The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza by Lawrence Block Page B

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 tokeep 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 identifyboth 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