"Two hundred thirty-seven thousand," she said. "Even?"

"I rounded it off."

"That's almost a quarter of a million."

"Pretty near."

"My God, it's a fortune."

"Keep it in proportion. It's the price of a large studio apartment in a good building."

"That's one way of looking at it," she allowed. "But since I'm not shopping for a place to live, there's another way I like better. It's enough to pay the rent on this place for a thousand months. How many years is that?"

"More than eighty. Of course even with rent control, you'd have some increases over the years. Figure sixty-five years."

"That's plenty, Bern. Sixty-five years from now I'll probably want to move over to the Village Nursing Home, anyway. I just hope they'll let me bring the cats. Anyway, not all of this is mine. How much have I got coming, can you figure it out for me?"

I could, with pencil and paper, subtracting Marty's share and dividing the remainder by three. Her end, I was able to tell her, came to $67,150.

"I'm rich, Bern."

"Well, you're richer than you were a few hours ago."

"I'm richer than I ever was. Bern, I'm scared to have the money in the house."

"It should be safe here. Your locks are good ones. You're on the ground floor, but you've got bars on your window. Most important, no one's got any reason to think you've got anything worth taking."

"Thanks a lot."

"You know what I meant. There's a lot of money here, but you and I are the only ones who know about it, and I don't plan to tell anyone."

"Neither do I. And I know it's safer than your place. But the closet, Bern? Isn't that the first place they'd look?"

She had a point. I asked her if she needed a bath. "Not desperately," she said. "Or do I?" She raised an arm, sniffed herself. "Nothing that would make a billy goat leave the room," she said. "I'll have a bath before I go to bed. Why?"

"Have it now."

"Huh? Oh, I get it."

"I'll turn the other way," I said, "and bury my nose in a book. I wish I had the one I was reading. The new John Sandford."

"I bought it, Bern. I read it, I finished it a week ago. I was gonna ask if you wanted to borrow it."

"I would have, if I'd known. A copy came into the store, and I started it the other day. The one where the guy's killing vegetarians."

"That's the one. I wanted to kill one myself once. I had this sweet young thing over for dinner, and I splurged and bought a gorgeous beef Wellington at Ottomanelli's, and I bring it to the table just in time for her to tell me she doesn't eat red meat. 'Take it home with you,' I wanted to tell her, 'and leave it out on the counter for a week, and it won't be red anymore. It'll be nice and green and you can pretend it's a vegetable.' Did you find it yet? I think it's on the top shelf."

"I've got it."

"I loved it. I think the best scene's where he gets the diet doctor, the one who has all his patients eating nothing but bean sprouts and celery."

I told her I hadn't gotten that far yet, and she said she'd stop before she spoiled it for me. I got caught up in the book and read until she told me I could turn around now, that she was all bathed and dressed.

"And I took a towel," she said, "and dried the tub. How's the book? Enjoying it?"

"Yeah, it's terrific."

"I think it may be his best. I even like the title.Lettuce Prey. The tub's all ready, Bern."

I put the two bags of money in the tub, put the cover on, then took it off again. "It's a shame your cats know how to use the toilet," I mused.

"It is? I always thought it was a blessing. Oh! If we covered up the money with Kitty Litter, anybody who looked would just figure it was one big catbox."

"That's what I was thinking."

"They'd also figure my cats were cleaner than their owner, because what would I use for bathing? But the hell with the good opinion of burglars. Present company excepted, of course." She winked. "The deli's still open. You think one bag's enough? Or should we get two?"

Two bags did the job. Anybody who took the lid off the bathtub-and why anybody would do that was beyond me-would put it back on in a hurry. We could have upped the verisimilitude quotient by encouraging the cats to use the thing, but Carolyn drew the line at that. It had taken her long enough to teach them to use the toilet, and if they switched to the tub she'd have to put them to sleep and start over with two new kittens.

"I think we're set," she said. "Oh, I forgot to ask. His answering machine, that you left a message on. Did you get the tape?"

"It was digital, so all I had to do was erase it. And I got rid of the cell phone. Nowadays it's the easiest thing in the world for them to find out the source of an incoming call. Even if you don't have Caller ID, or if it just registers asUnknown Caller, the cops can pull the LUDS and know exactly who called and when."

"I know, they do it onLaw amp; Order all the time."

"But with a prepaid cell phone," I said, "all they can find out is where the phone was sold, but not who bought it. So I dumped the phone, and that's the end of that."

"You just threw it away?"

"I could have, but it seemed wasteful. All of those prepaid minutes. I left it on the subway on my way down here. Somebody'll find it and call his mother in Santo Domingo for free."

"That was thoughtful, Bern."

"I was almost thoughtful enough to top up the gas tank on the Mercury," I said, "but not quite. I managed to find a parking place just a few doors down from where it was when I borrowed it. And I put back the ignition cylinder that I'd pulled. The owner won't know the difference."

"Except that it's not where he clearly remembers parking it. So he'll just think it's early Alzheimer's. Bern, what happened?"

"Huh?"

"You were preoccupied," she said, "and now you're not. What happened?"

"I'm still preoccupied," I said. "I just put it on the shelf."

"You did?"

"Literally," I said, and went to the closet. I'd taken something besides the money from the Mapes house, had tucked it into one of the bags before I left the house, and had removed it from the bag when I put it and its fellow in the closet. I'd put it on a high shelf, out of harm's and Carolyn's way, and now I took it down and handed it to her.

"It's a book," she announced. "Hardbound, no dust jacket." She squinted at the spine. "The Secret Agent,by Joseph Conrad. Isn't that the title of the book you sold to the fat man?"

"For thirteen hundred dollars."

"And you found a replacement copy in Mapes's library? That's handy, Bern. Now you can make that customer happy. What was his name again?"

"Colby Riddle."

"Right, and how'd I forget it? Ought to be an easy name to remember. Well, you said you had a feeling there was a coincidence waiting to show up, and I'd say this qualifies, wouldn't you? Or did he have such a huge library the book just about had to be there?"

"He had a very small library."

"Yeah? Then it was a real coincidence."

"More than you know," I said.

" Bern, you're kidding."

"Look on the flyleaf. It's priced at twelve dollars, and you can probably recognize the numerals as mine. And it wasn't in the bookcase, either. It was downstairs, on the desk in his den."

"It's the same book."

"Right."

"Not just the same title, but the same book."

"Right."

" Bern, that's more than a coincidence. That's… Bern, how the hell did it get there?"

"I don't know," I said, "but you wanted to know why I was preoccupied. That's why."