Thanks, Maxine. You're a lifesaver, and don't ask me what flavor, it'll give me ideas. Bern, pick up your glass. Here's to crime."
"And punishment," I said, and we touched glasses and drank.
"Punishment," she said. "Well, sure, why not? For them that have it coming, that is."
We were in the Bum Rap, you will not be surprised to learn, on a Thursday evening just a week and a day after I'd gathered much of New York 's population into the living room of the house on Devonshire Close. It was not the first time Carolyn and I had sat down together since what a less original narrator might characterize as that fateful day, since we'd kept our standing lunch date more often than not. It wasn't even the first time we'd met for our after-work drinks date at the Bum Rap. But there'd been time constraints, or people around, on other evenings, and lunch wasn't right for the conversation we had to have. It was somehow necessary that there be glasses in our hands, and scotch in those glasses.
And this seemed like the time and place. Neither of us had anything to do for the next hour or so, nor was anyone likely to pull up a chair and horn in. And we had scotch at hand, and if it somehow disappeared, the faithful Maxine would see that it was replenished.
" Bern," Carolyn said, "there are a couple of things I'm not sure I understand."
"I'm not surprised. There are things I don't understand myself."
"A lot of things came out in Mapes's living room, and I was following along okay, but it was confusing. And then the way it ended, with the shooting and all, it seemed like some ends were left dangling."
"Like participles," I agreed. "No question about it."
"And then there were the things that came out that weren't true."
"Lies, we call them."
"Well, I wasn't going to say that. It seemed a little harsh."
"But accurate," I said. "There were basically three kinds of information dispensed that afternoon. Some of it was true, and some of it was guesswork, and some was utter fiction."
"That's what I thought, Bern. But now that it's over, I'd love to know the pure and simple truth."
"According to Oscar Wilde," I said, "the truth is rarely pure and never simple. Some of it we'll never know, because the only people who could tell us are dead. But I can certainly tell you what I know. Where do you want me to start?"
"With William Johnson," she said. "Billy the Nephew. Talk about your impossible coincidences. He didn't date-rape Marisol, did he?"
"No, of course not. He never saw her before in his life."
"But she said he did."
"Does that mean it must be true?"
"She was very convincing, Bern. I was watching her, and she had tears in the corners of her eyes."
"Everybody was watching her," I said. "The girl has presence. Carolyn, she's an actress. She was acting."
"Well, she fooled me. I knew what she was saying couldn't possibly be true, and I believed it anyway. You must have told her what to say."
"When I saw her," I said, "she fell apart. Because of what she'd done, violating her lover's confidence, four people were dead, including Valdi Berzins, a genuine Latvian patriot."
"And a positive thinker."
"That too. She felt guilty, and when I suggested she might be able to do something to make it right, she was eager to help-especially when I told her what kind of a fellow Johnson was and what he'd pulled on Barbara Creeley. We worked out a story, and she gave me the ruby necklace Mapes had given her."
"And you planted it in Johnson's apartment."
"When I let myself in, after I'd left him in the alley swathed in Sigrid's puke."
"I can't believe she did that."
"She's a resourceful woman," I said, "with a tendency to get straight to the heart of the matter."
"She backed up Marisol's date-rape story, too. And she was pretty convincing in her own right, Bern."
"She's an actress herself, even if she doesn't go on auditions anymore. I didn't coach her, just let her know what to expect, and she did a great improv. But then she'd improvised beautifully getting Johnson out of Parsifal's and into the alley, so I could get his address."
"Because you had to get into his place."
I nodded. "I had two things to do there. First, I had to plant Marisol's necklace where he wouldn't come across it himself in the next day or two, without concealing it so well that the cops couldn't find it when the time came."
"And it came soon enough. Ray was reading him his rights before the bodies were cold."
"I'm not sure of that. Before Colby Riddle's body was cold, maybe, but I have a feeling Georgi Blinsky's body was somewhere around room temperature long before Mapes started tossing lead around the room. That Russian was the coldest man I ever saw."
"He looked good in black, though. What else did you do in Johnson's apartment?"
"I found Barbara's class ring from Bennett High."
"And gave it to her?"
"Just the other night. I have to say she was impressed."
"I bet she was. Maxine?" She pointed at our glasses, and got a nod of assent from Maxine. "Reinforcements are coming, Bern. I've got some more questions."
"Shoot."
"Colby Riddle. When did you start to think he had something to do with it?"
"Well, I always wondered," I said. "He never called me about a book before. It's rare that I get a phone call from someone who's just looking for a reading copy, andThe Secret Agent 's in print in trade paperback, so anybody hunting for it could just drop into the nearest general bookstore, or get online and pick it up from Amazon. But Colby was always an odd bird to begin with, and we were up to our eyeballs in coincidences anyway, so I didn't dwell on it. I didn't really tie him in until I let myself into Mapes's office."
"You went there to check out his appointment book, and pick a time that would work for the showdown."
"And while I was there, I had a look at his files. I was looking for Kukarov, not really expecting to find anything, not under that name. And I didn't, of course. But then I looked up a few other people, and the only one I found was Colby. And he'd been there for just the reason I'd said. He had a growth removed from his cheek two years earlier."
"That could have been a coincidence too, couldn't it?"
"I suppose so, but I figured he was tied in."
"Yeah, I guess not even coincidence has arms that long. Hey, thanks, Max. Bern, we're not gonna die of thirst after all."
I took a sip of my drink just to make sure.
" Bern? Summarize what happened, will you? Not with William Johnson, I get all that. But the rest of it, with the photographs and the people getting killed and all."
I thought about it. "Well," I said, "there are a couple of versions. There's what I laid out, which is how the cops have the case written up. And there's what Ray knows is really true. And then there's what's even truer, that Ray doesn't know about. And then of course there are the things I did to make it happen."
"Uh-huh."
"So which would you like to hear?"
She grinned. "All of 'em, Bern."
"The Lyles got the photographs pretty much the way it came out in Mapes's living room. Marisol told her cousin Karlis, and he made a fake appointment with Mapes and swiped the book when no one was looking. He got it to his father, who in turn got it to Arnold Lyle."
"Okay."
"Lyle talked to more people than he should have, and made arrangements to sell the book to Georgi Blinsky."
"Principles of Organic Chemistry, you mean. That book."
"Right, Volume Two. The book Mapes taped the photos in. First, though, Lyle removed the Kukarov photos from the book, but he liked Mapes's system, so he taped them into another book, one belonging to the owner of the apartment he'd sublet, and stuck it back in the bookcase."
"And that wasQB VII."
"Uh-huh. Now the way I told the story, Ray found the book in a careful search of the apartment after the murder, but the photos were already missing."
"Ray couldn't find a black cat on a white sofa, Bern."
"This is the official story, remember? Ray found the book, but the photos were gone."
"Who took them?"
"Good question. First, though, the home invasion and the murder. Michael Quattrone's men were responsible for the home invasion part, as he more or less admitted, albeit hypothetically. The cops can't make a case against him and won't try, but they know his guys did it. And the doorman's death was accidental. It was homicide, that's what you call it when someone's killed in the commission of a felony, but nobody meant for it to happen."
"That must make the doorman feel a lot better."
"Quattrone wound up withPrinciples of Organic Chemistry, which by now contained Mapes's mug shots of everybody but Kukarov. His main goal was to destroy the ones of Whitey Mullane, his friend and mentor, and my guess is he'll trash the others as well, if he hasn't already. They'd be worth something to a blackmailer, but that's not his line of work, and anyway he doesn't know who the people are."
"And after his men left?"
"Blinsky and his crew got there, too late to pick up the book, or to recover the twenty grand they'd already paid the Lyles. So they shot them, which I suspect they were planning to do all along, book or no book. I don't think Georgi Blinsky was a very nice man."
"Then I won't feel too bad that he got killed. What about the photos of Kukarov?"
"What about them?"
"Well, I know what happened to them. They were in the Leon Uris book waiting for you to find them. I know that because you told me, and Ray knows it because he was there. But what do the cops think happened to them?"
"They think they disappeared."
"Just like that? Poof?"
"No one's too clear on the details. Maybe when they took the tape off his mouth Lyle told Blinsky where the photos were."
"And Blinsky took them. And put the book back where he found it?"
"Does that seem unlikely? How about this-Lyle taped the Kukarov photos inQB VII, then thought better of it and cut them out again. He put them somewhere else, and gave them to Blinsky, hoping it would lead the man in black to spare his life."
"That's a little better, but-"
"Carolyn, it didn't happen, so what difference does it makehow it didn't happen? Somebody got the photos, and whoever it was he doesn't have them now, so what do the cops care?"
"I just wondered, that's all. But I see what you mean."
"Now what comes next? Colby Riddle, I guess, and Valdi Berzins. Well, you know how the story goes there. Mapes called Colby, who agreed to help out, probably for a substantial consideration."
"Money, in other words."
"What could be more considerate? Colby got me to set a book aside for him, then told Berzins to go in and ask for it. Meanwhile, a car full of Russians was waiting for Berzins to come out of my store."
"How'd they know to wait for him there?"
"They knew about me from the newspaper article," I said, "or they knew about Berzins and tailed him to the bookstore. He was waiting around on the sidewalk while I had lunch at your place, so that would have given them time to get into position. Both explanations play out about the same, so you can take your pick."
"Okay."
"Then Berzins came in, picked up the book, overpaid or under-paid for it, as you prefer, and went out to meet his death."
"In a hail of flying bullets," she said. "A Russian shot him, right?"
"Right."
"And then jumped out and picked up the book."
"Right."
"So how did it get in Mapes's den?"
"Well, that's hard to say for sure," I said, "because all the people involved are dead."
"Not Mapes."
"He's refusing to answer questions. And nobody much cares, because he killed two men in front of a roomful of witnesses, including three cops and two members of the New York bar."
"And a paralegal," she said, "and someone who works behind a New York bar, and a lot of others besides. But they must have some explanation."
"The Russians," I said. "I'll tell you, they make even better villains now than they did during the Cold War. They shot Berzins, and they wound up with the book, and they already had the photos. They taped the photos intoThe Secret Agent, and sold the package to Mapes."
"If they already had the photos, why shoot Berzins?"
"That's a good question. Hmmm. Okay, try this: Colby and Mapes didn't know the Russians already had the photos, so Blinsky killed Berzins and grabbed the book so he'd have a plausible explanation for how the photos came into his possession."
"I'm not sure that makes perfect sense, Bern. Thank God it doesn't have to. But getting back to Mapes. Why would he come back with the book? He'd have to know the photos were in it, and he looked completely surprised when they showed."
"That would have been a problem," I acknowledged. "He could have been planning to remove the photos, and somehow forgot that he hadn't gotten around to it yet. Or he could have been brazening it out. Remember, the photos were taped securely to the pages. You could give them a fast riffle without revealing anything. He gambled that you could, anyway. And on the off chance that it didn't work, well, he brought his gun along for backup."
"Or Colby could have put the photos in the book without telling him, Bern."
I nodded. "Much better. Colby thought he was doing Mapes a favor, and Mapes saw it as betrayal, and that's why the first person he shot was Colby. That's good, Carolyn. If they ever ask me, I'll trot that one out for them. But I don't think they will."
"So that's the story," she said. "The Russians sold the book back to Mapes. For the money in the wall safe, I suppose. And then he lost it and shot everybody, because he saw the walls closing in on him."
"And he'd have shot Marisol, too," I said, "if Wally hadn't blown out a knee and switched to martial arts. Marathon training just doesn't do much for you in close-quarters combat."
"Wally was terrific, Bern." She picked up her glass, drank deep. "And so was everything you just told me. Now tell me what really happened."
"Well," I said, "to begin with, I had the photos."
"Right."
"Of course I didn't get them until after Berzins was killed. That was on Friday, and Ray let me into the taped-up crime scene on Sunday afternoon."
"I'd forgotten that part."
"Colby never knew Berzins. I was just blowing smoke when I said he did. He knew Mapes, and after Mapes called him, asking what he knew about a bookseller named Rhodenbarr, Colby wanted to make sure the store was open. So he called, and when I picked up the phone he had the answer to his question. Then, to give himself an excuse to stop by later on, he asked for a book he already knew I had."
"Because he'd seen it in the section he always browsed. But if Colby didn't know Berzins, how did Berzins know to ask for the book?"
"He didn't."
"He didn't what? Didn't know or didn't ask?"
"Both. He knew I had something to do with the burglary-even though I didn't-and he combined positive thinking with diplomatic caution. He left his ID and his regular wallet in his parked car and came to me with nothing but ten thousand dollars and a bellyful of self-confidence. 'I believe you have something for me'-that's what he said. If I told him I didn't know what he was talking about, he'd have gone into more detail. But he didn't have to, because I was obliging enough to turn around and hand him a book."
"And he assumed the photos were in it."
"Wouldn't you?"
"I might have looked to make sure, Bern."
"Even if a fast response would let you get something for thirteen hundred bucks that you'd been prepared to pay ten thousand for?"
"That's a point."
"Then he got gunned down, and somebody picked up the book."
"And there weren't any photos in it."
"Of course not. They saw him come out of my store, and they had to assume he had the photos, because what else would he have gone there for? So they shot him and took what he was carrying, and it was nothing but a Joseph Conrad novel, and not even a first edition."
"So the Russians had the book."
"Maybe."
"Maybe? What do you mean, maybe?"
"I think there was probably a Russian behind the wheel," I said, "and another one firing the gun. But I think there was a third person in the car, and I think that person was Colby Riddle."
"In the murder car."
"That would be my guess. He looked at the book and knew right away what had happened. He took it home with him, or back to his office, and he paged through it and made absolutely sure there were no pictures in it. And then he took it to his friend Mapes's office and let Mapes look, and commiserated with Mapes about the problems they were having. 'Here,' he told Mapes. 'You might as well hang onto this goddamn thing. Call it a souvenir.' "
"And Mapes took it home?"
"And left it on the desk in his den, where I found it that very same night after I cleaned out his safe."
"And you brought it home."
"Which seemed like a mistake at the time," I said, "but I couldn't get over the surprise of finding it there. The last I'd seen of it, someone was snatching it out of a fat man's dead hands for reasons I couldn't begin to fathom. And here it was, on Mapes's desk."
"Wow. And he never knew it was gone?"
"How would he know? It was just an old book, with nothing valuable about it. He could have thrown it out in the first place. He kept it, but that didn't mean he was going to sit down and read it. He tossed it on his desk, and wouldn't have noticed it was gone unless he went looking for it."
"But he could have noticed, Bern."
"I know," I said, "and that worried me, but only a little. Because the last thing I did Monday night-although it was well into Tuesday morning by then-was drive out to Riverdale and let myself into his house for a second time."
"Through the milk chute."
"Don't remind me. It went smoother this time. Maybe I lost a pound or two, or maybe I improved with practice. I took the book along, and I'd already fixed it up, taping the photos in place. I could have just dropped it on his desk, I suppose, but I didn't want him paging idly through it, so I found a place on his shelf. The spine's dark, you don't notice it right away, but it would show up in a search. If he'd already missed it, well, that might have been tricky, but I knew I was in the clear when he came downstairs after showing his empty safe to the IRS boys. His reaction made it very clear he hadn't had a clue the money was missing. That meant he hadn't missed the book, because if he'd been aware that something had disappeared, the first thing he'd have done was check the safe to see if anything else was gone."
She took it all in, and asked a few more questions, and I did the best I could to answer them. Then she pointed out that Ray knew I'd had the photos. So how did he think they'd found their way into the book, and the book onto Mapes's shelf?
"Ray's a practical man," I said. "He's not as stupid as you think he is."
"He couldn't be, Bern, or he'd die because he forgot to breathe."
"He only thinks about things if he has to," I said. "He knows I had the photos, and if he thought about it he'd wonder how they got where they did, and how I knew they were there, and, well, any number of things. But what he wanted me to do was pull a rabbit out of a hat, and I did, and he wasn't about to ask who the rabbit's father was, or how much I paid for the hat. Instead he concentrated on the fact that he'd brought in a fellow the press is calling the Date-Rape Bandit of Murray Hill, at the same time that he was solving a crime Major Cases had yanked out from under him."
"So he came out of it okay."
"Smelling like a rose."
"I could say something," she said, "but it would reveal me as a mean-spirited human being, so I'll keep it to myself. And you know what? I'm glad Ray came out of it okay. I mean, you and I did all right, didn't we?"
"My Get Out of Dodge fund is replenished. And I've got money in the bank, and I just yesterday got a line on a carpenter who'll build me a hidey-hole every bit as good as the one Quattrone's clowns wrecked."
"And you've got a girlfriend."
"Oddly enough, I do. And I don't have to worry what she'll think when she finds out I'm a burglar, because she already knows."
"And it doesn't bother her?"
"Sooner or later it will, and sooner or later the relationship'll fall apart. But for the time being she's okay with it."
"I'm happy for you, Bern. She's really nice."
"So's Lacey."
"Yeah," she said, beaming. "We both did fine. I've got a safe-deposit box stuffed with money, plus I've got a really neat girlfriend who thinks I'm pretty neat myself."
"I gather LBD's not a problem at this stage."
She blushed, something she doesn't do often. LBD stands for Lesbian Bed Death, a name coined to describe the curiously sexless state of so many long-term lesbian relationships. It seems to me heterosexual couples have the same problem, but we don't have a cute term for it. We just call it marriage.
"I thought Marty and Marisol might get back together again," she said, changing the subject deftly. "But I guess that's a thing of the past, huh?"
"They were both ready to move on. And they didn't have trouble finding somewhere to move. Marisol's seeing a lot of Wally these days."
"I guess it's hard for a woman to resist someone who just saved her life."
"And hard for a guy to resist someone whose life he just saved, especially if she looks like Marisol. It's got him over his hopeless crush on that Chinese waitress, so now he's not spending all his time at that dopey teahouse."
"That's good."
"And he's keeping up his martial-arts training, which is also good. On the downside, he's studying Latvian."
"Why? Marisol speaks perfect English."
"I know that," I said, "and so does Wally. That's just the way he is. Pardon my Latvian, but the other day he wished meDauds laimis jaungada. That means Happy New Year."
"Really? When do Latvians celebrate New Year?"
"January first, remarkably enough, so he was eight months early."
"Or four months late."
"Look, he's happy. Meanwhile, Marty and Sigrid couldn't be happier. He's the married older man she always wanted, and she's the hot gorgeous blonde everybody always wanted."
"Including me, Bern, but I've got my hands full just now. Is that why you invited them to Riverdale? Because you figured they'd be right for each other?"
"Well, I had to have Sigrid there to back up Marisol's date-rape story. And I thought Marty deserved a chance to see the shitheel get what was coming to him. But yeah, I sort of had it in mind that the two of them might hit it off."
"What a storybook ending," she said, and sighed. Then she straightened up and leaned forward. " Bern, the photos. What happened to the photos?"
"You saw them. In the copy of The Secret Agent. "
"Right. What happened to them after Mapes and Johnson went off to Central Booking?"
"Oh," I said. "Well, I sort of took them."
"Sort of? What do you mean,sort of?"
"When no one was looking," I said, "I picked it up. Otherwise it might have spent the next fifty years in an NYPD evidence locker."
"And you wanted it for a souvenir?"
I shook my head. "I already gave it away."
"You gave it away. Wait a minute, let me guess. You gave it to the little man from the Latvian embassy."
"Mr. Grisek."
"So they'll hunt down the Black Scourge of Riga after all."
"They'll try. He seems to have pretty good survival instincts, but they're highly motivated. So we'll see."
"Wow," she said, and leaned back in her chair and stretched like a cat. "Gee, look at the time. I guess we don't need another round of drinks, do we? We had two already."
"Three."
"Really? Was it three?"
"I'm afraid so."
"It's funny how you can lose count. Three. You know what that means?"
"No, but I'll bet you're about to tell me."
"It means we had two drinks," she said, "and then we had a third."
"So?"
"Two drinks, and then one drink."
"So?"
"So that one drink seems incomplete, doesn't it? Because you know my theory about how there's no such thing as one drink." She waved a hand, crooked a finger. "Maxine!"