The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza Read online

  In Carolyn’s apartment we got the Chagall litho out of my attaché case and held it up to the wall above the wicker chair. (That was another reason I’d accompanied her downtown, come to think of it. So that the picture could travel south in my case.) It looked good but the mat was the wrong color, so she decided to take it to a framer before hanging it. She poured herself a nightcap while I divvied up the cash. I gave her her share and she fanned the bills and whistled soundlessly at them. She said, “Not bad for a night’s work, huh? I know it’s not much for burglary, but it’s different when your frame of reference is dog-grooming. You got any idea how many mutts I’d have to wash for this?”

  “Lots.”

  “Bet your ass. Hey, I think you owe me a couple of bucks. Or are you charging me for the Chagall?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, you gave me twelve hundred, and that’s fifty dollars short of half. Not to be chintzy, but—”

  “You’re forgetting our expenses.”

  “What, cabfare? You paid one way and I paid coming back. What expenses?”

  “Spinoza’s Ethics.”

  “I thought it came in with a load of books you bought by the yard. Or are you figuring on the basis of value instead of cost? That’s fair, I don’t care one way or the other, but—”

  “I bought the book at Bartfield’s on Fifty-seventh Street. It was a hundred dollars even. I didn’t have to pay sales tax because I have a resale number.”

  She stared at me. “You paid a hundred dollars for that book?”

  “Sure. Why? The price wasn’t out of line.”

  “But you told Abel—”

  “That I got it for next to nothing. I think he believed me, too. I also think it got us an extra five hundred bucks for the watch and the earrings. It put him in a generous frame of mind.”

  “Jesus,” she said. “There’s a lot I don’t understand about this business.”

  “There’s a lot nobody understands.”

  “Whoever heard of buying presents for a fence?”

  “Whoever heard of a fence who quotes Spinoza?”

  “That’s a point. You sure you don’t want a nightcap?”

  “Positive.”

  “Did you know the nickel was worth that much?”

  “I had a pretty good idea.”

  “You were so cool about it on the way up there. I had no idea it was worth a fortune.”

  “I just seemed cool.”

  “Yeah?” She cocked her head, studied me. “I’m glad we didn’t take the ten grand apiece and say the hell with it. Why not take a gamble? It’s not like I needed ten thousand dollars to get my kid brother an operation. How long do you think it’ll take him to sell it?”

  “There’s no telling. He could move it tomorrow or sit on it for six months.”

  “But sooner or later the phone’ll ring and we’ll find out we just hit the Irish Sweepstakes.”

  “Something like that.”

  She stifled a yawn. “I thought I’d feel like celebrating tonight. But it’s not really over yet, is it? It’s probably a good thing. I don’t think I’ve got the strength for a celebration. Besides, I’m sure to have a bitch of a sugar hangover in the morning.”

  “A sugar hangover?”

  “All that pastry.”

  “You think it’s the sugar that’s going to give you a hangover?”

  “What else?” She picked a cat off the couch, set him on the floor. “Sorry, fellow,” she told him, “but it’s bedtime for Mama.”

  “You sure you don’t want the bed, Carolyn?”

  “How are you supposed to fit on the couch? We’d have to fold you in half.”

  “It’s just that I hate to chase you out of your own bed.”

  “Bern, we have this same argument every time you stay over. One of these days I’ll actually let you have the couch and you’ll never make the offer again.”

  So I took the bed and she took the couch, as usual and I slept in my underwear and she in her Dr. Denton’s. Ubi joined her on the couch. Archie, the Burmese, was restless at first, pacing the perimeters of the dark apartment like a rancher checking his fences. After a few circuits he threw himself onto the bed, flopped against me, and got the purring machine going. He was great at it, but then he’s had all his life to practice.

  Carolyn had had about three drinks to each of mine and they kept her from spending much time tossing and turning. In minutes her breathing announced that she was asleep, and in not too many more minutes she began emitting a ladylike snore.

  I lay on my back, hands behind neck, eyes open, running the night’s events through my mind. However long it took Abel to sell the nickel and whatever price we ultimately received for it, the Colcannon burglary was over and we were clear of it. As unpromising as it had been at first glance, when I’d seen we were not the first burglars to pay a call, things had worked out rather well. The loot was out of our hands, all but a rather anonymous minor Chagall litho which, given the chaos in the Colcannon carriage house, might never even get reported. And if it did, so what? It was one of a series of 250, and who’d come looking for it on Carolyn’s wall anyway?

  All the same, I put it in her closet when I awoke the next morning. It was around nine-thirty and she’d already fed herself and the cats and left for her Schnauzer appointment. I had a cup of coffee and a roll, tucked the litho away, let my attaché case keep it company rather than carry my burglar tools to work with me. The sun was shining, the air fresh and clean, and instead of contending with the subway I could walk to work. I could have run, for that matter—I had the shoes for it—but why spoil a beautiful morning? I strode along briskly, inhaling great lungfuls of air, swinging my arms at my sides. There was even a point when I caught myself whistling. I don’t remember the tune.

  I opened up around ten-fifteen and had my first customer twenty minutes later, a bearded pipe smoker who chose a couple volumes of English history. Then I sold a few things from the bargain table, and then trade slowed down enough for me to get back to the book I’d been reading yesterday. Old Spenser was still knocking himself out. This time he was doing bench presses, whatever they are, on a Universal machine. Whatever that is.

  Two men in their forties walked in a little before eleven. They both wore dark suits and heavy shoes. One of them could have trimmed his sideburns a little higher. He was the one who walked to the back of the store while the other took an immediate and unconvincing interest in the poetry section.

  I had Abel’s thirteen hundred dollars in my wallet, plus the thousand dollars I always carry on a job in case I have to bribe somebody. I hoped they would settle for the money in the register. I hoped the bulge under the jacket of the sideburned chap wasn’t really a gun, and that if it was he wouldn’t decide to shoot me with it. I sent up an urgent brief prayer to Saint John of God, the patron saint of book-sellers, a framed picture of whom old Mr. Litzauer had left hanging in the office. No point praying to Dismas now. I was bookselling, not burgling.

  There was nothing I could do but wait for them to make a move, and I didn’t have to do that for very long. They approached the counter, the one with the sideburns returning from the rear of the store, the other still clutching a volume of Robert W. Service’s verses. I had a flash vision of one of them shooting me while the other recited “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”

  They reached the counter together. The Service fan said, “Rhodenbarr? Bernard Rhodenbarr?”

  I didn’t deny it.

  “Better get your coat. Want to talk to you downtown.”

  “Thank God,” I said.

  Because, as you must have guessed and as I should have guessed, they weren’t robbers after all. They were cops. And while cops may indeed rob you now and then, it’s uncommon for them to do so at gunpoint. And gunpoint is something I prefer not to be at.

  “He’s glad to see us,” said the sideburned chap.

  The other nodded. “Probably a load off his mind.”

  “Sure. Probably up
all night with guilt, aching to confess.”

  “I think you’re right, Phil. Here’s a guy, small-time burglar, he’s in over his head. You look at his sheet, you can patch it together pretty good. He teamed up with somebody violent.”

  “I’m right with you, Dan. Bad companions.”

  “Do it every time. Now he’s probably up to his kidneys in guilt and remorse. He can hand us the partner, make him the heavy, turn state’s evidence and cop to a lesser charge. Good lawyer and the right attitude and what do you bet he’s on the street in three years?”

  “No bet, Phil. Three years, four at the outside. You want to close the store, Bernie? We’ll just take a little ride downtown.”

  The fog lifted slowly. I’d been so relieved at not being robbed that it took a minute or two to realize I was being arrested, which is no pleasure in and of itself. They were talking to each other as if I weren’t even in the room, but it was easy to see that I was the intended object of this merry little Phil-and-Dan patter. (Phil was the one with the sideburns, Dan the poetry lover.) According to their private script, I was supposed to be shaking in my Pumas even as they spoke.

  Well, it was working.

  “What’s it all about?” I managed to ask.

  “Some people would like to talk to you,” Dan said.

  “About what?”

  “A little visit you paid last night to a house on Eighteenth Street,” Phil said. “A little unannounced call.”

  Shit, I thought. How had they tagged us for Colcannon? My stomach turned with the beginnings of despair. It’s particularly disheartening to be charged with a crime, I’ve found, when it’s one you’ve committed. There’s rather less opportunity for righteous indignation.

  “So let’s get going,” Dan said. He set the book of poems on the counter. I found myself hoping his last name was McGrew, and that Phil would shoot him.

  I’d just opened the store and now I had to close it. “Am I under arrest?” I asked.

  “Do you want to be?”

  “Not especially.”

  “Well, if you come with us voluntarily we won’t have to arrest you.”

  That seemed fair enough. Phil helped me drag the bargain table inside, so I guessed that Dan ranked him. I locked the door and closed the gates, and while I was doing this they made the predictable jokes about a burglar locking up his own place, and how I didn’t have to worry about forgetting my keys. Real side-splitters, let me tell you.

  Their car was a blue-and-white police cruiser. Phil drove while I sat in back with Dan. A couple blocks from the store I said, “What am I supposed to have done, anyway?”

  “As if you didn’t know.”

  “Right, as if I didn’t. It happens I don’t, so humor me. What’s the charge?”

  “He’s cool now,” Dan said to Phil. “Notice how the professional attitude comes into play? He was nervous before, but now he’s cool as a pickle.” He turned to me and said, “There’s no charge. How can there be a charge? We didn’t arrest you.”

  “If you arrested me, what would the charge have been?”

  “Just hypothetically?”

  “Okay.”

  “Burglary, first degree. And homicide, first degree.” He shook his head. “You poor bastard,” he said. “You never killed anybody before, did you?”

  CHAPTER

  Six

  Herbert and Wanda Colcannon had not stayed in Pennsylvania overnight after all. They had indeed driven out to Berks County, where they’d bred their beloved Bouvier to the chosen champion. Then they’d boarded Astrid overnight with the stud’s owner, evidently a recommended procedure, and drove back to New York for dinner with business associates of Herbert’s and an evening at the theater. After-theater drinks kept them out late, and they’d arrived home after midnight, intending to get a night’s sleep and drive back to Pennsylvania first thing in the morning.

  Instead, they had walked in on a burglary in progress. The burglars relieved Herbert of his cash and Wanda of the jewels she was wearing, then attempted to tie them up. When Herb protested, he got a punch in the mouth for his troubles. This provoked a voluble protest from Wanda, which earned her a couple of whacks on the head. Herb saw her fall and lie there motionless, and that was the last thing he saw, because that was when he got hit on the head himself.

  When he came to he was tied up, and it took him a while to work his way loose. Wanda was also tied up, and she couldn’t work her way loose because she was dead. She’d been hit on the head with something harder than her skull, and the fracture she’d sustained had proved fatal.

  “That was your partner’s doing,” Sam Richler told me. He was the detective who seemed to be in charge of the case, and it was to him that Phil and Dan had turned me over upon arrival at police headquarters. “We know you’re not violent by nature or habit, Rhodenbarr. You always used to work alone. What made you decide you needed a partner?”

  “I don’t have a partner,” I said. “I don’t even work alone anymore. I’m a legitimate businessman, I have a store, I sell books.”

  “Who was your partner? For Christ’s sake, you don’t want to protect him. He’s the one put you in the soup. Look, I can see how it shapes. You retired, tried to make a go of it selling books”—he didn’t believe this but was humoring me—“and this hard case talks you into trying one more job. Maybe he’s got the place set up and he needs somebody with your talents to get around the locks. You figure you’ll take one last job to keep you going while the store gets off its feet, and all of a sudden a woman’s dead and your partner’s off spending his money and you’ve got your head in the toilet. You know what you wanna do? You wanna pick your head up outta the bowl before somebody pulls the chain.”

  “That’s a horrible image.”

  “You want a horrible image, I’ll give you a horrible image.” He opened a desk drawer, shuffled papers, came up with an eight-by-ten glossy. A woman, blond, wearing an evening gown, half sat against a wall in what looked to be the Colcannon living room. Her shoes were off, her ankles tied together, and her hands looked to be tied behind her back. The photo wasn’t in color—which was just as well, thank you—but even in black and white one could see the discoloration right below the hairline where someone had struck her with something heavy. She looked horrible, all right; I had Carolyn’s word that Wanda Colcannon was a beauty, but you couldn’t prove it by this photograph.

  “You didn’t do that,” Richler said. “Did you?”

  “Do it? I can’t even look at it.”

  “So give us the man who did. You’ll get off light, Rhodenbarr. You might even walk with the right lawyer.” Sure. “Thing is, we’re certain to nail your partner anyway, with your help or without it. He’ll run his mouth in a saloon and the right ear’ll pick it up and we’ll have him in a cell before it gets dark out. Or Colcannon’ll find his mug shot in one of the books. Either way we get him. Only difference is if you help us you do your own self some good.”

  “It makes sense.”

  “That’s just what it makes. Damn good sense. Plus you don’t owe him a thing. Who got you in this mess, anyway?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  “So?”

  “There’s only one thing,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “I wasn’t there. I never heard of anybody named Colcannon. I was nowhere near West Eighteenth Street. I gave up burglary when I bought the store.”

  “You’re going to stick with that story?”

  “I’m stuck with it. It happens to be the truth.”

  “We’ve got hard evidence that puts you right in that house.”

  “What evidence?”

  “I’m not revealing that now. You’ll find out when the time comes. And we’ve got Colcannon. I guess you didn’t realize the woman was dead or you wouldn’t have left him alive. Your accomplice wouldn’t, anyway. We know he’s the violent one. Maybe she was still alive when you left her. She could have died while he was unconscious. We don’t have the me
dical examiner’s report on that yet. But the thing is, see, we’ve got Colcannon and he can identify both you and your partner. So what’s the point of sticking with your story?”

  “It’s the only story I’ve got.”

  “I suppose you’ve got an alibi to go with it?”

  It would have been nice, but you can’t have everything. “I sat home and watched television,” I said. “Had a few beers, put my feet up.”

  “Just spent the whole night at home, huh?”

  A little alarm went off. “The whole evening,” I corrected. “After the eleven o’clock newscast I went out.”

  “And knocked over the Colcannon place.”

  “No. I had a late date.”

  “With anyone in particular?”

  “With a woman.”

  “The kind of woman you can drop in on at eleven o’clock.”

  “It was more like midnight by the time I met her.”

  “She got a name?”

  “Uh-huh. But I’m not going to give it unless I have to. She’s my alibi for the whole night, because I was with her from around midnight through breakfast this morning, and I’ll use her if I don’t have any choice, but not otherwise. She’s separated from her husband and she’s got a couple of young children and she doesn’t need her name dragged into this. But that’s where I was.”

  He frowned in thought. “You didn’t get home last night,” he said. “We know that much.”

  “I just told you.”

  “Yeah. We checked your apartment around four-thirty and left it staked out and you never showed up. But that’s not enough to make me believe in your secret divorced lady.”

  “Not divorced. Separated.”