The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams

“But you went anyway.”

“Well, how could it have been a setup? She’d have had to know I was a burglar, and she’d have had to know I was going to be on that particular subway.”

“Maybe she was on it herself. Maybe she’d been following you.”

“All day? It doesn’t seem very likely. And I don’t think she was on the train, because I would have noticed her. She’s the kind of woman you notice.”

“Beautiful, huh?”

“Close enough. An easy eight on a ten scale.”

“And she just happened to ask you to walk her home, and then she just happened to mention that Joan and Harlan were in Europe.”

“I don’t think she followed me,” I said, “but she could have gone out to buy a quart of milk, say, and spotted me coming out of the subway. She said she recognized me from having seen me around the neighborhood, but I don’t remember seeing her, so maybe she made that up. Suppose she knew I was a burglar, and she spotted me, so she got me to walk her home.”

“If that was her home,” she said. “Stay,” she told Alison Wanda, and looked in the White Pages. “Cardamom…Chesapeake…Collier. Here we are, Cooper…. I don’t see a Gwendolyn Cooper. There’s a lot of G Coopers, and there’s one at 910 West End, but that would have to be way uptown. What’s the address of the Nugents’ building?”

“Three-oh-four.”

“Nope. I don’t see any Coopers at that address.”

“Maybe she spells it with a K.”

“Like Kountry Kupboard? Let’s see…. Gee, people really do spell it with a K, don’t they? But not our Doll. Still, what does it prove? She could have an unlisted number, or she could be subletting or sharing an apartment with somebody, and the phone could be in another name.”

“She knew the doorman.”

“It sounds to me as though he’s easy to know. You knew him, too, remember?”

“Good point,” I said. “He’s not the Maginot Line. She could have gotten past him whether she belonged in the building or not. But then where would she go?”

“The Nugent apartment.”

“A quick entrance and exit? Maybe. Or she could have killed time in a stairwell waiting for me to go home and then just walked out herself. ‘Bye, Eddie.’ ‘Hey, how ya doin’.’ Piece of cake.” I frowned. “But what’s the point?”

“To set you up.”

“To set me up to do what? Carolyn, any other night of my life I would have gone home and stayed home. Never mind that I’ve given up burglary. Say I was still an active burglar, even a hyperactive one. It’s the middle of the night, and a mysterious stranger has just managed to let me know that the occupants of a particular apartment are out of town. What am I going to do?”

“You tell me.”

“At the very least,” I said, “I’m going to sleep on it. In the cold light of dawn I might do a little research, and if it looks extremely promising I might knock it off a day or two down the line. Probably in the early afternoon, when visitors look a whole lot less suspicious. Most likely, though, I’d wake up and decide to forget the whole thing. But the one thing I would never do is go in that very night.”

“But you did.”

“But I did,” I acknowledged, “but how could she know I would?”

“Maybe she reads minds, Bern.”

“Maybe she does. Maybe she read mine and saw that I was out of it. So she set me up, and I went for it. What’s in it for her?”

“I don’t know, Bern.”

“Was I supposed to get caught in the Nugent apartment? God knows I was a sitting duck. Ordinarily I get in and out of a place as quickly as I can, but not this time. If I’d stayed there much longer I could have claimed squatter’s rights. If she’d tipped the police, they’d have had me dead to rights. The state troopers could have come on foot from Albany and got there before I left.”

“Maybe you were supposed to do something inside the apartment.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I. Whatever it was, I didn’t do it. All I did in Apartment 9-G was kill time. I brought some groceries in and I took some groceries out.”

“And gave your groceries a shake-shake-shake and turned yourself about.”

“Turned myself inside out is more like it. When I saw the corpse in the bathtub—”

“Who was he, Bern?”

“Not Harlan or Joan.”

“Well, I didn’t think he was Joan.”

“In this day and age,” I said, “you never know. But there was a picture of the Nugents in Harlan’s study, and the dead guy wasn’t either of them. There were other pictures around the house, Nugent children and grandchildren, and he didn’t turn up in any of the pictures. Probably not a long-lost relative, either, because I couldn’t detect any family resemblance.” I frowned. “There was something vaguely familiar about him, but I couldn’t tell you what it was.”

“What did he look like?”

“Mostly he looked naked and dead.”

“Well, that explains it. You must have recognized him from a Norman Mailer novel.”

I gave her a look. “I’d guess he was in his thirties,” I said. “Dark hair, cut short and combed forward like Julius Caesar.”

“No stab wounds, though.”

“No, just a bullet hole in the forehead.” I closed my eyes, trying to picture him. “He was thin,” I said, “but muscular. A lot of dark body hair. His eyes were wide open, but I can’t remember what color they were. I didn’t really spend a lot of time looking at him.”

“What was he doing there, Bern?”

“By the time I saw him,” I said, “he wasn’t doing much of anything.”

“Maybe he was just looking for a place to kill himself,” she said, “and he didn’t have the price of a hotel room. So he broke in—”

“Through a Poulard lock?”

“It didn’t stop you. All right, say he had a key. He got in, he took off all his clothes…Where were his clothes, Bern?”

“I guess he must have given them to the Goodwill. I certainly didn’t run across them.”

“Well, forget the clothes. He took ’em off, we know that much, and then he got in the tub. Why the tub?”

“Who knows?”

“He got in the tub and shot himself. No, first he locked the bathroom door, and then he got in the tub, and then he drew the shower curtain shut, and then he shot himself.”

“High time, too.”

“But why, Bern?”

“That’s the least of it. My question is, how did he do it? I suppose you could shoot yourself in the middle of the forehead if you put your mind to it. You could always use your thumb on the trigger. But wouldn’t it be more natural to put the gun to your temple or stick it in your mouth?”

“The natural thing,” she said, “would be to go on living.”

“The thing is,” I said, “I didn’t see a gun. Now, I didn’t go looking for one, either, and if he was standing up when he shot himself it’s entirely possible that he dropped the gun inside the tub and then fell so that his body was concealing it. But it’s also possible that there was no gun in the tub, or anywhere in the room.”

“If there was no gun—”

“Then somebody else shot him.”

“Doll Cooper?”

“Maybe,” I said, “but there are eight million other people in town who could just as easily have done it. Either of the Nugents, for example, which would have given them a good reason to get on a plane.”

“You think they did it?”

“I don’t have a clue who did it,” I told her. “It could have been anybody.”

“Not you or me, Bern. We can alibi each other. We were together all evening.”

“Except I don’t know when he was killed. I don’t know any of that forensic stuff about rigor mortis and lividity, and I didn’t want to touch him to find out how cold he felt. He didn’t smell too great, but corpses don’t, even if they’re fairly fresh. Remember the time a guy died in my store?”

“How could I forget? That was in the john, too.”

“So it was.”

“And we moved the body in a wheelchair. Yeah, I remember. He hadn’t been dead long at all, and he wasn’t too fragrant, was he?”

“No.”

“So we can’t alibi each other,” she said. “That’s a hell of a thing. How do you know we didn’t do it?”