The Burglar In The Closet

Chapter Six

I don’t know if Jillian was nonplussed, but she certainly wasn’t plussed. Her face held an expression somewhere between bemusement and astonishment, with pronounced overtones of shock. Have I mentioned her eyes? They were the faded blue of well-washed denim, and they were large, and I had never seen them larger.

Rat-tat-tat.

“Bernie!”

“Police. Open up there.”

I was still gripping her shoulders. “I’m your boyfriend,” I whispered urgently. “You’re not Craig’s girl, you’re my girl, and that’s why you happened to ask me to drop over, and we’ve been doing a little innocent smooching.”

Her mouth made an O, her eyes showed instant comprehension, and her head bobbed in affirmation. Even as I was pointing at the door she was moving toward it. I snatched a Kleenex from the box on Marian’s desk, and as the door opened to reveal a pair of plainclothes cops, I was in the process of dabbing at Jillian’s scarlet lipstick.

“Sorry to interrupt you,” said the taller of the two. He had bigger shoulders than most people, and very widely spaced eyes, as if while in the womb he’d toyed with the idea of becoming Siamese twins and decided against it at the last minute. He did not sound at all sorry to interrupt us.

“We’re police,” the other one said. During the July blackout someone said “Dark out, isn’t it?” That was as unnecessary a sentence as I’ve ever heard uttered, and “We’re police” came a close second.

For one thing, they’d told us as much through the locked door. For another, they damn well looked the part. The shorter one was slender rather than broad. He had black curly hair and a small, inexpertly trimmed black mustache, and no Hollywood casting director would pick him for a cop. He looked more like the member of the gang who turns stool pigeon in the second-to-last reel. But standing there in front of us he looked like a cop and so did the one with all the shoulders. Maybe it’s the stance, maybe it’s the facial expression, maybe it’s just some aspect of the inner self they manage to project, but cops all look like cops.

This pair introduced themselves. The block of granite was Todras, the stoat was Nyswander. Todras was a detective and Nyswander was a patrolman, and if they had first names they were keeping them a secret. We furnished our names, first and last, and Todras asked Jillian to spell her first name. She did, and Nyswander wrote all this down in a little dog-eared notebook. Todras asked Jillian what people called her for short and she said they didn’t.

“Well, it’s just routine,” Todras said. He seemed to be the natural leader of the two, the offensive guard clearing a path for Nyswander to weasel through. “I guess you heard about your boss, Miss Paar.”

“There was something on the radio.”

“Yeah, well, I’m afraid he’s gonna have his hands full for a while now. You got the office closed up, I see. You call around and cancel his appointments yet?”

“For the rest of the day.”

The two of them exchanged glances. “Maybe you should cancel them for the rest of the month,” Nyswander suggested.

“Or the rest of the year.”

“Yeah, because it really looks as though he stepped in it this time.”

“Maybe you better close the office for good,” Todras said.

“Maybe you should.”

“And find somebody else to work for.”

“Somebody who figures divorce is enough and stops short of murder.”

“Or someone who when he kills a former spouse finds a way to get away with it.”

“Yeah, that’s the idea.”

“Right.”

It was really something, the way the lines came back and forth from the two of them. It was as though they had a vaudeville act they were working on, and they wanted to break it in in the smaller rooms before they took it on the road. We were a sort of warm-up audience, and they were making the most of us.

Jillian didn’t seem to think they were all that hysterical. Her lower lip, which now carried less than its usual quantity of lipstick, trembled slightly. Her eyes looked misty. I’m your boyfriend, I thought, trying to beam the thought her way. Craig’s just your boss. And don’t for God’s sake call him Craig.

“I can’t believe it,” she said.

“Believe it, Miss Paar.”

“Right,” came the echo from Nyswander.

“But he wouldn’t do something like that.”

“You never know,” Todras said.

“They’ll fool you every time,” said Nyswander.

“ But Dr. Sheldrake couldn’t kill anyone!”

“He didn’t kill just anyone,” Todras said.

“He killed somebody specific,” Nyswander said.

“Namely his wife.”

“Which is pretty specific.”

Jillian frowned and her lip quivered again. I had to admire the way she was using that lip-quiver. Maybe it was real, maybe she wasn’t even conscious of it, but she was fitting it into a generally effective act. It might not stun ’ em in Peoria the way Todras amp; Nyswander might, but she got her point across.

“He’s such a good man to work for,” she said.

“Been working for him long, Miss Paar?”

“Quite a while. That’s how I met Bernie. Mr. Rhodenbarr.”

“You met Mr. Rhodenbarr here through the doc?”

She nodded. “He was a patient of the doctor’s. And we met here and started seeing each other.”

“And I suppose you had an appointment for some more dental work this morning. That right, Mr. Rhodenbarr?”

It wasn’t right. Tempting, perhaps, but not right, and if they checked the appointment book they’d know as much. Why tell an obvious lie when a less obvious one will do?

“No,” I said. “Miss Paar called me and I was able to get over to comfort her. She was anxious and didn’t want to be here alone.”

They nodded to each other and Nyswander wrote something down. The time and temperature, perhaps.

“I guess you been a patient of the doc’s for some time, Mr. Rhodenbarr.”

“A couple of years now.”

“Ever meet his former wife?”

Well, we were never formally introduced. “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“She was his nurse before they got married, wasn’t she?”

“His hygienist,” Jillian corrected. The two of them stared at her. I said that I understood Mrs. Sheldrake had retired upon marrying her employer, and that by the time I became his patient she was no longer working at the office.

“Nice deal,” Nyswander said. “You marry the boss, that’s even better’n marrying the boss’s daughter.”

“Unless the boss kills you,” Todras suggested.

The conversation drifted on in this fashion. I slipped in a tentative question now and again of the sort they could have fun doing macabre Smith-and-Dale routines with, and I managed to pick up an item here and an item there.

Item: The Medical Examiner had fixed the time of death at somewhere between midnight and one in the morning. Now you know and I know that Crystal Sheldrake died at 10:49, eleven minutes of eleven, but I couldn’t find a way to supply that bit of information.

Item: There were no signs of forced entry, no indication that anything had been removed from the apartment, and everything pointed to the supposition that Crystal had admitted her killer herself. Since she was rather informally attired, even to the bathing cap on her head, it was logical to suppose that the murderer was a close acquaintance at the very least.

No argument there. No signs of forced entry, certainly, because when I bamboozle the tumblers of a lock I don’t leave tracks. No indication of burglary if only because there was no mess, no drawers turned inside-out, none of the signals left behind by either an amateur at the game or a pro in a hurry. Whoever killed Crystal might well have left the apartment looking as though the Hell’s Angels had sublet it for a month, but I’d made things uncommonly easy for him, gathering all the loot in advance of his call and packing it up for him. God, that rankled!

Item: Craig couldn’t account for his time while his ex-wife was getting herself murdered. If he’d mentioned anything about having dinner with Jillian, the news didn’t seem to have found its way to Todras amp; Nyswander. It would eventually, of course, and sooner or later they’d know Jillian was the boss’s girlfriend and I was nothing more than your friendly neighborhood burglar. Which would, sooner or later, constitute a problem, a thorn in the side, a pain in the neck. But not yet, thank you. Meanwhile, Craig was telling them that he’d spent a quiet evening at home. A lot of people spend a lot of their evenings quietly at home, but those are the hardest sort of evenings to prove.

Item: Someone, some neighbor I suppose, had seen a man answering Craig’s description leaving the Gramercy building at around the time the murder was supposed to have been committed. I couldn’t tell just what time the person had been seen, or whether he’d been leaving merely the building or the specific apartment, or just who had seen him or just how certain the witness was about the time and the identification. Someone or anyone could have spotted the man who’d made love to Crystal, or the man who killed her, or even Bernard Rhodenbarr himself, beating a hasty retreat from the premises after the horse was stolen.

Or it could have been Craig. All I knew about the killer was he had two feet and he didn’t talk much. If Gary Cooper were still alive he could have done it. Maybe it was Marcel Marceau. Maybe it was Craig, uncharacteristically silent.

“Wondered if we could just go into the office,” Todras said. And when Jillian explained that that’s where we were, in the office, he said, “Well, I don’t know the name for it, maybe. The room where he does what he does.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“With the chair that goes back,” Nyswander said.

“And all the drills.”

“And the instruments, those cute little mirrors on the ends of sticks, and the things for picking the crud out from underneath your gums.”

“Oh, right,” Todras said, smiling at the memory. His own teeth were large and white and even, like the snow when Good King Wenceslas looked out. (That’s not exactly right, but you must know what I mean.) His wide-set eyes gleamed like high-beamed headlights over the grillwork of his smile. “And that slurpy thing that sucks up all your spit. Don’t forget the slurpy thing.”

“That’s Mr. Thirsty,” I said.

“Huh?”

Jillian led us to the room where Craig did his handiwork, solving people’s problems and sending them out to do battle with tough steaks and nougat-centered chocolates. The two cops amused themselves by tilting the chair to and fro and making Dr. Kronkheit passes at each other with the drill, but then they got down to serious business and opened the cabinet with the drawers of steel implements.

“Now these here are interesting,” little Nyswander said, holding a nasty little pick at arm’s length. “What’s this called, anyway?”

Jillian told him it was a pick for scraping tartar from the teeth. He nodded and said it must be important to do that, huh? She said it was vital; otherwise you got irritation and bone erosion and periodontal disease, and you wound up without any teeth. “People think cavities are the big thing,” she explained, “but your teeth can be in perfect shape and you’ll lose them anyway because of the gums.”

“Those teeth are beauties,” Todras said heartily, “but I’m afraid those gums have to come out.”

We all laughed it up over that one. Nyswander and Todras took turns holding up implements and wanting to know what they were. This one was another pick, that one was a dental scalpel, and there were no end of others, the names and functions of which have mercifully slipped my mind.

“All these gizmos,” Todras said, “there’s a basic similarity, right? Like they’re all part of a set, but instead of being in a case or something so you can be sure they’re all here, they’re just sort of lined up in the drawer. The doc buy ’em all in a set or something?”

“You can buy them in sets.”

“Is that what he did?”

Jillian shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. He had the office set up a good many years before I came to work for him. Of course the individual implements are available singly. These are fine-quality steel, but accidents happen. Picks drop and get bent. Scalpels get nicks. And we keep several of each implement on hand because you have to have the right tool for the job. I’m the hygienist, I don’t handle paperwork, but I know we reorder individual items from time to time.”

“But they’re all the same,” Nyswander said.

“Oh, they may look it, but the picks will be angled in slightly different ways, or-”

She stopped because he was shaking his head, but it was Todras who spoke. “They all have these six-sided handles,” he said. “They all come from the same manufacturer is what he means.”

“Oh. Yes, that’s right.”

“Who’s the manufacturer, Miss Paar? You happen to know?”

“Celniker Dental and Optical Supply.”

“You want to spell that, Miss Paar?” She did, and Nyswander wrote something in his notebook, capped his pen, turned a page. While he was doing this Todras brought a large hand out of his pocket and opened it to disclose yet another dental implement. It looked to me quite like the one Jillian had identified as a dental scalpel. I’d had something similar in appearance once, though undoubtedly inferior in quality. It had been part of an X-acto knife kit I had as a boy, and I’d used it to whittle sad little wingless birds from balsa blocks.

“You recognize this, Miss Paar?”

“It’s a dental scalpel. Why?”

“One of yours?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible.”

“You wouldn’t know how many of this model the doc happens to have on hand?”

“I wouldn’t have any idea. Quite a few, obviously.”

“He ever carry them with him when he leaves the office?”

“Whatever for?”

Again they exchanged presumably meaningful glances.

“We found this one in Crystal Sheldrake’s apartment,” Nyswander said.

“Actually it was some other cop found it. He’s using ‘we’ in the departmental sense.”

“Actually it was found in Crystal Sheldrake herself.”

“Actually it was in her heart.”

“Actually,” said Todras (or perhaps it was Nyswander), “this pretty much frosts the cupcake, don’t it? Looks to me like your boss is up every creek in town.”

It rattled Jillian. It didn’t do a thing to me or for me, as I’d seen that hexagonal handle protruding from between Crystal ’s breasts while I was fumbling mindlessly for a pulse. I’d more or less known it would turn out to be one of Craig’s tools, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, and I’d even toyed with the idea of carrying it off with me.

But there had been abundant reasons for not doing so. The most obvious one was that it would have been just my luck to pocket the deadly device and walk straight into the arms of a cop. It’s bad enough when they catch you with burglar’s tools. When you’re carrying murderer’s tools as well they take a dim view indeed.

Besides, as far as I was concerned the scalpel proved Craig was innocent, not guilty, and that someone had only succeeded in setting up the world’s clumsiest framing job. Why would Craig use a dental scalpel to kill his wife, knowing it would point immediately to him? And why, if he did have a sufficient lapse of taste and sense to do so, would he leave the scalpel sticking out of her instead of retrieving it and carrying it away with him? Whatever line they took officially, the cops would have to reason along these lines themselves sooner or later, whereas if I had removed the scalpel and some brilliant lab work had later proved that a dental scalpel had inflicted the wound, well, then Craig would really be in a bind.

So I’d left it there, and now I was doing my best to appear as though I was seeing it for the first time. “Gee,” I said, mouth agape. “That was the murder weapon?”

“You bet it was,” Todras said.

“Plunged right into her heart,” Nyswander added. “That’s a murder weapon, all right.”

“Death musta been instant.”

“Hardly any bleeding. No muss, no fuss, no bother.”

“Gee,” I said.

Jillian was on the edge of hysteria, and I was hoping she wouldn’t overreact. It was logical to assume she’d be shocked at the idea of her boss committing murder, but if their relationship was just that of dentist and hygienist there was a limit to the extent of her shock.

“I just can’t believe it,” she was saying. She reached out her hand to touch the scalpel, then drew back at the last moment, her fingertips just avoiding contact with the bright metal. Todras smiled fiercely and returned the scalpel to his pocket, while Nyswander drew a manila envelope from his inside jacket pocket and commenced selecting other dental scalpels from a tray of implements. He put four or five of them into the envelope, licked the flap, sealed it, and wrote something on its outside.

Jillian asked him what he was doing. “Evidence,” he said.

“The D.A.’ll want to show how the doc’s got other scalpels the same size and shape as the murder weapon. You get a good look at it, Miss Paar? Maybe there’s something about it, some nick or scratch you’ll recognize.”

“I saw it. I can’t identify it, if that’s what you mean. They all look alike.”

“Might notice something if you give it a close look. Todras, let Miss Paar here have another look at it, huh?”

Jillian didn’t much want to look at it. But she forced herself, and after a careful glance announced that there was nothing specifically familiar about the instrument, that it seemed identical to ones they used in the office. But, she added, dentists all over the country used Celniker tools, they were very common, and a search of the offices of dentists throughout New York would turn up thousands of them.

Nyswander said he was sure that was true but that only one dentist had a clear motive for killing Crystal Sheldrake.

“But he cared for her,” she said. “He was hoping to get back together with her again. I don’t think he ever stopped loving her.”

The cops looked at each other, and I couldn’t say I blamed them. I don’t know what had prompted her to start off in this direction but the cops dutifully followed it up, questioning her about this desire of Craig’s for a reconciliation. Then, after she’d improvised reasonably well, Todras took the wind out of her sails by explaining that this just furnished Craig with yet another motive for murder. “He wanted to get back together,” he said, “and she spurned him, so he killed her out of love.”

“‘Each man kills the thing he loves,’” Nyswander quoted. “‘By each let this be heard. The coward does it with a kiss. The brave man with a sword.’ And the dentist with a scalpel.”

“Pretty,” Todras said.

“That’s Oscar Wilde.”

“I like it.”

“Except that part about a dentist doing it with a scalpel. Oscar Wilde never said that.”

“No kidding.”

“I just put that in on my own.”

“No kidding.”

“’Cause it seemed to fit.”

“No kidding.”

I thought Jillian was going to scream. Her hands had knotted themselves into little fists. Just hang in there, I wanted to tell her, because this comedy routine of theirs takes their minds off more important things, and in a minute they’ll bow and scrape themselves offstage and out of our lives, and then we can work up an act of our own.

But I guess she wasn’t listening.

“Wait a minute!”

They turned and stared at her.

“Just one damn minute! How do I know you actually brought that thing with you? That scalpel? I never saw you take it out of your pocket. Maybe you picked it up off a tray while I was looking the other way. Maybe all those things you hear about police corruption are true. Framing people and tampering with evidence and-”

They were still staring at her and at about this point she just ran out of words. Not, I’d say, a moment too soon. I wished, not for the first time in my life, that there were a way to stop the celestial tape recorder of existence, rewind it a bit, and lay down a substitute track for the most recent past.

But you can’t do that, as Omar Khayyám explained long before tape recorders. The moving finger writes and all, and dear little Jillian had just gone and given us the moving finger, all right.

“This dental scalpel,” said Todras, showing it to us yet again. “This particular one wasn’t found in the chest of Crystal Sheldrake, as a matter of fact. Rules of evidence and everything, we don’t ever carry murder weapons around with us. The actual scalpel that snuffed the lady, it’s in the lab right now with a tag on it while the men in the white smocks check blood types and do all the things they do.”

Jillian didn’t say anything.

“The scalpel my partner’s showing you,” Nyswander put in, “was picked up on the way here when we stopped at Celniker Dental and Optical Supply. It’s an exact twin of the murder weapon and useful for us to carry around in the course of our investigation. That’s why my partner can keep it in his pocket and take it out when the spirit moves him. It’s not evidence so there’s no way he can be tampering with it.”

Todras, grinning furiously, made the scalpel disappear again. “Just for curiosity,” he said, “maybe you’d like to tell us how you spent the evening, Miss Paar.”

“How I-”

“What did you do last night? Unless you can’t remember.”

“Last night,” Jillian said. She blinked, gnawed her lip, looked beseechingly at me. “I had dinner,” she said.

“Alone?”

“With me,” I put in. “You’re writing this down? Why? Jillian’s not a suspect, is she? I thought you had an open-and-shut case against Dr. Sheldrake.”

“We do,” said Todras.

“It’s just routine,” Nyswander added. His weasel face looked craftier than ever. “So you had dinner together?”

“Right. Honey, what was the name of that restaurant?”

“Belevedere’s. But-”

“Belvedere’s. Right. We must have been there until nine o’clock or thereabouts.”

“And then I suppose you spent a quiet evening at home?”

“Jillian did,” I said. “I headed on over to the Garden myself and watched the fights. They already started by the time I got there but I saw three or four prelim bouts and the main event. Jillian doesn’t care for boxing.”

“I don’t like violence,” Jillian said.

Todras seemed to approach me without actually moving. “I suppose,” he said, “you can prove you were at the fights.”

“Prove it? Why do I have to prove it?”

“Oh, just routine, Mr. Rhodenbarr. I suppose you went with a friend.”

“No, I went alone.”

“That a fact? But you most likely ran into somebody you knew.”

I thought about it. “Well, the usual ringside crowd was there. The pimps and the dope dealers and the sports crowd. But I’m just a fan, I don’t actually know any of those people except to recognize them when I see them.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The fellow who sat next to me, we were talking about the fighters and all, but I don’t know his name and I don’t even know if I’d recognize him again.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Anyway, why would I have to prove where I was?”

“Just routine,” Nyswander said. “Then you can’t-”

“Oh,” I said brightly. “Hell. I wonder if I have my ticket stub. I don’t remember throwing it out.” I looked at Jillian. “Was I wearing this jacket last night? You know, I think I was. I probably dropped the stub in the garbage, or when I was cleaning out my pockets before I went to bed. Maybe it’s in a wastebasket at my apartment. I don’t suppose-oh, here’s something.”

And, amazingly enough, I showed Nyswander an orange stub from last night’s fight card at Madison Square Garden. He eyed it sullenly before passing it to Todras who didn’t seem any happier to see it, his smile notwithstanding.

The ticket stub cooled things. They didn’t suspect us of anything, they knew they already had the murderer in a cell, but Jillian had irritated them and they were getting a little of their own back. They returned to a less intimidating line of questioning, just rounding out things in their notebooks before moving on. I could relax now, except that you can’t relax until they’re out the door and gone, and they were in the process of going when Todras raised a big hand, placed it atop his big head, and scratched diligently.

“Rhodenbarr,” he said. “Bernard Rhodenbarr. Now where in the hell have I heard that name before?”

“Gee,” I said, “I don’t know.”

“What’s your line of work, Bernie?”

A warning bell sounded. When they start calling you by your first name it means they’ve pegged you as a criminal. As long as you’re a citizen in their eyes it’s always Mr. Rhodenbarr, but when they call you Bernie it’s time to watch out. I don’t think Todras even knew what he’d said, but I heard him, and the ice was getting very thin out there.

“I’m in investments,” I said. “Mutual funds, open-end real-estate trusts. Estate planning, that’s the real focus of what I do.”

“That a fact. Rhodenbarr, Rhodenbarr. I know that name.”

“I don’t know where from,” I said. “Unless you grew up in the Bronx.”

“How’d you know that?”

By your accent, I thought. Anybody who sounds like Penny Marshall in Laverne and Shirley could have grown up nowhere else. But I said, “What high school?”

“Why?”

“What school?”

“James Monroe. Why?”

“Then that explains it. Freshman English. Don’t you remember Miss Rhodenbarr? Maybe she’s the one who had you reading Oscar Wilde.”

“She’s an English teacher?”

“She was. She passed on-oh, I don’t know exactly how many years ago. Little old lady with iron-gray hair and perfect posture.”

“Relative of yours?”

“My dad’s sister. Aunt Peg, but she’d have been Miss Margaret Rhodenbarr as far as her students were concerned.”

“Margaret Rhodenbarr.”

“That’s right.”

He opened his notebook, and for a moment I thought he was going to write down my aunt’s name, but he wound up shrugging his great shoulders and putting the book away. “Must be it,” he said. “A name like that, it’s distinctive, you know? Sticks in the mind and rings a bell. Maybe I wasn’t in her class myself but I just have a recollection of the name.”

“That’s probably it.”

“It woulda come to me,” he said, holding the door for Nyswander. “Memory’s a funny thing. You just let it find its own path and things come to you sooner or later.”