The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams

by Lawrence Block

  “‘H’ Is for Preparation.”

  “That’s it. Wonderful book. I think she’s gay, though, Bern. I really do.”

  “Carolyn.”

  “What?”

  “Carolyn, she’s a character. In a book.”

  “I know that. Bern, just because somebody happens to be a character in a book, do you think she can’t have a sexual preference?”

  “But—”

  “And don’t you think she might decide to keep it to herself? Do you figure there aren’t any closets in books?”

  “But—”

  “Never mind,” she said. “I understand. You’re upset about the rent, about maybe losing the store. That’s why you’re not thinking clearly.”

  It was around six in the evening, some three hours after Borden Stoppelgard had paid me a fifth of fair market value for my copy of the second novel about that notorious dyke Kinsey Millhone, and I was with Carolyn Kaiser in the Bum Rap, a shabby little ginmill at Eleventh and Broadway. While it may hearken back to the days when Fourth Avenue was given over largely to dealers in secondhand books, Barnegat Books itself is situated on Eleventh Street about halfway between Broadway and University Place. (You could say it’s a stone’s throw from Fourth Avenue, but it’s a block and a half, and if you can throw a stone that far you don’t belong on Fourth Avenue or East Eleventh Street. You ought to be up in the Bronx, playing right field for the Yankees.)

  Also on Eleventh Street, but two doors closer to Broadway, is the Poodle Factory, where Carolyn earns a precarious living washing dogs, many of them larger than herself. We met shortly after I bought the store, hit it off from the start, and have been best friends ever since. We usually have lunch together, and we almost always stop at the Bum Rap after work for a drink.

  Typically I’ll nurse a bottle of beer while Carolyn puts away a couple of scotches. Tonight, though, when the waitress came over to ask if we wanted the usual, I started to say, “Yeah, sure,” but stopped myself. “Wait a second, Maxine,” I said.

  “Oh-oh,” Carolyn said.

  “Eighty-six the beer,” I said. “Make it scotch for both of us.” To Carolyn I said, “What do you mean, ‘oh-oh’?”

  “False alarm,” she said. “Eighty-six the oh-oh. You had me worried for a second, that’s all.”

  “Oh?”

  “I was afraid you were going to order Perrier.”

  “And you know that stuff makes me crazy.”

  “Bern—”

  “It’s the little bubbles. They’re small enough to pierce the blood-brain barrier, and the next thing you know—”

  “Bern, cut it out.”

  “Most people,” I said, “would be apprehensive if they thought a friend was about to order scotch, and relieved if he wound up ordering soda water. With you it’s the other way around.”

  “Bern,” she said, “we both know what it means when a certain person orders Perrier.”

  “It means he wants a clear head.”

  “And nimble fingers, and quick reflexes, and all the other things you need if you’re about to go break into somebody’s house.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Plenty of times I’ll have a Coke or a Perrier instead of a beer. It doesn’t always mean I’m getting ready to commit a felony.”

  “I know that. I don’t pretend to understand it, but I know it’s true.”

  “So?”

  “I also know you make it a rule not to drink any alcohol whatsoever before you go out burgling, and—”

  “Burgling,” I said.

  “It’s a word, isn’t it?”

  “And a colorful one at that. Here are our drinks.”

  “And not a moment too soon. Well, here’s to crime. Scratch that, I didn’t mean it.”

  “Sure you did,” I said, and we drank.

  We talked about my landlord, the book lover, and then we talked about Sue Grafton and her closeted heroine, and somewhere along the way we ordered a second round of drinks. “Two scotches,” Carolyn said. “I guess I don’t have to worry about you tonight.”

  “You can sleep easy,” I said, “knowing that I’m half in the bag.” I looked down at the tabletop, where I’d been busy making interlocking rings with the bottom of my glass, trying to duplicate the Olympics logo. “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I had a reason to order scotch tonight.”

  “I always order scotch,” she said, “and believe me, I always have a reason. But I’ve got to admit you had a particularly good reason after that scene with your friend Stoppelgard.”

  “That’s not the reason.”

  “It’s not?”

  I shook my head. “I’m drinking,” I said, “to make sure I don’t commit a burglary tonight. For ten days now I’ve been fighting the urge.”

  “Because of—”

  “The rent increase. You know, I never got into the book business to make money. I just figured I could come close to breaking even. I made my real money stealing, and the store gave me a respectable front and provided me with all the reading material I could possibly want. And I thought it would be a good place to meet girls.”

  “Well, you met me.”

  “I’ve met a lot of people, and most of the meetings have been pleasant ones. A nice thing about the book business is your clientele tends to be literate and your relationships with them are rarely adversarial, today’s episode notwithstanding. And, amazingly, the store has actually become profitable as I’ve learned more about the business. Oh, it’ll never be a gold mine. Nobody gets rich doing this. But for the past year I’ve been able to live on what I take home from the shop.”

  “That’s great, Bern.”

  “I guess so. I never actually decided to give it up. I just kept putting it off, and then one day I realized it had been over six months since my last burglary, and then the next thing I knew it was a year. And I thought, well, maybe I’ve reformed, maybe the good moral upbringing I had as a child has finally taken hold, or maybe it’s just adulthood creeping up on me, but whatever it was I seemed ready to be a decent law-abiding citizen. Then I found out what my new landlord wanted in the way of rent and I suddenly couldn’t see the point of it all.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “The rent increase was on my mind all the time, and I couldn’t figure out what to do about it. Believe me, there’s no way to pick up an extra ten grand a month selling more books. What am I going to do, hike the price of the books on my three-for-a-buck table? So I found myself thinking, well, maybe I could cover the increase by stealing a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year.”

  “To plow back into the business.”

  “I know it doesn’t make any sense, but I just hate the thought of giving up the store. Still, I was all right until ten days ago.”

  “What happened ten days ago?”

  “Maybe it was nine days.”

  “So what happened nine days ago?”

  “No, I was right the first time. Ten days.”

  “Jesus, Bernie.”

  “I’m sorry. What happened was I was standing in line to get tickets for If Wishes Were Horses. I picked up a pair for the following night’s performance, but the woman in front of me was getting tickets ten days in advance. She was wearing fur and a lot of jewelry, and she was having a very la-di-da conversation with another similarly pelted and bejeweled woman, and it struck me that I knew her name and address and that she and her husband would be away from the apartment on a particular September evening.”

  “Tonight’s the night?”

  “It is,” I agreed, and held up a hand to get Maxine’s attention, and made that circular motion you make to order another round. “Tonight’s the night. When the curtain goes up at eight this evening at the Cort Theatre, the audience will include Martin and Edna Gilmartin, currently residing in Apartment 6-L at 1416 York Avenue.”

  “They make you give your apartment number when you buy theater tickets?”

  “Not as of ten days ago. But I picked up some information from her
conversation with her friend, and then I did a little research later on my own.”

  “You were planning to burgle the place.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Not exactly?”

  “I was thinking about it,” I said. “That’s all. I was keeping my options open. That’s why Stoppelgard gave me such a turn at the beginning, mentioning burglars and alibis before I even realized he was talking about books.” I stopped talking while Maxine brought our drinks, then took a sip of mine and said, “It would be stupid to go back to burglary, and it wouldn’t work anyway. I can’t steal myself solvent.”

  “Can you relocate?”

  “Not unless I want to leave the neighborhood altogether. I checked on some vacancies around here, and the best I could do was a place way east on Ninth Street with half my present square footage and a base rental three times what I’m paying now, with escalators that will double that figure by the end of five years.”

  “That’s no good.”

  “No kidding. I looked at lofts, too, but I need ground-floor space for the kind of store I have. I need the passerby trade, the people who start out browsing the bargain table and wind up coming inside. To duplicate what I’ve got I’d have to move clear out of Manhattan, and what’s the point? No one would ever walk into the store. Including me, because I wouldn’t want to go there either. I want to stay right where I am, Carolyn. I want to be two doors away from the Poodle Factory so we can always have lunch together, and I want to be a block from the Bum Rap so we can come here after work and get snockered.”

  “Are you getting snockered?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “Well, you’re entitled,” she said. “And it’s good insurance against visiting the Gilhooleys tonight.”

  “The Gilmartins.”

  “That’s what I meant.”

  “The Martin Gilmartins. If your name was Gilmartin, would you name your son Marty?”

  “Probably not.”

  “I should hope not. What a thing to do to a kid.”

  “Well, at least you won’t be picking their locks.”

  “Are you kidding? I never have so much as a beer before I go out. And I’ve had what, three drinks?”

  “Three and a half, actually. You’ve been drinking mine.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, that’s okay.”

  “Three and a half scotches,” I said. “And you think I could pick locks in this condition?”

  “Bern—”

  “I couldn’t pick bagels,” I said.

  “Bern, not so loud.”

  “That was a joke, Carolyn. ‘I couldn’t pick locks, I couldn’t even pick bagels.’ Get it?”

  “I got it.”

  “You didn’t laugh.”

  “I figured I’d laugh later,” she said, “when I have more time. Bern, the thing is you’re talking kind of loud to be talking about picking locks.”

  “Or bagels.”

  “Or bagels,” she agreed. “Either way, the volume control needs adjusting.”

  “Oh. I didn’t realize I was shouting.”

  “Well, not shouting exactly, but—”

  “But loud.”

  “Kind of.”

  “I didn’t realize it,” I said. “Am I talking loud now?”

  “No, this is fine.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “It’s funny how you can talk loud without even knowing it. It never happens on Perrier, I can tell you that.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you have any quarters?”

  “Quarters?”

  “Round things,” I said. “George Washington on one side, a bird on the other. They still call them quarters, don’t they?”

  “I think so,” she said. “Here’s one, here’s another. Is that enough, Bern? What do you want them for?”

  “I’m going to play the jukebox,” I said. “You wait right here. I’ll be right back.”

  The jukebox at the Bum Rap is eclectic, which is to say that there’s something on it to offend every taste. It leans more toward country and western than anything else, but there’s some jazz and some rock and a single Bing Crosby record, with “Mother Machree” on the flip side of “Galway Bay.” In the midst of all this are the two best records ever made—“I Can’t Get Started With You” with a vocal and trumpet solo by Bunny Berrigan, and “Faded Love,” sung by The Late Great Patsy Cline. They are wonderful recordings, and you do not by any means have to be drunk to enjoy them, but I’ll tell you something. It doesn’t hurt.

  I finished Carolyn’s drink while the records played, and I was chewing ice cubes by the time the second one was done. “How lucky we are,” I told Carolyn. “How incredibly lucky we are.”

  “How so, Bern?”

  “It could as easily have gone the other way around,” I said. “We could have had Bunny Berrigan singing ‘Faded Love’ and The Late Great Patsy Cline singing ‘I Can’t Get Started.’ Then where would we be?”

  “You’re right.”

  “No, you’re right,” I said. “You’re right when you say that I’m right. You know what that means, don’t you?

  “We’re both right.”

  “We’re both right,” I said. “God, what a world. What an absolutely incredible world.”

  She laid a hand on top of mine. “Bern,” she said gently, “I think we should think about getting something to eat.”

  “Here? At the Bum Rap?”

  “No, of course not. I thought—”

  “Good, because we tried that once, remember? Maxine popped a couple of burritos in the microwave for us. It took forever before they were cool enough to eat, and by then they were stale.”

  “I remember.”

  “For days,” I said, “all I did was fart.” I frowned. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize now, Bern. That was a year and a half ago.”

  “I’m not sorry I farted. I’m sorry I mentioned it. It’s not terribly elegant, is it? Talking about farting. Damn, I just did it again.”

  “Bern.”

  “I don’t mean I farted again. I mentioned it again, that’s all. Isn’t it amazing that I’ll ordinarily go weeks on end without using the word ‘fart,’ and all of a sudden I can’t seem to get through a sentence without it?”

  “Bern, what I was thinking—”

  “So I’d better not have any burritos tonight. I mean, if I can’t even handle the whole concept verbally—”

  “I thought Indian food.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Or maybe Italian.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or Thai.”

  “Always a possibility,” I said. A thought started to slip past me on the right, and I extended a mental foot and sent it sprawling. “But I’m afraid tonight’s out of the question,” I said. “I must plead a previous engagement.”

  “You were going to cancel the Gilmartins,” she said. “Remember?”

  “Not the Gilmartins. My date’s with Patience. Isn’t that a great name?”

  “It is, Bern.”

  “Deliriously old-fashioned, you might say.”

  “You might,” she agreed. “She’s the poet, right?”

  “She’s a poetry therapist,” I said. “She has an MSW from NYU. Or is it an MSU from NYW?”

  “I think you were right the first time.”

  “Maybe it’s a BMW,” I said, “from PDQ. Anyway, what she does is work with emotionally disturbed people, teaching them to express their innermost feelings through poetry. That way nobody will realize they’re crazy. They’ll just think they’re poets.”

  “Does it work?”

  “I guess so. Of course Patience is a poet, too, besides being a poetry therapist.”

  “Do people realize she’s crazy?”

  “Crazy? Who said she was crazy?”

  “Never mind,” she said. “Look, Bern, I think I’d better call her.”

  “What for?”

  “To brea
k the date.”

  “To break the date?” I stared at her. “Wait a goddam minute here,” I said. “You mean to say you’ve got a date with her? I thought I was the one who had a date with her.”

  “You do.”

  “This isn’t gonna be another Denise Raphaelson affair, is it?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Remember Denise Raphaelson?”

  “Of course I remember her.”

  “She was my girlfriend,” I said, “and then one day she was your girlfriend.”

  “Bern—”

  “Just like that,” I said. “Poof. Just like that.”

  “Bern, focus for a minute, okay? Pull yourself together.”

  “Okay.”

  “I want to call Patience to break your date because you’re drunk and it wouldn’t be a great idea for you to see her tonight. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve just started seeing her, it’s still early in the relationship, and you’d be making the wrong impression.”

  “I might fart,” I said.

  “Well—”

  “Or mention farting, or something. So I’d better not see her.” I took a deep breath. “You’re absolutely right, Carolyn. I’ll call her right now.”

  “No, I’ll call.”

  “Would you do that? Would you really do that for me?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re a wonderful person, Carolyn. You’re the best friend any man ever had. Or any woman. You’re an equal-opportunity friend, Carolyn.”

  “Just let me have her number, Bern.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Right.”

  She went away, and a few minutes later she was back again. “All taken care of,” she said. “I told her you had a nasty case of stomach flu and the doctor thought it was probably food poisoning. I said it looked as though you got a bad burrito at lunch.”

  “And we know what that’ll do, don’t we?”

  “She was very sympathetic, Bern. She seems like a nice person.”

  “They all seem nice,” I said darkly. “And then you get to know them.”

  “I guess that’s one way to look at it. Bernie, where did these drinks come from? We never ordered them.”