The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams - By Lawrence Block Page 0,28

tipped the police, they’d have had me dead to rights. The state troopers could have come on foot from Albany and got there before I left.”

“Maybe you were supposed to do something inside the apartment.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I. Whatever it was, I didn’t do it. All I did in Apartment 9-G was kill time. I brought some groceries in and I took some groceries out.”

“And gave your groceries a shake-shake-shake and turned yourself about.”

“Turned myself inside out is more like it. When I saw the corpse in the bathtub—”

“Who was he, Bern?”

“Not Harlan or Joan.”

“Well, I didn’t think he was Joan.”

“In this day and age,” I said, “you never know. But there was a picture of the Nugents in Harlan’s study, and the dead guy wasn’t either of them. There were other pictures around the house, Nugent children and grandchildren, and he didn’t turn up in any of the pictures. Probably not a long-lost relative, either, because I couldn’t detect any family resemblance.” I frowned. “There was something vaguely familiar about him, but I couldn’t tell you what it was.”

“What did he look like?”

“Mostly he looked naked and dead.”

“Well, that explains it. You must have recognized him from a Norman Mailer novel.”

I gave her a look. “I’d guess he was in his thirties,” I said. “Dark hair, cut short and combed forward like Julius Caesar.”

“No stab wounds, though.”

“No, just a bullet hole in the forehead.” I closed my eyes, trying to picture him. “He was thin,” I said, “but muscular. A lot of dark body hair. His eyes were wide open, but I can’t remember what color they were. I didn’t really spend a lot of time looking at him.”

“What was he doing there, Bern?”

“By the time I saw him,” I said, “he wasn’t doing much of anything.”

“Maybe he was just looking for a place to kill himself,” she said, “and he didn’t have the price of a hotel room. So he broke in—”

“Through a Poulard lock?”

“It didn’t stop you. All right, say he had a key. He got in, he took off all his clothes…Where were his clothes, Bern?”

“I guess he must have given them to the Goodwill. I certainly didn’t run across them.”

“Well, forget the clothes. He took ’em off, we know that much, and then he got in the tub. Why the tub?”

“Who knows?”

“He got in the tub and shot himself. No, first he locked the bathroom door, and then he got in the tub, and then he drew the shower curtain shut, and then he shot himself.”

“High time, too.”

“But why, Bern?”

“That’s the least of it. My question is, how did he do it? I suppose you could shoot yourself in the middle of the forehead if you put your mind to it. You could always use your thumb on the trigger. But wouldn’t it be more natural to put the gun to your temple or stick it in your mouth?”

“The natural thing,” she said, “would be to go on living.”

“The thing is,” I said, “I didn’t see a gun. Now, I didn’t go looking for one, either, and if he was standing up when he shot himself it’s entirely possible that he dropped the gun inside the tub and then fell so that his body was concealing it. But it’s also possible that there was no gun in the tub, or anywhere in the room.”

“If there was no gun—”

“Then somebody else shot him.”

“Doll Cooper?”

“Maybe,” I said, “but there are eight million other people in town who could just as easily have done it. Either of the Nugents, for example, which would have given them a good reason to get on a plane.”

“You think they did it?”

“I don’t have a clue who did it,” I told her. “It could have been anybody.”

“Not you or me, Bern. We can alibi each other. We were together all evening.”

“Except I don’t know when he was killed. I don’t know any of that forensic stuff about rigor mortis and lividity, and I didn’t want to touch him to find out how cold he felt. He didn’t smell too great, but corpses don’t, even if they’re fairly fresh. Remember the time a guy died in my store?”

“How could I forget? That was in the john, too.”

“So it was.”

“And we moved the body in a wheelchair. Yeah, I remember. He hadn’t been dead long at all, and he wasn’t too fragrant, was he?”

“No.”

“So we can’t alibi each other,” she said. “That’s a hell of a thing. How do you know we didn’t