“Unless it’s your Haitian friend.”
“I could have sailed right past him, too, but I wanted him to ring the apartment first. We wouldn’t have to do that this time. We could just walk in as if we lived there.”
“And then what?”
“Then you could open Luke’s door for me.”
“Luke might not like that.”
“I’m positive he’s not there,” she said. “You know what I bet happened? He stole Marty’s cards early in the week. Then he got offered a job out of town. He would have jumped at it, too. But we can always ring his bell first, if you’re nervous about picking his lock with him inside.”
“Sure, that’s a good idea,” I said. “We’ll ring his bell.”
“And if he’s there I’ll just say I came to pick up my clothes. That’s easy enough.”
“And then we can drop in on the Nugents.”
She frowned. “The Nugents? Joan and Harlan Nugent?”
“Those very Nugents. In 9-G.”
“How do you know them?”
“I don’t.”
“Then why did you mention them?”
“You’re the one who mentioned them.”
“You just did, just a minute ago. ‘And then we can drop in on the Nugents,’ those were your very words. Remember?”
“Vividly. But you mentioned them two nights ago when we were standing in front of their building.”
“I did?” She scratched her head. “Why would I do that? I barely know them.”
“Well, you’re still way ahead of me,” I said, “because I don’t know them at all. You asked Eddie when they were coming back from Europe.”
“My God,” she said. “You’re right, I did. But that was after you left, wasn’t it?” She considered this, answered her own question. “Obviously not, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. The Nugents are an older couple. They live two flights up from Luke.”
“In 9-G, if I remember correctly.”
“You mean I even mentioned the apartment number? You must have thought—”
“That I was being invited to knock off their apartment,” I finished for her. “That’s exactly what I thought. But if you really didn’t know I was a burglar—”
“How could I have known? When a man tells me he’s a bookseller I generally take his word for it.”
“Why did you mention the Nugents?”
“Because I wondered if they were back yet, that’s all. Joan Nugent is an artist, and a couple of times we met in the hall and she asked me about posing for her. The last time I ran into her in the elevator she said she and Harlan were going to Europe, but that she would get in touch when she got back.” She shrugged. “I don’t know if I want to do it, though, if it would mean coming to this building and possibly running into Luke.”
“Especially if you suspect him of taking the cards.”
“It’s more than a suspicion,” she said. “I’m sure of it, and that’s all the more reason why I’d like to get my stuff out of there before he comes back. Suppose his place gets raided and my things wind up in an evidence locker?”
“It could happen.”
“I’d hate that.” She put her hand on my arm. “So what do you say, Bernie? Want to be a real sweetie and show me how good you are at opening locks?”
CHAPTER Thirteen
Ten minutes later we were sitting in a Blimpie Base on Broadway, planning the commission of a felony. That set us apart from the other customers, who looked to have gotten well past the planning stage.
I started out by telling Doll I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I’d stayed away from burglary for over a year. Then all I’d done was think about knocking off an apartment and the next thing I knew I was spending the night in a cell.
“I’d like to help,” I said. “You left some clothes in Luke’s apartment and naturally you wanted them back. But it seems to me there are a couple of alternatives to illegal entry. You could wait until he gets back and give him a call, or you could hit Marty up for a loan and go shopping.”
“Forget the clothes,” she said.
“Exactly. Forget them and buy new ones.”
Forget she’d even mentioned the clothes, she said. The big reason to break into Luke’s apartment was to recover Marty’s baseball cards. If Luke had left town in response to a call with an offer of work, he had probably rushed off before he had an opportunity to convert the baseball card collection into cash. Maybe he was in no rush, maybe he’d just as soon let the heat die down while he figured out the best way to sell them.
If we could just get into Luke’s apartment, she was pretty sure we could find the cards. And if we could return them to Marty, that meant I’d be off the hook for burglarizing his apartment. The charges would be dropped, and wouldn’t that be great?
“Well, it would certainly be nice,” I told her. “But according to my lawyer they’re probably going to have to drop the charges anyway, because he says they haven’t got enough evidence to get an indictment, let alone a conviction. On top of that, do you see what I’d be doing? I’d be actually committing a crime in order to exonerate myself from one I didn’t do. Somehow it doesn’t seem worth it.”
As a matter of fact, she went on, there might be something extra in it for me. She was pretty sure there’d be a reward. Marty, after all, was a generous man. His baseball card collection was near and dear to him. Surely I could count on being reimbursed handsomely for the risk I’d be running.
How handsomely, I wondered. Whatever Marty paid me would be coming out of his own pocket, and he’d already paid for the cards once. He wouldn’t want to shell out for them all over again, would he?
“You know,” she said, “he’s already reported the loss to the insurance company, so I suppose they’re already processing the claim. If I sat down with him privately and told him how you’d managed to recover the cards, well, maybe he wouldn’t bother saying anything to the insurance company.”
“I think I see what you’re getting at.”
“It wouldn’t exactly be stealing,” she said. “It would be more a case of letting things run their course, wouldn’t it? If the insurance company paid half a million dollars to settle the claim, which is only fair because the cards really were stolen, well, Marty would have all that money to spend replenishing his collection. If he could do that by buying an almost identical collection from you for a quarter of a million dollars, say, he’d be ahead of the game.”
“And so would I.”
“Absolutely. We both would.”
“Both of us, eh?”
“Fifty-fifty,” she said. “I need you to open Luke’s door and you need me to handle the arrangements with Marty. Bernie, that’s more than a hundred thousand dollars apiece.”
“I don’t know about the percentages,” I said.
“What could be fairer than fifty-fifty?”
“But is it really fifty-fifty? That’s one way to look at it, that you and I split what Marty pays out. But the whole pie is half a million dollars—”
“And Marty gets half of that, and we get the other half.”
“That’s if you count you and me as a team, Doll.”
“I think we make a great team, Bernie.”
“I’m sure we do, but there’s another way to look at it, and that’s that you and Marty are already a team, and your team winds up with three-quarters of the half million dollars.”
We sat there for twenty minutes, arguing over money an insurance company hadn’t yet paid for a box of baseball cards we hadn’t yet seen. She gave ground grudgingly, and we wound up agreeing to a three-way split. Marty would pay each of us a third of whatever he got from his insurance company.
“But don’t even think about going in there tonight,” I said. “The public has this romantic idea of burglary as night work, but that’s the most dangerous time for it. The later it gets, the worse it is. Right now it’s past midnight, and the average person looks suspicious at this hour without even doing anything.”