all the time. Right now I’m afraid this is as fancy as it gets.”
We were at the Poodle Factory, Carolyn’s place of business, just two doors down from my bookstore on East 11th Street between University Place and Broadway. This was a Wednesday, and ordinarily we’d be eating our sandwiches at Barnegat Books, having lunched at her dog grooming salon the day before. But instead I’d joined Marty on Tuesday, and we’d been at the bookstore Monday, so it was her turn to play host and mine to show up with the food. Accordingly I’d picked up a couple of stuffed pitas and two portions of an indeterminate side dish at Two Guys from Kandahar, the latest incarnation of the hole-in-the-wall around the corner on Broadway. The only soft drink they carried was a hideous blue-green thing flavored with pistachio nuts, so I’d stopped next door for a couple of Cokes.
“These are good,” she said, “but how authentic do you figure they are? I mean, do they even have pita bread in Afghanistan?”
“Does it matter? I mean, do they have tacos in Beijing? Or cal-zone in Tirana?”
She saw my point. We were, after all, in New York, where half the taco stands are run by Chinese, and most of the pizzerias by Albanians. “You’re right,” she said. “But getting back to Marty. This is something different for him, isn’t it? The jobs he steers you to are usually friends of his who want to be burgled so they can collect the insurance. This Mapes doesn’t sound like a friend—”
“Not unless you consider shitheel a term of endearment.”
“—and I don’t suppose he’s going to be in on the burglary. What’s in the safe?”
“Cash.”
“How does Marty know that? Don’t tell me it was open.”
“If it had been open,” I said, “he could have taken the money himself. Not that he would have, because at the time he didn’t have anything against Mapes. He didn’t much care for him, he’d always thought of him as a weasel and a fourflusher, but this was long before Marty had met Marisol.”
“Who was probably still in high school in San Juan.”
“Oakmont, actually.”
“Wherever. Oakmont? Where’s that, Bern?”
“Pennsylvania. It’s outside of Pittsburgh.”
“So’s Philadelphia,” she said. “Outside of Pittsburgh, that is. How does he know about the cash?”
“Things Mapes let drop. I don’t know what he said exactly, but the implication was that he got paid now and then in cash, and that it stayed out of the bank, and off the books.”
“I hardly ever get cash anymore,” she said. “It’s almost all credit cards nowadays. Which is fine, because they don’t bounce the way checks used to. Do you get much cash?”
“When it’s less than ten dollars, almost everybody pays cash. And just the other day I had a sale that came to forty-eight dollars and change, and the guy handed me a fifty-dollar bill. But that’s a rarity.”
“The forty-eight-dollar sale? Or getting paid in cash.”
“Both. When it’s a two-dollar sale from the bargain table, sometimes I just put it in my pocket. But most of the time I ring the sale. I mean, I’m not looking to skim cash from the business. I’d rather show as much store income as possible, and declare it and pay taxes on it.”
“Because your other job’s tax-free.”
“That’s the thing about burglary,” I said. “There’s no tax bite, and very little paperwork.”
“I’m not gonna ask about the pension plan, Bern. Anyway, what does Mapes do?”
“He’s a doctor.”
“And he gets paid in cash?”
“Not entirely, but there’s a fair amount of cash involved.”
“But everybody has medical insurance,” she said. “Who pays cash?”
“I don’t have medical insurance.”
“Well, no. Neither do I, Bern. We run our own businesses, and the cost of medical coverage would bankrupt us. Fortunately my health is good, so it doesn’t come up very often, but when I have to go to the doctor I wind up writing a check. That way at least it’s tax deductible.”
“Right.”
“Of course maybe Mapes is an old-fashioned doctor,” she said, “like the one I go to over in Stuyvesant Town. You don’t need an appointment, you just walk in and take a number like you were at Zabar’s. And it’s fifteen or twenty dollars for your basic office visit. But the guy’s a saint, Bern, and Mapes doesn’t sound much like a candidate for canonization.”
“He doesn’t, does he?”
“So what kind of a doctor is he?”
“A plastic surgeon.”
“You’re kidding, right? A guy does nose jobs and gets paid in cash?”
“According to Marty,” I said, “most plastic surgery