The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams - By Lawrence Block Page 0,34

gone then, right? At midnight or twelve-thirty or whenever it was, right?”

“What’s the point, Bern?”

“The point,” I said, “is that his baseball cards were already gone when I talked to him, so what possible difference could it make if I went to the deli at one or one-thirty in the morning?”

“If it don’t make no difference,” he said, “why did you have to go and lie about it?”

“Lie about it?”

“Well, what else would you call it?” He took out a pocket notebook, consulted a page. “You left your house at one-thirty. You got back at twenty minutes of six. That’s better’n four hours, Bern. Where was this deli, Riverdale?”

“I guess I must have made another stop,” I said. “On my way home from the deli.”

“And it slipped your mind until this minute.”

“No, it’s been on my mind since the questioning started, and I didn’t want to have to talk about it. I’ve been seeing someone, Ray.”

“Oh, yeah? Anybody I know?”

“No, and you’re not going to meet her, either. Look, you’re a man of the world, Ray.”

“This is gonna be a good one, isn’t it?”

“She’s married,” I said. “We’ve had to sneak around and grab moments when we can. Last night was one of those moments.”

“I’m ashamed of you, Bernie.”

“Well, I’m not proud of it myself, Ray, but—”

“Ashamed of you, trottin’ out an oldie like that. You wouldn’t want to give me her name, would you?”

“Ray, you know I can’t do that.”

“Too much of a gentleman, huh?”

“Ray, common decency requires—”

He held up a hand. “Spare me,” he said. “You didn’t go visit no woman last night, married or single. What you did, leavin’ your place on the sly in the middle of the night, is you took the baseball cards you already stole from Martin Gilmartin—”

“See?” I demanded. “It is a silly name, drunk or sober.”

“—an’ you took ’em to a fence, an’ you sold ’em. As far as when you broke into the Gilmartin place to steal ’em, my guess is it was sometime last night, because it was yesterday you had the argument with your landlord.” He made a face. “Don’t sputter like that, Bernie. If you got somethin’ to say, go ahead an’ say it. You gonna tell me you didn’t have no trouble with the landlord?”

“We had a heated discussion about books,” I said. “But you expect that sort of thing in a literary saloon. Anyway, his name is Stoppelgard.”

“Borden Stoppelgard.”

“So what has he got to do with Marty Gilmartin and baseball cards?”

“Gilmartin’s married.”

“Well, I swear it wasn’t his wife I was in bed with last night.”

“His wife’s name is Edna.”

“That’s an okay name,” I said. “Edna Gilmartin. Nothing the least bit funny about that.”

“How about Edna Stoppelgard? What’s that do for your funny bone?”

When Cornwallis was about to surrender his troops to George Washington at Yorktown, he ordered the band to play a tune called “The World Turned Upside Down.” If I’d had a tape of it lying around I would have played it.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Gilmartin’s wife used to be married to Stoppelgard?”

“Couldn’t happen,” he said. “There’s a law against it. Although I suppose there’s ways of gettin’ around it, don’t you figure?”

“Ways of getting around what?”

“The law against marryin’ your own sister, but why would you want to? The only plus I can see is you wouldn’t be arguin’ every year about do you spend Christmas with your parents or hers.” He shook his head. “Borden Stoppelgard is Martin Gilmartin’s brother-in-law.”

“You’re making this up.”

“All news to you, huh, Bernie? Nice try. Here’s more news. Last night the Stoppelgards an’ the Gilmartins all went to the theater together, to see something about wishin’ for horses. Then they all went out for supper, an’ your name came up. Seems Stoppelgard was crowin’ about the good deal he got on a rare book you sold him, an’ how the prices’d be even better when you had your Goin’-Outta-Business sale.”

“He said that, did he?”

“Then Gilmartin an’ his wife went home, an’ he got the call from you, but at the time he didn’t know who it was. Even without knowin’ it was you, first thought he had was somebody broke in, and the first thing he went an’ looked for was his baseball card collection, an’ it was gone.”

“So he called the police.”

“That’s just what he did, an’ the desk sent a couple of blue uniforms over, an’ they took a report. It landed on my desk this mornin’, an’ I mighta let it lay there