The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,118
his ID and his regular wallet in his parked car and came to me with nothing but ten thousand dollars and a bellyful of self-confidence. ‘I believe you have something for me’—that’s what he said. If I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about, he’d have gone into more detail. But he didn’t have to, because I was obliging enough to turn around and hand him a book.”
“And he assumed the photos were in it.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“I might have looked to make sure, Bern.”
“Even if a fast response would let you get something for thirteen hundred bucks that you’d been prepared to pay ten thousand for?”
“That’s a point.”
“Then he got gunned down, and somebody picked up the book.”
“And there weren’t any photos in it.”
“Of course not. They saw him come out of my store, and they had to assume he had the photos, because what else would he have gone there for? So they shot him and took what he was carrying, and it was nothing but a Joseph Conrad novel, and not even a first edition.”
“So the Russians had the book.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe? What do you mean, maybe?”
“I think there was probably a Russian behind the wheel,” I said, “and another one firing the gun. But I think there was a third person in the car, and I think that person was Colby Riddle.”
“In the murder car.”
“That would be my guess. He looked at the book and knew right away what had happened. He took it home with him, or back to his office, and he paged through it and made absolutely sure there were no pictures in it. And then he took it to his friend Mapes’s office and let Mapes look, and commiserated with Mapes about the problems they were having. ‘Here,’ he told Mapes. ‘You might as well hang onto this goddamn thing. Call it a souvenir.’ ”
“And Mapes took it home?”
“And left it on the desk in his den, where I found it that very same night after I cleaned out his safe.”
“And you brought it home.”
“Which seemed like a mistake at the time,” I said, “but I couldn’t get over the surprise of finding it there. The last I’d seen of it, someone was snatching it out of a fat man’s dead hands for reasons I couldn’t begin to fathom. And here it was, on Mapes’s desk.”
“Wow. And he never knew it was gone?”
“How would he know? It was just an old book, with nothing valuable about it. He could have thrown it out in the first place. He kept it, but that didn’t mean he was going to sit down and read it. He tossed it on his desk, and wouldn’t have noticed it was gone unless he went looking for it.”
“But he could have noticed, Bern.”
“I know,” I said, “and that worried me, but only a little. Because the last thing I did Monday night—although it was well into Tuesday morning by then—was drive out to Riverdale and let myself into his house for a second time.”
“Through the milk chute.”
“Don’t remind me. It went smoother this time. Maybe I lost a pound or two, or maybe I improved with practice. I took the book along, and I’d already fixed it up, taping the photos in place. I could have just dropped it on his desk, I suppose, but I didn’t want him paging idly through it, so I found a place on his shelf. The spine’s dark, you don’t notice it right away, but it would show up in a search. If he’d already missed it, well, that might have been tricky, but I knew I was in the clear when he came downstairs after showing his empty safe to the IRS boys. His reaction made it very clear he hadn’t had a clue the money was missing. That meant he hadn’t missed the book, because if he’d been aware that something had disappeared, the first thing he’d have done was check the safe to see if anything else was gone.”
She took it all in, and asked a few more questions, and I did the best I could to answer them. Then she pointed out that Ray knew I’d had the photos. So how did he think they’d found their way into the book, and the book onto Mapes’s shelf?
“Ray’s a practical man,” I said. “He’s not as stupid as you think he is.”
“He couldn’t be, Bern, or he’d die because he forgot to breathe.”