The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza (8 page)

I hung up. Carolyn frowned to herself for a moment, then said, “It’s just business as usual, isn’t it? Wanda’s dead but nothing’s changed. Abel will sell the coin in a few days or a few months and we’ll get our share, same as if nothing ever happened to her.”

“That’s right.”

“It seems wrong. I don’t know why.”

“We didn’t kill her, Carolyn.”

“I know that.”

“We didn’t do anything to cause her death.”

“I know that, too. It was some other guys and they had no connection with us. I understand all that, Bern. I just feel funny, that’s all. What do you think we’ll get?”

“Huh?”

“For the coin.”

“Oh. I don’t know.”

“How will we know what price he sells it for?”

“He’ll tell us.”

“What I mean is he won’t cheat us, will he?”

“Abel? He might.”

“Really?”

“Well, the man’s a receiver of stolen goods,” I said. “I imagine he’s told a lie or two in the course of a long life. I don’t suppose he’d draw the line at telling another. And it’s the easiest sort of a lie because there’s no way for us to know about it.”

“Then how can we trust him?”

“In a sense I don’t suppose we can. Not to be perfectly honest, anyway. If he got lucky and peddled the V-Nickel for half a million dollars, say, I’d guess he might tell us he got two hundred thousand dollars for it. We’d get half of that, and I suppose he’d have cheated us out of a bundle if that happened, but would we really have a complaint? It would be hard for me to
work up much indignation if my end of a night’s work came to fifty thousand dollars.”

“Suppose he tells us he sold it for fifty thousand? Then what?”

“Then he’ll probably be telling the truth. My guess is that he’d be most likely to cheat us if the coin sells high and most likely to be completely honest if the selling price is low. And we can be sure that our end won’t drop below seventeen thousand five hundred, because he offered us that much for cash on delivery, so he’ll make sure we get more than that if we have to wait for our money. Unless the coin turns out to be a counterfeit, in which case all bets are off.”

“Is that a possibility?”

“No. It’s a genuine coin. My prediction is that you and I will wind up dividing fifty thousand dollars.”

“Jesus. And all we have to do is sit around and wait for it?”

“Right. What was it the German officer used to say to POWs in the war movies? ‘My friend, for you ze var is over.’ I think I’ll celebrate the end of the war by opening the store for a couple of hours. You doing anything special tonight?”

“I’ll probably bounce around the bars eventually. Why? Want to have dinner?”

“Can’t. I’ve got a date.”

“Anybody I know?”

“Denise.”

“The painter? The one who doesn’t shut up?”

“She has a ready wit and a self-deprecatory sense of humor.”

“If you say so, Bern.”

“Do I criticize your taste in women?”

“Sometimes.”

“Hardly ever,” I said. I got up. “I’m going to sell some books. I’ll call you later if I hear anything. Have a good time at the dyke bars.”

“I intend to,” she said. “Give my love to Denise.”

D
enise Raphaelson is long-legged and slender, although Carolyn insists on describing her as gawky and bony. Her hair is dark brown and curly and worn medium-long, her complexion fair with a dusting of unobtrusive freckles. Her blue-gray eyes are artist’s eyes, always measuring and assessing and seeing the world as a series of framed rectangles.

There was no end of rectangles, albeit unframed, on the walls of Narrowback Gallery, where she lived and worked. It’s on the third floor of a loft building on West Broadway between Grand and Broome, and its name derived from the loft’s unusual shape, narrow at the back and wider at the front. Denise subsequently discovered that
narrowback
is a term of contempt applied by native Irish to those kinsmen of theirs who have emigrated to America. No one has yet satisfacto
rily explained the term to her, although speculation on the subject has sparked any number of drunken conversations at the Broome Street Bar.

I looked at a couple of paintings she’d done since I was last at the loft, including the one she’d been working on that day. I exchanged a few sentences with Jared, her twelve-year-old genius son, and gave him the stack of paperback science fiction I’d been setting aside for him. (I don’t handle paperbacks in the store, wholesaling the ones that come in to a store that sells nothing else.) He seemed happy with what I’d brought, especially an early Chip Delaney novel that he’d been wanting to read, and we had the sort of stilted conversation one has with the precocious and overly hip child of a woman with whom one occasionally beds down.

I’d gone home to shave and change clothes before trekking down to SoHo. I had my Weejuns on my feet again and was comfortably casual in Levi’s and a flannel shirt. Denise was wearing a lime turtleneck and a pair of those forty-dollar jeans with an over-the-hill debutante’s autograph on a rear pocket. Remember when clothes had their labels on the inside?

We had a glass of wine each at the gallery, then moved on to an Ethiopian place in Tribeca where you bring your own wine and eat unpronounceable dishes at your peril. We brought a rosé to see if it really does go with anything, and it did, but not terribly well. Our dishes, hers made with chicken and mine with lamb,
were identically sauced and hot enough to blister paint. They came with a disc of spongy bread the size of a small pizza, and we tore off hunks of this gooey muck and used it to scoop up mouthfuls of the hot stuff. In the name of ethnic authenticity, a whole lot of New Yorkers are relearning the table manners of messy children.

When we got out of there—and not a moment too soon—we walked around for a while and wound up listening to a jazz trio on Wooster Street. We had a couple of Scotches there and Denise worked her way through a pack of Virginia Slims. I tried Abel once or twice, and then we walked north a ways and caught Lance Hayward’s ten o’clock set at the Village Corner. Denise knows him, so we chatted with him after the set and it turned out there was another pianist we simply had to hear at a new club in my neighborhood. I dialed Abel’s number again and we had a quick drink with Lance—we were drinking stingers by this time—before grabbing a cab uptown.

The new club was on Columbus Avenue in the low eighties and the piano player was a young black kid who kept reminding me of a Lenni Tristano record I hadn’t listened to in years. We got out of there when the set ended and cabbed to my place, where I dug out the record in question and put it on. We had a nightcap and threw our clothes on the floor and dived into bed.

I did not find her to be gawky and bony. I found her to be warm and soft and quick and eager, and the music’s
eccentric harmonies and offbeat rhythm didn’t interfere with the pleasure we took with one another. If anything, it gave a nice brittly atonal edge to our lovemaking.

The tone arm had just dropped to begin replaying the record for the third time when she yawned and stretched and reached for the inevitable cigarette. She got it lit and said something about going home.

“Stay over,” I suggested.

“I didn’t say anything to Jared. I figured we’d wind up at my place.”

“And if you’re not there when he wakes up?”

“He’ll figure I’m here, which is cool, but if I’d known I would have called him earlier. I’d call now but I don’t want to wake him.”

I thought of trying Abel again but it would have involved moving.

“I think I
will
stay,” she said, after a moment’s reflection. “Mind if I change the record?”

“Not at all. Put on a stack.”

She crouched at the record rack, her bare behind tilted charmingly in my direction. Bony? Gawky? Pfui.

When she came back to bed I slipped an arm around her and told her I was glad she was staying.

“Me too,” she said.

“You said earlier that you went to the movies last night.”

“Right. I took the kid and we saw the new Woody Allen picture.”

“And you loved it but he thought it was superficial.”

“Yeah, the little wiseass.”

“Do anything afterwards?”

She shifted around, glanced up at me. “A little dancing,” she said, “but no fooling around. What do you mean?”

“You went to the movies and then you and Jared went home and you stayed there?”

“Right. Except that we stopped on the way home for frozen yogurt. Why?”

“When did he go to sleep?”

“Around eleven, maybe a little later.”

“It won’t come up,” I said, “but if it does, I was over at your place last night. I got there around midnight after the kid went to bed and left first thing in the morning.”

“I see.”

“What do you see?”

She sat up, lit another Virginia Slim. “I see why you called me this afternoon.”

“You do like hell.”

“Oh? You burgled somebody last night and you need an alibi, so Denise is elected. I thought you gave up stealing, you swore you gave up stealing, but what does it mean when a thief takes an oath? Good old Denise. Take her out for a meal, pour a few drinks into her, hit a few jazz clubs, then throw her a friendly fuck—”

“Cut it out.”

“Why should I? Isn’t that about how it goes?”

Jesus, why had I brought it up? Well enough seems to be the one thing I’m incapable of leaving alone.

I said, “You’re wrong, but maybe you’re too mad to listen to an explanation. I called you because we had a date for tonight.” The best defense is a good offense, isn’t it? “Don’t blame me for your bad memory. I can’t help that.”

“I didn’t—”

“I
did
give up burglary, and I’m not exactly in trouble, but someone committed a crime last night and used the type of gloves I used to use, and the police found one on the scene and think I’m involved. And I don’t happen to have an alibi because I happened to spend the night alone, because who knew I was going to
need
an alibi? When you don’t do anything criminal you don’t bother to arrange an alibi in advance.”

“And you just sat home in front of the television set?”

“As a matter of fact I was reading Spinoza.”

“I don’t suppose anyone would make that up. Except you might.” She fixed those artist’s eyes on me. “I don’t know how much of your word to take. Where was the burglary? Oh, wait a minute. It wasn’t the one I read about in the paper? That poor woman in Chelsea?”

“That’s the one.”

“You didn’t do that, did you, Bernie?” Her eyes
probed mine for a long moment. Then she took one of my hands in both of hers and looked at my fingers. “No,” she said, more to herself than to me. “You’re very gentle. You couldn’t kill someone.”

“Of course I couldn’t.”

“I believe you. You said they found a glove? Does that mean you’re in trouble?”

“Probably not. They’ll probably catch the guys who did it within a couple of days. But in the meantime I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have someone back up my story, in case anybody ever leans on it.”

She asked what story I’d told them and I repeated my conversation with Richler.

“You didn’t tell them my name,” she said. “That’s good. So I won’t come into it unless they give you more trouble and you need a backup.”

“That’s right.”

“Why didn’t you just tell them the truth? That you were home watching TV?”

“I tend to lie to cops.”

“Oh?”

“Old habits die hard.”

“I guess.” She leaned over to stub out her cigarette in the ashtray on the bedside table. In that position the curve of her pendant breast was particularly appealing, and I reached out a hand and stroked her. Bony? Gawky?

“I feel manipulated,” she said lazily. “And as though I’ve been lied to a little.”

“Maybe a very little,” I conceded.

“Well, nobody’s perfect.”

“That’s the prevailing opinion, anyway.”

“And I’m a little sleepy and the least bit horny, and isn’t Duke Ellington divine? Thief that you are, why don’t you steal a little kiss?”

“God knows where that might lead.”

“He’s not the only one.”

I
woke up around seven to let her out. I have several locks on the door in addition to the police lock, and she was having a hell of a time getting them all lined up. I unlocked everything and told her I’d call her, and she said that would be nice, and we gave each other one of those near-miss kisses you exchange when one or more of you has not recently employed a toothbrush.

I locked up after her and went to the bathroom, where I employed a toothbrush and swallowed a couple of aspirin. I thought about breakfast, thought better of it, and decided to lie down for a minute to give the aspirins a chance to work.

Next thing I knew, someone was pummeling my door. I thought first that it was Denise, come to retrieve something. But it didn’t sound like her. Nor did it
sound like little Mrs. Hesch, my one friend in that soulless building. Mrs. Hesch drops by now and again to pour me a cup of great coffee and bitch about the building management’s failure to keep the washers and dryers in good repair. But Mrs. Hesch is a little bird of a woman, not much given to pounding on one’s door.

More knocking. I had my feet on the floor now and some of the fog was starting to lift from my brain. It was cops, of course, as I realized as soon as I was awake enough to be capable of things like realization. Nobody else knocks like that, as if you should have been expecting them and ought to have met them at the door.

I went to the door and asked who it was. “Well, it ain’t Santy Claus,” said a recognizable voice. “Open up, Bern.”

“Oh, hell.”

“What kind of attitude is that?”

“You picked a bad time,” I said. “Why don’t I meet you in the lobby in say five minutes?”

“Why don’t you open the door in say ten seconds?”

“The thing is,” I said, “I’m not dressed.”

“So?”

“Give me a minute.”

What time was it, anyway? I found my watch and learned it was a few minutes past nine, which meant I was going to be late opening up the store. I might miss selling a few three-for-a-buck books as a result, and
while that’s hard to take seriously when you’ve just stolen something with a six-figure price tag, standards must be maintained.

I got into some clothes, splashed a handful of cold water on my face, and opened a window to air the place out a little. Then I unlocked all my locks for the second time that morning, and Ray Kirschmann shook his head at them as he lumbered across my threshold.

“Look at that,” he said. “Figure you got enough security devices there, Bern?”

Security devices, yet. Anybody but a cop would have called the damn things locks. “They say you can’t be too careful,” I said.

“That’s what they say, all right. Police lock’s new, isn’t it? You gettin’ paranoid in your old age?”

“Well, we’ve had a rash of burglaries in the neighborhood. Four or five right in this building.”

“Even with the doorman on the job?”

“He’s not exactly the Secret Service,” I said. “Incidentally, I must not have heard him ring to announce you.”

“I sort of told him not to take the trouble, Bern. I said I’d just make things easy and go straight up.”

“Did you tell him you were Santa Claus?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because that’s who’s going to have to take care of him at Christmas. I’m not even putting coal in his stocking.”

“Funny. What did you have, company last night?”

“You didn’t get that from the doorman.”

He looked pleased. “I’m a detective,” he said. “What I did, I detected it. Well, look around, Bern. Ashtray full of cigarette butts and you don’t smoke. Two glasses, one on each of the bedside tables. If she’s hidin’ in the bathroom, tell her to come join the party.”

“She already went home, but I’m sure she’d appreciate the invitation.”

“She’s not here?”

“No. You missed her by a couple hours.”

“Well, thank God for small favors.”

“Huh?”

“Now I can use your bathroom.”

When he emerged from it I was sipping a glass of orange juice and feeling more alert, if not altogether on top of things. “You just dropped in to use the John,” I said. “Right?”

“You kiddin’, Bern? I came by to see you. We don’t see each other that often.”

“I know. It’s been ages.”

“It seems I only see you when somebody gets killed. You had overnight company, huh? That’s not bad, two nights in a row.”

“The other night I was at her place.”

“Same lady, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“Handy.”

“Ray, it’s always wonderful to see you,” I said, “but
I overslept and I’m late getting to the store as it is, and—”

“Business comes first, right?”

“Something like that.”

“Sure, I know how it is, Bern. I wouldn’t be here myself if it wasn’t business. Who’s got the time for social calls, right?”

“Right.”

“So I guess you got yourself an alibi for last night. The little lady who smoked all the cigarettes.”

“She’s not so little. There are those who would call her gawky. And I already told Richler all that. I’ll give her name if I absolutely have to, if I’m charged and booked, but until then—”

“That’s the night before last, Bern. The Colcannon job, I’m talkin’ about last night.”

“What about last night?”

“Tell me about it. Matter of fact, take it from when I dropped you off at the store yesterday around noon. Run it down for me.”

“What’s last night got to do with anything?”

“You first, Bern.”

He listened attentively, and I could almost see wheels turning behind his forehead. Just because his integrity’s for sale doesn’t change the fact that Ray Kirschmann’s a pretty good cop. It is not for nothing that he is known as the best cop money can buy.

When I was finished he frowned, sucked at his
teeth, clucked his tongue, yawned, and allowed as to how my alibi sounded pretty good.

“It’s not an alibi,” I said. “It’s what I did yesterday. An alibi’s when something happened and you have to prove you didn’t do it.”

“Right.”

“What happened?”

“Friend of yours got hisself killed. Least he used to be a friend of yours. Before you went straight and gave up burgling for books.”

I felt a chill. He could have meant anyone but I knew without a moment’s doubt just who it was that he was talking about.

“A top fence. What the papers’ll call a notorious receiver of stolen goods, except they better say
alleged
because he never took a fall for it. Somebody got into his apartment yesterday and beat him to death.”