Not a bad afternoon at all, and it ended with a phone call from a woman who told me she’d had to put her mother in a nursing home, and would I like to come have a look at the library? From her description it sounded promising, and I made an appointment to see it.
What with one thing and another, I was whistling by the time I got to the Bum Rap. I ordered a Perrier and got a quizzical look from Carolyn.
“It’s not what you think,” I said. “I had a couple of brandies at lunch. They’ve just about worn off, and I’d just as soon not add fuel to a dying fire. I had a good day, Carolyn. I bought some books, I sold some books.”
“Well, that’s the whole idea with bookstores, Bern. How was lunch?”
“Lunch was great,” I said. “As a matter of fact, lunch was terrific. I think I’m going to be able to keep the store.”
“It’s very confusing,” she said.
“What’s so confusing? It’s a perfectly good way for me to wind up with the bookstore.”
“Not that, Bern. The whole business with what happened to the baseball cards. According to Doll—”
“I don’t think ‘according to Doll’ is ever going to have the authority of, say, ‘according to Hoyle,’ or ‘according to Emily Post.’ ”
“I understand that, Bern. But even so, if she’s Marty’s girlfriend—”
“She’s not.”
“But—”
“I had a feeling she was making that up. I was pretty sure before I went up to her apartment, but that clinched it. I couldn’t imagine why a man crowding sixty would want to climb all those stairs to visit his mistress. A fifth-floor walk-up with a single bed, that’s some love nest.”
“Then where does she fit in?”
“I don’t know.”
“And how did the cards wind up in Luke’s apartment? And how did she and Luke know each other?”
“Good question.”
“Which one?”
“Both of them.”
“And what about the Nugents, Bern? How do they fit into the picture? What was Luke doing in their apartment? Who killed him?”
“Beats me.”
“Don’t you care?”
“Not particularly.”
“You’ve got some ideas, though. Right?”
“Nope.”
“But you can’t just—uh-oh.”
“What’s the matter?” I turned and saw the answer to that question, looming over our table like bad weather in the western sky. “Oh,” I said. “Hi, Ray.”
“Don’t mind me,” he said, pulling up a chair from another table. “I just thought I’d stop by an’ pass the time of day. Had a real funny thing yesterday in your neighborhood, an’ I was wonderin’ if you had any ideas on the subject.”
“Something happened in the Village, Ray?”
“I’m sure plenty of things did,” he said, “but the neighborhood I was referrin’ to is the one where you live. As opposed to down here, where you got your store, say, or the East Side, where you do the bulk of your stealin’.” He turned to favor the waitress with a smile. “Oh, hiya, Maxine,” he said. “Make it a glass of plain ginger ale. You know the way I like it.”
“How’s that, Ray?” Carolyn asked him.
“How’s what?”
“How do you like your plain ginger ale?”
“With about two an’ a half ounces of rye in it,” he said, “if it’s any of your business.”
“So why not order it that way?”
“Because it don’t look good for a cop to be drinkin’ spirits in public.”
“But you’re not in uniform, Ray. Who’s gonna know you’re a cop?”
“Anybody who looks at him,” I told her. “You were telling a story, Ray. Something happened uptown?”
“Yeah,” he said levelly. “An’ you’re involved, an’ I don’t know how I know that, but I know it all the same. They got a call on 911 about a bad smell, an’ you know what that means. It’s never once turned out to be somebody forgot to put the Limburger cheese back in the icebox. So a couple of blues went over, an’ nobody in the buildin’ knew nothin’ about it, an’ you couldn’t smell nothin’ in the hall. The doorman got hold of the super, an’ he had keys to the place, an’ he let ’em in.”
“I think I know what they found,” I said, hoping to save us all some time. “There was something on the news last night. There was a man dead in the bathroom, right?”
“That’s where the smell was comin’ from. The door was jammed so they had to kick it in, an’ there he was. Been dead since the middle of last week, accordin’ to the doc.”
“Had a Spanish name, if I remember correctly.”
“Santangelo,” he said. “Spanish or Italian, which is pretty much the same thing. Marginal.”
“Marginal?”
He nodded. “Like you wouldn’t want your sister to marry one, but it’d be okay for your cousin. Marginal. What you prolly don’t know, on account of we just learned it ourselves, is he lived right there in the building. What you also don’t know, on account of we been holdin’ it back, is he was burglarizin’ the place.”
“Is that right?”
“Well, somebody was,” he said, “an’ it sure as shit wasn’t me. Was it you, Bernie?”
“Ray—”
“Drawers pulled out an’ overturned in the master bedroom. A couple of pieces of jewelry in the tub with him. A bullet hole in the guy’s forehead, an’ no gun to be found anywhere in the apartment. What’s it sound like to you, Bernie?”
“Foul play,” I suggested.
“He was no straight arrow, this Santangelo. We got a sheet on him. Mostly drug stuff, but people change, right? Say he’s upstairs knockin’ off the apartment. Say you’re Nugent.”
“Come again?”
“Nugent, the guy who lives there. You’re Nugent an’ you come home, an’ there’s this spic or guinea, whatever he is, helpin’ hisself to a fistful of bracelets an’ earrings. So you grab your gun an’ blow him away, which is your right in a free country, him bein’ a burglar an’ all. What’s the matter, Bernie, did I say something?”
“I get nervous when people talk about blowing away burglars.”
“I can see where you would. Anyway, here’s my question. Say you’re a burglar.”
“You’ve been saying that for years, Ray.”
“Say you’re a burglar, an’ you’re knockin’ off this apartment. Why would you take off your clothes?”
“Huh?”
“He was bareass naked. Didn’t that make the news?” I couldn’t remember if it had or not. “Naked and dead as the day he was born,” he said, “an’ I heard of women who do their housecleanin’ in the nude, an’ I heard of burglars leavin’ all kinds of disgustin’ souvenirs behind, but did you ever hear of one took all his clothes off before he started huntin’ for the valuables?”
“Never.”
“Me neither. I can’t picture him climbin’ two flights of stairs in the buff, either, or ridin’ in the elevator that way. But what did he do with his clothes? He wasn’t wearin’ ’em, an’ they weren’t in a pile, so what did he do, fold ’em up an’ put ’em in the drawers? If you’re Nugent an’ you shoot the guy, why do you run off with his clothes?”