Well, how could it have been a setup? She’d have had to know I was a burglar, and she’d have had to know I was going to be on that particular subway.”

“Maybe she was on it herself. Maybe she’d been following you.”

“All day? It doesn’t seem very likely. And I don’t think she was on the train, because I would have noticed her. She’s the kind of woman you notice.”

“Beautiful, huh?”

“Close enough. An easy eight on a ten scale.”

“And she just happened to ask you to walk her home, and then she just happened to mention that Joan and Harlan were in Europe.”

“I don’t think she followed me,” I said, “but she could have gone out to buy a quart of milk, say, and spotted me coming out of the subway. She said she recognized me from having seen me around the neighborhood, but I don’t remember seeing her, so maybe she made that up. Suppose she knew I was a burglar, and she spotted me, so she got me to walk her home.”

“If that was her home,” she said. “Stay,” she told Alison Wanda, and looked in the White Pages. “Cardamom…Chesapeake…Collier. Here we are, Cooper…. I don’t see a Gwendolyn Cooper. There’s a lot of G Coopers, and there’s one at 910 West End, but that would have to be way uptown. What’s the address of the Nugents’ building?”

“Three-oh-four.”

“Nope. I don’t see any Coopers at that address.”

“Maybe she spells it with a K.”

“Like Kountry Kupboard? Let’s see…. Gee, people really do spell it with a K, don’t they? But not our Doll. Still, what does it prove? She could have an unlisted number, or she could be subletting or sharing an apartment with somebody, and the phone could be in another name.”

“She knew the doorman.”

“It sounds to me as though he’s easy to know. You knew him, too, remember?”

“Good point,” I said. “He’s not the Maginot Line. She could have gotten past him whether she belonged in the building or not. But then where would she go?”

“The Nugent apartment.”

“A quick entrance and exit? Maybe. Or she could have killed time in a stairwell waiting for me to go home and then just walked out herself. ‘Bye, Eddie.’ ‘Hey, how ya doin’.’ Piece of cake.” I frowned. “But what’s the point?”

“To set you up.”

“To set me up to do what? Carolyn, any other night of my life I would have gone home and stayed home. Never mind that I’ve given up burglary. Say I was still an active burglar, even a hyperactive one. It’s the middle of the night, and a mysterious stranger has just managed to let me know that the occupants of a particular apartment are out of town. What am I going to do?”

“You tell me.”

“At the very least,” I said, “I’m going to sleep on it. In the cold light of dawn I might do a little research, and if it looks extremely promising I might knock it off a day or two down the line. Probably in the early afternoon, when visitors look a whole lot less suspicious. Most likely, though, I’d wake up and decide to forget the whole thing. But the one thing I would never do is go in that very night.”

“But you did.”

“But I did,” I acknowledged, “but how could she know I would?”

“Maybe she reads minds, Bern.”

“Maybe she does. Maybe she read mine and saw that I was out of it. So she set me up, and I went for it. What’s in it for her?”

“I don’t know, Bern.”

“Was I supposed to get caught in the Nugent apartment? God knows I was a sitting duck. Ordinarily I get in and out of a place as quickly as I can, but not this time. If I’d stayed there much longer I could have claimed squatter’s rights. If she’d tipped the police, they’d have had me dead to rights. The state troopers could have come on foot from Albany and got there before I left.”

“Maybe you were supposed to do something inside the apartment.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I. Whatever it was, I didn’t do it. All I did in Apartment 9-G was kill time. I brought some groceries in and I took some groceries out.”

“And gave your groceries a shake-shake-shake and turned yourself about.”

“Turned myself inside out is more like it. When I saw the corpse in the bathtub—”

“Who was he, Bern?”

“Not Harlan or Joan.”

“Well, I didn’t think he was Joan.”

“In this day and age,” I said, “you never know. But there was a picture of the Nugents in Harlan’s study, and the dead guy wasn’t either of them. There were other pictures around the house, Nugent children and grandchildren, and he didn’t turn up in any of the pictures. Probably not a long-lost relative, either, because I couldn’t detect any family resemblance.” I frowned. “There was something vaguely familiar about him, but I couldn’t tell you what it was.”

“What did he look like?”

“Mostly he looked naked and dead.”

“Well, that explains it. You must have recognized him from a Norman Mailer novel.”

I gave her a look. “I’d guess he was in his thirties,” I said. “Dark hair, cut short and combed forward like Julius Caesar.”

“No stab wounds, though.”

“No, just a bullet hole in the forehead.” I closed my eyes, trying to picture him. “He was thin,” I said, “but muscular. A lot of dark body hair. His eyes were wide open, but I can’t remember what color they were. I didn’t really spend a lot of time looking at him.”

“What was he doing there, Bern?”

“By the time I saw him,” I said, “he wasn’t doing much of anything.”

“Maybe he was just looking for a place to kill himself,” she said, “and he didn’t have the price of a hotel room. So he broke in—”

“Through a Poulard lock?”

“It didn’t stop you. All right, say he had a key. He got in, he took off all his clothes…Where were his clothes, Bern?”

“I guess he must have given them to the Goodwill. I certainly didn’t run across them.”

“Well, forget the clothes. He took ’em off, we know that much, and then he got in the tub. Why the tub?”

“Who knows?”

“He got in the tub and shot himself. No, first he locked the bathroom door, and then he got in the tub, and then he drew the shower curtain shut, and then he shot himself.”

“High time, too.”

“But why, Bern?”

“That’s the least of it. My question is, how did he do it? I suppose you could shoot yourself in the middle of the forehead if you put your mind to it. You could always use your thumb on the trigger. But wouldn’t it be more natural to put the gun to your temple or stick it in your mouth?”

“The natural thing,” she said, “would be to go on living.”

“The thing is,” I said, “I didn’t see a gun. Now, I didn’t go looking for one, either, and if he was standing up when he shot himself it’s entirely possible that he dropped the gun inside the tub and then fell so that his body was concealing it. But it’s also possible that there was no gun in the tub, or anywhere in the room.”

“If there was no gun—”

“Then somebody else shot him.”

“Doll Cooper?”

“Maybe,” I said, “but there are eight million other people in town who could just as easily have done it. Either of the Nugents, for example, which would have given them a good reason to get on a plane.”

“You think they did it?”

“I don’t have a clue who did it,” I told her. “It could have been anybody.”

“Not you or me, Bern. We can alibi each other. We were together all evening.”

“Except I don’t know when he was killed. I don’t know any of that forensic stuff about rigor mortis and lividity, and I didn’t want to touch him to find out how cold he felt. He didn’t smell too great, but corpses don’t, even if they’re fairly fresh. Remember the time a guy died in my store?”

“How could I forget? That was in the john, too.”

“So it was.”

“And we moved the body in a wheelchair. Yeah, I remember. He hadn’t been dead long at all, and he wasn’t too fragrant, was he?”

“No.”

“So we can’t alibi each other,” she said. “That’s a hell of a thing. How do you know we didn’t do it?”

“Well, I know I didn’t. It’s the sort of thing I would remember. And I know you didn’t because you’re not the type.”

“That’s a relief.”

“And that’s all I have to know,” I said, “because it’s not my problem. Because I was never there.”

“Huh?”

“I took no snapshots and left no footprints,” I said. “Or fingerprints. Or cereal boxes. Nobody saw me enter and nobody saw me leave, unless you count Steady Eddie, and I don’t. I took away everything I brought with me and put back everything I took. I even locked up after myself.”

“You always do.”

“Well, how much trouble is it? If I can pick a lock open, I ought to be able to pick it shut. And it’s good policy. The longer it takes people to realize they’ve been burgled, the harder it is to catch the guy who did it.”

“So you left everything exactly as you found it.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Bern? You left everything exactly as you found it, right?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘everything,’ ” I said. “I wouldn’t say ‘exactly.’ ”

“What do you mean?”

I reached out a hand and ruffled Alison’s coat. She made that whimpering sound again. “I kept the money,” I said.

“Bern.”

“Well, I was going to put it back,” I said, “and then I remembered that I’d taken off my gloves to count it, because if I was taking the money it hardly mattered if I got my prints on it. So I would have had to wipe off every single bill, and I’d have had to be thorough about it, and then I’d have had to pick the lock on the desk drawer, once to open it and a second time to close it again.”

“So you took it.”

“Well, I’d already taken it. What I did was keep it.”

“Eight thousand dollars?”

“Close enough. Eighty-three fifty.”

“And how long were you in there? Four hours? Call it two thousand dollars an hour. That sure beats minimum wage.”

“Believe me,” I said, “it wasn’t worth it. I only kept the money because it was less trouble than putting it back. And it was pretty close to untraceable. The watches and the jewelry might lead back to the Nugent apartment, but money’s just money.” I shrugged. “I suppose I should have put it back, even if it meant wiping off each and every bill. But it was late and all I wanted to do was get out of there.”

“But you took time to pick the locks. The ones on the outer door I can understand, but why lock up the bathroom? It took you forever to open that lock, and it must have been just as much trouble to relock it.”

“Not quite. Locking’s easier than unlocking with that particular mechanism, and I’d already made some surface grooves in the bolt the first time around. But it still took some time, I’ll say that much.”

“Then why bother?”

“Think about it,” I said. “Say the cops come and they have to break the door down. They find a corpse in the tub with a gun alongside him. One little window, and it’s locked, and so was the door until they forced it. If you’re one of the cops, what conclusion do you draw?”

“Suicide,” she said. “It couldn’t be anything else. Bern? Wait a minute.”

“I’m waiting.”

“Suppose there’s no gun.”

“So?”

“Then it’s not suicide, is it?”

I shook my head. “It’s not,” I said, “and what you’ve got is a locked-room homicide straight out of John Dickson Carr, and I’ll be damned if I can figure out how the killer could have worked it. Now, I don’t honestly think that’s what happened, because it would have been impossible. I think the gun must have been out of sight somewhere, behind the body or underneath it. If it was suicide, I’d just as soon leave it as open-and-shut as possible. And if it was murder, some physically impossible kind of locked-room murder, why should I be the one to screw it up? Because if the door’s open when the cops get there, then it’s just another naked corpse in the bathtub. There’s nothing special about it at all.”

“I see what you mean.”

“So that’s why I locked up,” I said, “and there may well be a flaw in my logic, but I was too worn out to spot it. The bathroom lock was easier to manipulate the second time around, but it was still a real pain in the neck, and it took time. Do you want to know something? I felt justified keeping the eighty-three fifty. I worked hard for it. I figure I earned it.”

I chased the last bite of my sandwich with the last swallow of coffee and put the wrappings and the empty cup in the trash. Then I returned to watch Carolyn put the finishing touches on Alison Wanda’s coiffure. “You must be exhausted after a night like that,” she said. “I’m surprised you bothered to open up today.”

“Well, Patience called, and that woke me up. And I had to come down and feed Raffles.”

“Don’t bother,” she said. “When I saw you hadn’t opened, I used my set of keys and gave him food and fresh water.”

“When was that?”

“I don’t know, eleven o’clock, something like that. Why?”

“Because he gave a damn good imitation of a cat on the brink of starvation when I opened up a little after twelve.”

“You fed him again?”

“Of course I fed him again. His dish was spotless and he was wearing a hole in my sock.”

“You’re not supposed to overfeed them, Bern.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

I went back to Barnegat Books and opened up again. Raffles was rubbing against my ankle the minute my foot cleared the threshold.

“Yeah, right,” I told him. “In your dreams, pal.”

I hauled my bargain table outside and propped up the cardboard three-books-for-a-buck sign. Sometimes passersby lifted the odd volume, but at that price how much harm were they doing me? I’d have been more dismayed if one of them walked off with the sign.

I perched on my stool behind the counter and picked up my current book, Clan of the Cave Bear. (I’d read it once years ago, but if you don’t think books are worth reading more than once you’ve got no business running a used-book store.) I still hadn’t read the paper I’d bought when I got off the subway the night before, but neither had I brought it along when I left the apartment. That was just as well, because I didn’t much want to know what was happening in the world. I was a lot more comfortable reading about a Cro-Magnon child being brought up by a couple of Neanderthals, which wasn’t all that different from the way I remembered my own childhood.

Around two o’clock I made my first sale. It was only a buck but it broke the ice, and by three I’d rung up something like fifty dollars on the cash register. You don’t get rich that way, you don’t even break even that way, but at least I was selling books. And I suppose the cat could take credit for those sales, because if I hadn’t had to feed him I wouldn’t have bothered opening up.

And, like it or not, I was $8,350 ahead for having dropped in on the Nugents. And I could do what I wanted with the money and forget what I’d gone through to earn it, because that chapter was over forever and I was in the clear.

Yeah, right. In your dreams, Bernie.