The Burglar on the Prowl

by Lawrence Block

  “I’ve no idea. A couple of dollars.”

  “I think it was a little more than that. I think you paid a pile for it, but then you weren’t buying the book. You were buying the photos.”

  I’d just given him an out, and he grabbed it. “I can prove you’re wrong,” he said, and hurried through the dining room to the den, and came back triumphantly, book in hand. “Here,” he said. “Here’s the damned book. And if you can find any photos in it—”

  He riffled the pages and stopped in abject horror. Gently I took the book from his hand and flipped it open to show a mug shot of a blond man in profile, with a scar alongside his mouth. It was fastened to the page with Scotch tape, as were three more photos which I found and displayed.

  “No,” he cried. “No, that’s impossible.” He grabbed for the book, but I snatched it out of his reach. He stepped back, plunged a hand into his pocket, and the book wasn’t the only thing he’d had in the den, because when his hand came out there was a gun in it. It wasn’t a very big gun, but they’re all huge when they’re pointed at you.

  This one wasn’t pointed at me for long. “You bastard,” he cried, and he could have meant me, God knows, but as he spoke the words he whirled toward Colby Riddle and fired the gun. “Son of a fucking bitch,” he yelled, and pumped two bullets into Georgi Blinsky, and looked around for someone else to shoot.

  The cops and goons all had their guns drawn, but we were all in a circle, and no one wanted to risk a shot because a miss could kill the wrong person. “You started this,” he screamed, “you brainless spic whore!” and took careful aim at Marisol Maris.

  Whereupon Wally Hemphill, marathoner turned martial artist, leapt from the sofa, whirled like a dervish, and delivered a spinning back kick that knocked the gun from his hand, following it with a move I couldn’t follow that sent Mapes reeling across the room, right into the arms of a cop and two thugs. The thugs slapped him silly, the cop cuffed him, and Ray Kirschmann read him his rights. I hadn’t paid attention to Miranda for a while, and noted that Mapes had a nice long list of rights. Somehow, though, I didn’t think they were going to do him a whole lot of good.

  Forty-One

  Thanks, Maxine. You’re a lifesaver, and don’t ask me what flavor, it’ll give me ideas. Bern, pick up your glass. Here’s to crime.”

  “And punishment,” I said, and we touched glasses and drank.

  “Punishment,” she said. “Well, sure, why not? For them that have it coming, that is.”

  We were in the Bum Rap, you will not be surprised to learn, on a Thursday evening just a week and a day after I’d gathered much of New York’s population into the living room of the house on Devonshire Close. It was not the first time Carolyn and I had sat down together since what a less original narrator might characterize as that fateful day, since we’d kept our standing lunch date more often than not. It wasn’t even the first time we’d met for our after-work drinks date at the Bum Rap. But there’d been time constraints, or people around, on other evenings, and lunch wasn’t right for the conversation we had to have. It was somehow necessary that there be glasses in our hands, and scotch in those glasses.

  And this seemed like the time and place. Neither of us had anything to do for the next hour or so, nor was anyone likely to pull up a chair and horn in. And we had scotch at hand, and if it somehow disappeared, the faithful Maxine would see that it was replenished.

  “Bern,” Carolyn said, “there are a couple of things I’m not sure I understand.”

  “I’m not surprised. There are things I don’t understand myself.”

  “A lot of things came out in Mapes’s living room, and I was following along okay, but it was confusing. And then the way it ended, with the shooting and all, it seemed like some ends were left dangling.”

  “Like participles,” I agreed. “No question about it.”

  “And then there were the things that came out that weren’t true.”

  “Lies, we call them.”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to say that. It seemed a little harsh.”

  “But accurate,” I said. “There were basically three kinds of information dispensed that afternoon. Some of it was true, and some of it was guesswork, and some was utter fiction.”

  “That’s what I thought, Bern. But now that it’s over, I’d love to know the pure and simple truth.”

  “According to Oscar Wilde,” I said, “the truth is rarely pure and never simple. Some of it we’ll never know, because the only people who could tell us are dead. But I can certainly tell you what I know. Where do you want me to start?”

  “With William Johnson,” she said. “Billy the Nephew. Talk about your impossible coincidences. He didn’t date-rape Marisol, did he?”

  “No, of course not. He never saw her before in his life.”

  “But she said he did.”

  “Does that mean it must be true?”

  “She was very convincing, Bern. I was watching her, and she had tears in the corners of her eyes.”

  “Everybody was watching her,” I said. “The girl has presence. Carolyn, she’s an actress. She was acting.”

  “Well, she fooled me. I knew what she was saying couldn’t possibly be true, and I believed it anyway. You must have told her what to say.”

  “When I saw her,” I said, “she fell apart. Because of what she’d done, violating her lover’s confidence, four people were dead, including Valdi Berzins, a genuine Latvian patriot.”

  “And a positive thinker.”

  “That too. She felt guilty, and when I suggested she might be able to do something to make it right, she was eager to help—especially when I told her what kind of a fellow Johnson was and what he’d pulled on Barbara Creeley. We worked out a story, and she gave me the ruby necklace Mapes had given her.”

  “And you planted it in Johnson’s apartment.”

  “When I let myself in, after I’d left him in the alley swathed in Sigrid’s puke.”

  “I can’t believe she did that.”

  “She’s a resourceful woman,” I said, “with a tendency to get straight to the heart of the matter.”

  “She backed up Marisol’s date-rape story, too. And she was pretty convincing in her own right, Bern.”

  “She’s an actress herself, even if she doesn’t go on auditions anymore. I didn’t coach her, just let her know what to expect, and she did a great improv. But then she’d improvised beautifully getting Johnson out of Parsifal’s and into the alley, so I could get his address.”

  “Because you had to get into his place.”

  I nodded. “I had two things to do there. First, I had to plant Marisol’s necklace where he wouldn’t come across it himself in the next day or two, without concealing it so well that the cops couldn’t find it when the time came.”

  “And it came soon enough. Ray was reading him his rights before the bodies were cold.”

  “I’m not sure of that. Before Colby Riddle’s body was cold, maybe, but I have a feeling Georgi Blinsky’s body was somewhere around room temperature long before Mapes started tossing lead around the room. That Russian was the coldest man I ever saw.”

  “He looked good in black, though. What else did you do in Johnson’s apartment?”

  “I found Barbara’s class ring from Bennett High.”

  “And gave it to her?”

  “Just the other night. I have to say she was impressed.”

  “I bet she was. Maxine?” She pointed at our glasses, and got a nod of assent from Maxine. “Reinforcements are coming, Bern. I’ve got some more questions.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Colby Riddle. When did you start to think he had something to do with it?”

  “Well, I always wondered,” I said. “He never called me about a book before. It’s rare that I get a phone call from someone who’s just looking for a reading copy, and The Secret Agent’s in print in trade paperback, so anybody hunting for it could just drop into the nearest general bookstore, or get online and pick i
t up from Amazon. But Colby was always an odd bird to begin with, and we were up to our eyeballs in coincidences anyway, so I didn’t dwell on it. I didn’t really tie him in until I let myself into Mapes’s office.”

  “You went there to check out his appointment book, and pick a time that would work for the showdown.”

  “And while I was there, I had a look at his files. I was looking for Kukarov, not really expecting to find anything, not under that name. And I didn’t, of course. But then I looked up a few other people, and the only one I found was Colby. And he’d been there for just the reason I’d said. He had a growth removed from his cheek two years earlier.”

  “That could have been a coincidence too, couldn’t it?”

  “I suppose so, but I figured he was tied in.”

  “Yeah, I guess not even coincidence has arms that long. Hey, thanks, Max. Bern, we’re not gonna die of thirst after all.”

  I took a sip of my drink just to make sure.

  “Bern? Summarize what happened, will you? Not with William Johnson, I get all that. But the rest of it, with the photographs and the people getting killed and all.”

  I thought about it. “Well,” I said, “there are a couple of versions. There’s what I laid out, which is how the cops have the case written up. And there’s what Ray knows is really true. And then there’s what’s even truer, that Ray doesn’t know about. And then of course there are the things I did to make it happen.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So which would you like to hear?”

  She grinned. “All of ’em, Bern.”

  “The Lyles got the photographs pretty much the way it came out in Mapes’s living room. Marisol told her cousin Karlis, and he made a fake appointment with Mapes and swiped the book when no one was looking. He got it to his father, who in turn got it to Arnold Lyle.”

  “Okay.”

  “Lyle talked to more people than he should have, and made arrangements to sell the book to Georgi Blinsky.”

  “Principles of Organic Chemistry, you mean. That book.”

  “Right, Volume Two. The book Mapes taped the photos in. First, though, Lyle removed the Kukarov photos from the book, but he liked Mapes’s system, so he taped them into another book, one belonging to the owner of the apartment he’d sublet, and stuck it back in the bookcase.”

  “And that was QB VII.”

  “Uh-huh. Now the way I told the story, Ray found the book in a careful search of the apartment after the murder, but the photos were already missing.”

  “Ray couldn’t find a black cat on a white sofa, Bern.”

  “This is the official story, remember? Ray found the book, but the photos were gone.”

  “Who took them?”

  “Good question. First, though, the home invasion and the murder. Michael Quattrone’s men were responsible for the home invasion part, as he more or less admitted, albeit hypothetically. The cops can’t make a case against him and won’t try, but they know his guys did it. And the doorman’s death was accidental. It was homicide, that’s what you call it when someone’s killed in the commission of a felony, but nobody meant for it to happen.”

  “That must make the doorman feel a lot better.”

  “Quattrone wound up with Principles of Organic Chemistry, which by now contained Mapes’s mug shots of everybody but Kukarov. His main goal was to destroy the ones of Whitey Mullane, his friend and mentor, and my guess is he’ll trash the others as well, if he hasn’t already. They’d be worth something to a blackmailer, but that’s not his line of work, and anyway he doesn’t know who the people are.”

  “And after his men left?”

  “Blinsky and his crew got there, too late to pick up the book, or to recover the twenty grand they’d already paid the Lyles. So they shot them, which I suspect they were planning to do all along, book or no book. I don’t think Georgi Blinsky was a very nice man.”

  “Then I won’t feel too bad that he got killed. What about the photos of Kukarov?”

  “What about them?”

  “Well, I know what happened to them. They were in the Leon Uris book waiting for you to find them. I know that because you told me, and Ray knows it because he was there. But what do the cops think happened to them?”

  “They think they disappeared.”

  “Just like that? Poof?”

  “No one’s too clear on the details. Maybe when they took the tape off his mouth Lyle told Blinsky where the photos were.”

  “And Blinsky took them. And put the book back where he found it?”

  “Does that seem unlikely? How about this—Lyle taped the Kukarov photos in QB VII, then thought better of it and cut them out again. He put them somewhere else, and gave them to Blinsky, hoping it would lead the man in black to spare his life.”

  “That’s a little better, but—”

  “Carolyn, it didn’t happen, so what difference does it make how it didn’t happen? Somebody got the photos, and whoever it was he doesn’t have them now, so what do the cops care?”

  “I just wondered, that’s all. But I see what you mean.”

  “Now what comes next? Colby Riddle, I guess, and Valdi Berzins. Well, you know how the story goes there. Mapes called Colby, who agreed to help out, probably for a substantial consideration.”

  “Money, in other words.”

  “What could be more considerate? Colby got me to set a book aside for him, then told Berzins to go in and ask for it. Meanwhile, a car full of Russians was waiting for Berzins to come out of my store.”

  “How’d they know to wait for him there?”

  “They knew about me from the newspaper article,” I said, “or they knew about Berzins and tailed him to the bookstore. He was waiting around on the sidewalk while I had lunch at your place, so that would have given them time to get into position. Both explanations play out about the same, so you can take your pick.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then Berzins came in, picked up the book, overpaid or under-paid for it, as you prefer, and went out to meet his death.”

  “In a hail of flying bullets,” she said. “A Russian shot him, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And then jumped out and picked up the book.”

  “Right.”

  “So how did it get in Mapes’s den?”

  “Well, that’s hard to say for sure,” I said, “because all the people involved are dead.”

  “Not Mapes.”

  “He’s refusing to answer questions. And nobody much cares, because he killed two men in front of a roomful of witnesses, including three cops and two members of the New York bar.”

  “And a paralegal,” she said, “and someone who works behind a New York bar, and a lot of others besides. But they must have some explanation.”

  “The Russians,” I said. “I’ll tell you, they make even better villains now than they did during the Cold War. They shot Berzins, and they wound up with the book, and they already had the photos. They taped the photos into The Secret Agent, and sold the package to Mapes.”

  “If they already had the photos, why shoot Berzins?”

  “That’s a good question. Hmmm. Okay, try this: Colby and Mapes didn’t know the Russians already had the photos, so Blinsky killed Berzins and grabbed the book so he’d have a plausible explanation for how the photos came into his possession.”

  “I’m not sure that makes perfect sense, Bern. Thank God it doesn’t have to. But getting back to Mapes. Why would he come back with the book? He’d have to know the photos were in it, and he looked completely surprised when they showed.”

  “That would have been a problem,” I acknowledged. “He could have been planning to remove the photos, and somehow forgot that he hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Or he could have been brazening it out. Remember, the photos were taped securely to the pages. You could give them a fast riffle without revealing anything. He gambled that you could, anyway. And on the off chance that it didn’t work, well, he brought his gun along for backup.”r />
  “Or Colby could have put the photos in the book without telling him, Bern.”

  I nodded. “Much better. Colby thought he was doing Mapes a favor, and Mapes saw it as betrayal, and that’s why the first person he shot was Colby. That’s good, Carolyn. If they ever ask me, I’ll trot that one out for them. But I don’t think they will.”

  “So that’s the story,” she said. “The Russians sold the book back to Mapes. For the money in the wall safe, I suppose. And then he lost it and shot everybody, because he saw the walls closing in on him.”

  “And he’d have shot Marisol, too,” I said, “if Wally hadn’t blown out a knee and switched to martial arts. Marathon training just doesn’t do much for you in close-quarters combat.”

  “Wally was terrific, Bern.” She picked up her glass, drank deep. “And so was everything you just told me. Now tell me what really happened.”

  “Well,” I said, “to begin with, I had the photos.”

  “Right.”

  “Of course I didn’t get them until after Berzins was killed. That was on Friday, and Ray let me into the taped-up crime scene on Sunday afternoon.”

  “I’d forgotten that part.”

  “Colby never knew Berzins. I was just blowing smoke when I said he did. He knew Mapes, and after Mapes called him, asking what he knew about a bookseller named Rhodenbarr, Colby wanted to make sure the store was open. So he called, and when I picked up the phone he had the answer to his question. Then, to give himself an excuse to stop by later on, he asked for a book he already knew I had.”

  “Because he’d seen it in the section he always browsed. But if Colby didn’t know Berzins, how did Berzins know to ask for the book?”

  “He didn’t.”

  “He didn’t what? Didn’t know or didn’t ask?”

  “Both. He knew I had something to do with the burglary—even though I didn’t—and he combined positive thinking with diplomatic caution. He left his ID and his regular wallet in his parked car and came to me with nothing but ten thousand dollars and a bellyful of self-confidence. ‘I believe you have something for me’—that’s what he said. If I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about, he’d have gone into more detail. But he didn’t have to, because I was obliging enough to turn around and hand him a book.”