it to me.”
“I don’t believe this is happening.”
I snapped my fingers. “The wallet.”
It was a nice enough black pinseal billfold, complete with the telltale outline of a rolled condom to recall my own lost adolescence. There was almost a hundred dollars in the currency compartment. I counted out fifty dollars in fives and tens, replaced the rest, and returned the wallet to its owner.
“That’s my money,” he said.
“You just bought books with it,” I told him. “Want a receipt?”
“I don’t even want the books, dammit.” His eyes were watering behind the thick glasses. “What am I going to do with them, anyway?”
“I suppose reading them is out. What did you plan to do with them originally?”
He stared at his track shoes. “I was going to sell them.”
“To whom?”
“I don’t know. Some store.”
“How much were you going to get for them?”
“I don’t know. Fifteen, twenty dollars.”
“You’d wind up taking ten.”
“I suppose so.”
“Fine,” I said. I peeled off one of his tens and pressed it into his palm. “Sell them to me.”
“Huh?”
“Saves running from store to store. I can use good books, they’re the very sort of item I stock, so why not take the ten dollars from me?”
“This is crazy,” he said.
“Do you want the books or the money? It’s up to you.”
“I don’t want the books.”
“Do you want the money?”
“I guess so.”
I took the books from him and stacked them on the counter. “Then put it in your wallet,” I said, “before you lose it.”
“This is the craziest thing ever. You took fifty bucks from me for books I didn’t want and now you’re giving me ten back. I’m out forty dollars, for God’s sake.”
“Well, you bought high and sold low. Most people try to work it the other way around.”
“I should call a cop. I’m the one getting robbed.”
I packed his gym gear into the Braniff bag, zipped it shut, handed it to him. Then I extended a forefinger and chucked him under his hairy chin.
“A tip,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Get out of the business.”
He looked at me.
“Find another line of work. Quit lifting things. You’re not terribly good at it and I’m afraid you’re temperamentally unsuited to the life that goes with it. Are you in college?”
“I dropped out.”
“Why?”
“It wasn’t relevant.”
“Few things are, but why don’t you see if you can’t get back in? Pick up a diploma and find some sort of career that suits you. You’re not cut out to be a professional thief.”
“A professional—” He rolled his eyes again. “Jesus, I ripped off a couple of books. Don’t make a life’s work out of it, huh?”
“Anybody who steals things for resale is a professional criminal,” I told him. “You just weren’t doing it in a very professional manner, that’s all. But I’m serious about this. Get out of the business.” I laid a hand lightly on his wrist. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “but the thing is you’re too dumb to steal.”
CHAPTER
Two
After he’d left I tucked his forty dollars into my wallet, where it promptly became my forty dollars. I marked the Steinbeck down to fifteen dollars before shelving it and its companions. While doing this I spotted a few errant volumes and put them back where they belonged.
Browsers came and went. I made a few sales from the bargain table, then moved a Heritage Club edition of Virgil’s Eclogues (boxed, the box water-damaged, slight rubbing on spine, price $8.50). The woman who bought the Virgil was a little shopworn herself, with a blocky figure and a lot of curly orange hair. I’d seen her before but this was the first time she’d bought anything, so things were looking up.
I watched her carry Virgil home, then settled in behind the counter with a Grosset & Dunlap reprint of Soldiers Three. I’d been working my way through my limited stock of Kipling lately. Some of the books were ones I’d read years ago, but I was reading Soldiers Three for the first time and really enjoying my acquaintance with Ortheris and Learoyd and Mulvaney when the little bells above my door tinkled to announce a visitor.
I looked up to see a man in a blue uniform lumbering across the floor toward me. He had a broad, open, honest face, but in my new trade one learned quickly not to judge a book by its cover. My visitor was Ray Kirschmann, the best cop money could buy, and money could buy him seven days a week.
“Hey, Bern,” he said, and propped an elbow on the counter.