The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza

by Lawrence Block

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And you don’t have to believe in her. Just put me in the lineup and let Colcannon fail to identify me. Then I can go home.”

  “Who said anything about a lineup?”

  “Nobody had to. You brought me here instead of the precinct because this is where the mug shots are and you’ve got Colcannon looking through them. You haven’t arrested me yet because he took a look at my picture and shook his head. Well, who knows, maybe I’m not photogenic, and it’s worth letting him have a look at me in person, so that’s why I’m here. Now you’ll put me in a lineup and he’ll say the same thing and I’ll go back to my store and try to sell some books. It’s hard to do much business when the store’s closed.”

  “You really don’t think he’ll identify you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t get it,” he said. He got to his feet. “Come on along,” he said. “Let’s take a walk.”

  We took a walk down the corridor and came to a door with frosted glass in the window and nothing written on it. “I’m not sure whether we want to bother with a lineup or not,” he said, holding the door for me. “Whyntcha have a seat in here while I talk to some people and find out how they want to proceed?”

  I went in and he closed the door. There was one chair in the room and it faced a large mirror, and Mrs. Rhodenbarr didn’t raise no fools, so I knew right away why I was supposed to cool my heels in this particular little cubicle. What we were going to have was a oneman lineup, an unofficial lineup, and if it came out negative there wouldn’t be a record of it to prejudice any case the State might decide to bring against one Bernard Grimes Rhodenbarr.

  The mirror, I was bright enough to figure out, was of the one-way-glass variety. Herbert Franklin Colcannon would be positioned on the other side of it, where he could see me while I could not see him.

  Fine with me.

  In fact, I decided after a moment’s reflection, it was more than fine with me, and the one thing I wanted to make sure of was that he got a good look at me, a good enough one to convince him once and for all that he had never seen me before. So I walked right up to the mirror, approaching it as if I thought it were indeed a mirror and nothing more. It was hard to repress the urge to make a face, but I squelched the impulse and adjusted the knot in my tie instead.

  A funny thing about one-way glass. When you get close enough to it you can see through it. The vision you get is imperfect, because there’s still a mirror effect and you get a sort of double image like a piece of twice-exposed photographic film, seeing what’s in front of you and what’s behind you at the same time. What I saw for a while was an empty room, and then I saw Richler bring in a man in a gray suit with a bandage on his head and a lot of swelling and discoloration around it.

  He approached the mirror and stared at me, and I stared right back at him. It took an enormous effort of will to avoid winking or extending my tongue or rolling my eyes or doing something similarly hare-brained. Instead I took my time looking him over.

  He wasn’t terribly impressive. He was an inch or two below medium height and he looked to be about fifty-five. An oval face, slate-gray hair, a small clipped mustache with some white in with the gray. A snub nose, a small mouth. Eyes an indeterminate color somewhere between brown and green. If you saw him you’d guess banker first, tax lawyer second. He didn’t particularly look like a man who’d just lost a glamorous wife and a $500,000 coin, but then he didn’t look like a man who’d had either of them in the first place.

  He looked at me and I looked at him, and he shook his head from side to side, solemn as an owl.

  I don’t think I smiled, not just then, but when he turned at Richler’s touch and followed the detective out of the room I grinned like a Hallowe’en pumpkin. When Richler walked in a few minutes later I was sitting in the chair cleaning my fingernails with the blunt end of a toothpick. I looked up brightly and asked him if they were going to put me in a lineup.

  “You’re cute as a button,” he said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Straightening your goddamn tie. No, there’s not going to be a lineup, Rhodenbarr. You can go home now.”

  “The police realize their mistake?”

  “I don’t think we made one. I think you pulled that burglary last night. I think you were upstairs goosing the wall safe while your partners were roughing up the Colcannons. That way he never got a look at you, and you think that’s gonna save your neck. It’s not. We’ll still get your pals, and we’ve still got evidence against you, and you’ll wind up taking twice the fall you’d take if you cooperated. But you’re a wiseass and it’s your funeral.”

  “I’m just a used-book dealer.”

  “Sure you are. What you can do right now is get the hell out of here. You’re not bright enough to recognize it when someone’s trying to give you a break. If you wake up in a couple of hours, give me a call. But you don’t want to wait too long. If we get one of your partners first, he’ll be the one turning state’s evidence and what’ll we need with you? You’ll be the one doing the long time, and you weren’t even there when the woman got killed, and what sense does that make? You sure you still don’t want to come clean?”

  “I already came clean.”

  “Yeah, sure. Get out, Rhodenbarr.”

  I was on my way out of the building when I heard a familiar voice speak my name. “If it ain’t Bernie Rhodenbarr. Hang around No. 1 Police Plaza and you never know who you’ll run into.”

  “Hello, Ray.”

  “Hello yourself, Bernie.” Ray Kirschmann gave me a lopsided grin. His suit didn’t fit him very well, but then his suits never do. You’d think with all the shakedown money he takes he could afford to dress better. “Beautiful mornin’, huh, Bern?”

  “Beautiful.”

  “Except it’s past noon now. An’ I see I won a little bet I made with myself. They’re lettin’ you go home.”

  “You know about it?”

  “Sure. The Colcannon thing. I knew you didn’t do it. When did you ever work with a partner? And when did you ever pull anything violent. Except”—and he looked reproachful—“for the time you hit me and knocked me down. You remember that, Bern?”

  “I panicked, Ray.”

  “I remember it well.”

  “And I wasn’t trying to hurt you. I was just trying to get away.”

  “Uh-huh. They still figure you’re it, you know. Richler’s got enough to hold you on. He thinks he’ll have a stronger case in the long run if he doesn’t slap you in a cell just yet.”

  We were standing on the pavement outside the redbrick structure, looking across the plaza at the central arch of the Municipal Building. Ray cupped his hands to light a cigarette, inhaled, coughed, took another drag. “Beautiful day,” he said. “Just gorgeous.”

  “Why do they think I was involved in the Colcannon burglary?”

  “Your M.O., Bern.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. When did I ever turn a place upside down and leave a mess? When did I ever hurt anybody, or do anything but run like a thief if the owners came home while I was working? When did I ever get into a place by smashing a skylight? How does all that add up to my modus operandi?”

  “They figure your partners were sloppy and violent. But they’ve got evidence that fits you like a glove.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Here’s what I mean.” He reached into his jacket pocket and came up with something that he dangled from thumb and forefinger. It was a Playtex Living Glove, but he held it as if it had died.

  The palm had been cut out of it.

  “That’s your evidence?”

  “Their evidence, not mine. It’s on the sheet, Bern. ‘Wears rubber gloves with palms excised.’ I like that word, excised. That means you cut the palms out but they can’t come right out and say so, you know?”

  “For God’s sake,” I said. “Where did they find this?”

  “Right outside of Colcannon’s house. There’s a gar
den there and that’s where it was.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “It’s evidence.”

  “So was the glass slipper,” I said, taking the glove from him, trying to force my hand into it. “And I must be one of Cinderella’s ugly sisters because this thing doesn’t fit. It doesn’t even come close to fitting. They make these things in sizes, Ray, and this one’s just not my size.”

  He took a close look. “You know somethin’? I think you’re right.”

  I gave the glove back to him. “Take care of this. You might even tell them the glove’s the wrong size. They can start looking around for a klutzy burglar with very small hands.”

  “I’ll spread the word. You headin’ back to the store now? I’ll give you a ride.”

  “All part of the service?”

  “Just that it’s on my way. What the hell.”

  This time I got a ride in an unmarked car. We made small talk about the Mets’ new third baseman, a possible garbage strike, and a shakeup in the Queens District Attorney’s office. Crooks and cops always have plenty of things to talk about once they can get past the basic adversary nature of their relationship. The two classes actually have more in common than either of us would like to admit. Phil and Dan, who couldn’t have looked more like cops unless they’d been in uniform, had looked like robbers to me when they came into my store.

  Ray dropped me right in front of Barnegat Books, told me to take care, gave me a slow wink, and drove off. I started to open up, looked to see if he was gone, then said to hell with it and refastened the locks I’d opened. I had to do a few things that were more important than selling books.

  I hadn’t been part of the gang of burglars who’d killed Wanda Colcannon. Her husband hadn’t merely failed to identify me. He’d given them a firm negative identification. And if the rubber glove was all they had, their evidence was a joke.

  But Richler still thought I was involved.

  And something funny, something I’d realized at the very end of the ride back to the store. Ray Kirschmann thought so, too.

  CHAPTER

  Seven

  Carolyn and I usually have lunch together. Mondays and Wednesdays I pick up something and we eat at the Poodle Factory. Tuesdays and Thursdays she brings our lunch to the bookstore. Fridays we generally go someplace ethnic and inexpensive and toss a coin for the check. All of this, of course, is subject to change if anything comes up, and Carolyn must have gathered that something had. It was a Wednesday, so when I’d failed to turn up around noon she’d evidently gone somewhere herself. The Poodle Factory was closed, with a cardboard sign hanging on the back of the door. BACK AT, the sign said, and beneath it the movable clock hands pointed to one-thirty.

  I looked in at the coffee shop on the corner of Broadway but didn’t see her. There was a pay phone on the wall at the back but it looked a little too exposed. I walked north a block and checked the felafel place. She wasn’t there, either, but their pay phone was a little more private. I ordered a cup of coffee and a hummus sandwich. I wasn’t especially hungry but I hadn’t had anything since my roll for breakfast and figured I probably ought to eat. I ate most of my sandwich, drank all of my coffee, and made sure I got some dimes in my change.

  The first call I made was to Abel Crowe. The Post was on the street by now, and I didn’t have to look at it to know that Wanda Colcannon would be spread all over page three. Her murder might even get the front page, unless something more urgent displaced it, like a projected invasion of killer bees from South America. (Once, during the Son of Sam foofaraw, they’d given the entire front page to a photo of David Berkowitz asleep in his cell. SAM SLEEPS! the headline shrieked.)

  At any rate, the murder was general knowledge by now and one medium or another was sure to call it to Abel’s attention. Any stolen object with a six-figure price tag is hot enough to blister the skin, but homicide always turns up the heat, and Abel would not be happy. Nor could I make him happy, but I could at least assure him that we were burglars, not murderers.

  I let the phone ring an even dozen times. When my dime came back I stood there for a minute, then tried the number again. One sometimes misdials, and telephone-company equipment sometimes misbehaves.

  No answer. I’d dialed his number from memory and there was no directory handy to confirm my recollection, so I let Information check it for me. I’d remembered correctly, but to be on the safe side I dialed it yet again, and when there was still no answer I gave up. Maybe he was already out selling the coin. Maybe he was at his favorite bakery on West Seventy-second Street, buying up everything in sight. Maybe he was napping with the phone’s bell muffled, or soaking in the tub, or tempting muggers in Riverside Park.

  I dialed 411 again and let them look up another number for me. Narrowback Gallery, on West Broadway in SoHo. The phone rang four times, just long enough for me to decide I wasn’t destined to reach anybody this afternoon, and then Denise Raphaelson answered, her voice scratchy from the cigarettes she chain-smoked.

  “Hi,” I said. “Are we set for dinner tonight?”

  “Bernie?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  There was a pause. “I’m a little confused,” she said finally. “I’ve been painting my brains out and I think the fumes are starting to get to me. Did we have a dinner date for tonight?”

  “Well, yeah. It was sort of mentioned casually. Too casually, I guess, if it slipped your mind.”

  “I should write these things down,” she said, “but I never do. I’m sorry, Bernie.”

  “You made other plans.”

  “I did? I don’t think I did. Of course if I could forget a dinner date with you, I could forget other things at least as easily. For all I know I’m throwing a party tonight. Truman and Gore are coming, and Hilton wanted a quick look at my latest work before he does his piece for the Sunday Times, and Andy said he’d bring Marlene if she’s in town. What do you suppose it’s like being one of those people that people know who you are without hearing your last name? I bet if I was Jackie I’d still have to show ID to cash a check at D’Agostino’s.”

  Telephonic whimsy is her specialty. We’d first met over the phone when I was trying to find an artist without knowing anything about him but his last name. She’d told me how to manage that, and one thing had led to another, as it so often does. We have since seen each other now and again, and if it’s all remained very casual and on the surface, that’s not the worst thing that can be said of what one has learned to call interpersonal relationships.

  “What I should have done,” she said now, “is fake it. When you asked if we were set for dinner tonight I should have said yes and let it go at that. It’s a shame I don’t take drugs. Then I could blame this mental sluggishness on the joint I’d just smoked. Would you believe paint fumes?”

  “Sure.”

  “Because I am free for dinner, and just because I don’t seem to recall our date shouldn’t prevent me from keeping it. Did we make plans to meet someplace?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Should we?”

  “Why don’t I drop by your place around seven-thirty?”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “I think I will.”

  “I think you should. Shall I cook something?”

  “We’ll go out.”

  “This is sounding better and better. Maybe I’ll have this painting finished and you can look at it. Maybe I won’t and you can’t. ‘Bernie at 7:30.’ I’ve written it down. I can’t possibly forget now.”

  “I have faith in you, Denise.”

  “Shall I wear anything in particular?”

  “Just a smock and a smile.”

  “Ta.”

  I tried Abel again, twelve rings and out. By then it was one-thirty. I hiked back to the Poodle Factory and caught Carolyn between appointments. “There you are,” she said. “When you didn’t show I went looking for you, and when I saw your store was closed I figured you’d just ducked out to pick up lunch, so I came back here and waited,
and when you still didn’t show I said the hell with it and went out and ate.”

  “Not at the coffee shop,” I said, “and not at Mamoun’s.”

  “I went and had some curry. I figured some really hot food would counteract the sugar from last night. God, what a morning!”

  “Bad?”

  “My head felt like the soccer ball from Pélé’s last game. You have any idea what it’s like to face a Giant Schnauzer on top of a sugar hangover?”

  “No.”

  “Count your lucky stars. The coffee shop and Mamoun’s—what did you do, go out looking for me?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  I hated to ruin her day, but what else could I do? “Just wanted to tell you you were missing a glove,” I said. “Of the rubber variety, and with the palm cut out.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “You weren’t going to say that, remember? You were going to switch to ‘child of a dog’ because ‘son of a bitch’ is sexist.”

  “Shit. I saw the glove was missing last night when I checked my pockets. I threw away the one but the other was gone. I thought it over and decided not to tell you. How’d you find out? What did you do, go through my garbage?”

  “I always go through your garbage. It started out as a perversion and now it’s a hobby.”

  “That’s the way it always works.”

  “I didn’t go through your garbage. You dropped it in the garden, in case you were wondering.”

  “I did? Jesus, they ought to put me away. How do you know this? You didn’t go back there, did you? No, of course you didn’t.”

  “No. Somebody showed me the glove.”

  “Who would—” Light dawned and her face fell. “Oh, no,” she said. “Cops.”

  “Right.”

  “You got arrested.”

  “Not officially.”

  “What happened?”

  “They let me go. My hands are bigger than yours. The glove didn’t fit. And Herbert Colcannon didn’t recognize me.”

  “Why would he recognize you? He never met you.”