Read Online The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza by Lawrence Block - Free Book Online

have been nice, but you can’t have everything. “I sat home and watched television,” I said. “Had a few beers, put my feet up.”
    “Just spent the whole night at home, huh?”
    A little alarm went off. “The whole evening,” I corrected. “After the eleven o’clock newscast I went out.”
    “And knocked over the Colcannon place.”
    “No. I had a late date.”
    “With anyone in particular?”
    “With a woman.”
    “The kind of woman you can drop in on at eleven o’clock.”
    “It was more like midnight by the time I met her.”
    “She got a name?”
    “Uh-huh. But I’m not going to give it unless I have to. She’s my alibi for the whole night, because I was with her from around midnight through breakfast this morning, and I’ll use her if I don’t have any choice, but not otherwise. She’s separated from her husband and she’s got a couple of young children and she doesn’t need her name dragged into this. But that’s where I was.”
    He frowned in thought. “You didn’t get home last night,” he said. “We know that much.”
    “I just told you.”
    “Yeah. We checked your apartment around four-thirty and left it staked out and you never showed up. But that’s not enough to make me believe in your secret divorced lady.”
    “Not divorced. Separated.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “And you don’t have to believe in her. Just put me in the lineup and let Colcannon fail to identify me. Then I can go home.”
    “Who said anything about a lineup?”
    “Nobody had to. You brought me here instead of the precinct because this is where the mug shots are and you’ve got Colcannon looking through them. You haven’t arrested me yet because he took a look at my picture and shook his head. Well, who knows, maybe I’m not photogenic, and it’s worth letting him have a look at me in person, so that’s why I’m here. Now you’ll put me in a lineup and he’ll say the same thing and I’ll go back to my store and try to sell some books. It’s hard to do much business when the store’s closed.”
    “You really don’t think he’ll identify you.”
    “That’s right.”
    “I don’t get it,” he said. He got to his feet. “Come on along,” he said. “Let’s take a walk.”
    We took a walk down the corridor and came to a door with frosted glass in the window and nothing written on it. “I’m not sure whether we want to bother with a lineup or not,” he said, holding the door for me.“Whyntcha have a seat in here while I talk to some people and find out how they want to proceed?”
    I went in and he closed the door. There was one chair in the room and it faced a large mirror, and Mrs. Rhodenbarr didn’t raise no fools, so I knew right away why I was supposed to cool my heels in this particular little cubicle. What we were going to have was a oneman lineup, an unofficial lineup, and if it came out negative there wouldn’t be a record of it to prejudice any case the State might decide to bring against one Bernard Grimes Rhodenbarr.
    The mirror, I was bright enough to figure out, was of the one-way-glass variety. Herbert Franklin Colcannon would be positioned on the other side of it, where he could see me while I could not see him.
    Fine with me.
    In fact, I decided after a moment’s reflection, it was more than fine with me, and the one thing I wanted to make sure of was that he got a good look at me, a good enough one to convince him once and for all that he had never seen me before. So I walked right up to the mirror, approaching it as if I thought it were indeed a mirror and nothing more. It was hard to repress the urge to make a face, but I squelched the impulse and adjusted the knot in my tie instead.
    A funny thing about one-way glass. When you get close enough to it you can see through it. The vision you get is imperfect, because there’s still a mirror effect and you get a sort of double image like a piece of twice-exposed photographic film, seeing what’s in front of you and what’s