The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams Read Free Page A

want. And I thought it would be a good place to meet girls.”
    “Well, you met me.”
    “I’ve met a lot of people, and most of the meetings have been pleasant ones. A nice thing about the book business is your clientele tends to be literate and your relationships with them are rarely adversarial, today’s episode notwithstanding. And, amazingly, the store has actually become profitable as I’ve learned more about the business. Oh, it’ll never be a gold mine. Nobody gets rich doing this. But for the past year I’ve been able to live on what I take home from the shop.”
    “That’s great, Bern.”
    “I guess so. I never actually decided to give it up. I just kept putting it off, and then one day I realized it had been over six months since my last burglary, and then the next thing I knew it was a year. And I thought, well, maybe I’ve reformed, maybe the good moral upbringing I had as a child has finally taken hold, or maybe it’s just adulthood creeping up on me, but whatever it was I seemed ready to be a decent law-abiding citizen. Then I found out what my new landlord wanted in the way of rent and I suddenly couldn’t see the point of it all.”
    “I can imagine.”
    “The rent increase was on my mind all the time, and I couldn’t figure out what to do about it. Believe me, there’s no way to pick up an extra ten grand a month selling more books. What am I going to do, hike the price of the books on my three-for-a-buck table? So I found myself thinking, well, maybe I could cover the increase by stealing a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year.”
    “To plow back into the business.”
    “I know it doesn’t make any sense, but I just hate the thought of giving up the store. Still, I was all right until ten days ago.”
    “What happened ten days ago?”
    “Maybe it was nine days.”
    “So what happened nine days ago?”
    “No, I was right the first time. Ten days.”
    “Jesus, Bernie.”
    “I’m sorry. What happened was I was standing in line to get tickets for If Wishes Were Horses. I picked up a pair for the following night’s performance, but the woman in front of me was getting tickets ten days in advance. She was wearing fur and a lot of jewelry, and she was having a very la-di-da conversation with another similarly pelted and bejeweled woman, and it struck me that I knew her name and address and that she and her husband would be away from the apartment on a particular September evening.”
    “Tonight’s the night?”
    “It is,” I agreed, and held up a hand to get Maxine’s attention, and made that circular motion you make to order another round. “Tonight’s the night. When the curtain goes up at eight this evening at the Cort Theatre, the audience will include Martin and Edna Gilmartin, currently residing in Apartment 6-L at 1416 York Avenue.”
    “They make you give your apartment number when you buy theater tickets?”
    “Not as of ten days ago. But I picked up some information from her conversation with her friend, and then I did a little research later on my own.”
    “You were planning to burgle the place.”
    “Not exactly.”
    “Not exactly?”
    “I was thinking about it,” I said. “That’s all. I was keeping my options open. That’s why Stoppelgard gave me such a turn at the beginning, mentioning burglars and alibis before I even realized he was talking about books.” I stopped talking while Maxine brought our drinks, then took a sip of mine and said, “It would be stupid to go back to burglary, and it wouldn’t work anyway. I can’t steal myself solvent.”
    “Can you relocate?”
    “Not unless I want to leave the neighborhood altogether. I checked on some vacancies around here, and the best I could do was a place way east on Ninth Street with half my present square footage and a base rental three times what I’m paying now, with escalators that will double that figure by the end of five years.”
    “That’s no good.”
    “No kidding. I looked at