The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams (18 page)

“How much?”

“Ideally, a million dollars.”

I wondered what it would be like to need a million dollars. I knew people who
wanted
a million dollars, but that’s not the same thing.

I said, “So you thought of your baseball cards.”

“I’ve been collecting them for years. My occupation is buying and selling, you know. I began acquiring the cards as a hobby, something to take my mind off weightier matters. Can you believe I’ve had a higher annual return on them than on stocks or paintings? And don’t even mention commercial real estate.”

“I won’t.”

“But what’s truly remarkable about the cards,” he said, “is the ease with which they can be sold. You walk in with a box of cards, you walk out with a fistful of cash.”

“Like stamps or coins.”

“I would suppose so, although I think that cards are if anything a little more anonymous. I can tell you this much. In a matter of weeks, without anyone’s knowing what I was doing, I had liquidated virtually my entire holdings and raised close to six hundred thousand dollars.” He leaned forward. “I should emphasize that there was nothing the slightest bit illegal or immoral or unethical about what I had done. I owned those cards outright. I had bought them, and they were mine to sell.”

“And nobody had to know about it.”

“And no one did. My collection was housed in a rosewood humidor in my study. The cedar lining that once protected fine cigars from deteriorating is equally efficacious at preserving cardboard rectangles from insect damage. I kept the most valuable cards in acetate sleeves. The rest were loose.” He raised a hand, and a waiter hurried over to pour us more coffee. “I would take twenty or fifty or a hundred cards at a time from the box. After I’d sold them, I would stop at another card store and buy late-date commons to replace what I’d sold. Or earlier material in very poor condition, like that unfortunate Rabbit Maranville specimen you brought along.”

“So the humidor stayed full.”

“That’s right. I took a few dozen cards from the box in the morning, and I put back that many or more at night. Nowadays, you know, a full set includes a card for every player in the major leagues. It hasn’t always been like that. The 1933 DeLong set had only twenty-four cards in total. The key to it’s the Lou Gehrig card. It’s worth a little more than the other twenty-three cards combined.”

“Did you have one?”

“In VG. In the Goudey set of the same year there were two hundred forty cards, but substantially fewer than two hundred forty different players. The most popular athletes had more than one card. Gehrig had two, and Babe Ruth had four different cards. I owned three of the four Babe Ruth cards, and one day last summer I sold them for a total of twenty-eight thousand dollars. I replaced the Babe with Zane Smith, Kevin McReynolds, and Bucky Pizzarelli.” He shook his head. “Babe Ruth started out with the Boston Red Sox, you may recall. He was the best pitcher in baseball, but you couldn’t keep a hitter like the Babe on the bench three days out of four, so they had him play the outfield. And the owner of the Red Sox sold him outright to New York. He wanted the money so he could back a Broadway show. Yankee Stadium became the House That Ruth Built, and the Boston fans never forgave that damn fool of an owner, and who could blame them? But I think I know how he may have felt, selling the Babe three times over and filling his slot with the likes of Zane Smith, Kevin McReynolds, and Bucky Pizzarelli.”

“And did you use the money to back a Broadway show?”

He smiled at the very thought. “That would be rather like trading the family cow for some magic beans, wouldn’t it? No, the stage is many things to me, but not a commercial arena. My wife and I believe in patronage, and I suppose you could say that we err on the side of generosity in our support of the theater. Sometimes our contribution takes the form of an investment, but it’s made without much hope of return.”

“I see.”

“So I gradually sold off my holdings,” he said, “deliberately replacing the wheat with chaff and constructing a sort of Potemkin Village of worthless cards in my humidor. Everything good was gone.”

“Except Ted Williams.”

“You spotted those, did you?” His eyes twinkled. “Couldn’t trade Ted Williams. The Red Sox fans would hang me in effigy.”

“That’s not why you kept them.”

“No, of course not. They were identifiable. The set’s scarce, all out of proportion to the price it would bring. And you know my brother-in-law.”

“He’s my landlord.”

“And presumably you know of his passion for the Splendid Splinter. If I sold those cards, there was a fair chance they’d wind up in the hands of a dealer who’d offer them to Borden. One thinks of baseball cards as interchangeable, but Borden’s seen my Williams cards enough to recognize them. At the very least, he’d buy the set and then want to compare it to mine. When I couldn’t produce them, he’d know I’d sold them. Which is to say he’d know I’d been forced to sell them in order to raise cash.”

“Which is what you didn’t want to get around.”

“Precisely. Easier and safer all around to hang on to the Ted Williams material. But I sold off everything else of value. And, as I’ve said, what I’d done was entirely within my rights. It was secretive, but one’s allowed to have secrets.”

“And then?”

“Then I got a telephone call in the middle of the night,” he said. “I’d spent an evening with my brother-in-law, always an exhausting experience—”

“I can imagine.”

“—and you called, and it was late and I was tired, and something made me go directly to my study and lift the lid of my humidor. And the cards were gone.”

“No,” I said.

“I didn’t go to my study? I didn’t open the humidor? The cards were not gone?”

“You already knew they were gone,” I said. “Say my call spooked you and you jumped to the conclusion you’d been burglarized. It’s an odd reaction to a late-night nuisance call, but it’s not inconceivable. Maybe you’d scout around to make sure your valuables were intact, but your valuables were long gone from the rosewood humidor because you’d already taken them out and sold them. Why would you dash into the study to check on Zane Smith and Bucky Pizzarelli?”

He bought time with a sip of coffee. “You’re a very perceptive young man,” he said.

“Not that perceptive,” I said, “or that young, either, but it’s pretty clear what was going on. You already knew the humidor was empty. My phone call was a perfect opportunity for you to go public with the information. You could scoot into the study, open the celebrated rosewood humidor, and discover the cards were gone.”

“Why would I do that?”

“To collect the insurance. You had sold the cards, but I don’t suppose you canceled your insurance coverage, did you?”

He was silent for a long moment, gazing off at some dead actor’s portrait, gathering his thoughts. Then he said, “It’s not like murder, is it? Premeditation’s immaterial. Insurance fraud isn’t considered a less serious offense if you do it on the spur of the moment.”

“No.”

“I have to say I didn’t plan it from the very beginning. My original intention was merely to sell the cards quietly for the best possible price. And I did a good job of that.”

“And?”

“When I’d disposed of perhaps a third of my holdings, the insurance premium came due. A floater on that sort of collection isn’t terribly expensive, and I couldn’t have saved all that much by asking them to lower my coverage to reflect the diminished nature of the collection. So I paid the premium in full, telling myself that I’d notify the company when I’d sold off the remainder.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No, I didn’t. Instead, I laid the groundwork for the commission of a felony. You can’t imagine what that felt like. Oh, for heaven’s sake, what’s the matter with me? Of course you can.”

“I’ve laid a little groundwork in my time.”

“Indeed. Bernard, I don’t ordinarily have a brandy after luncheon. After dinner, yes, but not after luncheon. But if I could persuade you to join me—”

“What a nice idea,” I said.

“I don’t know that I would have gone through with it. You see, I’ve always been an honest man. In my business dealings I’ve always tried to be a step ahead of the next fellow, but I’ve been law-abiding throughout. Still, there’s an emotional difference between defrauding an insurance company and stealing the pencils from a blind man’s cup.”

“I know what you mean.”

“I wasn’t sure how best to proceed. It seemed to me that the cards couldn’t simply disappear. There ought to be the appearance of a burglary. We live in a building with exemplary security, and I understand the locks are on an order that would keep most housebreakers out.”

“Most of them,” I said.

“So how to create the appearance of a burglary? If I’d known you I might have asked for your professional advice on the matter. I thought I could just leave the door unlocked after having pretended to lock it. But I wasn’t sure that would set the stage sufficiently. Oughtn’t the premises to look as though they’d been ransacked? What does a house look like after you’ve been through it?”

“About the same as it did when I arrived.”

“Really? Perhaps I was trying to be too thorough, perhaps out of a reluctance to commit myself. The point turned out to be moot. I went to the humidor one day and found it unlocked. I lifted the lid and found it empty.”

“When was this?”

“Monday afternoon. I had luncheon here and got home between three and four. I couldn’t guess when I’d last looked at the cards. There was little reason to examine them, now that all the decent material was gone. I can’t tell you what went through my mind when I looked into that empty box.”

“I can imagine.”

“I wonder if you can. I began to doubt my own soundness of mind. Had I disposed of the cards and somehow forgotten the episode? Because, you see, I’d planned to get rid of them.”

“Who was going to hold them for you?”

He looked puzzled. “No one, for heaven’s sake. I certainly wasn’t going to let anybody know what I was doing. And why would I want anyone to hold them, anyway? As soon as they were out of my house, I intended for them to disappear from the face of the planet. They’d wind up in an incinerator or a Dumpster, I suppose. I hadn’t worked out the details at that point.”

“And instead they vanished into thin air.”

“Someone had taken them,” he said, “but who and why? And what was I to do? Report them stolen? There was certainly not the slightest evidence of a burglary. My policy covers mysterious disappearance as well as theft, and no disappearance was ever more mysterious than this one, but did I dare report it? I was in a quandary. It seemed to me as though I still ought to try to make it look like a burglary, even though the cards were already out of the house.” He sighed. “And then we spent the evening with Edna’s awful brother, and he was crowing over his triumph in having bought a rare book for a fraction of its current value.”

“
‘B’ Is for Burglar.
”

“Exactly. All I heard was the last word. So burglary was very much on my mind, and we came home and the telephone rang, and it was you. Though of course I didn’t know who you were or what you did for a living. You didn’t mention your name—”

“Impolite of me.”

“—and if you had I’d have thought of you as Borden’s tenant, if indeed I chanced to recognize the name at all. I might have, because it’s an unusual name, Rhodenbarr. What’s the derivation?”

“It was my father’s.”

“Ah, I see.” He lifted his glass of brandy and admired in turn its color, its bouquet, and its taste. “As I was saying, I knew nothing about the identity of my late-night caller, but the opportunity seemed heaven-sent. Edna asked me what was so disturbing. I’m no actor, my membership here notwithstanding, but I had only to be myself. I rushed into the study, I unlocked the humidor, I ‘discovered’ the loss of its contents, and I called the police.”

“Who promptly traced the call.”

“I didn’t even know they could do that. In the movies and on television they’re forever trying to keep criminals on the phone while they trace the call. Now I gather computers keep a record of everything. They did indeed trace the call, and remarkably enough traced it to a known burglar, who turned out to be the very bookstore owner Borden had boasted of outwitting. Ironic, eh? But horribly inconvenient for you, and for that I apologize. Did they go so far as to arrest you?”

I nodded. “I spent a night in a cell.”

“No!”

“Not your fault,” I said. “Hazards of the game.”

“How sporting of you to see it that way. But you hadn’t done anything to deserve it, had you?”

“Well,” I said, “actually, when you come right down to it, that’s not entirely true.”

More coffee, more brandy. “When you called this morning,” Martin Gilmartin was saying, “I was utterly confounded.”

That had been my intention. I’d told him I had been fortunate enough to recover his cards, and wondered if he could let me know the name of his insurance company so that I could see about turning them in for a reward. Unless he thought there might be a mutually advantageous way to handle the matter between ourselves. There had been a strangled pause, then a remarkably graceful invitation to lunch.

“Then I gave it some thought,” he went on, “and my position seemed a little less dire. After all, suppose you did go to the insurance company. One of two things would happen. They might look at the cards, assess their value, compare them to the inventory I’d supplied when I arranged the coverage, and conclude that you were trying to pull a fast one. Either you’d already skimmed off the cream of the collection or you’d never taken it in the first place, but in any event they certainly would refuse to have any further dealings with you.”

“Possible.”

“Or they might have the cards appraised. They’re not worthless, after all. The Chalmers Mustard set is worth a couple of thousand, and there are some other Ted Williams items I held on to as well. Say the whole batch is worth ten thousand dollars. I don’t think it is, but we’ll use that as a figure. After they’ve run the numbers, they negotiate with you and arrange to acquire the cards. Then they present them to me. ‘Here you are, Mr. Gilmartin,’ they say. ‘We were ever so fortunate as to recover your collection intact. Have a nice day.’ ‘I beg your pardon,’ I reply, ‘but these are not my cards at all.’ ‘Our position is that they are, and that you misrepresented them when you applied for the policy, which we are accordingly canceling as of this moment. If you institute a lawsuit, we’ll respond by having you charged with misrepresentation and fraud, but do have a nice day.’ ”