Lawrence Block - The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza

"Let's just call it a mistake," I suggested. "The gentleman was under a lot of stress. He'd lost his wife, his house had been cruelly looted, and a coin worth a fortune was missing.

"And here's something interesting," I said, glancing again at Colcannon. "He never mentioned the coin to the police. He never said a word about it. You have to report losses to the police in order to make an insurance claim, but that didn't mean anything in this instance because the coin wasn't insured. And it wasn't insured for a very good reason. The gentleman didn't have title to it."

"This has gone far enough." It was Colcannon who spoke, and he managed to surprise me, not to mention the rest of the crowd. He got to his feet and glared at me. "I don't know how I let myself be gulled into coming here. I never knew the late Mr. Crowe. I was brought here on a false pretext. I never reported the loss of a 1913 V-Nickel and never carried insurance coverage on such a coin for a much better reason than the one you've advanced. I never had such a coin in my possession."

"I almost believed that for a while myself," I admitted. "Oh, I knew you had one, but I thought it might be a counterfeit. I ran a check on the five V-Nickels to find out which one you bought, and it turned out that they were all accounted for. Four were in museum collections and the fifth was privately owned, and the private specimen was lightly circulated and easily distinguishable from the others, and certainly not the specimen I took from your safe."

Another collective gasp-I'd gone and blown my anonymity, and now all and sundry knew who the perpetrator of the Second Burglary was. Ah, well. These things happen.

"But I had a good close look at that coin," I went on, "and I couldn't believe it was a counterfeit. So I did a little more checking and I invited some museum people to take a close look at their coins, and three of the four told me their coins looked just fine, thank you.

"The fourth museum had a counterfeit in the case."

I looked at the three men in dark suits. The one seated on the aisle, the little button-nosed guy with the thick glasses, was Milo Hracec, and he recognized his cue. "It was not a bad counterfeit," he said. "It was made from a proof 1903 nickel. The zero was removed and a one soldered in place. It was good work, and no one glancing into our display case would be likely to think twice about it, but you could never sell it to anyone as genuine."

The white-haired man cleared his throat. "I'm Gordon Ruslander," he announced. "When Mr. Hracec reported his discovery to me I went immediately to see for myself. He's right-the coin's not a bad counterfeit, but neither is it terribly deceptive at close glance. It's certainly not the coin I received when I traded a painting to the Baltimore Historical Society. That was a genuine specimen. I knew they wouldn't palm off a counterfeit on me, but as a matter of course I had it xrayed anyway, and it was authentic. The coin that had been substituted for it didn't have to be x-rayed. It was visibly fraudulent."

"What did you do after you'd seen the coin?"

"I went to my curator's home and confronted him," he said. The man on Ruslander's other side, the balding chap with the long nose, seemed to shrink in his seat. "I knew Howard Pitterman had been having his troubles," Ruslander went on. "He went through a difficult divorce and had some investment reverses. I didn't realize just how hard his circumstances had been or I would certainly have offered help." He frowned. "Instead he took matters into his own hands a couple of months ago. He substituted a counterfeit for the 1913 nickel, then sold off our most important rarity for a fraction of its value."

"I got twenty thousand dollars for it," Howard Pitterman said, his voice trembling. "I must have been insane."

"I don't know who that man is," Colcannon said, "but I've never seen him before in my life."

"If that's the man who bought the coin," Pitterman said, "he didn't buy it from me. I sold it to a dealer in Philadelphia, a man with a shady reputation. Maybe he sold it to this Mr. Colcannon, or maybe it went through another pair of hands first. I wouldn't know. I could give you the name of that dealer, although I'd rather not, but I don't think he'd admit to anything, and I can't prove he bought the coin from me." His voice broke. "I'd like to help," he said, "but I don't see that there's anything I can do."

"I'll say it again," Colcannon said. "I don't know any disreputable coin dealers in Philadelphia. I scarcely know any reputable ones. I know Mr. Ruslander by reputation, of course, as the founder of the Gallery of American and International Numismatics as well as proprietor of the Liberty Bell Mint, but I've never met him or his employees."

"Then why did you call Samuel Wilkes yesterday?"

"I never heard of Samuel Wilkes."

"He has an office near Rittenhouse Square," I said, "and he deals in coins and medals, and shady's the word for him. You called him yesterday at his home and left your name, and you called his office, and you also put in a call to the Gallery of American and International Numismatics. You made those calls from your home telephone, and since they're long distance there'll be a record of them."

There would be a record, all right. Colcannon was staring at me, trying to figure out how there would be a record of calls he had never made. Any minute now he'd recall that he'd been lured away from his house and hustled off to Madison and Seventy-ninth, and he might even figure out that he'd had company in his absence, but right now he seemed content to deny the whole thing.

"I never heard of this Wilkes," he said, "and I never called him, and I certainly didn't call the gallery."

"What's it matter anyway, Bern?" It was Ray Kirschmann, and I wasn't sure how much of this he was following. "If Crowe got killed for this nickel, all right, that makes sense, but who cares how the nickel got into the safe? Crowe got killed after it got outta the safe."

"Ah," I said. "What's significant is that nobody knew it was in the safe in the first place. Except for the Third Burglar."

"The who? "

"Rabbit Margate and Harlan Reese didn't know about the nickel," I went on. "All they knew was that the Colcannons were going to be out of town overnight. They knew that because Wanda Colcannon got her hair done at a beauty shop called Hair Apparent, where Rabbit's sister Marilyn was one of the operators. And she was quite an operator. Among her customers in the past year and a half, eight of them got burglarized while they were out of town on vacation. All eight of those burglaries had the same modus operandi. A crude break-in, a completely messy burglary, and a pattern of vandalism that was almost deliberate in nature. Marilyn just kept her ears open when her customers talked about going out of town, and she passed on the information to her brother, and that was all it took. What good does it do to stop the milk and mail and leave the lights on a timer if the sweet young thing who does your hair has a burglar for a brother?"

I avoided looking in Marilyn's direction while I said all this. Now I caught Carolyn's eye. "Wanda used to stop in my bookstore when she brought her dog for grooming at a place down the street." Might as well keep Carolyn out of it. "The last time I saw her, she happened to mention she was taking the animal out of town to be bred. So, like Rabbit and Harlan, I had inside information. I knew the Colcannons would be away overnight, and they knew the same thing.

"But the Third Burglar knew no such thing. The Third Burglar was waiting for the Colcannons to come home. Ever since I realized there was a third burglar involved, I've tended to think of him in capital letters, like the Third Murderer in Macbeth. Shakespearean scholars have a lot of fun with the Third Murderer, you know. Shakespeare didn't give him all that much to say, so the evidence is pretty sketchy, but one school of thought holds that the Third Murderer was actually Macbeth himself."