“Except they’re not there,” he said, “seein’ as they’re in France. Go on.”
“Candlemas was on the fourth floor,” I said. “So who’s on three?”
“Now that’s a real interestin’ question,” he said. “You know, if I was what’s-his-name, the guinea with the raincoat, I’d save this for when I got one foot out the door. ‘Oh, by the way…’ But who’s got the fuckin’ patience?”
“What are you talking about, Ray?”
“What I’m talkin’ about is how you happen to know there’s four floors and Candlemas lived up on four. That ain’t a detail I ever mentioned.”
“Sure you did.”
“Uh-uh.”
“Then he must have.”
“Who, Candlemas?”
“Who else?”
“What I think,” he said, “is you’re full of crap, but I thought that all along. What did I say yesterday? I knew you were up there at one time or another. Bernie, tell me the truth. You got any idea at all who killed this guy?”
“No.”
“You want to cooperate and make the formal identification? And the hell with who lives on the third floor. They’re like everybody else, they don’t know shit. Be a pal, Bernie. Do us both a favor.”
I frowned. “I hate looking at dead bodies,” I said.
“Be glad you’re not a mortician. How about it? All I care, you can keep your eyes closed when they bring the body up. Just so you swear it’s him.”
“No, I’ll look,” I said. “If I’m going to do it the least I can do is keep my eyes open. When do you want to go over there?”
“How about right now?”
“What, during business hours?”
“Yeah, an’ I can see how much business you’re doin’. It won’t take but a few minutes an’ then it’ll be out of the way.” He shrugged. “Or, if you’d rather, I’ll pick you up at closing time. You close around six, right?”
“That’s no good,” I said. “I’m meeting somebody at a quarter to seven. But if I go now I have to close up and reopen and…I’ll tell you what. Come by for me around a quarter to five and I’ll close an hour early. How’s that?”
As the afternoon wore on, I began wishing I’d locked up then and there and gone straight to the morgue. It was Friday and the weather was great, and as a result everybody who could manage it was leaving town early and getting a jump on the weekend. And they weren’t stopping to buy books on their way, either.
The morgue would have been livelier than where I was. At times like that I’m glad I have a cat for company, but on this particular occasion he was no company at all. He slept on the windowsill for a while, and then when the sun got too strong for him he found a perch he liked on a high shelf in Philosophy amp; Religion. I couldn’t even see him from where I sat.
I called Ilona a couple of times. No answer. I sat down with that week’s copy of AB Bookman’s Weekly and looked through the listings to see if anybody was hunting for something I happened to have in stock. I check now and then, and sometimes I’ve actually got something that some dealer somewhere is searching for, but I rarely follow through and do anything about it. It just seems like too much trouble to write out a postcard with a price quote and put it in the mail and then hold the book in reserve until the person does or doesn’t order it. And then you have to wrap the damn thing, and stand in line at the post office.
And all for what, two dollars profit? Or five, or even ten?
Not worth it.
Of course, if you do it regularly, and develop a system for quoting and packing and shipping, it can be a profitable element of the business. At least that’s what various articles have assured me, and I have to assume that they’re right.
But it still seems like more trouble than it’s worth.
See, that’s how thieving spoils a man.
There was a time a while back when the store began to turn a small but steady profit. What I’d begun as a combination of a respectable front and a cultured pastime was supporting itself, and looked as though it might even support me in the bargain. Before I knew it I had stopped burgling.
Well, I got over that. Prompted by a rapacious landlord, I’d saved the business by stealing myself solvent. Flush with ill-gotten gains, I’d gone and bought the building. Barnegat Books was secure, and I could run it for good or ill as long as I wanted.
And I didn’t have to pinch pennies, either, or send postcards full of price quotations to dealers in Pratt, Kansas, and Oakley, California. I could leave the bargain table where it was while I trotted around the corner, and I didn’t have to have an apoplectic fit if someone walked off with a water-damaged second printing of a Vardis Fisher novel. And when I cover expenses that’s fine, and when I don’t, well, I can always flimflam my way into a building and pick my way past a lock and pick up a quick five grand for my troubles.
Of course I hadn’t received anything for my recent night’s efforts.
And who said my troubles were over?
That happy thought sent me to the telephone, to try Ilona’s number again. No answer. I put the phone down and thought about the question Carolyn had asked me, and the answer I had given. I didn’t know if it was true, but it was close enough to be disturbing.
Reverie carried me back to that grotty little top-floor room on East Twenty-fifth Street. I found myself thinking about the man in the photograph. Where the hell had I seen him before?
He wasn’t the same man as the fellow in the stiff family portrait. I was pretty sure of that. For one thing, the guy with his arm around the huge-haired lady would never be that rigid, not even after rigor mortis had set in. He was used to having his picture taken. The way he was beaming, he looked as though he thrived on it.
I frowned, as if that would bring the photograph into sharper focus. The woman, I remembered, had shoulders like a halfback. But she didn’t get them on a football field, or in a gym, either. She was wearing shoulder pads, even more exaggerated than the ones that had blossomed anew in the recent shoulder-pad renaissance.
You weren’t seeing shoulder pads as much lately. And you weren’t seeing silver fox stoles either, the kind she was wearing with little heads and feet still attached. They hadn’t experienced a revival, as far as I knew, and I could understand why.
Probably an old photo. Notes from the world of fashion notwithstanding, it had looked like an old photograph to me. Was it because cameras were different then? Had the print faded with time? Or was it just that people composed their faces differently in different eras, so that their faces were indelibly marked as if with a date stamp?
He was a crowd pleaser, this Smilin’ Jack. A credit to his dentist, too. Damn, where had I seen his beaming countenance before? And what would he look like if he covered those big teeth with his lips and took a serious picture?
He had a face that would look good on a coin, I decided. Not an old Roman coin, his wasn’t that sort of face. Something more recent…
Bingo.
I don’t think I said anything, but maybe my ears perked up, because Raffles leaped from his perch over in Philosophy amp; Religion and came out to see what was going on. “Not a coin,” I told him. “A stamp.”
That seemed to satisfy him; he did a set of stretching exercises and trotted off to the john. I found my way to Games amp; Hobbies, where there was a Scott’s world postage stamps catalog on the very bottom shelf, right where I’d last seen it. It was four years out of date but too useful a store reference to consign to the bargain table.
I carried it to the counter and flipped pages until I found the one I was looking for. I squinted at an illustration, then closed my eyes entirely and compared it to the picture in my memory.
Was it the same guy?
I thought it was, but it was hard to be sure. Postage stamps are illustrated in black and white in the catalog, and at less than half their actual size. Years ago there was a federal regulation in the United States requiring that an illustration of a postage stamp be broken by a horizontal white line, so that unscrupulous persons couldn’t cut them out of the book, paste them on envelopes, and defraud the government. Nowadays, when a ten-year-old can run off color Xeroxes of twenty-dollar bills that will make it past your average bank teller, that old rule has been discarded as obsolete, and it’s now legal to illustrate postage stamps as realistically as you wish, and to print actual-size photographs of U.S. currency.