The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams - By Lawrence Block Page 0,52

in touch when she got back.” She shrugged. “I don’t know if I want to do it, though, if it would mean coming to this building and possibly running into Luke.”

“Especially if you suspect him of taking the cards.”

“It’s more than a suspicion,” she said. “I’m sure of it, and that’s all the more reason why I’d like to get my stuff out of there before he comes back. Suppose his place gets raided and my things wind up in an evidence locker?”

“It could happen.”

“I’d hate that.” She put her hand on my arm. “So what do you say, Bernie? Want to be a real sweetie and show me how good you are at opening locks?”

CHAPTER

Thirteen

Ten minutes later we were sitting in a Blimpie Base on Broadway, planning the commission of a felony. That set us apart from the other customers, who looked to have gotten well past the planning stage.

I started out by telling Doll I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I’d stayed away from burglary for over a year. Then all I’d done was think about knocking off an apartment and the next thing I knew I was spending the night in a cell.

“I’d like to help,” I said. “You left some clothes in Luke’s apartment and naturally you wanted them back. But it seems to me there are a couple of alternatives to illegal entry. You could wait until he gets back and give him a call, or you could hit Marty up for a loan and go shopping.”

“Forget the clothes,” she said.

“Exactly. Forget them and buy new ones.”

Forget she’d even mentioned the clothes, she said. The big reason to break into Luke’s apartment was to recover Marty’s baseball cards. If Luke had left town in response to a call with an offer of work, he had probably rushed off before he had an opportunity to convert the baseball card collection into cash. Maybe he was in no rush, maybe he’d just as soon let the heat die down while he figured out the best way to sell them.

If we could just get into Luke’s apartment, she was pretty sure we could find the cards. And if we could return them to Marty, that meant I’d be off the hook for burglarizing his apartment. The charges would be dropped, and wouldn’t that be great?

“Well, it would certainly be nice,” I told her. “But according to my lawyer they’re probably going to have to drop the charges anyway, because he says they haven’t got enough evidence to get an indictment, let alone a conviction. On top of that, do you see what I’d be doing? I’d be actually committing a crime in order to exonerate myself from one I didn’t do. Somehow it doesn’t seem worth it.”

As a matter of fact, she went on, there might be something extra in it for me. She was pretty sure there’d be a reward. Marty, after all, was a generous man. His baseball card collection was near and dear to him. Surely I could count on being reimbursed handsomely for the risk I’d be running.

How handsomely, I wondered. Whatever Marty paid me would be coming out of his own pocket, and he’d already paid for the cards once. He wouldn’t want to shell out for them all over again, would he?

“You know,” she said, “he’s already reported the loss to the insurance company, so I suppose they’re already processing the claim. If I sat down with him privately and told him how you’d managed to recover the cards, well, maybe he wouldn’t bother saying anything to the insurance company.”

“I think I see what you’re getting at.”

“It wouldn’t exactly be stealing,” she said. “It would be more a case of letting things run their course, wouldn’t it? If the insurance company paid half a million dollars to settle the claim, which is only fair because the cards really were stolen, well, Marty would have all that money to spend replenishing his collection. If he could do that by buying an almost identical collection from you for a quarter of a million dollars, say, he’d be ahead of the game.”

“And so would I.”

“Absolutely. We both would.”

“Both of us, eh?”

“Fifty-fifty,” she said. “I need you to open Luke’s door and you need me to handle the arrangements with Marty. Bernie, that’s more than a hundred thousand dollars apiece.”

“I don’t know about the percentages,” I said.

“What could be fairer than fifty-fifty?”

“But is it really fifty-fifty? That’s one way to look at