The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams (12 page)

F
aded jeans, a cocoa-brown turtleneck, and a black leather bikers jacket with zipper pockets. No polish on her nails, no rings on her ringers. I slid in opposite her and told the waiter I’d have a cup of coffee. He brought it, and refilled Doll’s cup without being asked.

“I have a few questions,” I said. “How did you know my number?”

“I looked in the book.”

“How did you know my name?”

“You told me, Bernie. Remember?”

“Oh.”

“You told me your name was Bernie Rhodenbarr and you owned a used-book store in the Village. I couldn’t call you there because I didn’t know the name or address of the store, but you’re the only B Rhodenbarr in the Manhattan phone book, and anyway I knew you lived at Seventy-first and West End, because you told me.”

“Oh.”

“You did me a favor,” she said, “and you were totally sweet about it, and I figured maybe I’d give you a call sometime if I didn’t happen to run into you in the neighborhood. And then when Marty told me about you—”

“Marty.”

“Marty Gilmartin,” she said. “You must know who that is. You stole his baseball cards.”

“Wait a minute,” I said.

“All right.”

“I know who Martin Gilmartin is. And I didn’t steal his baseball cards. Wait a minute.”

“I’m waiting, Bernie.”

“Good,” I said, and closed my eyes. When I opened them she was still there, patiently waiting. “This is very confusing,” I said.

“It is?”

“How do you know him?”

“He’s a friend.”

“Well, that clears it up.”

“Sort of a special friend.”

“Oh,” I said.

Archly, I guess, because she colored. “I don’t know how much you know about Marty,” she said.

“Not a whole lot. I know where he lives, and I know what his building looks like because I went over and had a look at it, although I swear I never set a foot inside it. I never met him. I saw his wife once, but I never met her, either. I met her brother because it turns out he’s my landlord, which made it a small world. It got a lot smaller when you mentioned his name.”

She took a sip of her coffee. “Marty’s crazy about the theater,” she said. “He sees everything, and not just on Broadway. He’s a member of the Pretenders, the actors’ club on Gramercy Park. The playbills for half the off-Broadway theaters in town have him listed as a patron or supporter. He’s extremely generous.”

“I see.”

“Marty’s fifty-eight years old. He’s plenty old enough to have a daughter my age, but he doesn’t. He married late, and he and his wife didn’t have any kids.”

“So he’s like a father to you.”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“When I met him,” she said, “I was working at a midtown law firm called Haber, Haber & Crowell.”

“You mentioned them.”

“I know. I said I still worked there, but that’s not true.”

“Marty took you away from all that.”

She nodded. “He was a client. I was a theatrical wannabe, taking classes and running around to auditions. They’re very good about that at HH&C. They represent a lot of people in the theater, and they hire a lot of young actors and actresses as clerical workers and receptionists.”

“And paralegals.”

“I was never a paralegal. I worked reception desk and switchboard. Until, as you said, Marty took me away from all that. He was very nice to me, he took an interest in my career, he took me to lunch at the Pretenders and introduced me to people. And he said it was hard enough for a young person to get a foot in the door of the New York theater without having to hold down a full-time job at the same time. Which is the absolute truth, believe me.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“And he said he’d like to pay my rent and give me enough money every month so that I could get by. It wouldn’t be the lap of luxury, but it would keep me going while I found out whether I had a chance to make it in the theater.”

“And all you had to do in return was go to bed with him.”

“I was already doing that.”

“Oh.”

“He’s an attractive man, Bernie. Tall and slender, flowing gray hair, very distinguished. Wonderful manners. He kind of swept me off my feet. When he made a pass at me, I was too honored to think about refusing.” She lowered her eyes, gnawed at a thumbnail. “Even if I was sort of involved at the time.”

“With Borden Stoppelgard,” I guessed.

“Ughhh,” she said. “Are you out of your mind?”

“Evidently.”

“Borden Stoppelgard is pond scum, Bernie. You get warts from touching people like Borden Stoppelgard.”

“I’m sorry I mentioned him.”

“So am I. Marty thinks Borden is a joke. He has to put up with him because he’s married to Borden’s big sister. I only met Borden once, and believe me, that was enough.”

“When was that?”

“Sometime in June. I was in a showcase presentation of an early P. J. Barry play. You know how that works, don’t you? Nobody gets paid, but you can try to get people to come and see your work. Agents and people like that. Of course, ninety percent of the audience consists of the friends and relatives of the different members of the cast. But it’s good experience, especially if the plays any good, and this one was excellent.”

“And Marty brought the whole family?”

“He brought his wife,” she said, “and he brought Borden and
his
wife. He gets a block of four patron tickets to every production at this particular theater, because he’s one of their angels.” She started to look away, then met my eyes. “That may have had something to do with my getting the part,” she said levelly.

“Oh.”

“I had dinner with the four of them after the show, along with a couple of other members of the cast. So I had a chance to form an opinion of Borden, and I already told you what it was.”

“Pond scum, I think you said.”

“I was giving him the benefit of the doubt. It would be just my luck to sound off like this and then have him turn out to be your best friend, but of course he’s not, is he? He’s your landlord.”

“Right, and pond scum’s the nicest thing anybody ever said about him. You said you were involved with somebody besides Gilmartin.”

“I was,” she said. “But I broke it off.”

“When you started sleeping with Marty.”

“No.”

“When he started paying your rent.”

“A little later than that, actually.”

“When?”

“This past Monday.”

“Oh.”

“Or was it Tuesday? No, it was Monday night. I threw his keys at him and I stormed out the door. It was a great exit, but I should have held on to the keys. Bernie, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Did you take Marty’s cards? Look, in case you’re afraid I’m wearing a wire, don’t answer out loud. Blink once for yes and twice for no.”

“I don’t care if you’re wearing a wire,” I said. “The answer’s no. No one else has believed me, so I hardly expect you to, but that’s the answer.”

“I believe you.”

“You do?”

“I never thought you took them in the first place. I had a pretty good idea who took them the minute Marty mentioned they were gone, and before your name even came up. I think Luke took them.”

“Good old Luke.”

“I can’t believe this. You know Luke?”

“Nope. Never heard of him. But I can probably guess who he is. Your boyfriend, right?”

“Not since Monday.”

“That’s when you threw the keys in his face.”

“Actually I threw them across the room.”

“Tell me about Luke,” I suggested.

“I don’t know where to start. He’s an actor. He came to New York fresh out of high school and he’s spent the past fifteen years trying to get a break. He’s had some commercials and bit parts in a couple of soaps, and he had two lines in Sidney Lumet’s last film, and he toured for three months in the road company of
Sour Grapes.
He pays the rent by tending bar and working for a couple of unlicensed moving companies. Gypsy movers, they call them.” She frowned. “And he likes to see himself as a romantically shady character. One time he jumped out of bed in the middle of the afternoon and put on a suit and tie. I asked him where he was going. The supermarket, he told me. I said, you’re dressing like that for D’Agostino’s? You get more respect, he said, and he grabbed his attaché case and went out the door.

“Twenty minutes later he came back with a bag of groceries. A head of lettuce, a couple of potatoes, I forget what else. A couple of dollars’ worth of groceries. Then he goes, Duh-dah! and opens the attaché case, and inside he’s got two gorgeous strip sirloins an inch thick. You just have to know how to shop, he said.”

“Isn’t that how Jesse James used to do it?”

“At the time,” she said, “I have to admit I thought it was pretty cool. And then when I started seeing Marty, the contrast between the two of them was kind of interesting.”

“I can imagine.”

“He’s sort of a crook. I tried not to know very much about the various hustles he was working, but I know he’s been doing a little small-time drug dealing. He takes a lot of pills himself, uppers and downers, and he pays for them by selling some of them to people he knows.”

“Safer than selling to people you don’t know.”

“At first he thought it was really neat that Marty was paying my rent. He figured I had a hustle of my own going and that made us birds of a feather. He would refer to Marty as ‘the old guy’ or ‘your meal ticket.’ It started to bother him when he began to realize that I really cared for Marty, that the relationship was important to me emotionally.”

“So he was jealous.”

“Kind of, yeah.”

“And then you had a fight and broke up with him.”

“On Monday, and when Marty looked for his baseball cards Thursday night they were gone. I’m sure Luke took them. And it’s all my fault.”

“How do you figure that?”

“I told him about Marty’s apartment, and the things he had in it. Marty took me there one afternoon last month. He and his wife were spending the week with friends in East Hampton, and he had come in for the day, and we went out to lunch and then he said he’d like to show me where he lived. It’s not what you’re thinking.”

“Huh?”

“We didn’t…do anything,” she said. “I couldn’t, not in his wife’s house. I felt funny enough just being there. But it’s a beautiful apartment, with a spectacular river view and gorgeous furnishings. When I was with Luke that night I couldn’t stop myself from going on and on about what I saw.”

“Including the baseball cards.”

“They were in his office,” she said, “in a polished rosewood chest lined with cedar. Marty used to keep cigars in it back when he still smoked, and when you opened it there was still a faint trace of the aroma of a good Havana cigar. The box wasn’t even locked, and he kept it right on top of his desk. It was still there Thursday, Bernie, but when he lifted the lid it was empty.”

“Somebody took the cards and left the box.”

“I’m sure it was Luke. He got a lot more excited hearing about the baseball cards than when I told him about the bridges you could see from the living room window. He started talking about how valuable baseball cards were, and how easy it was to sell them. It seems he used to collect them as a kid, and—”

“Everybody did.”

“Well, I didn’t. Anyway, Marty’s collection stirred up feelings of greed and nostalgia both at once. And when he had a chance to lash out at me and Marty, and make himself a bundle in the process—”

“He jumped at it.”

“Right.”

I thought about it. “All right,” I said. “That’s how you fit in, and Marty, and Luke. At least I’ve got a scorecard now, and everybody knows you can’t tell the players without a scorecard. The thing is, there’s no mirror handy. If I can’t look in the mirror, how can I tell what number I’m wearing?”

“You lost me, Bernie.”

“I’m the one who’s lost. Why am I here? Why did you call me? What am I supposed to do?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” she said. “You’re going to help me get Marty’s cards back.”

“I know what they say about coincidence,” I said. “It’s just God’s way of remaining anonymous. But I can only swallow so much of it. Let’s go back to Thursday night, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Marty Gilmartin and his wife and Borden Stoppelgard and
his
wife—what’s she like, by the way?”

“Nothing special. I just met her that one time, and I barely noticed her. I don’t think she opened her mouth all evening.”

“Anyway, the four of them went off to see
If Wishes Were Horses.
Did they like the play, incidentally? I asked Marty, but I might as well have asked Mary Lincoln what she thought of
Our American Cousin.
” I shrugged. “Never mind. They went to the play, and they finally came home, and I made an ill-considered phone call to the Gilmartin residence. That was just after midnight.”

“Where does the coincidence come in?”

“It comes in about the time I get off the IRT a block from here and stop to buy a paper. And an extremely attractive young woman in corporate drag and a red beret singles me out and asks me to walk her home.”

“That sort of thing must happen to you all the time, Bernie.”

“It never happens,” I said. “I’ve been buying the
Times
on the way home for years, and it never once happened in the past.”

“I guess you were overdue.”

“This woman,” I went on, “just happens to be Martin Gilmartin’s girlfriend. And, in her free time, she’s also the girlfriend of the fellow who seems to have stolen Marty’s baseball cards.”

“I see what you mean about coincidence.”

“If God really wants to keep his name out of it,” I said, “he ought to wear gloves, because this one’s got fingerprints all over it. But here’s what I can’t understand. How did you find out about the cards in time to pick me up at the corner newsstand? And how did you even know it was me, considering that nobody knew that until the cops checked the NYNEX records and found out the call had come from my friend Carolyn’s apartment? And how could you know I’d be coming home by subway? I’d have taken a cab if a couple of rubes hadn’t beaten me to it. How would you even recognize me? I don’t get it. I don’t get any of it, and…wait a minute, Doll. Where are you going?”