The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart Read online

  “Well,” I said, “I do now.”

  “You do, and you can give me twenty dollars right now and I’ll send it in for you. Unless you want to write a check so you can take it off your taxes.”

  I found a twenty and handed it over.

  “Thanks, Bern. I bet you feel better already, don’t you?”

  “How much do you want to bet?”

  “Well, you will,” she said, and tucked the twenty away. “So tell me,” she said. “How were the movies?”

  “The movies?” I said. “The movies were great. Virginia City and Sabrina. What’s not to like?”

  “Virginia City,” she said. “It sounds like a western. Actually, it sounds like a southern western, if you stop and think about it. What is it?”

  “A western.”

  “Humphrey Bogart in a western?”

  “Errol Flynn’s the hero,” I said. “Bogart’s a half-breed bandit.”

  “Give me a break, Bern.”

  “With a mustache and sideburns, and it is a sort of a southern western, because it’s during the Civil War and Confederate sympathizers in this Nevada mining town are planning to ship a load of gold bullion to Dixie.”

  “But Errol Flynn saves the day?”

  “And Bogie’s killed, of course. Flynn won’t say where the gold is because he hopes it’ll be used to rebuild the South after the war. That’s his story, anyway. I figure he wanted a retirement fund for himself. Anyway, Miriam Hopkins pleads for his life and Abraham Lincoln commutes his sentence.”

  “Who played Lincoln?”

  “I missed the credit. Not Raymond Massey, though.”

  “And Sabrina’s with Audrey Hepburn, right? She’s in love with Alan Ladd and winds up with Bogart.”

  “William Holden.”

  “She winds up with William Holden?”

  “Holden’s the brother she starts out with, and Bogart gets her in the end.”

  “Yeah? What happened to Alan Ladd?”

  “He must have been off making another picture,” I said, “because he sure wasn’t in this one.”

  We were in her apartment on Arbor Court, where I’d gone, flight bag in hand, after the credit crawl at the end of Sabrina. No one was home when I got there, unless you want to count Archie and Ubi. I let myself in and played with them and made a pot of coffee, and before I’d drunk half a cup of it she’d come in, relieved to see me.

  We were sitting at the kitchen tub-table now, and I’d switched from coffee to Evian water while Carolyn sipped Scotch. “I don’t particularly feel like a drink,” she said, “but it’s not a good idea to miss a day. It’s like exercise. If you want to stay in shape, you should make sure you get out there and do something every day. Even if it’s just a slow jog around the block or two laps in the swimming pool, at least you’re hanging in there.”

  “I’d join you,” I said, “but I might work tonight.”

  “It’s kind of late for it, Bern.”

  “I know, and I don’t think I will, but I might. It’s called keeping my options open. While you’re hanging in there, I’m keeping my options open.”

  “I think it’s great the way it looks as though we’re just sitting here with glasses in our hands,” she said, “when we’ve each actually got a sound philosophical basis for what we’re doing. I was glad to find you here when I got in, Bern. I was a little worried when I didn’t hear from you all day.”

  “I called,” I said.

  “And we talked? Better bring on the ginkgo biloba, because I don’t remember a thing.”

  “I couldn’t reach you,” I said. “I tried you here and at the store. Two, three times minimum. You were never at either place.”

  “Which store, Bern?”

  “The Poodle Factory, of course. How many stores do you have?”

  “Just one,” she said, “but you’ve got one, too, and that’s where I was.”

  “At my store?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Barnegat Books?”

  “No. Lord and Taylor. How many stores do you have, smartie?”

  “I was closed today, Carolyn.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  “You opened up for me?”

  “Well, I had to go in to feed Raffles,” she said, “and I got to thinking that somebody might be trying to get in touch with you. Like Tiggy, for instance, or Candlemas, or the other one whose name was mentioned. The fat man. Sarnoff.”

  “Tsarnoff,” I said.

  “Whatever you tsay, Bern. I figured nobody could reach you at home, and they didn’t know you were staying here, and you don’t have an answering machine on either of your phones, so how could they get in touch with you?”

  “They can’t,” I said, “which should make it hard for them to kill me.”

  “Well, I didn’t think anybody would try to kill me, so I figured I’d spend the day in the bookstore. It’s not as if I had anything else to do. My store’s closed for the weekend.”

  “So was mine. How did you manage? The bargain table must have been a bitch to move.”

  “For a small weak woman like me? That’s what I figured. I left it inside.”

  “Really? It’s a good draw, it lets people know they’re passing a bookstore.”

  “Bern, I wasn’t looking to do big business. I just wanted to be open in case anybody came by with a message for you. I sold some books, but that wasn’t the point.”

  “You actually sold some books?”

  “What’s so remarkable about that? You sit behind the counter, people bring up a book, you check the price and add the tax and take their money and make change. It’s not nuclear physics.”

  “How much did you take in?”

  “I don’t know, a little under two hundred dollars. Whatever it was, I left it in the register.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t send it to the hip dysplasia people.”

  “I wish I’d thought of it. A lot of your regular customers asked about you. They wanted to know if you were sick. I told ’em you were up till all hours and had a killer hangover.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “People like hearing that sort of thing, Bernie. It’s a humanizing flaw, they identify with you and feel superior to you at the same time. Anyway, I didn’t want to say you were sick or they might worry.”

  “You could have said I had hip dysplasia.”

  “You think that’s funny, but—”

  “I know, I know, it’s no laughing matter.”

  “Well, it’s not.” She poured herself a little more Scotch, hanging in with a vengeance. “Mowgli came by with a shopping bag full of treasures from the Twenty-sixth Street flea market. He said he was sure you’d want them, but I said I couldn’t do any buying.”

  “Is he going to come back?”

  “He’ll have to. I gave him a ten-dollar advance and got him to leave the books for you to look at. If they’re not worth ten dollars—”

  “They’ll be worth it. You did the right thing, otherwise he’d have taken them to somebody else. Anybody else come in that I should know about?”

  “Tiggy Rastafarian.”

  “Rasmoulian.”

  “I know, I was being funny.”

  “You’re joking anyway, right? He didn’t really come in.”

  “Sure he did. I think that book confused him, Bern. He didn’t know what to make of it. He’s a snappy dresser, the way you said, and I guess he’s pretty short, but you made him sound like a midget.”

  “For a full-grown person,” I said, “he’s not.”

  “He’s taller than I am, Bern.”

  “That’s different.”

  “How is it different? Because I’m a woman? Why should that make a difference?”

  “You’re right,” I said. “It’s a clear-cut case of sex discrimination, and I think there must be a government agency you can call. What did he want?”

  “Tiggy? He wouldn’t come right out and say, and then he didn’t get a chance to say anything, becaus
e Ray came in.”

  “Again? Tiggy must think he lives there.”

  “That’s what Ray seems to think. He comes in and makes himself right at home, doesn’t he? He remembered Tiggy, who I guess would be hard to forget, wouldn’t he? Ray greeted him by name, but of course he got the name wrong, not that Tiggy bothered correcting him. He just got the hell out of there, which gave Ray a chance to do what he’d wanted to do from the minute he walked in.”

  “What was that?”

  “What he always does. Make short jokes. ‘Hey, Carolyn, it does my heart good to see you finally got a boyfriend your own size.’ And that was just to get himself warmed up. I happen to be altitudinally challenged. What’s the big deal?”

  “Well, you know how he is.”

  “I know what he is, too,” she said with feeling, “but I’m not insensitive. You don’t see me making asshole jokes every time I’m in the same room with him. He wants you to get in touch with him. He says it’s urgent.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “No, and I couldn’t get it out of him, but he sounded serious. I told him you were away for the weekend.”

  “Good thinking.”

  “I said I didn’t know where but you’d mentioned something about New Hampshire. Bern, do you think those were cops hanging around your place uptown? Because he said he knew you hadn’t been home, and how else would he know that unless they had the place staked out?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “They were obvious enough about it. But I don’t get it. I can see him dropping in, he does that all the time, and I can even see him leaving a message that it’s urgent, even if it’s not. But a stakeout? What for?”

  “Unless they found out about Hoberman.”

  “So what if they did? Look, when I ID’d the body, I made sure Ray got the impression I wasn’t a hundred percent certain, that I was mostly going through with it to oblige him and be a nice guy. If they finally got a make on Hoberman’s prints or something like that, well, yeah, I can see where he’d want to talk with me, at least to get me to rethink the ID. But why would he park a cop in my lobby and two more in an unmarked car out in front?”

  “You could call him and ask him.”

  “How? I’m in New Hampshire.”

  “You came back ahead of schedule.”

  “I don’t want to come back,” I said. “Then he’ll want to pull me in, and that’s the last thing I want.”

  She thought about it. “Okay, you’re calling him from New Hampshire, because you called me to tell me how beautiful it is up there and I gave you his message. That would work, wouldn’t it?”

  “Maybe. Until he ran a trace and found out where the call came from.”

  “Would he do that?”

  “He might.”

  “You want to rent a car and drive up somewhere to make the call? Not New Hampshire, that’s too far, but say Connecticut? Then when he traces the call…forget I said anything, Bern. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I didn’t think it did.”

  “He said you can call him at home anytime. He said you’d have the number.”

  “He’s right, I do. I’ll see how I feel about it in the morning. What’s this?”

  She’d handed me a business card. No name, no address, just a seven-digit number, the first three digits separated from the last four with a hyphen.

  “It looks like a phone number,” I said.

  “Very good, Bern.”

  “No area code, though.” I ran my thumb across the surface. “Raised lettering,” I said. “Or should that be numbering? Since there aren’t any letters. I don’t remember Ray’s number offhand, but I’d be willing to bet this isn’t it. Unless he had it changed, but this is a little too minimalist for Ray, wouldn’t you say?”

  “It’s not Ray’s.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “A man who walked into the store and asked for you. I said you weren’t in.”

  “You were right about that.”

  “He said you should call him sometime to discuss a matter of mutual interest.”

  “Ah, that narrows it down. This is great, I’ve got a card with a name and no number and another with a number and no name. I wish somebody else would come along and give me one with nothing on it but an address. Ten Downing Street, say, or Sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue.”

  “Maybe one of those was this guy’s. I tried to get his name but you’d have thought it was a state secret.”

  That rang a muted bell. I said, “I don’t suppose he was around six-two or -three, mid to late thirties, short blondish hair, broad shoulders? Handsome guy, might have been wearing black Levi’s and an air of contentment.”

  “Sounds like Mike Todd.”

  “That’s who I was describing. Is that who gave you the card?”

  “Nothing like him. This man never wore jeans in his life. He was wearing a white suit.”

  “Maybe it was Tom Wolfe.”

  “It wasn’t Tom Wolfe. This guy was sixty or sixty-five, around six feet tall, blue eyes, iron-gray hair. Bushy eyebrows, big nose like an eagle’s beak, prominent jaw.”

  “I’m impressed,” I said. “All you left out was his weight and the amount of change in his pocket.”

  “I kept my hands out of his pockets,” she said, “so I don’t know about the second part. I’d say he weighed somewhere around three hundred and fifty pounds.”

  I made a sound by snicking the tip of my tongue back from my teeth. “Tssss,” I said.

  “As in Tsarnoff. That would be my guess, Bern.”

  “You had a busy day,” I said. “You did great, Carolyn.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It was a good idea to open the store, and I’d say it was productive. I don’t know what they all want from me or what I’m going to give them, but it’s good to know they’re looking for me. At least I think it is. I’ll know more when I make some calls in the morning.”

  “I don’t know what Ray wants,” she said. “I guess everybody else wants the documents.”

  “Whatever they are.”

  “And wherever they are.”

  “Oh, I think I know where they are,” I said.

  “You do?”

  “Well, I’ve got an inkling. Put it that way.”

  “That’s great. And you’ve got a partner, too. I don’t mean me, I mean the mouse.”

  “The mouse? Oh, Charlie Weeks. I guess we’re partners. In that case I hope he takes care of himself.”

  “Why’s that? Oh, if he gets killed you’ll have to do something about it.”

  “You got it,” I said, and leaned back and yawned. “I’m beat,” I said. “Ray can wait until morning, and so can everybody else. I’m going to bed. Or to couch, if I can persuade you to—”

  “Let’s not have that argument again. You’re not going out? You could have been drinking Scotch after all.”

  “Somehow,” I said, “I don’t think I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning and regret that I didn’t have anything stronger than Evian this evening.”

  “Maybe not,” she said, “but you can’t miss days and expect to stay in shape. That’s my theory. You want me to mind the store tomorrow?”

  “I’m never open Sundays.”

  “Is that carved in stone somewhere? It wouldn’t hurt anything if I opened up, would it?”

  “No, but—”

  “Because I found a book there that I was reading, and I might as well finish it before I start something else. And you never know who’ll pop in looking for you.”

  “Well, that’s true. What did you find to read?”

  “Reread, actually, but it’s one I haven’t looked at since it came out. It’s an early one of Sue Grafton’s.”

  “I didn’t think I had anything of hers in stock. Oh, I remember. It’s a book club edition, isn’t it?”

  She nodded. “It’s the one about the jazz musician who kills his unfaithful wife by throwing her onto the subway tracks.”

  “I don�
�t think I ever read that one. What’s the title?”

  “‘A’ Is for Train,” she said. “You can borrow it when I’m done with it.”

  “Borrow it? It’s my book.”

  “That’s okay,” she said. “You can still borrow it, but you’ll have to wait until I’m finished.”

  CHAPTER

  Seventeen

  I slept soundly and woke up early, managing to get dressed and out the door without waking Carolyn, who looked so blissful curled up on the couch that I couldn’t feel too guilty for taking her bed. I walked across town, pausing at my bookshop only long enough to feed Raffles and give him fresh water, then catching the IRT at Union Square and riding to the Hunter College stop at Sixty-eighth and Lex. I walked six blocks up and two blocks over, stopping en route at a deli for a container of coffee and a bagel. When I got to where I was going I found a good doorway and lurked in it, passing the time by sipping the coffee and gnawing at the bagel. I kept my eyes open, and when I finally saw what I’d come there to see I retraced my steps, but this time I passed up the deli and went straight to the subway station.

  I caught another train, this one headed downtown, and got off at Wall Street. There’s no more peaceful place in the city on a Sunday morning, when the engines of commerce have ground to a halt. It’s never entirely deserted. I saw joggers on training runs, chugging away, and folks wandering around singly and in pairs, intent on enjoying the stillness.

  I’d come to use the phone.

  There were more convenient phones, including one in the bookstore and another in Carolyn’s apartment, but you can never be sure you’re not calling someone with one of those gadgets on his phone that displays the number you’re calling from. I was reasonably certain Ray Kirschmann wouldn’t have anything like that at his home in Sunnyside, if only because he wouldn’t want to spend the extra $1.98 a month, or whatever they charge for the service. But he’d have the resources of the New York Police Department, and thus could probably get the folks at NYNEX to trace the call.

  If he traced it to a pay phone in the West Village, he’d guess I was at Carolyn’s apartment. So I had to go someplace, and Wall Street seemed as good a choice as any. Let him trace the call, and let him race down to the corner of Broad and Wall, and let him wonder if I was planning to knock over the New York Stock Exchange.