The Burglar in the Rye (13 page)

“He was recruiting you,” I guessed, “to be the private detective.”

“Do you think I’m the type, Bernie? A shady character? You’re my sole contact in the criminal demimonde, and John doesn’t even know about you. No, he just wanted a confidant, someone who knew the participants. Edna and I are friendly with him and Cynthia, you see, and at the same time I’d seen Isis onstage. I must say John’s heat-of-the-moment comment was unwarranted. She’s a perfectly adequate actress, and she lights up the theater.”

“When was your lunch with John?”

“Friday.”

“And his blowup with Isis was—”

“A few days before. I told John I’d see what I could do. He couldn’t talk to her, they’d parted on bad terms, but perhaps a third party could get somewhere on his behalf. He thought I might offer her a decent sum for the rubies. He suggested five thousand dollars, which would be less than a tenth of their value, but a not in
significant sum. Coming from him, such an offer would be an unpardonable insult, essentially setting a price on her favors after the fact. Coming from a dispassionate friend, however, it might be another matter.”

“So you came to the hotel, and—”

He shook his head. “I called her on Monday,” he said, “and made a date for lunch on Wednesday. I met her at Le Chien Bizarre on East Thirty-ninth. You met her, so you must have noticed those blue eyes.”

“They’d have been hard to miss.”

“If she were a blonde from Sweden,” he said, “I don’t suppose those eyes of hers would be anything special. Context is everything, isn’t it?” He pursed his lips, whistled soundlessly. “We had salads and omelets and shared a very decent bottle of wine.”

“And went back to the Paddington.”

“We were coming in,” he said, “even as you were going out.”

“I guess she’d agreed to return the jewels.”

“Not exactly. We were going to continue our discussion.”

“In her room,” I said. “How long were you there?”

“A couple of hours.”

“Discussing the situation.”

“Quite,” Marty said, looking like the cat who has done something naughty to the canary.

“I guess there was a lot to discuss.”

“More than you might think. I had to take her side against John, and she was positively furious with him.”

“Because he’d insulted her?”

“He’d done more than that. He’d taken the rubies.”

“It’s good we didn’t have that third round of drinks,” I said, “because I think the last round hit me harder
than I realized. If John already had the rubies, why did he send you after them?”

“He didn’t have them. But neither did she. She’d planned on wearing them to lunch, and when she looked for them they were gone.”

I lifted an eyebrow.

“You don’t believe her?”

Not for a minute. If her jewels were gone when Marty saw her at lunchtime, how did they magically reappear in her undies drawer that evening? But all I said was it seemed remarkably convenient.

“I had much the same thought,” he allowed. “Yet her words had the ring of truth.”

The necklace of falsehood and the ring of truth. “You said she was a good actress.”

“I had that thought as well. All in all, I was inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt.” He looked off into the middle distance. “She’s attractive and personable. We enjoyed our lunch, we enjoyed a good bottle of Pommard, and we enjoyed each other’s company. Did it occur to me that she might be lying about the disappearance of the jewels? Of course it did. Maybe they were in a dresser drawer, or tucked in one of the boots her teddy bear was wearing. I couldn’t be certain, and at the moment I didn’t care overly much.”

“And why should you? They weren’t your rubies.”

“But John’s my friend, and he’d entrusted me with a mission. Going to bed with his girlfriend didn’t lessen my obligation to him. So I took care to let Isis know that, should the gems reappear as magically as they’d vanished, I could see that she wound up ten thousand dollars to the good.”

“Didn’t you say five thousand?”

“That was John’s original idea, but he’d agreed I could go as high as ten if I had to. I barely mentioned the lower number, and then went right to the top. Why bargain with a woman you’ve just been to bed with, especially when it’s somebody else’s money?” He sighed. “The sum didn’t bowl her over. I sensed she’d had the pieces appraised, or at least had some notion of their value. Her position never changed—she couldn’t take the money because she didn’t have the rubies. They’d been stolen, and she hadn’t reported the theft because she’d taken it for granted it was John’s doing.”

“And she didn’t have title, so what good would it do her to report the loss?”

“Exactly,” he said. “When I saw you, Bernie, I didn’t think about you in connection with John and Isis and the rubies, because I didn’t as yet know they’d been stolen. Then afterward I remembered passing you in the lobby.”

“But they were gone when she was dressing for lunch, and you’d already had lunch when you ran into me.”

“Who’s to say when you arrived, or how many visits you might have paid to the hotel? But it might not have been you. It could have been anyone John commissioned to go after the necklace and earrings. So I called him, and he was astonished at her effrontery. He flatly denied having anything to do with the jewelry’s disappearance, and took it for granted she was lying, and was amazed she’d turned out to be such a devious bitch. The intensity of his reaction was convincing, and helped dispel any guilt I might have had about sharing a tender moment with the girl. I hadn’t been poaching on my friend’s preserve, because their relationship had clearly run its course.”

“So you believed them both. Somebody took the rubies, but it wasn’t him.”

“That’s correct. And then I thought of you once more, and I was going to call you today. But something made me call Isis last night, and she told me about the excitement at the Paddington. How she’d confronted a suspicious character in the hallway, and how he turned out to be a burglar and a murderer.”

“A burglar perhaps, but—”

“You don’t have to tell me, Bernie. I know the woman’s death wasn’t your doing.”

“Everybody seems to know I’m not capable of murder,” I said, “and all the same I keep getting arrested for it. You did me a big favor, bailing me out.”

“I’m only sorry you had to spend the night in a cell. But, if you’re inclined to return the favor…”

“How?”

“The rubies.”

“Ah, the rubies,” I said. “Who’ll you give them to, have you decided? Your old buddy or your new girlfriend?”

“That’s a question,” he acknowledged. “And merely one of many. What sent you after the rubies? Was it sheer coincidence? Or did John know a shady private detective after all?”

“I don’t know any private detectives,” I said, “shady or otherwise. And I’d never heard of John Considine, and I guess I missed that Molnár revival, because I’d never heard of Isis Gauthier, either. I didn’t go to the Paddington for the rubies. I went for Gulliver Fairborn’s letters.”

“And the woman who was murdered—”

“Was his agent, and she had the letters, and yes, I went looking for them. Somebody else found them first, and killed her, and the next thing I knew I was wearing handcuffs and hearing all about my constitutional rights.”

“You didn’t know about the rubies.”

“No.”

He looked at me, looked away, looked down at his hands. “I’m going to have another drink,” he said, and raised a hand for the waiter. “Perrier for you this time?”

“No, rye’s fine.”

“I thought you wanted to keep a clear head.”

“It’s too late for that, and I’m beginning to think clear heads are overrated. I had a clear head last night, and what did it get me?”

The drinks came and we went to work on them. Then he said, “This is difficult, but there’s no getting around it. You’ve just said you knew nothing about the rubies, and the last thing I want to do is call you a liar, and yet…”

“And yet you think I’m lying.”

“Bernie, how on earth did you know the jewels were rubies?”

“You said they were.”

“No.”

“Of course you did, Marty. Burmese rubies set in twenty-two-karat gold. Remember?”

He shook his head. “First I mentioned the necklace she’d worn in the play, and I said John offered her a replacement. ‘A ruby necklace,’ you said, and only then did I describe the necklace and earrings. But how did you know they were rubies?”

“I could say something about the whole world of psychic phenomena, of which we understand so little.”

“I suppose you could.”

“But I won’t,” I said, and drank some more of my rye, hoping it would do more than Milt or malt to make me feel blameless. “I was lying, but at the same time I was telling the truth.”

“Oh?”

“I never heard of Considine, or Isis, or the rubies. I went looking for some letters and found a dead body. All I wanted to do was get out of there.”

“And?”

“And on my way out I took a shortcut through another room, and guess what I found in the underwear drawer?”

“You didn’t.”

“I did. I wasn’t looking for rubies, not specifically. I’d have preferred cash, to tell you the truth, but what I found was rubies, and to my not entirely untrained eye they looked pretty good. So I took them.”

“Because, after all, that’s what you do.”

“It seems to be. But she looked for the rubies that morning and couldn’t find them, isn’t that what she told you?”

“Yes.”

“I hadn’t even been to the hotel at that point. I didn’t check in until a few minutes before I saw you. Anyway, she must have been telling you a story, don’t you think? Unless she looked in the wrong drawer and honestly thought they’d been stolen.”

He thought that one over. “I don’t know,” he said. “That sounds a little far-fetched, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t she go through all the drawers and make sure?”

“Probably, but—”

“She could have been lying,” he said, “though it’s hard to know why. Still, the possibility had occurred to me.”

“You mentioned as much. You said maybe the rubies were stuffed in Paddington’s boots.”

“Paddington’s—oh, the bear. Yes, I did say that, didn’t I?”

“I didn’t even notice a bear in her room. It certainly wasn’t on top of the dresser.”

“She kept it on the bed. It, uh, got moved to the little chair.”

“I must have looked at the bed,” I said, “but if there was a bear on it I never noticed. I don’t remember a bear on the little chair, either.” I frowned. “Come to think of it, I don’t remember a little chair. Just a big Morris-type armchair.”

“Well,
I
don’t recall an armchair, but I can’t say I was paying much attention to the furnishings. I remember the little side chair because she moved the bear to it, but I should be hard put to describe it to you. The only decorative note that sticks in my mind is that godawful painting.”

“What painting was that?”

“Elvis on black velvet. I guess my horror showed. ‘It’s a black thing,’ she told me. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’ I’m sure she was being ironic, but—”

“Elvis on black velvet.”

“You’ve seen them, haven’t you? In the same sort of shops that sell pictures of dogs playing poker. I always wondered who would buy something like that, and now I know.”

“I don’t know how I missed it. I was in a hurry to get out of there, but it’s not like me to be that oblivious to my surroundings. And it’s a dangerous trait in a burglar. But I’d just seen a corpse and escaped from a murder scene while the cops were knocking on the door, and maybe that threw me off. I was too grateful to be off the fire escape to pay attention to where I was.”

“But not too grateful to keep you from picking up some jewelry.”

“Never mind that,” I said. “I just realized something.
I ran into Isis in the hallway outside Anthea Landau’s room.”

“So?”

“So what the hell was she doing there?”

“Didn’t you say she was waiting for the elevator?”

“So she said, and eventually it came and she got on it, though not a moment too soon. But forget the elevator. What was she doing on the sixth floor?”

“What do you mean?”

“I may not remember Elvis on black velvet,” I said, “but I remember that fire escape. I went out Landau’s bedroom window and climbed down three flights of rickety iron steps until I found a room with nobody home. That was on the third floor, and that’s where Isis lived, and—”

“No.”

“No?”

“I distinctly remember,” he said, “that her room was on the sixth floor. So she had every right to be waiting for an elevator in the sixth-floor hallway. But if her room was on Six, and if the room you broke into was three floors below…”

We looked at each other.

“T
he cat uses the toilet,” Henry Walden said. “But of course you would know that. You’re probably the one who taught him.”

“The only thing I ever taught him is to play shortstop,” I said, and crumpled a sheet of paper into a ball, flinging it to Raffles’s left. If he was at shortstop, then the ball was headed straight for second base. He pounced on it, robbing me of a base hit.

“Like that,” I said, “but I don’t know how much teaching was involved. He’s responded like that from the very beginning. And I’ve gotten nowhere at teaching him to throw to first, and let’s not even talk about turning the double play.”

“He went right over to the bathroom door,” Walden said, “which I’d closed, not realizing that you left it open for him. He scratched at the door, and I got the idea and opened it, and he went right in and hopped up onto the seat, and used it just as if it were a litter box.”

“Did he flush?”

“Why, no.”

“He never does,” I said. “I’d have to say there’s a limit to what you can teach him. He won’t throw to first base and he won’t flush the toilet after himself. Other than that—” I crumpled paper, hurled it “—he’s not so bad.”

I went on throwing balls of paper to catdom’s Derek Jeter. I’d initiated the routine to hone Raffles’s mousing skills, but as it turned out his mere presence was enough to keep my shop a rodent-free environment. He didn’t actually have to do anything. Still, it wouldn’t do to let him lose his edge, and for my own part I was pleased to discover that throwing balls of paper for him to chase was something I could still do after three stout glasses of Kessler’s Maryland Rye.

There’d been some traffic in the shop, Henry told me, and he’d sold some books, collecting the marked price for each and remembering to charge the sales tax. He’d made out a slip for each sale, something I don’t always remember to do, and had the carbon copies clipped together and tucked away in a corner of the cash register.

A woman had come in with a shopping bag full of books, hoping to sell them, and Henry had persuaded her to leave the books so that I could appraise them at leisure. I took a quick gander at them and saw Mark Schorer’s biography of Sinclair Lewis, a first of James T. Farrell’s
Gas-House McGinty,
and a batch of boxed Heritage Press editions, never hard to find but always easy to sell.

“Yes, I can use these,” I told him. “I think the Farrell’s genuinely rare. I know I’ve never seen a copy. The only thing harder to find is someone who collects the man, but if I get stuck with it I can always read it.”

“They looked like good books,” he said. “I didn’t have the authority to make her an offer, but I didn’t want her to sell them to somebody else, either.”

I told him he’d done perfectly, and you’d have thought I scratched him behind the ear. He had a short list of phone messages, too, and I went over them. Carolyn had called to cancel our standing date for drinks. Something had come up. A man named Harkness, from Sotheby’s, had called and left a number. And a woman had called several times and had declined to give her name, or leave any message at all.

I said, “The same woman each time? And she didn’t say her name was Alice?”

“She never gave a name.”

“Hmmm. Did she sound as though her name
might
have been Alice?”

That confused him, and I could understand why. I had the feeling I wouldn’t have asked the question if I hadn’t had that third drink at The Pretenders. Three stiff drinks on an empty stomach—empty unless you count the pastrami sandwiches, and I figured they’d used up all their absorbency neutralizing the cream soda.

It was past closing time. Henry gave me a hand with the table, and I closed the window gates and changed Raffles’s water and did my other evening chores. Raffles had seen it before, but Henry stood around and watched, utterly absorbed, as if I was passing on the tricks of the bookselling trade with my every move.

I wanted to give him a few dollars, but he flat out refused to take money from me. It was a pleasant way to pass a couple of hours, he said, and who knew but that it might be good experience? He had to spend the rest of his life somewhere, and he could do worse than spend it in a bookshop.

“The best way to learn a business,” he said, “is to work for somebody who’s already in it. That’s how you learned, isn’t it? By helping out in somebody else’s store?”

“No, I just plunged in,” I said. I started walking, and he fell into step beside me. “I used to buy books from Mr. Litzauer, and he was talking about how he’d move to Florida in a heartbeat if he could just get a halfway decent price for his store, and I asked him what a halfway decent price amounted to in dollars and cents. He fumfered around a little, but then he came up with a figure and I said I’d buy the place.”

“Just like that?”

“I’d come into a few dollars, and I figured why not? Otherwise I’d only piss it away on food and shelter. So I just jumped in with both feet. I didn’t know zip about the business, and if I had I might have had the sense to stay out of it.”

“But you love it,” he said.

“Do I? I guess I do.” And we walked along, talking books and bookselling, and before I knew it my feet showed they had a mind of their own, and a lousy one at that. They took me right to the Bum Rap.

I figured the least I could do was buy the guy a drink. We went in, and I sat where I usually sit, and he sat in Carolyn’s chair, and when Maxine came over I asked Henry what he’d have. He asked me what I was having. I said I’d been drinking rye lately and figured I ought to stick with it, and he said that sounded good.

I didn’t need that drink, but if I’d had it and left I’d have been all right. But then, wouldn’t you know, Henry insisted on buying a round, and how was I supposed to refuse without offending him? There’s no logical
justification for the third round, I’ll admit, but after the second round logic went out the window, if it had even strolled through the door in the first place.

It might have helped if I’d eaten something, but eating at the Bum Rap has never helped anybody but the makers of Alka-Seltzer. At one point Henry wanted to order a burrito, but I talked him out of it, and the next thing I remember was playing the jukebox. It’s always a bad sign when I decide to play the jukebox. I always pick the same records—Bunny Berigan’s “I Can’t Get Started” and Patsy Cline’s “Faded Love,” and there’s nothing wrong with either of those two, but it’s still a bad sign when I play them, because it means I’m drunk.

Some places get all huffy when their customers get drunk, as if they’d sold you the booze never for a moment suspecting you intended to drink it. But no, you actually went and swallowed the terrible stuff, and then you had the poor taste to let it affect you. Well, shame on you, buster, and kindly take your business somewhere else.

But they’re not like that at the Bum Rap. It’s acceptable to be drunk there, as long as you don’t disturb the other drunks. And I didn’t disturb them. There was a point when I led them in song, and that might have disturbed someone with a fine ear for music, but all of us Bum Rappers seemed to be having a good enough time.

I don’t have any clear memory of getting out of there, but all at once we were on the street, me and my new best friend. I rushed to the curb and hailed everything that came along—trucks, vans, off-duty cabs, and a bus. None of them stopped, curiously enough, but a cab did, finally, and I made Henry take it.

“I’ll get the next one,” I said. “Nothing to it.” And
off he went, and I caught myself just as I was about to hail a blue-and-white police cruiser.

I kept my arm down, but even so it seemed to me that the two cops were looking at me as they sailed on by. “Bernie,” I said to myself, talking out loud and trying not to slur my words, “Bernie, old boy, you’re drunk as a lord, tight as a tick, high as a kite. You’ve got to get home before you get in trouble. Wait for a yellow car with a light on top. That’s the kind to wave at. It’s the only kind to wave at.”

I may have erred on the side of caution, because a cab or two got by me before I could get my hand up. But eventually I must have snagged one, because the next thing I knew I was riding in it. And I was tired, too, so much so that I could barely keep my eyes open.

I must have closed them. They were closed when I became aware of the cabdriver, to whom I had evidently bonded. “My frien’, my frien’,” he was saying, with a certain degree of urgency, and one of those accents that can cope with no more than one consonant at the end of a word. “My frien’, we are here. You wan’ to sleep, you mus’ go to your room.”

I didn’t see why he couldn’t leave me alone. But I sighed and opened my eyes. I leaned forward and squinted at the meter. It was hard to make out and I decided I was reading it wrong, because what I thought I saw was $3.60, and it generally costs me ten bucks plus a tip to get home, which is one reason the subway generally gets my business.

But this would have been a bad night for the subway.

I got out, leaned against the cab, got out my wallet, and found a ten and two singles. “Your meter’s wrong,” I said. “You ought to see about getting it fixed.”

He took the money, looked at the bills, then looked
at me. I asked him if something was wrong. Wasn’t that enough money? Did he want more?

“Is plenny money,” he said. “You go in your house, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, and looked around. “Where is it? Where are we?”

“Where you say.”

“Where I say?”

“Where you say to take you. We here, my frien’. You go to your bed, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, and let go of the cab for a moment, and when I reached for it again it was gone. I got my balance, no easy task, and I turned around for a good look at my house, which I have to say didn’t look like my house at all.

Well, that might explain the low fare. The cabby, upset at having a fare sleeping in his cab, had just dropped me any old place—and I, willing to believe we’d gone all the way to the Upper West Side, had insisted on paying him accordingly.

But where the hell were we?

I straightened up and focused on the building in front of me, and either it was swaying or I was, and logic suggested the instability was mine. There was something written on the canopy, but how was I going to read it?

Definitely not my building, no matter what the driver said. And yet it did look familiar.

Was I intent on visiting a friend? This certainly wasn’t Carolyn’s place on Arbor Court, although the meter would have been about right. Some other girlfriend? I didn’t know where Alice Cottrell lived, we’d only been to my place, but maybe I’d given the driver some exgirlfriend’s address, out of force of habit. Well, force of nonhabit, since I didn’t have any old girlfriends I was
in the habit of dropping in on. Force of rye whiskey, call it.

I walked up to the entrance, and it still looked familiar. I opened the door and went in, and the entranceway looked familiar, too. I looked past some chairs and couches to a fireplace, and I looked up over the fireplace, and I saw a little furry chap in a royal blue hat and a bright red jacket and boots the very color of the cab that had brought me here.

Oh.

I straightened up, and I walked a perfectly straight line over to the desk, where a round-shouldered man with the air of a defrocked accountant was reading one of Patrick O’Brian’s sea stories of the Napoleonic Wars.

“Jeffrey Peters,” I said. “Room 415. I’d like my key, please.”