“What is it, some carcinogen in the gum?” She raised a hand and waved the thought aside. “It’s all crazy,” she said. “Oh, hi, Raffles. Were you hiding from the nasty old policemen? Oh, you are a sweetie pie. Yes, you are! Yes, you are!”
“Miaow,” said Raffles.
When the store’s empty, or when the browsers strike me as trustworthy types, I’m apt to pick up a book and read. There’s a little bell that tinkles when someone opens the door, but if I’m really caught up in my reading I don’t always hear it.
Which is what happened around four-thirty. I was back in prehistory, sharing the heroine’s dismay that those Neanderthals just didn’t understand her, when the deliberate clearing of a throat just across the counter from me yanked me back to present time. I looked up from the primitive brutes on the page and into the swinish little eyes of Borden Stoppelgard.
“I suppose you want your change,” I said.
“What, from the day before yesterday? No, of course not. You offered it to me then and I didn’t take it. You think I’d make a special trip here for it?”
“Probably not,” I said. “Unless you had to be in the neighborhood anyway to evict some widows and orphans.”
“You’ve got me wrong, Rhodenbarr.”
“Oh?”
“All wrong. What kind of man evicts widows and orphans in September? Christmas Eve, that’s the time for it.”
“‘Hark, the City Marshals Sing.’”
“My favorite Christmas carol,” he said, with a hearty chuckle. He stepped closer to the counter. “As a matter of fact, I did make a special trip here this afternoon, but not to buy books. What I really want to do is apologize. We got off on the wrong foot the other day and it was my fault. I had the wrong idea about you.”
“You did?”
“It’s a constant hazard in my business, Rhodenbarr. I have to make snap judgments, and as a rule I’m pretty good at it. But nobody’s a hundred percent, and every once in a while I put my foot in it.”
“These things happen.”
“Here’s what I did,” he said. “I walked in here, I checked out the store, I checked you out, and I jumped to a conclusion. I said to myself, Here’s this poor sap busting his hump trying to clear twenty grand a year in a dead business. Be a good thing for him and everybody, I said to myself, when his lease is up and the laws of the marketplace put him out of his misery.”
“Economic euthanasia,” I suggested.
“That’s a good way of putting it. But here’s where I went wrong. I went strictly by appearances. And then I find out you’re not an earnest nebbish of a bookseller after all. What you really are is a burglar.”
“Uh, Mr. Stoppelgard—”
“Please,” he said. “Borden.”
“Uh.”
“And what shall I call you? Bernard?”
Call me a taxi, I thought. I said, “Well, uh, people generally call me Bernie.”
“Bernie,” he said. “Bernie. I like that.”
“Then I’ll keep it.”
“A burglar,” he said, pronouncing the phrase the way a grandmother in Miami Beach might say “a doctor” or “a lawyer” or “a specialist.” “This,” he said, with a dismissive wave around him, “this is not the run-down mess it appears to be. On the contrary, it’s a brilliantly executed false front. My congratulations, Bernie.”
“Well, thanks,” I said, “but—”
“The way I hear it, you’re not just a garden-variety burglar, either. It seems you’re something of a genius at what you do. The lock that can stop you hasn’t been invented yet, according to that policeman, and there was more than a little grudging admiration in his voice, I have to tell you.”
I was being buttered up. But why?
“So naturally you were upset at the thought of a rent increase. The store works for you because it’s a subsistence enterprise with a very low overhead. Once the rent jumps anywhere near market value, you can’t operate anywhere near the break-even point, not without changing your operation dramatically. The alternative is to shove money into the business from an outside source, and if you do that somebody’s going to want to know where the money came from. And that’s no good, is it?”
“No.”
“What you need,” he said, “is a renewal of your lease at the present rent for a substantial period of time. You don’t have any kids, do you?”
“Not that I know of.”
“ ‘Not that I know of.’ I’ll have to remember that one. No kids, then there’s nobody you’re going to have to leave the business to. You figure thirty more