The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams

“Death appears to have been the result of a single gunshot wound,” she said, “but whether it may have been self-inflicted seems to be an open question at this stage. My hunch is that there’s more to come on this one, Chuck.”

“Thanks, Norma, and now for a look at tomorrow’s weather—”

I killed the set and went back to the phone. “Wow,” I said.

“When we went there,” she said, “they must have already hauled him out in a body bag.”

“Are you sure?”

“Don’t you remember what the old lady was saying about cops in the hallways? What do you think she was talking about?”

“I thought she said some woman killed her husband.”

“So she got it wrong. They hadn’t identified him yet.”

“The address they gave—”

“Way west on Forty-sixth Street. It’s a rooming house. He stayed there for a couple of weeks when he first moved to New York years ago. The thing is, the apartment on West End was never in his name. It was one of those things where he was subletting it from a rent-controlled tenant. That’s how he could afford to live there. Bernie, what are we going to do?”

“I don’t know about you,” I said, “but I’m going to go to sleep. I was going to shower first, but I think I’ll let that go until morning.”

“But—”

“You’re upset,” I said, “because he was your boyfriend. But I never even met the guy.”

“My fingerprints are all over his apartment.”

“You just said the apartment’s in somebody else’s name. Maybe they’ll never get there.”

“They’ll get there,” she said. “They’ll talk to the right person at the rooming house and find out he didn’t live there anymore, and then they’ll call the Actors Equity office and get the right address. Shit, all they really have to do is look in the phone book. Lucas Santangelo, 304 West End. Even the cops ought to be able to figure that out.”

I wasn’t so sure of that, but I let it pass. I told her that she might get drawn into the case, if anybody happened to volunteer the information that she had been romantically involved with the dead man. If that happened, all she had to do was tell them an abbreviated version of the truth. “You didn’t know him that well,” I said. “He was one of several men that you were friendly with—”

“God, that makes me sound like a tramp.”

“—and you broke up with him recently, and saw him for the last time a week ago. If you left fingerprints in his apartment, well, so what? I’d be surprised if they gave his apartment a second look. I gather they think he may have killed himself.”

“Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know why anybody would do it,” I said, “but it’s something people seem to do all the time. Maybe it just struck him that his life wasn’t working out.”

“Right, he had half a million dollars’ worth of baseball cards in his attaché case and it depressed him so badly that he shot himself. Where would he get a gun?”

“Maybe he had one all along.”

“You searched his apartment top to bottom this afternoon,” she said. “Did you see a gun?”

“No, I didn’t,” I said. “On the other hand, you couldn’t really expect him to put it back in his sock drawer after shooting himself upstairs in 9-G.”

“I didn’t think of that,” she said softly.

“No, because you’re too upset to think clearly. I’m not upset, but I’m certainly exhausted. It’s been a long day.”

“It’s been almost twelve hours since I met you at your bookstore.”

“And I’d already put in half a day by then. I opened up around ten.”

“So you’ve been up since what, eight o’clock?”

“Something like that.”

“I should let you go to sleep,” she said. “I guess I just want to be reassured that there’s nothing I have to worry about.”

“Is that all? That’s easy. There’s nothing you have to worry about, Doll. Get some sleep yourself. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

I got undressed and decided I wanted a shower after all, no matter how late it was or how long I’d been up. Afterward I put on a robe and checked the pocket of my blazer for “A Stand-up Triple!” The back of the card enumerated all the three-base hits Ted Williams had had in the years through 1949, and told which years he’d had them in, and whether he’d secured them in Fenway or on the road. There was no indication, though, as to how many had been stand-up triples of the sort illustrated on the card’s face and how many times he’d had to slide.

Damn, I thought. Inquiring Minds Want to Know…

I sighed, and got out the step stool, and stood on it while I removed the little screws that held the panel that makes the back wall of my closet appear to start a few inches sooner than it does. I could have put my picks and probes to bed in the compartment I thus opened, but I decided not to. I’d gotten used to having them on my person lately. I don’t know that I’d have felt naked without them, but I decided to go on providing pocket space for them for the next little while.

I could have helped myself to all or part of Harlan Nugent’s $8,350, too. It was still there, where I’d tucked it away Friday morning. Sooner or later I’d want to relocate it to Carolyn’s hidey-hole, in case she had to bail me out again. But that could wait.

So what I did instead was take out a tan attaché case of Hartma

I carried it into the living room and sat down on the couch with it. Luggage locks in general are more for show than security. Anyone with enough brute strength to pull the ring top off a can of Dr Pepper can knock them loose with a hammer, or pry them off with a screwdriver. A gentler soul can simply run the numbers. There are, after all, only a thousand possibilities, and how long can it take? It’s tedious, starting with 0–0–0 and 0–0–1 and 0–0–2, but once you get going there’s not much to it. If you worked at a positive snail’s pace of five seconds per combination, you’d run twelve in a minute, 120 in ten minutes, and you’d be all the way to 9–9–9 in what, an hour and a half?

Since the mechanisms are pretty simple, they’re also easy to pick, which is what I’d done. Having done so, I’d reset both combinations to 4–2–2, which was the house number of my boyhood home. (That’s where my baseball cards used to be, once upon a time.) I opened them now so that I could put “A Stand-up Triple!” with its companions.

I know, I know. You’re wondering where the attaché case came from. Didn’t Doll and I just spend part of the afternoon searching fruitlessly for it?

Well, much as it pains me to admit it, I haven’t played entirely fair with you. My day actually got underway a little earlier than you (and Doll Cooper) may have been led to believe. See, I left out a few things in the telling….

CHAPTER Sixteen

I was somewhere, God knows where, picking a lock. Had I been an Iraqi, I might have called it the mother of all locks, because every time I seemed to have opened it I found another more intricate mechanism within. At last the final set of tumblers tumbled, giving me access not to a house or apartment but to the i