The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams (20 page)

T
he car slowed. I pressed a button to lower the window and had a good look at the house in front of me—or as good a look as possible under the circumstances. There were trees in the way, and a vast expanse of lawn, but what I saw through the trees and beyond the lawn was a house not unlike its neighbors. We were, after all, in a subdivision. A subdivision of million-dollar homes, but a subdivision nonetheless. This particular million-dollar home had its porch light on, and light showed through a curtained upstairs window, and in two rooms downstairs as well.

I thought what I’ve often thought in similar circumstances. How considerate of them, I thought, to leave a light for the burglar.

“Circle the block,” I said, and sat back while we did just that. The car was last year’s Lincoln, smooth red leather within, hand-rubbed black lacquer without, the air climate-controlled, the engine noise no more than a Rafflesian purr. It was more comfortable by far than a bus, a subway, or a Tajik taxi, but none of those would have got me here. I was north of the city, in Westchester County. The subways don’t go this far, and Hashmat Tuktee couldn’t have found his way in a million years.

On our second time past the house I reached to take the automatic garage door opener from the driver’s visor. I stuck it out the window, pointed it at the garage, and clicked it. Nothing happened.

“You never know,” I said, and handed it back. We rode on, and I got out at the first stop sign and walked back. I was wearing a glen plaid sport jacket—it was time, I’d decided, to give the blazer a rest—and a pair of dark trousers. I had a tie on, too, but not the one that had received such good reviews at lunch.

I went right up the front walk, mounted the porch steps and rang the bell, then rang it again. Nothing happened. I had a look at the lock and shook my head at it. New York apartment dwellers know about locks, Poulards and Rabsons and Fox police locks, and gates on the windows and concertina wire at the tops of fences. In the suburbs, where the houses stand apart and each one has a dozen ground-floor windows, it’s sort of pointless to knock yourself out making your door hard to get through. And this one wasn’t. I was through it in a minute, tops.

The instant I breached the threshold, the alarm went off. It let out that high-pitched whine, that shrill insistent nagging squeal that puts a burglar right off his feed. I’ll tell you, if you had a kid who made a sound like that, you’d strangle the little monster.

I had forty-five seconds. I passed quickly through the foyer, angled left through the large cathedral-ceilinged living room, entered the dining room. A Jacobean breakfront on the far wall was flanked by two doors. I opened the one on the right. Within it was a cupboard containing table linen, table pads, and sets of poker chips and mah-jongg tiles. And, right there on the wall, was a numeric keypad, its red light flashing hysterically.

I pushed 1-0-1-5.

The results could hardly have been more gratifying. The flashing red light went out, to be replaced by a steady light of a soothing green. The demonic sound ceased as abruptly as if a celestial hand had placed a pillow over that squalling electronic mouth. I let out the breath I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding. I put my set of picks in my pocket—they were still in my hand—and put on my gloves. Then I wiped the few surfaces my unprotected fingers might have touched—the key pad, the closet door and knob, and the door and knob at the front entrance. I closed the door, locked up, and went to work.

The den was on the first floor at the rear of the house, with windows overlooking the garden. I drew the drapes shut before flicking a light on. To the right of the desk stood a three-tiered glassed-in bookcase, and above the bookcase hung an oil painting of a tall ship on the high seas. I took it down from the wall to reveal the circular door of a wall safe with a combination lock.

There is a knack to opening combination locks. A stethoscope is sometimes helpful, but you have to have the touch.

I had that, but I had something better, too. I had the combination.

I spun the dial right and left and right and left again, and damned if the door didn’t open right up. I hauled out a dozen boxes, each two inches square and a foot long, all of them chock full of two-by-two kraft envelopes and the odd two-by-two Lucite holder, each of which held a small metal disk.

Coins. Besides the boxes, there were proof sets and uncirculated rolls, a couple of Library of Coins albums, and a custom-made black plastic holder in the shape of a shield, housing an almost-complete collection of Seated Liberty dimes, from 1837 to 1891. And there was some U.S. currency as well, a banded packet half an inch thick.

I emptied the safe, piling the numismatic material on the desk and stacking the other items—wills, deeds, various official-looking documents—to the side. I took the set of dimes with me and found my way to the kitchen. I opened the door leading to the attached garage, entered the garage with the set of dimes, and came back without them, locking up after myself.

In a hall closet I found a bag that would do, a battered leather satchel with nothing in it but memories. It held the coin collection with room to spare. I packed it, zipped it up, and set it down alongside the front door.

Now the part I hated.

From the hardware drawer in the kitchen I equipped myself with a hammer, a chisel, and a mean-looking screwdriver. I returned to the den and proceeded to beat the crap out of the wall safe, prying the dial loose from the door, banging away at the hardware, and making a hell of a racket and a horrible mess. When I’d completed the job of ruining a perfectly satisfactory safe, I took the various documents it had contained, the wills and deeds and all, and left them strewn in and out of the safe, kicking them around the carpet. I pulled out the desk’s five unlocked drawers and spilled their contents onto the floor, and I was all poised to open the remaining drawer with hammer and chisel.

“No,” I said aloud and laid those crude tools aside and opened the drawer with my picks. It was almost as fast that way. I dumped the drawer, then bent down to pick up a hundred dollars in twenties. I put it in my pocket, where I found the roll of uncirculated 1958-D nickels I’d set aside earlier. They were in a sealed plastic tube, which I cracked open by knocking it sharply against the edge of the desk. I let the coins spill into my palm and tossed a handful of them at the open safe. Some landed inside, while others rained down over the bookcase and onto the floor.

Perfect.

I walked to the front door, checked my watch, and flicked the porch light on and off three times. I hoisted the satchel, opened the door, set the latch so it wouldn’t lock behind me, and walked to the street. I got there just as the Lincoln was pulling up. I opened the door, tossed the bag inside, and returned to the house.

One final outrage to perform. I took up hammer and chisel again and had at the poor innocent front door, gouging the jamb, ruining the lock. I went back to the kitchen, put the tools where I’d found them, and went back to the dining room, where I entered 1-0-1-5 on the keypad. The green light went off and the device beeped seven times. I now had something like forty-five seconds to quit the premises and lock the door, after which time the alarm would be armed and dangerous.

I went out on the porch and drew the door almost but not quite shut, counting seconds in my head. I guess my count was a shade fast, because I’d completed it and nothing was happening. I wondered if I’d done something wrong, and then it began, that horrible high-pitched whistling whine.

We’d have forty-five seconds of that, but I didn’t have to stand around and endure it I walked quickly down the flagstone path to the curb, once again reaching it just as the black Lincoln pulled up. “Twenty-three,” I said, opening the door. “Twenty-four. Twenty-five. Twenty-six.”

“Everything go all right?”

“Like clockwork,” I said, as we pulled away from the curb. “Thirty-one. Thirty-two.”

“And the set of dimes in plastic?”

“In the garage,” I said. “On a high shelf all the way over on the right, in a box marked ‘Games.’ About halfway down in the box, between Parcheesi and Stratego. Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine.”

By the time I got to forty-five we had turned a corner and covered a couple hundred yards. I had the window down, and when the alarm went off I could hear it clearly. If we’d had Luke Santangelo stuffed in the trunk, it would have been enough to wake him. They’d hear it all over the neighborhood, even as they’d see the board light up in the offices of the security company in the next town over.

But before anybody could do anything about it, Marty Gilmartin and I would be back in Manhattan.

I got out at the corner. No need for my talkative doorman to see me hop out of a Lincoln.

“I’ll want to see exactly what we’ve got here,” I said, laying a hand on the satchel. “I know a man who’s very good with coins, but even so I like to know what I’m selling. I’ve got last years Red Book upstairs, which is all I need to price the U.S. material. I’ll have to trust him on the foreign, but there didn’t look to be too much of that. Oh, that reminds me.” I unzipped the bag, fished around for the packet of currency, and tore off the paper wrapper.

“What’s that?”

“Money,” I said, dealing out hundred-dollar bills like a hand of gin rummy, one for him, one for me, one for him, one for me. “Something like five thousand would be my guess, but we’ll just divvy it up.”

“You were just going to take the coin collection. That was the agreement.”

“Well, it has to look right,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe what a mess I made, all for the sake of creating the proper appearance. Did you want me to spoil the illusion by leaving a wad of cash in the safe?”

“No, but—”

“In New York,” I said, “if I left cash lying around you could count on the cops to take it. Maybe they’re honest here, in which case they’d report it to the IRS and let Mr. McEwan explain where it came from.” One for him, one for me, one for him, one for me. “You think he’d prefer it that way?”

“No, you’re quite right. But maybe you should keep all the cash for yourself. You found it, after all.”

I shook my head. “It’s share and share alike. There, it comes out even. Oh, one more thing.” I got five twenties from my pocket. “In the desk. Again, how would it look if I left them? Two for you and two for me, and have you got a ten by any chance? Wait a minute, I’ve got it. There you go.”

He looked at the bills he was holding. He said, “The dimes are in a box of games in the garage? Between the Parcheesi and…what was the other one you mentioned?”

“Stratego.”

“I’ll make a note of that. The dimes are the only collection Jack cares about. His father gave him one he’d found in a drawer when Jack was a boy, and that started him collecting. I think the set’s worth forty or fifty thousand dollars. At least that’s what they’re insured for.”

“I didn’t examine them too closely,” I said, “but the condition looked good, and there were only a couple of dates missing.”

“It must have been hard to leave them behind.”

I shook my head. “That was the deal. Besides, you’d take a beating fencing anything that specialized. No, the hard part was wrecking the safe and leaving a mess. But I forced myself.”

I watched as he put the money in his jacket pocket. He’d already participated fully in a felony, but actually taking the money evidently had some strong symbolic value for him, because he straightened up behind the wheel and gave a little sigh when he had done so.

“Jack’s in Atlanta,” he said. “He and Betty flew down for the golf. Said he almost didn’t go this year, the way the market’s been behaving. Said he’d thought about selling the coins, but how would that look? And he’d have hated to part with those dimes.”

“Now he won’t have to. But he’d better figure on keeping them out of sight for a year or two.”

“I’ll make sure he knows that.” A slow smile spread on his face. “What’s the line from
Casablanca?
At the very end, Bogart to Claude Rains.”

“This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”

“Indeed. And a profitable one. Get some sleep, Bernie. I’ve a feeling the next few days are going to be busy ones.”

H
e was right. It was a busy week.

Tuesday night, while an eminent cardiologist and his wife were at the Met oohing and ahing over David Hockney’s sets for
Die Zauberflöte,
Marty and I were on the way to their house in Port Washington. A security patrol watched over the neighborhood according to a strict schedule; armed with that schedule, we synchronized our own movements accordingly.

There was no alarm this time, just a formidable door with a brass lion’s-head knocker and one of those legendary Poulard locks, to which I laid a successful siege. Inside, I dumped a couple of drawers without bothering to see what hit the floor, hurrying directly to the master bedroom, where the doctor’s wife kept her jewelry in a handsome dresser-top chest with five inch-deep drawers and a mirrored lid. I grabbed a pillow off one of the twin beds, stripped it of its pillowcase, and scooped all of the jewelry into the pillowcase. I dumped a drawer or two, knocked over a lamp, and hurried downstairs. I was right on schedule, and so were the security forces; I hunkered down by the living-room picture window and watched in admiration as they slowed their prowl car in front of the house and beamed their pivoting spotlight here and there. Then, satisfied that all was well, they pressed on.

For variety’s sake, I left the Poulard’s pickproof reputation unsullied, picking it shut behind me and scuttling around to the side of the house, where I kicked in a basement window and made a mess of a flower bed. Then I swung the pillowcase over my shoulder, checked my watch, and met the Lincoln out front.

“Poor Alex,” Marty said. “A couple of wrong moves in the commodities market put his back against the wall. Unfortunately, frozen pork bellies aren’t like stamps and coins and baseball cards. You can’t cash them in when times get tough.”

“Or arrange to have them stolen.”

“Quite. He swallowed his pride and went to Frieda, told her the situation. Pointed out that they had a substantial amount of money invested in her jewelry, and that it could see them through a tight spot. Perhaps they might sell some of the pieces she never wore anyway.” He shook his head. “The woman wouldn’t hear of it. Well, he suggested, it was only a temporary difficulty. A few triple-bypass operations would set them right again, but in the meantime suppose they pledged the odd tiara as collateral with Provident Loan.” He chuckled. “Alex said she was aghast. Pawn her jewelry? Hock her bracelets at some corner pawnshop? Not a chance.”

I told him I’d barely had time to look at what I was taking, but the quality looked good.

“The insurance coverage is close to two hundred thousand,” he said. “Of course one dresses for the opera, so whatever she wore tonight will have escaped us.” I said it was a shame they couldn’t have gone square dancing instead, and he smiled at the very idea. “One thing, Bernie. There should be a jade-and-diamond necklace with matching earrings. Everything else is ours to sell, but Alex would like that back.”

“No problem,” I said, “but how’s he going to manage that? Won’t it tip her off that he staged the whole thing?”

“Oh, it’s not for Frieda,” he said. “But Alex is especially fond of that particular ensemble. He wants to give it to his girlfriend.”

Wednesday I didn’t need the Lincoln, or Marty’s company either. I closed the store in the middle of the afternoon, hung the clock face in the window, and told Raffles to take messages if anybody called. I caught a cab and got out half a block from a four-story townhouse in Murray Hill. On the parlor floor, I found what I was looking for in a place of honor over the living-room fireplace. It was an oil painting about twelve inches high and sixteen inches wide, a rural landscape showing some fat cattle taking shelter beneath an enormous tree.

I cut it from its frame and rolled the canvas so that it would fit wrapped around my forearm between my shirtsleeve and my jacket. Minutes later I was on Third Avenue, my hand raised to summon a taxi that took me uptown to Marty’s apartment. His eyes widened when I walked in empty-handed. Then I took off my jacket and he smiled and reached for the canvas.

“Here we are,” he said, unrolling it. “Many’s the time I’ve admired this little beauty over the years. ‘Best investment I ever made,’ George Hanley always said. ‘Gave ten thousand dollars for it to a little mustachioed froggy art dealer on the Boulevard Haussmann. Barb thought I was crazy, but we both liked it and it made a nice souvenir of the trip. I’ll be honest with you, I never even heard of the artist at the time. Courbet? I didn’t know Courbet from Beaujolais.’ He never tired of that phrase, Bernie. ‘I didn’t know Courbet from Beaujolais.’ ”

“Well, it has a nice ring to it.”

“It turned out to be worth two or three times what he paid for it, and that was twenty years ago. When the art market went crazy, the value of the little Courbet just kept climbing. A few months ago George realized he had a painting worth several hundred thousand dollars, and that he could use the money and they could hang something else over the fireplace.”

“But his wife didn’t want to sell it?”

“It was her idea in the first place. George had a chap from Christie’s look at it, and that’s when he got the bad news. The little Frenchman with the mustache had been the screwer, not the screwee. George had paid ten thousand dollars for a fake. He felt so abashed he couldn’t even tell his wife. ‘Oh, we can’t sell our Courbet,’ he told Barbara. ‘It would be like auctioning off a member of the family. And it just keeps going up in value. We’d be crazy to sell.’ What he said to me, one afternoon at the club when some single-malt scotch had loosened his tongue, was that the most infuriating thing was what he’d paid over the years for insurance. ‘The premium kept going up,’ he said, ‘to reflect the steady increases in value. Turns out I’ve just been throwing good money after bad. I’ll never see a dime of it back.’ The other day I took him aside and reminded him of our conversation. What you said about never seeing any of the money back,’ I said. ‘You know, George, that’s not necessarily so.’ ”

“The insurance company won’t know it’s a fake.”

“Of course not. The man from Christie’s wouldn’t have run off and told them. But if they did know, they’d refuse to honor the claim.”

“Obviously.”

“But suppose George had told them the truth as soon as he’d learned it. Unwittingly, he’d been insuring a worthless painting for twenty years. That being the case, the company had been taking his premiums without assuming any actual risk. So, now that the actual circumstances had become known, would they agree to refund the premiums he had paid?”

“Obviously not.”

“That’s why I see nothing wrong with defrauding the sons of bitches,” he said with feeling. “They’ve taken larceny and institutionalized it.” He clucked his tongue at the
faux
Courbet and carried it over to the fireplace.

“Wait,” I said.

“George never wants to see the thing again,” he said, “and I don’t suppose you could find a customer for it, do you?”

“I wouldn’t know how to sell it even if it were real.”

“I shouldn’t think so, not without provenance. George gave me ten thousand dollars on signature, as it were, as an advance against half the settlement from the insurance company. The painting’s currently insured for $320,000, but they’ll very likely stall, and they may even try to chisel.” He shook his head. “The swine. If they live up to their part of the deal, you and I walk away with eighty thousand apiece.”

“That would be great,” I said.

“So I guess we can afford to consign this canvas to the flames.”

“We can afford to,” I said, “but do we have to? The guy from Christie’s could be wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time. And even if it is a fake Courbet, so what? It’s a real something, even if it’s only a real fake. I’ll tell you this, it’d look great in my apartment.”

“And I imagine it would make a good souvenir.”

“That too,” I said.

It was a full week, what with the appointments Marty arranged and the follow-up visits I had to make to various gentlemen who would buy choice material even if one couldn’t show clear title to it. Coins, jewelry, postage stamps, a Matisse litho, all passed through my hands. The weekend was busy, too, and when I opened up the following Monday I spent most of the morning on the telephone. I had a whole series of conversations with Wally Hemphill, and after the last of these I called time out and looked around for the cat. When I couldn’t find him I started crumpling a sheet of paper, and the sound drew him. He knew it was time for another training session.

I had the floor nicely littered with paper balls when Carolyn showed up. “Look at that!” I cried. “Did you see what he just did?”

“What he always does,” she said. “He killed a piece of crumpled-up paper. Bern, I went to the Russian deli. I got an Alexander Zinoviev for you and a Lavrenti Beria for myself, but I can’t remember which is which. What do you say we each have half of each?”

“That’ll be fine,” I said. “Look! I swear the training’s making a difference. His reflexes are getting sharper every day.”

“If you say so, Bern.”

“The son of a gun could play shortstop,” I said. “Did you see the way he went to his left on that one? Rabbit Maranville, eat your heart out.”

“Whatever you say, Bern.” She pulled up a chair. “Bern, we have to talk.”

“Eat first,” I said. “Then we’ll talk.”

“Bern, I’m serious. Ray stopped by this morning. I was vacuuming a bull mastiff and there was Ray, standing there with his dewlaps hanging out.”

“You should report him.”

“Bern, it’s a sign of how desperate he is. You know how Ray and I get along.”

“Like oil and water.”

“Like Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bern, but he came into the Poodle Factory because he’s concerned about you. And he’s convinced you could clear up this case for him if you put your mind to it.”

I chewed thoughtfully. “This must be the Lavrenti Beria,” I said. “With the raw garlic and the horseradish.”

“And I have to tell you I agree with him.”

“That’s good,” I said. “It’s even better that garlic agrees with me, because the Zinoviev seems to be laced with it, too. It’s probably just as well that I don’t have a date tonight.”

“He says the Nugents are back. He’s been to see them a couple of times. He’s really investigating in a big way. It’s not like him, Bern.”

“He must smell money.”

“I don’t know what he smells. Not Luke Santangelo, because they must have aired out the place by now. Bern—”

I tossed the Zinoviev wrapper and watched Raffles make his move. He was on it like a pike on a minnow. “He likes sandwich wrappings from the deli best of all,” I told Carolyn. “The smell makes him nuts.”

“You should get him a catnip mouse, Bern. He’d play with it by the hour.”

“You don’t get it, do you? I don’t want to buy toys for him, Carolyn. He’s not a pet.”

“He’s on staff.”

“That’s right. The last thing I want to do is play with him. These are training sessions, they’re for his reflexes.”

“I keep forgetting. I look at the two of you and it looks for all the world like you’re having fun, so I forget that the relationship is essentially serious.”

“Work can be fun,” I said, “if you’re goal-oriented.”

“Like you and Raffles.”

“That’s right,” I said. “There’s something else you should know, besides the fact that Raffles is not a pet, and that’s that I’m no Kinsey Millhone.”

“You think I don’t know that, Bern? You’ve been a lot of things in your life, but you’ve never been a lesbian.”

“What I mean,” I said, “is that I’m not a detective. I don’t solve crimes.”

“You have in the past, Bern.”

“Once or twice.”

“More than that.”

“A few times,” I conceded. “But it just happened. One way or another I wound up in a jam and in the course of getting out of it I happened to stumble on the solution to a homicide. It was serendipity, that’s all. I was looking for one thing and I found something else.”

“And that’s what happened here, Bern. You were looking for something to steal and you found a dead body.”

“And I went home, remember?”

“But you went back.”

“Only to go home again. Thomas Wolfe was wrong, you can go home again, and I did. I’m out of it, Carolyn. They dropped the charges, did I tell you that? For me the case is over.” I flipped a paper ball, but Raffles was still busy killing the last one. “If you want somebody to solve it,” I said, “why don’t you try the cat?”

“The cat?”

“Raffles,” I said. “Maybe he’ll figure it out for you, like in those books by What’s-her-name.”

“Lillian Jackson Braun.”

“That’s the one. Everybody’s stymied, and then the genius cat breaks a T’ang vase or coughs up a hairball, and that provides the vital clue that nails another killer. I forget his name, this crime-solving cat.”

“It’s Ko-Ko. He’s Siamese.”

“Good for him. He’s been doing this forever, hasn’t he? Ko-Ko must be getting a little long in the fang by now. She ought to call the next one
The Cat Who Lived Forever.
I can’t believe some Siamese is that much sharper than old Raffles here. Go ahead, ask him who did it. Maybe he’ll knock a book off the shelves and answer all your questions.”

“You think you’re pretty funny, don’t you, Bern?”

“Well…”

“Well, what the hell,” she said. “Raffles, what’s the solution to the mystery of the stiff in the tub?”

Raffles stopped what he was doing, which was the systematic demolition of one of the sandwich-wrapper mice. He backed away from it, extended his front paws, stretched, extended his back paws, stretched again, and then arched his back, looking like something that belonged on a Halloween card. Then he wagged the tail he didn’t have—I can’t think of another way to say it—and leaped straight up in the air, grabbing at something only he could see. He landed on all fours, in the manner of his tribe, and turned slowly around, settled on his haunches, and stared at us.

I said, “Well, I’ll be damned.”

“We all will, Bern, but what’s that got to do with the price of Meow Mix? What was all that about, anyway?”