The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,75
a prepubescent girl who won’t have anything to do with Humbert Humbert, but a realtors’ term for the emerging area north of Little Italy. By acting as their own general contractor and doing most of the work themselves, they’d managed to hold the cost of the gut rehab they’d done to another four million, so—well, you can run the numbers yourself and see what a bargain they’d got, with enough square footage to give him the HO-gauge equivalent of fifty miles of railroad track, while she had plenty of room to show off her treasures, including one of the very first McCormick reapers.
I called Carolyn. “What I want to know,” I said, “is where do they find these people?”
“Huh? Where do who find what people?”
“Page four of the Real Estate section.”
“I’ll call you back,” she said.
It was close to fifteen minutes before the phone rang, and I picked it up and said, “Well, it took you long enough. After we finish the remodeling, what do you want to do—play with your trains or go cut the wheat in the back forty?”
There was a long, thoughtful pause, and then a voice not at all like Carolyn’s said, “It didn’t take me long at all, not once I got your message. An’ the rest of what you said must be in English, because I recognize all the words, but I don’t know what the hell you’re talkin’ about.”
“Oh, Ray. I thought you were Carolyn.”
“I’m a foot taller’n she is an’ a lot heavier, an’ I got a deeper voice. Not to mention the fact that she’s a woman, for all the good it does anybody. Most people don’t have a whole lotta trouble tellin’ the two of us apart. You called me, Bern. You got somethin’?”
“I might,” I said.
“It took a while findin’ out who he was, Bernie. He had a wallet with enough cash in it to choke a goat, but not a lick of ID anywhere in it, or anywhere else on him.”
“No money belt?”
“Not unless he was wearin’ it underneath his skin, because the last I seen him he was bareass naked on a metal table with a doctor diggin’ bullets out of him. We ran his prints, of course, but he didn’t have none.”
“The man had no fingerprints?”
“He had ’em on the tips of his fingers, like everybody else except your occasional visitor from outer space. But he didn’t have ’em on file, so when we ran ’em we didn’t get nowhere.”
He bit into a doughnut, chased it with a gulp of coffee. He’d picked me up in a city car, a Chevrolet Monte Carlo that must have been confiscated from somebody buying or selling low-grade cocaine, and now we were in a restaurant near the Manhattan side of the Williamsburg Bridge. Ray was partial to it, for reasons that remain unclear to me. We’d picked up our coffee and doughnuts at the counter and taken them to a table, on which Ray was now putting his cards.
“So we had nothin’ to go on,” he said, “an’ we ID’d him anyway.”
“How?”
“Good police work,” he said. “How’d he get to your store? Well, you don’t see too many fat guys on the bus or the subway, unless that’s all they can afford, an’ I already told you about his wallet.”
“How much was he carrying?”
“I didn’t weigh him, but he had to go over three hundred pounds. Oh, money?” He held his thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. “A wad this thick. Eighty-seven hundred bucks, all in hundreds, an’ that’s not countin’ what he had in euros. That’s a man who can afford to take a cab, but I knew right off that’s not how he got there.”
“How’d you know?”
“What’s he gonna do, get a cabby to break a hundred? He didn’t have any small bills, Bernie. What that tells me is he’s got a car. He drove there, an’ he’s plannin’ to drive straight home, wherever home is.” He shrugged. “Course, we checked cabbies, too, lookin’ for somebody who dropped a fat guy on your block of East 11th somewhere around lunchtime. You go through the motions, but I knew he drove.”
“Unless he walked.”
“A guy with his build?”
“I don’t know, Ray. The man was light on his feet.”
“Every fat man’s light on his feet, Bernie. They gotta be or they wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. Anyway, even if you had a point, it’s a mute one. We found the car.”