The Burglar In The Closet (9 page)

"I just can't believe it," she was saying. She reached out her hand to touch the scalpel, then drew back at the last moment, her fingertips just avoiding contact with the bright metal. Todras smiled fiercely and returned the scalpel to his pocket, while Nyswander drew a manila envelope from his inside jacket pocket and commenced selecting other dental scalpels from a tray of implements. He put four or five of them into the envelope, licked the flap, sealed it, and wrote something on its outside.

Jillian asked him what he was doing. "Evidence," he said.

"The D.A.'ll want to show how the doc's got other scalpels the same size and shape as the murder weapon. You get a good look at it, Miss Paar? Maybe there's something about it, some nick or scratch you'll recognize."

"I saw it. I can't identify it, if that's what you mean. They all look alike."

"Might notice something if you give it a close look. Todras, let Miss Paar here have another look at it, huh?"

Jillian didn't much want to look at it. But she forced herself, and after a careful glance announced that there was nothing specifically familiar about the instrument, that it seemed identical to ones they used in the office. But, she added, dentists all over the country used Celniker tools, they were very common, and a search of the offices of dentists throughout New York would turn up thousands of them.

Nyswander said he was sure that was true but that only one dentist had a clear motive for killing Crystal Sheldrake.

"But he cared for her," she said. "He was hoping to get back together with her again. I don't think he ever stopped loving her."

The cops looked at each other, and I couldn't say I blamed them. I don't know what had prompted her to start off in this direction but the cops dutifully followed it up, questioning her about this desire of Craig's for a reconciliation. Then, after she'd improvised reasonably well, Todras took the wind out of her sails by explaining that this just furnished Craig with yet another motive for murder. "He wanted to get back together," he said, "and she spurned him, so he killed her out of love."

"'Each man kills the thing he loves,'" Nyswander quoted. "'By each let this be heard. The coward does it with a kiss. The brave man with a sword.' And the dentist with a scalpel."

"Pretty," Todras said.

"That's Oscar Wilde."

"I like it."

"Except that part about a dentist doing it with a scalpel. Oscar Wilde never said that."

"No kidding."

"I just put that in on my own."

"No kidding."

"'Cause it seemed to fit."

"No kidding."

I thought Jillian was going to scream. Her hands had knotted themselves into little fists. Just hang in there, I wanted to tell her, because this comedy routine of theirs takes their minds off more important things, and in a minute they'll bow and scrape themselves offstage and out of our lives, and then we can work up an act of our own.

But I guess she wasn't listening.

"Wait a minute!"

They turned and stared at her.

"Just one damn minute! How do I know you actually brought that thing with you? That scalpel? I never saw you take it out of your pocket. Maybe you picked it up off a tray while I was looking the other way. Maybe all those things you hear about police corruption are true. Framing people and tampering with evidence and-"

They were still staring at her and at about this point she just ran out of words. Not, I'd say, a moment too soon. I wished, not for the first time in my life, that there were a way to stop the celestial tape recorder of existence, rewind it a bit, and lay down a substitute track for the most recent past.

But you can't do that, as Omar Khayyam explained long before tape recorders. The moving finger writes and all, and dear little Jillian had just gone and given us the moving finger, all right.

"This dental scalpel," said Todras, showing it to us yet again. "This particular one wasn't found in the chest of Crystal Sheldrake, as a matter of fact. Rules of evidence and everything, we don't ever carry murder weapons around with us. The actual scalpel that snuffed the lady, it's in the lab right now with a tag on it while the men in the white smocks check blood types and do all the things they do."

Jillian didn't say anything.

"The scalpel my partner's showing you," Nyswander put in, "was picked up on the way here when we stopped at Celniker Dental and Optical Supply. It's an exact twin of the murder weapon and useful for us to carry around in the course of our investigation. That's why my partner can keep it in his pocket and take it out when the spirit moves him. It's not evidence so there's no way he can be tampering with it."

Todras, grinning furiously, made the scalpel disappear again. "Just for curiosity," he said, "maybe you'd like to tell us how you spent the evening, Miss Paar."

"How I-"

"What did you do last night? Unless you can't remember."

"Last night," Jillian said. She blinked, gnawed her lip, looked beseechingly at me. "I had dinner," she said.

"Alone?"

"With me," I put in. "You're writing this down? Why? Jillian's not a suspect, is she? I thought you had an open-and-shut case against Dr. Sheldrake."

"We do," said Todras.

"It's just routine," Nyswander added. His weasel face looked craftier than ever. "So you had dinner together?"

"Right. Honey, what was the name of that restaurant?"

"Belevedere's. But-"

"Belvedere's. Right. We must have been there until nine o'clock or thereabouts."

"And then I suppose you spent a quiet evening at home?"

"Jillian did," I said. "I headed on over to the Garden myself and watched the fights. They already started by the time I got there but I saw three or four prelim bouts and the main event. Jillian doesn't care for boxing."

"I don't like violence," Jillian said.

Todras seemed to approach me without actually moving. "I suppose," he said, "you can prove you were at the fights."

"Prove it? Why do I have to prove it?"

"Oh, just routine, Mr. Rhodenbarr. I suppose you went with a friend."

"No, I went alone."

"That a fact? But you most likely ran into somebody you knew."

I thought about it. "Well, the usual ringside crowd was there. The pimps and the dope dealers and the sports crowd. But I'm just a fan, I don't actually know any of those people except to recognize them when I see them."

"Uh-huh."

"The fellow who sat next to me, we were talking about the fighters and all, but I don't know his name and I don't even know if I'd recognize him again."

"Uh-huh."

"Anyway, why would I have to prove where I was?"

"Just routine," Nyswander said. "Then you can't-"

"Oh,"
I said brightly. "Hell. I wonder if I have my ticket stub. I don't remember throwing it out." I looked at Jillian. "Was I wearing this jacket last night? You know, I think I was. I probably dropped the stub in the garbage, or when I was cleaning out my pockets before I went to bed. Maybe it's in a wastebasket at my apartment. I don't suppose-oh, here's something."

And, amazingly enough, I showed Nyswander an orange stub from last night's fight card at Madison Square Garden. He eyed it sullenly before passing it to Todras who didn't seem any happier to see it, his smile notwithstanding.

The ticket stub cooled things. They didn't suspect us of anything, they knew they already had the murderer in a cell, but Jillian had irritated them and they were getting a little of their own back. They returned to a less intimidating line of questioning, just rounding out things in their notebooks before moving on. I could relax now, except that you can't relax until they're out the door and gone, and they were in the process of going when Todras raised a big hand, placed it atop his big head, and scratched diligently.

"Rhodenbarr," he said. "Bernard Rhodenbarr. Now where in the hell have I heard that name before?"

"Gee," I said, "I don't know."

"What's your line of work, Bernie?"

A warning bell sounded. When they start calling you by your first name it means they've pegged you as a criminal. As long as you're a citizen in their eyes it's always Mr. Rhodenbarr, but when they call you Bernie it's time to watch out. I don't think Todras even knew what he'd said, but I heard him, and the ice was getting very thin out there.

"I'm in investments," I said. "Mutual funds, open-end real-estate trusts. Estate planning, that's the real focus of what I do."

"That a fact. Rhodenbarr, Rhodenbarr. I know that name."

"I don't know where from," I said. "Unless you grew up in the Bronx."

"How'd you know that?"

By your accent, I thought. Anybody who sounds like Penny Marshall in
Laverne and Shirley
could have grown up nowhere else. But I said, "What high school?"

"Why?"

"What school?"

"James Monroe. Why?"

"Then that explains it. Freshman English. Don't you remember Miss Rhodenbarr? Maybe she's the one who had you reading Oscar Wilde."

"She's an English teacher?"

"She was. She passed on-oh, I don't know exactly how many years ago. Little old lady with iron-gray hair and perfect posture."

"Relative of yours?"

"My dad's sister. Aunt Peg, but she'd have been Miss Margaret Rhodenbarr as far as her students were concerned."

"Margaret Rhodenbarr."

"That's right."

He opened his notebook, and for a moment I thought he was going to write down my aunt's name, but he wound up shrugging his great shoulders and putting the book away. "Must be it," he said. "A name like that, it's distinctive, you know? Sticks in the mind and rings a bell. Maybe I wasn't in her class myself but I just have a recollection of the name."

"That's probably it."

"It woulda come to me," he said, holding the door for Nyswander. "Memory's a funny thing. You just let it find its own path and things come to you sooner or later."

Chapter Seven

Jillian and I left the office together ten or fifteen minutes after Todras and Nyswander. We joined the lunch crowd at a coffee shop around the corner on Seventh Avenue. We had coffee and grilled-cheese sandwiches, and I wound up eating half of her sandwich along with my own.

"Crystal Sheldrake," I said between bites. "What do we know about her?"

"She's dead."

"Beside that. She was Craig's ex-wife and somebody killed her, but what else do we know about her?"

"What difference does it make, Bernie?"

"Well, she was killed for a reason," I said. "If we knew the reason we might have a shot at figuring out who did it."

"Are we going to solve the murder?"

I shrugged. "It's something to do."

But Jillian insisted it was exciting, and her blue eyes danced at the prospect. She decided we would be Nick and Nora Charles, or possibly Mr. and Mrs. North, two pairs of sleuths she had a tendency to confuse. She wanted to know how we would get started and I turned the conversation back to Crystal.

"She was a tramp, Bernie. Anybody could have killed her."

"We only have Craig's word that she was a tramp. Men tend to have strict standards when it comes to their ex-wives."

"She hung out in bars and picked up men. Maybe one of them turned out to be a homicidal maniac."

"And he just happened to have a dental scalpel in his pocket?"

"Oh." She picked up her cup, took a delicate sip of coffee. "Maybe the guy she picked up was a dentist and-but I guess most dentists don't carry scalpels around in their pockets."

"Only the ones who are homicidal maniacs in their off hours. And even if she was killed by a dentist, he wouldn't have left the scalpel sticking in her. No, somebody swiped a scalpel from the office deliberately to frame Craig for the killing. And that means the murderer wasn't a stranger and the murder wasn't a spur-of-the-moment thing. It was planned, and the killer was someone with a motive, someone who was involved in Crystal Sheldrake's life. Which means we ought to learn something about that life."

"How?"

"Good question. Do you want some more coffee?"

"No. Bernie, maybe she kept a diary. Do women still keep diaries?"

"How would I know?"

"Or a stack of love letters. Something incriminating that would let us know who she was seeing. If you could break into her apartment-What's the matter?"

"The horse has already been stolen."

"Huh?"

"The time to break into an apartment," I said, "is before someone gets killed in it. Once a murder takes place the police become very efficient. They put seals on the doors and windows and even stake the place out now and then. And they also search whatever the killer left behind, so if there was a diary or a pile of letters, and if the killer didn't have the presence of mind to carry it away with him"-like a caseful of jewels, I thought with some rancor-"then the cops already have it. Anyway, I don't think there was a diary or a love letter in the first place."