“They are?”

“The roses are spectacular.”

Oh, I thought. Wrong woman. “Patience,” I said.

“And the African violet is the sweetest thing, but I have to warn you, I have a brown thumb. I can never keep plants alive.”

“It’s supposed to help if you talk to them.”

“I know, but I never know what to say. Do you suppose this one likes poetry? I could read to it.” She sighed. “I don’t know what to say to you, either. Two nights in a row, two broken dates in a row, two different friends breaking them for you—or do you do voices, too?”

“Just Jimmy Stewart.”

“I can hardly wait. Two different excuses, first a burrito and then a burglary. Both words are on the same page of the dictionary, but of course you know that. That’s the page you break all your dates from, isn’t it?”

“Patience—”

“We could make another date,” she said, “but I’d only get a phone call advising me that you wouldn’t be able to make it because you’d been eaten by a bugbear. Or bummed out, or bumped off, or some bumptious buckaroo had burst your bubble. The roses are truly beautiful.”

“I’m glad.”

“I was feeling terribly depressed. I get that way a lot. Most poets do, it’s sort of an occupational illness. But then the flowers came and cheered me right up. So it’s hard for me to stay mad at you. Are you really a burglar?”

“I can explain,” I said.

“Whenever people say that, they can’t. But I’ll give you a chance. Tomorrow night there’s going to be a poetry reading at the Café Villanelle on Ludlow Street. Do you know where that is?”

“Sort of.”

“Two of my clients will be reading, and I promised I’d go. I may read something myself, I’m not sure. The readings scheduled to start at ten o’clock, but it’s all right to come early. It’s all right to come late, too. It’s even okay not to come at all.”

“Patience—”

“What’s not okay,” she said, “is to have any of your legion of friends call with an excuse, no matter what letter it starts with. So maybe I’ll see you tomorrow night, Bernie, and maybe I won’t.”

“You will.”

“But if you don’t come,” she said, “do me a favor. Don’t send flowers.”

“So I started off small,” he said. “Same as when I first got into real estate. You make some mistakes, but how else are you going to get the feel for what you’re doing? You have to be willing to go in there and get your feet wet. You take your medicine, you pull up your socks, and you get right back up on the horse.” He frowned, and who could blame him? “Bernie,” he said, “you don’t need to listen to all this crap.”

“It’s interesting.”

“It’s nice of you to say that, but let’s cut to the chase, huh? We can do each other some good here. Each of us has something the other wants. I’ve got a storefront I can let you have for thirty years at half the price of a rooftop pigeon coop in Bensonhurst. And we both know what you’ve got.”

“What?”

He grinned. “Marty’s baseball cards.”

“In 1950,” I told Carolyn, “the Chalmers Mustard Company got up a special promotion. Every time you bought a jar of their mustard, you got a free coupon. If you mailed it in, they sent you three baseball cards.”

“I never heard of Chalmers Mustard.”

“You didn’t grow up in Boston. Chalmers was strictly local, and I gather a major corporation acquired the company a few years ago, but back then it must have been hot stuff. If you bought a frankfurter at Fenway Park, you got Chalmers Mustard on it.”

“Unless you said, ‘Hold the mustard.’ ”

“There were forty of these cards,” I went on, “and they all showed the same player, Ted Williams, who was the one thing in Boston hotter than Chalmers Mustard. They showed him in different poses and doing different things. Mostly hitting, of course, because that was what he was so good at, but also catching fly balls and trotting around the bases, and holding his cap in his hands while they played the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ and signing autographs for little kids.”

“I think I get the idea.”

“In order to get all forty cards, you’d have had to buy a ton of mustard.”

“Fourteen jars,” she said. “And then you’d have two extras to trade for Dwight Gooden.”

“He wasn’t even born then. The thing is, you wouldn’t necessarily get different cards every time you sent in a coupon, any more than you do nowadays when you buy a pack of baseball cards at the candy store. I gather they made more of some cards than others, and the high-numbered cards weren’t distributed until late in the promotion. The idea was to make you buy as much mustard as possible.”

“Sneaky.”

“And not terribly effective, as it turned out, because kids got pretty tired of getting the same pictures of Williams every time the mailman showed up. And I guess their parents got tired of buying endless jars of mustard. There were no investors around at the time, either. So the whole thing sort of died out, with relatively few of cards #31 through #40 ever reaching the hands of collectors. That makes complete sets pretty hard to come by.”

“And very valuable, I suppose.”

“Not really,” I said, “because this was strictly a regional issue, all of it tied to a single player, so it’s not something you absolutely have to have in order to consider your collection complete. Most of the card encyclopedias don’t even list it. And the cards themselves are pretty ugly, according to Stoppelgard. The photos are all black-and-white and the printing job leaves a lot to be desired. And the series is just too long. A dozen cards devoted to one player might be interesting, but forty is too many. So the series was never popular.”

“What’s it worth?”

“Hard to say. If you want a complete set, you pretty much have to hunt around and pick it up a card or two at a time. And you have to be careful about condition, because a lot of cards were poorly printed. I pressed Stoppelgard for a number, and he said that card #40 is genuinely rare, and would probably bring a thousand dollars. The common cards in the series bring anywhere from ten to twenty dollars, and cards #31 through #39 might go for a hundred apiece.”

“So the whole set would be worth—”

“Something in the neighborhood of three thousand dollars. Pocket change, from Borden Stoppelgard’s point of view, but that’s not the point. The point is that Marty Gilmartin had the set and Stoppelgard didn’t.”

“And Stoppelgard wanted it?”

“Desperately. And Gilmartin wouldn’t sell it to him. Gilmartin didn’t give a hoot about Ted Williams, but he still insisted on holding on to the set, which struck Stoppelgard as a real dog-in-the-manger attitude.”

“So he wants you to give him the set.”

“Along with the rest of Gilmartin’s baseball cards, in return for which I get a sweetheart deal on the store lease. I wish I’d had the damn cards. I’d have done the deal in a hot second.”

“Really, Bern? I thought Gilmartin’s collection was worth a million dollars.”

“That’s according to Gilmartin. It’s only insured for half that, which means the insurance company would probably pay twenty or twenty-five percent of half a million to avoid having to pay the claim. If I let Ray be the go-between, he’d wind up with half, so what would that leave me? Fifty, sixty thousand dollars?”

“If you say so.”

“I might do better fencing the cards myself,” I said. “That might boost the take up into the low six figures. Well, as Stoppelgard pointed out, the new lease would be worth almost that much to me in the first year. You bet I’d have taken the deal.”

“I don’t suppose he believed you when you told him you didn’t have the cards.”

“I’m not sure.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t even think he cared,” I said. “If I want to extend my lease, all I have to do is bring him half a million dollars’ worth of baseball cards. It doesn’t matter to him if they’re Marty’s cards. It doesn’t even matter if the Chalmers Mustard set is part of the package, although that would certainly be a sweetener. But he doesn’t care where they come from, and I don’t suppose he really cares if they’re baseball cards. He’d settle for Sue Grafton first editions if they added up to half a mil. You know what Scott Fitzgerald said.”