The Burglar In The Closet (22 page)

"Well, the lawyer just grabbed that attache case and took off. When he got home and opened it he found a ton of jewelry all rolled up in enough linen to keep it from rattling around. It wasn't what he'd wanted and it was too hot for him to unload it easily, but at least he had the fifty grand in cash free and clear and he could probably raise close to that much again on the jewelry when it was safe to show it around.

"Maybe he even planned to go back and take another shot at the counterfeit money. But Knobby Corcoran didn't give him the chance. Knobby switched shifts with the other bartender the day after Crystal was murdered, and he was the one who broke the police seals on her door and gave her apartment a second run-through. Maybe he knew where to look, maybe she'd said something like 'Don't worry, it's all here on a shelf in my closet.' Because he broke in and went home with the counterfeit money and tucked it away on the shelf in
his
closet."

"How do you know that, Mr. Rhodenbarr?"

"Simple. That's where I found it."

"That's where you-"

"Found the case full of counterfeit twenties. How else would I know about them? I left them there to keep from rattling Knobby."

Jillian knew better. I'd told her something about stowing the funny twenties in the bus locker and hoped she wouldn't pick this time to remember what I'd said. But she had something else on her mind.

"The scalpel," she said. "The lawyer killed Crystal with one of our dental scalpels."

"Right."

"Then he must have been a patient."

"A lawyer named John," Craig said. "What lawyers do we have as patients?" He frowned and scratched his head. "There's lots of lawyers," he said, "and John's not the scarcest name in the world, but-"

"It wouldn't have to be a patient," I said. "Try it this way. Crystal's been to Grabow's loft on King Street. She saw the dental instruments he used for his printmaking work and recognized them as the same line Craig stocks. That was a coincidence and she happened to mention it to the lawyer. And that made his choice of a murder weapon the simplest thing in the world. He'd use one of the dental implements. It would point to Craig, and if Craig somehow managed to get out from under, he could always find a way to steer the cops toward Grabow."

I'd been pacing around. Now I went over and sat on the edge of Marion the Receptionist's desk. "His plan was a pretty good one," I said. "There was just one thing to screw it up and that was me."

"You, Bern?"

"Right," I told Craig. "Me. The cops had you in a cell and you were looking for a way out, and you decided to throw them your old buddy Bernie."

"Bern, what choice did I have?" I looked at him. "Besides," he said, "I knew
I
hadn't killed Crystal, and if you were in her apartment, and one of my scalpels, hell, it started looking as though you were trying to frame
me,
and-"

"Forget it," I said. "You were looking for a way out and you took it. And Knobby broke into the apartment and snatched the counterfeit money, and that break-in made it obvious there was more going on than a simple case of a man killing his ex-wife. The lawyer saw that he had to move quickly. There were loose threads around and he had to tie them off, because if the police ever really checked into Crystal's background his role in the whole affair might start to become evident.

"And he was worried about Grabow. Maybe the two of them had met. Maybe Grabow knew about the lawyer's relationship with Crystal, or maybe the lawyer didn't know for certain just how much talking Crystal might have done. For one reason or another, Grabow was a threat. And Grabow himself was nervous when I saw him. Maybe he got in touch with the lawyer. Anyway, he had to go, and the lawyer decided he might as well kill Grabow and tighten the frame around me at the same time. He managed somehow to get the artist over to my apartment, killed him with another of those goddamned dental scalpels, and planted a couple of pieces of Crystal's jewelry there to tie it all together for the police. Now why I would kill Grabow in the first place, and why I would kill him with a dental scalpel in my own apartment, and why I would then leave Crystal's jewels around, that was all beside the point. It might not make any absolute sense but it would certainly make the police put out a pick-up order on me, and of course that's what they did." I drew a breath, looked at each of them in turn, Jillian and Craig and Carson Verrill. "And that's where we are," I said, "and that's why we're here."

The silence built up rather nicely. Finally Verrill broke it. He cleared his throat. "You see the problem," he said. "You've developed a convincing case against this nameless attorney. But you don't know who he is and I gather it's not going to be terribly easy to track him down. You mentioned a woman, a friend of Crystal Sheldrake's?"

"Frankie Ackerman."

"But did you say she killed herself?"

"She died mixing alcohol and Valium. It could have been an accident or it could have been suicide. She'd been brooding about Crystal and something was on her mind. It's not impossible that she got in touch with the lawyer directly. Maybe he fed her the booze and pills as part of his process of tying off loose ends."

"That sounds a little farfetched, doesn't it?"

"A little," I admitted. "But either way she's dead."

"Exactly. And a chance to identify this lawyer seems to have died with her. Now this bartender. Corcoran? Is that his name?"

"Knobby Corcoran."

"And he has the counterfeit money?"

"He had it the last I saw of it, but that was yesterday evening. I'd guess he still has it and I'd guess he and the money are a long ways from here. After he closed the bar last night he went home and grabbed a suitcase and left town. I don't think he'll be back. Either all the killings scared him or he'd been planning all along to cross his mob associates. He was living on tips and leavings and maybe the sight of all that money was too much for him. Remember, it looked like a quarter of a million bucks, even if you could only get twenty cents on the dollar for it. I'll bet Knobby took a cab to Kennedy and a plane to someplace warm, and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of counterfeit twenties turn up in the West Indies between now and next spring."

Verrill nodded, frowning. "Then you don't really have anything to work with," he said slowly. "You don't have any leads to the identity of this lawyer and you don't know who he is."

"Well, that's not exactly true."

"Oh?"

"I know who he is."

"Really?"

"And I've even got some proof."

"Indeed."

I got up from the desk, opened the frosted glass door, motioned Dennis inside. "This is Dennis," I announced. "He knew Crystal pretty well and he was a good friend of Frankie Ackerman."

"She was a hell of a fine woman," Dennis said.

"Dennis, that's Jillian Paar. And this is Dr. Craig Sheldrake, and Mr. Carson Verrill."

"A pleasure," he said to Jillian. "Pleasure, Doc," he said to Craig. And he smiled at Verrill.

To me-to all of us-he said, "That's him."

"Huh?"

"That's him," he said again, pointing now at Carson Verrill. "That's Crystal's boyfriend. That's the Legal Beagle. That's Johnny, all right."

Verrill broke the silence. It took him a while to do it, and first he got up from the chair and extended himself to his full height, and when he spoke the words were on the anticlimactic side.

"This is ridiculous," he said.

What I said wasn't much better. "Murder," I said, "is always ridiculous." I'm not proud of it but that's what I said.

"Ridiculous, Rhodenbarr. Who is this oaf and where did you find him?"

"His name's Dennis. He runs a parking garage."

"I don't just run it. I happen to own it."

"He happens to own it," I said.

"I think he's been drinking. And I think you've taken leave of your senses, Rhodenbarr. First you try to manipulate me into defending you and now you accuse me of murder."

"It does seem inconsistent," I allowed. "I guess I don't want you defending me after all. But I won't need anybody to defend me. You just have to confess to the two murders and the police'll probably drop their charges against me."

"You must be out of your mind."

"I should be, with the kind of week I've had. But I'm not."

"Out of your mind. In the first place, my name's not John. Or hasn't that occurred to you?"

"It was a problem," I admitted. "When I first expected you I wondered if maybe your name was John Carson Verrill and you dropped the John. No such luck. Carson's your first name, all right, and your middle name is Woolford. Carson Woolford Verrill, the man with three last names. But you're the man Frankie Ackerman was talking about. It's pretty obvious, when you stop to think about it."

"I don't follow you, Bernie." Jillian did look puzzled, all right. "If his name is Carson-"

I said, "'And now, heeeeeeeere's Johnny.' Johnny
Who,
Jillian?"

"Oh!"

"Right. There's millions of people named John, it's hardly a rare enough name to make Frankie go into Ed McMahon's routine every time she met somebody with the name. But Carson, that's something else again. That's not so common as a first name, and maybe it struck Frankie funny."

"Ridiculous," Verrill said. "I'm a respectable married man. I love my wife and I've always been faithful to her. I was never involved with Crystal."

"You're not that respectable," Jillian said. "You flirt."

"Nonsense."

"You'd have made a pass at me last night. You were sort of moving in that direction. But I wasn't interested and you backed off."

"That's absurd."

"You knew Crystal years ago," I said. "You knew her when she was married to Craig. That's right, isn't it?"

Craig confirmed that it was. "Carson represented me in my divorce," he said. "Hey, maybe that's why I got such a reaming in the alimony. Maybe my trusted attorney was already hopping in the sack with my wife and the two of them teamed up to put me through the wringer." The World's Greatest Dentist let that thought sink in, and his face took on a new set. Murder was one thing, he seemed to be thinking, but shafting a pal in the alimony department was really rotten. "You sonofabitch," he said.

"Craig, you can't believe-"

"I wish I had you in the chair right now. I'd grind your teeth clear to the gum line."

"Craig-"

"You'll have free dental care for the next few years, Mr. Verrill," I said. "Those penitentiary dentists are terrific. You're in for a treat."

He turned on me, and if those weren't a killer's eyes then seeing's not believing. "You're out of your mind," he said. "You have a lot of theories and nothing else. You don't have any proof."

"That's what the bad guy always says in the movies," I said. "That's when you know he's really guilty, when he starts talking about the lack of proof."

"You've got the prattling of a convicted burglar and a drunken car parker. That's all you've got."

"What's this car-parker crap? I don't park the cars. I own the garage."

"But as for hard evidence-"

"Well, it's a funny thing about evidence," I said. "You usually find it when you know what to look for. When the police start showing your photo around it's going to turn out that more people saw you with Crystal than you ever realized. You found a way to get past my doorman last night, and that couldn't have been the hardest thing in the world, but he or someone else in the building will probably remember you. And then there's the jewelry. You didn't plant all of Crystal's stuff at my place because you're too damned greedy for that. Where's the rest of it? Your apartment? A safe-deposit box?"

"They won't find any jewelry."

"You sound pretty confident. I guess you found a safe place for it."

"I never took any jewelry. I don't know what you're talking about."

"Well, there's the counterfeit money. That ought to be enough to hang you."

"What counterfeit money?"

"The twenties."

"Ah, the elusive twenties." He arched an eyebrow at me. "I thought we were to understand that the equally elusive Knobby headed south with them."

"That's what he must have done. But I've got a hunch there was a sample batch that Grabow ran off in advance, because I've got the damnedest feeling there's a couple thousand dollars' worth of those phony bills in your office."

"In my office?"

"On Vesey Street. It's funny how deserted the downtown section is on a Sunday. It's as if a neutron bomb got rid of all the people and just left the buildings standing there. I've got a strong hunch there's a thick stack of twenties in the center drawer of your desk, and I'll bet they're a perfect match to the plates in Walter Grabow's loft."

He took a step toward me, then drew back. "My office," he said.

"Uh-huh. Nice place you've got there, incidentally. No view of the park like Craig has, of course, but you can see a little of the harbor from the one window, and that's something."