“Find another line of work. Quit lifting things. You’re not terribly good at it and I’m afraid you’re temperamentally unsuited to the life that goes with it. Are you in college?”
“I dropped out.”
“Why?”
“It wasn’t relevant.”
“Few things are, but why don’t you see if you can’t get back in? Pick up a diploma and find some sort of career that suits you. You’re not cut out to be a professional thief.”
“A professional-” He rolled his eyes again. “Jesus, I ripped off a couple of books. Don’t make a life’s work out of it, huh?”
“Anybody who steals things for resale is a professional criminal,” I told him. “You just weren’t doing it in a very professional manner, that’s all. But I’m serious about this. Get out of the business.” I laid a hand lightly on his wrist. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “but the thing is you’re too dumb to steal.”
CHAPTER Two
After he’d left I tucked his forty dollars into my wallet, where it promptly became my forty dollars. I marked the Steinbeck down to fifteen dollars before shelving it and its companions. While doing this I spotted a few errant volumes and put them back where they belonged.
Browsers came and went. I made a few sales from the bargain table, then moved a Heritage Club edition of Virgil’s Eclogues (boxed, the box water-damaged, slight rubbing on spine, price $8.50). The woman who bought the Virgil was a little shopworn herself, with a blocky figure and a lot of curly orange hair. I’d seen her before but this was the first time she’d bought anything, so things were looking up.
I watched her carry Virgil home, then settled in behind the counter with a Grosset amp; Dunlap reprint of Soldiers Three. I’d been working my way through my limited stock of Kipling lately. Some of the books were ones I’d read years ago, but I was reading Soldiers Three for the first time and really enjoying my acquaintance with Ortheris and Learoyd and Mulvaney when the little bells above my door tinkled to announce a visitor.
I looked up to see a man in a blue uniform lumbering across the floor toward me. He had a broad, open, honest face, but in my new trade one learned quickly not to judge a book by its cover. My visitor was Ray Kirschmann, the best cop money could buy, and money could buy him seven days a week.
“Hey, Bern,” he said, and propped an elbow on the counter. “Read any good books lately?”
“Hello, Ray.”
“Watcha readin’?” I showed him. “Garbage,” he said. “A whole store full of books, you oughta read somethin’ decent.”
“What’s decent?”
“Oh, Joseph Wambaugh, Ed McBain. Somebody who tells it straight.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
“How’s business?”
“Not too bad, Ray.”
“You just sit here, buy books, sell books, and you make a livin’. Right?”
“It’s the American way.”
“Uh-huh. Quite a switch for you, isn’t it?”
“Well, I like working days, Ray.”
“A whole career change, I mean. Burglar to bookseller. You know what that sounds like? A title. You could write a book about it. From Burglar to Bookseller. Mind a question, Bernie?”
And what if I did? “No,” I said.
“What the hell do you know about books?”
“Well, I was always a big reader.”
“In the jug, you mean.”
“Even on the outside, all the way back to childhood. You know what Emily Dickinson said. ‘There is no frigate like a book.’ ”
“Frig it is right. You didn’t just run around buyin’ books and then open up a store.”
“The store was already here. I was a customer over the years, and I knew the owner and he wanted to sell out and go to Florida.”
“And right now he’s soakin’ up the rays.”
“As a matter of fact, I heard he opened up another store in St. Petersburg. Couldn’t take the inactivity.”
“Well, good for him. How’d you happen to come up with the scratch to buy this place, Bernie?”
“I came into a few dollars.”
“Uh-huh. A relative died, somethin’ like that.”
“Something like that.”
“Right. What I figure, you dropped out of sight for a month or so during the winter. January, wasn’t it?”
“And part of February.”
“I figure you were down in Florida doin’ what you do best, and you hit it pretty good and walked with a short ton of jewelry. I figure you wound up with a big piece of change and decided Mrs. Rhodenbarr’s boy Bernard oughta fix hisself up with a decent front.”
“That’s what you figure, Ray?”
“Uh-huh.”
I thought for a minute. “It wasn’t Florida,” I said.
“ Nassau, then. St. Thomas. What the hell.”
“Actually, it was California. Orange County.”
“Same difference.”
“And it wasn’t jewels. It was a coin collection.”
“You always went for them things.”
“Well, they’re a terrific investment.”
“Not with you on the loose they aren’t. You made out like a bandit on the coins, huh?”
“Let’s say I came out ahead.”
“And bought this place.”
“That’s right. Mr. Litzauer didn’t want a fortune for it. He set a fair price for the inventory and threw in the fixtures and the good will.”
“Barnegat Books. Where’d you get the name?”
“I kept it. I didn’t want to have to spring for a new sign. Litzauer had a summer place at Barnegat Light on the Jersey shore. There’s a lighthouse on the sign.”
“I didn’t notice. You could call it Burglar Books. ‘These books are a steal’-there’s your slogan. Get it?”
“I’m sure I will sooner or later.”
“Hey, are you gettin’ steamed? I didn’t mean nothin’ by it. It’s a nice front, Bern. It really is.”
“It’s not a front. It’s what I do.”
“Huh?”
“It’s what I do for a living, Ray, and it’s all I do for a living. I’m in the book business.”
“Sure you are.”
“I’m serious about this.”
“Serious. Right.”
“I am.”
“Uh-huh. Listen, the reason I dropped in, I was thinkin’ about you just the other day. What it was, my wife was gettin’ on my back. You ever been married?”
“No.”
“You’re so busy gettin’ settled, maybe marriage is the next step. Nothin’ like it for settlin’ a man. What she wanted, here it’s October already and she’s expectin’ a long winter. You never met my wife, did you?”
“I talked to her on the phone once.”
“ ‘The leaves are turnin’ early, Ray. That means a cold winter.’ That’s what she tells me. If the trees don’t turn until late, then that means a cold winter.”
“She likes it cold?”
“What she likes is if it’s cold and she’s warm. What she’s drivin’ at is a fur coat.”
“Oh.”
“She goes about five-six, wears a size-sixteen dress. Sometimes she diets down to a twelve, sometimes she packs in the pasta and gets up to an eighteen. Fur coats, I don’t figure they got to fit like gloves anyway, right?”
“I don’t know much about them.”
“What she wants is mink. No wild furs or endangered species because she’s a fanatic on the subject. Minks, see, they grow the little bastards on these ranches, so there’s none of that sufferin’ in traps, and the animal’s not endangered or any of that stuff. All that they do is they gas ’em and skin ’em out.”
“How nice for the minks. It must be like going to the dentist.”
“Far as the color, I’d say she’s not gonna be too fussy. Just so it’s one of your up-to-date colors. Your platinum, your champagne. Not the old dark-brown shades.”
I nodded, conjuring up an image of Mrs. Kirschmann draped in fur. I didn’t know what she looked like, so I allowed myself to picture a sort of stout Edith Bunker.
“Oh,” I said suddenly. “There’s a reason you’re telling me this.”
“Well, I was thinkin’, Bern.”