Lawrence Block - The Burglar in the Rye

And where did that leave me? Well, for the moment it left me with a bag of books I’d just purchased, and they weren’t doing me any good where they were. I took them out and stacked them on my counter and set about pricing them, then placing them where they belonged on my shelves. Gas-House McGinty was hard to price; I checked a couple of price guides to no avail, wound up leaving it unpriced for the time being.

Idly I opened the book to the first page of text and started reading, and I was halfway down page three when a familiar voice jarred me out of Farrell’s narrative. “Well, well, well,” Ray Kirschmann boomed, and I straightened up and closed the book with a snap.

“Hey, Bern,” he said. “You look like you just got caught redhanded, an’ all you’re doin’ is readin’ a book. You got a bad conscience or somethin’?”

“It’s a valuable book,” I said. “I shouldn’t be reading it. Anyway, you startled me, Ray.”

“Man’s got a store, he’s gotta expect somebody might walk into it every once in a while. It’s one of the risks of retail. Even if it’s a fake store an’ all he really is is a burglar.”

“Ray…”

“Those letters turn up yet, Bern?”

“No,” I said, “and they’re not going to. I was looking for them, I admit it, but somebody got there first.”

“An’ stabbed Landau.”

“Evidently.”

He frowned. “Seems to me,” he said, “you said the other day that you had the letters.”

“No,” I said, “ you said I had them, and I said they were in a safe place.”

“Safe from who?”

“Safe from me,” I said, “and I have to say I don’t care where they are, or who took them.”

“ Bern, what happened to our deal?”

“Nothing happened to it, but not even Steven can make something out of nothing. There’s nothing for us to split, Ray.”

“So you’re out of it.”

“Right.”

He started to say something, but the phone rang and I reached to answer it. It was Hilliard Moffett, the world’s foremost collector of Gulliver Fairborn, just calling to remind me of the intensity of his interest.

I stopped him in midsentence. “I don’t have the letters,” I said, “and I never will. And I’m a little busy right now.”

I hung up. Ray said, “What we were sayin’, you washed your hands of the whole business.”

“Absolutely.”

“So you ain’t been back to that hotel, the padded bears.”

“The Paddington,” I said, “and no, I haven’t. How could I? I don’t think they’d let me in.”

“When did anybody ever have to let you in, Bern?”

The phone rang again. I made a face and picked it up, and it was Lester Eddington, the Fairborn scholar, to say that he perhaps ought to stress how important it was that he receive copies of the Fairborn-Landau correspondence, and that on consideration he realized he could pay quite a bit more than the cost of making copies. Several thousand dollars, in fact, and-

It helps when you know your lines, and I didn’t have any trouble remembering mine. “I don’t have the letters,” I said, “and I never will. And I’m a little busy right now.”

I hung up. “You keep tellin’ people that,” Ray said, “an’ pretty soon you’re gonna believe it yourself. Tell me somethin’, Bern. What did you do last night?”

“What did I do?”

“Uh-huh. You hang out with Carolyn?”

“No, she had a date.”

“So what did you do?”

“I had a few drinks at the Bum Rap,” I said.

“All by your lonesome? You know what they say about drinkin’ all by yourself.”

“I suppose it’s better than being all by yourself and not drinking,” I said, “but I had company.”

“An’ then?”

“And then I went home.”

“To your place on West End an’ Seventy-first.”

“That’s where I live,” I said. “That’s my home, so when I decide to go home, that’s where I go to.”

“You coulda gone home with whoever you were drinkin’ with,” he said. “To her home, is what I mean.”

“It was a guy.”

“Well,” he said, “I never thought you were that way, Bern, but what’s it to me who you go home with?”

“I went home alone,” I said, “to my own home, and all by myself, and-”

And the phone rang. I picked it up and barked into the receiver, and there was a pause, and a Mr. Victor Harkness of Sotheby’s said he’d been trying to reach me, and he guessed I hadn’t had an opportunity to call him back.

“This is unofficial,” he said, “so let’s just call it an exploratory inquiry. Miss Anthea Landau had made arrangements for us to handle the sale of the Fairborn letters. She’d brought in some representative letters, so we’d had a look at them, but she wouldn’t leave them with us. But we gave her an advance, and she signed our standard agreement, and it’s binding on her heirs and assigns.”

“I doubt that would include me,” I said. “I can’t imagine why she would mention me in her will. I never met the woman.”

There was a long pause, and then Mr. Harkness tried again. “My point, Mr. Rhodenbarr, is that we have a vested interest in the material. It will be the highlight of our January sale of books and documents. Its value to us thus exceeds somewhat the commissions we’d expect to collect on the sale, which would in themselves be substantial.”

“That’s interesting, but-”

“Consequently,” he said, “we could pay a finder’s fee. In cash. No questions asked.”

“And you can do that?”

“The letters remain the legal property of Miss Landau,” he said, “no matter in whose hands they may be at the moment. And our arrangement with her remains in force. Should we succeed in recovering the letters, we’d be under no obligation to account for the manner in which they came into our possession.”

I took a deep breath. “I don’t have the letters,” I said, “and I never will. And I’m a little busy right now.”

I hung up. “You’re repeatin’ yourself,” Ray said. “I’ll tell you, Bern, you sound like a broken record.”

“Records are made to be broken.”

“Uh-huh. So you went straight home last night, huh?”

Where was he going with this? “I went to the Bum Rap,” I said. “I already told you that.”

“Having drinks with some fag friend of yours.”

“His name’s Henry,” I said, “and he’s not gay, or at least I don’t think he is. What difference does it make?”

“It don’t make none to me. I didn’t go home with him.”

“And neither did I.”

“No, you went home alone. What time?”

“I don’t know. Eight or nine o’clock, I guess. Something like that.”

“An’ you went right home.”

“I stopped at the deli and bought a quart of milk. Why?”

“Prolly to put in your coffee. Oh, why am I askin’? Just makin’ conversation, Bern. So you went home an’ you were there alone all night, is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“An’ this mornin’…”

“I got up and came to the store.”

“An’ opened up, an’ fed your cat, an’ did the things you always do.”

“Right.”

“An’ you just walked out your door, right? You didn’t notice a thing?”

Oh, God. I had to ask, even though I didn’t want to hear the answer. “Didn’t notice what, Ray?”

“The dead girl,” he said, “lyin’ smack in the middle of your living-room floor. There was hardly room enough to walk around her, so I guess you musta stepped right over her. Funny you didn’t even notice.”

“Adead woman,” I said.

“Girl, woman. Suit yourself, Bern. It don’t matter what you call her on account of she ain’t likely to answer. Poor dame’s dead as a hangnail.”