The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart - By Lawrence Block Page 0,54

not like a stain on the wall, you can’t hide it by throwing a coat of paint over it. How are you going to get rid of it?”

“Actually,” I said, “I had that happen once.”

“Oh?”

“In my store,” I said quickly, “and I had nothing to do with it, but all the same I had to get the body out of there. I rented a wheelchair.”

“That was damned clever,” Weeks said admiringly. “Hard to manage in the middle of the night, however, and not terribly useful anyway on the fourth floor of a walk-up.”

“No.”

“Nothing for it, then. You’d have to make several trips.”

“How’s that?”

“Unpleasant subject,” he said, “but there’s no way around it, is there? You’d cut the corpse into manageable segments and carry them out one at a time, disposing of them wherever your ingenuity might suggest.”

“An arm here, a leg there. But Captain Hoberman wasn’t missing any pieces when the cops got there. Otherwise I’m sure they would have mentioned it.”

“Your Mr. Candlemas wouldn’t have begun the operation yet,” he said gently. “He’d need tools, wouldn’t he? And wouldn’t have them lying around unless he made a habit of this sort of thing. He’d need a saw or an ax or both. The average suburban householder might have such tools close at hand, but not the average New York apartment dweller.”

“So he goes out in the middle of the night looking for a meat saw?”

“That’s a point. He can’t have expected to find a restaurant supply outlet open at that hour. But a restaurant would be another matter. Perhaps he knows a friendly chef who will lend him the necessary items with no questions asked. Or perhaps he does own a heavy-duty knife equal to the task, and goes out to buy some stout plastic bags and tape to seal them up. He’s out of his apartment, poor Cappy’s stretched out on the floor, and you’re still stuck in a closet on the eighth floor.”

“And the cops turn up, roust the super, and wind up waiting around for a locksmith to open the door for them.”

“What brought the police in the first place? An anonymous call?”

“That’s what Ray Kirschmann said. Somebody heard a noise.”

“Hmmm. Candlemas comes home, I suppose, and sees that there are people in his apartment, or on the landing waiting for the locksmith. So what does he do?”

“Gets all the money he can out of his bank’s ATM,” I said, “and jumps ship for Australia, determined to make a new life for himself. Because he’s never been heard from since.”

“That’s true, he hasn’t. Why hasn’t he contacted you, do you suppose? As far as he knows, you got out of Eight-B with the portfolio. Wouldn’t he want to collect it?”

“Maybe he tried. Maybe he sent somebody.”

“The fellow with the unusual name?”

“They’ve all got unusual names,” I said. “I never ran into this many people with unusual names outside of a Ross Thomas novel. But if you mean Tiglath Rasmoulian, yes, Candlemas could have sent him. He wouldn’t want to show himself because the cops think they’ve got him neatly filed away at the morgue. In fact, when Rasmoulian came to my store, I hadn’t gone yet to identify the body.”

“So if Candlemas had walked into your store on his own—”

“I’d have thought I was seeing a ghost. Maybe Candlemas did send him. Who else knows I’m involved?”

“If there’s one thing I learned over there,” he said, waving a hand in what I suppose must have been the general direction of Europe, “it’s that more people know something than you would suspect. Information leaks out, you see. People play multiple roles. Very little remains a secret.”

“Candlemas walked into my store Tuesday, and the following night I committed illegal entry at about the same time that he was committing homicide. By Friday afternoon, Tiglath Rasmoulian knew enough about me to come into my shop and point a gun at me. For God’s sake, he even knew my middle name.”

“Grimes.”

“Right. Now what time was there for word to get around? The only two people who knew I was involved were Candlemas and Hoberman, and Hoberman was dead.”

“Aren’t you forgetting the girl?”

“Ilona.”

“Or course.”

After a moment I said, “I thought of that myself. That she didn’t walk into my shop by accident. It’s too much of a coincidence otherwise. But all we ever did was go to the movies, and all we ever talked about was what we’d just seen on the screen. If she was setting me up, she was