The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams - By Lawrence Block Page 0,27

‘I know, I know, I know.’ So why did you do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Bern—”

“Call it a character defect,” I said, “or a mental lapse, or temporary insanity. Maybe I was still a little bit drunk and all that coffee kept me from feeling it. All I can say is it seemed like a gift from the gods. I’d been a good boy, I’d resisted irresistible temptation, and they’d repaid me by sending a beautiful woman to lead me to an apartment just there for the taking.”

“Figure she set you up?”

“First thing I thought of. Matter of fact, the possibility occurred to me before I even put my picks in my pocket.”

“But you went anyway.”

“Well, how could it have been a setup? She’d have had to know I was a burglar, and she’d have had to know I was going to be on that particular subway.”

“Maybe she was on it herself. Maybe she’d been following you.”

“All day? It doesn’t seem very likely. And I don’t think she was on the train, because I would have noticed her. She’s the kind of woman you notice.”

“Beautiful, huh?”

“Close enough. An easy eight on a ten scale.”

“And she just happened to ask you to walk her home, and then she just happened to mention that Joan and Harlan were in Europe.”

“I don’t think she followed me,” I said, “but she could have gone out to buy a quart of milk, say, and spotted me coming out of the subway. She said she recognized me from having seen me around the neighborhood, but I don’t remember seeing her, so maybe she made that up. Suppose she knew I was a burglar, and she spotted me, so she got me to walk her home.”

“If that was her home,” she said. “Stay,” she told Alison Wanda, and looked in the White Pages. “Cardamom…Chesapeake…Collier. Here we are, Cooper…. I don’t see a Gwendolyn Cooper. There’s a lot of G Coopers, and there’s one at 910 West End, but that would have to be way uptown. What’s the address of the Nugents’ building?”

“Three-oh-four.”

“Nope. I don’t see any Coopers at that address.”

“Maybe she spells it with a K.”

“Like Kountry Kupboard? Let’s see…. Gee, people really do spell it with a K, don’t they? But not our Doll. Still, what does it prove? She could have an unlisted number, or she could be subletting or sharing an apartment with somebody, and the phone could be in another name.”

“She knew the doorman.”

“It sounds to me as though he’s easy to know. You knew him, too, remember?”

“Good point,” I said. “He’s not the Maginot Line. She could have gotten past him whether she belonged in the building or not. But then where would she go?”

“The Nugent apartment.”

“A quick entrance and exit? Maybe. Or she could have killed time in a stairwell waiting for me to go home and then just walked out herself. ‘Bye, Eddie.’ ‘Hey, how ya doin’.’ Piece of cake.” I frowned. “But what’s the point?”

“To set you up.”

“To set me up to do what? Carolyn, any other night of my life I would have gone home and stayed home. Never mind that I’ve given up burglary. Say I was still an active burglar, even a hyperactive one. It’s the middle of the night, and a mysterious stranger has just managed to let me know that the occupants of a particular apartment are out of town. What am I going to do?”

“You tell me.”

“At the very least,” I said, “I’m going to sleep on it. In the cold light of dawn I might do a little research, and if it looks extremely promising I might knock it off a day or two down the line. Probably in the early afternoon, when visitors look a whole lot less suspicious. Most likely, though, I’d wake up and decide to forget the whole thing. But the one thing I would never do is go in that very night.”

“But you did.”

“But I did,” I acknowledged, “but how could she know I would?”

“Maybe she reads minds, Bern.”

“Maybe she does. Maybe she read mine and saw that I was out of it. So she set me up, and I went for it. What’s in it for her?”

“I don’t know, Bern.”

“Was I supposed to get caught in the Nugent apartment? God knows I was a sitting duck. Ordinarily I get in and out of a place as quickly as I can, but not this time. If I’d stayed there much longer I could have claimed squatter’s rights. If she’d