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

behind you at the same time. What I saw for a while was an empty room, and then I saw Richler bring in a man in a gray suit with a bandage on his head and a lot of swelling and discoloration around it.
    He approached the mirror and stared at me, and I stared right back at him. It took an enormous effort of will to avoid winking or extending my tongue or rolling my eyes or doing something similarly hare-brained. Instead I took my time looking him over.
    He wasn’t terribly impressive. He was an inch or two below medium height and he looked to be about fifty-five. An oval face, slate-gray hair, a small clipped mustache with some white in with the gray. A snub nose, a small mouth. Eyes an indeterminate color somewhere between brown and green. If you saw him you’d guess banker first, tax lawyer second. He didn’t particularly look like a man who’d just lost a glamorous wife and a $500,000 coin, but then he didn’t look like a man who’d had either of them in the first place.
    He looked at me and I looked at him, and he shook his head from side to side, solemn as an owl.
    I don’t think I smiled, not just then, but when he turned at Richler’s touch and followed the detective out of the room I grinned like a Hallowe’en pumpkin. When Richler walked in a few minutes later I was sitting in the chair cleaning my fingernails with the blunt end of a toothpick. I looked up brightly and asked him if they were going to put me in a lineup.
    “You’re cute as a button,” he said.
    “Pardon me?”
    “Straightening your goddamn tie. No, there’s not going to be a lineup, Rhodenbarr. You can go home now.”
    “The police realize their mistake?”
    “I don’t think we made one. I think you pulled that burglary last night. I think you were upstairs goosing the wall safe while your partners were roughing up the Colcannons. That way he never got a look at you, and you think that’s gonna save your neck. It’s not. We’ll still get your pals, and we’ve still got evidence against you, and you’ll wind up taking twice the fall you’d take if you cooperated. But you’re a wiseass and it’s your funeral.”
    “I’m just a used-book dealer.”
    “Sure you are. What you can do right now is get the hell out of here. You’re not bright enough to recognize it when someone’s trying to give you a break. If you wake up in a couple of hours, give me a call. But you don’t want to wait too long. If we get one of your partners first, he’ll be the one turning state’s evidence and what’ll we need with you? You’ll be the one doing the long time, and you weren’t even there when the woman got killed, and what sense does that make? You sure you still don’t want to come clean?”
    “I already came clean.”
    “Yeah, sure. Get out, Rhodenbarr.”
     
    I was on my way out of the building when I heard a familiar voice speak my name. “If it ain’t Bernie Rhodenbarr. Hang around No. 1 Police Plaza and you never know who you’ll run into.”
    “Hello, Ray.”
    “Hello yourself, Bernie.” Ray Kirschmann gave me a lopsided grin. His suit didn’t fit him very well, but then his suits never do. You’d think with all the shakedown money he takes he could afford to dress better. “Beautiful mornin’, huh, Bern?”
    “Beautiful.”
    “Except it’s past noon now. An’ I see I won a little bet I made with myself. They’re lettin’ you go home.”
    “You know about it?”
    “Sure. The Colcannon thing. I knew you didn’t do it. When did you ever work with a partner? And when did you ever pull anything violent. Except”—and he looked reproachful—“for the time you hit me and knocked me down. You remember that, Bern?”
    “I panicked, Ray.”
    “I remember it well.”
    “And I wasn’t trying to hurt you. I was just trying to get away.”
    “Uh-huh. They still figure you’re it, you know.Richler’s got enough to hold you on. He thinks he’ll have a stronger case in the long run if he doesn’t slap you in a