The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams br-6

by Lawrence Block

  Doll Cooper was seated next to him, at one end of a long couch. She was wearing the very outfit she’d worn the night I first saw her—the dark business suit, the red beret. The only expression on her face was one of keen attention. Her body language reinforced the impression. One sensed that she was poised to cut and run at any moment, but in the meantime she would wait and see.

  Borden Stoppelgard had the center of the couch, but he was keeping his distance from Doll and had positioned himself all the way at the other edge of the middle cushion. Borden was wearing a brown suit and a tie with alternating inch-wide stripes of red and green. He was sitting knee-to-knee with a woman with stylish blond hair and eyes the color of a putting green. The process of elimination, along with the fact that Borden was practically sitting in her lap, brought me to the conclusion that she was Lolly Stoppelgard.

  There was a chair for me, too, one from the dining room, but I didn’t figure to get much use out of it. It was time for me to be on my feet. On my toes, if I could manage it.

  “Well, now,” I said. “I suppose you’re wondering why I summoned you all here.”

  I’ll tell you, no matter how many times you deliver that line, it never fails to quicken the pulse. The game, by God, was afoot.

  “Once upon a time,” I said, “there were two men, and one of them married the other’s sister. That made them brothers-in-law, and they had something else in common. They were both businessmen, they both bought and sold real estate, and they both dabbled in other investments. Martin Gilmartin sometimes took a flier in show business. Borden Stoppelgard stockpiled first-edition crime fiction. And both of them had a passion for baseball cards.”

  “As far as I know, Borden Stoppelgard still has every baseball card he ever bought or traded for. A week ago this past Thursday, Marty Gilmartin received a telephone call just minutes after he and his wife returned from an evening at the theater. The anonymous caller had evidently paid a lot of attention to Marty’s recent movements, and that made him suspicious. He hung up the phone, hurried to his den, and opened the box where he kept his card collection.”

  “We know all this,” Borden Stoppelgard interrupted. “He lifted the lid and the box was empty. Anyway, you took ’em, right?”

  “Wrong,” I said. “But it’s not a farfetched notion, in view of the fact that I was the mysterious caller. The police traced the call to Carolyn Kaiser’s apartment, and Officer Kirschmann knew Ms. Kaiser as a close friend of mine. And, much as it pains me to admit it, there was a time years ago when I made occasional forays into, uh, burglary.”

  “You went away for it once,” Ray said helpfully, “an’ got away with it hundreds of times.”

  “Excuse me,” Joan Nugent said. “I’m sorry for Mr. Gilmartin, but I don’t quite see his connection with our apartment. We had a break-in while we were away. Are you suggesting that the same burglar broke into both his apartment and ours?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Oh.”

  “There was no burglar.”

  “No burglar here?” This from Harlan Nugent. “We had a break-in, you know. It’s a matter of record.”

  “No burglar here,” I said, “and no burglar at the Gilmartin residence. No break-in at either location.”

  I caught a glimpse of Marty’s face, and he did not look terribly happy at the direction the discussion was taking.

  “We’ll let that pass for the moment,” I said smoothly. “Let’s just note that the Gilmartin cards had disappeared. That’s one of the reasons we’re here. The other phenomenon that has drawn us together is not a disappearance but an appearance, and an astonishing manifestation it was. A man turned up in one of the Nugent bathrooms. He didn’t have any clothes on, and he didn’t have a pulse, either. He’d been shot, and he was dead.”

  “Who was he?” Patience wanted to know.

  “His name was Luke Santangelo,” I said, “and he lived two floors below the Nugents in this very building. Like half the waiters and a third of the moving men in this city, he’d come here to be an actor. Well, de mortuis and all that, but I’m afraid Luke was something of a bad actor, and that’s irrespective of how he may have acquitted himself on stage. He was a small-time drug dealer and a petty criminal.”

  “I was so shocked to learn that,” Joan Nugent put in. “I knew him, you see. He posed for me, as it happens, in this very apartment.” She hazarded a smile. “I paint, you know. He was happy to pose for me, even though I couldn’t afford to pay him very much.”

  Her husband snorted. “While you were painting him,” he said, “he was figuring out how to break in.”

  “Two incidents,” I said. “On Thursday, Mr. Gilmartin finds his cards are missing. On Sunday, the police find a dead man in the Nugents’ bathroom. But what’s the connection?”

  “No connection,” Borden Stoppelgard said. “Case closed. Can we all go home now?”

  “There has to be a connection,” Carolyn told him. “You’re the one who collects mystery novels, aren’t you? It’s a shame you don’t take the trouble to read them. If you did, you’d know that whenever there are two crimes in the same story, they’re related. The connection may not turn up until the last chapter, but it’s always there.”

  “There’s a connection,” I agreed. “And you’re part of it, Mr. Stoppelgard.”

  “Huh?”

  “We’ll start with the cards,” I said. “Your brother-in-law owned them. And you coveted them.”

  “If you’re trying to say I took ’em—”

  “I’m not.”

  “Oh. But you just said—”

  “That you coveted them,” I said. “Didn’t you?”

  He looked at Marty, then at me. “No secret he had some nice material there,” he said.

  “You wanted the Ted Williams cards.”

  “I admired them. I wouldn’t have minded having a set of them myself. But I didn’t want ’em bad enough to steal ’em.”

  “You thought I stole them.”

  “Well, yes,” he said. “That’s what the police were saying, and I didn’t have any reason to think they were wrong.”

  “And, thinking that I’d stolen them, you came to my shop and offered me a deal. If I gave you your brother-in-law’s baseball cards, you’d cut me a sweetheart deal on an extension of the store lease.”

  “Borden,” Marty Gilmartin said, his tone one of bottomless disappointment. “Borden, Borden, Borden.”

  “Marty, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

  “Oh, Borden,” Marty said. “I’m surprised at you.”

  And he sounded it, all right. I have to tell you, I was impressed with Marty. I’d told him days ago about his brother-in-law’s offer, and what he’d said at the time was along the lines of “That’s typical of the avaricious son of a bitch.” The Pretenders would have been proud of the show he was putting on.

  “I was testing the waters,” Borden said now. “Trying to find out for certain if you were the burglar, and laying a little trap for you if you were. Obviously it didn’t work, because you never had the cards in the first place, but all it proves now is that I didn’t have them either. So I’ll ask you again—can we go home now?”

  “I think you might want to stick around,” I said. “You didn’t take them, and it’s also true that you didn’t know who took them. But the person who did take them got the idea from you.”

  “Oh, yeah? You want to tell me who that was?”

  “You’re sitting next to her,” I said.

  Logically enough, everybody turned to stare at Lolly Stoppelgard, who looked understandably puzzled. Not that one, I wanted to cry. The other one. But they all figured it out for themselves, and eyes turned to the woman sitting on the other side of Borden Stoppelgard.

  “Gwendolyn Beatrice Cooper,” I said. “Like Luke Santangelo, she came to New York hoping for acting success. In the meantime, though, she got a job at a law firm called Haber, Haber & Crowell.”

  “My attorneys,” Marty said.r />
  “And your brother-in-law’s as well. Ms. Cooper worked there, doing general office work, sometimes filling in as the relief receptionist. She was a natural choice for the front desk because she’s personable and eye-catching, and two of the eyes she caught belonged to Borden Stoppelgard. He was a happily married man. She was a young working woman going about her business. So he did the natural thing under the circumstances. He hit on her.”

  “Oh, Borden,” said Lolly Stoppelgard.

  “He’s full of crap,” her husband said. “I may have passed the time of day with Wendy.” Wendy! “I’m a friendly guy. But that’s as far as it went, believe me.”

  “You asked her to meet you for a drink,” I said. “Then lunch, and then another lunch, and—”

  “One drink,” he said, “to be sociable. On one occasion, and that’s it, total, the end. No lunches. Ask her, for God’s sake. Wendy—”

  “Oh, Borden…”

  “Lolly, who are you gonna believe, some convicted felon or your own loving husband?”

  “I’m certainly not going to believe you. That’s just the way you hit on me, Borden.”

  “Lolly—”

  “You met me when I was working reception, you passed the time of day, you invited me out for a drink, you asked could we have lunch—”

  “Lolly, that was completely different.”

  “I know.”

  “I was single then. I’m married now.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Which is why it was okay then, and why it’s not okay now, you dirty cheating son of a bitch.”

  There was nothing much to say to that, and nobody did. I let the moment stretch—rather enjoying it, I have to admit—and then I said that I didn’t think it had gone very far.

  “One occasion,” Borden cried. “One drink, for God’s sake!”

  “Perhaps a little farther than that,” I said, “but I don’t think your husband made a very favorable impression on Miss Cooper. I’ve heard her compare him to pond scum.”

  “If pond scum had a lawyer,” Lolly Stoppelgard said, “pond scum could sue for libel.”

  “Say, Bernie,” Ray Kirschmann said, “this here ain’t Divorce Court, if you take my meanin’. Whether or not he’s been puttin’ her away—”

  “One miserable drink, dammit!”

  “—don’t really constitute police business. You were startin’ to say somethin’ about how she took the cards. He didn’t give ’em to her, did he?”

  Borden Stoppelgard looked as though he might turn apoplectic at the very thought.

  “No,” I said, “but he gave her the idea to steal them. Borden’s the sort of fellow who likes to brag about what he has. He started out that way with Wendy”—I’d almost called her Doll—“but before he knew it he was off on his favorite theme, his brother-in-law’s great collection and how he kept it right out in plain sight instead of tucking it away in a safe deposit vault where it belonged.”

  Doll raised her eyebrows. She said, “You sound as though you must have been at the next table, Bernie. It’s funny, but I don’t remember any conversation like that. Do you, Mr. Stoppelgard?”

  “Jesus,” Borden said, and turned to his left. “Wendy,” he said, “what the hell’s the matter with you? Tell the truth. Did I ever say anything to you about stealing Marty’s cards?”

  “Never,” Doll said.

  “I said he had some valuable material and he ought to take better care of it. I said there was stuff of his I’d love to get my hands on but he wouldn’t sell it to me. I said—”

  Doll looked at him, and I guess looks can’t kill, because he didn’t die. She rolled her eyes, then aimed them at me. “Tell us more, Bernie,” she said. “How did I get my greedy little hands on the cards?”

  “You found an excuse to go over to the Gilmartin apartment on York Avenue,” I said. “My guess is you turned up on the doorstep during business hours with some papers for Marty to sign. It wouldn’t have been all that hard for you to hold out an envelope and deliver it yourself instead of giving it to one of the firm’s messengers. And then—”

  “I knew she looked familiar,” Marty said. “I couldn’t think why.”

  “You must have seen me at the office, Mr. Gilmartin.”

  “No,” he said with conviction. “You came over to the apartment.”

  “Suppose I did,” said Doll.

  Gotcha!

  “As it happens,” she went on, “I didn’t. But suppose I did. Then what?”

  “You took the cards,” I said. “One way or another you contrived to be in Marty’s den long enough to transfer the cards into whatever you’d brought along for the purpose, a tote bag or briefcase, something like that. You were out the door and gone without arousing any suspicions, and you had a half million dollars’ worth of cardboard in your kick. But you also had a problem.”

  “Oh?”

  “You’d met Marty face to face. Suppose he looked in his rosewood humidor an hour after you left. He could hardly fail to remember the cheerfully efficient visitor from Haber, Haber & Crowell. Even if he didn’t miss the cards for days, there was no way to be sure your name and face wouldn’t come to mind when he tried to think who might have taken them. So you had to do two things. You had to stash the cards where they wouldn’t be found while you made arrangements to sell them, and you had to develop some way to misdirect suspicion so it would fall on somebody else.

  “The first part was easy. You knew a fellow actor named Luke Santangelo. He wasn’t exactly a boyfriend of yours, but he wasn’t pond scum either, and you’d been over to his apartment a couple of times. Luke was a shady guy, which was ideal for your purposes. You told him you wanted to leave a briefcase with him for a few days. That way if the police searched your apartment they’d come up empty. You figured you could stand up well enough under questioning, as long as there wasn’t any physical evidence to drag you down.

  “But you still needed a patsy, and that’s where I came in. What put you on to me, Doll?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I can’t be sure how my name came up,” I said. “My guess would be that Luke mentioned me, and perhaps even pointed me out on the street. I had a little trouble with the law some years back, and I still live in the same neighborhood, so there must be plenty of people around who remember what I used to do for a living.”

  “Before you saw the error of your ways,” Ray Kirschmann drawled.

  “In any event, the name registered. And you may have heard it again from Borden Stoppelgard. I know he must have said something about the bookseller he was planning to evict. Did he mention the poor jerk by name?”

  Borden started to say that he’d bought the young lady one drink on one occasion, for God’s sake, and here I was making a federal case out of it. Lolly said he was just making it worse every time he opened his mouth, whereupon he closed it.

  “I think you came to my store once. It would have been after you took Marty’s cards but before he found out about it. I can’t be sure about the timetable, but I’ll try to ballpark it, okay? My guess is you grabbed the cards on Monday and dropped them in Luke’s apartment later the same day. Tuesday or Wednesday you came to my store and had a quick look around. Borden had mentioned the books he was buying, so you called him and told him you’d seen something at Barnegat Books that was right up his alley. If he hadn’t already told you that was one of the buildings he owned, he told you now.

  “Meanwhile, Luke disappeared. You tried to reach him and you couldn’t. He didn’t answer his phone, and when you went over and pounded on his door, all you got was a sore hand. You started to get nervous. Maybe he’d skipped with the cards. But that didn’t seem likely, because the briefcase you gave him was locked and you’d described the contents in a way that wouldn’t set dollar signs blinking in his head. Maybe you said they were legal papers with blackmail value, something like that. It would give you a reason to hide them, but there’d be no way for him to cash in on them by h
imself.

  “So he’d probably left the cards behind, but he himself was gone, and this wasn’t good. Suppose he got arrested on a dope charge and the police searched his apartment and found the cards while they were at it? Suppose he actually got work out of town and didn’t come back for two or three months? Suddenly stowing the cards on West End Avenue didn’t seem like such a good idea.

  “Now you had more use for me than ever. If I was a burglar, maybe I could do something useful for a change. Maybe I could open his door for you.

  “That fateful Thursday night,” I said, “I made that silly call to the Gilmartin house. One explanation for my conduct was I had had far too much to drink, and one reason I drank so much is Borden Stoppelgard had just bought a Sue Grafton novel from me for a fraction of its value.”

  “You’re the one priced the book,” that gentleman pointed out.

  “That’s true,” I said, “but you didn’t have to crow about it. You bragged to the Gilmartins when the four of you went to the theater together that night. Did you do a little boasting to Wendy, too? I’ll bet you did. She tipped you off about the book, so it would be only natural for you to call her up and thank her. While you were at it, you could suggest spending some of the money she’d saved you on a nice dinner for two.”

  That was a shot in the dark, but judging from the expression on his face it struck home. His wife shrank away from him and told him he was disgusting, and all around the room people lowered their eyes in embarrassment.

  “You needed me,” I told Doll. “You weren’t sure what you needed me for, but you needed me. So after you heard from Borden you came downtown looking for me. And you found me, but I had company. I was with Carolyn.”

  “At the Bum Rap,” Carolyn recalled, “and then at the Italian restaurant, and then we wound up at my place.”

  “And then I kept calling Marty until I reached him around midnight. I don’t suppose you stood around on Arbor Court waiting for me to come out. Maybe you gave up, stopped for a cup of coffee on Hudson Street, and got lucky when I turned up. Either way, you must have seen me fail to get a cab and stalk off to the subway, and you knew where I had to be going. All you had to do was jump in a cab and wait for me to come out of the subway entrance at Seventy-second and Broadway.”