“To Martin Gilmartin.”
“When my kid was old enough to be interested, I gave him my old baseball cards to play with. I mentioned this to Marty, and it turned out he was a big collector himself. And that’s when I found out about the investment potential of these cards.”
“So you took them away from your kid.”
“I borrowed a book from Marty,” he said, “and I checked the lad’s cards, and not too surprisingly there was nothing rare or valuable in the lot. They were in terrible condition, Scotch tape on some of them, others all beat up and scuffed and folded. But there was one, if it hadn’t been in such bad condition, it would have been worth fifty bucks.”
“Wow.”
“What could I have paid for it? It seems to me you used to get a whole pack for a quarter, and that included the gum. They don’t bother giving you the gum anymore, you know. They found out the kids just threw it away. Anyway, say I paid a nickel for that card, and now it was worth fifty bucks. Or at least it would have been if I’d taken decent care of it.”
“Next time you’ll know.”
“Exactly what I told myself. ‘This time,’ I said, ‘you take good care of your cards.’ And I started collecting. I let my kid keep my old junk and I started right in buying quality, and…”
And the phone rang.
“Barnegat Books,” I said.
“Hello, Bernie.”
A woman’s voice, familiar but hard to place. Then I reached out and nailed it.
“Well, hello, Doll. I didn’t expect to hear from you.”
“What a greeting! But you’re the doll, Bernie. They’re absolutely gorgeous.”
“They are?”
“The roses are spectacular.”
Oh, I thought. Wrong woman. “Patience,” I said.
“And the African violet is the sweetest thing, but I have to warn you, I have a brown thumb. I can never keep plants alive.”
“It’s supposed to help if you talk to them.”
“I know, but I never know what to say. Do you suppose this one likes poetry? I could read to it.” She sighed. “I don’t know what to say to you, either. Two nights in a row, two broken dates in a row, two different friends breaking them for you—or do you do voices, too?”
“Just Jimmy Stewart.”
“I can hardly wait. Two different excuses, first a burrito and then a burglary. Both words are on the same page of the dictionary, but of course you know that. That’s the page you break all your dates from, isn’t it?”
“Patience—”
“We could make another date,” she said, “but I’d only get a phone call advising me that you wouldn’t be able to make it because you’d been eaten by a bugbear. Or bummed out, or bumped off, or some bumptious buckaroo had burst your bubble. The roses are truly beautiful.”
“I’m glad.”
“I was feeling terribly depressed. I get that way a lot. Most poets do, it’s sort of an occupational illness. But then the flowers came and cheered me right up. So it’s hard for me to stay mad at you. Are you really a burglar?”
“I can explain,” I said.
“Whenever people say that, they can’t. But I’ll give you a chance. Tomorrow night there’s going to be a poetry reading at the Café Villanelle on Ludlow Street. Do you know where that is?”
“Sort of.”
“Two of my clients will be reading, and I promised I’d go. I may read something myself, I’m not sure. The readings scheduled to start at ten o’clock, but it’s all right to come early. It’s all right to come late, too. It’s even okay not to come at all.”
“Patience—”
“What’s not okay,” she said, “is to have any of your legion of friends call with an excuse, no matter what letter it starts with. So maybe I’ll see you tomorrow night, Bernie, and maybe I won’t.”
“You will.”
“But if you don’t come,” she said, “do me a favor. Don’t send flowers.”
“So I started off small,” he said. “Same as when I first got into real estate. You make some mistakes, but how else are you going to get the feel for what you’re doing? You have to be willing to go in there and get your feet wet. You take your medicine, you pull up your socks, and you get right back up on the horse.” He frowned, and who could blame him? “Bernie,” he said, “you don’t need to listen to all this crap.”
“It’s interesting.”
“It’s nice of you to say that, but let’s cut to the chase, huh? We can do each other some good here. Each of us has something the other wants. I’ve got a storefront I can let you have for thirty years at half the price of a rooftop pigeon coop in Bensonhurst. And we both know what you’ve got.”
“What?”
He grinned. “Marty’s baseball cards.”
CHAPTER Eleven
“In 1950,” I told Carolyn, “the Chalmers Mustard Company got up a special promotion. Every time you bought a jar of their mustard, you got a free coupon. If you mailed it in, they sent you three baseball cards.”
“I never heard of Chalmers Mustard.”
“You didn’t grow up in Boston. Chalmers was strictly local, and I gather a major corporation acquired the company a few years ago, but back then it must have been hot stuff. If you bought a frankfurter at Fenway Park, you got Chalmers Mustard on it.”
“Unless you said, ‘Hold the mustard.’ ”
“There were forty of these cards,” I went on, “and they all showed the same player, Ted Williams, who was the one thing in Boston hotter than Chalmers Mustard. They showed him in different poses and doing different things. Mostly hitting, of course, because that was what he was so good at, but also catching fly balls and trotting around the bases, and holding his cap in his hands while they played the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ and signing autographs for little kids.”
“I think I get the idea.”
“In order to get all forty cards, you’d have had to buy a ton of mustard.”
“Fourteen jars,” she said. “And then you’d have two extras to trade for Dwight Gooden.”
“He wasn’t even born then. The thing is, you wouldn’t necessarily get different cards every time you sent in a coupon, any more than you do nowadays when you buy a pack of baseball cards at the candy store. I gather they made more of some cards than others, and the high-numbered cards weren’t distributed until late in the promotion. The idea was to make you buy as much mustard as possible.”
“Sneaky.”
“And not terribly effective, as it turned out, because kids got pretty tired of getting the same pictures of Williams every time the mailman showed up. And I guess their parents got tired of buying endless jars of mustard. There were no investors around at the time, either. So the whole thing sort of died out, with relatively few of cards #31 through #40 ever reaching the hands of collectors. That makes complete sets pretty hard to come by.”
“And very valuable, I suppose.”
“Not really,” I said, “because this was strictly a regional issue, all of it tied to a single player, so it’s not something you absolutely have to have in order to consider your collection complete. Most of the card encyclopedias don’t even list it. And the cards themselves are pretty ugly, according to Stoppelgard. The photos are all black-and-white and the printing job leaves a lot to be desired. And the series is just too long. A dozen cards devoted to one player might be interesting, but forty is too many. So the series was never popular.”
“What’s it worth?”
“Hard to say. If you want a complete set, you pretty much have to hunt around and pick it up a card or two at a time. And you have to be careful about condition, because a lot of cards were poorly printed. I pressed Stoppelgard for a number, and he said that card #40 is genuinely rare, and would probably bring a thousand dollars. The common cards in the series bring anywhere from ten to twenty dollars, and cards #31 through #39 might go for a hundred apiece.”