The Burglar in the Rye (10 page)

“Rye whiskey,” I said.

“That’s what they say, and I gather he drinks quite a good deal of it. Oh, I hope he lives for years and years, Mr. Rhodenbarr. I hope he writes many more books and that I have the chance to read them all. But all men are mortal, even if some of them manage to create immortal work during their lifetime. And, while he could live another thirty years and I could get run over by a bus this afternoon…”

“The odds are you’ll outlive him.”

“That’s what any insurance actuary would tell you. I won’t even attempt to publish my book during his lifetime. Believe me, I can write with a freer hand if I don’t have to worry what he’d think of it. Once he’s no longer in the picture, I can publish as I please. For the time being, my only concern is making the book as accurate and as comprehensive as possible.” He smiled with all the warmth of an SS officer in a forties film. “And that is where you come in,” he said.

“Except it’s not.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I don’t have the letters,” I said.

“Oh?”

“Not even a postcard. It’s true I’ve been charged with burglary in the past, and it’s also true I was arrested at Anthea Landau’s hotel last night. But I didn’t steal her letters.”

“His letters, you mean.”

“Whatever.”

“I suppose you would have to say that.”

“So would Pinocchio,” I said, “unless he wanted his nose to grow.”

“If you don’t have them, who does?”

It was a good question, and I wished I knew the answer myself. I told him as much, and his face took on a crafty look. “Suppose they come into your possession,” he said. “If they’re floating around they have to wind up somewhere, and who’s to say it won’t be with you?”

“Who indeed?”

“You’d have to consider your options and select the best course open to you. But, if only for your own protection, you’d want to run them through a Xerox machine, wouldn’t you?”

“That’s what burglars always do,” I said.

“Really?”

“We Xerox everything. Furs, jewelry, rare coins…”

He nodded, registering as new data what had been an attempt at levity. “Just let me have a set,” he urged. “I don’t have any money, that must be obvious, but I could manage a few dollars to cover the cost.”

“The cost?”

“Of making copies.”

“In other words,” I said, “you could pay me ten cents a page.”

“Well, perhaps a bit more than that. But what I can offer you is something far more important. You’ll be helping a scholar with his life’s work. And, of course, you’d be listed in the acknowledgments when the book was published.”

“Now you’re talking,” I said. “How often does a humble burglar get that sort of recognition? ‘Thanks
to Bernard Rhodenbarr’—do you suppose you’d have room for my middle name?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“‘To Bernard Grimes Rhodenbarr, for sharing with me useful documents stolen from the late Anthea Landau.’ Wouldn’t that make her proud?”

“Miss Landau?”

“My mother, to see her son get such recognition. Of course, the police might view it differently, but I suppose we could be a shade more circumspect in the wording. And who’s to say the statute of limitations on burglary won’t run out by the time you’re able to publish?”

He agreed it was possible, even likely, and gave me a card with his name on it, Lester Eddington, along with that of a college and a town in Pennsylvania, neither of which I’d ever heard of. I said as much and learned the town was in the western part of the state, near the Ohio border.

“You must be tired,” I said. “You had a long drive this morning.”

But he’d been in town since the weekend, staying at a hotel. Not the Paddington, by any chance? Nothing so good, he assured me, and named a hotel on Third Avenue which was indeed a step or two down from the Paddington, but not too many steps away from it. He’d come to town to talk to the folks at Sotheby’s on the slim chance they could be persuaded to copy the letters for him. And he’d hoped for an audience with Anthea Landau, either to see the letters or to interview her, a request she’d always refused in the past. And he had other leads to pursue as well.

“Well,” he said, straightening up. “I’ve taken up enough of your time. If it turns out that you have those letters…”

“I’ll keep you in mind.”

He’d have liked something a little firmer than that,
but I guess he was used to disappointment. He nodded shortly and thrust his hand across the counter in a manner awkward enough to leave me wondering for a moment just what I was supposed to do with it.

I shook it, which was evidently what he’d had in mind. Then I gave it back to him and off he went.

The door had barely closed behind Eddington when the phone rang. It was Carolyn, offering to pick up lunch and bring it over. “I know today’s your turn,” she said, “but I also know you just opened up, so I thought I could take two turns in a row. Unless you had a late breakfast and want to skip lunch altogether.”

“I didn’t have any kind of a breakfast,” I said, “now that you mention it. I fed Raffles, which was the only way to get him out from underfoot. The poor guy was starving. So was I, and I still am, so I certainly don’t want to skip lunch.”

“That pig,” she said.

“What pig are we talking about?”

“Your pig of a cat, Bern. Did he eat his breakfast?”

“Every morsel.”

“Well, he’s two meals ahead of you. I fed him around nine-fifteen, before I opened up. I bet he didn’t say a word, did he?”

“He said ‘Meow.’ Does that count?”

“The animal’s a real con artist. Look, I’ll see you in a little while. What would you say to some pastrami sandwiches and a couple of bottles of cream soda?”

“Meow,” I said.

“That was really sweet of Marty,” she said. “Go figure, huh? You start out by stealing a man’s baseball cards, and he winds up getting you out of jail.”

“I didn’t steal his cards.”

“Well, he thought you did. My point is the relationship didn’t exactly get off on the right foot, and look at it now.”

“I’m seeing him in a couple of hours,” I said. “At his club.”

“I guess it’s been a while since you’ve seen him, huh?”

“Quite a while,” I said, and glanced at my watch. “Something like twenty-two hours.”

“Where did you—”

“At the Paddington,” I said. “Not last night, but earlier in the day. When I was on my way out of the place, he was on his way in.”

“What was he doing there?”

“He didn’t say,” I said, “because we didn’t speak. But my guess would be that he was committing adultery.”

“Is it that kind of a hotel, Bern?”

“The kind you commit adultery in? What other kind is there?”

“I mean is it crawling with hookers? Because I didn’t think it had that kind of reputation.”

“It doesn’t,” I said, “and it wasn’t, but you don’t need a hooker for adultery. All you need is a partner you’re not married to.”

“And he had one?”

“Right there on his arm. I got a good look at her, and she was worth looking at. But I don’t think she looked at me, or if she did she wasn’t paying attention. Because she didn’t recognize me.”

“She was someone you knew?”

“No.”

“Oh. For a minute there I thought…”

“Thought what?”

“That you were going to say it was Alice Cottrell.”

“Nope.”

“Not if you didn’t know her. But in that case why would you expect her to recognize you?”

“Not then,” I said. “Later.”

“Later?”

“When I met her in the sixth-floor hallway,” I said. “God knows I remembered her, even if she was dressed up like Paddington Bear this time around. And she remembered me later on in the lobby. ‘That’s him!’ she sang out, the little darling.”

“She’s the one you saw with Marty?”

“The very same,” I said, “and I’ve got to say I admire the man’s taste. Her name’s Isis Gauthier and she lives right there at the hotel.”

“And she turned you in to the cops, and Marty bailed you out.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What does it all have to do with the letters?”

“I don’t know.”

“Or the murder. Is it all connected?”

“Good question.”

“There’s nothing like pastrami, is there, Bern?”

“Nothing like it.”

“And I don’t know why cream soda goes with it. It doesn’t go with anything else.”

“You’re right about that.”

“Bern, what
happened
last night?”

“I wish I knew,” I said, “because I was there when it happened, and I got scooped up in the net, and I’d be a lot happier if I knew what was going on.”

I went over it again, from my own arrival at the Paddington the previous evening to my departure a little while later, handcuffs on my wrists and Ray’s singular version of the Miranda warning ringing in my ears.

“My mother always told me to wear clean underwear,” I said. “In case I got hit by a car.”

“Mine told me the same thing, Bern, but she never said why. I just figured it was one of the things decent people did. Anyway, what good would it do? If you got hit by a car, wouldn’t your underwear get messed up along with everything else?”

“I never thought of that,” I admitted. “But I’ve taken her advice and put on clean underwear every morning, and in all these years I’ve never been hit by a car.”

“What a waste.”

“But what she should have said,” I went on, “is to wear clean underwear in case you get strip-searched by the cops.”

“Because that’s a lot more likely than getting mowed down by a Toyota?”

“It’s certainly worked out that way for me. The thing is, though, what would be really embarrassing is if you had dirty drawers when you were being strip-searched. I mean, it’s embarrassing enough with clean ones.”

“I can imagine.”

“But if you got run over by a car, the odds are you’d be unconscious.”

“Or dead.”

“Either way, you wouldn’t even know your underwear was dirty. And if you were awake, would you care? I’d have too much on my mind to be embarrassed about my underwear.”

“It was embarrassing last night, huh?”

“Getting searched? I’ll tell you, it would have been a lot worse if they’d found anything. And I’m not talking about dirty underwear.”

“Good,” she said, “because we’ve talked plenty about
it already and it’d be fine with me if we never talked about it again. They didn’t find anything, Bern?”

“Not a thing. They didn’t find my tools, or they’d have had more charges to bring. And they didn’t find Gulliver Fairborn’s letters to his agent, which figured, because neither did I. And they also didn’t find—”

The door opened.

“—out what happened to the Mets last night,” I said innocently. “That young left-hander they just called up from Sarasota was supposed to start last night, but I never heard how he made out.”

Carolyn was looking at me as though I’d lost my mind, or at the very least misplaced it. Then she glanced over at the doorway and got the picture.

I
t was Ray Kirschmann, wearing a dark blue suit and a red-and-blue-striped tie and, in all likelihood, clean underwear, which I hoped for his sake fit him better than the suit did. He looked at me, shook his head, looked at Carolyn, shook his head again, and came over to lean on my counter.

“I heard they let you out,” he said. “I’m sorry I had to lock you up in the first place. I didn’t have a whole lotta choice in the matter.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t suppose you did.”

“No hard feelin’s, Bern?”

“No hard feelings, Ray.”

“Glad to hear it. Bern, I gotta tell you, you’re gettin’ a little old to be creepin’ around hotels. That’s a young man’s game, and you ain’t a kid no more. What you are, you’re knockin’ on the door of middle age.”

“If I am,” I said, “I’m knocking gently. And if they don’t let me in, I’m not going to pick the lock.”

“Then it’d be the first one in ages that you didn’t,” he said. “You were in the old lady’s room last night, weren’t you?”

“What gives you that idea?”

His expression turned crafty. “Nothin’,” he said.

“Nothing?”

“Nothin’ at all, Bern. No burglar tools, no wad of cash, no coin collection, no jewelry. What did the English guy say about a dog that never barks?”

What indeed? I’ve thought about that sentence, and I have to assume the Englishman in question was Sherlock Holmes, and that the dog in question was not the titular Hound of the Baskervilles (a common mistake) but the beast in “Silver Blaze” who remains silent as a basenji. But at the time the only English guy I could think of was Redmond O’Hanlon, who when last I looked had enough on his mind with jaguars and scorpions and biting flies, not to mention our friend the toothpick fish. What did he care about dogs?

“I don’t know, Ray,” I said. “What did he say about the dog?”

“It bites, Bern. An’ so does your story, rentin’ a hotel room to meet some girl. There’s only one reason a guy like you’d shell out good money for a room, an’ it goes by the name of grand larceny. You were on those premises lookin’ for somethin’ to steal.”

“Maybe I was.”

“Bern…”

“Carolyn,” he said, “didn’t they learn you not to interrupt?”

“They tried hard to learn me,” she said, “but I was always a slow teacher. Bern, he Mirandized you last night, remember? So watch what you say, because it
can be used as evidence. He could stand up in court and swear you said it.”

“I could anyway,” he said reasonably, “whether Bernie here said it or not. A man who’s not willin’ to stretch a point on the witness stand is a man’s got no business bein’ a cop. But this ain’t about court, Bern. It’s about you an’ me comin’ out of this in good shape. Now do you want me to keep talkin’ or should I take a hike?”

“Do I get to vote?”

He glared at Carolyn, and I took a last sip of my cream soda. “Keep talking,” I said.

“You were in this hotel,” he said, “an’ it wasn’t romance brought you there. An’ you were up on the sixth floor, ’cause that’s where you ran into Goat Ear.”

“Goat Ear?”

“You forget her already? The black girl, the one that hollered when you tried to sneak out through the lobby.”

“Isis Gauthier.”

“Right, like I said. Goat Ear.”

“I met her in the hall,” I said, “and I thought we hit it off reasonably well.”

“Let’s say you made an impression, Bern. She went straight to the desk clerk and told him to quit puttin’ shoe polish on his hair an’ call 911, because there’s a suspicious person creepin’ the place.”

“I don’t know how she could call me suspicious,” I said. “I never suspected a thing.”

“What you were,” he said, “is cooler than a cucumber, even if it’s a dill pickle. Speakin’ of which, you gonna eat that one?” I shook my head and he snatched it off my plate, polishing it off in a couple of chomps. “Thanks,” he said. “What you did, Bern, you heard
about this Landau woman and these letters of hers. You went lookin’ for ’em, an’ you walked in on a corpse.”

“You mean it wasn’t me who killed her.”

“Of course not, Bern. You ain’t a killer. What you are’s a burglar, an’ you’re one of the best, but when it comes to violence you’re Mahatma Gandhi rolled into one.”

“That’s me,” I said.

“So there’s Landau,” he said, “an’ she’s dead. And you let yourself out an’ lock up after yourself, chain bolt an’ all, same as you always do. It’s a trademark of yours, Bern.”

“I’m neat by nature,” I admitted, “but—”

“Lemme finish. You let yourself in, find a dead woman, an’ let yourself out. An’ run smack into a live one.”

“Isis Gauthier.”

“The black one,” he agreed, “with the French name. She’s on her way out. Now why don’t you hop on the elevator with her an’ get away from the crime scene? That way you’re home in your own bed by the time the blue uniforms hit the hotel lobby.”

“I’m sure you have the answer, Ray.”

“Sure,” he said. “The dog.”

“What dog?”

“The quiet one. We searched you, Bern. Turned you upside down an’ turned your room on the fourth floor inside out. An’ you know what we came up with?”

“Some socks and underwear,” I said. “And a teddy bear, unless one of New York’s Finest stole it for himself.”

“You got some high opinion of the police, Bern. Nobody stole your teddy bear, which ain’t yours in the first place, bein’ as it’s the property of the hotel. What we
came up with was empty hands, an’ what we didn’t find none of was burglar’s tools.”

“So?”

“So where were they?”

“Search me.”

“We did, remember?”

“Vividly.”

“You didn’t leave ’em home,” he said, “or how would you open Landau’s door, or lock up after you left? Anyhow, they’re your American Express card. You never leave home without ’em. But you knew you stood a chance of bein’ frisked, so you dumped ’em somewhere.”

“And if we only knew where they were,” I said, “we could use them to break into the Pentagon and steal government secrets.”

“If we knew where they were,” he said, “we could find more’n a set of burglar’s tools. We could find those letters, too. An’ don’t ask what letters, Bern. You’d know from reading the papers this morning, as if you didn’t know in the first place. Letters from this famous writer I never heard of, so how famous can he be? It’s not like you see the guy on the talk shows. How’s anybody supposed to know who he is?”

“You could try reading his books.”

“If I want to read, I’ll stick with Wambaugh and Caunitz and Ed McBain. Guys who know what it’s all about, not some jerk who writes all his letters on purple paper. The letters were gone, Bern. We searched her rooms the way you’d expect, it bein’ a crime scene an’ all. No letters.”

“And no burglar’s tools.”

“Like I just said.”

“And no dog,” I said. “Ray, you already said I didn’t kill her. Remember?”

“Like it was yesterday.”

“And it was homicide, wasn’t it? Or did she die of natural causes?”

“Somebody hit her over the head,” he said, “an’ then stuck a knife in her chest, which naturally caused her to die. The killer took the knife along with him. I suppose he coulda left it behind, an’ you coulda picked it up an’ put it the same place you put the burglar tools an’ the letters, but why would he leave it an’ why would you pick it up? It don’t make no sense.”

“Few things do,” I said. “I thought she was shot.”

“Why’d you think that?”

Because I’d smelled the gunpowder. “I don’t know,” I said vaguely. “I must have heard it.”

“Well, you heard wrong. But even if she was shot, it wasn’t you that shot her, on account of we gave you a paraffin test last night an’ you passed it with flyin’ colors.” He tugged at his lower lip. “Of course you coulda worn gloves. Remember how you always used to wear those rubber gloves with the palms cut out for ventilation? Another trademark of yours, like locking up after the horse is stolen.”

“I know Bernie,” Carolyn said, “and I’ll tell you this right now, Ray. He didn’t steal a horse.”

He gave her a look. “Those rubber gloves wouldn’t help you beat a paraffin test,” he went on, “’cause you’d wind up with nitrate particles on your palms. But nowadays you wear those disposable gloves, made of that plastic film.” A smile began to form on his lips. “Except you weren’t wearing
any
gloves last night, Bern. Were you?”

“Why do you say that?”

“You left a print.”

How? I distinctly remembered sliding my hands into my Pliofilm gloves before I turned the bolt to lock myself in Andrea Landau’s chambers. And, gloved, I’d promptly wiped the knob and the surfaces of door and jamb I might have touched. The gloves had stayed on my hands until I was out of the apartment altogether. I was on the fire escape, a floor below the crime scene, before I took them off.

“Ain’t you gonna ask where, Bern?”

“I would,” I said, “but I have the feeling you’ll tell me anyway.”

“On one of the envelopes.”

“Oh,” I said, and frowned. “On one of
what
envelopes?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I thought so.”

“You thought what?”

“That you didn’t even know you left ’em behind. Two purple envelopes, both of ’em addressed to Anthea Landau. What kind of a name is Anthea, anyway?”

“A girl’s name,” Carolyn said.

“Well, so’s Carolyn, and what’s that prove? They were the same envelopes the letters came in, Bern, an’ they got dusted for prints, same as everything else on the scene, an’ one of ’em had prints all over it. Some of ’em were smudged, an’ plenty of ’em were hers, but one of ’em was clear as a crystal, an’ guess whose it was?”

“Something tells me it was mine.”

“You didn’t worry about handling it,” he said, “because you figured on taking it with you, along with the rest of the letters. But I guess you dropped it. Don’t look so down in the mouth, Bern. It puts you on the scene, but I already knew you were there, so it’s no big deal.”

“If you say so.”

“You had the stack of letters. They musta been in an envelope or a file folder, and that’d be what, an inch thick? Two inches? Goat Ear didn’t mention you holdin’ nothin’, so your hands were empty, but that’s because your shirt was full.”

“My shirt?”

“Under your shirt, that’d be my guess as to where you put the letters. That’d get you past Goat Ear, but a trained observer would spot it, so you had to stash the stuff before you hit the lobby, since you know somebody’s been murdered, and you realize you might get spotted.”

“By a trained observer.”

“Or anyone who happens to recognize you for the encourageable burglar you are.”

“Incorrigible.”

“You said it. But you didn’t dump the stuff in your room, Bern, an’ you didn’t get out of the hotel with it, an’ what’s that leave?”

“Since you don’t believe I never had it in the first place—”

“Not on your life, Bern.”

“—then I must have stashed it somewhere in the hotel.”

“Uh-huh. Another room’d be my guess, an’ if I was a young hothead I’d be goin’ room to room, movin’ furniture an’ pullin’ up the carpet.”

“But you’re older and wiser.”

“You got the idea, Bern. Why make waves when we both get a chance here to do ourselves some good? What you gotta do is tell me where you stashed the stuff, an’ I’ll go in myself an’ get it, an’ we’ll wait and see.”

“We’ll wait and see what?”

“How to cash in. That’s gonna be the tricky part. The way I hear it, nobody knows what the letters are worth. An’ they ain’t worth much unless they can be sold right out in the open. You steal a rare book or a valuable coin or a painting, you got these crackpot collectors who’ll pay through the nose for it and keep it where nobody ever gets a peek at it. But your college libraries are the big buyers for letters like this Gulliver wrote, an’ they won’t pay big bucks for something unless they get to brag that they got it.”

“They want the publicity.”

“Like an old guy with a young girlfriend. Half the fun is showin’ her off to his buddies, especially since that’s about all he can still do. So this is the kind of deal where you sell the loot back to the insurance company.”

“Well, in that case…”

“Except it ain’t insured. Landau wouldn’t take out a floater policy on all her old letters, an’ they wouldn’t be covered by Sotheby’s insurance because Sotheby’s didn’t have ’em yet. An’ Landau can’t ransom ’em back, because she’s dead, an’ unless there’s a new will nobody knows about, the estate goes to the Authors Guild for handouts to writers who are up against it, which I guess plenty of ’em are most of the time.”

“It’s this society of ours, Ray. We don’t value the arts sufficiently.”

“Yeah, we all of us oughta be ashamed. Thing is, Bern, somebody’s gonna offer a reward, or some other way’ll open up to make a quiet dollar. An’ we’ll split.”

“Fifty-fifty,” I said.

“Only way to avoid hard feelings, Bernie. Half for you an’ half for me. Keep it all as even as Steven.”

“It seems fair.”

“Damn right it does. So? We got a deal?”

“I guess so,” I said. “But I’m going to have to retrieve the letters myself.”

“How? Your picture’s all over the papers, Bern. You’ll never get past the front desk. Lemme get ’em. I can walk in like I own the place.”

“Just lend me your badge,” I said, “and I can do the same.”

“Very funny.”

“The letters are in a safe place,” I said, “and nobody’s going to disturb them. I’ll get to them as soon as I can, but there’s no hurry. And they’d be difficult for you to get to, Ray, even if you knew where they were.”

“That don’t make sense, Bern.”

“Ray,” I said, “I could tell you everything I know about those letters and you couldn’t find them. Trust me.”

“Yeah,” he said, “you’re as good at hidin’ stuff as you are at findin’ it. Only thing is I hope you didn’t hide it right there in Landau’s apartment.”

“How could I do that? You must have searched the place from top to bottom.”

“We did,” he said, “and your room, too. Includin’ the bear.”

“The bear? Paddington Bear?”

“In your room, sittin’ on top of the fireplace.”

“And you thought he might have a two-inch-thick file of correspondence? Did he hide it under his little red jacket?”