“What did you tell her, Bern?”

“I told her yes,” I said, and picked up my drink. “I must be out of my mind.”

CHAPTER Eight

Gulliver Fairborn would have hated it.

They took me to the precinct in handcuffs, which is just plain undignified, and they took my fingerprints and made me pose for pictures, full-face and profile. That’s a clear-cut invasion of privacy, but try telling that to a couple of cops at the end of a long shift. Then they strip-searched me, and then they tossed me in a holding cell, and that’s where I spent what was left of the night.

I’d have slept better at home, or on the office couch at the store, or in Room 415 at the Paddington. As it was I barely slept at all, and I was groggy and grubby when Wally Hemphill showed up first thing in the morning and bailed me out.

“I told them they had nothing,” he said. “You were in a hotel where a woman died. Where’s the crime in that? They said a witness could place you on the floor where the murder took place, and where you had no reason to be. And you were registered under a false name, and you have a sheet with a whole lot of arrests on it.”

“But only one conviction,” I pointed out.

“A judge hears that,” he said, “it’s like telling him you only put the tip in. What I stressed was you’re an established retailer with your own store, and there’s no chance you’re going to cut and run. I tried for Own Recognizance, but the papers teed off on the last judge who let a murderer out without bail, and-”

“I’m not a murderer, Wally.”

“I know that,” he said, “and anyway it’s beside the point, which is that I got bail knocked down to a manageable fifty K.”

“Manageable?”

“You’re out, aren’t you? You can thank me, for cutting my run short and coming down bright and early.” Wally was training for the New York Marathon, upping his weekly mileage as the race approached. Law was his profession, but running was his passion. “And you can thank your friend Marty Gilmartin,” he added. “He put up the dough.”

“Marty Gilmartin,” I said.

“Why are you frowning, Bernie? You remember him, don’t you?”

Of course I did. I’d met Martin Gilmartin a while back, after I’d been arrested for stealing his collection of baseball cards. I hadn’t done it, but my alibi would have been that I was cracking an apartment across town at the time, and I figured I was better off keeping my mouth shut. It all worked out, and Marty and I wound up having a mutually profitable association, breaking effortlessly into houses of friends of his who wanted to collect on their insurance. We each had a good chunk of cash by the time we were done, and mine was enough to buy the building that housed the bookstore. Now I don’t have to worry about grasping landlords, since I’ve had the good fortune to become one myself. You know how they say crime doesn’t pay? They don’t know what they’re talking about.

“I remember him,” I said, “as if I’d seen him only yesterday. If I was frowning it’s because I’d meant to tell you to call him. But I didn’t, did I?”

“No,” Wally said, “and I didn’t, either. Call him, I mean.”

“He called you.”

“Right. Said he’d heard you were in trouble, and what would it take to get you out? I said it would probably take an act of God to get you out of trouble, but all it would take to get you out of jail was ten percent of the bond, which is to say five large. He sent a messenger with fifty hundred-dollar bills in an envelope, which ought to earn him an invitation to your Christmas party. And here you are.”

“Here I am,” I agreed.

“You’re charged with murder,” Wally went on, “but I don’t think they’re serious about it. They can’t possibly make it stick. Of course, life would get a lot simpler if they found the person who actually did kill the Landau woman.”

“If I knew,” I said, “I’d be happy to tell them. Meanwhile I’d better go open the store. I’ve got a cat who hates to miss a meal.”

“I know how he feels, Bernie. But swing past your apartment first, why don’t you.” His nose wrinkled. “You might want to get under the shower.”

“It’s cigarette smoke,” I said. “I was in the kind of smoke-filled room where they decided to nominate Harding for President.”

“That was a little before my time,” Wally said, “and that’s not just cigarette smoke.”

“You’re a runner,” I said. “I didn’t figure you would mind the smell of good clean sweat.”

“Good clean sweat is one thing,” he said. “Jailhouse sweat is something else. Go on home, Bernie. Take a shower, put on some clean clothes. You got an incinerator in your building?”

“A compactor.”

“Whatever. The clothes you got on? Toss ’em down the chute.”

People talk about burning their clothes, but does any sensible middle-class person ever actually do it? I bundled mine up and ran them over to the laundry around the corner.

My apartment’s on West End and Seventy-first. I’d cabbed there from the Thirteenth Precinct (“the one-three,” as the TV cops would say) on East Twenty-first, and, after a shower and a shave and a change of clothes, I cabbed back down to the store. I usually take subways-they’re usually faster, they’ve got more legroom, and you don’t have to listen to Jackie Mason’s recorded voice urging you to wear a seatbelt. But there’s nothing like a night in a cell to make a man appreciate life’s little refinements, even if there’s precious little refined about them.

It was around eleven by the time I got to the store, and Raffles made it clear that he was glad to see me, rubbing himself against my ankles in the fashion of his tribe. I’m happy you’re here, he was saying, and I’ll be happier when you feed me. I did and he was, and as soon as I had the place up and running I looked up Marty Gilmartin’s number and dialed it.

“I wanted to thank you,” I said.

“It’s nothing.”

“If you’d ever spent a night in a cell,” I said, “you wouldn’t say that.”

“No, I don’t suppose I would. So let me just say that you’re welcome, and that I was glad for the chance to do you a service. It’s been a long time, Bernard.”

“It has,” I agreed. “I haven’t seen you in ages, except for a quick glimpse now and then.”

“Quite. I’m tied up for lunch, dammit, but do you suppose you could drop over to the club sometime this afternoon? Say half past three?”

That would mean closing early, but without his help I wouldn’t be open at all. I told him half past three would be fine, then hung up and waited for the world to beat a path to my door. First of the path-beaters was a fellow in his late thirties, wearing navy slacks and a sportshirt he’d buttoned wrong. He was skinny, with knobby wrists and a prominent Adam’s apple, and his straw-colored hair looked as though it had been cut at the barber college, and by one of their less-promising students. He squinted through rimless eyeglasses at Raffles, who had made short work of his breakfast and was on his way back to the sunny spot in the front window. When the animal had plopped himself down without turning around three times, thus proving conclusively that he wasn’t a dog, the geeky-looking guy turned his pale blue eyes on me.

“He doesn’t have a tail,” he said.

“Neither do you,” I said, “but I wasn’t going to mention it. He’s a Manx.”

“I’ve heard of them,” he said. “They don’t have tails, do they?”

“They’ve outgrown them,” I said, “even as you and I. When you come right down to it, what does a cat in this day and age need with a tail?”

I’d offered this by way of small talk, but he took it seriously, creasing his high forehead in thought. “I wonder,” he said. “Doesn’t it play a role in keeping the animal balanced?”

“He sees a therapist once a week,” I said, “and when he has a problem we talk about it.”

“Physically, I meant.”

Duh. I let him speculate on the role of the feline caudal appendage in maintaining the animal’s equilibrium and the possible evolutionary advantage of taillessness on the Isle of Man, the breed’s ancestral home, but I didn’t contribute much to the conversation myself beyond the occasional nod or grunt. I didn’t want to waste wit on him, since he didn’t seem to know what it was, nor did I want to inquire too closely into Raffles’s origins.