The Burglar on the Prowl Page 13

  “Oh, God,” he said. “Not Graham Greene.”

  “Don’t care for him?”

  “The salient fact about Graham Greene,” he said, “is that his characters get less joy from adultery than the rest of us do embracing our wives. No, I’ll pass on Graham Greene.”

  He settled for one of Evelyn Waugh’s Guy Crouchback stories, I forget which one. He’d read it, but didn’t own it, and enough time had passed so that he could happily read it again. The prospect pleased him so much that he decided it was time to go on a Waugh jag, and accordingly he picked out three more books and wrote out a check for the lot. “But I do still want The Secret Agent,” he said from the doorway. “If someone happens to bring in a copy—”

  “It’s yours,” I assured him. “And nobody’ll get it away from me, either.”

  Nineteen

  I was getting ready to close when Ray Kirschmann turned up like the bad penny he is. “Perfect,” I told him. “Just the man I was hoping to see.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “You’re just in time to help me with my bargain table.”

  “I’d be glad to, Bernie.”

  “Good. You take that end—”

  “Except I ain’t supposed to lift nothin’. Doctor’s orders, on account of my back.”

  “If our roles were reversed,” I said, “and I tried an excuse like that on you, you’d want to know the name of the doctor. Never mind, I don’t want to hear it. You can just stand there and watch me work.”

  “Fair enough,” he said, and did just that. The least he could do was hold the door for me, and he did, being a great believer in doing the least. Inside, he leaned his bulk against my counter while I did what I do to settle Raffles in for the night.

  “Soon as you’re ready,” he said, “we can go over to that gin mill where you an’ Shorty go every night. I was gonna head there myself an’ surprise you.”

  “I wish you had.”

  “Yeah? Why’s that? You like surprises?”

  “I like them when they happen to other people, and you’re the one who would have been surprised, Ray, when we didn’t show up.”

  “You don’t like that place no more?”

  “Carolyn’s got a previous engagement,” I told him, “and I don’t feel like drinking alone.”

  “So you’ll drink with me, Bernie. Lock up an’ let’s go.”

  I shook my head. “Not tonight, Ray.”

  “Not tonight? Ain’t it Friday?”

  “Yes,” I said, “and thank God and all that, but I don’t feel like a drink tonight.”

  “Cup of coffee, then. Over on University, there’s this place opened up that’s supposed to be good.”

  “It’s not bad. A little expensive, though.”

  “No problem,” he said. “You’re buyin’.”

  I was buying a grande latte for each of us, it turned out. I’m sure they’d have been cheaper with English names. I brought them to the table he’d picked out over at the side, and told him Colby Riddle had come looking for his copy of the Conrad novel.

  “So it’s as I figured,” I said. “A legitimate customer ordered the book, and I assumed the fat man was there to pick it up, and he assumed it was what he was looking for, because he didn’t know exactly what he was looking for. All he knew was that I had it.”

  “But you say you don’t.”

  “If I did,” I said, “you’d be the first to know. People are getting killed over it, whatever it is, so why would I want to hang on to it? I’d turn it over to the proper authorities.”

  “That’d be a first. This customer of yours got a name?”

  “He’d almost have to, Ray. These days it’s almost as hard to go through life without a name as it is without a Social Security number.”

  “You wanna tell me his name, Bernie?”

  “Can’t.”

  “Can’t? What do you mean, you can’t?”

  “My lips are sealed,” I said. “Don’t you read the papers? There was a case in Denver where the cops tried to make a bookstore owner divulge what books one of her clients had bought. He was a dope dealer, and they wanted to prove he’d bought a copy of How to Make Crystal Meth in Your Very Own Kitchen.”

  “Who’d publish somethin’ like that?”

  “That may not be the exact title. The point is, Joyce Meskis took a stand, and it must have cost her a fortune in legal fees, but she won. And if she could put her life on the line for the principle of the Freedom to Read, I don’t see how I can do less.”

  “What a load of crap,” he said. “What’s this Polack Conrad have to do with cooking crank at home? You’re blowin’ smoke, Bernie, but it don’t matter. You don’t want to tell me the name, that’s fine. I’ll tell you a name instead. How’s that?”

  “You’ve lost me, Ray.”

  “Arnold Lyle.”

  “Arnold Lyle.”

  “Ring a bell?” I shook my head. “How about Shirley Schnittke?”

  “Arnold Lyle and Shirley Schnittke. Schnittke?”

  “I think I’m pronouncin’ it right.”

  I suppose it was possible, although when he tried for Mondrian it always came out Moon Drain. “Arnold Lyle and Shirley Schnittke. I can see the two names carved into the trunk of a tree, with a heart around it pierced by an arrow. Who are they, anyway?”

  “Remember Rogovin’s first name?”

  “Give me a moment, it’s on the tip of my tongue.”

  “Spit it out, why don’t you?”

  “Lyle,” I said. “Arnold and Shirley are the Rogovins?”

  “They were,” he said. “Now they’re toast. Fingerprints came back, and that’s who they turned out to be, with records almost as long as yours. They both came over from Russia a few years back and went straight to Brighton Beach. There’s a lot of hardworkin’, law-abidin’ Russians in Brighton Beach, but he wasn’t one of ’em an’ neither was she.”

  “He came over from Russia with a name like Arnold Lyle.”

  “Naw, he changed it when he got here. Changed it legally, which musta made it the last legal thing he ever did. Far as anybody knows, Schnittke’s the name she was born with.”

  “Some people are just lucky that way,” I said.

  “They took that apartment less’n a month ago. Sublet it, signed a one-year lease, an’ paid cash. Don’t ask me where they came up with the name Rogovin.”

  “Maybe they were thinking of Saul Rogovin.”

  “Who the hell’s that?”

  “He pitched for the Buffalo Bisons fifty years ago,” I said. “Or maybe Syrell Rogovin Leahy. She’s a writer, and I’ve actually got a book of hers in the store.”

  “That’s nice, Bern. Let’s stick with their real names, Lyle and Schnittke. Names don’t mean nothin’ to you, huh?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “They musta already owned the safe. The rest of the furniture came with the place, but we got in touch with the owner, an’ she don’t know nothin’ about a safe. An’ we contacted the companies in town that sell safes, an’ nobody sold ’em one.”

  “That’s interesting,” I said, although I’m not sure it was. “Why are you telling me all this, Ray?”

  “That’s a question I oughta be askin’ myself, Bernie.”

  “And?”

  “First off,” he said, “I’m pretty sure you didn’t have nothin’ to do with this.”

  “So am I, and it seems to me I told you that early on.”

  “Yeah, but when I start automatically takin’ your word for anythin’, it’s time for them to ship me to the funny farm. This time, though, it looks like you’re tellin’ the truth. An’ I figure it’s an opportunity for the both of us.”

  “An opportunity?”

  He nodded gravely. “Over the years,” he said, “you an’ I done pretty good together, Bern.”

  “On balance,” I said, “I’d have to agree with you.”

  “There’s somethin’ here that a lot of people want. Whatever it
is, they want it bad enough to kill for it.”

  “And that looks like an opportunity to you? To me it looks like an opportunity to leave the country.”

  “If I was to break this case,” he said, “it’d be a real good collar. Now that we know who the Rogovins are, an’ what with all that shootin’ in the street, it ain’t my case anymore. Major Cases took it over. But that don’t mean I can’t put in a little work on it, an’ if I was to crack it open, well, it’d look pretty good for me.”

  “I’m sure it would. Where do I come into it, Ray?”

  “Not every case gets solved,” he said. “Good police work only goes so far.”

  “A lot of the time,” I said, “it goes too far.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Thing is, you got Lyle and Schnittke in the middle of this, you’re talkin’ some kind of organized crime. A lot of the time you can’t close those cases, even though you got a pretty good idea who did it. But whether we close it or not, there could be a nice payoff in it, Bernie.”

  “If we were to find what everybody’s looking for.”

  “Bingo,” he said.

  “You still don’t know what it is, do you?”

  “No. How about you?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “Well,” he said, “one of us might learn something. What do you say we pool our information? You find out somethin’, you let me know. An’ the vice is versa, as far as that goes.”

  “And if there’s a payoff?”

  “Fifty-fifty,” he said. “Except the credit, which I’ll take, because it wouldn’t do you much good. Unless we could get the mayor to give you a citation, Citizen of the Week or somethin’, but I’d have to say it’s a long shot, what with your record an’ all. But a straight fifty-fifty split on the cash.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll go along with your tailor on that one.”

  “My tailor? What are you talkin’ about? I don’t have a tailor.”

  “Really? I figured Omar the Tent Maker got all your business.”

  “Is that a crack? An’ who the hell is he, anyway?”

  “It’s sort of a crack,” I said, “but nothing too serious. And he’s toast now, like Arnold and Shirley, but back when he was still fresh pita bread he was a Persian poet named Omar Khayyám, and he said a lot of good things. ‘Take the cash and let the credit go’ was one of them.”

  “The cash an’ the credit, huh?” He considered the matter. “Well, he’s no tailor of mine,” he said. “I want ’em both.”

  There’s a store on 23rd Street off Fifth Avenue that sells prepaid cell phones. There are, I’m fairly sure, similar establishments all over town, but you generally only notice that sort of place when you’re in the market, and even then your eyes can skip right over them. I’m sure I’d have found one on 14th Street, just a few blocks from where Ray left me to sip the dregs of my four-dollar latte, but it seemed simpler to go to the place I knew about, and I did.

  I gave the clerk some money and he gave me a phone that would stop working after I’d spent a certain number of minutes talking on it. I forget how many minutes I had coming, because I knew I wasn’t going to use more than the merest fraction of them. There was only one number I was planning to call, and I didn’t expect to call it more than once or twice, maybe three times at the outside.

  I left the store with my new cell phone in my breast pocket, and I just started walking, and after I’d gone a couple of blocks I realized where I was headed. I looked at my watch, and I had plenty of time, and this seemed like a reasonable way to kill it. I let my feet keep on walking in the direction they seemed to have chosen for themselves, and before very long I was standing diagonally across the street from a white brick building at the corner of Third Avenue and 34th Street. I’d walked past that building Wednesday night, I’d walked all over the damn neighborhood, but I hadn’t had any reason to notice it.

  I looked it over, and all it looked like was a white brick apartment building of the sort that went up all over the city around forty years ago. Ugly no-frills architecture, cheap construction, ceilings as low as the building code permitted, and walls you could detect a fart through, even if you were deaf. They don’t build ’em like that anymore, and it’s a damn good thing.

  I considered going over and having a word with the doorman, who was on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette. But what could I ask him, and what would he be likely to tell me? Nothing, I was sure, that Ray didn’t already know.

  Not that I expected anything to come of the partnership he’d proposed. Still, somebody had killed the Rogovins (whom I was going to have to learn to think of as Lyle and Schnittke). And the same people—the perps, if you will—had traumatized Edgar the Doorman, sacked my apartment, stolen my emergency fund, and shot holes in a good customer of mine. (I’d never seen the fat man before, but anybody who’s in my store for less than five minutes and manages to spend $1300 is a hell of a good customer. Besides, Raffles thought he was a prince.)

  If I could help Ray nail the bastards, or if we could take some money away from them, or both—well, that was fine with me.

  I walked around some more, wondering just how many security cameras were recording my movements. All of these infringements on our privacy are making it particularly difficult on people who are doing something they shouldn’t be doing, so I suppose it’s not surprising the crime rate is dropping. Pretty soon every criminal in a position to make a choice will choose to go straight, or at least to go into the world of big business, where criminal conduct rarely leads to anything so extreme as a jail sentence, and where security cameras aren’t a factor.

  This is the sort of musing best done in a place where alcoholic beverages are sold, and before I knew it I was in just such a place myself, an upscale saloon called Parsifal’s on Lexington a few doors south of 37th Street. It was that transitional hour when the less hardy members of the local workforce were ready to head home, while the crowd of drinkers who lived in the neighborhood had not yet arrived in full force. Thus there were seats at the bar, and I took one and ordered a Perrier. The bartender, a tall blonde with cheekbones you could cut yourself on, brought Pellegrino, squeezed a wedge of lime in it, collected a couple of bucks for it, and left me to drink myself into a stupor.

  It would have been in a place just like this, I thought, that Barbara Anne Creeley would have met the deep-voiced chap who’d slipped her her first Rohypnol and then a token of his esteem, or lack thereof. I wondered if he might be fishing the same waters again, and I looked around, wondering what I thought I was looking for. Since I hadn’t seen him and had nothing to go by but his voice, I couldn’t very well expect to recognize him.

  But I could recognize Barbara Creeley, and did, standing at the bar with one foot on the rail, not five stools away from mine.

  Except it wasn’t her, as a second glance quickly established. This woman was a little older and a little heavier than the woman into whose apartment I’d recently broken, and her face was harder and her hair shorter. The more I looked, the less resemblance I could see.

  I scanned the rest of the room, but largely as a matter of form. I knew she wasn’t there, and I was right. But I also felt absolutely certain that this was a regular stop of hers. It might not be where she met the Rohypnol guy—the roofer is how I found myself thinking of him—but I thought it very likely was. If I hung around long enough, and poured down enough of the Italian fizzy water, one or both of them was almost certain to turn up.

  Why, I wondered, would I want to run into either of them?

  But I didn’t have to know the answer to that one, did I? I had things to do, and it was time to go do them. I drank down most of my Pellegrino, scooped up most of my change, and went home.

  Twenty

  By 8:45 I was sitting behind the wheel of a bronze-colored Mercury Sable sedan. It was parked with its front bumper about eight feet from the only curbside fire hydrant on Arbor Court. That’s closer than the law allows, but that was the least of my wo
rries, because the car was stolen.

  I somehow doubt that too many traffic cops and meter maids work Arbor Court—how many of them even know where it is?—but if one turned up I was ready, parked so that I could see anyone, on wheels or on foot, who happened to turn into the little street. I didn’t have the key in the ignition, because I hadn’t had a key in the first place, but it wouldn’t take me more than a second or two to start the car up, and I’d do that the minute a cop came into view.

  For ten minutes no one turned up, cop or civilian, and when someone finally did I started up the Sable and honked the horn, because it was Carolyn. She looked around, saw nothing familiar, and kept walking. I honked again and she spun around, frowning, and I lowered the window and said her name.

  “Oh,” she said. “Neat car, Bern. Where’d you get it?”

  “Seventy-fourth Street. I borrowed it.”

  “Oh yeah? Who from?”

  “Beats me.”

  “That means you stole it.”

  “Only technically,” I said. “I intend to give it back.”

  “That’s what embezzlers always say, Bern. They were planning to give the money back. Somehow they never get around to it.”

  “Well, I fully intend to give this one back,” I said. “Cars are a pain in the neck in the city. Where would I park it? It costs a fortune to garage them, and if you park them on the street—”

  “People ‘borrow’ them,” she said, “and take them to chop shops.”

  “You know,” I said, “you’re sounding less and less like a henchperson, and more and more like Ray Kirschmann.”

  “That may be the nastiest thing you ever said to me,” she said, “but I think maybe you’re right. I’m sorry, Bern. I got a little confused. I wasn’t sure you were coming.”

  “I said I was.”

  “I know, but what with everything that happened today I thought you might change your mind. That fat guy getting shot right in front of you.”

  “Riverdale’s miles away.”