“Did you have one?”
“In VG. In the Goudey set of the same year there were two hundred forty cards, but substantially fewer than two hundred forty different players. The most popular athletes had more than one card. Gehrig had two, and Babe Ruth had four different cards. I owned three of the four Babe Ruth cards, and one day last summer I sold them for a total of twenty-eight thousand dollars. I replaced the Babe with Zane Smith, Kevin McReynolds, and Bucky Pizzarelli.” He shook his head. “Babe Ruth started out with the Boston Red Sox, you may recall. He was the best pitcher in baseball, but you couldn’t keep a hitter like the Babe on the bench three days out of four, so they had him play the outfield. And the owner of the Red Sox sold him outright to New York. He wanted the money so he could back a Broadway show. Yankee Stadium became the House That Ruth Built, and the Boston fans never forgave that damn fool of an owner, and who could blame them? But I think I know how he may have felt, selling the Babe three times over and filling his slot with the likes of Zane Smith, Kevin McReynolds, and Bucky Pizzarelli.”
“And did you use the money to back a Broadway show?”
He smiled at the very thought. “That would be rather like trading the family cow for some magic beans, wouldn’t it? No, the stage is many things to me, but not a commercial arena. My wife and I believe in patronage, and I suppose you could say that we err on the side of generosity in our support of the theater. Sometimes our contribution takes the form of an investment, but it’s made without much hope of return.”
“I see.”
“So I gradually sold off my holdings,” he said, “deliberately replacing the wheat with chaff and constructing a sort of Potemkin Village of worthless cards in my humidor. Everything good was gone.”
“Except Ted Williams.”
“You spotted those, did you?” His eyes twinkled. “Couldn’t trade Ted Williams. The Red Sox fans would hang me in effigy.”
“That’s not why you kept them.”
“No, of course not. They were identifiable. The set’s scarce, all out of proportion to the price it would bring. And you know my brother-in-law.”
“He’s my landlord.”
“And presumably you know of his passion for the Splendid Splinter. If I sold those cards, there was a fair chance they’d wind up in the hands of a dealer who’d offer them to Borden. One thinks of baseball cards as interchangeable, but Borden’s seen my Williams cards enough to recognize them. At the very least, he’d buy the set and then want to compare it to mine. When I couldn’t produce them, he’d know I’d sold them. Which is to say he’d know I’d been forced to sell them in order to raise cash.”
“Which is what you didn’t want to get around.”
“Precisely. Easier and safer all around to hang on to the Ted Williams material. But I sold off everything else of value. And, as I’ve said, what I’d done was entirely within my rights. It was secretive, but one’s allowed to have secrets.”
“And then?”
“Then I got a telephone call in the middle of the night,” he said. “I’d spent an evening with my brother-in-law, always an exhausting experience—”
“I can imagine.”
“—and you called, and it was late and I was tired, and something made me go directly to my study and lift the lid of my humidor. And the cards were gone.”
“No,” I said.
“I didn’t go to my study? I didn’t open the humidor? The cards were not gone?”
“You already knew they were gone,” I said. “Say my call spooked you and you jumped to the conclusion you’d been burglarized. It’s an odd reaction to a late-night nuisance call, but it’s not inconceivable. Maybe you’d scout around to make sure your valuables were intact, but your valuables were long gone from the rosewood humidor because you’d already taken them out and sold them. Why would you dash into the study to check on Zane Smith and Bucky Pizzarelli?”
He bought time with a sip of coffee. “You’re a very perceptive young man,” he said.
“Not that perceptive,” I said, “or that young, either, but it’s pretty clear what was going on. You already knew the humidor was empty. My phone call was a perfect opportunity for you to go public with the information. You could scoot into the study, open the celebrated rosewood humidor, and discover the cards were gone.”
“Why would I do that?”
“To collect the insurance. You had sold the cards, but I don’t suppose you canceled your insurance coverage, did you?”
He was silent for a long moment, gazing off at some dead actor’s portrait, gathering his thoughts. Then he said, “It’s not like murder, is it? Premeditation’s immaterial. Insurance fraud isn’t considered a less serious offense if you do it on the spur of the moment.”
“No.”
“I have to say I didn’t plan it from the very beginning. My original intention was merely to sell the cards quietly for the best possible price. And I did a good job of that.”
“And?”
“When I’d disposed of perhaps a third of my holdings, the insurance premium came due. A floater on that sort of collection isn’t terribly expensive, and I couldn’t have saved all that much by asking them to lower my coverage to reflect the diminished nature of the collection. So I paid the premium in full, telling myself that I’d notify the company when I’d sold off the remainder.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t. Instead, I laid the groundwork for the commission of a felony. You can’t imagine what that felt like. Oh, for heaven’s sake, what’s the matter with me? Of course you can.”
“I’ve laid a little groundwork in my time.”
“Indeed. Bernard, I don’t ordinarily have a brandy after luncheon. After dinner, yes, but not after luncheon. But if I could persuade you to join me—”
“What a nice idea,” I said.
“I don’t know that I would have gone through with it. You see, I’ve always been an honest man. In my business dealings I’ve always tried to be a step ahead of the next fellow, but I’ve been law-abiding throughout. Still, there’s an emotional difference between defrauding an insurance company and stealing the pencils from a blind man’s cup.”
“I know what you mean.”
“I wasn’t sure how best to proceed. It seemed to me that the cards couldn’t simply disappear. There ought to be the appearance of a burglary. We live in a building with exemplary security, and I understand the locks are on an order that would keep most housebreakers out.”
“Most of them,” I said.
“So how to create the appearance of a burglary? If I’d known you I might have asked for your professional advice on the matter. I thought I could just leave the door unlocked after having pretended to lock it. But I wasn’t sure that would set the stage sufficiently. Oughtn’t the premises to look as though they’d been ransacked? What does a house look like after you’ve been through it?”
“About the same as it did when I arrived.”
“Really? Perhaps I was trying to be too thorough, perhaps out of a reluctance to commit myself. The point turned out to be moot. I went to the humidor one day and found it unlocked. I lifted the lid and found it empty.”
“When was this?”
“Monday afternoon. I had luncheon here and got home between three and four. I couldn’t guess when I’d last looked at the cards. There was little reason to examine them, now that all the decent material was gone. I can’t tell you what went through my mind when I looked into that empty box.”
“I can imagine.”