The Burglar on the Prowl (25 page)

“That’s what I thought at first, but it doesn’t add up. It still
doesn’t explain why he thought I’d have a book for him, or why he was happy with the one I handed him. He didn’t flip through it looking for pictures. He just paid for it and left. Colby, what made you ask for that particular book?”

“I’d been looking for a copy. It’s a book, and you’re a bookseller, and so—”

“You don’t much care for Conrad.”

“I don’t like his sea stories. I’m told
The Secret Agent
is the sort of book the man might have written if he’d never gone to sea. I thought it worth a try.”

“And worth a phone call.”

“Why not?”

“But I think you already got a phone call,” I said. “From a plastic surgeon.”

“Bernie,” he said, “you can’t be serious. I may look like a candidate for plastic surgery, but I’m afraid I lack the requisite vanity. Am I to assume the plastic surgeon in question is our host, Dr. Mapes? Why would you think I even know the man? How would we have met?”

“At school,” I said, “or on a bus, or in an Internet chat room, with both of you pretending to be lesbians. But if I had to guess, I’d say your dermatologist referred you. Maybe you had a suspicious mole on your face, in a spot that was sufficiently visible to warrant a plastic surgeon’s doing the work.”

“How could you possibly know something like that?”

“Just a wild guess. What I can’t figure out is how you knew Valdi Berzins.”

“I didn’t.”

“You must have. The two of you probably had a friend in common, some professor teaching a course called
Latvian as a Second Language
. One way or another, you knew both of them. And you called Mapes, or Mapes called you, and he let you know about these photos, and that he had a few hundred thousand dollars in a wall safe in his bedroom, and—”

“Hold it right there,” said one of the government men. They
were both on their feet. One of them was holding a gun, while the other brandished a piece of paper. “I was wondering when you’d get around to the reason we’re here. A couple of hundred thousand dollars in undeclared cash, that sounds about right.” He whirled on Mapes. “Crandall Rountree Mapes? I’m from Internal Revenue, and I have here a court order authorizing my partner and I—”

My partner and me, I thought, you federal dimwit.

“—to search said Devonshire Close premises. Sir, I’d like you to escort us upstairs and open the safe for us.”

Mapes had weathered everything up to this point. Now it was as if the hand of fate had come at him with a scalpel and savaged all the fine work some colleague had done for him. He aged ten years just like that, and his color faded even as the perspiration poured out of him.

He was sputtering, something about an attorney, and the IRS man told him he could get one later, but in the meantime they were damn well going to have a look at that safe. Wally Hemphill scanned the piece of paper and told Mapes yes, they had the authority, and there was nothing he could do but keep his mouth shut.

“The rest of you wait down here,” the other IRS agent said.

And off they went.

T
hey weren’t gone long, and when they came back, well, as Carolyn has been known to say, the worm was on the other foot. The IRS robots looked thoroughly disgruntled, so much so that it was hard to believe they had ever been gruntled to begin with, while Mapes had somehow reclaimed the face someone had constructed for him.

“Well, I told you,” he said. “And now you can tell the rest of these ladies and gentlemen. Was there any money in that safe?”

They glared at him.

“I’ll take that as a no,” he said. “Insurance policies, stock certificates. A few pieces of jewelry, none of them terribly costly, and all of them purchased for my wife with after-tax dollars. That’s what you found, and what I’d said you would find. But you found not a drop of this mysterious cash.”

“Don’t think you’re getting off that easy,” one of them said. “You can expect to be audited for the rest of your life.”

Mapes drew himself up to his full height and glared down at them. “That’s enough,” he said. “You’ve exercised your warrant and exhausted my patience. I want you to leave.”

And I guess they didn’t care about the missing photos, or who
killed Valdi Berzins, or any of the rest of it. If the cash was gone, so were they, and that was the last we saw of them.

By walking upstairs and coming down five minutes later and a quarter of a million dollars poorer, Mapes had suddenly blossomed as a folk hero, a little man who had taken a stand against the machine. Michael Quattrone was telling him that the Feds pulled shit like that all the time, and that he could recommend a lawyer who would run rings around them. Wally Hemphill told him there was a limit to how much they could harass a person, and they might have crossed it; he told Mapes he should talk to Quattrone’s lawyer.

I wasn’t much surprised that the safe in the bedroom was empty—after all, as you’ll recall, I was the one who had emptied it. But what relieved me enormously was the extent to which Mapes was relieved. He was so happy to be off the federal hook that he hadn’t yet had a chance to wonder where his money had gone. That meant this was the first time he’d opened the safe since my visit, and that meant the rest of the plan had a chance of working.

First, though, he tried to throw us out. “I want to thank you all,” he said, “for your support just now. But I don’t need to keep you any longer. I think you should go.”

“Oh, I dunno about that,” Ray said. “Seems like we’re just gettin’ warmed up.”

“I’ll admit I’m growing interested myself,” Michael Quattrone said. “I think our friend here should continue.”

I was glad to hear I was his friend, and by implication everybody else’s. I’d taken a seat, but I got up now and faced them. “Getting back to you,” I said to Colby Riddle, who looked as though he’d hoped I would have forgotten him in all the excitement. “Mapes called you. He mentioned money, whether there’s any in the safe right now or not. And he mentioned me, because he’d read the same newspaper stories as everybody else. You were a scholar, a book person. I owned a bookstore not far from where you taughtology, and—”

“Ology?”

“Well, whatever. It ends in -ology, doesn’t it?”

“It’s comparative linguistics.”

“I stand corrected,” I said, “though that’s even better, come to think of it. You’d have friends in all languages, including Latvian. Mapes thought you might know me, and he was right, but you also knew some Latvians, and you knew Valdi Berzins was after the Kukarov photos.

“Mapes wanted them back. He had a pretty good idea what kind of treatment he could expect from the Black Scourge of Riga if they got into the wrong hands. He called you, hoping you could do something. You knew there was an opportunity here, you could smell it, but what action could you take?

“First, you called me. There was a chance you could keep out of sight altogether, so you didn’t bother to identify yourself. You asked for a particular book, one by an author in whom you have no interest—”

“I don’t care for the sea stories, I told you.”

“You don’t care for Conrad, period. You once quoted a line from
Heart of Darkness
—‘The horror! The horror!’ According to you, the horror was the way the man wrote.”

“Did I say that? I can’t say I recall it.”

“Well, I can. You asked if I had
The Secret Agent
only because you knew the answer would be yes. It was right in the middle of the section you always go to, and it’s been there for years. If by some chance I’d sold it since your last visit, you’d just ask for something else. But I hadn’t, and you didn’t, and I set the book aside for you.

“Then you got in touch with Berzins. I had the photos, they were in a book called
The Secret Agent,
and all he had to do was pick them up and pay for them. You figured I’d hand him the book, and he’d look through it and throw a fit, and I’d ask him what the hell he expected for twelve lousy dollars, and he’d walk out knowing he’d had a shot at the photos, but now they were gone.

“But Valdi Berzins was a positive thinker, and Norman Vincent Peale would have been proud of him. It didn’t even occur to him
that he wasn’t getting the photos when he bought the book. He knew others were after them, knew they might show up at my store at any moment, so he was quick to pay for his purchase and get out. When he asked the price I said ‘Thirteen’ and left out the word
dollars,
and he thought I left out
hundred
as well. Of course I might have meant thirteen thousand, but that was more than he had, so he thought positively and counted out thirteen hundred-dollar bills and took a hike.”

“And they killed him,” Grisek said mournfully. “They killed this good man.”

“ ‘They,’ ” Sigrid said. “Does this ‘they’ have a name?”

“Not one that I can supply. At least two people were in a car that pulled up at the curb halfway down the block from my store. When Valdi Berzins walked out the door, the car shot forward. Berzins was gunned down, and either the gunman or another passenger snatched up the book he was carrying, still in the brown paper bag I’d put it in.”

“That’s how it musta happened,” Ray said. “But you ain’t tellin’ us nothin’ new, Bernie. Who was in the car an’ what happened to the book?”

“I can answer the second part, and maybe the rest will become clear. What happened to the book? Well, one way or another, it wound up here.”

Mapes shook his head. “Ridiculous.”

“Oh? I wish I’d been with you when you opened the safe for the IRS boys. But no, I don’t think that’s where you’d keep it. It’s a book, so you’d hide it with your other books. Have you got a den, Doc?”

He didn’t answer right away. Then he asked me to tell him the book’s title again, and I did, and he said he had a copy of
The Secret Agent,
that he’d owned it for years. He’d read it in college and still had it.

“I’ll be doggoned,” I said. “Another coincidence.”

“And that’s all it is, damn you. Maybe Riddle asked for that book because he knew I had a copy. There must be hundreds of copies of the book in New York.”

“Enough so that I’ve never been able to sell mine,” I said, “until someone came along and gave me thirteen hundred dollars for it. How much did you pay for your copy?”

“I’ve no idea. A couple of dollars.”

“I think it was a little more than that. I think you paid a pile for it, but then you weren’t buying the book. You were buying the photos.”

I’d just given him an out, and he grabbed it. “I can prove you’re wrong,” he said, and hurried through the dining room to the den, and came back triumphantly, book in hand. “Here,” he said. “Here’s the damned book. And if you can find any photos in it—”

He riffled the pages and stopped in abject horror. Gently I took the book from his hand and flipped it open to show a mug shot of a blond man in profile, with a scar alongside his mouth. It was fastened to the page with Scotch tape, as were three more photos which I found and displayed.

“No,” he cried. “No, that’s impossible.” He grabbed for the book, but I snatched it out of his reach. He stepped back, plunged a hand into his pocket, and the book wasn’t the only thing he’d had in the den, because when his hand came out there was a gun in it. It wasn’t a very big gun, but they’re all huge when they’re pointed at you.

This one wasn’t pointed at me for long. “You
bastard,
” he cried, and he could have meant me, God knows, but as he spoke the words he whirled toward Colby Riddle and fired the gun. “Son of a fucking
bitch,
” he yelled, and pumped two bullets into Georgi Blinsky, and looked around for someone else to shoot.

The cops and goons all had their guns drawn, but we were all in a circle, and no one wanted to risk a shot because a miss could kill the wrong person. “You started this,” he screamed, “you brainless spic whore!” and took careful aim at Marisol Maris.

Whereupon Wally Hemphill, marathoner turned martial artist, leapt from the sofa, whirled like a dervish, and delivered a spinning back kick that knocked the gun from his hand, following it with a move I couldn’t follow that sent Mapes reeling across the room,
right into the arms of a cop and two thugs. The thugs slapped him silly, the cop cuffed him, and Ray Kirschmann read him his rights. I hadn’t paid attention to Miranda for a while, and noted that Mapes had a nice long list of rights. Somehow, though, I didn’t think they were going to do him a whole lot of good.

T
hanks, Maxine. You’re a lifesaver, and don’t ask me what flavor, it’ll give me ideas. Bern, pick up your glass. Here’s to crime.”

“And punishment,” I said, and we touched glasses and drank.

“Punishment,” she said. “Well, sure, why not? For them that have it coming, that is.”

We were in the Bum Rap, you will not be surprised to learn, on a Thursday evening just a week and a day after I’d gathered much of New York’s population into the living room of the house on Devonshire Close. It was not the first time Carolyn and I had sat down together since what a less original narrator might characterize as
that fateful day,
since we’d kept our standing lunch date more often than not. It wasn’t even the first time we’d met for our after-work drinks date at the Bum Rap. But there’d been time constraints, or people around, on other evenings, and lunch wasn’t right for the conversation we had to have. It was somehow necessary that there be glasses in our hands, and scotch in those glasses.

And this seemed like the time and place. Neither of us had anything to do for the next hour or so, nor was anyone likely to pull up a chair and horn in. And we had scotch at hand, and if it somehow disappeared, the faithful Maxine would see that it was replenished.

“Bern,” Carolyn said, “there are a couple of things I’m not sure I understand.”

“I’m not surprised. There are things I don’t understand myself.”

“A lot of things came out in Mapes’s living room, and I was following along okay, but it was confusing. And then the way it ended, with the shooting and all, it seemed like some ends were left dangling.”

“Like participles,” I agreed. “No question about it.”

“And then there were the things that came out that weren’t true.”

“Lies, we call them.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to say that. It seemed a little harsh.”

“But accurate,” I said. “There were basically three kinds of information dispensed that afternoon. Some of it was true, and some of it was guesswork, and some was utter fiction.”

“That’s what I thought, Bern. But now that it’s over, I’d love to know the pure and simple truth.”

“According to Oscar Wilde,” I said, “the truth is rarely pure and never simple. Some of it we’ll never know, because the only people who could tell us are dead. But I can certainly tell you what I know. Where do you want me to start?”

“With William Johnson,” she said. “Billy the Nephew. Talk about your impossible coincidences. He didn’t date-rape Marisol, did he?”

“No, of course not. He never saw her before in his life.”

“But she said he did.”

“Does that mean it must be true?”

“She was very convincing, Bern. I was watching her, and she had tears in the corners of her eyes.”

“Everybody was watching her,” I said. “The girl has presence. Carolyn, she’s an actress. She was acting.”

“Well, she fooled me. I knew what she was saying couldn’t possibly be true, and I believed it anyway. You must have told her what to say.”

“When I saw her,” I said, “she fell apart. Because of what she’d done, violating her lover’s confidence, four people were dead, including Valdi Berzins, a genuine Latvian patriot.”

“And a positive thinker.”

“That too. She felt guilty, and when I suggested she might be able to do something to make it right, she was eager to help—especially when I told her what kind of a fellow Johnson was and what he’d pulled on Barbara Creeley. We worked out a story, and she gave me the ruby necklace Mapes had given her.”

“And you planted it in Johnson’s apartment.”

“When I let myself in, after I’d left him in the alley swathed in Sigrid’s puke.”

“I can’t believe she did that.”

“She’s a resourceful woman,” I said, “with a tendency to get straight to the heart of the matter.”

“She backed up Marisol’s date-rape story, too. And she was pretty convincing in her own right, Bern.”

“She’s an actress herself, even if she doesn’t go on auditions anymore. I didn’t coach her, just let her know what to expect, and she did a great improv. But then she’d improvised beautifully getting Johnson out of Parsifal’s and into the alley, so I could get his address.”

“Because you had to get into his place.”

I nodded. “I had two things to do there. First, I had to plant Marisol’s necklace where he wouldn’t come across it himself in the next day or two, without concealing it so well that the cops couldn’t find it when the time came.”

“And it came soon enough. Ray was reading him his rights before the bodies were cold.”

“I’m not sure of that. Before Colby Riddle’s body was cold, maybe, but I have a feeling Georgi Blinsky’s body was somewhere around room temperature long before Mapes started tossing lead around the room. That Russian was the coldest man I ever saw.”

“He looked good in black, though. What else did you do in Johnson’s apartment?”

“I found Barbara’s class ring from Bennett High.”

“And gave it to her?”

“Just the other night. I have to say she was impressed.”

“I bet she was. Maxine?” She pointed at our glasses, and got a nod of assent from Maxine. “Reinforcements are coming, Bern. I’ve got some more questions.”

“Shoot.”

“Colby Riddle. When did you start to think he had something to do with it?”

“Well, I always wondered,” I said. “He never called me about a book before. It’s rare that I get a phone call from someone who’s just looking for a reading copy, and
The Secret Agent
’s in print in trade paperback, so anybody hunting for it could just drop into the nearest general bookstore, or get online and pick it up from Amazon. But Colby was always an odd bird to begin with, and we were up to our eyeballs in coincidences anyway, so I didn’t dwell on it. I didn’t really tie him in until I let myself into Mapes’s office.”

“You went there to check out his appointment book, and pick a time that would work for the showdown.”

“And while I was there, I had a look at his files. I was looking for Kukarov, not really expecting to find anything, not under that name. And I didn’t, of course. But then I looked up a few other people, and the only one I found was Colby. And he’d been there for just the reason I’d said. He had a growth removed from his cheek two years earlier.”

“That could have been a coincidence too, couldn’t it?”

“I suppose so, but I figured he was tied in.”

“Yeah, I guess not even coincidence has arms that long. Hey, thanks, Max. Bern, we’re not gonna die of thirst after all.”

I took a sip of my drink just to make sure.

“Bern? Summarize what happened, will you? Not with William Johnson, I get all that. But the rest of it, with the photographs and the people getting killed and all.”

I thought about it. “Well,” I said, “there are a couple of versions. There’s what I laid out, which is how the cops have the case written up. And there’s what Ray knows is really true. And then there’s what’s even truer, that Ray doesn’t know about. And then of course there are the things I did to make it happen.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So which would you like to hear?”

She grinned. “All of ’em, Bern.”

“The Lyles got the photographs pretty much the way it came out in Mapes’s living room. Marisol told her cousin Karlis, and he made a fake appointment with Mapes and swiped the book when no one was looking. He got it to his father, who in turn got it to Arnold Lyle.”

“Okay.”

“Lyle talked to more people than he should have, and made arrangements to sell the book to Georgi Blinsky.”

“
Principles of Organic Chemistry
, you mean. That book.”

“Right, Volume Two. The book Mapes taped the photos in. First, though, Lyle removed the Kukarov photos from the book, but he liked Mapes’s system, so he taped them into another book, one belonging to the owner of the apartment he’d sublet, and stuck it back in the bookcase.”

“And that was
QB VII
.”

“Uh-huh. Now the way I told the story, Ray found the book in a careful search of the apartment after the murder, but the photos were already missing.”

“Ray couldn’t find a black cat on a white sofa, Bern.”

“This is the official story, remember? Ray found the book, but the photos were gone.”

“Who took them?”

“Good question. First, though, the home invasion and the murder. Michael Quattrone’s men were responsible for the home invasion part, as he more or less admitted, albeit hypothetically. The cops can’t make a case against him and won’t try, but they know his guys did it. And the doorman’s death was accidental. It was homicide, that’s what you call it when someone’s killed in the commission of a felony, but nobody meant for it to happen.”

“That must make the doorman feel a lot better.”

“Quattrone wound up with
Principles of Organic Chemistry
, which by now contained Mapes’s mug shots of everybody but Kukarov.
His main goal was to destroy the ones of Whitey Mullane, his friend and mentor, and my guess is he’ll trash the others as well, if he hasn’t already. They’d be worth something to a blackmailer, but that’s not his line of work, and anyway he doesn’t know who the people are.”

“And after his men left?”

“Blinsky and his crew got there, too late to pick up the book, or to recover the twenty grand they’d already paid the Lyles. So they shot them, which I suspect they were planning to do all along, book or no book. I don’t think Georgi Blinsky was a very nice man.”

“Then I won’t feel too bad that he got killed. What about the photos of Kukarov?”

“What about them?”

“Well, I know what happened to them. They were in the Leon Uris book waiting for you to find them. I know that because you told me, and Ray knows it because he was there. But what do the cops think happened to them?”

“They think they disappeared.”

“Just like that? Poof?”

“No one’s too clear on the details. Maybe when they took the tape off his mouth Lyle told Blinsky where the photos were.”

“And Blinsky took them. And put the book back where he found it?”

“Does that seem unlikely? How about this—Lyle taped the Kukarov photos in
QB VII,
then thought better of it and cut them out again. He put them somewhere else, and gave them to Blinsky, hoping it would lead the man in black to spare his life.”

“That’s a little better, but—”

“Carolyn, it didn’t happen, so what difference does it make
how
it didn’t happen? Somebody got the photos, and whoever it was he doesn’t have them now, so what do the cops care?”

“I just wondered, that’s all. But I see what you mean.”

“Now what comes next? Colby Riddle, I guess, and Valdi Berzins. Well, you know how the story goes there. Mapes called Colby, who agreed to help out, probably for a substantial consideration.”

“Money, in other words.”

“What could be more considerate? Colby got me to set a book aside for him, then told Berzins to go in and ask for it. Meanwhile, a car full of Russians was waiting for Berzins to come out of my store.”

“How’d they know to wait for him there?”

“They knew about me from the newspaper article,” I said, “or they knew about Berzins and tailed him to the bookstore. He was waiting around on the sidewalk while I had lunch at your place, so that would have given them time to get into position. Both explanations play out about the same, so you can take your pick.”

“Okay.”

“Then Berzins came in, picked up the book, overpaid or under-paid for it, as you prefer, and went out to meet his death.”

“In a hail of flying bullets,” she said. “A Russian shot him, right?”

“Right.”

“And then jumped out and picked up the book.”

“Right.”

“So how did it get in Mapes’s den?”

“Well, that’s hard to say for sure,” I said, “because all the people involved are dead.”

“Not Mapes.”

“He’s refusing to answer questions. And nobody much cares, because he killed two men in front of a roomful of witnesses, including three cops and two members of the New York bar.”

“And a paralegal,” she said, “and someone who works behind a New York bar, and a lot of others besides. But they must have some explanation.”

“The Russians,” I said. “I’ll tell you, they make even better villains now than they did during the Cold War. They shot Berzins, and they wound up with the book, and they already had the photos. They taped the photos into
The Secret Agent,
and sold the package to Mapes.”

“If they already had the photos, why shoot Berzins?”

“That’s a good question. Hmmm. Okay, try this: Colby and Mapes didn’t know the Russians already had the photos, so Blinsky
killed Berzins and grabbed the book so he’d have a plausible explanation for how the photos came into his possession.”

“I’m not sure that makes perfect sense, Bern. Thank God it doesn’t have to. But getting back to Mapes. Why would he come back with the book? He’d have to know the photos were in it, and he looked completely surprised when they showed.”

“That would have been a problem,” I acknowledged. “He could have been planning to remove the photos, and somehow forgot that he hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Or he could have been brazening it out. Remember, the photos were taped securely to the pages. You could give them a fast riffle without revealing anything. He gambled that you could, anyway. And on the off chance that it didn’t work, well, he brought his gun along for backup.”

“Or Colby could have put the photos in the book without telling him, Bern.”

I nodded. “Much better. Colby thought he was doing Mapes a favor, and Mapes saw it as betrayal, and that’s why the first person he shot was Colby. That’s good, Carolyn. If they ever ask me, I’ll trot that one out for them. But I don’t think they will.”

“So that’s the story,” she said. “The Russians sold the book back to Mapes. For the money in the wall safe, I suppose. And then he lost it and shot everybody, because he saw the walls closing in on him.”

“And he’d have shot Marisol, too,” I said, “if Wally hadn’t blown out a knee and switched to martial arts. Marathon training just doesn’t do much for you in close-quarters combat.”