The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza (17 page)

“H
e had European manners,” Mrs. Pomerance said. “Always a smile and a kind word. The heat of summer bothered him, and sometimes you could tell his feet hurt by the way he walked, but you would never hear a complaint out of him. Not like some others I could mention.”

I wrote “real gent” and “never complained” in my little notebook and glanced up to catch Mrs. Pomerance sneaking a peek at me. She didn’t know how she knew me and it was driving her crazy. Since I was clearly the sincere Brooklyn clergyman Jessica Garland had called her about, the obliging chap gathering material for Abel Crowe’s eulogy, it hadn’t occurred to her that I might also be the Stettiner boy who’d shared an elevator with her a day earlier. But if I was
Reverend Rhodenbarr of Cobble Hill, why did I look familiar?

We sat on plump upholstered chairs in her over-furnished little apartment, surrounded by bright-eyed photographs of her grandchildren and a positive glut of bisque figurines, and for twenty minutes or so she alternately spoke well of the dead and ill of the living, doing a good job of dishing the building’s other inhabitants. She lived alone, did Mrs. Pomerance; her beloved Moe was cutting velvet in that great sweatshop in the sky.

It was about eight-thirty when I turned down a second cup of coffee and got up from my chair. “You’ve been very helpful,” I told her, truthfully enough. “I’ll look forward to seeing you at the service tomorrow.”

She walked me to the door, assuring me she wouldn’t miss it. “I’ll be interested to see if you use anything I told you,” she said. “No, you have to turn the top lock, too. That’s right. You want to know something? You remind me of somebody.”

“The Stettiner boy?”

“You know him?”

I shook my head. “But I’m told there’s a resemblance.”

She closed the door after me and locked up. I walked down the hall, picked Abel’s spring lock and let myself
into his apartment. It was as I’d left it, but darker, of course, since no daylight was streaming through his windows.

I turned some lights on. I wouldn’t have done this ordinarily, not without drawing drapes first, but the closest buildings across the way were also across the river, so who was going to see me?

I did a little basic snooping, but nothing like the full-scale search I’d given the place the day before. I went through the bedroom closet, looking at this and at that, and I paid a second visit to the cigar humidor. Then I browsed the bookshelves, looking not for stashed loot but simply for something to read.

What I would have liked was my Robert B. Parker novel. I would have enjoyed finding out what was going on with old Spenser, who was evidently capable of jogging without orthotics and lifting weights without acquiring a hernia. But light fiction was harder to find in that place than a 1913 V-Nickel, and any number of books which might have been interesting were less so because of my inability to read German, French or Latin.

I wound up reading Schopenhauer’s
Studies in Pessimism,
which was not at all what I’d had in mind. The book itself was a cheap reading copy, a well-thumbed Modern Library edition, and either Abel himself or a previous owner had done a fair amount of underlining,
along with the odd exclamation point in the margin when something struck his fancy.

“If a man sets out to hate all the miserable creatures he meets,”
I read,
“he will not have much energy left for anything else; whereas he can despise them, one and all, with the greatest ease.”

I rather liked that, but a little Schopenhauer does go a long way. I thought about playing a little music, decided that having turned on some lights was as dangerously as I cared to live for the time being.

Some of that ancient Armagnac would have gone nicely. I had a little milk instead, and somewhere between ten and eleven I turned off the lights in the living room and went into the bedroom and got undressed.

His bed was neatly made. I suppose he must have made it up himself upon arising on the last morning of his life. I set the bedside alarm for two-thirty, crawled under the covers, switched off the lamp and went to sleep.

The alarm cut right into a dream. I don’t recall what the dream was about, but it very likely concerned illegal entry of one sort or another because my mind promptly incorporated the wail of the clock into the dream, where it became a burglar alarm. I did a lot of fumbling for the off-switch in the dream before I tore myself free of it and fumbled for the actual clock,
which had just about run down of its own accord by the time I got my hands on it.

Terrific. I sat for a few minutes in the dark, listening carefully, hoping no one would take undue note of the alarm. I don’t suppose anybody even heard it. Those old buildings are pretty well soundproofed. I certainly didn’t hear anything, and after a bit I switched on the lamp and got up and dressed.

This time, though, I put on the Pumas instead of the black wingtips. And I put my gloves on.

I let myself out of Abel’s apartment, pushing the latch button so that the spring lock wouldn’t engage when I closed the door. I walked down the hallway past the elevator to the stairwell, and I walked down seven flights of stairs and made my way to 4-B.

No light showed beneath the door. No sound was audible within. There was only one lock on the door, and you could have taken it to the circus and sold it as cotton candy. I let myself in.

Ten minutes later I let myself out and locked the door behind me. I climbed up seven flights of stairs, let myself back into Abel’s apartment by the simple expedient of turning the knob, closed and locked the door, took off my trusty Pumas and everything else, set the bedside alarm for seven, and got back into bed.

And couldn’t sleep at first. I got up, found a robe in the closet, put it on. It dawned on me that I hadn’t eaten enough all day to sustain a canary, so I went into
the kitchen and knocked off the rest of the Black Forest cake and finished the quart of milk. Then I went back to bed and slept.

I was up before the alarm. I had a quick shower, found a safety razor and shaved with it. It was strange, living in his apartment, as if I’d slipped into the very life my old friend had lately given up, but I didn’t let myself dwell on it. I made a cup of instant coffee, drank it, and got dressed. I put on the dress shoes again and packed the Pumas in the attaché case, along with another of the books I’d been browsing earlier.

Neither the elevator operator nor the doorman gave me a second glance. They had never seen me before, but I was leaving at a civilized hour of the morning, and even in a stuffy old co-op on Riverside Drive there are surely some tenants of either gender who are apt to have the occasional stranger spending the occasional night, and leaving under his or her own power by light of dawn.

Hair Apparent was on Ninth Avenue a few doors north of Twenty-fourth Street, next to a restaurant called Chelsea Commons. It was closed, of course, with a folding steel gate similar to the one I had at Barnegat Books. A padlock secured the gate across the doorway. I stood there in full view of passers-by and used a piece of spring steel to tease the lock until it opened.

Nobody paid any attention. It was broad daylight—
and shaping up to be a beautiful day in the bargain. And I was well-dressed and obviously respectable, and to anyone watching I’d have looked as though I were using not a lock-pick but a perfectly legitimate key. Nothing to it, really.

Not much more to the business of unlocking the door. It took a little longer but it wasn’t terribly tricky.

Then I opened the door and the burglar alarm went off.

Well, these things happen, in life as in dreams. I’d noted the alarm when I’d dropped in on Marilyn Margate the previous afternoon, and I’d looked around long enough to spot the cut-out switch on the wall near the first chair. I walked into the shop, proceeded directly to the cut-out switch, and silenced the shrill wailing.

No harm done. The neighbors were very likely used to that sort of thing. Business proprietors set off their own alarms all the time when they open up. It’s when an alarm goes off in the middle of the night, or sounds for a long time unattended, that people reach for the phone and dial 911. Otherwise they assume it’s all business as usual.

Anyway, what sort of idiot would burglarize a beauty shop?

I spent better than half an hour burglarizing this one. When I left, everything was as I had found it, with the sole exception of the burglar alarm, which I didn’t
reset for fear of setting it off again on my way out. I left the money in the register—just a few rolls of change and a dozen singles. And I left the gun Marilyn had pointed at me; she’d returned it to her employer’s drawer, and that’s where I let it remain.

I wiped the surfaces I was likely to have touched—rubber gloves didn’t go well with my outfit. And I locked up after myself, and drew the window gates shut, and fastened the padlock.

Carolyn’s number didn’t answer. I started to call Denise, then changed my mind. I walked east on Twenty-third Street and read the plaques on the Chelsea Hotel, which boasted not of pediatricians and podiatrists in residence but writers who’d lived there in the past—Thomas Wolfe, Dylan Thomas. At Seventh Avenue I turned right and walked on downtown. Now and then I would pass a church, the worshipers all fresh-faced and spruced up as if in celebration of the season. A beautiful morning, I told myself. You couldn’t ask for a finer day to bury Abel Crowe.

Of course, I reminded myself, we wouldn’t actually bury him today. That would have to wait. But, if the service went as I hoped it would, perhaps we could lay my old friend to rest—his spirit if not his body. I had spent a night in his apartment, the apartment in which he’d been struck down and killed, and I couldn’t say that I felt the
presence of a restless spirit, an unquiet ghost. Then again, I’m not much at feeling presences. Someone who’s more sensitive to that sort of thing might have felt Abel’s shade close at hand in that living room, pacing the oriental carpet, crying out for vengeance. Just because I’m not aware of those things doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

I walked down below Fourteenth Street and had a big breakfast at a coffee shop in the Village—eggs, bacon, orange juice, toasted bran muffin, plenty of coffee. I picked up the Sunday
Times,
threw away all those sections nobody reads, and took the rest to Washington Square. There I sat on a bench, ignored all the obliging young men who offered to sell me every mood-altering chemical known to modern man, and read the paper while watching people and pigeons and the occasional ditsy gray squirrel. Kids climbed on the monkey bars. Young mothers pushed prams. Youths flung frisbees to and fro. Bums panhandled. Drunks staggered. Chess players advanced pawns while kibitzers shook their heads and clucked their tongues. People walked dogs, who ignored the signs and fouled the footpath. Drug dealers hawked their wares, as did the sellers of hot dogs, ice cream, Italian ices, helium-filled balloons, and organic snacks. I spotted my favorite vendor, a black man who sells large fuzzy yellow ducks with bright orange bills. They are the silliest damned things I have ever seen, and people evi
dently buy them, and I have never been able to figure out why.

I walked from the park to the subway, and by one-thirty I was in Cobble Hill and twenty minutes later I was at the Church of the Redeemer. I met Jessica Garland and the young man she lived with. His name was Clay Merriman, and he turned out to be a lanky fellow, all knees and elbows and a toothy smile. I told them both what I had in mind. He had a little trouble following me, but Jessica grasped it right away. Well, why not? She was Abel’s granddaughter, wasn’t she?

We looked over the room where the service was to take place. I told her where to seat people, assuming they didn’t grab seats on their own. Then I left her and Clay to greet the guests as they arrived, biding my time in a room down the hall that looked to be the minister’s study. The door was locked, but you can imagine the kind of lock they put on a minister’s study.

At two-thirty the canned organ music started. By now the guests should have arrived, but stragglers will straggle, so the service itself was not going to start for another ten minutes. I waited out those ten minutes in the minister’s study, doing a little pacing of the sort one probably does when rehearsing a sermon.

Then it was time. I took two books from my attaché case, refastened its clasps and left it in a corner of the
room. I made my way down the corridor and entered the larger room where a fair crowd of people had assembled. I walked down the side aisle, mounted a two-foot platform, and took my place at the lectern.

I looked at all those people and took a deep breath.

“G
ood afternoon,” I said. “My name is Bernard Rhodenbarr. I’m here, as we all are, because of my friendship for Abel Crowe. Our friend and neighbor was struck down in his own home this past week, and we have assembled here to pay final tribute to his memory.”

I looked over my audience. There were a great many unfamiliar faces in the crowd, and I guessed the older ones belonged to Abel’s neighbors from Riverside Drive while the younger ones were Cobble Hill friends of Jessica’s. Among them were quite a few people I recognized. I spotted Mrs. Pomerance in the second row, and my hearty podiatrist was one row behind her. Over to the left Ray Kirschmann sat beside a skinny young man with a lot of forehead and not much chin, and it didn’t take a great leap of logic to guess I was
looking at George Edward Margate. His ears were no longer than anybody else’s, and his nose didn’t exactly twitch, but it wasn’t hard to see why they called him Rabbit.

His sister Marilyn was in the first row all the way over on the right. She was dressed quite sedately in a black skirt and dark-gray sweater, but all the same she looked like a whore in church. The man sitting beside her, a round-faced lumpish lout, had to be Harlan Reese.

Denise and Carolyn were sitting together all the way at the back. Carolyn was wearing her blazer. Denise had a sweater on, but I couldn’t see whether she was wearing pants or a skirt. No smock, though, and no smile.

As chief mourner, Jessica Garland sat front row center, with Clay Merriman on her left. A pity we hadn’t all met before this unhappy occasion, I thought. Abel could have had us all over of an evening, Clay and Jessica and Carolyn and I, and we could have fattened up on pastry while he regaled us with stories of Europe between the wars. But, oddly, he’d never mentioned a granddaughter.

Three men in dark suits sat together at the right of the third row. The one closest to the center was tall and balding, with a long nose and very thin lips. Beside him sat the oldest of the trio, a gentleman about sixty with wide shoulders, snow-white hair and a white mus
tache. The third man, seated on the aisle, was a small and slightly built fellow with a button nose and thick eyeglasses.

I had never seen them before but I was fairly certain I knew who they were. I paused long enough to meet the eyes of the white-haired man in the middle, and while his face did not change its stern expression he gave a short but distinct nod.

At the opposite end of the second row sat another man I recognized. Oval face, clipped mustache, slate-gray hair, little mouth and nose—I’d seen him before, of course, but Jessica had known where to put him because Herbert Franklin Colcannon had obligingly worn a carnation in his lapel.

I winced when I saw it. Somehow with all the running around I’d done I hadn’t remembered to get to a florist before they closed. I suppose I could have let myself into a shuttered flower shop that very morning, but the act seemed disproportionately risky.

Anyway, I’d just introduced myself to the company. So Colcannon knew who I was.

“We’re told our good friend made his living as a receiver of stolen property,” I began. “I, however, knew him in another capacity—as a student of philosophy. The writings of Spinoza were particularly precious to Abel Crowe, and I would like to read a brief passage or two as a memorial to him.”

I read from the leatherbound copy we’d given to Abel, the copy I’d retrieved Friday and had subsequently packed in my attaché case the following night. I read a couple short selections from the section entitled “On the Origin and Nature of the Emotions.” It was dry stuff, and my audience did not look terribly attentive.

I closed Spinoza, placed the book on the lectern, and opened the other volume I’d brought along, one I’d selected last night from Abel’s shelves.

“This is a book of Abel’s,” I said. “Selections from the writing of Thomas Hobbes. Here’s a passage he underlined from
Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society:
‘The cause of mutual fear consists partly in the natural equality of men, partly in their mutual will of hurting; whence it comes to pass that we can neither expect from others nor promise to ourselves the least security. For if we look on men full-grown, and consider how brittle the frame of our human body is, which perishing, all its strength, vigor and wisdom itself perisheth with it; and how easy a matter it is even for the weakest man to kill the strongest; there is no reason why any man trusting to his own strength should conceive himself made by nature above others. They are equals who can do equal things one against the other; but they who can do the greatest thing, namely kill, can do equal things.’”

I skipped to another marked passage. “This is from
Leviathan,
” I said. “‘In the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrels. First, competition; second, diffidence; thirdly, glory. The first maketh man invade for gain, the second for safety, and the third for reputation.’”

I placed Hobbes with Spinoza. “Abel Crowe was killed for gain,” I announced. “The person who killed him is right here. In this room.”

It was not without effect. The whole crowd seemed to draw breath at once. I fixed my eyes for the moment on Carolyn and Denise. They’d known what was coming but my announcement had gotten to them just the same, and they’d drawn a little closer together as if the drama of the moment had obscured their loathing for one another.

“Abel was murdered for a nickel,” I went on. “People are killed every day for trifling sums, but this particular nickel was no trifle. It was worth something like a quarter of a million dollars.” Another collective gasp from the crowd. “Tuesday night Abel came into possession of that coin. Twelve hours later he was dead.”

I went on to tell them a little about the history of the five legendary 1913 V-Nickels. “One of these nickels wound up in the safe of a man who lived in a carriage house in Chelsea. The man and his wife had left town and weren’t expected back until the following day. Tuesday evening, while they were gone, a pair of bur
glars broke through the skylight and ransacked the carriage house.”

“We didn’t take no nickel!” Heads swiveled and eyes stared at Rabbit Margate. “We never took no nickel,” he said again, “and we never opened no safe. We found the safe, sure, but we couldn’t punch it or peel it or nothing. I don’t know shit about no nickel.”

“No.”

“And we didn’t kill nobody. We didn’t hurt nothing. Wasn’t nobody home when we went in, and we went out again before nobody came home. I don’t know shit about no murders and no nickels.”

He slumped in his seat. Ray Kirschmann turned to whisper something to him, and Rabbit’s shoulders sagged in dejection. I don’t know what Ray said, probably pointed out Rabbit had just admitted the burglary in front of God and everybody.

“That’s true,” I said. “The first burglars. Rabbit Margate and Harlan Reese”—and didn’t Harlan look startled to hear his name spoken aloud—“contented themselves with burglary and vandalism. Not long after they left, a second burglary took place. This burglar, a considerably more sophisticated and accomplished individual than Margate and Reese, went directly to the wall safe, opened it, and removed a pair of earrings, a valuable wristwatch, and the 1913 nickel. He took them directly to Abel’s apartment, where he left them on consignment.”

No point, really, in mentioning we’d obtained some cash for the watch and earrings. No need to tell these people every last detail.

“While the second burglar was delivering the safe’s contents to Abel Crowe, the nickel’s owner and his wife were returning to their home. They’d had a change of plans that none of the burglars had any reason to be aware of, and so they walked in on a house that looked like Rome after the Goths sacked it. They also walked in on another burglary in progress, and this third burglary was the charm. The man and woman were knocked out and tied up, and when the man regained consciousness and worked free of his bonds he discovered that his wife was dead.”

I looked at Colcannon. He returned my glance, his face quite expressionless. I had the feeling he’d have preferred to be almost anywhere else, and I don’t suppose he figured he was going to have the chance to buy his coin back, not this afternoon. He looked like a man who wanted to walk out of a bad movie but had to stay to find out what happened next.

“The nickel’s owner called the police, of course. He was given the opportunity to look at the perpetrator of the second burglary but couldn’t identify him. Subsequently he did make a positive identification of one of the participants in the first burglary.”

“That was a frame,” Rabbit Margate called out. “He never saw me. That was a setup.”

“Let’s just call it a mistake,” I suggested. “The gentleman was under a lot of stress. He’d lost his wife, his house had been cruelly looted, and a coin worth a fortune was missing.

“And here’s something interesting,” I said, glancing again at Colcannon. “He never mentioned the coin to the police. He never said a word about it. You have to report losses to the police in order to make an insurance claim, but that didn’t mean anything in this instance because the coin wasn’t insured. And it wasn’t insured for a very good reason. The gentleman didn’t have title to it.”

“This has gone far enough.” It was Colcannon who spoke, and he managed to surprise me, not to mention the rest of the crowd. He got to his feet and glared at me. “I don’t know how I let myself be gulled into coming here. I never knew the late Mr. Crowe. I was brought here on a false pretext. I never reported the loss of a 1913 V-Nickel and never carried insurance coverage on such a coin for a much better reason than the one you’ve advanced. I never had such a coin in my possession.”

“I almost believed that for a while myself,” I admitted. “Oh, I knew you had one, but I thought it might be a counterfeit. I ran a check on the five V-Nickels to find out which one you bought, and it turned out that they were all accounted for. Four were in museum collections and the fifth was privately owned, and the private
specimen was lightly circulated and easily distinguishable from the others, and certainly not the specimen I took from your safe.”

Another collective gasp—I’d gone and blown my anonymity, and now all and sundry knew who the perpetrator of the Second Burglary was. Ah, well. These things happen.

“But I had a good close look at that coin,” I went on, “and I couldn’t believe it was a counterfeit. So I did a little more checking and I invited some museum people to take a close look at their coins, and three of the four told me their coins looked just fine, thank you.

“The fourth museum had a counterfeit in the case.”

I looked at the three men in dark suits. The one seated on the aisle, the little button-nosed guy with the thick glasses, was Milo Hracec, and he recognized his cue. “It was not a bad counterfeit,” he said. “It was made from a proof 1903 nickel. The zero was removed and a one soldered in place. It was good work, and no one glancing into our display case would be likely to think twice about it, but you could never sell it to anyone as genuine.”

The white-haired man cleared his throat. “I’m Gordon Ruslander,” he announced. “When Mr. Hracec reported his discovery to me I went immediately to see for myself. He’s right—the coin’s not a bad counterfeit, but neither is it terribly deceptive at close glance. It’s certainly not the coin I received when I traded a
painting to the Baltimore Historical Society. That was a genuine specimen. I knew they wouldn’t palm off a counterfeit on me, but as a matter of course I had it xrayed anyway, and it was authentic. The coin that had been substituted for it didn’t have to be x-rayed. It was visibly fraudulent.”

“What did you do after you’d seen the coin?”

“I went to my curator’s home and confronted him,” he said. The man on Ruslander’s other side, the balding chap with the long nose, seemed to shrink in his seat. “I knew Howard Pitterman had been having his troubles,” Ruslander went on. “He went through a difficult divorce and had some investment reverses. I didn’t realize just how hard his circumstances had been or I would certainly have offered help.” He frowned. “Instead he took matters into his own hands a couple of months ago. He substituted a counterfeit for the 1913 nickel, then sold off our most important rarity for a fraction of its value.”

“I got twenty thousand dollars for it,” Howard Pitterman said, his voice trembling. “I must have been insane.”

“I don’t know who that man is,” Colcannon said, “but I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

“If that’s the man who bought the coin,” Pitterman said, “he didn’t buy it from me. I sold it to a dealer in Philadelphia, a man with a shady reputation. Maybe he sold it to this Mr. Colcannon, or maybe it went through
another pair of hands first. I wouldn’t know. I could give you the name of that dealer, although I’d rather not, but I don’t think he’d admit to anything, and I can’t prove he bought the coin from me.” His voice broke. “I’d like to help,” he said, “but I don’t see that there’s anything I can do.”

“I’ll say it again,” Colcannon said. “I don’t know any disreputable coin dealers in Philadelphia. I scarcely know any reputable ones. I know Mr. Ruslander by reputation, of course, as the founder of the Gallery of American and International Numismatics as well as proprietor of the Liberty Bell Mint, but I’ve never met him or his employees.”

“Then why did you call Samuel Wilkes yesterday?”

“I never heard of Samuel Wilkes.”

“He has an office near Rittenhouse Square,” I said, “and he deals in coins and medals, and shady’s the word for him. You called him yesterday at his home and left your name, and you called his office, and you also put in a call to the Gallery of American and International Numismatics. You made those calls from your home telephone, and since they’re long distance there’ll be a record of them.”

There would be a record, all right. Colcannon was staring at me, trying to figure out how there would be a record of calls he had never made. Any minute now he’d recall that he’d been lured away from his house and hustled off to Madison and Seventy-ninth,
and he might even figure out that he’d had company in his absence, but right now he seemed content to deny the whole thing.