The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams by Lawrence Block
“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.”
“This is fascinating,” she said. “I had no idea I was such a resourceful woman.”
“And a hell of a liar, Doll. I’m going to call you Doll instead of Wendy from now on because that’s what I called you that night, once we got around to names. All you wanted me to do was walk you home. You spent a few blocks setting things up so you could make use of me later on, and when we got to the entrance downstairs you decided to float a trial balloon. You made a point of asking the doorman about the Nugents.”
“About us?” Joan Nugent demanded. “But how did this young woman even know us?”
“She didn’t,” I said, “but Luke must have mentioned you. That he used to pose for you, and that you were out of town. So, in the guise of an idle question to the doorman, she let a known burglar know that the tenants in 9-G were out of town.”
“Why would I do that, Bernie?”
“I don’t know for sure,” I admitted. “Maybe you thought Luke was holing up in chez Nugent and you were hoping I’d smoke him out. Maybe you figured I’d get caught burgling their place and you could hang the baseball card theft on me at the same time.”
“It was spiritual. Blood was calling to blood.”
It was Patience who said this, and all of us stopped what we were doing and stared at her.
She put her hand to her mouth. “Maybe I spoke too soon,” she said. “Was Luke already in this apartment?” I said he was. “And he was, uh, dead?” Quite dead, I said. “Then that must have been it,” she said. “There must have been a strong psychic connection between Luke and…I’m sorry, Bernie, is her name Wendy or Doll?”
“Actually, most people call me Gwen,” Doll said, “but at this point I don’t honestly give a damn what anybody calls me. Could we get on with this?”
“A strong connection,” Patience said. “His spirit, freed from his body, was in communication with her. But she didn’t know that’s what it was, she only felt a sense of urgency relating to this apartment.” She held out both hands, the fingers spaced an inch or so apart. “This apartment is psychically charged,” she told Joan Nugent. “I don’t know how you can possibly live here.”
“It’s intense,” Mrs. Nugent agreed, with a toss of her braids. “But I think the energy is good for my creative work.”
“I never thought of that,” Patience said. “I’ll bet you’re right.”
I felt like a backseat passenger trying to get a grip on the steering wheel. “Whatever it was,” I said, “she baited the trap, bade me good night—”
“With a kiss,” Doll reminded me.
“With a kiss,” I agreed, “and then you scooted past the doorman and disappeared into the building.”
“It was probably Eddie,” Harlan Nugent murmured to his wife. “That incompetent.”
“Maybe you went upstairs and banged on Luke’s door some more,” I went on. “Maybe you stationed yourself where you could keep an eye on the lobby to see if I took the bait. Eventually you gave up and went home, which is what I’d already done. I slept off a larger intake of scotch than is my custom, went downtown to open up the store, and the next thing I knew I was under arrest.”
“It was a legitimate collar,” Ray Kirschmann said. “The phone call you made, your priors—”
“I’m not complaining,” I said. “It was a shock, that’s all. I spent Friday night in a cell, and Saturday night all I wanted to do was sleep in my own bed. But I got a late-night phone call from you, Doll. You had a brand-new collection of lies to tell me, and this time you knew just what you wanted me to do. Luke was your boyfriend, you said, and you broke up with him and threw his keys in his face, and you just knew he’d retaliated by stealing your good friend Marty’s baseball cards. And all I had to do was open Luke’s door for you and we could return Marty’s baseball cards and clear my name.”
“Hang on a sec,” Ray said. “She took the cards an’ now she wants to give ’em back?”
“I have a feeling the program would have changed again once she got her hands on the cards,” I said, “but it made a good story for the time being. I knew something was fishy, but I figured I’d play out the string and see where it led. One of the first things it did was catch you in a lie, Doll. You’d said you couldn’t call me earlier because you didn’t know the name of the store or where it was located. So when we split up Saturday night I said I’d meet you the following afternoon at the bookshop, and you said fine. You didn’t have to ask where it was or how to find it.”
“You had told me earlier.”
“Nope. You already knew. And you were there in plenty of time, and we came uptown and I opened Luke’s door.”
“Breaking and entering,” Ray intoned.
“I’ll cop to entering,” I said, “but we didn’t break anything. Didn’t find much of anything, either. Some pills, and what looked like marijuana. A couple of dollars in a jelly jar.”
“We found the drugs when we searched the place,” Ray said, “but I don’t remember no cash in no jam jar.”
“Gee,” I said, “I wonder what could have happened to it. Oh, and there was one other thing. We found a baseball card. ‘A Stand-up Triple!’ it was called, and it showed Ted Williams with his hands on his hips.”
“From the mustard set,” Borden Stoppelgard said. “That was one of Marty’s cards, all right. It’s a great picture of Williams, too.”
“If you like that sort of thing,” I said. “Much of its charm was lost on Doll and me. The message I got from it was that the cards had been there and now they were gone. Doll already knew they’d been there, and now she knew that Luke must have forced the lock on the briefcase. Then he’d started to transfer the cards to a backpack, and then he’d evidently changed his mind, but the one card he overlooked in a compartment of the backpack made it clear what he’d done. So that meant he was making a move on his own, and either he’d sold the cards already or he was in the process of doing so, and either way Doll could kiss the money goodbye, at least until Luke turned up again and she got another shot at him.”
“But that wasn’t going to happen,” Carolyn said helpfully, “because Luke was dead in the bathroom.”
“Not anymore,” I said. “Oh, he was still dead, but by the time we got into his apartmen
“What happened to the cards?” It was Lolly Stoppelgard who wanted to know, reinforcing my view of her as an eminently practical woman.
“Gone,” I said. “Did Luke sell them? If so, what happened to the money? My guess is he put them, briefcase and all, in a coin locker somewhere while he figured out what to do with them. But there must be half a dozen other things that could have happened to them, and I have a feeling we’ll never know where they wound up.”
“And what about Luke?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The young man,” Edna Gilmartin said. It was, as far as I could recall, the first time she’d spoken up all night. “The young man who died mysteriously in a locked bathroom. Who killed him?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” I said. “Harlan Nugent killed him.”
CHAPTER
Twenty-two
I had a tense moment there, I have to admit it. Because all Harlan Nugent had to do was tell us to go home and pick up the phone to call his lawyer.
But what he said was, “That’s ridiculous. I never even knew the man. Why on earth would I kill him?”
“That’s a good question,” I said.
“And we were in London,” Joan Nugent put in. “Neither of us could have had anything to do with it. We were out of the country.”
“You left Wednesday evening,” I said. “Doll dropped the cards at Luke’s apartment on Monday. Sometime between then and when you left, Luke was up here and Harlan Nugent killed him. If I had to guess, I’d go with Tuesday afternoon.” I looked over at Ray. “How does that square with the estimated time of death?”
“No problem, Bernie.”
“I think you must be out of your mind,” Nugent said. “That man was never in this apartment on any of those days.” A shadow passed over his wife’s face, and for an instant it looked as though she was about to say something, but her husband’s hand settled on hers and the moment passed. He set his jaw. “I’ll repeat what I said before. You admitted it was a good question. Why on earth would I kill him?”
“It’s still a good question,” I said, “but I’ve got a couple of good questions myself. Why would a man take off all his clothes and lock himself in somebody else’s bathroom?”
“To take a shower,” Lolly Stoppelgard suggested.
“That would make sense if it was his own bathroom,” Carolyn volunteered, “but it wasn’t. Maybe he got all sweaty posing and he needed to wash up.”
“He was not here,” Harlan Nugent said.
“Or maybe he just needed to use the john, Bern. That wouldn’t get him in the tub, though, would it? Ray, has anybody checked if the shower worked in his apartment on the seventh floor? See, if he couldn’t take a shower at his own place—”
“Forget the shower,” I said. “The water wasn’t on and the body wasn’t wet.”
“Some men tend to lock themselves in the bathroom,” Lolly Stoppelgard said, with a glance at her husband. “Did they find any funny magazines in there with him?”
Time to grab the wheel again. “He would lock himself in the bathroom,” I said, “as a way of hiding. Once, years ago, back in the days when I still engaged in occasional acts of burglary—”
“Aw, Jesus,” Ray muttered.
“—I was an uninvited guest in an empty apartment when its occupant returned. I hid in the closet, though a bathroom would have done as well had one been close at hand. I couldn’t lock the closet, of course.” Someone else had locked the closet, with me in it, and when I managed to get out I found a corpse on the floor. I winced at the memory.
“Nor was I naked,” I continued. “Last week Ray Kirschmann asked me what kind of burglar takes off his clothes in the course of a burglary. No burglar I ever heard of, I told him, so—”
“He was posing,” Patience said. “That’s it, isn’t it?” She smiled at Joan Nugent. “He was posing for you, wasn’t he?”
“I’ve never painted nudes,” Joan Nugent said. “I don’t believe in it.”
“You don’t believe in it?”
“No, I don’t. I think we’ve had entirely too much of that sort of thing down through the centuries. My most recent painting of Luke was in harlequin garb. I assure you he was fully clothed.”
“Then he was changing,” Patience said. “He’d posed in costume, and—”
“Never in costume. When he posed for me he wore street clothes. I would sketch the lines of his body, and then I’d paint the harlequin costume in later. I didn’t need him for that.”
“But he was naked,” I said.
“Oh, no,” she said. “I’d remember that. I’m sure it’s not at all the sort of thing I would forget.”
“Joan,” Harlan Nugent said gently, “shut up.”
“You might have remembered,” I told her, “if you’d known what was going on. But you were unconscious. You’d been drugged.”
“Not a word, Joan,” Nugent said.
“If you’ll all follow me,” I said, leading the way to the studio or guest bedroom, as you prefer. “You were drugged, Mrs. Nugent, and you were unconscious. Your clothes were off. Luke Santangelo’s clothes were off as well, and he was attempting to—”
“Oh my God,” someone said.
“I suppose you were on the daybed over there, or perhaps on the floor. Then there was the sound of your husband’s key in the lock, and seconds later he had thrown open the hall door and announced his presence. He’s a big, hearty man. I’m sure he tends to make his presence known.”
“Sometimes he’ll say, ‘Lucy, I’m home.’ Like Ricky Ricardo, you know. He does a good Cuban accent. Show them, darling.”
Harlan Nugent looked like a man trying to think of a reason to take the next breath.
“You walked in,” I said to him, “and found your wife unconscious, or at the very least out of her mind on drugs. You saw the bathroom door, closed. You tried the knob and it was locked.”
“And then what did I do?”
“You banged on the door, demanding that it be opened. Luke Santangelo was many things, most of them unsavory, but he was not entirely out of his mind. The last thing he was going to do was open the door.”
“Then I’d say we were at an impasse,” Nugent said, “since I’m hardly of a size to slither through the keyhole, and the door doesn’t have one anyway, does it?” He made a huge fist and gave the door a thump. “Pretty sturdy,” he observed, “but I suppose I could have knocked it down in extremis. Kicked it in, put my shoulder to it, that sort of thing. But didn’t I understand that it was still intact, indeed still locked, when the police were forced to break in?”
“I was wondering about that myself,” I said. I went over and tapped on the door, then flicked the switch alongside it. No lights went on or off. I opened the bathroom door and repeated the process, with the same results. “What have we here?” I said. “Doesn’t seem to do anything, does it?”
“I think it may control one of the baseboard outlets,” Nugent said. “What possible difference could it make?”
“I wonder,” I said, and whipped out my ring of burglar’s tools and began unscrewing the screws that held the switch plate in place. “Voilà,” I said at length, showing them all the rectangle devoid of the usual switchbox. “Once upon a time, this must have been a child’s bedroom. And after the child locked itself in the bathroom and couldn’t get out, perhaps for the second or third time, one of its parents resolved to make sure nothing of the sort ever happened again. Hence this little safety device.”
“Our children were grown when we moved here,” Joan Nugent said. “This room has always been my studio. And I’ve never locked myself in this bathroom. I hardly ever use this bathroom, and I rarely lock the door in
“Joan,” her husband said, “nobody cares. And you, sir,” he said to me. “What you’re suggesting makes no sense at all. Even if all the other nonsense you’ve suggested were true, which it is not, and even if I had known about this ancient passageway, which I did not, and even if I were sufficiently outraged to want to injure the villain, why would I leave him in the bathroom? If I went in there and killed him, why wouldn’t I get rid of the body?”
“Because you couldn’t get in the room.”
“Bernie,” Ray Kirschmann pointed out, “you just showed us how to do it. Remember?”
“Vividly,” I said. “But that’s not what Mr. Nugent did. Instead he got a gun from wherever he keeps that sort of thing, and he stuck the business end of it through the opening and shot Luke Santangelo right between the eyes. I don’t know if Luke was standing in the tub at the time. He may have tried backing away when he saw a gun poking through a wall at him, and who could blame him? But once he was shot the impact would have sent him reeling, and one way or another he wound up in the tub. He was dead, and the door was still locked.”
“So, Bernie? He reaches in like you did, unlocks the lock, an’ walks out with the stiff draped over his shoulder. Mr. Nugent here’s a big guy, the stiff was a wiry little punk, he wouldn’t have no trouble doin’ it. Your doctor didn’t say nothin’ about not doin’ any heavy liftin’, did he, Mr. Nugent?”
“Had any of this happened, Officer, I’d have done exactly what you’ve just said.”
I said, “Oh yeah? Let’s see you do it, Mr. Nugent.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Come on,” I said. “Show us how you’d have done it and we’ll all go home.”
“This is a farce,” he said. “Why should I dignify it by—”
“Oh, give it a rest,” I told him. “You’re too big. You’ve got forearms like a Bulgarian weightlifter. I don’t even know if you could get your hand through the opening, but you’d never get enough of your arm in to reach the lock. And why should you make a fool of yourself now by trying? You already tried once and found out it didn’t work.”