“You know,” he said, “that’s probably exactly what you ought to do. Tell you what, Bern. I’ll read you your Miranda rights, an’ then you an’ me’ll head over to Central Bookin’, an’ we’ll see about gettin’ you mugged an’ printed. Then you can give Wally Hemphill a call. If he ain’t doin’ laps around Central Park, maybe he can help you decide what to remember about last night.”

“Don’t read me my rights.”

“You remember ’em from last time, huh? It don’t matter, Bern. I gotta go by the book.”

With the marathon coming up, Wally might not be that easy to get hold of. Who else could I call, Doll Cooper?

“I guess there’s no reason not to talk,” I said slowly. “Since I didn’t do anything wrong, why not clear the air?”

He smiled, looking more like a shark than ever.

First I locked the door and hung the “Back in Ten Minutes” sign in the window. I didn’t want customers to disturb us while I straightened things out with Ray, and I could use a minute or two to get my thoughts in order.

On the one hand, it was ridiculous to get mugged and printed and thrown in a holding cell for a couple of hours for a crime that I’d had nothing to do with. At the same time, I had to be careful what I said or I’d simply be swapping the Gilmartin skillet for the Nugent bonfire.

I bought myself a few extra seconds by freshening the water in Raffles’ bowl. I was tempted to feed him again while I was at it, and I don’t suppose he would have given me an argument, but he’d already had one extra meal that day. At this rate his mousing days would soon be over.

“All right,” I told Ray. “I’m ready to talk now.”

“You sure you don’t want to take a little time to rearrange the stock on your shelves?”

I ignored that. “I called Gilmartin,” I said. “I admit it.”

“Well, hallelujah.”

“But it had nothing to do with a burglary. I really have retired, Ray, whether you’re prepared to believe it or not. Look, I’d better start at the beginning.”

“Why not?”

“Carolyn and I went out after work yesterday,” I said.

“You always do,” he said. “The Bum Rap, right?”

I nodded. “I’ve been under a little pressure lately,” I said, “and I guess I let it get to me. The long and short of it is I had more to drink than I usually do.”

“Hey, it happens.”

“It does,” I agreed, “but not to me, not that often, and I wasn’t used to it. I got silly.”

“Silly?”

“You know. Playful, goofy.”

“I bet it was somethin’ to see.”

“You should have been there. Anyway, Carolyn and I spent the whole evening together. From the Bum Rap we went to an Italian restaurant for dinner, and then we went back to her place on Arbor Court. That’s where I was when I called Mr. Gilmartin.”

He nodded, as if I’d just passed some sort of test.

“I don’t know how it started,” I went on. “I was still a little drunk, I guess, and I got into this routine where I was finding funny names in the telephone book. I was picking out names and reading them aloud to Carolyn and making jokes.”

“The two of you were makin’ fun of people’s names, Bern?”

“It was mostly my doing,” I said, “and I’m not proud of it, but what can I say? It happened. Somehow or other the name Geraldine Fitzgerald came up. Remember her? She was a singer years ago.”

“Is that a fact.”

“Anyway, I said her name sounded to me like a recipe for a perfect relationship. Get it? Geraldine fits Gerald.”

“Geraldine Fitzgerald,” he said. “So?”

“Geraldine. Fits. Gerald.”

“That’s what I just said. What the hell’s supposed to be so funny about that?”

“I guess you had to be there. I couldn’t find a Geraldine Fitzgerald in the phone book, but I found a Gerald Fitzgerald, and I thought that was pretty funny.”

“Yeah, it’s a riot. Wha’d you do, call the guy up?”

A little warning bell went off. “I did,” I said, “but nobody was home. So I flipped through the phone book some more, looking for doubled names like that.”

“William Williams,” he suggested. “John Johnson.”

“Well, sort of, but the ones you just mentioned aren’t particularly funny.”

“Not real thigh-slappers like Gerald Fitzgerald.”

“I know it doesn’t seem all that amusing,” I said, “when you’re sober, but I wasn’t. Eventually I found Martin Gilmartin, and for some reason I thought that one was a real screamer. I should have known better, it was too late to call anybody, let alone a total stranger, but I picked up the phone and called him. He answered the phone, and I made some sort of joke about his name, real high-school humor, I’m ashamed to say.”

“Did he get a good chuckle out of it, Bern?”

“He seemed a little flustered, so I joked with him some more and then hung up.”

“Just like that.”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“How’d you know he and his wife went to a play?”

Jesus. “Is that where they were? I knew he was out somewhere because I tried him a few times before I finally got an answer.”

“Oh, yeah? Why’d you keep callin’?”

“Well, they make it easy these days,” I said. “Carolyn’s phone has this button that automatically redials the last number.”

“A real time-saver.”

“So when I finally got through,” I said, “I guess I said something about being glad he was home, and I hoped he’d had a good evening. You know, some kind of smartass remark. But I didn’t say anything about a play.”

He let that pass. “Gilmartin says it was after midnight when you called.”

“I would have said a few minutes before midnight,” I said, “but I’ll take his word for it. So?”

“What did you do after that? Call some more people?”

“No,” I said. “Actually completing a call made me realize what a childish thing I was doing. Besides, it was late and I was tired.”

“You stay the night at Carolyn’s?”

“No, I went home.”

“And you never left your house until morning, right?”

Uh-oh. “That’s right,” I said.

“You got home around one, musta been, and then you didn’t set foot outside your apartment until you came down here and opened up earlier today.”

“Right,” I said. And just as he was about to say something I added, “Except for going to the store.”

“When would that have been, Bernie?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t remember noticing the time. I put the TV on and watched CNN for a little while, then realized I was out of milk for the morning. I went out and got a few things from the deli. Why?”

“Just curious.”

“Well, I’m curious, too,” I said. “According to what you said, Gilmartin got off the phone with me and went looking for his comic books and his Captain Midnight decoder ring.”

“Just his baseball cards, Bern.”

“You mean he didn’t keep all his boyhood treasures in the same place? Never mind. Wherever he kept them, he looked for them and they were gone. Correct?”

“So?”

“They were gone then, right? At midnight or twelve-thirty or whenever it was, right?”

“What’s the point, Bern?”

“The point,” I said, “is that his baseball cards were already gone when I talked to him, so what possible difference could it make if I went to the deli at one or one-thirty in the morning?”

“If it don’t make no difference,” he said, “why did you have to go and lie about it?”

“Lie about it?”

“Well, what else would you call it?” He took out a pocket notebook, consulted a page. “You left your house at one-thirty. You got back at twenty minutes of six. That’s better’n four hours, Bern. Where was this deli, Riverdale?”

“I guess I must have made another stop,” I said. “On my way home from the deli.”

“And it slipped your mind until this minute.”

“No, it’s been on my mind since the questioning started, and I didn’t want to have to talk about it. I’ve been seeing someone, Ray.”

“Oh, yeah? Anybody I know?”

“No, and you’re not going to meet her, either. Look, you’re a man of the world, Ray.”