The Burglar in the Rye

CHAPTER Eight

Gulliver Fairborn would have hated it.

They took me to the precinct in handcuffs, which is just plain undignified, and they took my fingerprints and made me pose for pictures, full-face and profile. That’s a clear-cut invasion of privacy, but try telling that to a couple of cops at the end of a long shift. Then they strip-searched me, and then they tossed me in a holding cell, and that’s where I spent what was left of the night.

I’d have slept better at home, or on the office couch at the store, or in Room 415 at the Paddington. As it was I barely slept at all, and I was groggy and grubby when Wally Hemphill showed up first thing in the morning and bailed me out.

“I told them they had nothing,” he said. “You were in a hotel where a woman died. Where’s the crime in that? They said a witness could place you on the floor where the murder took place, and where you had no reason to be. And you were registered under a false name, and you have a sheet with a whole lot of arrests on it.”

“But only one conviction,” I pointed out.

“A judge hears that,” he said, “it’s like telling him you only put the tip in. What I stressed was you’re an established retailer with your own store, and there’s no chance you’re going to cut and run. I tried for Own Recognizance, but the papers teed off on the last judge who let a murderer out without bail, and-”

“I’m not a murderer, Wally.”

“I know that,” he said, “and anyway it’s beside the point, which is that I got bail knocked down to a manageable fifty K.”

“Manageable?”

“You’re out, aren’t you? You can thank me, for cutting my run short and coming down bright and early.” Wally was training for the New York Marathon, upping his weekly mileage as the race approached. Law was his profession, but running was his passion. “And you can thank your friend Marty Gilmartin,” he added. “He put up the dough.”

“Marty Gilmartin,” I said.

“Why are you frowning, Bernie? You remember him, don’t you?”

Of course I did. I’d met Martin Gilmartin a while back, after I’d been arrested for stealing his collection of baseball cards. I hadn’t done it, but my alibi would have been that I was cracking an apartment across town at the time, and I figured I was better off keeping my mouth shut. It all worked out, and Marty and I wound up having a mutually profitable association, breaking effortlessly into houses of friends of his who wanted to collect on their insurance. We each had a good chunk of cash by the time we were done, and mine was enough to buy the building that housed the bookstore. Now I don’t have to worry about grasping landlords, since I’ve had the good fortune to become one myself. You know how they say crime doesn’t pay? They don’t know what they’re talking about.

“I remember him,” I said, “as if I’d seen him only yesterday. If I was frowning it’s because I’d meant to tell you to call him. But I didn’t, did I?”

“No,” Wally said, “and I didn’t, either. Call him, I mean.”

“He called you.”

“Right. Said he’d heard you were in trouble, and what would it take to get you out? I said it would probably take an act of God to get you out of trouble, but all it would take to get you out of jail was ten percent of the bond, which is to say five large. He sent a messenger with fifty hundred-dollar bills in an envelope, which ought to earn him an invitation to your Christmas party. And here you are.”

“Here I am,” I agreed.

“You’re charged with murder,” Wally went on, “but I don’t think they’re serious about it. They can’t possibly make it stick. Of course, life would get a lot simpler if they found the person who actually did kill the Landau woman.”

“If I knew,” I said, “I’d be happy to tell them. Meanwhile I’d better go open the store. I’ve got a cat who hates to miss a meal.”

“I know how he feels, Bernie. But swing past your apartment first, why don’t you.” His nose wrinkled. “You might want to get under the shower.”

“It’s cigarette smoke,” I said. “I was in the kind of smoke-filled room where they decided to nominate Harding for President.”

“That was a little before my time,” Wally said, “and that’s not just cigarette smoke.”

“You’re a runner,” I said. “I didn’t figure you would mind the smell of good clean sweat.”

“Good clean sweat is one thing,” he said. “Jailhouse sweat is something else. Go on home, Bernie. Take a shower, put on some clean clothes. You got an incinerator in your building?”

“A compactor.”

“Whatever. The clothes you got on? Toss ’em down the chute.”

People talk about burning their clothes, but does any sensible middle-class person ever actually do it? I bundled mine up and ran them over to the laundry around the corner.

My apartment’s on West End and Seventy-first. I’d cabbed there from the Thirteenth Precinct (“the one-three,” as the TV cops would say) on East Twenty-first, and, after a shower and a shave and a change of clothes, I cabbed back down to the store. I usually take subways-they’re usually faster, they’ve got more legroom, and you don’t have to listen to Jackie Mason’s recorded voice urging you to wear a seatbelt. But there’s nothing like a night in a cell to make a man appreciate life’s little refinements, even if there’s precious little refined about them.

It was around eleven by the time I got to the store, and Raffles made it clear that he was glad to see me, rubbing himself against my ankles in the fashion of his tribe. I’m happy you’re here, he was saying, and I’ll be happier when you feed me. I did and he was, and as soon as I had the place up and running I looked up Marty Gilmartin’s number and dialed it.

“I wanted to thank you,” I said.

“It’s nothing.”

“If you’d ever spent a night in a cell,” I said, “you wouldn’t say that.”

“No, I don’t suppose I would. So let me just say that you’re welcome, and that I was glad for the chance to do you a service. It’s been a long time, Bernard.”

“It has,” I agreed. “I haven’t seen you in ages, except for a quick glimpse now and then.”

“Quite. I’m tied up for lunch, dammit, but do you suppose you could drop over to the club sometime this afternoon? Say half past three?”

That would mean closing early, but without his help I wouldn’t be open at all. I told him half past three would be fine, then hung up and waited for the world to beat a path to my door. First of the path-beaters was a fellow in his late thirties, wearing navy slacks and a sportshirt he’d buttoned wrong. He was skinny, with knobby wrists and a prominent Adam’s apple, and his straw-colored hair looked as though it had been cut at the barber college, and by one of their less-promising students. He squinted through rimless eyeglasses at Raffles, who had made short work of his breakfast and was on his way back to the sunny spot in the front window. When the animal had plopped himself down without turning around three times, thus proving conclusively that he wasn’t a dog, the geeky-looking guy turned his pale blue eyes on me.

“He doesn’t have a tail,” he said.

“Neither do you,” I said, “but I wasn’t going to mention it. He’s a Manx.”

“I’ve heard of them,” he said. “They don’t have tails, do they?”

“They’ve outgrown them,” I said, “even as you and I. When you come right down to it, what does a cat in this day and age need with a tail?”

I’d offered this by way of small talk, but he took it seriously, creasing his high forehead in thought. “I wonder,” he said. “Doesn’t it play a role in keeping the animal balanced?”

“He sees a therapist once a week,” I said, “and when he has a problem we talk about it.”

“Physically, I meant.”

Duh. I let him speculate on the role of the feline caudal appendage in maintaining the animal’s equilibrium and the possible evolutionary advantage of taillessness on the Isle of Man, the breed’s ancestral home, but I didn’t contribute much to the conversation myself beyond the occasional nod or grunt. I didn’t want to waste wit on him, since he didn’t seem to know what it was, nor did I want to inquire too closely into Raffles’s origins.

Because, when you come right down to it, I’ve never been entirely certain that Raffles is a Manx. He doesn’t look a lot like any photos I’ve seen of Manx cats, nor does he have the breed’s characteristic hopping gait. What he looks like, really, is a garden-variety gray tabby who lost his tail in some unrecorded accident, and who has learned to live without it.

He’d learned, God knows, to live without any number of other things to which he was once presumably attached. Although he still seeks to sharpen them on the furniture, his claws are but a memory, surgically removed before Fate (and Carolyn Kaiser) brought him into my life. And, although he is in attitude and temperament an outstanding example of feline masculinity, two emblems of his maleness have, alas, had similar surgical alteration.

Since this last point makes breeding him out of the question, it renders his bloodlines largely academic. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a Manx, and a fine one in the bargain. How he got that way is no concern of mine.

“…Gulliver Fairborn,” my visitor was saying.

That got my attention, which he’d hitherto succeeded in losing. I looked up and there he was, eyes wide, waiting for me to answer a question of which I’d heard only the last two words. I tried to look blank, and I have to say it comes easy to me.

“Let me explain,” he said.

“Perhaps that would be best.”

“All I need,” he said, “are photocopies. Do whatever you want with the originals. It’s not the letters I’m interested in. It’s their contents, it’s knowing what they say.”

I could have told him the letters were as hard to trace as Raffles’s tail, but what was my hurry? He was a lot more interesting now than when he’d been discussing my cat. “I don’t think I got your name,” I said. “Mine is-”

“Rhodenbarr,” he said. “Did I pronounce it correctly?”

The place some people go wrong is the first syllable. The O is long, as in “Row, row, row your boat,” and that’s how he’d rendered it. “Either you got it right,” I said, “or my parents lied to me. And you are…”

“Lester Eddington.”

I waited for the name to ring a bell. When you own a bookstore, you recognize the names of thousands of authors. They are, after all, quite literally one’s stock in trade. I may not know anything about a writer, I may never have read a word he’s written, but I tend to know the titles of his books and what shelf to put them on.

I just knew this bird was a writer, but his name was new to me, and I found out why when he explained that he hadn’t published anything yet, except for articles in academic journals that I’d been lucky enough to miss. But this didn’t mean he hadn’t been writing. For almost twenty years he’d been hard at work on a book about a subject that had preoccupied him since he was-surprise!-seventeen years old.

“Gulliver Fairborn,” he said. “I read Nobody’s Baby and it changed my life.”

“That’s what everybody says.”

“But in my case it really did.”

“That’s the other thing that everybody says.”

“In college,” he said, “I wrote paper after paper on Gulliver Fairborn. You’d be surprised how many courses you can fit him into besides English Lit. ‘Changing Attitudes on Race in America as revealed in the works of Gulliver Fairborn’-that worked fine in freshman sociology. For art history, I discussed the novels as literary reflections of abstract expressionism. I had a little trouble in earth science, but everything else fell into place.”

He’d done a master’s thesis on Fairborn, of course, and expanded it for his doctorate. And he’d spent his life teaching at one college or another, always on the move, never getting tenure. Wherever he went, he taught a couple of sessions of freshman English, along with a seminar on Guess Who.

“But they don’t really want to study him,” he said. “They just want to sit around and talk about how great Nobody’s Baby is, and how it changed their lives. And, of course, what a ‘cool dude’ Fairborn must be, and how they’d love to call him up late at night and talk about Archer Manwaring and all, but how they can’t because he’s such a man of mystery. Do you realize how many books he’s written since then?”

I nodded. “I have some of them on the shelves.”

“Well, you would. You’re in the business. But the man has published a new book every three years, forever taking chances, constantly growing as a writer, and hardly anyone pays any attention. The kids don’t care. They don’t want to read the later work, and judging by the papers they turn in, most of them don’t get very far with it.”

“But you’ve read all the books.”

“I read everything he writes,” he said, “and everything written about him. He’s my life’s work, Mr. Rhodenbarr. When I’m done, I’ll have produced the definitive book on the life and work of Gulliver Fairborn.”

“And that’s why you want copies of the letters.”

“Of course. Anthea Landau was his first agent, the only one with whom he had a close relationship.”

“Not too close,” I said. “The way I heard it, they never met.”

“That’s probably true, although the letters may show otherwise. That’s only one of the questions they may answer. Did they meet? Were they more to each other than author and agent?” He sighed. “The answer to both of those questions is probably no. Still, she was as close to him as anyone. What did he confide in his letters? What did he say about the books he was working on? About his thoughts and feelings, about his inner and outer life? You see why I need those letters, Mr. Rhodenbarr?”

“I see why you want them,” I said. “What I don’t see is what you can do with them. Fairborn went to court once to keep his letters from being quoted in print. What makes you think he won’t do it again?”

“I’m sure he will. But I can wait as long as I have to. He’s almost thirty years older than I am. I don’t drink or smoke.”

“Good for you,” I said. “How about cursing?”

“Oh, I’m not a goody-goody,” he said, about as convincingly as one President insisting he wasn’t a crook or another claiming he’d never inhaled. “But the vices I have aren’t the sort that compromise one’s health. I don’t know that Fairborn smokes, but I have it on good authority that he drinks.”

“ Rye whiskey,” I said.

“That’s what they say, and I gather he drinks quite a good deal of it. Oh, I hope he lives for years and years, Mr. Rhodenbarr. I hope he writes many more books and that I have the chance to read them all. But all men are mortal, even if some of them manage to create immortal work during their lifetime. And, while he could live another thirty years and I could get run over by a bus this afternoon…”

“The odds are you’ll outlive him.”

“That’s what any insurance actuary would tell you. I won’t even attempt to publish my book during his lifetime. Believe me, I can write with a freer hand if I don’t have to worry what he’d think of it. Once he’s no longer in the picture, I can publish as I please. For the time being, my only concern is making the book as accurate and as comprehensive as possible.” He smiled with all the warmth of an SS officer in a forties film. “And that is where you come in,” he said.

“Except it’s not.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I don’t have the letters,” I said.

“Oh?”

“Not even a postcard. It’s true I’ve been charged with burglary in the past, and it’s also true I was arrested at Anthea Landau’s hotel last night. But I didn’t steal her letters.”

“His letters, you mean.”

“Whatever.”

“I suppose you would have to say that.”

“So would Pinocchio,” I said, “unless he wanted his nose to grow.”

“If you don’t have them, who does?”

It was a good question, and I wished I knew the answer myself. I told him as much, and his face took on a crafty look. “Suppose they come into your possession,” he said. “If they’re floating around they have to wind up somewhere, and who’s to say it won’t be with you?”

“Who indeed?”

“You’d have to consider your options and select the best course open to you. But, if only for your own protection, you’d want to run them through a Xerox machine, wouldn’t you?”

“That’s what burglars always do,” I said.

“Really?”

“We Xerox everything. Furs, jewelry, rare coins…”

He nodded, registering as new data what had been an attempt at levity. “Just let me have a set,” he urged. “I don’t have any money, that must be obvious, but I could manage a few dollars to cover the cost.”

“The cost?”

“Of making copies.”

“In other words,” I said, “you could pay me ten cents a page.”

“Well, perhaps a bit more than that. But what I can offer you is something far more important. You’ll be helping a scholar with his life’s work. And, of course, you’d be listed in the acknowledgments when the book was published.”

“Now you’re talking,” I said. “How often does a humble burglar get that sort of recognition? ‘Thanks to Bernard Rhodenbarr’-do you suppose you’d have room for my middle name?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“‘To Bernard Grimes Rhodenbarr, for sharing with me useful documents stolen from the late Anthea Landau.’ Wouldn’t that make her proud?”

“Miss Landau?”

“My mother, to see her son get such recognition. Of course, the police might view it differently, but I suppose we could be a shade more circumspect in the wording. And who’s to say the statute of limitations on burglary won’t run out by the time you’re able to publish?”

He agreed it was possible, even likely, and gave me a card with his name on it, Lester Eddington, along with that of a college and a town in Pennsylvania, neither of which I’d ever heard of. I said as much and learned the town was in the western part of the state, near the Ohio border.

“You must be tired,” I said. “You had a long drive this morning.”

But he’d been in town since the weekend, staying at a hotel. Not the Paddington, by any chance? Nothing so good, he assured me, and named a hotel on Third Avenue which was indeed a step or two down from the Paddington, but not too many steps away from it. He’d come to town to talk to the folks at Sotheby’s on the slim chance they could be persuaded to copy the letters for him. And he’d hoped for an audience with Anthea Landau, either to see the letters or to interview her, a request she’d always refused in the past. And he had other leads to pursue as well.

“Well,” he said, straightening up. “I’ve taken up enough of your time. If it turns out that you have those letters…”

“I’ll keep you in mind.”

He’d have liked something a little firmer than that, but I guess he was used to disappointment. He nodded shortly and thrust his hand across the counter in a manner awkward enough to leave me wondering for a moment just what I was supposed to do with it.

I shook it, which was evidently what he’d had in mind. Then I gave it back to him and off he went.

The door had barely closed behind Eddington when the phone rang. It was Carolyn, offering to pick up lunch and bring it over. “I know today’s your turn,” she said, “but I also know you just opened up, so I thought I could take two turns in a row. Unless you had a late breakfast and want to skip lunch altogether.”

“I didn’t have any kind of a breakfast,” I said, “now that you mention it. I fed Raffles, which was the only way to get him out from underfoot. The poor guy was starving. So was I, and I still am, so I certainly don’t want to skip lunch.”

“That pig,” she said.

“What pig are we talking about?”

“Your pig of a cat, Bern. Did he eat his breakfast?”

“Every morsel.”

“Well, he’s two meals ahead of you. I fed him around nine-fifteen, before I opened up. I bet he didn’t say a word, did he?”

“He said ‘Meow.’ Does that count?”

“The animal’s a real con artist. Look, I’ll see you in a little while. What would you say to some pastrami sandwiches and a couple of bottles of cream soda?”

“Meow,” I said.

“That was really sweet of Marty,” she said. “Go figure, huh? You start out by stealing a man’s baseball cards, and he winds up getting you out of jail.”

“I didn’t steal his cards.”

“Well, he thought you did. My point is the relationship didn’t exactly get off on the right foot, and look at it now.”

“I’m seeing him in a couple of hours,” I said. “At his club.”

“I guess it’s been a while since you’ve seen him, huh?”

“Quite a while,” I said, and glanced at my watch. “Something like twenty-two hours.”

“Where did you-”

“At the Paddington,” I said. “Not last night, but earlier in the day. When I was on my way out of the place, he was on his way in.”

“What was he doing there?”

“He didn’t say,” I said, “because we didn’t speak. But my guess would be that he was committing adultery.”

“Is it that kind of a hotel, Bern?”

“The kind you commit adultery in? What other kind is there?”

“I mean is it crawling with hookers? Because I didn’t think it had that kind of reputation.”

“It doesn’t,” I said, “and it wasn’t, but you don’t need a hooker for adultery. All you need is a partner you’re not married to.”

“And he had one?”

“Right there on his arm. I got a good look at her, and she was worth looking at. But I don’t think she looked at me, or if she did she wasn’t paying attention. Because she didn’t recognize me.”

“She was someone you knew?”

“No.”

“Oh. For a minute there I thought…”

“Thought what?”

“That you were going to say it was Alice Cottrell.”

“Nope.”

“Not if you didn’t know her. But in that case why would you expect her to recognize you?”

“Not then,” I said. “Later.”

“Later?”

“When I met her in the sixth-floor hallway,” I said. “God knows I remembered her, even if she was dressed up like Paddington Bear this time around. And she remembered me later on in the lobby. ‘That’s him!’ she sang out, the little darling.”

“She’s the one you saw with Marty?”

“The very same,” I said, “and I’ve got to say I admire the man’s taste. Her name’s Isis Gauthier and she lives right there at the hotel.”

“And she turned you in to the cops, and Marty bailed you out.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What does it all have to do with the letters?”

“I don’t know.”

“Or the murder. Is it all connected?”

“Good question.”

“There’s nothing like pastrami, is there, Bern?”

“Nothing like it.”

“And I don’t know why cream soda goes with it. It doesn’t go with anything else.”

“You’re right about that.”

“ Bern, what happened last night?”

“I wish I knew,” I said, “because I was there when it happened, and I got scooped up in the net, and I’d be a lot happier if I knew what was going on.”

I went over it again, from my own arrival at the Paddington the previous evening to my departure a little while later, handcuffs on my wrists and Ray’s singular version of the Miranda warning ringing in my ears.

“My mother always told me to wear clean underwear,” I said. “In case I got hit by a car.”

“Mine told me the same thing, Bern, but she never said why. I just figured it was one of the things decent people did. Anyway, what good would it do? If you got hit by a car, wouldn’t your underwear get messed up along with everything else?”

“I never thought of that,” I admitted. “But I’ve taken her advice and put on clean underwear every morning, and in all these years I’ve never been hit by a car.”

“What a waste.”

“But what she should have said,” I went on, “is to wear clean underwear in case you get strip-searched by the cops.”

“Because that’s a lot more likely than getting mowed down by a Toyota?”

“It’s certainly worked out that way for me. The thing is, though, what would be really embarrassing is if you had dirty drawers when you were being strip-searched. I mean, it’s embarrassing enough with clean ones.”

“I can imagine.”

“But if you got run over by a car, the odds are you’d be unconscious.”

“Or dead.”

“Either way, you wouldn’t even know your underwear was dirty. And if you were awake, would you care? I’d have too much on my mind to be embarrassed about my underwear.”

“It was embarrassing last night, huh?”

“Getting searched? I’ll tell you, it would have been a lot worse if they’d found anything. And I’m not talking about dirty underwear.”

“Good,” she said, “because we’ve talked plenty about it already and it’d be fine with me if we never talked about it again. They didn’t find anything, Bern?”

“Not a thing. They didn’t find my tools, or they’d have had more charges to bring. And they didn’t find Gulliver Fairborn’s letters to his agent, which figured, because neither did I. And they also didn’t find-”

The door opened.

“-out what happened to the Mets last night,” I said innocently. “That young left-hander they just called up from Sarasota was supposed to start last night, but I never heard how he made out.”

Carolyn was looking at me as though I’d lost my mind, or at the very least misplaced it. Then she glanced over at the doorway and got the picture.