The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart - By Lawrence Block Page 0,37
corridor looking through a pane of glass at someone who couldn’t look back. “I hate this,” I said to Ray. “Remember? I told you I hated this.”
“You’re not gonna puke, are you, Bernie?”
“No,” I said firmly. “I’m not. Can we leave now?”
“You seen enough?”
“More than enough, thank you.”
“Well?”
“Well what? Oh, you mean—”
“Yeah. It’s him, right?”
I hesitated. “You know,” I said, “how many times did I actually set eyes on the man? Two, three times?”
“He was a customer of yours, Bernie.”
“Not a very frequent one. And you don’t really look at a person in a bookstore, at least I don’t.”
“You don’t?”
“Not really. What usually happens is we both wind up looking at the book we’re discussing. And if he’s paying by check I’ll look at the check, and at his ID, if I ask him for ID. Of course Candlemas paid me in cash, so I never had any reason to ask to see his driver’s license.”
“So instead you looked at his face, like you just did a minute ago, and that’s how you’re able to tell it’s him.”
“But did I really look at his face?” I frowned. “Sometimes we look without seeing, Ray. I looked at his clothes. I could swear he was a sharp dresser. But now all he’s wearing is a sheet, and I never saw him on his way to a toga party.”
“Bernie…”
“Think about the man you just met in my store. That was no more than half an hour ago, Ray, and you looked right at him, but did you really see him? If you had to do it, could you furnish a description of him?”
“Sure,” he said. “Name, Tignatz Rasmoolihan. Height, five foot two. Weight, a hundred an’ five. Color of hair, black. Color of eyes, green.”
“Really? He had green eyes?”
“Sure, matched his shirt. Probably why he picked it, the vain little bastard. Complexion, pale. Spots of rouge here an’ here, only it ain’t rouge, it’s natural. Shape of face, narrow.”
He went on, describing the clothes Rasmoulian was wearing down to an alligator belt with a silver buckle, which I certainly hadn’t noticed. I must have seen it but it didn’t register. “That’s amazing,” I said. “You barely looked at him and you got all that. You fluffed the name a little, but everything else was picture-perfect.”
“Well, I’m what you call a trained observer,” he said, clearly pleased. “I’ll screw up a name now an’ then, but I get the rest of it right most of the time.”
“Now that just shows you,” I said. “I’m the other way around. I guess I’m just more verbal than visual. I’ll get the names right every time, but the faces are another story.”
“I guess it comes from hangin’ around books all the time.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Instead of gettin’ out and mixin’ with people.”
“That must be it.”
“So?”
“How’s that, Ray?”
“So are you gonna ID this poor dead son of a bitch or what?”
“Just hypothetically,” I said. “Suppose I wasn’t a hundred percent certain.”
“Aw, Jesus, why’d you have to go an’ say a thing like that?”
“No, let me finish. I get the impression that my identifying the body is really nothing more than a formality.”
“That’s exactly what it is, Bernie.”
“You’ve probably already identified him from fingerprints and dental records. You just need somebody to eyeball the deceased and confirm what you already know.”
“So far we didn’t get any kind of a bounce from the prints or the dental records. But we sure as hell know who he is.”
“So it’s just a formality.”
“Didn’t I just say that, Bernie?”
I made up my mind. “All right,” I said. “It’s Candlemas.”
“Way to go, Bern. For the record, you’re formally identifying the man you just saw as Hugo Candlemas, right?”
If this had been a movie there’d have been an ominous chord right about now, so that you’d know the hero was about to put his foot in it. No, you’d want to cry. No, you fool, don’t do it!
But would he listen?
“Ray,” I said, “there’s no question in my mind.”
CHAPTER
Ten
Ray dropped me at the subway and I was in my own apartment with time for a shower and shave before I headed for the Musette. I was there first so I bought two tickets and waited in the lobby.
I was still waiting when they opened the doors and started letting people take seats. I followed the crowd inside and threw my jacket over a pair of seats halfway down the aisle on the left, then went back to the guy taking tickets. He knew me by