The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

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It was around a quarter to five on a Wednesday afternoon in October when I marked my place in the Fredric Brown paperback I’d spent much of the day reading. I tucked it in my back pocket, then went outside and retrieved my table of bargain books from the sidewalk. This was a good fifteen minutes earlier than usual, but when you’re the store owner you can do this sort of thing on a whim. That’s one of the nice things about being an independent antiquarian bookseller, and there are days when it seems like the only nice thing.

This was one of them.

I typically start to shut down for the day around five, and usually manage to clear the last customer from the premises by five-thirty. Then I do what tidying up needs to be done, freshen Raffles’s water dish and put some dry food in his bowl, draw the steel window gates shut, and lock up. The Bum Rap, where Carolyn and I have a standing appointment with a bottle of scotch, is just around the corner at Broadway and East Tenth Street. It’s a five-minute walk, and I generally cross the threshold within a few minutes of six o’clock.

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