The Burglar in the Rye (11 page)

He shook his head. “Not the letters. But he coulda been holdin’ the burglar’s tools, or even the gun, if it was a little one.”

Carolyn said, “Is that a gun in your paw, or are you just glad to see me? Ray, did you and your buddies cut
open Bernie’s bear? Because if you did I think he’s got the makings of a pretty good lawsuit.”

“An’ a complaint to the SPCA,” Ray said, “but all we did was x-ray him, so put your mind at rest. All in all it was a pretty thorough search, Bernie, your room an’ hers, but it ain’t like searching for narcotics, where you can go in with dogs. How’s a dog gonna help you find letters from a particular person?”

“Maybe you could let him sniff a sample of Gully Fairborn’s handwriting.”

“Or a purple envelope. I know how cute you are, an’ I had a couple of uniforms go through her files lookin’ for anything purple. Perfect place to hide ’em, just stick ’em in the wrong file.”

“Like ‘The Purloined Letter,’” Carolyn said.

“Whatever. Purloin or sirloin, they came up empty. But we didn’t rip the desk apart, or the refrigerator door, so you coulda double-dipped back into Landau’s place an’ found some tricky spot to leave everything. Only thing, the apartment’s sealed off now as a crime scene. You can’t get in.”

“I don’t need to.”

“Good,” he said. “So it’s somewhere else, somewhere you can get to.”

“I’d say so.”

“An’ where I can’t.”

“Not without creating a disruption,” I said, “and attracting more attention than you’d be comfortable with.”

“An’ who wants that?” He shrugged. “Okay, Bern. We’ll play it your way for now. Take your time, but not too much of it, huh? There’s a lot of heat, what with a dame bumped off who’s supposed to be kind of prominent, even if nobody I know ever heard of her.
You wouldn’t happen to know who knocked her off, would you?”

“If all this has been an elaborate buildup…”

“Naw, I know you didn’t kill her. But you beat us to the crime scene, so you might have seen somethin’ that gave you an idea. An’ even if you didn’t, you got a knack for steppin’ on your dick an’ coming up smellin’ like a daffodil. One minute you’re under arrest, an’ the next minute you’re tellin’ a roomful of people who the real killer is.”

“Well, I’m glad this room’s not full of people,” I said, “because for a change I’d be tongue-tied.”

“That straight, Bern?”

“Absolutely. I haven’t got a clue.”

“But you might come up with somethin’,” he said. “It wouldn’t be the first time. If you do, you know where to bring it.”

“Sure, Ray. We’re partners.”

“You bet we are, Bernie. We generally do all right together, don’t we? An’ I got a good feelin’ about this one. I think we’re gonna come out of it lookin’ real good.” He paused at the door. “Been a pleasure, Carolyn. You hardly said a word.”

“I never had a chance, Ray.”

“Maybe that’s the answer. You’re a lot less of a pain in the neck when you don’t open your mouth.”

“Gee,” she said, “I wonder if it’d work for you?”

“See? The minute you got that mouth runnin’ you’re as bad as ever. But when you zip it up you’re okay. You know what? You look different.”

“Huh?”

“You look different,” he said. “Most of the time you look like a dog gettin’ ready to bite somebody.”

“And now I look like a poodle that’s just had a wash and set.”

“More like a fluffy little cocker spaniel,” he said. “Softer an’ gentler, you know?” He opened the door. “Whatever you’re doin’, keep doin’ it. That’s my advice.”

“W
hatever you’re doin’,”
she growled, “
keep doin’ it.
Words of advice from the founder of the Raymond Kirschmann Charm School.”

“You know Ray.”

“I do,” she said, “and I never cease to regret it. Daffodils don’t have any odor, Bern, so how are you gonna come out smelling like one? That rat.”

“Because of what he said about daffodils?”

“Because of what he said about me. He noticed, Bern. He doesn’t know what he noticed, but he noticed it all the same.”

“It’s the longer hair,” I said.

“That’s just part of it. It’s the clothes, too. Look at this blouse.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Could you wear it?”

“Well,” I said, “no, not really. But I’m a guy, Carolyn.”

“And it’s too feminine, right?”

“Well, yeah.”

“It’s happening, Bern. I’m turning femme. Look at my nails, will you?”

“What’s the matter with them?”

“Just look at them.”

“So?”

“They look the same to you?”

“They’re trimmed short,” I said, “and there’s no polish on them, at least as far as I can see. Unless you’ve got some of that colorless polish on to protect them.” She shook her head. “Then as far as I can tell,” I said, “they’re the same.”

“Right.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“The problem,” she said, “is inside.”

“Under the nails?”

“Under the skin, Bern. They’re the same as ever, but for the first time ever they don’t look right. To me, I mean. They look short.”

“They
are
short. Same as always.”

“Up to now,” she said, “they didn’t look short to me. They just looked right. Now I look at them, and they look too short. Unattractively short.”

“Oh.”

“Like they ought to be longer.”

“Oh.”

“Like my hair.”

“Oh.”

“You see what’s happening, Bern?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“It’s Erica,” she said. “She’s turning me into a Barbie Doll. What’s next, will you tell me that? Painted toenails? Pierced ears? Bern, you’ll be sleeping with a teddy and I’ll be sleeping
in
one. Rats.”

“Well, you still use strong language.”

“For now. Next thing you know I’ll be saying ‘Mice.’ Bern, I thought you didn’t take the letters.”

“I didn’t.”

“How’d you get your prints on the envelope?”

“That’s how I found out Landau’s room number. Remember? I pretended to find an envelope with her name on it…”

“And the clerk put it in her box. You just happened to pick a purple envelope?”

“I wanted something distinctive. I knew Fairborn always used purple envelopes, and, well…”

“What was in the envelope?”

“Just a piece of blank paper.”

“Purple paper?”

“What else?”

“What were you trying to do, give her a heart attack? She gets the letter, she thinks it’s from him, and then it’s blank. If I were her, I’d figure I just got a death threat from a man of few words.”

“What I sort of figured,” I said, “is she wouldn’t get the envelope until I’d gotten away with the letters, and then she’d think Fairborn was going nyah nyah nyah at her.”

“That’s what you figured, huh?”

“Well, sort of.”

“And this was on Perrier, right?”

“Carolyn…”

“So you really don’t know where they are?”

“Haven’t a clue.”

“Did you talk to the woman who started the whole thing?”

“Alice Cottrell?” I reached for the phone. “I tried her earlier, but she didn’t answer…. Still no answer.”

“I’m surprised she hasn’t tried to reach you.”

“So am I, now that you mention it. I’ll try her again later.”

“And your partnership with Ray…”

“Is a fifty-fifty deal,” I said. “Every bit as even as Steven. But we don’t have anything to sell, and the best offer so far is from a guy who’ll reimburse me for the cost of making photocopies. So there’s not going to be anything to divide. Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Unless I’m wrong,” I said. “We’ll see. I wonder what Marty wants.”

I was still wondering after she headed back to the Poodle Factory, but I had a stream of visitors to keep me distracted. First through the door was Mary Mason, who I swear buys books from me as an excuse to visit my cat. She made her usual fuss over him, and as usual he took it as his due. Then he hopped onto a high shelf and curled up next to a boxed volume of the letters of Thomas Love Peacock, which I’m afraid I’ll own as long as I own the store. I sold Miss Mason reading copies of two or three mysteries—cozies, you’ll be astonished to learn—and while I was ringing the sale a man came in on crutches and wanted to know how to find Grace Church.

It’s just around the corner on Broadway, and a lot easier to get to than Lourdes. I pointed him in the right direction. He hobbled off, and in came my friend with the long face and the tan beret and the silver beard, smiling wistfully and smelling pleasantly of whiskey. He found his way to the poetry section and got down to the serious business of browsing.

A young woman in bib overalls wanted to know what time it was, and I told her, and a Senegalese, very
tall and impossibly thin, wanted to sell me some Rolex watches and Prada handbags. They were, he assured me, genuine fakes, and represented an excellent business opportunity for me. I explained that I was running a bookshop, and consequently dealt exclusively in printed matter, and he went off shaking his head at my lack of enterprise and business acumen. I shook my own head, though I’m not sure what at, and tried Alice Cottrell’s number again. No answer.

I made another call, this one to Mowgli. He’s a Columbia dropout, a former druggie with just enough brain cells left to make a living as a book scout. I’ve bought quite a few books from him, and he’s bought a few from me, when he’s spotted something badly under-priced on my shelves. When he’s not otherwise occupied he’ll fill in for me behind the counter, and I was hoping he could do that today, while I met with Marty Gilmartin. But he didn’t answer, either.

I went back to Redmond O’Hanlon, hoping to be reminded that there were worse jungles than the one I lived in, and the next person to interrupt me was a fat fellow with an underslung jaw and a head of tightly curled brown hair. He looked like a bulldog with a permanent.

“Rhodenbarr,” he said, and shoved a card at me.
Hilliard Moffett,
it read.
Collector.
And beneath that was an address consisting of a post office box in Bellingham, Washington, along with phone and fax numbers and an e-mail address.

Collectors can drive you crazy. They’re all a little bit nuts, but the antiquarian book business wouldn’t exist without them, because they buy more books than anybody else. They buy books they’ve already read, and other books they never intend to read. They don’t re
ally have time to read, anyway. They’re too busy poring over book catalogs and rummaging through thrift shops and yard sales and, yes, stores like mine.

I asked him what he collected. He leaned over the counter and lowered his voice to a confidential whisper.

“Fairborn,” he said.

What a coincidence.

“I’m a completist,” he said, with an air that combined pride and resignation, as if he were at once claiming royal blood and admitting to hemophilia. “I want everything.”

“Well, I don’t have much,” I said. “A few books shelved alphabetically in the fiction section. I’ve got
Nobody’s Baby,
but it’s a fifth printing.”

“I have a first.”

“I thought you probably did.”

“And a tenth,” he said. “For the revised jacket. And I have fourteen paperbacks.”

“So you can give copies to friends?”

He gaped at the very idea. I don’t know which seemed outlandish to him—the idea of having friends, or the thought of giving books to them. Both, probably.

“Fourteen paperbacks,” I said. “Oh. One for each printing?”

“Hardly. There have been over sixty printings. What sort of fool would want to collect them all? What I want is a copy of each cover. There have been fourteen different covers among the sixty-plus printings.”

“So you have them all.”

“I have the first printing in which each appeared. Except in one instance. There was a new cover introduced on the twenty-first printing, but my copy is the twenty-second. I’ve not yet been able to get my hands
on a twenty-first. It’s not rare, it’s certainly not valuable, but try to find one.”

“Well,” I said, “I wish I could help you out, but I only get paperbacks when I buy a whole library, and I wholesale them off right away.”

“I have my want list with specialists,” he said. “That’s not what I came here for.”

“Oh.”

“I just wanted you to understand the scope of my collection.”

“You’re a true completist.”

He nodded. “I have the foreign editions. Almost all of them. I have
Nobody’s Baby
in Macedonian. Not Serbo-Croat, Serbo-Croat’s common as dirt, but Macedonian. It’s not supposed to exist, none of the bibliographies list it, and I don’t believe the edition was ever authorized. It must have been pirated. But somebody translated the text, and somebody set type and printed it, and I have a copy. It may be the only copy this side of Skopje, but it exists and I’ve got it.”

“That’s impressive.”

“When I collect someone, Rhodenbarr, I go all out.”

“I can see that.”

“I don’t just collect the books. I collect the man.”

I pictured him with a great butterfly net, running over hill and dale in pursuit of a terrified Gulliver Fairborn.

“I have a copy of his high school yearbook,” he said. “There were eighty students in the graduating class, so how many yearbooks could they have printed? And how many do you suppose have survived? It wasn’t easy to find a classmate who still had his yearbook handy, and it was harder still to persuade him to sell it.”

“But you managed.”

“I did, and I can assure you I wouldn’t part with it,
not for twenty times what it cost me. He was the only senior who didn’t have his picture included. There’s a blank space opposite his list of accomplishments and activities. He was a hall monitor his junior year, did you know that? He was in the Latin Honor Society, he played trombone in the school band. Did you know that?”

“I know the capital of South Dakota.”

“That’s neither here nor there.”

“It’s not here,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure it’s there.”

He gave me a look. “He was camera-shy even then,” he said, “the only senior class member unpictured. He signed this particular copy. Where the photo would have been, he wrote, ‘When you are old / And sitting still / Remember the fellow / Who wrote uphill.’ The handwriting slants.”

“Upward,” I guessed.

“And he signed his name in full. Gulliver Fairborn.”

“A signed photo,” I said. “Without the photo.”

“His photograph does appear in the book, however. Not in the senior listings, but in the group photos. He’s in the band photo, but he’s holding the trombone right in front of his face. On purpose, I’m sure.”

“What a kidder.”

“But he was also in the Latin Honor Society, as I may have mentioned, and they didn’t let him hide behind a copy of Caesar’s
Commentaries.
He’s in the last row, second from the left. He’s half hidden behind another student, and his face is shadowed, so you can’t really get much sense of what he looked like. But it’s nevertheless a genuine photograph of Gulliver Fairborn.”

“And you have it.”

“I have the yearbook. I’d like to get the original. The
photographer’s long dead, and his files were dispersed years ago. The original’s lost, probably forever. But I do have an original photograph of Fairborn’s boyhood home. The house itself was torn down over twenty years ago. I missed my chance.”

“To see it for yourself?”

“To buy it. The state took the property for an expressway extension, but I could have bought the house and moved it to another lot. Imagine housing the world’s foremost Gulliver Fairborn collection in the house he grew up in!” He sighed for what might have been. “Over twenty years ago. Even if I’d known about it, I’d have been hard put to afford it. Still, I’d have found a way.”

“You’re dedicated.”

“One has to be. And now I have the means, as well as the dedication. I want those letters.”

“If I had them,” I said, “what would you pay?”

“Name your price.”

“If I had a price,” I said, “it would be high.”

“Name it, Rhodenbarr.”

“The thing is, you’re not the only person who wants those letters.”

“But I’m the one who wants them the most. Get all the offers you want. Just give me the opportunity to top them. Or set a price yourself and give me the chance to meet it.” He leaned forward, his collector madness burning in his dark eyes. “But whatever you do, don’t sell those letters without giving me a crack at them.”

“The letters,” I said carefully, “are not physically in my possession at the moment.”

“Quite understandable.”

“But that’s not to say they won’t be.”

“And when they are…”

“I’ll want to contact you. But you’re in…” I looked at his card. “…Bellingham, Washington. That’s near Seattle?”

“It is but I’m not. I’m in New York.”

“I can see that.”

“I flew in the day before yesterday. I thought I might speak to this Landau and see if she’d entertain a preemptive offer as an alternative to public auction. Why wait for her money? Why pay a commission?”

“What did she say?”

“I never spoke to her. I went first to Sotheby’s, where I learned they had a signed agreement with the woman. They’d given her an advance and she’d agreed to turn over the entire Fairborn file within the month, so it could be cataloged for sale in January. I urged them to offer it as one lot. I’m sure the University of Texas would prefer it that way, and whatever other institutional bidders turn up.”

“And did they agree?”

“They hadn’t decided, and won’t until they see the material. My hunch is they’ll parcel it out. That means bidding lot by lot. I’ll do that if I have to, but I’d much rather write one enormous check and be done with it.”