That seemed fair enough. Phil helped me drag the bargain table inside, so I guessed that Dan ranked him. I locked the door and closed the gates, and while I was doing this they made the predictable jokes about a burglar locking up his own place, and how I didn't have to worry about forgetting my keys. Real side-splitters, let me tell you.

Their car was a blue-and-white police cruiser. Phil drove while I sat in back with Dan. A couple blocks from the store I said, "What am I supposed to have done, anyway?"

"As if you didn't know."

"Right, as if I didn't. It happens I don't, so humor me. What's the charge?"

"He's cool now," Dan said to Phil. "Notice how the professional attitude comes into play? He was nervous before, but now he's cool as a pickle." He turned to me and said, "There's no charge. How can there be a charge? We didn't arrest you."

"If you arrested me, what would the charge have been?"

"Just hypothetically?"

"Okay."

"Burglary, first degree. And homicide, first degree." He shook his head. "You poor bastard," he said. "You never killed anybody before, did you?"

CHAPTER Six

Herbert and Wanda Colcannon had not stayed in Pennsylvania overnight after all. They had indeed driven out to Berks County, where they'd bred their beloved Bouvier to the chosen champion. Then they'd boarded Astrid overnight with the stud's owner, evidently a recommended procedure, and drove back to New York for dinner with business associates of Herbert's and an evening at the theater. After-theater drinks kept them out late, and they'd arrived home after midnight, intending to get a night's sleep and drive back to Pennsylvania first thing in the morning.

Instead, they had walked in on a burglary in progress. The burglars relieved Herbert of his cash and Wanda of the jewels she was wearing, then attempted to tie them up. When Herb protested, he got a punch in the mouth for his troubles. This provoked a voluble protest from Wanda, which earned her a couple of whacks on the head. Herb saw her fall and lie there motionless, and that was the last thing he saw, because that was when he got hit on the head himself.

When he came to he was tied up, and it took him a while to work his way loose. Wanda was also tied up, and she couldn't work her way loose because she was dead. She'd been hit on the head with something harder than her skull, and the fracture she'd sustained had proved fatal.

"That was your partner's doing," Sam Richler told me. He was the detective who seemed to be in charge of the case, and it was to him that Phil and Dan had turned me over upon arrival at police headquarters. "We know you're not violent by nature or habit, Rhodenbarr. You always used to work alone. What made you decide you needed a partner?"

"I don't have a partner," I said. "I don't even work alone anymore. I'm a legitimate businessman, I have a store, I sell books."

"Who was your partner? For Christ's sake, you don't want to protect him. He's the one put you in the soup. Look, I can see how it shapes. You retired, tried to make a go of it selling books"-he didn't believe this but was humoring me-"and this hard case talks you into trying one more job. Maybe he's got the place set up and he needs somebody with your talents to get around the locks. You figure you'll take one last job to keep you going while the store gets off its feet, and all of a sudden a woman's dead and your partner's off spending his money and you've got your head in the toilet. You know what you wanna do? You wanna pick your head up outta the bowl before somebody pulls the chain."

"That's a horrible image."

"You want a horrible image, I'll give you a horrible image." He opened a desk drawer, shuffled papers, came up with an eight-by-ten glossy. A woman, blond, wearing an evening gown, half sat against a wall in what looked to be the Colcannon living room. Her shoes were off, her ankles tied together, and her hands looked to be tied behind her back. The photo wasn't in color-which was just as well, thank you-but even in black and white one could see the discoloration right below the hairline where someone had struck her with something heavy. She looked horrible, all right; I had Carolyn's word that Wanda Colcannon was a beauty, but you couldn't prove it by this photograph.

"You didn't do that," Richler said. "Did you?"

"Do it? I can't even look at it."

"So give us the man who did. You'll get off light, Rhodenbarr. You might even walk with the right lawyer." Sure. "Thing is, we're certain to nail your partner anyway, with your help or without it. He'll run his mouth in a saloon and the right ear'll pick it up and we'll have him in a cell before it gets dark out. Or Colcannon'll find his mug shot in one of the books. Either way we get him. Only difference is if you help us you do your own self some good."

"It makes sense."

"That's just what it makes. Damn good sense. Plus you don't owe him a thing. Who got you in this mess, anyway?"

"That's a good question."

"So?"

"There's only one thing," I said.

"Oh?"

"I wasn't there. I never heard of anybody named Colcannon. I was nowhere near West Eighteenth Street. I gave up burglary when I bought the store."

"You're going to stick with that story?"

"I'm stuck with it. It happens to be the truth."

"We've got hard evidence that puts you right in that house."

"What evidence?"

"I'm not revealing that now. You'll find out when the time comes. And we've got Colcannon. I guess you didn't realize the woman was dead or you wouldn't have left him alive. Your accomplice wouldn't, anyway. We know he's the violent one. Maybe she was still alive when you left her. She could have died while he was unconscious. We don't have the medical examiner's report on that yet. But the thing is, see, we've got Colcannon and he can identify both you and your partner. So what's the point of sticking with your story?"

"It's the only story I've got."

"I suppose you've got an alibi to go with it?"

It would 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."