There was a chair for me, too, one from the dining room, but I didn’t figure to get much use out of it. It was time for me to be on my feet. On my toes, if I could manage it.
“Well, now,” I said. “I suppose you’re wondering why I summoned you all here.”
I’ll tell you, no matter how many times you deliver that line, it never fails to quicken the pulse. The game, by God, was afoot.
“Once upon a time,” I said, “there were two men, and one of them married the other’s sister. That made them brothers-in-law, and they had something else in common. They were both businessmen, they both bought and sold real estate, and they both dabbled in other investments. Martin Gilmartin sometimes took a flier in show business. Borden Stoppelgard stockpiled first-edition crime fiction. And both of them had a passion for baseball cards.”
“As far as I know, Borden Stoppelgard still has every baseball card he ever bought or traded for. A week ago this past Thursday, Marty Gilmartin received a telephone call just minutes after he and his wife returned from an evening at the theater. The anonymous caller had evidently paid a lot of attention to Marty’s recent movements, and that made him suspicious. He hung up the phone, hurried to his den, and opened the box where he kept his card collection.”
“We know all this,” Borden Stoppelgard interrupted. “He lifted the lid and the box was empty. Anyway, you took ’em, right?”
“Wrong,” I said. “But it’s not a farfetched notion, in view of the fact that I was the mysterious caller. The police traced the call to Carolyn Kaiser’s apartment, and Officer Kirschmann knew Ms. Kaiser as a close friend of mine. And, much as it pains me to admit it, there was a time years ago when I made occasional forays into, uh, burglary.”
“You went away for it once,” Ray said helpfully, “an’ got away with it hundreds of times.”
“Excuse me,” Joan Nugent said. “I’m sorry for Mr. Gilmartin, but I don’t quite see his connection with our apartment. We had a break-in while we were away. Are you suggesting that the same burglar broke into both his apartment and ours?”
“No,” I said.
“Oh.”
“There was no burglar.”
“No burglar here?” This from Harlan Nugent. “We had a break-in, you know. It’s a matter of record.”
“No burglar here,” I said, “and no burglar at the Gilmartin residence. No break-in at either location.”
I caught a glimpse of Marty’s face, and he did not look terribly happy at the direction the discussion was taking.
“We’ll let that pass for the moment,” I said smoothly. “Let’s just note that the Gilmartin cards had disappeared. That’s one of the reasons we’re here. The other phenomenon that has drawn us together is not a disappearance but an appearance, and an astonishing manifestation it was. A man turned up in one of the Nugent bathrooms. He didn’t have any clothes on, and he didn’t have a pulse, either. He’d been shot, and he was dead.”
“Who was he?” Patience wanted to know.
“His name was Luke Santangelo,” I said, “and he lived two floors below the Nugents in this very building. Like half the waiters and a third of the moving men in this city, he’d come here to be an actor. Well, de mortuis and all that, but I’m afraid Luke was something of a bad actor, and that’s irrespective of how he may have acquitted himself on stage. He was a small-time drug dealer and a petty criminal.”
“I was so shocked to learn that,” Joan Nugent put in. “I knew him, you see. He posed for me, as it happens, in this very apartment.” She hazarded a smile. “I paint, you know. He was happy to pose for me, even though I couldn’t afford to pay him very much.”
Her husband snorted. “While you were painting him,” he said, “he was figuring out how to break in.”
“Two incidents,” I said. “On Thursday, Mr. Gilmartin finds his cards are missing. On Sunday, the police find a dead man in the Nugents’ bathroom. But what’s the connection?”
“No connection,” Borden Stoppelgard said. “Case closed. Can we all go home now?”
“There has to be a connection,” Carolyn told him. “You’re the one who collects mystery novels, aren’t you? It’s a shame you don’t take the trouble to read them. If you did, you’d know that whenever there are two crimes in the same story, they’re related. The connection may not turn up until the last chapter, but it’s always there.”
“There’s a connection,” I agreed. “And you’re part of it, Mr. Stoppelgard.”
“Huh?”
“We’ll start with the cards,” I said. “Your brother-in-law owned them. And you coveted them.”
“If you’re trying to say I took ’em—”
“I’m not.”
“Oh. But you just said—”
“That you coveted them,” I said. “Didn’t you?”
He looked at Marty, then at me. “No secret he had some nice material there,” he said.
“You wanted the Ted Williams cards.”
“I admired them. I wouldn’t have minded having a set of them myself. But I didn’t want ’em bad enough to steal ’em.”
“You thought I stole them.”
“Well, yes,” he said. “That’s what the police were saying, and I didn’t have any reason to think they were wrong.”
“And, thinking that I’d stolen them, you came to my shop and offered me a deal. If I gave you your brother-in-law’s baseball cards, you’d cut me a sweetheart deal on an extension of the store lease.”
“Borden,” Marty Gilmartin said, his tone one of bottomless disappointment. “Borden, Borden, Borden.”
“Marty, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“Oh, Borden,” Marty said. “I’m surprised at you.”
And he sounded it, all right. I have to tell you, I was impressed with Marty. I’d told him days ago about his brother-in-law’s offer, and what he’d said at the time was along the lines of “That’s typical of the avaricious son of a bitch.” The Pretenders would have been proud of the show he was putting on.
“I was testing the waters,” Borden said now. “Trying to find out for certain if you were the burglar, and laying a little trap for you if you were. Obviously it didn’t work, because you never had the cards in the first place, but all it proves now is that I didn’t have them either. So I’ll ask you again—can we go home now?”
“I think you might want to stick around,” I said. “You didn’t take them, and it’s also true that you didn’t know who took them. But the person who did take them got the idea from you.”
“Oh, yeah? You want to tell me who that was?”
“You’re sitting next to her,” I said.
Logically enough, everybody turned to stare at Lolly Stoppelgard, who looked understandably puzzled. Not that one, I wanted to cry. The other one. But they all figured it out for themselves, and eyes turned to the woman sitting on the other side of Borden Stoppelgard.
“Gwendolyn Beatrice Cooper,” I said. “Like Luke Santangelo, she came to New York hoping for acting success. In the meantime, though, she got a job at a law firm called Haber, Haber & Crowell.”
“My attorneys,” Marty said.
“And your brother-in-law’s as well. Ms. Cooper worked there, doing general office work, sometimes filling in as the relief receptionist. She was a natural choice for the front desk because she’s personable and eye-catching, and two of the eyes she caught belonged to Borden Stoppelgard. He was a happily married man. She was a young working woman going about her business. So he did the natural thing under the circumstances. He hit on her.”