The Burglar in the Rye (21 page)

“Kassenmeier?”

“That’s what I assumed,” I said. “I didn’t know her name yet, I hadn’t had time to read the luggage tag, but I assumed the person at the door was the room’s current occupant. It was the middle of the night, so it didn’t figure to be a friend paying a call.”

“It could have been another burglar,” Isis suggested. “Like you.”

“Not like me,” I said, “because this burglar had a key. What I did was hide.”

“In the closet?”

I looked at Alice, whose question it was, and who seemed surprised at having raised it. “Not the closet,” I said. “And a good thing, because I have a feeling they looked in the closet.”

“‘They’?”

I nodded at Isis. “There were two of them,” I said. “A man and a woman. I was in the bathroom, behind the shower curtain, and I didn’t get a look at either of them. I stayed where I was, and they used the bedroom and left.”

“They used the bedroom?” Erica said. “How?”

“Well, not to sleep.”

“They had sex in it,” Carolyn said. “Right, Bern?”

“They did,” I said, “and then they left.”

“Kassenmeier and some guy,” Ray Kirschmann said, and glanced at Carolyn. “Or maybe it wasn’t a guy.”

“It was,” I said.

“What did you do, hear his voice?”

I shook my head. “He left the toilet seat up,” I said.

“The pig,” Isis said.

“I never really heard his voice,” I went on, “except in an undertone, and I certainly didn’t recognize it. But I recognized
her
voice, and it wasn’t Kassenmeier’s.”

“How could you tell? You said you never met Kassenmeier.”

“I never did,” I said, “so if I recognized this voice—”

“Then you knew who the person was,” Marty said. “The woman.”

“Yes. She was the person who got me interested in Anthea Landau and her file folder full of letters. And now she turned up in a room where I’d found some stolen jewelry, and then she left and I checked the luggage tag and read the name Karen Kassenmeier. So my first thought was that this was her room, and that she and Kassenmeier were the same person, even if I had met her under another name. One of the names was an alias, and they were both the same person.”

“Maybe you were right,” Alice Cottrell said levelly. “How can you be sure they weren’t the same person?”

Because Karen Kassenmeier’s dead,
I thought,
and you’re sitting here trying to look innocent.
But what I said was, “I saw Karen Kassenmeier at the morgue, and she wasn’t anyone I’d seen before. But even before then, I had the feeling the woman I overheard wasn’t the same person whose room it was.”

Ray said, “Why’s that, Bern?”

“The bed was made.” That put a puzzled look on every face in the room, so I explained. “The two visitors made love in Room 303, and then they left, and when I saw the bed it had been made up.”

The man from Sotheby’s, Victor Harkness, cleared his throat. “All that would seem to establish,” he said, “is that they’re neat.”

“I couldn’t see how they’d had time to make the bed,” I said, “and it was very professionally made, as if the chambermaid had done it. In fact it looked the same as it had looked before they got there, and there was a reason for it. They’d never unmade the bed in the first place.”

“You mean they…”

“Had sex on top of the bedspread,” Isis Gauthier finished for him, and made a face. “That’s even worse than leaving the toilet seat up.”

“I suppose they were in a hurry,” I said, “and they probably wanted to avoid leaving evidence of their visit to the room, evidence Karen Kassenmeier might notice when she returned to it. But they did leave some evidence, and it enabled me to determine who the man was.”

“DNA,” the uniformed cop said. “But how would you get samples for comparison, and when did you have time to run tests, and—”

“Not DNA,” I said, “and that wasn’t the kind of evidence that was left behind. Maybe they practiced safe sex.”

“I hope so,” Isis said. “Everybody ought to.”

“Who was the man?” Carolyn asked. “And what was the evidence that pointed to him?”

“It was a black mark.”

“On his record?” Victor Harkness suggested. “A blot on his copybook?”

“Don’t forget his escutcheon,” I said. “But this was a black mark on the bedspread. At the top, over the pillow. Right where his head would be.” While they
thought about it, I added, “Remember what I said earlier, about hearing a key in the lock? That was one of the reasons I assumed it was the room’s occupant coming home. But it wasn’t, yet it was somebody with a key. Of the two people in that room, I knew the woman, and I couldn’t think of any reason she would have a key to another person’s hotel room. But maybe the man had access to a key. A key to Room 303, say, or a master key, a key that would open any room in the hotel.”

“A key to the door,” Carolyn said, “and a black mark on the bedspread.”

“A picture begins to emerge,” I said. “A picture of a hotel employee. Someone who could put Karen Kassenmeier in a room without officially registering her. Someone who would thus know what room she was in, and would be able to get in and out with no trouble. Someone whose hair is as black as the telltale mark on the bedspread, and not because that’s the way Mother Nature made it. Carl, you’ve been at the Paddington for years. Is there anyone you know of who fits that description?”

E
veryone looked at Carl Pillsbury, and I have to hand it to him—he was as cool and as bold as a brass cucumber. He frowned in thought, took his chin between his thumb and forefinger, pursed his lips, and emitted a soundless whistle. “Someone who works for the Paddington and dyes his hair,” he said. “Now a couple of years ago we had a fellow who wore a toupee, but that’s not the same thing, is it? But I can’t think of anyone who uses hair coloring.”

“Then somebody musta turned you upside down,” Ray said, “an’ stuck your head in the inkwell, ’cause that mop of yours looks about as natural as Astroturf.”

“Me?” he said, his eyes widening. “You actually think I color my hair?”

“Everybody knows you do, Carl,” Isis said.

“Everybody?”

“Everybody in the tristate area.”

“It’s obvious?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I have a pretty good idea what happened,” I said, “although there are a few gaps here and there. I know you’re from the Midwest originally, and so was Karen Kassenmeier. The two of you aren’t that far apart in age. I think you knew each other way back when, or else you met here in New York.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I suppose it’s possible she approached you cold when she got here,” I said, “but that’s hard to believe. She must have known you.”

“That would explain something,” Hilliard Moffett said. “I certainly never suggested anything criminal when I met that woman in Seattle—”

“Whether you did or not,” Ray assured him, “we got bigger fish to fry. An’ whatever you did you did in Seattle, an’ this here’s New York, an’ I don’t see no Seattle cops in this room. So just say whatever you got to say.”

“All right,” Moffett said, and stuck out his jaw. “She had an interesting reaction when I mentioned the name of the hotel. Until then she’d seemed noncommittal, lukewarm to the whole notion, but then she brightened. ‘The Paddington,’ she said. ‘I wonder if he’s still there.’ I asked her what she meant, and she just shook her head and pressed me for more details.”

“That proves nothing,” Carl said. “She once knew someone who once worked or lived at the hotel. So what?”

“You’d be surprised what good police work can turn up,” Ray said. “Once we take a good long look at both your backgrounds, don’t you think we’re gonna find somethin’ puts you an’ her in the same place at the same
time? You could cop to it right now an’ save everybody some trouble.”

“Even if I knew her once,” he said, “it still proves nothing.”

“Here’s what I think happened,” I said. “She showed up at the hotel and told you she wanted to check in under a false name. You had an even better idea: she wouldn’t register at all, and you’d stick her in a room. That would save her upwards of a hundred and fifty dollars a night.”

“What makes you think I would do anything like that?”

“It’s not exactly unheard-of in the business,” I said. “It’s a good way for a desk clerk to make a few dollars for himself. Like a bartender forgetting to charge for drinks, with the understanding that the customer will show his appreciation with an oversize tip. But Karen Kassenmeier was offering you more than the chance to knock down a few dollars on an off-the-books rental, wasn’t she? She could afford to, because you could provide more than a place to stay. You could get her into Anthea Landau’s room.”

“Why would she need me for that? You already said the woman was a professional thief.”

“She was a pro at liftin’ things,” Ray said, “but there’s nothin’ on her sheet shows she ever opened a door she didn’t have the key to.”

“You could get her in,” I said. “That had to be worth something to her. You could find a spare key to Landau’s room, or lend her your passkey. And you could tip her off as to when Landau was out of the hotel, so that she could get in and out without encountering the woman.”

“We had a case like that a couple of years back,” Ray
said. “Big midtown hotel, an’ we started gettin’ reports of things missin’ from the rooms. No signs of forced entry, and it was almost always cash that was taken, an’ another thing—the victims were almost always Japanese businessmen.”

“At some midtown hotels,” Erica said, “that’s just about all you find.”

“This one got a lot of ’em,” Ray said, “but it was still pretty clear they were gettin’ targeted. An’ we looked into it, an’ we found it was worse than we figured, because a lot of the Japs was gettin’ knocked off an’ not botherin’ to report it. We knew it had to be somebody on the inside, an’ we narrowed it down to this one clerk, but we couldn’t make a case.”

“What happened?”

“You tell me. There was this one Jap we talked to. He got knocked off, an’ he knew some other people who got knocked off, an’ I guess maybe we let on which clerk we suspected.” He looked off into the distance, recalling the moment. “Funny guy,” he said. “Woulda made a hell of a poker player, ’cause he didn’t show nothin’ in his face. An’ when he stretched out his arms you could see he had tattoos on his wrists, an’ there was more tattooin’ that showed when he loosened his tie an’ unbuttoned his collar. An’ one more thing that was pretty funny. I mean, he was the kind of guy that if he was an American you’d figure him to have a pinkie ring. But there was no way in hell he could manage that.”

Somebody obligingly asked why.

“No place to put it,” Ray said. “Both his pinkies were gone. Funny, huh?”

“Yakuza,” I said. “Japanese gangsters. What happened to the clerk?”

“Well, must be he took the money an’ ran,” Ray said,
“because he disappeared, an’ nobody ever saw him again.” He shrugged. “But just to be on the safe side, I stayed outta sushi bars for the next month or so.”

Carl had the look of someone who’d eaten a little too much Uzbek food. I guess he didn’t like stories where the hotel clerk disappeared.

“Maybe you’d worked a deal with her before,” I said to Carl. “For one reason or another she knew you weren’t an altar boy, and she made her pitch and you liked the sound of it. As a matter of fact, you had an idea of your own.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“People say that all the time,” I said, “and it’s hardly ever true. You know exactly what I’m talking about. You told her about a woman living right here at the Paddington, a fellow member of the theatrical profession, who was wearing an extremely valuable necklace with matching earrings.”

Isis’s jaw dropped, and she wheeled on Carl. “You son of a bitch,” she said. “I thought we were friends.”

“Don’t believe him, Isis.”

“Tell me why I should believe you instead, Carl.”

“For God’s sake, he’s a self-proclaimed burglar.”

“Actually,” Carolyn put in, “I think ‘admitted’ would be a better word for Bernie than ‘self-proclaimed.’ It’s not as though he goes around making proclamations. If anything, he’s a little ashamed of being a burglar.”

“Then why doesn’t he stop burgling?” Isis wanted to know.

“Just between us, I think it’s an addiction.”

“Has the man tried therapy? Or some sort of twelve-step program?”

“Nothing seems to work.”

“But I live in hope,” I said. “Carl, you and Isis were
both actors. You were still jockeying a desk in a hotel lobby and she was getting work and wearing rubies. Maybe that gave you a resentment, or maybe you just saw some easy money. You gave your friend Karen a key and a room number and told her what to look for. And I guess she was a pro, all right, because she got out with the jewelry and otherwise left the place the way she’d found it.”

“I didn’t know anyone had been in there,” Isis said. “I always thought burglars made a mess.”

“Only the low-level ones,” I said.

“All I knew was that the necklace and earrings were gone. I looked for them and they were gone. I thought I’d misplaced them, and then I started thinking the, uh, friend who gave them to me had taken them back. And finally I found out that you were a burglar, and I decided you must have taken them.”

“Well, I did,” I said, “but Kassenmeier took them first. She stuffed them in the back of her underwear drawer.” I shook my head. “The cobbler’s children go barefoot, all right. A pro like Kassenmeier goes and hides the rubies in the first place a burglar would look. I guess she was in a hurry to get back to work on the job that brought her here in the first place, the Fairborn-Landau letters.”

I drew a breath. “Now here’s where the timing gets a little tricky,” I said. “The day of Landau’s murder was the same day I first came to the Paddington. I checked in around lunchtime, collected my bear, and went to my room.”

“You took a bear?” Isis said. “You came here to commit burglary and you wanted a bear in your room?”

“I don’t see what one thing has to do with the other,” I told her. “It’s a cute bear. Point is, while I was checking
in I picked up an envelope from the floor. It was there to be picked up because I had just that minute dropped it. It had Anthea Landau’s name on it, and it was my way of finding out which room she was in. All I had to do was watch where Carl put it.”

“I didn’t put it anywhere,” Carl said. “I left it on the desk.”

“For the moment,” I said. “But by the time I’d put my things away and went back downstairs, you’d tucked it in Landau’s pigeonhole.”

“How could you tell?” Lester Eddington asked. “There must have been a dozen envelopes in as many pigeonholes.”

“This one was purple.”

His eyes lit up at the news, as did Hilliard Moffett’s. “Like every letter Gulliver Fairborn ever wrote,” Moffett said.

“I wanted something distinctive,” I said, “so I’d be able to spot it. And I had purple on the brain because I knew it was Fairborn’s favorite color for correspondence. So I bought some purple paper and envelopes at a stationery store.” I drew a folded sheet from my breast pocket, waved it around. “Like this,” I said, and put it back. “I put a blank sheet in an envelope and left it at the desk, and it was in Anthea Landau’s pigeonhole when I left my key on the way out. And when I picked up my key that evening, it was gone.”

“She picked up her mail.”

“That’s what I assumed. But Anthea Landau had become increasingly reclusive in recent years. She rarely left the hotel, and didn’t often leave her suite of rooms.”

“I had to go to her room to examine the letters she was going to consign to us,” Victor Harkness put in.
“‘You’ll have to come to the hotel,’ she said, arranging to meet me in the lobby. When I called from the lobby she said, ‘You’ll have to come upstairs.’”

“So I hardly think she would come downstairs for her mail,” I said. “I think she would have it brought up to her.”

Everyone looked at Carl. “So?” he demanded. “What does that have to do with anything? When I was on my break I took her mail up and slid it under her door. There are a few guests who get that service. Miss Landau was one of them.”

“So you slid it under her door.”

“That’s right.”

“Is it? What if I told you someone saw you knocking on her door?”

“I slid the mail under her door. If I knocked, it was just to let her know I’d brought her mail. I did that sometimes.”

“And walked away without waiting for the door to be opened.”

“Yes.”

“What if I told you someone saw you wait until she opened the door?”

“Nobody saw me.” He colored. “Look, who can tell one day from the next? Maybe she opened the door. She sometimes did, if she was standing right next to it when I knocked. What difference does it make?”

“I’m guessing now,” I said, “but I think my guess is pretty close to the truth. I know you knocked and I’m sure she let you in, and then I think you did something to make sure she’d sleep soundly. Was she drinking a cup of tea? Did you put something in her tea?”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“It may not have been tea,” I said, “and she may
not have been drinking it right there in front of you, whatever it was. But one way or another you slipped her some kind of a mickey.”

“If he did,” Ray said, “there’ll be traces somewhere. In the cup if she didn’t wash it, an’ in her if she drank it.” Marty asked if they’d found anything. “No,” Ray said, “on account of we didn’t look. When a woman’s been hit over the head an’ stabbed to death, you don’t generally order a toxicology scan to find out if she took poison. But I can order it now, an’ if she did we’ll know about it.”

“It wasn’t poison,” Carl said. “My God, I wouldn’t poison anybody.”

“It was just something to help her sleep.”

“She hadn’t been sleeping well,” he said, “and she never left those rooms, and I knew Karen was getting tired of waiting. She’d go in while Miss Landau was asleep, and if she wasn’t sleeping soundly—well, I was afraid of what might happen.”

“With good cause, as it turned out.”

“Oh, God,” Carl said. “I probably shouldn’t say any more. I’ve said too much already.”

“Well, you got the right to remain silent,” Ray said smoothly, and ran the whole Miranda warning past him. “An’ that goes for everybody in this room,” he added. “All of you’s got the right to remain silent, an’ all the rest I just read. But you want my opinion, you’d be crazy to quit talkin’ now.”

“I would?”

“You broke some laws,” he said, “an’ no question you were an accessory, but if you help us clear the case an’ tie the whole thing to Kasimir—”

“Kassenmeier,” I said.

“Whatever. You do that, you’re in good shape. And she’s dead as a doorknob, so what’s the harm in that?”

“She killed Miss Landau,” Carl said. “I mean, you already know that, don’t you?”

“Why don’t you tell us what happened?”

“There’s not much to tell. I gave the drug time to work, and then I called Miss Landau. She didn’t answer her phone, so I assumed she was sleeping soundly. Then I called Karen in her room and told her to come down and pick up a key. She did, and went upstairs with it. The next thing I knew, Miss Landau was dead.”

“What happened?”

“All I know is what Karen told me. She went in and Miss Landau woke up and confronted her. Karen stabbed her and got away without being seen.”

“Aren’t you leaving something out?”

“I don’t think so.”

“When they found Kassenmeier in my apartment,” I said, “she’d been shot in the shoulder, and it didn’t happen on West End Avenue, either, because the wound had been cleaned and dressed and was already starting to heal. Landau shot her, didn’t she?”