Page 52 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
“Pawn shops are full of stolen typewriters. They’re easy to grab, hard to identify as stolen.” It isn’t even the first time Patrick’s had a typewriter stolen.
“Hmm,” Nathaniel says, sounding skeptical.
Patrick doesn’t know what there is to be skeptical about. It’s a straightforward burglary, textbook in every way. The thieves grabbed whatever was portable and valuable, including some books—putting something in a glass case is a great way to let the world know that it’s worth something.
Patrick calls Mrs. Kaplan, then calls the police, because they’ll need a police report to collect on their insurance policy. She gives him the name of a glazier to fix the front window and the glass case.
“What happened here?” Susan asks when she comes down.
“We had a break-in,” Patrick says. “Just the shop, not the apartment.”
When he tells the Valdezes there was a break-in, they seem wildly unconcerned. They’ve lived in New York a lot longer than he has. Mr. Valdez shows him the police lock he has on the door, a metal pole that fits into the floor. Patrick always thought this was paranoid, but then again he’s always had doors too flimsy for that kind of system to make sense. The door to Susan’s apartment is solid wood. He calls a locksmith right away.
Mrs. Kaplan gets there at the same time as the police. The cops take some pictures, act suspicious, complain about junkies, and leave before it’s even noon.
“Thank you,” Patrick tells Mrs. Kaplan. She didn’t have to drive out here during rush hour to talk to the cops, when that’s rightfully Patrick’s responsibility.
“Nonsense. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to deal with the police. There was a rock through the window in 1922, some teenage hooligans in 1938, and a hold-up in—it must have been ‘56 or ‘57, because Abe was gone and you weren’t around yet.”
Patrick has already heard all those stories, but he’d bet that Mrs. Kaplan really came because she knows Patrick doesn’t like cops. Nobody with a record wants to talk to cops. It doesn’t matter that Patrick’s rap sheet consists of one count ofdisorderly conduct—that’s what they charge everyone with who gets caught in a raid—and not anything to do with theft.
“Now,” Mrs. Kaplan says, “somebody ought to tell Nathaniel that the coast is clear.” Nathaniel made himself scarce as soon as the cops arrived. That’s definitely something that Patrick ought to be worried about, but he has enough to worry about right now—that first edition ofManhattan Transferhe bought from Gary was in the glass case, and the loss makes Patrick’s skin crawl.
He’d been waiting for a chance to get Mrs. Kaplan alone to ask her where she found Nathaniel, but right now he doesn’t care. Nathaniel can keep his damn secrets; they aren’t hurting anybody. And maybe Patrick doesn’t want to know.
“I’ll get him,” Susan says. “He’s in my apartment.”
“I’ll drive you back home,” Patrick offers Mrs. Kaplan.
“I’ll drive myself later on. You look like you’d break the steering wheel in two, and you have enough to do,” she says, gesturing at the mess in the store. “Don’t you have anything to drink around here?”
“It’s barely noon.”
“Put it in your coffee,” Mrs. Kaplan says.
“I’ll bring down the Ballantine’s!” Susan shouts from the stairs.
It’s going to take the rest of the day to get the books back on the right shelves. There isn’t any point in opening, but Nathaniel goes to the Italian bakery anyway and comes back with three big white cardboard boxes filled with pastries; he also comes back looking only the slightest bit shaken, even though he went by himself. Patrick watches him take some dishes out of the kitchen and arrange them on the table by the door, alongside the coffeepot and the cups and that stupid porcelain milk pitcher.
“I wanted something nice,” Nathaniel says by way of explanation. That apparently means spending too much moneyon snacks for customers who won’t even buy anything, because the merchandise is mostly all over the floor.
Susan puts on some Motown. Nathaniel takes out the broom and borrows an extra dustpan from the dry cleaners across the street. Patrick puts the open bottle of Ballantine’s next to the coffee and pastries, figuring that anyone who makes it that far into the store deserves it. The weather’s warm enough that the breeze through the broken window is kind of nice.
It’s the summer, so there’s more foot traffic than usual, even on a weekday. Some people look in, see chaos, and beat a hasty retreat. But a lot of regulars stay longer. After they help themselves to coffee and a pastry and gasp and cluck about the break-in, most of them shelve some books. Jerome comes by in street clothes but with the makeup only partly scraped off his face, clearly on his way home from wherever he spent the night. “Poor darling,” he says, apparently to the store itself, and shelves all the nineteenth-century French novels.
Beverly, aTimesreporter a few years older than Patrick and Susan, comes in wearing a three-piece suit that has to be sweltering on such a warm day, but she stays long enough to weed out some of the more damaged books and stack them off to the side.
Viv is on the verge of tears to see the shop in such a state. “I came in to ask if you had a bulletin board, but you have your hands full.”
“We do have a bulletin board,” Nathaniel tells her, and points to the wall behind the cash register. Right now, the bulletin board has a single piece of yellowed paper tacked to it, reading “NO RETURNS” in Patrick’s handwriting; it’s been there for so long that the edges are starting to curl. The bulletin board isn’t a community message board. Except, apparently it is, because Nathaniel tacks up a note saying a 45-year-old woman is lookingfor a roommate, written in a slanting blue copperplate that must be Viv’s handwriting.
John, a distractingly handsome square-jawed twentysomething who really isn’t Patrick’s type, but probably could be for an hour or two, comes in that afternoon. “Oh no,” he says. “What happened?”
“We had a break-in,” Patrick says. He thought that much was obvious. They didn’t have a localized earthquake.
John puts a few books away. Nathaniel reshelves every one of them.
“I’m trying to figure out who’s less subtle, Nathaniel or Captain America over there.” Susan asks.
