If we could just get into Luke’s apartment, she was pretty sure we could find the cards. And if we could return them to Marty, that meant I’d be off the hook for burglarizing his apartment. The charges would be dropped, and wouldn’t that be great?

“Well, it would certainly be nice,” I told her. “But according to my lawyer they’re probably going to have to drop the charges anyway, because he says they haven’t got enough evidence to get an indictment, let alone a conviction. On top of that, do you see what I’d be doing? I’d be actually committing a crime in order to exonerate myself from one I didn’t do. Somehow it doesn’t seem worth it.”

As a matter of fact, she went on, there might be something extra in it for me. She was pretty sure there’d be a reward. Marty, after all, was a generous man. His baseball card collection was near and dear to him. Surely I could count on being reimbursed handsomely for the risk I’d be running.

How handsomely, I wondered. Whatever Marty paid me would be coming out of his own pocket, and he’d already paid for the cards once. He wouldn’t want to shell out for them all over again, would he?

“You know,” she said, “he’s already reported the loss to the insurance company, so I suppose they’re already processing the claim. If I sat down with him privately and told him how you’d managed to recover the cards, well, maybe he wouldn’t bother saying anything to the insurance company.”

“I think I see what you’re getting at.”

“It wouldn’t exactly be stealing,” she said. “It would be more a case of letting things run their course, wouldn’t it? If the insurance company paid half a million dollars to settle the claim, which is only fair because the cards really were stolen, well, Marty would have all that money to spend replenishing his collection. If he could do that by buying an almost identical collection from you for a quarter of a million dollars, say, he’d be ahead of the game.”

“And so would I.”

“Absolutely. We both would.”

“Both of us, eh?”

“Fifty-fifty,” she said. “I need you to open Luke’s door and you need me to handle the arrangements with Marty. Bernie, that’s more than a hundred thousand dollars apiece.”

“I don’t know about the percentages,” I said.

“What could be fairer than fifty-fifty?”

“But is it really fifty-fifty? That’s one way to look at it, that you and I split what Marty pays out. But the whole pie is half a million dollars—”

“And Marty gets half of that, and we get the other half.”

“That’s if you count you and me as a team, Doll.”

“I think we make a great team, Bernie.”

“I’m sure we do, but there’s another way to look at it, and that’s that you and Marty are already a team, and your team winds up with three-quarters of the half million dollars.”

We sat there for twenty minutes, arguing over money an insurance company hadn’t yet paid for a box of baseball cards we hadn’t yet seen. She gave ground grudgingly, and we wound up agreeing to a three-way split. Marty would pay each of us a third of whatever he got from his insurance company.

“But don’t even think about going in there tonight,” I said. “The public has this romantic idea of burglary as night work, but that’s the most dangerous time for it. The later it gets, the worse it is. Right now it’s past midnight, and the average person looks suspicious at this hour without even doing anything.”

“But—”

“Look around you,” I said. “Here are a bunch of perfectly nice people having coffee and doughnuts, and just because it’s the middle of the night they look like riffraff and lowlife trash.”

“That’s what they are, Bernie.”

“See? Case closed.”

“But—”

“Tomorrow afternoon,” I said. “The jeans and the jacket are great on you, but leave them home tomorrow. Dress up nice and meet me at the bookstore at two. We’ll go straight from there.”

I got to the bookstore the next morning at ten minutes of ten. The first thing I did was call Carolyn. “I’m at the store,” I told her. “You said you’d walk over and feed Raffles for me, but you didn’t have a chance yet, did you?”

“I’m still on my first cup of coffee.”

“He’s acting like a famine victim,” I said, “but I’ve learned not to trust him, so I thought I’d better check. I’ll feed him, so you don’t have to.”

“I was gonna come over around eleven. How come you opened up? You’re always closed on Sundays.”

“Well, maybe I’ve been making a mistake all these years,” I said. “Maybe I’ve cost myself a bundle by closing on Sundays.”

“You really think so?”

“No, but I’m meeting somebody here at two o’clock.”

“You’re four hours early.”

“So? Everybody’s got to be someplace. Come by and keep me company if you feel like it.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “You really did have a quiet evening at home, didn’t you? That’s why you’re so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I don’t know if I can take it.”

“Take what?”

“Your good mood.”

I considered this. “You didn’t have a quiet evening at home,” I said.

“I was going to,” she said, “but I stopped in at DT’s Fat Cat. I figured I’d sleep better if I had a drink.”

“Did you?”

“I slept fine,” she said, “once they closed the place so I could go home. I may not get there, Bern, but I’ll see you tomorrow for sure. Go feed the cat, he must be starving.”

I filled his food dish, freshened his water, flushed his toilet, and came back and watched him eat. That reminded me I hadn’t had anything myself since last night’s moo shu pork, so I went to the deli and picked up a couple of bagels and a container of coffee. After I had my bargain table set up outside I settled in behind the counter and ate my breakfast. The cat came over and sat on my lap for a while, watching me eat, but eating only held his interest when he was the one doing it. He leaped down onto the floor and sat there as if waiting for something to happen.

I finished one bagel and crumpled the paper it had come wrapped in. The noise caught Raffles’ attention and he reacted, the way they do. I let him stare in my direction. The minute he looked away I crumpled the paper some more, then tossed it past him. Except it didn’t get past him, because he sprang to his right and snagged the ball of paper on one hop. Then he batted it to and fro, chasing it up one aisle and down another and slapping it silly. Finally he decided it was dead and wasn’t going to come back to life, so he turned and walked away from it.

“Bring it back,” I said, “and I’ll throw it again.”

I swear he gave me a look, and I swear the unvoiced thought that accompanied it was something along the lines of What the hell do you think I am, a fucking Labrador retriever?

His game, his rules. I unwrapped the other bagel, crumpled the paper, and put the ball in play.

Carolyn never showed up, which gave her something in common with most of humanity. I spent a couple of hours crumpling up sheets of paper and trying to throw them past Raffles. Then at a quarter of two the door opened, and it was Doll.

She was all dolled up, too, in a navy-blue dress and high heels. The dress was a perfect choice; it made her look as respectable as a Junior League luncheon while leaving no doubt whatsoever that she was a female member of her species, and that it was a distinctly mammalian species at that.

“You look great,” I told her. “That’s the perfect outfit.”

“Is it all right? I tried on the leather hot pants and the Deadhead T-shirt, but wouldn’t you know it got shrunk the last time I washed it? I was afraid it made me look too chesty.”

“That would never do.”

“No,” she said. “You look great yourself, Bernie. You should put on a tie and jacket more often. Bernie, why are there balls of paper all over your floor?”

I looked around for Raffles, but he was hiding. I crumpled a sheet of paper and his head came into view. “Now watch,” I said, and I threw the ball to his left, and the little rascal sprang up and batted it down.