Lawrence Block - The Burglar who thought he was Bogart

“Tsarnoff,” I said.

“Whatever you tsay, Bern. I figured nobody could reach you at home, and they didn’t know you were staying here, and you don’t have an answering machine on either of your phones, so how could they get in touch with you?”

“They can’t,” I said, “which should make it hard for them to kill me.”

“Well, I didn’t think anybody would try to kill me, so I figured I’d spend the day in the bookstore. It’s not as if I had anything else to do. My store’s closed for the weekend.”

“So was mine. How did you manage? The bargain table must have been a bitch to move.”

“For a small weak woman like me? That’s what I figured. I left it inside.”

“Really? It’s a good draw, it lets people know they’re passing a bookstore.”

“ Bern, I wasn’t looking to do big business. I just wanted to be open in case anybody came by with a message for you. I sold some books, but that wasn’t the point.”

“You actually sold some books?”

“What’s so remarkable about that? You sit behind the counter, people bring up a book, you check the price and add the tax and take their money and make change. It’s not nuclear physics.”

“How much did you take in?”

“I don’t know, a little under two hundred dollars. Whatever it was, I left it in the register.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t send it to the hip dysplasia people.”

“I wish I’d thought of it. A lot of your regular customers asked about you. They wanted to know if you were sick. I told ’em you were up till all hours and had a killer hangover.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“People like hearing that sort of thing, Bernie. It’s a humanizing flaw, they identify with you and feel superior to you at the same time. Anyway, I didn’t want to say you were sick or they might worry.”

“You could have said I had hip dysplasia.”

“You think that’s funny, but-”

“I know, I know, it’s no laughing matter.”

“Well, it’s not.” She poured herself a little more Scotch, hanging in with a vengeance. “Mowgli came by with a shopping bag full of treasures from the Twenty-sixth Street flea market. He said he was sure you’d want them, but I said I couldn’t do any buying.”

“Is he going to come back?”

“He’ll have to. I gave him a ten-dollar advance and got him to leave the books for you to look at. If they’re not worth ten dollars-”

“They’ll be worth it. You did the right thing, otherwise he’d have taken them to somebody else. Anybody else come in that I should know about?”

“Tiggy Rastafarian.”

“Rasmoulian.”

“I know, I was being funny.”

“You’re joking anyway, right? He didn’t really come in.”

“Sure he did. I think that book confused him, Bern. He didn’t know what to make of it. He’s a snappy dresser, the way you said, and I guess he’s pretty short, but you made him sound like a midget.”

“For a full-grown person,” I said, “he’s not.”

“He’s taller than I am, Bern.”

“That’s different.”

“How is it different? Because I’m a woman? Why should that make a difference?”

“You’re right,” I said. “It’s a clear-cut case of sex discrimination, and I think there must be a government agency you can call. What did he want?”

“Tiggy? He wouldn’t come right out and say, and then he didn’t get a chance to say anything, because Ray came in.”

“Again? Tiggy must think he lives there.”

“That’s what Ray seems to think. He comes in and makes himself right at home, doesn’t he? He remembered Tiggy, who I guess would be hard to forget, wouldn’t he? Ray greeted him by name, but of course he got the name wrong, not that Tiggy bothered correcting him. He just got the hell out of there, which gave Ray a chance to do what he’d wanted to do from the minute he walked in.”

“What was that?”

“What he always does. Make short jokes. ‘Hey, Carolyn, it does my heart good to see you finally got a boyfriend your own size.’ And that was just to get himself warmed up. I happen to be altitudinally challenged. What’s the big deal?”

“Well, you know how he is.”

“I know what he is, too,” she said with feeling, “but I’m not insensitive. You don’t see me making asshole jokes every time I’m in the same room with him. He wants you to get in touch with him. He says it’s urgent.”

“Did he say why?”

“No, and I couldn’t get it out of him, but he sounded serious. I told him you were away for the weekend.”

“Good thinking.”

“I said I didn’t know where but you’d mentioned something about New Hampshire. Bern, do you think those were cops hanging around your place uptown? Because he said he knew you hadn’t been home, and how else would he know that unless they had the place staked out?”

“Maybe,” I said. “They were obvious enough about it. But I don’t get it. I can see him dropping in, he does that all the time, and I can even see him leaving a message that it’s urgent, even if it’s not. But a stakeout? What for?”

“Unless they found out about Hoberman.”

“So what if they did? Look, when I ID’d the body, I made sure Ray got the impression I wasn’t a hundred percent certain, that I was mostly going through with it to oblige him and be a nice guy. If they finally got a make on Hoberman’s prints or something like that, well, yeah, I can see where he’d want to talk with me, at least to get me to rethink the ID. But why would he park a cop in my lobby and two more in an unmarked car out in front?”

“You could call him and ask him.”

“How? I’m in New Hampshire.”

“You came back ahead of schedule.”

“I don’t want to come back,” I said. “Then he’ll want to pull me in, and that’s the last thing I want.”

She thought about it. “Okay, you’re calling him from New Hampshire, because you called me to tell me how beautiful it is up there and I gave you his message. That would work, wouldn’t it?”

“Maybe. Until he ran a trace and found out where the call came from.”

“Would he do that?”

“He might.”

“You want to rent a car and drive up somewhere to make the call? Not New Hampshire, that’s too far, but say Connecticut? Then when he traces the call…forget I said anything, Bern. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I didn’t think it did.”

“He said you can call him at home anytime. He said you’d have the number.”

“He’s right, I do. I’ll see how I feel about it in the morning. What’s this?”

She’d handed me a business card. No name, no address, just a seven-digit number, the first three digits separated from the last four with a hyphen.

“It looks like a phone number,” I said.

“Very good, Bern.”

“No area code, though.” I ran my thumb across the surface. “Raised lettering,” I said. “Or should that be numbering? Since there aren’t any letters. I don’t remember Ray’s number offhand, but I’d be willing to bet this isn’t it. Unless he had it changed, but this is a little too minimalist for Ray, wouldn’t you say?”

“It’s not Ray’s.”

“Where did it come from?”

“A man who walked into the store and asked for you. I said you weren’t in.”

“You were right about that.”

“He said you should call him sometime to discuss a matter of mutual interest.”

“Ah, that narrows it down. This is great, I’ve got a card with a name and no number and another with a number and no name. I wish somebody else would come along and give me one with nothing on it but an address. Ten Downing Street, say, or Sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue.”

“Maybe one of those was this guy’s. I tried to get his name but you’d have thought it was a state secret.”