The Burglar In The Closet (7 page)

What it came down to was that there were far too many ways that I could wind up in trouble.

And there was the fact that I liked Craig Sheldrake. When you are a patient of the World's Greatest Dentist you don't readily give him up and walk in off the street to any clown with a sign in his window advertising painless extractions. The man was taking good care of my mouth and I wanted him to carry on.

And Jillian was certainly a charming young lady. And it was much nicer to be called
Bernie
by her than
Mr. Rhodenbarr,
which had always struck me as overly formal. And her fingers did have that nice spicy taste to them, and it seemed reasonable to assume that this was characteristic of more of her than her fingers alone. Jillian was Craig's personal love interest, of course, and that was fine with me, and I had no intention of horning hornily in on another chap's romance. That's not my style. I only steal cash and inanimate objects. All the same, one needn't have designs on a young lady to find her company enjoyable. And if Craig should prove to be guilty, Jillian would be out of a job and a lover just as I would be out of a dentist, and there was no reason for us to do other than console each other.

But why build sand castles? Some evil bastard had not stopped at killing Crystal Sheldrake. He'd gone on to steal jewels I'd already stolen.

And I intended to make him pay for that.

Chapter Five

"You're fantastic, Bernie."

I must admit I'd had fantasies in which Jillian spoke those very words to me, and in approximately that tone of voice, but I hadn't been hanging up a telephone when it happened. I'd planned on being in a horizontal position at the time. Instead I was vertical, and I was replacing the receiver of the phone that perched on the desk of Marian the Receptionist. Marian was out for the day. Craig Sheldrake, on the other hand, was not. He was still behind bars-which was what my phone conversation had just determined.

A few other calls had revealed a few other things. Craig's regular attorney was a man by the name of Carson Verrill, with offices somewhere downtown. Verrill had engaged a criminal lawyer named Errol Blankenship to represent Craig in this particular matter. (The choice of phrasing was that of someone in Verrill's office.) Blankenship had an office listed in the phone book on Madison Avenue in the thirties. I tried his phone and no one answered it. If he had a home phone, either his home was outside of Manhattan or the number was unlisted. I let it go. I figured he was in court or something and his secretary had decided to celebrate by taking a long lunch hour.

Craig had been arrested in his own Upper East Side apartment around six-thirty in the morning. Not many good things happen at that time of day and being arrested certainly isn't one of them. They'd let him shave and change from his pajamas into something more suitable for street wear. I hoped he'd known to wear loafers, but how many straight-arrow citizens would think of that? They don't always take your shoelaces away from you in jail, but periodically some Yo-Yo decides you look like the suicidal sort, and there you are clumping around with your shoes falling off your feet.

Well, probably that was the least of his worries.

He was in a cell now in a hostile building downtown on Centre Street. I don't suppose he was happy about it. I've never known anyone who was. I'd asked if he could have visitors and the person I talked to didn't seem to be the voice of authority on the subject. He said he thought so, but why didn't I drop around and make sure? Whatever the ruling, the last thing I wanted to do was drop around that grim establishment myself. My previous visits had not been the sort to make me anxious to return for old times' sake.

"You're fantastic, Bernie."

Actually, she didn't say it again. I'm repeating it so as to preserve the thread of this narrative. What I said in reply was that she shouldn't be silly, that I was not fantastic, and even if I did happen to be moderately sensational in certain unspecified other areas, nevertheless I'd done nothing remarkable in her presence. Yet.

"You could have made the same calls and found out the same information," I said. "You just don't have experience with this sort of thing."

"I wouldn't have had any idea what to do."

"You could have figured it out."

"And I would have gotten all rattled on the phone. I sometimes get terribly nervous. I'm not very good at talking to people. Sometimes I think there's too much silence when I'm working on a patient. They can't talk, obviously, and I just can't manage to open my mouth."

"Believe me, it's a release after Craig does his Motormouth number."

She giggled. It was a charming giggle, which surprised me about as much as that the sun had picked the east to rise in that morning. "He does talk a lot," she acknowledged, as if painfully admitting that the Liberty Bell had a crack in it. "But that's only with patients. When he's alone he's very shy and quiet."

"Well, I wouldn't expect him to talk to himself."

"Pardon me?"

"Everybody's quiet when they're alone."

She thought about it, then blushed prettily. I'd come to think of that as a lost art. "I meant he's quiet when he's alone with me."

"I knew what you meant."

"Oh."

"I was being a smart-ass. Sorry."

"Oh, that's all right. I just-my mind's not working too brilliantly this morning. I wonder what I should do. Do you think I can go see Craig?"

"I don't know whether or not he can have visitors. You could go down there and find out, but I think it would be a good idea for us to learn a little more about what's going on first. If we had a better idea of just how good a case they've got against Craig, we might be in a better position to figure out what to do next."

"Do you think they've got a good case?"

I shrugged. "Hard to say. It would help if he has an alibi for last night, but I guess if he had a good one he'd be back on the street by now. I, uh, gather he wasn't with you?"

She blushed again. I guess there was no avoiding it. "No," she said. "We had dinner together last night but then we each had some things to do so we went our separate ways. I guess it was about nine o'clock that I saw him last. I went home and so did he."

"Uh-huh."

"Oh!" She brightened. "I talked to him before I went to bed. It was during the Carson show, I remember that. It wasn't much of a conversation, we just said goodnight to each other, but he was home then. Would that help give him an alibi?"

"Did you call him?"

"He called me."

"Then it wouldn't help his alibi a whole lot. You've only got his word as to where he was when he called you. And the police are likely to take the position that a murderer wouldn't draw the line at lying to a pretty lady."

She started to say something, then gnawed a little scarlet lipstick from her lower lip. It was a becoming shade and a most attractive lower lip. I wouldn't have minded gnawing it myself.

"Bernie? You don't think he did it, do you?"

"I'm pretty certain he didn't."

"Why?"

I had a reason but I preferred to keep it to myself. "Because of the kind of guy he is," I said instead, and that was evidently just what she wanted to hear. She started enlarging on the topic of Craig Sheldrake, World's Greatest Guy, and I'll be damned if she didn't make him sound like someone I'd have really liked to meet.

I decided to change the subject. "The fact that we know he's innocent doesn't do him much good," I said, by way of transition. "The cops have to know he's innocent, and the easiest way for that to happen is if they've got someone else they know is guilty. Unless you're on the Orient Express, one murderer per corpse is all anybody could possibly ask for."

"Do you mean we should try to solve the crime ourselves?"

Did I? "Well, I wouldn't go that far," I said, backpedaling. "But I wish I knew more than I do. I'd like to know just when the murder was committed, and I'd like to know what men Crystal was involved with lately, and where all of them were when somebody was busy killing her. And I'd like to know if anybody had a particularly strong reason for wanting her dead. Craig had a ton of reasons, and you and I know that and so does the long arm of the law, but a woman who led as active a life as Crystal Sheldrake did must have made a few enemies along the way. Maybe some lover of hers had a jealous wife or girlfriend. There's a whole world of possibilities out there and I hardly know where we should start."

She looked at me. "I'm so glad I called you, Bernie."

"Well, I don't know how much help I can really be-"

"I'm really so glad." Her eyes did a little number, and then suddenly her forehead crinkled up and her gaze narrowed. "I just thought of something," she said. "You were going to burglarize Crystal 's apartment on Saturday night, weren't you? Imagine if the killer had picked that time to strike!"

Let's imagine no such thing, Jillian. "But Crystal was home last night," I reminded her, carefully shifting her gears and pointing her in a safer direction. "I would never have gone in if she was home."

"Oh. Of course. I just thought-"

Whatever she just thought will be forever unrecorded because she didn't get to the end of the sentence. There was a brisk rat-tat-tat, a loud knock on the clouded glass panel of the outer door. "Open up in there," said a professionally authoritative voice. And added, quite unnecessarily in my opinion, "It's the police."

Jillian blanched.

I, in turn, did the only possible thing under the circumstances. Without the slightest hesitation I grabbed her by the shoulders, drew her close, and brought our mouths together in a passionate embrace.

The knock was repeated.

Well, what the hell. So was the kiss.

Chapter Six

I don't know if Jillian was nonplussed, but she certainly wasn't plussed. Her face held an expression somewhere between bemusement and astonishment, with pronounced overtones of shock. Have I mentioned her eyes? They were the faded blue of well-washed denim, and they were large, and I had never seen them larger.

Rat-tat-tat.

"Bernie!"

"Police. Open up there."

I was still gripping her shoulders. "I'm your boyfriend," I whispered urgently. "You're not Craig's girl, you're my girl, and that's why you happened to ask me to drop over, and we've been doing a little innocent smooching."

Her mouth made an O, her eyes showed instant comprehension, and her head bobbed in affirmation. Even as I was pointing at the door she was moving toward it. I snatched a Kleenex from the box on Marian's desk, and as the door opened to reveal a pair of plainclothes cops, I was in the process of dabbing at Jillian's scarlet lipstick.

"Sorry to interrupt you," said the taller of the two. He had bigger shoulders than most people, and very widely spaced eyes, as if while in the womb he'd toyed with the idea of becoming Siamese twins and decided against it at the last minute. He did not sound at all sorry to interrupt us.

"We're police," the other one said. During the July blackout someone said
"Dark out, isn't it?"
That was as unnecessary a sentence as I've ever heard uttered, and
"We're police"
came a close second.

For one thing, they'd told us as much through the locked door. For another, they damn well looked the part. The shorter one was slender rather than broad. He had black curly hair and a small, inexpertly trimmed black mustache, and no Hollywood casting director would pick him for a cop. He looked more like the member of the gang who turns stool pigeon in the second-to-last reel. But standing there in front of us he looked like a cop and so did the one with all the shoulders. Maybe it's the stance, maybe it's the facial expression, maybe it's just some aspect of the inner self they manage to project, but cops all look like cops.

This pair introduced themselves. The block of granite was Todras, the stoat was Nyswander. Todras was a detective and Nyswander was a patrolman, and if they had first names they were keeping them a secret. We furnished our names, first and last, and Todras asked Jillian to spell her first name. She did, and Nyswander wrote all this down in a little dog-eared notebook. Todras asked Jillian what people called her for short and she said they didn't.

"Well, it's just routine," Todras said. He seemed to be the natural leader of the two, the offensive guard clearing a path for Nyswander to weasel through. "I guess you heard about your boss, Miss Paar."

"There was something on the radio."

"Yeah, well, I'm afraid he's gonna have his hands full for a while now. You got the office closed up, I see. You call around and cancel his appointments yet?"

"For the rest of the day."

The two of them exchanged glances. "Maybe you should cancel them for the rest of the month," Nyswander suggested.

"Or the rest of the year."

"Yeah, because it really looks as though he stepped in it this time."

"Maybe you better close the office for good," Todras said.