The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart - By Lawrence Block Page 0,99

what the hell was going on. Cappy Hoberman called up, came to see me on the flimsiest of pretexts, and was eager to be on his way almost immediately. It never occurred to me he was running interference for a burglar. I thought he wanted something, or was setting me up somehow. For all I knew he’d tumbled to the way it all went kerblooey in Anatruria, and he had some curious notion of revenge.” He shrugged. “The whole point is I didn’t know. I needed to call someone who could tag him and report back. And the redoubtable Assyrian tagged him a little more forcefully than any of us would have preferred.”

“It is unfair,” Ilona said.

“Life’s unfair, honey,” Charlie Weeks said. “Better get used to it.”

“It is unfair that you get away with this, while Tiglath Rasmoulian pays the penalty.”

“There should be no penalty,” Rasmoulian said. “An accident, an act of self-defense—”

“I got to tell you,” Ray Kirschmann said. “We got us a problem here.”

Another silence. Ray let it stretch for a bit, then broke it himself.

“Way I see it,” he said, “I got enough to arrest Mr. Ras—” He broke off, made a face. “What I’m gonna do is call you TR,” he told Rasmoulian, “which is your initials, and also stands for Teddy Roosevelt, who it just so happens was police commissioner of this fair city before he got to be president of the United States.”

“Thank you very much,” Rasmoulian said.

“I got enough to arrest TR,” Ray said, “an’ I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s enough to indict him. He confessed to a double homicide after bein’ Mirandized one or two times, dependin’ how you calculate it. So his confession ain’t admissible, since nobody wrote it down an’ got him to sign it, or had the presence of mind to tape it. But anybody here could testify that he confessed, same as a cellmate can rat out a defendant, sayin’ he confessed, except in this case it happens to be the truth. TR here did confess, an’ we all heard him.”

“So?”

He glared at me. “So I can arrest him, an’ as far as the trial’s concerned, well, who knows what’ll happen, because you never know. What I can promise you, though, is he’ll get bail. Was a time nobody made bail on a murder charge, but now they do, an’ my guess is TR here’ll have to post something like a quarter mil max and he’s on the street. And once he’s on the street, citizen of the world that he is, all he’s gotta do is bail out, if you follow me.”

“Bail out?”

“Skip the country, forfeit the bond, and go about his business. And what’s even more of a shame is me and my fellow officers’ll be makin’ life hard for all the rest of you, even with TR here off the hook and out of the country. Takin’ testimony from Mr. Weeks, inquirin’ into the source of Mr. Sarnoff’s income—”

“Tsarnoff, officer.”

“Whatever. Makin’ sure everybody’s papers are legit. An’ of course there’ll be reporters crawlin’ up everybody’s ass, poppin’ flash bulbs at the king an’ queen of Anna Banana—”

“Anatruria.”

“Whatever. Be more important for you people to remember the name of the country, bein’ as they’ll probably wind up sendin’ you back to it. Not Mr. Weeks, though, on account of he’s an American citizen, an’ they’ll most likely want to keep him around so Congress can ask him some questions.”

He went on in this vein, probably longer than he had to. After all, these people were professionals. They’d played the game before, in the Balkans and the Middle East.

Weeks said, “Officer…Kirschmann, is it?” He picked up his homburg, balanced it on his knee. “You know, I got a speeding ticket a couple of years ago in the state of Montana. They had to pass a speed limit there, and in order to qualify for federal highway funds it had to be a max of sixty-five on the interstates and fifty-five everywhere else.”

“That a fact,” Ray said.

“It is,” Charlie Weeks said. “Now, Montana’s too large and too sparsely settled for those limits to make any sense. And the federal government could make them pass that law, but they couldn’t regulate how they enforced it. So Montana assigned only four state troopers to speed limit enforcement, and you know how large the state is.”

“Prolly as big as Brooklyn and Manhattan put together.”

Weeks’s smile spread across his face. “Very nearly,” he said. “The federal government couldn’t establish penalties for