Lawrence Block - The Burglar on the Prowl

Most of the time I wasn't listening that hard, anyway, because I was busy thinking. You ought to be able to work this out, I told myself. The whole thing was full of coincidences, and when you have that many of them, sooner or later they start fitting together in meaningful ways. That's what I told myself, anyway, but I kept turning the pieces around in my mind, and I couldn't quite make anything out of them. It was like a jigsaw puzzle, I decided, with some pieces missing. If I got hold of the missing pieces I might still be stumped, but at least I'd have a shot at it.

I went to the phone, dropped more coins into it than it used to cost, dialed a string of numbers that I remembered only because I'd dialed them twice already today, and listened to the phone ring in Ray Kirschmann's house. If a phone rings and there's no machine to answer it, does it make a sound? I decided it makes the sound of one hand clapping, which was about as much applause as I was capable of today, anyway. It rang until I was tired of listening to it, and then I hung up and went back to the bar. There'd been a sip or two left in my glass, and there'd been more cash on the bar than I would have left for a tip, but the bartender (whose name I hadn't caught, but I was pretty sure it wasn't Sigrid) had thought I'd left and taken it all away.

I really hate weekends.

The rain stopped sometime after midnight Saturday, too late to do most of the city any good, and started up again before dawn, in plenty of time to ruin Sunday. I went out for breakfast and came home with the paper. I still didn't have either copy ofLettuce Prey at hand, but the Sunday Times was enough to see anybody through a rainy Sunday, and clear into the middle of the week. Even after I'd tossed all the advertising supplements in the recycling bin, and added those sections like Jobs (which I don't want) and Automobiles (which I don't need), I still had enough paper left to make a person have second thoughts about freedom of the press.

I settled in with it, pausing now and then to try Ray Kirschmann in Sunnyside. Around eleven his wife answered, just home from church. No, she said, Ray wasn't home. He'd had to work, he hadn't even been able to go to services with her. I gave her my name and number, and she said she'd pass them on to him if he called in, but she sounded as though that wasn't likely to happen.

I tried the precinct and left a message there as well, and went back to the Real Estate section, where there was an inspiring story of a couple who'd searched high and low for a place that would accommodate both their hobbies, although they preferred to call them areas of interest. He built elaborate layouts for his model trains, while she collected weathervanes and old farm equipment. For a mere eight million dollars they'd bought an old warehouse in Nolita, which is not, as you might suppose, a Nabokovean tale about a prepubescent girl who won't have anything to do with Humbert Humbert, but a realtors' term for the emerging area north of Little Italy. By acting as their own general contractor and doing most of the work themselves, they'd managed to hold the cost of the gut rehab they'd done to another four million, so-well, you can run the numbers yourself and see what a bargain they'd got, with enough square footage to give him the HO-gauge equivalent of fifty miles of railroad track, while she had plenty of room to show off her treasures, including one of the very first McCormick reapers.

I called Carolyn. "What I want to know," I said, "is where do they find these people?"

"Huh? Where do who find what people?"

"Page four of the Real Estate section."

"I'll call you back," she said.

It was close to fifteen minutes before the phone rang, and I picked it up and said, "Well, it took you long enough. After we finish the remodeling, what do you want to do-play with your trains or go cut the wheat in the back forty?"

There was a long, thoughtful pause, and then a voice not at all like Carolyn's said, "It didn't take me long at all, not once I got your message. An' the rest of what you said must be in English, because I recognize all the words, but I don't know what the hell you're talkin' about."

"Oh, Ray. I thought you were Carolyn."

"I'm a foot taller'n she is an' a lot heavier, an' I got a deeper voice. Not to mention the fact that she's a woman, for all the good it does anybody. Most people don't have a whole lotta trouble tellin' the two of us apart. You called me, Bern. You got somethin'?"

"I might," I said.

"It took a while findin' out who he was, Bernie. He had a wallet with enough cash in it to choke a goat, but not a lick of ID anywhere in it, or anywhere else on him."

"No money belt?"

"Not unless he was wearin' it underneath his skin, because the last I seen him he was bareass naked on a metal table with a doctor diggin' bullets out of him. We ran his prints, of course, but he didn't have none."

"The man had no fingerprints?"

"He had 'em on the tips of his fingers, like everybody else except your occasional visitor from outer space. But he didn't have 'em on file, so when we ran 'em we didn't get nowhere."

He bit into a doughnut, chased it with a gulp of coffee. He'd picked me up in a city car, a Chevrolet Monte Carlo that must have been confiscated from somebody buying or selling low-grade cocaine, and now we were in a restaurant near the Manhattan side of the Williamsburg Bridge. Ray was partial to it, for reasons that remain unclear to me. We'd picked up our coffee and doughnuts at the counter and taken them to a table, on which Ray was now putting his cards.

"So we had nothin' to go on," he said, "an' we ID'd him anyway."

"How?"

"Good police work," he said. "How'd he get to your store? Well, you don't see too many fat guys on the bus or the subway, unless that's all they can afford, an' I already told you about his wallet."

"How much was he carrying?"

"I didn't weigh him, but he had to go over three hundred pounds. Oh, money?" He held his thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. "A wad this thick. Eighty-seven hundred bucks, all in hundreds, an' that's not countin' what he had in euros. That's a man who can afford to take a cab, but I knew right off that's not how he got there."

"How'd you know?"

"What's he gonna do, get a cabby to break a hundred? He didn't have any small bills, Bernie. What that tells me is he's got a car. He drove there, an' he's plannin' to drive straight home, wherever home is." He shrugged. "Course, we checked cabbies, too, lookin' for somebody who dropped a fat guy on your block of East 11th somewhere around lunchtime. You go through the motions, but I knew he drove."

"Unless he walked."

"A guy with his build?"

"I don't know, Ray. The man was light on his feet."

"Every fat man's light on his feet, Bernie. They gotta be or they wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Anyway, even if you had a point, it's a mute one. We found the car."

"Oh."

"He left your place walkin' east, an' he was gettin' ready to cross the street when he got blown away instead. So that tells me to look south an' east of your bookstore, an' what did we find on 10th Street between University an' Fifth?"

"A car?"

"A Buick," he said, "pulled up smack dab alongside a fire hydrant."

"It's good you got there before the traffic squad towed him."

"Couldn't happen, Bern. He had DPL plates. Diplomatic immunity might not keep him from gettin' shot full of holes, but it kept his car from gettin' hauled off to the pound. It mighta kept us from searchin' his car, I'm not too clear on the rules, but as fate would have it I had the car open before I even noticed the DPL tags. Careless of me."

"But convenient."

"Photo ID in the glove compartment, a driver's license plus his credentials from the Latvian embassy. Guy's name is Valdi Berzins, an' accordin' to the embassy he had somethin' to do with the Latvian mission to the UN, but nothin' too important. That was all we got from him outside of his address, which was a hotel, the Blantyre on East 51st Street. He had a room there by the month. Not a bad hotel, but not the Carlyle, either. Only thing we found in the room was a scrapbook of newspaper clippings, an' the last I heard they were lookin' for someone to translate 'em."