The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling

by Lawrence Block

  I glanced at Whelkin. “You sold him a book,” I said. “Didn’t you ever meet him?”

  “Maddy handled everything. She was the middleman.”

  “Middleperson, I think you mean. I suppose you spoke to him on the telephone?”

  “Briefly. I don’t recognize the voice.”

  “And you?” I asked the Maharajah. “You phoned Mr. Arkwright this morning, didn’t you?”

  “This could be the man whose voice I heard. I am unable to say one way or the other.”

  “This is absurd,” Demarest said. Hell, let’s call him Arkwright. “A presumed resemblance to a pair of portraits, an uncertain identification of a voice supposedly heard over a telephone—”

  “You forget. I saw you leave an office building on Pine Street. I called you there at a certain number, and the phone you answered was in the office of Tontine Trading Corp., and the owner of Tontine is a man named Jesse Arkwright. I don’t think you’re going to get very far insisting the whole thing’s a case of mistaken identity.”

  He didn’t take much time to think it over. “All right,” he said. “I’m Arkwright. There’s no reason to continue the earlier charade. I received a call earlier today, apparently from this gentleman whom you call the Maharajah. He wanted to know if I still possessed a copy of Fort Bucklow.”

  “I had seen the advertisement,” the Maharajah put in, “and I wondered at its legitimacy. When I was unable to obtain the book either from this store or from Miss Porlock, I thought it might remain in Mr. Arkwright’s possession. I called him before responding to the advertisement.”

  “And he referred to the ad,” Arkwright went on. “I looked for myself. I called you on the spur of the moment. I thought I could poke around and find out what was going on. A book disappeared from my house in the middle of the night. I wanted to see if I could get it back. I also wanted to determine whether it was indeed the rarity I’d been led to believe it was. So I called you, and came here tonight to bid on the book if it came to that. But none of that makes me a killer.”

  “You were keeping Madeleine Porlock.”

  “Nonsense. I’d met her twice, perhaps three times. She knew of my interest in rare books and approached me out of the blue to offer me the Kipling volume.”

  “She was your mistress. You had a kinky sex scene going in the apartment on East Sixty-sixth Street.”

  “I’ve never even been there.”

  “There are neighbors who saw you there. They recognized your photograph.”

  “What photograph?”

  I took it out and showed it to him. “They’ve identified you,” I said. “You were seen in Porlock’s company and on your own. Apparently you had a set of keys because some of the neighbors saw you coming and going, letting yourself in downstairs.”

  “That’s circumstantial evidence, isn’t it? Perhaps they saw me when I collected the book from her. Perhaps she let me in with the buzzer and they thought they saw me using a key. Memories are unreliable, aren’t they?”

  I let that pass. “Maybe you thought she loved you,” I said. “In any event, you felt personally betrayed. I’d robbed you, but that didn’t make you want to kill me. It was enough for you to get my prints on everything and leave me with a gun in my hand. But you wanted Madeleine Porlock dead. You’d trusted her and she’d cheated you.”

  “This is all speculation. Sheer speculation.”

  “How about the gun? A Marley Devil Dog, a. 32 automatic.”

  “I understood it was unregistered.”

  “How did you come to understand that? It wasn’t in the papers.”

  “Perhaps I heard it over the air.”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think the information was released. Anyway, sometimes an unregistered gun can be traced more readily than you might think.”

  “Even if you could trace it to me,” he said carefully, “that wouldn’t prove anything. Just that you’d stolen it when you burglarized my house.”

  “But it wasn’t in your house. You kept it in the lower left drawer of your desk in the Tontine office downtown.”

  “That’s absolutely untrue.”

  The righteous indignation was fetching. I’d seen that blued-steel automatic in the study on Copperwood Crescent. And now I was telling him it had been at his office, and it hadn’t, and he was steamed.

  “Of course it’s true,” I said. “Anybody would keep the gun and the bullets in the same place. And I have the damnedest feeling that you’ve got an almost full box of .32 shells in that drawer, along with a cleaning cloth and a pair of spare clips for a Marley Devil Dog.”

  He stared at me. “You were in my office!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “You—you planted those items. You’re framing me.”

  “And you’re grabbing at straws,” I sailed on. “Do you still claim you weren’t keeping Madeleine Porlock? If that’s so, why did you buy her a lynx jacket? It’s not hard to guess why she’d want one. It’s a stunning garment.” Pace, Carolyn. “But why would you buy it for her if you were just casual acquaintances?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I looked in your closets when I was checking out a book from your library, Mr. Arkwright. Your wife had a couple of pretty impressive furs there. They all had the same label in them. Arvin Tannenbaum.”

  “What does that prove?”

  “There’s a lynx jacket in the Porlock apartment with the same label in it.”

  “I repeat, what does that prove? Tannenbaum’s a top furrier. Any number of persons patronize him.”

  “You bought that jacket for Madeleine last month. There’s a record of the sale in their files with your name on it and a full description of the jacket.”

  “That’s impossible. I never—I didn’t—” He paused and regrouped, choosing his words more carefully this time around. “If I were keeping this woman, as you put it, and if I did purchase a jacket for her, I would certainly have paid cash. There would surely be no record of the transaction.”

  “You’d think that, wouldn’t you? But I guess they know you up there, Mr. Arkwright. You must be a treasured customer or something. I could be mistaken, but I have a hunch if the police looked through Tannenbaum’s files, they’d find the sales record I described. They might even find the actual bill of sale in your desk at Tontine, with your name and the notation that you’d paid cash.”

  “My God,” he said, ashen-faced. “How did you—”

  “Of course I’m just guessing.”

  “You framed me.”

  “That’s not a very nice thing to say, Mr. Arkwright.”

  He put his hand to his chest as if in anticipation of a coronary. “All of these lies and half-truths,” he said. “What do they amount to? Circumstantial evidence at best.”

  “Circumstantial evidence is sometimes all it takes. You were keeping Porlock and your gun killed her, and you had the strongest possible motive for her murder. What was the Watergate expression? The smoking pistol? Well, they didn’t catch you with the smoking pistol in your hand because you were considerate enough to leave it in my hand, but I think the D.A.’ll have enough to make your life difficult.”

  “I should have killed you while I was at it,” he said. Positively venomous, his voice was. He was still holding onto his chest. “I should have tucked your finger around the trigger and put the gun in your mouth and let you blow your little brains out.”

  “That would have been cute,” I agreed. “I killed her while committing a burglary, then took my own life in a fit of remorse. I haven’t had a remorse attack since the fifth grade, but who could possibly know that? How come you didn’t do it that way?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked thoughtful “I… never killed anyone before. After I shot her I just wanted to get away from there. I never even thought of killing you. I simply put the gun in your hand and left.”

  Beautiful. A full admission, and as much as anyone was likely to get without reading him his rights and letting him call
his lawyer. It was about time for the Cavalry to make its appearance. I started to turn toward the rear of the store, where Ray Kirschmann and Francis Rockland were presumably taking in all of this, when the hand Arkwright had been clutching to his breast snaked inside his jacket and back out again, and when it reappeared there was a gun in it.

  He pushed his chair back as he drew the gun, moving briskly backward so that he could cover the four of us at once—Whelkin and Atman Singh and the Maharajah. And me, at whom the gun was pointed. It was a larger gun than the one I’d come to clutching, far too large to be a Whippet or a Devil Dog. And a revolver, I noted. Perhaps, if he was partial to the Marley line, it was a Mastiff. Or a Rhodesian Ridgeback, or whatever.

  “Let’s hold it right there,” he said, waving the gun around. “I’ll shoot the first person who moves a hair. You’re a clever man, Rhodenbarr, but it won’t do you any good this time. I don’t suppose the world will miss a burglar. They ought to gas people like you in the first place, loathsome vermin with no respect for property rights. As for you”—this to Whelkin—“you cheated me. You employed Madeleine to swindle me out of some money. You made a fool of me. I won’t mind killing you. You other gentlemen have the misfortune of being present at an awkward time. I regret the necessity of doing this—”

  Killing women’s bad policy. Ignoring them can be worse. He’d forgotten all about Carolyn, and he was still running his mouth when she brained him with a bronze bust of Immanuel Kant. I’d been using it as a bookend, in the Philosophy and Religion section.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty

  At a quarter to twelve Monday morning I hung the Out to Lunch sign in the window and locked up. I didn’t bother with the iron gates, not at that hour. I went to the place Carolyn had patronized Thursday and bought felafel sandwiches and a container of hummus and some flat crackers to scoop it up with. They were oddly shaped and reminded me of drawings of amoebae in my high-school biology textbook. I started to order coffee too but they had mint tea and that sounded interesting so I picked up two containers. The counterman put everything in a bag for me. I still didn’t know if he was an Arab or an Israeli, so instead of chancing a shalom or a salaam I just told him to have a nice day and let it go at that.

  Carolyn was hard at work combing out a Lhasa Apso. “Thank God,” she said when she saw me, and popped the fluffy little dog into a cage. “Lunchtime, Dolly Lama. I’ll deal with you later. Whatcha got, Bern?”

  “Felafel.”

  “Sensational. Grab a chair.”

  I did and we dug in. Between bites I told her that everything looked good. Francis Rockland wouldn’t be hassling either me or the Sikh, having accepted three thousand of the Maharajah’s American dollars as compensation for his erstwhile toe. It struck me as a generous settlement, especially so when you recalled that he’d shot the toe off all by his lonesome. And I gather a few more rupees found their way into Ray Kirschmann’s pocket. Money generally does.

  Rudyard Whelkin, who incredibly enough proved to have a walletful of identification in that unlikely name, was booked as a material witness and released in his own recognizance. “I’m pretty sure he’s out of the country,” I told Carolyn. “Or at least out of town. He called me last night and tried to talk me into parting with the Hitler copy of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow.”

  “Don’t tell me he wants to sell it to the Sheikh.”

  “I think he knows what that would get him. Flayed alive, for instance. But there are enough other weirdos who’d pay a bundle for an item like that, and Whelkin’s just the man to find one of them. He may never make the big score he’s trying for but he hasn’t missed many meals so far in life and I don’t figure he’ll start now.”

  “Did you give him the book?”

  “No way. Oh, he’s got a satchel full of copies. I only took the Hitler specimen from his room at the Gresham. I left him some Haggard copies and a few that hadn’t been tampered with, so he can cook up another Hitler copy if he’s got the time and patience. If he forged all of that once, he can do it again. But I’m holding onto the copy I swiped from him.”

  “You’re not going to sell it?”

  I may have managed to look hurt. “Of course not,” I said. “I may be a crook in my off-hours, but I’m a perfectly honest bookseller. I don’t misrepresent my stock. Anyway, the book’s not for sale. It’s for my personal library. I don’t figure to read it very often but I like the idea of having it around.”

  The Maharajah, I told her, was on his way to Monaco to unwind with a flutter at roulette or baccarat or whatever moved him. The whole experience, he told me, had been invigorating. I was glad he thought so.

  And Jesse Arkwright, I added, was in jail. Jugged, by George, and locked up tighter than the Crown jewels. They’d booked the bastard for Murder One and you can’t get bailed out of that charge. Doesn’t matter how rich you are.

  “Not that he’ll be imprisoned on that charge,” I explained. “To tell you the truth, I’ll be surprised if the case ever comes to trial. The evidence is sketchy. It might be enough to convict a poor man but he’s got the bread for a good enough lawyer to worm his way out. He’ll probably plead to a reduced charge. Manslaughter, say, or overtime parking. He’ll pull a sentence of a year or two and I’ll bet you even money he won’t serve a day. Suspended sentence. Wait and see.”

  “But he killed that woman.”

  “No question.”

  “It doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Few things do,” I said philosophically. Move over, Immanuel Kant. “At least he’s not getting off scot-free. He’s behind bars even as we speak, and his reputation is getting dragged through the mud, and he’ll pay a lot emotionally and financially even if he doesn’t wind up serving any prison time for what he did. He’s lucky, no question, but he’s not as he thought he’d be before you nailed him with the bookend.”

  “It was a lucky shot.”

  “It was a perfect strike from where I stood.”

  She grinned and scooped up some hummus. “Maybe I’m what the Mets could use,” she said.

  “What the Mets could use,” I said, “is divine intercession. Anyway, lots of things aren’t fair. The Blinns are getting away with their insurance claim, for example. I’m off the hook for burglarizing their apartment. The police agreed not to press charges in return for my cooperation in collaring Arkwright for murder, which is pretty decent of them, but the Blinns still get to collect for all the stuff I stole, which I didn’t steal to begin with, and if that’s fair you’ll have to explain it to me.”

  “It may not be fair,” she said, “but I’m glad anyway. I like Gert and Artie.”

  “So do I. They’re good people. And that reminds me.”

  “Oh?”

  “I had a call from Artie Blinn last night.”

  “Did you? This mint tea’s terrific, incidentally. Sweet, though. Couldn’t you get it without sugar?”

  “That’s how it comes.”

  “It’s probably going to rot my teeth and my insides and everything. But I don’t care. Do you care?”

  “I can’t get all worked up about it. There was something Artie wanted to know, to get back to Artie.”

  “There are things I’ve been wanting to know,” she said. “Things I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

  “Oh?”

  “About Rudyard Whelkin.”

  “What about him?”

  “Was he really drugged when he set up the appointment with you? Or did he just sound that way?”

  “He just sounded that way.”

  “Why? And why didn’t he show up at Porlock’s place?”

  “Well, it was her idea. Her reason was that she was going to sandwich in a meeting with the Maharajah so she could sell him the odd copy of the book. She certainly didn’t want Whelkin around while all that was going on. The way she sold it to him was to leave things open so that I wouldn’t know he was involved in double-crossing me. He could always get in touch with me later on and explain that he
’d been doped, too, and that was why he missed the appointment. Of course, all of that went sour when Arkwright gave her a hole in the head. But that’s why he sounded groggy when I spoke to him—he was putting on an act in advance.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “I see,” she said. “A subtle pattern begins to emerge.”

  “Now if we can get back to Artie Blinn—”

  “What happened to your wallet?”

  “Arkwright took it and stuck it under a cushion where the cops would be sure to find it. I told you, didn’t I? That’s how they knew to suspect me.”

  “But what happened to it since then?”

  “Oh,” I said. I patted my pocket. “I got it back. They had it impounded as evidence, but no one could say exactly what it was evidence of, and Ray talked to somebody and I got it back.”

  “What about the five hundred dollars?”

  “It was either gone before the cops got it, or some cop made a profit on the day. But it’s gone now.” I shrugged. “Easy come, easy go.”

  “That’s a healthy attitude.”

  “Uh-huh. Speaking of Artie—”

  “Who was speaking of Artie?”

  “Nobody was, but we’re going to. Artie wanted to know what happened to the bracelet.”

  “Shit.”

  “He said he asked you about it when you were over there with the photographs, but you said you’d forgotten to bring it along.”

  “Double shit.”

  “But I seem to remember that I asked you about it just before you got out of the car, and you said you had it right there in your pocket.”

  “Yeah,” she said. She drank some more of the mint tea. “Well, I lied, Bernie.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Not to you. To Artie and Gert. It was in my pocket but I told him it wasn’t.”

  “I’ll bet you had a super reason.”

  “As a matter of fact I had a shitty reason. I kept thinking how nice it would look on a certain person’s arm.”

  “The certain person wouldn’t be Miranda Messinger, I don’t suppose.”

  “It’s your intuitive brilliance that makes me love you, Bernie.”