The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams - By Lawrence Block Page 0,37
just a little more upscale.
Besides, a successful professional criminal with a Legal Aid lawyer is like a billionaire collecting Social Security. Maybe he’s entitled to it, but so what? It’s still tacky.
For years my lawyer was a man named Klein with an office on Queens Boulevard, a wife and kids in Kew Gardens, and a girlfriend in Turtle Bay, just around the corner from the United Nations. Then one day a couple of years ago I got arrested, through no real fault of my own, and when I went to call Klein I found out he was dead.
Poof, just like that.
So I called Wally Hemphill. I knew him from the park, where we would encounter each other evenings, dressed in shorts and singlets and shod in state-of-the-art running shoes. We would jog along together for a mile or so, chatting companionably about this and that, until he sped up or I slowed down. When I met him he was training for the marathon. That was several marathons ago, and he’s never slowed down.
I, on the other hand, was a lot less dedicated. It’s hard to remember why I started running in the first place, although it may have been a natural outgrowth of the instinct for self-preservation. It’s nice to be able to run away if something takes it into its head to start chasing you. Still, I had never felt the urge to run twenty-six miles and change, or to transmute myself into a human whippet, and eventually the day came when running ceased to be one of the things I did and became instead one of the things I used to do, like reading comic books and collecting baseball cards. I still wear running shoes—they work just as well at low speeds—and I still own a few sets of running shorts and singlets, although I no longer get any use out of them. (If my mother lived with me, she’d probably throw them out.)
“I’m sorry it took so long,” Wally was saying. It was a quarter after ten Saturday morning, some eighteen hours after Ray Kirschmann had read me my rights, and we were in an Ethiopian coffee shop on Chambers Street. I think the restaurant’s previous owners must have been Greek, because they’ve still got spinach pie and moussaka on the menu.
Wally, who’d had an early breakfast before he came downtown, was working on a chocolate doughnut and a cup of coffee. I had coffee, too, along with a big glass of orange juice and a plate of scrambled eggs and salami and two slices of rye toast. Nothing builds an appetite like getting out of jail, even if you don’t pass Go and collect $200.
“They were being obstructive,” he explained. “Shunting you around from precinct to precinct like that so that I couldn’t get you out until morning. It’s a nuisance, but it’s actually a good sign.”
“How do you figure that?”
“What it tells me is they know they’ve got no case. What have they got? As far as evidence is concerned, they can demonstrate two things. One, someone called the Gilmartins from Carolyn’s apartment around midnight Thursday. They can’t even prove it was you that called, and the NYNEX records only show the one call that went through, so there’s no indication you’d been trying the number for hours. Two, they’ve got your doorman’s testimony that you left the building a little after one and didn’t get back until just before dawn. Well, so what? Leaving aside the fact that I could tie the guy in knots on cross, they can’t say you spent that time stealing Gilmartin’s baseball cards, because he had already reported them missing. You don’t have a working time machine, do you, Bernie?”
“I had one,” I said, “but I could never get batteries for it.”
“Their contention is you had the cards when you left your place and sold them during the night to person or persons unknown. But they have to do more than contend. Can they prove it?”
“No.”
“Suppose they find the buyer?”
“There was no buyer, Wally.”
“You know,” he said, “I think I’m gonna have another of these doughnuts. You can’t beat Ethiopians when it comes to doughnuts. You want one?” I shook my head. “It’s good I run seventy miles a week,” he said, “or I’d weigh three hundred pounds. Bernie, it might be a good idea if you beat them to the punch. Give up the fence.”