The Burglar in the Rye

CHAPTER Sixteen

In the time I was gone, Henry had made a couple of sales and settled with the woman who’d left the bag of books. He paid her in cash from the register and got her to write out a receipt, and he even saved me money; he’d offered her twenty-five dollars less than I’d been prepared to go, and she’d taken it without argument.

Mr. Harkness from Sotheby’s had called again. I didn’t feel like calling him back, nor could I see the point in trying Alice Cottrell’s number, because I’d figured out that it wasn’t her number after all. So what I did instead was stand there talking books with Henry, who leaned on my counter with his chin in his hand and talked about the impression Thomas Wolfe had made on him at an admittedly impressionable age. “I thought Look Homeward, Angel was just wonderful,” he said, “and then a few years ago I tried rereading it, and I couldn’t get anywhere with it.”

“Well, you can’t go home again,” I said.

“Maybe that’s it, although there are some books I can read over and over. But I think you have to be young when you read Wolfe.”

“It’s the same with Dr. Seuss.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I like The Cat in the Hat better than ever. And the one about the kid with all those hats.”

“Bartholomew Cubbins,” I said. “Maybe you just like books about hats. I’ve got a copy of The Green Hat around here somewhere. By Michael Arlen. I’ve had it for years, and if you read it you can tell me if it’s any good. What about Nobody’s Baby? If you’d read it when you were seventeen you’d be saying it changed your life, but I don’t suppose you did.”

“I was well past seventeen when it was published.”

“But you read it?”

“When it came out, and I’ve looked at it a few times since then.”

“But I don’t suppose it changed your life, did it?”

“I suppose everything does,” he said thoughtfully. “Even the morning paper, even the quiz on the back of the Special K box. One’s a different person for having read it, whatever it happens to be.”

That got us into a nice philosophical conversation. I’d bought the bookshop in the hope of conversations like this one, and I gave myself over to it wholeheartedly. I stopped in midsentence and turned at the sound of the door opening, and there was a woman who looked familiar. I couldn’t place her until she said, “Hi! What are you doing here?”

It was Isis Gauthier, and I didn’t recognize her until she spoke because she looked very different. She wasn’t dressed like Paddington Bear this time around, but looked just fine in jeans and a pink Brooks Brothers shirt. Her cornrows had transformed themselves into straight shoulder-length hair with red highlights, which, clever fellow that I am, I realized had to be a wig.

“I come here all the time,” I said. “It’s my store. What are you doing here?”

“Not you,” she said. She was looking at Henry, who straightened up, his hand dropping to his side. “Oh, sorry. I thought you were somebody else.” Now she turned to me. “I know it’s your store,” she said. “And I know what you do when you’re not running it, too. And I think we ought to have a talk.” Then she turned and looked at Henry again.

“Time I got some lunch,” Henry said diplomatically.

She was silent until the door closed behind him. Then she said she’d spoken to Marty, who told her he’d spoken to me. “He says you didn’t kill Miss Landau,” she said, “but that’s the same thing that policeman said. You went there to steal something but you couldn’t find it.”

“I hate the way that sounds,” I said. “As if I’m a crook, and incompetent in the bargain.”

I gave her my best disarming smile, but I couldn’t see that it had any effect. “You’re a burglar,” she said, “and you came to my hotel to steal something. And somebody got into my room and stole my rubies. Now it doesn’t seem like much of a leap to think you had something to do with it.”

“I see your point, but-”

“Marty says you didn’t,” she went on. “But here’s the thing, see. When I first told him my rubies were missing, I could tell he wasn’t buying it. He thought it was a way for me to keep them without flat out refusing to give them back. ‘Oh, Ah’d be happy to give dem back so poor Miz Considine don’t be pinin’ away for dem, but Ah cain’t, on account of somebody done stole dem.’”

“‘Glory be, Miz Scarlett, what do Ah know about birfin’ babies?’”

She gave me a look. “But now he believes me,” she said. “He had a conversation with you, and now he believes me. What does that tell you, Mr. Rhodenbarr?”

“I guess he came to his senses.”

“What it tells me,” she said, “is that he knew I hadn’t faked the theft of the rubies, because you admitted taking them. You must have made an earlier visit to the hotel, before the night I ran into you in the hallway.”

“And then I returned to the scene of the crime?”

“You found out the Paddington’s security wasn’t that great, and you wanted to see what some of the other rooms might hold. But what I want to know is how you came to my room in the first place. Did John Considine send you?”

“I’ve never met the man. And if I’d already stolen the rubies on his behalf, why would he send Marty to talk you out of them?”

“Maybe he didn’t know you were successful. Maybe you decided not to tell him, because you thought you could do better selling the rubies to somebody else than settling for whatever he promised you for them.”

“That’s a lot of maybes for one sentence.”

“It’s two sentences, with one maybe in each.”

“Is that all? Well, it still seems like a lot.”

“Too hypothetical for you?”

“Call me hypothetical,” I said.

“Is that a song cue?” She braced one hand on her hip and cocked her head. To the tune of “Call Me Irresponsible” she crooned, “Call me hypothetical. Toss in… toss in what?”

“Alphabetical,” I suggested.

She made a face. “Toss in theoretical.”

“Better.”

“Don’t leave alphabetical out.”

“I like it,” I said, “and I’m glad I was able to make a modest contribution. I think we’ve got a hit on our hands.”

“I think you changed the subject,” she said sternly, but she didn’t look as stern as she sounded. A smile was trying to play with her lips. It wasn’t getting a whole lot of encouragement, but it was hanging in there.

“You think I have your rubies,” I said. Note the possessive pronoun; it was my way of letting her know I was on her side. “Suppose you’re right.”

“I knew it!”

“Whoa,” I said. “Let’s keep it hypothetical, okay? I didn’t say you’re right, I said suppose you’re right. As a matter of fact, I never stole anything from you.”

“And that’s the truth, right?”

“Gospel.”

“And I’m just supposed to take your word for it? The word of a burglar?”

I said, “The jewels disappeared from your room, right? Well, I’ve never set foot inside your room. I don’t even know what room you’re in.”

“Then how do you know you’ve never been in it?”

“Because you’re on the sixth floor, and the only sixth-floor room I’ve been in was Anthea Landau’s.”

“Poor Anthea,” she said. “She was nasty to most of the other tenants, but she was always perfectly nice to me. ‘If you ever write a book,’ she told me, ‘you just bring it straight to me, dear.’” She fixed her gaze on me. “You just admitted it!”

“Admitted what?”

“That you were in her room.”

“It’s not much of an admission,” I said. “It’s not as though we were in court. Anyway, they found a fingerprint of mine in there. The point is I wasn’t in your room, and I never saw your Elvis on black velvet.”

“Then how do you…oh. Marty must have told you.”

“He was impressed. Can we get back to my hypothesis? Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that I have your rubies.”

“Argument’s the word for it. All right, I’ll play your little game. You don’t have the rubies, but suppose you did.”

“What would it take to make you happy?”

“To make me happy? Give me the damn rubies back and I’ll be happy as a lark.”

“Is that what it would take? The rubies themselves?”

“What are you getting at?”

“I’m just trying to find out what the main attraction is here,” I said. “Is it a handful of pretty red stones, or is it what they’re worth?”

“Keep talking.”

“Would you settle for what the rubies are worth?”

Her eyes flashed. They were still blue, I noted, but a little less startling. I must have been getting used to them.

“John Considine tried that on,” she said. “He told Marty to offer me five thousand dollars. Five thousand dollars!”

“A veritable pittance.”

“I’d say it’s about as veritable as pittances get. An appraiser told me they’re worth eighty thousand dollars.”

“That’s more than they were insured for, but it’s probably not far off. Look, forget five thousand dollars.”

“I forgot it the moment I heard it.”

“And forget eighty thousand too, while you’re at it. Suppose you could get twenty thousand.”

“Twenty thousand dollars.”

“In nice quiet cash.”

“It’s less than they’re worth.”

“Assuming they’re genuine, and assuming-”

“An expert appraiser said they were. Genuine Burmese rubies, he said.”

“It’s interesting about rubies,” I said. “The best ones come from Burma and Sri Lanka. They’re the major exporters of quality stones.”

“I know.”

“And who do you suppose are the biggest importers of synthetic rubies?”

She looked at me. “You’re going to tell me Burma and Sri Lanka, aren’t you? What’s the point?”

“Figure it out.”

“I saw a shop on the highway with a sign. ‘We Buy Junk and Sell Antiques.’ Is that what the folks in Burma and Sri Lanka are doing?”

“If they are,” I said, “and if they can get away with it because it’s virtually impossible to tell synthetic rubies from the real thing, then rubies might not be an ideal long-term investment.”

She frowned. “I wasn’t thinking about selling them,” she said. “If I did, I’d get more than twenty thousand. I wore them onstage, you know.”

“In The Play’s the Thing.”

“You saw me? No, of course not. Marty told you.”

“I heard you were sensational.”

“You’re just making that up, but I still like the way it sounds.” She came up with a real smile this time. “I loved those rubies,” she said. “I felt wonderful wearing them. Especially because John gave them to me. But when I stopped feeling that way about John, I still felt the same way about the rubies.”

“And now?”

“Twenty thousand dollars is a lot of money. I’d miss the rubies. As a matter of fact I miss them already. Still, I could get a lot more use out of the money. But you’re not offering it to me, are you?”

“We’re just being hypothetical, remember?”

“Is that what we’re doing?” She arched an eyebrow. “I’d like my rubies back, Mr. Rhodenbarr.”

“Bernie.”

“I’d like my rubies, Bernie. Or my twenty thousand dollars. But you don’t have the jewels or the money, and we’re just being hypocritical.”

“I think you mean hypothetical.”

“Not necessarily,” she said, and headed out the door.

The store was quieter for the absence of Isis, and a drabber place altogether. She brightened things up even when she wasn’t wearing all the colors of the rainbow. I was all alone. Henry hadn’t come back, and I didn’t know if he was going to.

I picked up the phone and tried Alice ’s number, or what I’d been given to think was Alice ’s number, and it went unanswered, as seemed to be its habit. I hung up and took a moment to Think Things Through, and I realized something.

I could wash my hands of the whole mess.

I’d gotten involved to impress a girlfriend and do a favor for a writer whose book had-oh, all right-changed my life. Nobody’s Baby may not have saved me from a life of crime, but my worldview was forever altered by it, and you couldn’t say the same for the quiz on the back of the Special K box. And so I’d tried to retrieve Fairborn ’s letters, but someone else had beaten me to it, and they were well beyond my reach by now. If you’re going to look for a needle, at the very least you ought to know which haystack to look in. And I didn’t. Anybody could have taken them, and they could be anywhere by now.

So Fairborn wouldn’t get his letters back, but he wouldn’t blame me, because he didn’t know I existed. He might or might not blame Alice Cottrell, and she could blame me if she wanted, but she’d effectively disappeared from my life, reappearing only to share her squeals of excitement with some faceless stranger. I couldn’t convince myself I owed her a thing.

I’d managed to walk in on a murder scene and get arrested for it, but I wasn’t languishing in a cell, and sooner or later the charges would be dropped. Even if they never found out who killed Anthea Landau, they didn’t have a case against me.

What did that leave? The rubies? Well, fine. I hadn’t checked lately, but I was pretty sure they were still covered with cat food and safe as houses. Whether or not John Considine was willing to pay twenty grand to get them back, and whether or not Isis decided to take the money, was not really my problem. It was Marty’s, as soon as I passed the jewelry on to him, and he could figure it out.

And where did that leave me? Well, for the moment it left me with a bag of books I’d just purchased, and they weren’t doing me any good where they were. I took them out and stacked them on my counter and set about pricing them, then placing them where they belonged on my shelves. Gas-House McGinty was hard to price; I checked a couple of price guides to no avail, wound up leaving it unpriced for the time being.

Idly I opened the book to the first page of text and started reading, and I was halfway down page three when a familiar voice jarred me out of Farrell’s narrative. “Well, well, well,” Ray Kirschmann boomed, and I straightened up and closed the book with a snap.

“Hey, Bern,” he said. “You look like you just got caught redhanded, an’ all you’re doin’ is readin’ a book. You got a bad conscience or somethin’?”

“It’s a valuable book,” I said. “I shouldn’t be reading it. Anyway, you startled me, Ray.”

“Man’s got a store, he’s gotta expect somebody might walk into it every once in a while. It’s one of the risks of retail. Even if it’s a fake store an’ all he really is is a burglar.”

“Ray…”

“Those letters turn up yet, Bern?”

“No,” I said, “and they’re not going to. I was looking for them, I admit it, but somebody got there first.”

“An’ stabbed Landau.”

“Evidently.”

He frowned. “Seems to me,” he said, “you said the other day that you had the letters.”

“No,” I said, “you said I had them, and I said they were in a safe place.”

“Safe from who?”

“Safe from me,” I said, “and I have to say I don’t care where they are, or who took them.”

“ Bern, what happened to our deal?”

“Nothing happened to it, but not even Steven can make something out of nothing. There’s nothing for us to split, Ray.”

“So you’re out of it.”

“Right.”

He started to say something, but the phone rang and I reached to answer it. It was Hilliard Moffett, the world’s foremost collector of Gulliver Fairborn, just calling to remind me of the intensity of his interest.

I stopped him in midsentence. “I don’t have the letters,” I said, “and I never will. And I’m a little busy right now.”

I hung up. Ray said, “What we were sayin’, you washed your hands of the whole business.”

“Absolutely.”

“So you ain’t been back to that hotel, the padded bears.”

“The Paddington,” I said, “and no, I haven’t. How could I? I don’t think they’d let me in.”

“When did anybody ever have to let you in, Bern?”

The phone rang again. I made a face and picked it up, and it was Lester Eddington, the Fairborn scholar, to say that he perhaps ought to stress how important it was that he receive copies of the Fairborn-Landau correspondence, and that on consideration he realized he could pay quite a bit more than the cost of making copies. Several thousand dollars, in fact, and-

It helps when you know your lines, and I didn’t have any trouble remembering mine. “I don’t have the letters,” I said, “and I never will. And I’m a little busy right now.”

I hung up. “You keep tellin’ people that,” Ray said, “an’ pretty soon you’re gonna believe it yourself. Tell me somethin’, Bern. What did you do last night?”

“What did I do?”

“Uh-huh. You hang out with Carolyn?”

“No, she had a date.”

“So what did you do?”

“I had a few drinks at the Bum Rap,” I said.

“All by your lonesome? You know what they say about drinkin’ all by yourself.”

“I suppose it’s better than being all by yourself and not drinking,” I said, “but I had company.”

“An’ then?”

“And then I went home.”

“To your place on West End an’ Seventy-first.”

“That’s where I live,” I said. “That’s my home, so when I decide to go home, that’s where I go to.”

“You coulda gone home with whoever you were drinkin’ with,” he said. “To her home, is what I mean.”

“It was a guy.”

“Well,” he said, “I never thought you were that way, Bern, but what’s it to me who you go home with?”

“I went home alone,” I said, “to my own home, and all by myself, and-”

And the phone rang. I picked it up and barked into the receiver, and there was a pause, and a Mr. Victor Harkness of Sotheby’s said he’d been trying to reach me, and he guessed I hadn’t had an opportunity to call him back.

“This is unofficial,” he said, “so let’s just call it an exploratory inquiry. Miss Anthea Landau had made arrangements for us to handle the sale of the Fairborn letters. She’d brought in some representative letters, so we’d had a look at them, but she wouldn’t leave them with us. But we gave her an advance, and she signed our standard agreement, and it’s binding on her heirs and assigns.”

“I doubt that would include me,” I said. “I can’t imagine why she would mention me in her will. I never met the woman.”

There was a long pause, and then Mr. Harkness tried again. “My point, Mr. Rhodenbarr, is that we have a vested interest in the material. It will be the highlight of our January sale of books and documents. Its value to us thus exceeds somewhat the commissions we’d expect to collect on the sale, which would in themselves be substantial.”

“That’s interesting, but-”

“Consequently,” he said, “we could pay a finder’s fee. In cash. No questions asked.”

“And you can do that?”

“The letters remain the legal property of Miss Landau,” he said, “no matter in whose hands they may be at the moment. And our arrangement with her remains in force. Should we succeed in recovering the letters, we’d be under no obligation to account for the manner in which they came into our possession.”

I took a deep breath. “I don’t have the letters,” I said, “and I never will. And I’m a little busy right now.”

I hung up. “You’re repeatin’ yourself,” Ray said. “I’ll tell you, Bern, you sound like a broken record.”

“Records are made to be broken.”

“Uh-huh. So you went straight home last night, huh?”

Where was he going with this? “I went to the Bum Rap,” I said. “I already told you that.”

“Having drinks with some fag friend of yours.”

“His name’s Henry,” I said, “and he’s not gay, or at least I don’t think he is. What difference does it make?”

“It don’t make none to me. I didn’t go home with him.”

“And neither did I.”

“No, you went home alone. What time?”

“I don’t know. Eight or nine o’clock, I guess. Something like that.”

“An’ you went right home.”

“I stopped at the deli and bought a quart of milk. Why?”

“Prolly to put in your coffee. Oh, why am I askin’? Just makin’ conversation, Bern. So you went home an’ you were there alone all night, is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“An’ this mornin’…”

“I got up and came to the store.”

“An’ opened up, an’ fed your cat, an’ did the things you always do.”

“Right.”

“An’ you just walked out your door, right? You didn’t notice a thing?”

Oh, God. I had to ask, even though I didn’t want to hear the answer. “Didn’t notice what, Ray?”

“The dead girl,” he said, “lyin’ smack in the middle of your living-room floor. There was hardly room enough to walk around her, so I guess you musta stepped right over her. Funny you didn’t even notice.”