The Burglar in the Rye

by Lawrence Block

  “So you didn’t have to go through the files.”

  “No. I got in and out as quickly as I could.”

  “And what did you do with the letters?”

  “I took the purse back to my room,” he said, “where Karen was resting. I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t know what had happened. Who stabbed Miss Landau? I was sure she was alive the first time I saw her, and I know she was dead when I went back, and I swear to God it wasn’t me who stabbed her.” He stopped himself, frowned. “I,” he said. “It wasn’t I who stabbed her.”

  “Well, it wasn’t me either,” Ray told him. “So keep talkin’.”

  “You took the purse back to the room,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “With the knife still in it.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the gun, of course. Landau’s gun.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what about the letters?”

  “What about them?”

  “What did you do with them? Because you couldn’t have given them to Kassenmeier or she’d have been out of there like a shot, mission accomplished. Where did you stash them, Carl?”

  He sighed. “In the other room.”

  “Which room? Room 303?”

  “Yes. Karen was in my room, and I thought…well, I don’t know what I thought. I didn’t really have time to think.”

  “And you stashed them there before you went back to your room.”

  “Well, on my way. It wasn’t on my way, not literally, but…”

  “I get the picture. I’ll be a son of a bitch. You must have been tucking them away while Isis and I were getting on a first-name basis in the sixth-floor corridor. You got the letters out of Landau’s room a few minutes before I let myself into it, and then you stashed them three floors below just before I came into that room off the fire escape. Why couldn’t you have put that envelope in the underwear drawer? Look what a lot of trouble you’d have saved me.”

  “I…”

  “Where did you put them, anyway?”

  “On a shelf in the closet.”

  “And then you went back and told Karen where you’d put them.”

  “Uh…”

  “You didn’t, did you?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “That Miss Landau was dead. I didn’t mention the knife, though, so I guess she assumed she’d died from getting hit with the Scotch tape dispenser.”

  “Hell of a way to go,” Carolyn said.

  “So she thought she’d killed her.”

  “I suppose she did, but then when the story came out on the TV news, she knew Miss Landau had been stabbed.”

  “And then she must have thought you did it.”

  “I told her I didn’t, that whoever got the letters must have found her knife at the same time, and used it on Miss Landau. I don’t know if she believed me.”

  “So you didn’t tell her where you’d hidden the letters.”

  “No. I thought she might find them when she went back to her room, but she didn’t. What she did find was that her rubies were missing.”

  “My rubies,” Isis said.

  “Well, yes, but by this time Karen thought of them as her rubies, and they were gone. I didn’t know what to think when she told me that. Was she lying, so that she wouldn’t have to share the proceeds with me? And if not, what had happened to them?”

  “In the meantime,” I said, “I’d been arrested. And you knew I was a burglar.”

  “But what would you be doing in Room 303? I decided it must have been the same person who stabbed Miss Landau.”

  “Well, a person who’d stick a knife in a little old lady probably wouldn’t draw the line at jewel theft,” I said. “But let’s focus on that person and forget the rubies for a minute. Who do you figure it was?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You know,” I said, “that’s hard for me to believe. I think you have a pretty good idea.”

  He lowered his eyes. “I’ve thought about it,” he admitted.

  “No kidding.”

  “And I honestly don’t know.”

  “But you honestly do have an idea.”

  “No, I—”

  “That person’s the reason you didn’t bring the letters back to your own room,” I said. “It’s the reason you didn’t tell your old buddy Karen that the envelope she swiped was on a shelf in her own closet. You were working an angle of your own, weren’t you?”

  “I wasn’t double-crossing Karen,” he said. “I was planning on giving her the letters.”

  “When?”

  “In another day or two. After I’d had a chance to—”

  “To have copies made,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Because a certain person wanted copies,” I said, “and made you an offer for them you really didn’t want to refuse.”

  “I never even met this man,” Lester Eddington asserted. “I need copies of all of Gulliver Fairborn’s correspondence, but I’m in no position to offer very much money, and I certainly wouldn’t be a party to a felony.”

  “Relax,” I said. “It wasn’t you.”

  “But who else would want copies? Moffett here is a collector. He wanted the originals, and anyway he was the one who brought in Karen Kassenmeier in the first place. Sotheby’s already had the right to auction the letters.”

  “And I just wanted to give them back to the poor guy who wrote them,” I said. “But there was somebody else, somebody who wanted to write a book of her own. That’s why she recruited me, but she didn’t want to leave anything to chance, and she redoubled her efforts after I tried for the letters and came up empty. Well, Carl? Is she the one you think killed Anthea Landau?”

  Carl didn’t say anything.

  “Cat’s got his tongue,” I said, and turned to look long and hard at Alice Cottrell. “Well? Did you kill her?”

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-two

  “Bernie,” she said, as if she’d just been stabbed in the heart herself, and by someone as dear to her as Brutus was to Caesar. “Bernie, I can’t believe you think I’m capable of murder.”

  “You’ve been capable of enough other things,” I said. “You got me into this mess in the first place, making up a story about wanting to retrieve the letters for Gulliver Fairborn out of kindness. That way you’d get the letters without laying out a cent.”

  “But that’s the truth,” she said. “That’s why I wanted them.”

  “Because Fairborn wrote to you at your home in Charlottesville.”

  “I may have told a few fibs.”

  “Fibs?”

  “White lies, then. I don’t live in Charlottesville and Gully didn’t write to me. But I knew how upset he must be, and I knew what a favor it would be to him if those letters could cease to exist. And I had passed your bookstore several times, and knew that its proprietor had a sideline career as a burglar—”

  “What he is, he’s a burglar,” Ray put in, “with a sideline sellin’ books.”

  “—so I thought I could persuade you to do something nice for a great writer.”

  “And a mediocre one, too.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I get Publishers Weekly at the shop,” I said. “I don’t usually have time to read it, and there’s not much in there for a used-book dealer, but I finally got around to going through some back issues, and guess who’s got a proposal making the rounds? I forget who your agent is, but it’s not Anthea Landau. You’re going to be writing a memoir, aren’t you? All about your affair with Gulliver Fairborn.”

  “That’s not all it’s about,” she said. “I’ve led an interesting life, and people will be interested in reading about me.”

  “But just in case they aren’t, a little dirt on Fairborn wouldn’t hurt. You gave me a sample of what you were going to be writing, telling me more than I really wanted to know about one of my literary heroes. As it turned out, it was more than you kn
ew.”

  “I’m a fiction writer,” she said. “I suppose it’s natural for me to improve on the truth a little.”

  “You weren’t going to return his letters, were you?”

  “Eventually I might have. Or I might have destroyed them. Or I might have sold them to you, Mr. Moffett, or passed them on to you, Mr. Harkness. And I might have even run off an extra set of copies for you, Mr. Eddington. But what does it matter what I might have done? I didn’t get the letters.”

  “You really wanted them, though. Even before I went into the Paddington, you got close to Carl and made him a similar offer. But instead of appealing to his better nature and making it sound like an act of charity, you put your body on the line.”

  “That’s not a nice way to put it.”

  “You didn’t have much to offer in the way of money,” I said, “but you’re sexy, and Carl was vulnerable. And you made it clear it wouldn’t cost him anything to get the letters for you. You’d copy them and return the originals, and he could do as he pleased with them.”

  “Carl gets around,” Carolyn said. “He’s sleeping with Karen, and he still can’t resist Alice.”

  “Karen and I were never lovers,” Carl said.

  “Just good friends,” Isis said. “You got her to sleep in your own bed and you weren’t even tempted?”

  “I always figured Carl was a little light on his feet,” Ray said. “But then why would he go for Alice here?”

  Carl rolled his eyes. “If a man has manners,” he said, “or a bearing that’s in any way theatrical, people jump to the conclusion that he’s gay. It so happens I’m not. But some of my best friends are, and Karen was one of them. Not a best friend, exactly, but a gay woman.”

  “So you weren’t interested in her sexually.”

  “No.”

  “But you were interested in Alice.”

  “She’s an attractive woman,” he said, “and seductive, and very persuasive. She offered me two thousand dollars, which I’m still waiting for, incidentally—”

  “Don’t hold your breath,” Alice said.

  “—and she indicated that we’d celebrate success in a manner I’d find very gratifying. The morning after Miss Landau was killed, she called to find out what had happened. And I told her I had the letters.”

  I turned to Alice. “I wondered why I didn’t hear from you,” I said. “Everybody else called or dropped in, but you stayed away. If nothing else, I figured you’d want to know whether or not I had the letters. But you already knew.”

  “All that’s true,” she said. “But I didn’t kill the Landau woman. I wasn’t even there that night.”

  “You could have been,” I said. “You could have sashayed right past the desk while Carl was running around breaking laws and betraying old friends.”

  “But why would I kill Anthea Landau?”

  “She was an agent,” I said. “Didn’t you say she turned you down once? Maybe you were harboring a resentment.”

  “You can’t believe that.”

  “Not for a moment,” I said. “Because how would you have known to look for a knife in Karen Kassenmeier’s purse? Besides, the person who killed Landau is almost certainly the same person who killed Kassenmeier. The killer probably used the same knife. And that pretty much lets you out, because Kassenmeier was up at my apartment getting stabbed to death at just about the same time that you were knocking off a quickie with Carl in Room 303.”

  “While you were hiding behind the shower curtain,” she said, and the trace of a smile appeared on her lips. “Just like Polonius, except you didn’t get stabbed. And you recognized my voice, Bernie. That’s sweet.”

  “You got dressed in a hurry,” I said. “You didn’t waste time unmaking the bed, so you didn’t have to waste more time making it. Carl got the letters from the shelf where he’d stashed them, and he gave them to you and you got out of there. Now I can’t be dead certain you wouldn’t have had time to cab up to my place, meet Karen, and stick a knife in her, but why the hell would you want to? You already had the letters and you were home free.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And what did you care about her, anyway? And how would you know about the knife in her purse?”

  “Carl could have mentioned the knife,” Erica Darby said. “Who knows what kind of pillow talk they had?”

  “But I didn’t,” Carl said. “I never even mentioned Karen’s name. We were in Karen’s room when we, uh, made love, because that’s where the letters were. But I didn’t tell Alice whose room it was.”

  “You told me it belonged to a permanent resident who was out on the Coast doing a guest shot in a sitcom,” she said, “so you knew the letters would be safe there, and we wouldn’t be disturbed.”

  “Let’s get back to Karen Kassenmeier,” I said. “What did you tell her about the letters?”

  “I didn’t tell her anything. She told me they were missing from her purse, and I told her the same person must have taken them as killed Miss Landau.”

  “This was after she realized she hadn’t done it herself with the Scotch tape dispenser.”

  “Right.”

  “And what did she decide to do?”

  “Well, she decided the letters were gone,” he said, “and there was no sense crying over spilled milk, or spilled blood, either. At least she had the rubies. Then she went to her room and the rubies were gone, and I just couldn’t believe it. She thought maybe I took them, because who else knew they were there? But I hadn’t known where they were, and I couldn’t say if they’d been there when I was in the room leaving the letters in the closet. But I didn’t say that, because she didn’t know about the letters in the closet.”

  “No.”

  “And then she decided you had them.”

  “The letters?”

  “No, the rubies. You were a burglar, she said, and the rubies were stolen from a locked hotel room, so of course you were the logical suspect. Anyway, she heard that you had them. I don’t know who told her.”

  “It wasn’t me,” Isis said. “I never met the woman, and I wouldn’t have said anything to her anyway.”

  “And she knew where you lived,” Carl went on. “She told me she was going to make one last try for the rubies, and if that didn’t work she’d catch the first flight she could get to Kansas City. It was late at night when she told me all this, and she went out, and I immediately called Alice and we went to her room, because I knew she’d be away for at least a couple of hours.”

  “And she never came back,” I said. “Somebody met her at my apartment, probably after luring her there in the first place. Somebody who could open the door for her, because she couldn’t do it herself. Karen was a pretty good thief, but she didn’t have burglar skills.”

  “Who did?” Ray wondered. “There’s a lot of doors openin’ an’ closin’ in this story, Bern, but so far the only person with burglar skills is you. An’ you wouldn’t need ’em to open your own door.”

  “That’s true,” I agreed. “And neither would the person who killed Karen Kassenmeier.”

  “You know who it is?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know who it is.”

  “Well, you’d better tell us,” Carolyn piped up, “because I for one haven’t got a goddam clue. I followed most of what you’ve said so far, Bern, although it’s pretty complicated. But I can’t see how anybody could have done it. Maybe Karen Kassenmeier killed Anthea Landau after all, and when she got to your apartment she had a fit of remorse and stabbed herself.”

  “And ate the knife?”

  “What, it was gone? So somebody else came along before the body was discovered and thought it’d be just the thing for peeling apples. All right, somebody murdered her. But it couldn’t have been anybody in this room, and I can’t think of anybody else it could be, so—”

  “It was somebody in this room,” I said. “And I wish I didn’t have to do this, Carolyn, but what choice have I got? It was the woman sitting next to you. It was Erica.
”

  “A longstanding resentment,” I said. “Maybe they were lovers whose affair ended badly. Maybe they both went after the same woman. Whatever the cause, Erica Darby hated Karen Kassenmeier, and she nursed that hatred over the years.”

  Erica looked at me. Her expression was hard to read, and she hadn’t said a word since I’d named her as the killer. Maybe she remembered that Ray had Mirandized everybody in the room, albeit in a casual manner. Maybe she just didn’t have anything to contribute.

  “Erica wanted revenge,” I went on, “and she was evidently familiar with the Sicilian maxim about revenge being a dish that’s best eaten cold, because she let things cool off so completely that Kassenmeier didn’t even know the resentment was still alive. She got in touch when she hit town, and she let her old friend know what brought her to town and where she was staying.

  “And Erica came to the hotel the night Karen was going to make her move. I don’t know how much she’d planned and how much she improvised on the spot, but she must have gotten to the lobby while Carl was away from the desk. She already knew what room Karen was going to hit, so all she had to do was grab a key from the board and go upstairs with it. She got to the sixth floor while Carl was downstairs demonstrating his medical training, and she went into Landau’s room and found the scene as the two of them had left it—Landau in bed unconscious, a gun on the floor, and Karen’s purse on a chair.

  “Maybe Landau woke up and started making a fuss, and Erica had to shut her up. But I don’t think the old lady ever opened her eyes. I think Erica saw her lying there, and she remembered the knife her old friend always carried and got it from the purse, wrapping her hand in a handkerchief so only Karen’s prints would be on it. And then she stuck it in Landau’s chest and left it there.

  “Then she left the hotel and called the police. They were already on their way when Carl called them after Isis reported her encounter with me in the hallway. That’s how they got there so fast. Erica figured that would do it—Karen Kassenmeier, a known thief who was handy with a knife, was right there on the premises, and her knife with her prints on it was planted in the victim’s chest, and her purse was a few yards away. The cops would be on Kassenmeier like buzzards on roadkill, and if she got a good lawyer she might see the sidewalk again in twenty years or so. If she got a bad one she could figure on life without parole, or a needle in her arm.