The Burglar in the Library

CHAPTER Twenty-two

At least that’s how I figure it went.

Oh, come on now. You didn’t actually think that was me, did you? Down at the bottom of the gully? Don’t tell me you figured I’d developed a late enthusiasm for body piercing, and the Malayan kris was my idea of a fashion statement.

No, of course not. The crumpled form a few yards from Orris Cobbett’s wasn’t me. It was a dummy-no cracks, please-a quickly wrought creation consisting of some of my clothing stuffed with the pillows from Jonathan Rathburn’s room. I’d fetched the kris from the wall on which I’d noticed it earlier, and it was not without a pang of regret that I stabbed my inoffensive parka in the back. I’d found a spool of fishing line in one of the cupboards, and I’d attached an end of it to the faux Rhodenbarr and lowered it-him?-to the bottom of the gully.

Then I cut the line and tossed the end I was holding into the abyss, figuring nobody would be able to see it. I certainly couldn’t, but then I could barely see the dummy, either; it was full dark when I performed these maneuvers, and the little pencil-beam flashlight that goes wherever I go is for peering into drawers and safes in dark apartments, not for gazing into near-bottomless ravines. Its narrow little beam had pretty much petered out by the time it got all the way down there.

I had a reason for all of this.

A good reason, too. It stemmed from more than an urge to be present, à la Tom Sawyer, at my own funeral, or to assert, à la Mark Twain, that reports of my death were greatly exaggerated.

If I was dead, I could move around a little.

Officially dead, that is. Generally Regarded as Dead, say. If everyone took it for granted that I was sprawled lifeless in a frozen creek bed at the bottom of a ravine, I could have the run of the place without people wondering where I was and what I was up to.

Because the immobility was driving me nuts.

At a glance, it might seem odd that I was feeling cramped at Cuttleford House. I’m a New Yorker, and it’s not as though I have the space requirements of a rancher in Montana. I live in a small one-bedroom apartment and spend my days in a cluttered bookstore, and I get from one place to the other in a subway car, generally packed shoulder to shoulder among my fellow citizens.

At Cuttleford House, on the other hand, there were more rooms than anyone knew what to do with, and acres of grounds, and plenty of country all around. All of this capaciousness was occupied by a scattering of guests and a small staff, and this human aggregate was itself shrinking on a daily basis. So why was I feeling claustrophobic?

Well, see, in New York the people you see all over the place are strangers. They don’t know you and you don’t know them, and thus even when you’re crammed sardine-style into the rush-hour IRT, you’re essentially alone. Anonymous, really. The next thing to invisible.

So I was used to zipping around the city, dashing to and fro, slipping in and out of offices and residences, not always with the tenant’s knowledge or permission. That was how I operated. It was the way I earned my living, and it had served me well on the handful of occasions when I’d found myself up to my ears in a homicide investigation.

Carolyn had called me an amateur sleuth, and if I’m any kind of a sleuth at all I’m certainly an amateur. I’m a pro in two other areas, burglary and bookselling, and I know the difference between amateurs and professionals, and when it comes to sleuthery I’m not about to hang out a shingle. I know what detectives do-I ought to, I’ve read enough books about them. They knock on doors and ask impertinent questions and check alibis and gather evidence and do all sorts of things I’d be no good at.

I don’t do that. I sort of slip around and sneak around and stir things up, and sometimes things work out.

But at Cuttleford House everybody was right there. There was never a question of rounding up the usual suspects, because they never strayed very far. They couldn’t. The bridge was out and the phone lines were down and the whole place was piled deep with snow.

So what had I done? Well, I’d tried approaching the situation like a real detective, interrogating everybody one at a time, and that hadn’t been a great success. Even so, by the end of the day I had a couple of ideas buzzing in my brain. I even had a strong hunch as to the identity of the killer, but it seemed impossible. I needed more information than I had, and I couldn’t get it because there were all these people all over the place, watching my every move even as I was watching theirs. (And who could blame them? For all they knew, I was the murderer and they were next on my list.)

And so I worked out a different approach. While the rest of the household slept, I’d skulk around with my flashlight, like Diogenes looking for a dishonest man. While I was at it, I’d take a shot at faking my own death, leaving an apparent corpse in a spot inaccessible enough to discourage close investigation. That would give me a chance to continue skulking in the daytime.

I explained what I had in mind to Carolyn before we turned out our respective bedside lamps. At first she thought I was going to lie down at the bottom of the gully and play dead, and she was concerned that I might catch a bad cold and wind up with pneumonia.

“I might even freeze to death,” I told her.

“Then don’t do it,” she said. “Why take the chance, Bern? It’s not worth it.”

The news that it wouldn’t actually be me down there reassured her, and when I’d run through it a couple of times she said she had it down pat. “The tricky part,” I said, “is getting somebody to think of looking in the gully.”

“Why don’t I just say, ‘Hey, guys, maybe he fell in the gully’?”

“That would work,” I allowed, “but it would be better if someone else thought of it.”

“So they don’t think it’s a setup.”

“Right.”

“I’ll work on it,” she said. “And you’ll be out of the way somewhere while we’re all running around searching the house?”

“Snug,” I said, “as a bug in a rug.”

“But that’s hours from now. What’ll you be doing between now and then?”

“Setting the stage,” I said. “Going places. Doing things.”

“Going where? Doing what?”

“Here and there,” I said. “This and that.”

“And you’re not gonna tell me who the killer is.”

“Not until I know for sure.”

She yawned. “I’d argue the point,” she said, “if I weren’t so tired. Aren’t you tired, Bern?”

“Exhausted.”

“Can I ask a dumb question? How are you gonna stay up all night sneaking around in the dark? You’ll be dead on your feet tomorrow.”

“Never mind tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll be dead on my feet tonight.”

“So why not forget it, Bern? Get a good night’s sleep. Sleep late, in fact, and take a nap tomorrow during the day, and if the police don’t turn up by then you can stay up tomorrow night.”

“You’re tempting me.”

“So? Do what I always do when I’m tempted.”

“Surrender to it?”

“Hey,” she said. “Works for me, Bern.”

I said I’d let my body decide. I read for a few minutes and turned off the light, and there was a moment when I almost drifted off, but it passed and I knew it wasn’t going to happen. But I waited until Carolyn was sleeping, snug in the arms of Morpheus or Molly Cobbett, before I got out of bed.

And then I got dressed in the darkness and let myself out of the room. But I already told you about that, didn’t I?

I had things to do and I got busy doing them. My first stop was Young George’s Room, way down at the other end of the long hallway. I didn’t have to worry that someone would catch sight of me, because I wasn’t doing anything all that suspicious. I could always say I was looking for an unoccupied bathroom, or stretching my legs, but I didn’t encounter anyone so it didn’t matter.

The only thing that would have been hard to explain was picking the lock and letting myself into Rathburn’s room, and to minimize the chance of discovery I spent as little time at the task as possible. Earlier I’d tried my own key in the lock for starters, and I wouldn’t have been much surprised if it had worked. Those old skeleton keys are often virtually interchangeable, especially when the locks are old and well used.

The key didn’t work, but my picks did, and in not much more time than it would take to turn a key. I darted inside, closed and locked the door, and stopped myself even as I was fumbling for the light switch. No need to let light leak out into the hallway from underneath the door. The average person would never notice, but there was a murderer in our midst. He was the one person likely to notice, and the one whose attention I most particularly wanted to escape.

I stayed put for about an hour and a half, going through the effects of the late Jonathan Rathburn and searching for something in writing that he might have left behind. I found enough to keep me interested until I figured the household had had a chance to settle in for the night. Then I raided the closet for clothes and took the pillow from the bed and let myself out of there.

I was downstairs and headed out the door when I remembered the kris. I remembered what room it was in but wasn’t sure how to get there, and I was tempted to settle for some other imperial artifact-an assegai spear, say, or a horn from the oryx. But I found the kris in due course. Next I rifled a pantry, looking for some kind of twine or cord, and couldn’t come up with anything better than a ball of cotton thread. It didn’t seem very strong to me. Then I came across the fishing line, and took them both.

The line was what I used for actually lowering the dummy, but the thread came in handy for stitching the thing together. I used the pillow and some of Rathburn’s clothes for stuffing, and I tied a pair of his shoes to the pants cuffs by their laces, and tied the cuffs of the jacket sleeves tight around a pair of my own gloves. (If he’d had any gloves, I couldn’t find them.) I couldn’t get the head so it looked right-it was just a ball of clothes tied in shape with string-and up close it was about as deceptive as a scarecrow, which, come to think of it, it rather resembled.

I reminded myself that no one was going to get a close look at it, but all the same I retied it. I wrapped a dark shirt around the top portion, so that it looked like a cap of dark hair over the white undershirt that was supposed to look like a face. Lowering the sucker turned out to be one of those things that are easier said than done, and it wasn’t made any easier by the fact that (a) I was lying on my belly with my arms out over the edge and the flashlight in my mouth and (b) I was still petrified of falling. I had to lower it slowly, too, because I knew how amateurishly I had constructed it. If it landed with any impact I was sure it would come apart, and while that may also happen with real people dropped from a great height, I somehow didn’t think the results would be convincing in the present instance.

So I lowered the dummy slowly and gently, resisting the impulse to jiggle the line and adjust its position once it had come to rest. I gave the end of the fishing line a toss, transferred the little flashlight from my mouth to my hand, and looked at what I’d done.

Was it deceptive?

Hard to say. It didn’t fool me, but then how could it? I knew better. It could pass for a bundle of rags, certainly, but so could the mortal remains of poor Orris. Could it pass for a body?

Not if some passing animal pawed at it, like a mad laundress bent on separating whites and colors.

Not if anyone took a really close look.

On the other hand, what would happen if my little subterfuge was spotted? The logical assumption, it seemed to me, would be that I had done the faking. And why would I have done such a thing? Because I was a murderer, obviously, and because I had hotfooted it, and wanted to delay pursuit.

In which case they’d assume I was off the premises, which, for my purposes, was the next best thing to being dead.

No time to brood about it, though. No time to worry and wonder. I had things to do.

I got busy doing them.

I’d been on the verge of sleep earlier, lying next to Carolyn in Aunt Augusta’s Room, but once I was up and dressed I’d caught a second wind, and it carried me a long ways. I was still going strong when the eastern sky began to show the first signs that eternal night had not yet descended upon the planet. There would indeed be a dawn, and it looked as though I’d be around to see it.

I was perhaps fifty yards from the front door of Cuttleford House when I noticed that faint glow in the east. You might think it would have heartened me, but all it really did was make me aware of the lateness of the hour, which in turn served to remind me that I’d been awake for almost twenty-four hours, that I was cold and wet and exhausted, and that if I didn’t get into a warm bed soon I might very well drop in my tracks.

I walked the rest of the way along the path to the front door, past the sugar-sabotaged snowblower, past the little red wagons. I used my picks on the lock and tickled it open, but the door wouldn’t budge. A close look showed why. Someone had slid the heavy bolt across.

It was hard to imagine why. There we were, out in the middle of nowhere, cut off utterly from the rest of the world and snowbound in the bargain. Cissy Eglantine’s fixation on the proverbial passing tramp notwithstanding, I had a hunch the nearest indigent wayfarer was hustling passersby in Boston Common, trying to raise busfare to Miami. So why bolt the door?

Habit, I guessed. It had been bolted until I let myself out earlier, and evidently someone had passed it during the night, noticed the unbolted state in which I’d left it, and shot the bolt home. Had I world enough and time I could have dealt with it, but it was simpler by far to walk around the house and find an unbolted door.

There was always the kitchen door, which may or may not have been bolted, but I didn’t get to find out. Before I reached it, in fact just after I’d passed the three lawn chairs with their grisly burden, I came to the door of a glassed-in back porch, the sort of room where people go to take the sun without having to endure fresh air. The door was all small panes of glass, and there’s not much point fastening elaborate hardware on a door like that, as anyone who wants to get in can just break one of the panes and reach in. So the lock was about what you’d expect. A clever woman could have opened it with a bobby pin. I used my picks. There was a latch as well, one of those hook-and-eye arrangements. All you have to do to defeat them is slip a wallet-size plastic calendar between the door and the frame and give a flick upward, lifting the hook from the eye, and that is precisely what I did.

I locked up after myself, slipping the hook back into the eye, and inclined my head respectfully when I caught sight of the three lawn chairs, each bearing a late member of our little company. Then, without further ado, I quit the little sunroom and began working my way through the maze of rooms.

The house was not entirely silent. There was the odd creaking noise to be heard, and the occasional footfall. With that many people under one roof, it was unlikely that there was ever a moment when not a creature was stirring. If that created the possibility that I might run into somebody on my way back to Mr. Rathburn’s room, it also meant I could put a foot wrong and step on a creaking board myself without raising suspicion. It didn’t matter greatly if people heard me moving about, just so nobody had a clear view of me.

So I kept to the shadows and scouted out each room before I entered it. The staircase and the upstairs hallway were dangerous areas, open and exposed, and I intended to spend no more time traversing them than I absolutely had to.

I was two-thirds of the way up the stairs when it hit me. Three lawn chairs?

I kept going.

I’d left Rathburn’s door unlocked in the interest of saving time going and coming, and for a change no one had happened along to alter the status quo. I let myself in, closed the door, and concentrated on picking the lock shut, which is essentially the same process as unlocking it, though understandably less exciting. It gave me something to think about, which kept me from having to consider the implications of the third lawn chair. But it didn’t take very long, and it took no time at all to work the little sliding bolt, and there I was, tucked safely away in Rathburn’s room, with plenty of time to wonder what that third lawn chair was doing there and just whose mortal remains might be weighing it down.

How, I wondered, could I have failed to notice the three chairs? Well, I told myself, I’d had a long day and a busy night, and it was fair to say I was exhausted. Nor was it entirely accurate to say I’d failed to notice the chairs. Obviously I’d noticed them, or I wouldn’t be agonizing over them now. What I’d done was fail to register the fact that there was one more corpse-laden chair than there ought to have been.

What did it mean?

Maybe it didn’t mean anything at all. Maybe there’d always been three chairs there, two of them pressed into service to hold the bodies of Rathburn and the cook, and one holding something completely uninteresting. Lawn and garden supplies, say. Perhaps all three chairs had been so encumbered originally. Then the clutter on two of the chairs had been transferred to the third, and the bodies shifted, and all three draped with sheets.

Possible, I decided, but not probable. It was far more likely that the third chair, like its fellows, had a corpse on it.

But whose?

The answer would have to wait. For all I knew it could be just about anybody. The only person I could rule out with any real certainty was Bernie Rhodenbarr. Last I saw of him, poor devil, he was at the bottom of the gully.

What I needed was an hour of sleep.

Well, no. What I needed was more like eight hours, but that was out of the question. Failing that, an hour or so would give me a chance of functioning with some semblance of efficiency. It wouldn’t set me up so that I’d be operating at the top of my game, but that was all right. After all, I wasn’t planning to drive or operate machinery. I just wanted to solve a few murders and go home.

Rathburn’s effects didn’t seem to include a travel alarm clock, and Cuttleford House wasn’t the sort of establishment where you could ring the desk and leave a wake-up call. I thought maybe I could just lie down with my eyes closed and rest rather than sleep, but I saw right away that wasn’t going to work.

So I just gave up and let go. I’m usually a fairly light sleeper, and I figured I’d wake up when Carolyn raised the alarm. If not, well, I’d hear them banging on the door. The bolt would keep them on the outside, and they wouldn’t figure it was bolted, they’d figure their key wasn’t working, and when that happened…

I don’t know what I thought would happen after that. Because by the time I’d got that far in my thoughts I was asleep.

I slept for an hour and a half, and nothing in particular woke me. There were sounds to be heard-people walking around, stairs creaking, old plumbing making the sounds old plumbing makes-but none of them sufficiently intrusive to wake a person up. But they say everybody has a personal inner alarm clock, and evidently mine was working.

I listened at the door, fairly certain Carolyn had not yet gone into her act. I couldn’t detect anything out of the ordinary, so I drew back the bolt and started to ease the door open a crack, but of course I couldn’t. I’d picked it shut. Now I could pick it open again, only to pick it shut once more in a minute or two, and for what? So that I could watch Rufus Quilp waddle across the floor to the bathroom? It hardly seemed worth it.

I grabbed a chair and sat on it. A pair of walkie-talkies, I thought, would have simplified operations considerably. I could get Carolyn out of bed and into action. The sooner she got moving, the sooner I’d be able to move. I could get to work. I could get to business. I could go to the bathroom.

Ah, yes. There’s that bit of business Ben Franklin stole from George Herbert: “For want of a nail a shoe was lost, for want of a shoe a horse was lost, for want of a horse a rider was lost.” I don’t know how many riders-and battles, and wars-have actually been lost for a nail, but I’ve sometimes wondered how often the course of history has been changed in one direction or another because somebody had to pee. I don’t know if its results are quite as dire as losing a nail out of a horseshoe, but I have a feeling it comes up more often.

It would have been nice if Cuttleford House’s commitment to quaintness included a chamber pot beneath the bed, but if such a thing had ever existed, some prior occupant of Young George’s Room had taken it home for use as a soup tureen.

Of course, I thought, if Carolyn would quit dreaming about unavailable chambermaids and raise the alarm for her absent best friend, the problem would soon be resolved. Once everyone gathered together, all I had to do was wait until the group had removed to the ground floor. Then I could have my pick of bathrooms, but until then it wasn’t safe to set foot in the hallway.

And how long, really, could a person be expected to wait?

I don’t want to dwell on this subject, it’s not a fit one for polite discourse, but neither do I want to leave you wondering.

So how will it be if I simply state that there was a time when I opened the window and held out a shoe that had once belonged to Jonathan Rathburn, and for which he could be presumed to have no further use? I turned the shoe upside down, and then I brought it back in again, and closed the window.

So much for that. Now all I had to do was wait for Carolyn to wake up, and hope she hadn’t forgotten what she was supposed to do. We’re none of us at our best first thing in the morning, and Carolyn had had the odd wee dram of malt the night before. I could picture her wondering where I’d disappeared to and dismissing the question with a shrug as she tucked into a hearty breakfast of fly-in-the-oatmeal or some such traditional British treat.

“And wherever is your uh husband, Mrs. Rhodenbarr?”

“You mean Bernie? Gee, I dunno… Omigod, we’ve got to find him! He’s disappeared!”

She’d get it right, I assured myself. And until she did, all I could do was wait.

No problem. I had something to read.

No problem at all, as it turned out. Carolyn did wake up, and did remember her lines, and did succeed in communicating her feigned panic to the rest of the household. My door (or Rathburn’s, if you prefer, or Young George’s) was unbolted but still locked when they got to it, and the lock yielded readily enough to the master key.

“No one here,” Nigel Eglantine announced, and the horde gathered itself and prepared to head elsewhere. I distinguished various voices in the throng-Carolyn sounding on the brink of panic, Leona Savage murmuring reassurance-and then Dakin Littlefield’s voice rang out like a cracked bell.

“Not so fast,” he said. “Nobody checked the closet.”

“Why bother?” Carolyn said quickly. “He’s not here. What would he be doing in the closet?”

“Dropping down to room temperature,” Littlefield said. “If he’s dead somebody must have stowed him somewhere, and the closet’s as good a place as any. If it was worth looking in this room, it’s worth looking in the closet.”

“Let me,” Carolyn said. “Bernie? Bernie, are you in there?”

“If he’s dead,” Littlefield told her, “you’ll be a long time waiting for an answer. Open the door, why don’t you?”

“It’s stuck. This is ridiculous, he’s not in here, and we’re wasting time when we could be-”

“Stuck?” Littlefield did a lot with the one syllable, making it clear somehow that an inability to open the closet door indicated not only physical but mental and moral weakness. “Let’s just see how stuck it is,” he said, and flung the thing open.