The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr) (39 page)

“No, I don’t think so.” Jackson seemed to grow taller, and his brow darkened. “Small talk,” he said. “Idle chatter. You were never much for that, and suddenly you filled my billable hours with questions about my mother and how she spent her time. By God, Alton, you broke into my mother’s house!”

Someone said something about the burglar alarm. “She didn’t always set it,” Boyd said, and Jackson said it hadn’t been armed when he’d arrived with Smith.

“But you made a thing of noticing the keypad,” he said to Smith. “You said you hoped the combination was easy for her to remember. And I told you what it was!”

“I don’t recall the conversation, Jackson. And if we even had it, I certainly didn’t make a note of the number.”

“Now that’s funny,” I said. “Because something tells me that if a person were to look in the top right-hand drawer of a desk on the parlor floor of your house on Willow Street, he’d find a note pad with that very four-digit combination written on it.”

“If someone did,” Smith said, glaring at me, “it would mean absolutely nothing, because it could mean anything, anything at all. One-two-three-four, a perfectly ordinary sequence, and—”

He stopped, as did most of the breathing in the room. I could have asked him how, if he didn’t recall the conversation and hadn’t taken notice of the number, he happened to have hit upon it now. But I didn’t have to say anything, because they’d already worked it out for themselves.

“Financial greed is what comes most often to mind. It’s greed that leads people to play the lottery, and the insatiable nature of the malady shows in the propensity of lottery winners to play the thing again. Why, once you’ve won a nine-figure jackpot, would you stand in line to buy more tickets? Because, like that farmer, you never have enough. You always want more.

“But greed takes other forms as well. Sometimes it’s a hunger for more sexual partners and a greater intensity of sexual experience.” I was careful not to look at Meredith and Nils, but made the mistake of looking at Boyd and Stephen instead, who responded by blushing. Who knew?

“And I could go on,” I said, deciding I’d gone on quite enough. “But let’s get down to cases. Alton Ogden Smith is a collector, and it is that particular obsession that has made him an uncommonly greedy man.”

“That’s just about enough,” Smith said. “I’m leaving.”

“No,” Ray said. “I don’t think so.”

“Oh? Am I under arrest?”

“Not yet,” Ray told him. “Do you wanna be?”

Smith started to object, then changed his mind. “I might as well hear this,” he said.

“You’re a collector,” I said, “with wide-ranging interests that all center upon a single theme. You collect buttons—clothing buttons, political campaign buttons, buttons from military uniforms, buttons of every sort. And you collect books about buttons, and books with characters named Button.”

“Like Benjamin Button,” Stephen said, and smiled brightly. “We saw the movie.”

“With Brad Pitt,” Boyd recalled.

“Like Benjamin Button,” I agreed. “And like real people named Button, of whom there have not been many, but one at least is of some renown.”

I waited for someone to supply a name. When nobody did, I glanced meaningfully at Carolyn.

“Like Button Gwinnett,” she said.

“The signer,” Nils Calder said. “The rare one.”

“The one with the elusive signature,” I said, and tossed in a fact or two about the man, which you needn’t hear all over again.

“Mr. Smith was obsessed with buttons,” I went on, “and consequently became obsessed with Button Gwinnett. His collection includes rare editions of books about the man, and the original sketch for the Great Seal of Gwinnett County, Georgia. It hangs on a wall in his study.”

Someone wanted to know how I happened to know that.

“Clairvoyance,” I said. “It’s a gift, and I’ve learned not to question it. I came to know Mr. Smith when he thought I might be able to help him obtain a spoon with Button Gwinnett’s likeness upon it, a spoon produced here in New York by a silversmith named Myer Myers, and—”

“That’d be Meyer Meyer,” Ray broke in, “and Ed McBain wrote about him. Greatest writer who ever lived, far as I’m concerned, on account of he wrote about cops and he got it right. The cops are the good guys in his books, and even the bad ones are okay, you know what I mean?”

“If you worked on the wording a little,” I said, “they’d probably use it for a cover blurb. ‘This is my kind of book, because even the bad cops are good—Ray Kirschmann, NYPD.’ It’s got a nice ring to it. But that’s Meyer Meyer, and I’m talking about somebody else.”

“Myer Myers,” Carolyn said helpfully.

“Who made a Button Gwinnett spoon, which Mr. Smith coveted, as he covets so many elusive items. And I thought I might be able to help him, but nothing came of it.”

Smith made a sound. A snort, you might have called it.

“So that’s how you know him,” Deirdre said. “And probably how you know what’s hanging on his wall.”

“Probably,” I agreed. I turned to Jackson. “When you showed your list of paintings to Mr. Smith, there was an artist on it named Chancelling.”

“Something like that,” Jackson said. “There was a signature in the lower right corner, but it was hard to make out. Chancellor, Chancelling, whatever. No first name, but there was an initial.”

“And that would be J.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“J. Chancelling,” I said, “of whom next to nothing is known besides his last name and first initial, painted the only known portrait of our friend Button Gwinnett. It disappeared over a century ago, and turned up in your mother’s house on Ninety-second Street, where it hung for years over the wall safe in the master bedroom.”

“But it’s not there now?”

“I’m afraid not. But if you were to go to Brooklyn Heights and pay a visit to Mr. Smith’s home, you’d find a portrait with that very signature hanging in a place of honor.”

Can a silence properly be described as thoughtful? Well, this one was. It stretched on until Alton Ogden Smith broke it. “I saw that name on Jackson’s list of artists,” he said. “Except I don’t believe it was Chancelling. It looked more like Chancellor. Still, I wondered if it was another work by Chancelling, even a second painting of Gwinnett.”

“A second painting,” I said.

“Because I own his Button Gwinnett portrait, have owned it for years. I’m afraid it wouldn’t be prudent for me to disclose how I came by it. Its provenance is cloudy, let us say, involving an under-the-table transaction that was surely unethical if not strictly illegal. So I was indeed interested in seeing the work, and I had a look at it, and it’s not Chancelling at all, and the subject is certainly not Gwinnett. If you say it’s no longer where it was, well, I can no more guess what’s become of it than I can fathom why anyone would want to walk off with it.”

“There’s a story of Saki’s,” I said, “called ‘The Open Window.’ Have any of you read it?”

None of them had. Well, I wasn’t surprised. Who reads anything these days?

“It comes to mind,” I said, “because there was a young girl in the story who was quite brilliant at elaborate improvisation on short notice. I have to say you’re right up there with her. I was impressed with your whole invention of the five Burton Bartons, but you had plenty of time to come up with it. This was virtually spur of the moment, and I have to say I’m in awe.”

So was Jackson, evidently, or perhaps he was beginning to realize that he stood to lose a major client. “You know,” he said, “you’re making serious accusations here. Alton Ogden Smith is a man of substance. If there’s an item he wants for his collection, he can write out a check for it. He doesn’t have to resort to housebreaking.”

“Or he could have hired some amoral wretch to commit a felony on his behalf,” I said. “He’d still be breaking the law, but he wouldn’t get his hands dirty. But maybe he discovered he actually
wanted
to get his hands dirty. Maybe it was time for him to see what it was like.”

I let them think about that for a moment.

Then I said, “Here’s what happened. Our Mr. Smith saw the painting and recognized it immediately for what it was, Chancelling’s long-lost portrait of Button Gwinnett. He had to have it, but how? His attorney needed money, but it wasn’t his to sell, it belonged to the man’s mother, who was no more eager to let go of her possessions than she was to move from a house that was far too large for her needs. She wanted to keep her surroundings as they were, and wouldn’t that extend to the paintings on her walls?

“And if he cleared that hurdle, how could he make sure the portrait wound up in his hands? If Jackson Ostermaier knew what he had, wouldn’t he want to get the best price for it? And wouldn’t that mean publicity, and an auction at Christie’s or Sotheby’s, with buyers representing everyone from the Georgia Historical Society to some oil-rich sheik from the Emirates keen to snatch the thing up before some Russian oligarch got his hands on it?

“Mr. Smith might be a wealthy man, but he’d come by his money in the old-fashioned way. He inherited it, and while it provided him with all of life’s luxuries and then some, it didn’t run into the billions. While one might think of him as a man who could have anything he wanted, that doesn’t take into account the nature of greed.

“So here was this painting, and he had to have it, and perhaps he felt it was his by right. He’d discovered it, hadn’t he? He’d recognized Chancelling’s name on his client’s inventory, then recognized Gwinnett’s face when he got a look at it. Didn’t this provide him with some sort of moral title to the thing?”

My eyes locked with Smith’s. “Here’s what you did. You put Jackson off the scent by telling him the ancestor portraits were not going to solve anybody’s financial problems. You slipped his mother’s key off his key ring, copied it, and put it back. You determined when she’d be away from the house, and the house empty.

“You paid a visit, but you didn’t come empty-handed. If your visit were to go unnoticed, you’d have to so arrange things that no one ever missed the portrait. That meant hanging something in its place—in the upstairs bedroom, covering the wall safe.

“So you brought a painting along. What you might have done was hunt the galleries and antique shops for another anonymous old portrait in a similar frame. But that would cost you a couple of thousand dollars, plus the time involved in finding something suitable, and you had something around the house, a museum reproduction, tastefully framed. John Constable, 1776-1837, cows in a field.”

“Those cows,” Deirdre said. “I was standing there, looking down at Mother, and I saw them out of the corner of my eye. And I thought how odd it was that I’d never really noticed them before. But of course I hadn’t, because they weren’t there.” She frowned. “But they were on the west wall, above the leather-topped drum table. And didn’t you say the Gwinnett portrait was upstairs?”

“Concealing the safe,” I said. “But that was the room your mother slept in, and he realized she’d know at once if a rural landscape abruptly replaced an ancestor portrait. So he switched his Constable for a downstairs ancestor, which he took upstairs to swap for his beloved Button Gwinnett. It looks right at home there.

“And the Constable wasn’t a bad match for the living room décor. But the size was wrong. It was wider than it was tall, unlike the portrait it replaced. Walls darken over time, except where they’re covered, and a close look at the Constable showed that it had been hung to replace a painting with very different dimensions.”

“Maybe that’s why I noticed it,” Deirdre said.

“And maybe nobody would have noticed anything,” I said, “but for the very unfortunate fact that your mother left the opera early, and returned home earlier than expected. Mr. Smith turned up an hour or so later, and I’m sure he took the precaution of ringing the doorbell before he used his key. That way, if anyone was home, he could say he’d come to the wrong address by mistake, and pay another visit on another evening.