The Burglar in the Rye

by Lawrence Block

  “I’d better not,” I said. “I looked at Mindy Sea Gull, and I got bawled out for it.”

  “I’m talking about coincidence,” she said. “Erica came into my life when I just happened to be in the mood for romance and open to the possibility of a relationship. Wouldn’t you call that a coincidence?”

  “Not really.”

  “No? Why the hell not?”

  “You’re generally in the mood for romance,” I said, “and whenever you see somebody cute, you’re ready to start picking out drapes together.”

  “Our eyes met across a crowded room, Bern. How often does that happen?”

  “You’re right,” I agreed. “It was a remarkable coincidence, and it means the two of you are made for each other. But it wasn’t a coincidence with Alice. She’d managed to learn about me, and maybe that’s not as hard to do as I’d like to think. Sit down at a computer, punch in books and burglar, and whose name is going to pop up?”

  “It’s true you’ve had your name in the papers a few times.”

  “That’s the trouble with getting arrested,” I said. “All the publicity. If Fairborn wants to find out what invasion of privacy is all about, let him stick up a liquor store. ‘No mug shots, please. I never allow photographs.’ Lots of luck, Gully.”

  “I guess that means he’d better not go after the letters himself.”

  “I should have seen it coming,” I said again, “and maybe I would have, but Mel Tormé was singing his heart out, and…”

  “I understand, Bern. You’re gonna do it, aren’t you? You’re gonna steal the letters.”

  “I’d have to be nuts,” I said. “There’s no money in it. The letters may be worth a small fortune, but I’d be returning them to the man who wrote them, and he can’t pay enough to make it worthwhile. And she lives in a hotel, and that’s always tricky. The Paddington’s not Fort Knox, but it’s still risky and there’s no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The only pot is one made out of black clay, and he already gave it to Alice. I’d have to be out of my mind to do it.”

  “What did you tell her, Bern?”

  “I told her yes,” I said, and picked up my drink. “I must be out of my mind.”

  CHAPTER

  Eight

  Gulliver Fairborn would have hated it.

  They took me to the precinct in handcuffs, which is just plain undignified, and they took my fingerprints and made me pose for pictures, full-face and profile. That’s a clear-cut invasion of privacy, but try telling that to a couple of cops at the end of a long shift. Then they strip-searched me, and then they tossed me in a holding cell, and that’s where I spent what was left of the night.

  I’d have slept better at home, or on the office couch at the store, or in Room 415 at the Paddington. As it was I barely slept at all, and I was groggy and grubby when Wally Hemphill showed up first thing in the morning and bailed me out.

  “I told them they had nothing,” he said. “You were in a hotel where a woman died. Where’s the crime in that? They said a witness could place you on the floor where the murder took place, and where you had no reason to be. And you were registered under a false name, and you have a sheet with a whole lot of arrests on it.”

  “But only one conviction,” I pointed out.

  “A judge hears that,” he said, “it’s like telling him you only put the tip in. What I stressed was you’re an established retailer with your own store, and there’s no chance you’re going to cut and run. I tried for Own Recognizance, but the papers teed off on the last judge who let a murderer out without bail, and—”

  “I’m not a murderer, Wally.”

  “I know that,” he said, “and anyway it’s beside the point, which is that I got bail knocked down to a manageable fifty K.”

  “Manageable?”

  “You’re out, aren’t you? You can thank me, for cutting my run short and coming down bright and early.” Wally was training for the New York Marathon, upping his weekly mileage as the race approached. Law was his profession, but running was his passion. “And you can thank your friend Marty Gilmartin,” he added. “He put up the dough.”

  “Marty Gilmartin,” I said.

  “Why are you frowning, Bernie? You remember him, don’t you?”

  Of course I did. I’d met Martin Gilmartin a while back, after I’d been arrested for stealing his collection of baseball cards. I hadn’t done it, but my alibi would have been that I was cracking an apartment across town at the time, and I figured I was better off keeping my mouth shut. It all worked out, and Marty and I wound up having a mutually profitable association, breaking effortlessly into houses of friends of his who wanted to collect on their insurance. We each had a good chunk of cash by the time we were done, and mine was enough to buy the building that housed the bookstore. Now I don’t have to worry about grasping landlords, since I’ve had the good fortune to become one myself. You know how they say crime doesn’t pay? They don’t know what they’re talking about.

  “I remember him,” I said, “as if I’d seen him only yesterday. If I was frowning it’s because I’d meant to tell you to call him. But I didn’t, did I?”

  “No,” Wally said, “and I didn’t, either. Call him, I mean.”

  “He called you.”

  “Right. Said he’d heard you were in trouble, and what would it take to get you out? I said it would probably take an act of God to get you out of trouble, but all it would take to get you out of jail was ten percent of the bond, which is to say five large. He sent a messenger with fifty hundred-dollar bills in an envelope, which ought to earn him an invitation to your Christmas party. And here you are.”

  “Here I am,” I agreed.

  “You’re charged with murder,” Wally went on, “but I don’t think they’re serious about it. They can’t possibly make it stick. Of course, life would get a lot simpler if they found the person who actually did kill the Landau woman.”

  “If I knew,” I said, “I’d be happy to tell them. Meanwhile I’d better go open the store. I’ve got a cat who hates to miss a meal.”

  “I know how he feels, Bernie. But swing past your apartment first, why don’t you.” His nose wrinkled. “You might want to get under the shower.”

  “It’s cigarette smoke,” I said. “I was in the kind of smoke-filled room where they decided to nominate Harding for President.”

  “That was a little before my time,” Wally said, “and that’s not just cigarette smoke.”

  “You’re a runner,” I said. “I didn’t figure you would mind the smell of good clean sweat.”

  “Good clean sweat is one thing,” he said. “Jailhouse sweat is something else. Go on home, Bernie. Take a shower, put on some clean clothes. You got an incinerator in your building?”

  “A compactor.”

  “Whatever. The clothes you got on? Toss ’em down the chute.”

  People talk about burning their clothes, but does any sensible middle-class person ever actually do it? I bundled mine up and ran them over to the laundry around the corner.

  My apartment’s on West End and Seventy-first. I’d cabbed there from the Thirteenth Precinct (“the one-three,” as the TV cops would say) on East Twenty-first, and, after a shower and a shave and a change of clothes, I cabbed back down to the store. I usually take subways—they’re usually faster, they’ve got more legroom, and you don’t have to listen to Jackie Mason’s recorded voice urging you to wear a seatbelt. But there’s nothing like a night in a cell to make a man appreciate life’s little refinements, even if there’s precious little refined about them.

  It was around eleven by the time I got to the store, and Raffles made it clear that he was glad to see me, rubbing himself against my ankles in the fashion of his tribe. I’m happy you’re here, he was saying, and I’ll be happier when you feed me. I did and he was, and as soon as I had the place up and running I looked up Marty Gilmartin’s number and dialed it.

  “I wanted to thank you,” I said.

  “It’s nothing.”<
br />
  “If you’d ever spent a night in a cell,” I said, “you wouldn’t say that.”

  “No, I don’t suppose I would. So let me just say that you’re welcome, and that I was glad for the chance to do you a service. It’s been a long time, Bernard.”

  “It has,” I agreed. “I haven’t seen you in ages, except for a quick glimpse now and then.”

  “Quite. I’m tied up for lunch, dammit, but do you suppose you could drop over to the club sometime this afternoon? Say half past three?”

  That would mean closing early, but without his help I wouldn’t be open at all. I told him half past three would be fine, then hung up and waited for the world to beat a path to my door. First of the path-beaters was a fellow in his late thirties, wearing navy slacks and a sportshirt he’d buttoned wrong. He was skinny, with knobby wrists and a prominent Adam’s apple, and his straw-colored hair looked as though it had been cut at the barber college, and by one of their less-promising students. He squinted through rimless eyeglasses at Raffles, who had made short work of his breakfast and was on his way back to the sunny spot in the front window. When the animal had plopped himself down without turning around three times, thus proving conclusively that he wasn’t a dog, the geeky-looking guy turned his pale blue eyes on me.

  “He doesn’t have a tail,” he said.

  “Neither do you,” I said, “but I wasn’t going to mention it. He’s a Manx.”

  “I’ve heard of them,” he said. “They don’t have tails, do they?”

  “They’ve outgrown them,” I said, “even as you and I. When you come right down to it, what does a cat in this day and age need with a tail?”

  I’d offered this by way of small talk, but he took it seriously, creasing his high forehead in thought. “I wonder,” he said. “Doesn’t it play a role in keeping the animal balanced?”

  “He sees a therapist once a week,” I said, “and when he has a problem we talk about it.”

  “Physically, I meant.”

  Duh. I let him speculate on the role of the feline caudal appendage in maintaining the animal’s equilibrium and the possible evolutionary advantage of taillessness on the Isle of Man, the breed’s ancestral home, but I didn’t contribute much to the conversation myself beyond the occasional nod or grunt. I didn’t want to waste wit on him, since he didn’t seem to know what it was, nor did I want to inquire too closely into Raffles’s origins.

  Because, when you come right down to it, I’ve never been entirely certain that Raffles is a Manx. He doesn’t look a lot like any photos I’ve seen of Manx cats, nor does he have the breed’s characteristic hopping gait. What he looks like, really, is a garden-variety gray tabby who lost his tail in some unrecorded accident, and who has learned to live without it.

  He’d learned, God knows, to live without any number of other things to which he was once presumably attached. Although he still seeks to sharpen them on the furniture, his claws are but a memory, surgically removed before Fate (and Carolyn Kaiser) brought him into my life. And, although he is in attitude and temperament an outstanding example of feline masculinity, two emblems of his maleness have, alas, had similar surgical alteration.

  Since this last point makes breeding him out of the question, it renders his bloodlines largely academic. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a Manx, and a fine one in the bargain. How he got that way is no concern of mine.

  “…Gulliver Fairborn,” my visitor was saying.

  That got my attention, which he’d hitherto succeeded in losing. I looked up and there he was, eyes wide, waiting for me to answer a question of which I’d heard only the last two words. I tried to look blank, and I have to say it comes easy to me.

  “Let me explain,” he said.

  “Perhaps that would be best.”

  “All I need,” he said, “are photocopies. Do whatever you want with the originals. It’s not the letters I’m interested in. It’s their contents, it’s knowing what they say.”

  I could have told him the letters were as hard to trace as Raffles’s tail, but what was my hurry? He was a lot more interesting now than when he’d been discussing my cat. “I don’t think I got your name,” I said. “Mine is—”

  “Rhodenbarr,” he said. “Did I pronounce it correctly?”

  The place some people go wrong is the first syllable. The O is long, as in “Row, row, row your boat,” and that’s how he’d rendered it. “Either you got it right,” I said, “or my parents lied to me. And you are…”

  “Lester Eddington.”

  I waited for the name to ring a bell. When you own a bookstore, you recognize the names of thousands of authors. They are, after all, quite literally one’s stock in trade. I may not know anything about a writer, I may never have read a word he’s written, but I tend to know the titles of his books and what shelf to put them on.

  I just knew this bird was a writer, but his name was new to me, and I found out why when he explained that he hadn’t published anything yet, except for articles in academic journals that I’d been lucky enough to miss. But this didn’t mean he hadn’t been writing. For almost twenty years he’d been hard at work on a book about a subject that had preoccupied him since he was—surprise!—seventeen years old.

  “Gulliver Fairborn,” he said. “I read Nobody’s Baby and it changed my life.”

  “That’s what everybody says.”

  “But in my case it really did.”

  “That’s the other thing that everybody says.”

  “In college,” he said, “I wrote paper after paper on Gulliver Fairborn. You’d be surprised how many courses you can fit him into besides English Lit. ‘Changing Attitudes on Race in America as revealed in the works of Gulliver Fairborn’—that worked fine in freshman sociology. For art history, I discussed the novels as literary reflections of abstract expressionism. I had a little trouble in earth science, but everything else fell into place.”

  He’d done a master’s thesis on Fairborn, of course, and expanded it for his doctorate. And he’d spent his life teaching at one college or another, always on the move, never getting tenure. Wherever he went, he taught a couple of sessions of freshman English, along with a seminar on Guess Who.

  “But they don’t really want to study him,” he said. “They just want to sit around and talk about how great Nobody’s Baby is, and how it changed their lives. And, of course, what a ‘cool dude’ Fairborn must be, and how they’d love to call him up late at night and talk about Archer Manwaring and all, but how they can’t because he’s such a man of mystery. Do you realize how many books he’s written since then?”

  I nodded. “I have some of them on the shelves.”

  “Well, you would. You’re in the business. But the man has published a new book every three years, forever taking chances, constantly growing as a writer, and hardly anyone pays any attention. The kids don’t care. They don’t want to read the later work, and judging by the papers they turn in, most of them don’t get very far with it.”

  “But you’ve read all the books.”

  “I read everything he writes,” he said, “and everything written about him. He’s my life’s work, Mr. Rhodenbarr. When I’m done, I’ll have produced the definitive book on the life and work of Gulliver Fairborn.”

  “And that’s why you want copies of the letters.”

  “Of course. Anthea Landau was his first agent, the only one with whom he had a close relationship.”

  “Not too close,” I said. “The way I heard it, they never met.”

  “That’s probably true, although the letters may show otherwise. That’s only one of the questions they may answer. Did they meet? Were they more to each other than author and agent?” He sighed. “The answer to both of those questions is probably no. Still, she was as close to him as anyone. What did he confide in his letters? What did he say about the books he was working on? About his thoughts and feelings, about his inner and outer life? You see why I need those letters, Mr. Rhodenbarr?”

  “I see w
hy you want them,” I said. “What I don’t see is what you can do with them. Fairborn went to court once to keep his letters from being quoted in print. What makes you think he won’t do it again?”

  “I’m sure he will. But I can wait as long as I have to. He’s almost thirty years older than I am. I don’t drink or smoke.”

  “Good for you,” I said. “How about cursing?”

  “Oh, I’m not a goody-goody,” he said, about as convincingly as one President insisting he wasn’t a crook or another claiming he’d never inhaled. “But the vices I have aren’t the sort that compromise one’s health. I don’t know that Fairborn smokes, but I have it on good authority that he drinks.”

  “Rye whiskey,” I said.

  “That’s what they say, and I gather he drinks quite a good deal of it. Oh, I hope he lives for years and years, Mr. Rhodenbarr. I hope he writes many more books and that I have the chance to read them all. But all men are mortal, even if some of them manage to create immortal work during their lifetime. And, while he could live another thirty years and I could get run over by a bus this afternoon…”

  “The odds are you’ll outlive him.”

  “That’s what any insurance actuary would tell you. I won’t even attempt to publish my book during his lifetime. Believe me, I can write with a freer hand if I don’t have to worry what he’d think of it. Once he’s no longer in the picture, I can publish as I please. For the time being, my only concern is making the book as accurate and as comprehensive as possible.” He smiled with all the warmth of an SS officer in a forties film. “And that is where you come in,” he said.

  “Except it’s not.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I don’t have the letters,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “Not even a postcard. It’s true I’ve been charged with burglary in the past, and it’s also true I was arrested at Anthea Landau’s hotel last night. But I didn’t steal her letters.”

  “His letters, you mean.”

  “Whatever.”