The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart - By Lawrence Block Page 0,63

with feeling, “but I’m not insensitive. You don’t see me making asshole jokes every time I’m in the same room with him. He wants you to get in touch with him. He says it’s urgent.”

“Did he say why?”

“No, and I couldn’t get it out of him, but he sounded serious. I told him you were away for the weekend.”

“Good thinking.”

“I said I didn’t know where but you’d mentioned something about New Hampshire. Bern, do you think those were cops hanging around your place uptown? Because he said he knew you hadn’t been home, and how else would he know that unless they had the place staked out?”

“Maybe,” I said. “They were obvious enough about it. But I don’t get it. I can see him dropping in, he does that all the time, and I can even see him leaving a message that it’s urgent, even if it’s not. But a stakeout? What for?”

“Unless they found out about Hoberman.”

“So what if they did? Look, when I ID’d the body, I made sure Ray got the impression I wasn’t a hundred percent certain, that I was mostly going through with it to oblige him and be a nice guy. If they finally got a make on Hoberman’s prints or something like that, well, yeah, I can see where he’d want to talk with me, at least to get me to rethink the ID. But why would he park a cop in my lobby and two more in an unmarked car out in front?”

“You could call him and ask him.”

“How? I’m in New Hampshire.”

“You came back ahead of schedule.”

“I don’t want to come back,” I said. “Then he’ll want to pull me in, and that’s the last thing I want.”

She thought about it. “Okay, you’re calling him from New Hampshire, because you called me to tell me how beautiful it is up there and I gave you his message. That would work, wouldn’t it?”

“Maybe. Until he ran a trace and found out where the call came from.”

“Would he do that?”

“He might.”

“You want to rent a car and drive up somewhere to make the call? Not New Hampshire, that’s too far, but say Connecticut? Then when he traces the call…forget I said anything, Bern. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I didn’t think it did.”

“He said you can call him at home anytime. He said you’d have the number.”

“He’s right, I do. I’ll see how I feel about it in the morning. What’s this?”

She’d handed me a business card. No name, no address, just a seven-digit number, the first three digits separated from the last four with a hyphen.

“It looks like a phone number,” I said.

“Very good, Bern.”

“No area code, though.” I ran my thumb across the surface. “Raised lettering,” I said. “Or should that be numbering? Since there aren’t any letters. I don’t remember Ray’s number offhand, but I’d be willing to bet this isn’t it. Unless he had it changed, but this is a little too minimalist for Ray, wouldn’t you say?”

“It’s not Ray’s.”

“Where did it come from?”

“A man who walked into the store and asked for you. I said you weren’t in.”

“You were right about that.”

“He said you should call him sometime to discuss a matter of mutual interest.”

“Ah, that narrows it down. This is great, I’ve got a card with a name and no number and another with a number and no name. I wish somebody else would come along and give me one with nothing on it but an address. Ten Downing Street, say, or Sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue.”

“Maybe one of those was this guy’s. I tried to get his name but you’d have thought it was a state secret.”

That rang a muted bell. I said, “I don’t suppose he was around six-two or -three, mid to late thirties, short blondish hair, broad shoulders? Handsome guy, might have been wearing black Levi’s and an air of contentment.”

“Sounds like Mike Todd.”

“That’s who I was describing. Is that who gave you the card?”

“Nothing like him. This man never wore jeans in his life. He was wearing a white suit.”

“Maybe it was Tom Wolfe.”

“It wasn’t Tom Wolfe. This guy was sixty or sixty-five, around six feet tall, blue eyes, iron-gray hair. Bushy eyebrows, big nose like an eagle’s beak, prominent jaw.”

“I’m impressed,” I said. “All you left out was his weight and the amount of change in his pocket.”

“I kept my hands out of his pockets,” she said, “so I don’t know about the second part. I’d say he weighed somewhere around three hundred