The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,116
thanks, Max. Bern, we’re not gonna die of thirst after all.”
I took a sip of my drink just to make sure.
“Bern? Summarize what happened, will you? Not with William Johnson, I get all that. But the rest of it, with the photographs and the people getting killed and all.”
I thought about it. “Well,” I said, “there are a couple of versions. There’s what I laid out, which is how the cops have the case written up. And there’s what Ray knows is really true. And then there’s what’s even truer, that Ray doesn’t know about. And then of course there are the things I did to make it happen.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So which would you like to hear?”
She grinned. “All of ’em, Bern.”
“The Lyles got the photographs pretty much the way it came out in Mapes’s living room. Marisol told her cousin Karlis, and he made a fake appointment with Mapes and swiped the book when no one was looking. He got it to his father, who in turn got it to Arnold Lyle.”
“Okay.”
“Lyle talked to more people than he should have, and made arrangements to sell the book to Georgi Blinsky.”
“Principles of Organic Chemistry, you mean. That book.”
“Right, Volume Two. The book Mapes taped the photos in. First, though, Lyle removed the Kukarov photos from the book, but he liked Mapes’s system, so he taped them into another book, one belonging to the owner of the apartment he’d sublet, and stuck it back in the bookcase.”
“And that was QB VII.”
“Uh-huh. Now the way I told the story, Ray found the book in a careful search of the apartment after the murder, but the photos were already missing.”
“Ray couldn’t find a black cat on a white sofa, Bern.”
“This is the official story, remember? Ray found the book, but the photos were gone.”
“Who took them?”
“Good question. First, though, the home invasion and the murder. Michael Quattrone’s men were responsible for the home invasion part, as he more or less admitted, albeit hypothetically. The cops can’t make a case against him and won’t try, but they know his guys did it. And the doorman’s death was accidental. It was homicide, that’s what you call it when someone’s killed in the commission of a felony, but nobody meant for it to happen.”
“That must make the doorman feel a lot better.”
“Quattrone wound up with Principles of Organic Chemistry, which by now contained Mapes’s mug shots of everybody but Kukarov. His main goal was to destroy the ones of Whitey Mullane, his friend and mentor, and my guess is he’ll trash the others as well, if he hasn’t already. They’d be worth something to a blackmailer, but that’s not his line of work, and anyway he doesn’t know who the people are.”
“And after his men left?”
“Blinsky and his crew got there, too late to pick up the book, or to recover the twenty grand they’d already paid the Lyles. So they shot them, which I suspect they were planning to do all along, book or no book. I don’t think Georgi Blinsky was a very nice man.”
“Then I won’t feel too bad that he got killed. What about the photos of Kukarov?”
“What about them?”
“Well, I know what happened to them. They were in the Leon Uris book waiting for you to find them. I know that because you told me, and Ray knows it because he was there. But what do the cops think happened to them?”
“They think they disappeared.”
“Just like that? Poof?”
“No one’s too clear on the details. Maybe when they took the tape off his mouth Lyle told Blinsky where the photos were.”
“And Blinsky took them. And put the book back where he found it?”
“Does that seem unlikely? How about this—Lyle taped the Kukarov photos in QB VII, then thought better of it and cut them out again. He put them somewhere else, and gave them to Blinsky, hoping it would lead the man in black to spare his life.”
“That’s a little better, but—”
“Carolyn, it didn’t happen, so what difference does it make how it didn’t happen? Somebody got the photos, and whoever it was he doesn’t have them now, so what do the cops care?”
“I just wondered, that’s all. But I see what you mean.”
“Now what comes next? Colby Riddle, I guess, and Valdi Berzins. Well, you know how the story goes there. Mapes called Colby, who agreed to help out, probably for a substantial consideration.”
“Money, in other words.”
“What could be more considerate? Colby got me to set a book aside for him, then told