The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza

by Lawrence Block

“Right. I’ll bet you didn’t read the paper at lunch.”

  “I read the Times this morning. Why?”

  “It’s complicated,” I said, “but it’s important. You’d better hear the whole thing.”

  Her phone rang a couple of times while I was going through it. She switched on the answering machine and let her callers leave messages if they wanted. We were interrupted once by a sad-eyed man wearing an obvious toupee who wanted to inquire about services and rates. If his pet resembled him, he probably had a basset hound.

  When I was finished Carolyn just sat there shaking her head. “I don’t know what to say,” she said. “I’m sorry about the glove, Bern. I feel rotten about it.”

  “These things happen.”

  “I thought I’d be a help and look what I did. I might as well have left a trail of bread crumbs.”

  “The birds would have eaten them.”

  “Yeah. I can’t believe she’s dead. Wanda Flanders Colcannon. I can’t believe it.”

  “You’d believe it if you saw the picture.”

  She shuddered, made a face. “Burglary’s fun,” she said. “But murder—”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t understand how it happened. The other burglars, the slobs, got there before we did.”

  “Right.”

  “And turned the place upside down and stole God knows what and left.”

  “Right.”

  “And then came back? Why? Don’t tell me it’s true about criminals returning to the scene of the crime?”

  “Only to commit another crime. Remember, we didn’t know the Colcannons were planning to leave Astrid. We thought they were staying overnight.”

  “I’m sorry about that, too.”

  “Don’t be. You couldn’t know otherwise. The point is, the other burglars probably made the same assumption. Suppose they grabbed up everything they could, took off over the rooftops, then decided they’d like to have another shot at the wall safe. They had time to pick up a torch or a drill. They might not have brought the right equipment the first time because they might not even have known about the safe, but if they had time to pick up a torch and all night to work on the safe, why not give it the old college try?”

  “And then the Colcannons came home right in the middle of it?”

  “Evidently.”

  “If they did, wouldn’t the burglars make them give them the combination of the safe?”

  “Probably. Unless they’d already opened it.”

  “If they had, why would they still be hanging around?”

  “They wouldn’t. But the Colcannons could have walked in the door just as the burglars were on their way out.”

  “Wouldn’t they leave the way they came? Through the skylight?”

  “You’re right,” I said. I frowned. “Anyway, there’s a third possibility. There could have been a third set of burglars.”

  “A third set? How many people knew that damned dog was going to Pennsylvania to get laid?”

  “Maybe these last burglars weren’t real burglars,” I suggested. “Maybe they were kids or junkies on the prowl, just roaming across the rooftops to see what they turned up. They’d notice the broken skylight and drop in for a look around. There were still plenty of things there to steal if you were an amateur on the prowl. Remember the radio? That would bring the price of a bag of heroin.”

  “There was at least one television set. Plus some stereo components on the second floor.”

  “See what I mean? Loads of goodies for a thief with low standards. But there wasn’t a lot of money, and sometimes amateur thieves take that sort of thing personally. You know how muggers sometimes beat up people who don’t have any cash on them?”

  “I’ve heard of that.”

  “Well, there’s a class of burglars who get the same sort of resentment. I can imagine a couple of punks dropping in through the broken skylight, picking up a radio and a portable TV, then deciding to hang around until the householders come home so they can rob them of their cash.” I followed that train of thought for a minute, then dropped it and shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter. I may have to spend the next week looking over my shoulder for cops, but basically we’re in the clear. The thing is, they’re going to find the guys who did it. There’ll be a lot of heat with her murdered, and Richler was right. He said somebody would blab at a bar and somebody else would overhear him. That’s what usually happens and it’s how most crimes get solved.”

  “And you think we’re all right?”

  “Sure. Colcannon can identify the men who killed his wife. We’ve already established that he can’t identify me. All they’ve got that leads to me is a rubber glove, and if the glove doesn’t fit, how can I wear it? If one of us had to drop a glove, I’m damned glad it was you.”

  “I wish that made me feel better.”

  “You’ve got to look on the bright side. Another thing to be glad of is that Colcannon wasn’t killed. If they had known Wanda was dead they probably would have killed him, too, and then he wouldn’t have been around to get me off the hook.”

  “I didn’t think of that.”

  “I did.” I lifted the phone from her desk. “Anyway, I’d better call Abel.”

  “Why?”

  “To tell him we didn’t kill anybody.”

  “He already knows that, doesn’t he? It’s a shame neither of us bothered to read the Post, but won’t it tell what time she was killed?”

  “Probably.”

  “Well, it was around 11:30 when we got to Abel’s. I remember it was 12:07 when he checked the Piaget watch against yours. And it was after midnight when the Colcannons walked in on the burglars, so how could Abel think we did it?”

  “My God,” I said. “He’s our alibi.”

  “Sure.”

  “I hope to God we never have to use him. Imagine trying to beat a burglary charge by insisting you were spending the time with a fence, trying to sell the things you’d already lifted from the burglary victim.”

  “When you put it that way, it does sound bizarre.”

  “I know.” I began dialing. “I’ll call him anyway and put him in the picture. He may not have noticed the timing and assume we killed that woman, and I wouldn’t want that.”

  “Would he refuse to handle the coin?”

  “Why?”

  “If we were killers—”

  The phone was ringing. I let it ring. “Abel’s a fence,” I said. “Not a judge. Anyway, we didn’t do it and I can make him believe it. If he’d ever answer his goddamned phone.”

  I hung up. Carolyn frowned to herself for a moment, then said, “It’s just business as usual, isn’t it? Wanda’s dead but nothing’s changed. Abel will sell the coin in a few days or a few months and we’ll get our share, same as if nothing ever happened to her.”

  “That’s right.”

  “It seems wrong. I don’t know why.”

  “We didn’t kill her, Carolyn.”

  “I know that.”

  “We didn’t do anything to cause her death.”

  “I know that, too. It was some other guys and they had no connection with us. I understand all that, Bern. I just feel funny, that’s all. What do you think we’ll get?”

  “Huh?”

  “For the coin.”

  “Oh. I don’t know.”

  “How will we know what price he sells it for?”

  “He’ll tell us.”

  “What I mean is he won’t cheat us, will he?”

  “Abel? He might.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, the man’s a receiver of stolen goods,” I said. “I imagine he’s told a lie or two in the course of a long life. I don’t suppose he’d draw the line at telling another. And it’s the easiest sort of a lie because there’s no way for us to know about it.”

  “Then how can we trust him?”

  “In a sense I don’t suppose we can. Not to be perfectly honest, anyway. If he got lucky and peddled the V-Nickel for half a million dollar
s, say, I’d guess he might tell us he got two hundred thousand dollars for it. We’d get half of that, and I suppose he’d have cheated us out of a bundle if that happened, but would we really have a complaint? It would be hard for me to work up much indignation if my end of a night’s work came to fifty thousand dollars.”

  “Suppose he tells us he sold it for fifty thousand? Then what?”

  “Then he’ll probably be telling the truth. My guess is that he’d be most likely to cheat us if the coin sells high and most likely to be completely honest if the selling price is low. And we can be sure that our end won’t drop below seventeen thousand five hundred, because he offered us that much for cash on delivery, so he’ll make sure we get more than that if we have to wait for our money. Unless the coin turns out to be a counterfeit, in which case all bets are off.”

  “Is that a possibility?”

  “No. It’s a genuine coin. My prediction is that you and I will wind up dividing fifty thousand dollars.”

  “Jesus. And all we have to do is sit around and wait for it?”

  “Right. What was it the German officer used to say to POWs in the war movies? ‘My friend, for you ze var is over.’ I think I’ll celebrate the end of the war by opening the store for a couple of hours. You doing anything special tonight?”

  “I’ll probably bounce around the bars eventually. Why? Want to have dinner?”

  “Can’t. I’ve got a date.”

  “Anybody I know?”

  “Denise.”

  “The painter? The one who doesn’t shut up?”

  “She has a ready wit and a self-deprecatory sense of humor.”

  “If you say so, Bern.”

  “Do I criticize your taste in women?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Hardly ever,” I said. I got up. “I’m going to sell some books. I’ll call you later if I hear anything. Have a good time at the dyke bars.”

  “I intend to,” she said. “Give my love to Denise.”

  CHAPTER

  Eight

  Denise Raphaelson is long-legged and slender, although Carolyn insists on describing her as gawky and bony. Her hair is dark brown and curly and worn medium-long, her complexion fair with a dusting of unobtrusive freckles. Her blue-gray eyes are artist’s eyes, always measuring and assessing and seeing the world as a series of framed rectangles.

  There was no end of rectangles, albeit unframed, on the walls of Narrowback Gallery, where she lived and worked. It’s on the third floor of a loft building on West Broadway between Grand and Broome, and its name derived from the loft’s unusual shape, narrow at the back and wider at the front. Denise subsequently discovered that narrowback is a term of contempt applied by native Irish to those kinsmen of theirs who have emigrated to America. No one has yet satisfactorily explained the term to her, although speculation on the subject has sparked any number of drunken conversations at the Broome Street Bar.

  I looked at a couple of paintings she’d done since I was last at the loft, including the one she’d been working on that day. I exchanged a few sentences with Jared, her twelve-year-old genius son, and gave him the stack of paperback science fiction I’d been setting aside for him. (I don’t handle paperbacks in the store, wholesaling the ones that come in to a store that sells nothing else.) He seemed happy with what I’d brought, especially an early Chip Delaney novel that he’d been wanting to read, and we had the sort of stilted conversation one has with the precocious and overly hip child of a woman with whom one occasionally beds down.

  I’d gone home to shave and change clothes before trekking down to SoHo. I had my Weejuns on my feet again and was comfortably casual in Levi’s and a flannel shirt. Denise was wearing a lime turtleneck and a pair of those forty-dollar jeans with an over-the-hill debutante’s autograph on a rear pocket. Remember when clothes had their labels on the inside?

  We had a glass of wine each at the gallery, then moved on to an Ethiopian place in Tribeca where you bring your own wine and eat unpronounceable dishes at your peril. We brought a rosé to see if it really does go with anything, and it did, but not terribly well. Our dishes, hers made with chicken and mine with lamb, were identically sauced and hot enough to blister paint. They came with a disc of spongy bread the size of a small pizza, and we tore off hunks of this gooey muck and used it to scoop up mouthfuls of the hot stuff. In the name of ethnic authenticity, a whole lot of New Yorkers are relearning the table manners of messy children.

  When we got out of there—and not a moment too soon—we walked around for a while and wound up listening to a jazz trio on Wooster Street. We had a couple of Scotches there and Denise worked her way through a pack of Virginia Slims. I tried Abel once or twice, and then we walked north a ways and caught Lance Hayward’s ten o’clock set at the Village Corner. Denise knows him, so we chatted with him after the set and it turned out there was another pianist we simply had to hear at a new club in my neighborhood. I dialed Abel’s number again and we had a quick drink with Lance—we were drinking stingers by this time—before grabbing a cab uptown.

  The new club was on Columbus Avenue in the low eighties and the piano player was a young black kid who kept reminding me of a Lenni Tristano record I hadn’t listened to in years. We got out of there when the set ended and cabbed to my place, where I dug out the record in question and put it on. We had a nightcap and threw our clothes on the floor and dived into bed.

  I did not find her to be gawky and bony. I found her to be warm and soft and quick and eager, and the music’s eccentric harmonies and offbeat rhythm didn’t interfere with the pleasure we took with one another. If anything, it gave a nice brittly atonal edge to our lovemaking.

  The tone arm had just dropped to begin replaying the record for the third time when she yawned and stretched and reached for the inevitable cigarette. She got it lit and said something about going home.

  “Stay over,” I suggested.

  “I didn’t say anything to Jared. I figured we’d wind up at my place.”

  “And if you’re not there when he wakes up?”

  “He’ll figure I’m here, which is cool, but if I’d known I would have called him earlier. I’d call now but I don’t want to wake him.”

  I thought of trying Abel again but it would have involved moving.

  “I think I will stay,” she said, after a moment’s reflection. “Mind if I change the record?”

  “Not at all. Put on a stack.”

  She crouched at the record rack, her bare behind tilted charmingly in my direction. Bony? Gawky? Pfui.

  When she came back to bed I slipped an arm around her and told her I was glad she was staying.

  “Me too,” she said.

  “You said earlier that you went to the movies last night.”

  “Right. I took the kid and we saw the new Woody Allen picture.”

  “And you loved it but he thought it was superficial.”

  “Yeah, the little wiseass.”

  “Do anything afterwards?”

  She shifted around, glanced up at me. “A little dancing,” she said, “but no fooling around. What do you mean?”

  “You went to the movies and then you and Jared went home and you stayed there?”

  “Right. Except that we stopped on the way home for frozen yogurt. Why?”

  “When did he go to sleep?”

  “Around eleven, maybe a little later.”

  “It won’t come up,” I said, “but if it does, I was over at your place last night. I got there around midnight after the kid went to bed and left first thing in the morning.”

  “I see.”

  “What do you see?”

  She sat up, lit another Virginia Slim. “I see why you called me this afternoon.”

  “You do like hell.”

  “Oh? You burgled somebody last night and you need an alibi, so Denise is elected. I thought you gave up stealing, you swore you gave up stealing, but what does it mean when a thief takes an oath? Good old Denise. Take her out for a meal, pou
r a few drinks into her, hit a few jazz clubs, then throw her a friendly fuck—”

  “Cut it out.”

  “Why should I? Isn’t that about how it goes?”

  Jesus, why had I brought it up? Well enough seems to be the one thing I’m incapable of leaving alone.

  I said, “You’re wrong, but maybe you’re too mad to listen to an explanation. I called you because we had a date for tonight.” The best defense is a good offense, isn’t it? “Don’t blame me for your bad memory. I can’t help that.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “I did give up burglary, and I’m not exactly in trouble, but someone committed a crime last night and used the type of gloves I used to use, and the police found one on the scene and think I’m involved. And I don’t happen to have an alibi because I happened to spend the night alone, because who knew I was going to need an alibi? When you don’t do anything criminal you don’t bother to arrange an alibi in advance.”

  “And you just sat home in front of the television set?”

  “As a matter of fact I was reading Spinoza.”

  “I don’t suppose anyone would make that up. Except you might.” She fixed those artist’s eyes on me. “I don’t know how much of your word to take. Where was the burglary? Oh, wait a minute. It wasn’t the one I read about in the paper? That poor woman in Chelsea?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “You didn’t do that, did you, Bernie?” Her eyes probed mine for a long moment. Then she took one of my hands in both of hers and looked at my fingers. “No,” she said, more to herself than to me. “You’re very gentle. You couldn’t kill someone.”

  “Of course I couldn’t.”

  “I believe you. You said they found a glove? Does that mean you’re in trouble?”

  “Probably not. They’ll probably catch the guys who did it within a couple of days. But in the meantime I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have someone back up my story, in case anybody ever leans on it.”

  She asked what story I’d told them and I repeated my conversation with Richler.

  “You didn’t tell them my name,” she said. “That’s good. So I won’t come into it unless they give you more trouble and you need a backup.”