The Burglar in the Rye

CHAPTER Seventeen

“A dead woman,” I said.

“Girl, woman. Suit yourself, Bern. It don’t matter what you call her on account of she ain’t likely to answer. Poor dame’s dead as a hangnail.”

“In my apartment.”

“Unless you moved out an’ somebody else moved in. You still livin’ in the same place, Bern?”

“Uh,” I said.

“I guess it ain’t a bad place to live,” he said, “or you wouldn’t be livin’ there, an’ it must be a good place to die, too, ’cause that’s what she used it for. Not that she didn’t have help.”

“She was murdered?”

“I’d say so. People’ll shoot themselves now an’ then, and sometimes they’ll stab themselves, but it’s rare for somebody to do both.”

“She was…”

“Shot an’ stabbed, right. Shot in the shoulder an’ stabbed in the heart, or close enough to it to be just as good. The ME says death was pretty much instantaneous.”

“At least she didn’t suffer,” I said, “whoever she was. Was it the knife wound that killed her?”

“For the gunshot to kill her,” he said, “it woulda had to be blood poisoning, because she had the wound all bandaged up. The doc wouldn’t go out on a limb, but what he said was it was a minimum of twenty-four hours old. She got shot, she got patched up, and she went over to your place and got herself stabbed to death.”

“When did this happen, Ray?”

“Sometime last night, from the looks of things. While you were home sleepin’, Bern.”

“Who found the body?”

“Couple of uniforms.”

“They were just passing through my apartment and happened to notice her there?”

“Respondin’ to a call.”

“When was this?”

“Around eleven this mornin’. Some neighbor told your doorman there was suspicious sounds comin’ from your apartment in the middle of the night.”

“So he waited until morning? And then he told the doorman?”

“She. You know a Mrs. Hesch?”

“Down the hall from me. A nice lady.”

“Well, she heard something in the middle of the night, but don’t ask her when. Because I already asked an’ I got everything but a straight answer. She went back to sleep an’ woke up wonderin’, so she knocked on your door an’ you didn’t answer, an’ then she called you on the phone an’ you still didn’t answer, so she told your doorman.”

“And he called it in?”

“He tried you on the intercom, and then he went upstairs and banged on the door, but you didn’t answer, and neither did she.”

“She?”

“The dead girl. So he went an’ phoned it in.”

“And a couple of uniforms came and forced my lock,” I said. “Damn it, anyway.”

“Relax, Bern.”

“If you knew how many times I’ve had to replace that lock…”

“You don’t have to replace it this time, because nobody forced it. The doorman had a key.”

“He did?”

“The one you left with him.”

“I figured it must have disappeared. If he had a key, why didn’t he open up right away?”

“Maybe he was afraid of what he might find. Maybe he did open the door an’ saw her from the doorway an’ got the hell out an’ let the uniforms find her for themselves. What the hell difference does it make? She was dead on the floor this mornin’, an’ she’d been dead for a while.”

“How long?”

“For the time bein’ I’m just guessin’, but say six or eight hours. She probably got herself killed sometime in the middle of the night.”

“When did you come into the picture, Ray?”

“Right away. Me an’ you are linked in the department’s computers, Bern. There’s a flag with my name on it that pops up anytime your name comes up. It didn’t take long for somebody to call me.”

I looked at my watch. “It took you a while to get here, though.”

“Yeah, it did. I figured, why hurry? I might as well wait an’ hear what the ME had to say. An’ I wanted to find out who she was, just in case you never managed to catch her name.”

I already had a pretty good idea, but I had to ask. “Who was she, Ray?”

“The name Karen Kassenmeier ring any kind of a bell?”

She’d been alive at four-thirty in the morning, I thought. Gloriously alive, making triumphant noises on the spread-covered bed in Room 303 at the Hotel Paddington. Then the guy had hustled her out of there and took her north and west to my apartment, where he stabbed her and left her for dead.

“ Bern?”

Unless she went up to my place on her own and met somebody else there. I had no way of knowing if the man she’d been with in Room 303 had killed her, or if it had been somebody else. And it didn’t make too much difference, since I didn’t know who he was. But why my place?

“Uh, Bern…”

Maybe because she knew where it was. Maybe she realized she was in danger, and thought I could save her.

“Hey, Bernie? Where’d you go?”

“I’m right here,” I said. “I was thinking, that’s all. Her name’s not Karen Kassenmeier.”

“Sure it is.”

“No, it’s not. As a matter of fact-”

The phone rang.

“Answer that,” Ray said. “An’ the hell that ain’t her name. It’s good solid police work turned it up, includin’ takin’ prints off her cold dead fingers an’ runnin’ ’ em by Washington. Karen Ruth Kassenmeier from-”

“ Oklahoma,” I said. “ Kansas City.”

“If it ain’t her, how come you know where she’s from? An’ whyntcha answer the phone, because it’s givin’ me a headache.”

“They all want the same thing,” I said. “You want me to answer it? Fine, I’ll answer it, and I’ll tell this one the same thing I told the other two. And then I’ll tell you the real name of the woman who’s been calling herself Karen Kassenmeier.”

I grabbed the phone.

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

“Bernie? Is that you?”

“Uh,” I said.

“I guess I picked a bad time,” she said. “I’ll try you a little later.”

“Wait,” I said, but the line went dead. I looked at the receiver for a moment, but that never really accomplishes anything, and eventually I gave up and put it back in its cradle.

“Well,” he said, “let’s hear it.”

“Huh?”

“The name,” he said. “The real name of the dead dame on your floor.”

“She’s not still on my floor, is she? Don’t tell me they haven’t moved her.”

“Quit stallin’, huh? Who is she?”

“Karen Kassenmeier,” I said.

“That’s what I said. You were gettin’ ready to say somethin’ else.”

“No, not me.”

“Of course you were. I know what I said, an’ I know what you said, an’ what I’d like to know is what you almost said an’ why you decided not to say it.”

“Whatever it was,” I said, “that phone call just drove it straight out of my mind. That’s what you get for making me answer it.”

“ Bern -”

“Whatever it was,” I said, “I’m sure it wasn’t important. And if I ever remember it I’ll be sure to let you know.”

Her name’s Alice Cottrell-that’s what I’d been ready to tell him, and if the phone call hadn’t emptied my mind, it had certainly changed it.

Because that was Alice Cottrell on the phone.

“Here you go,” Ray said. “Take a look.”

“I hate this.”

“No kiddin’, Bern. You liked it, I’d have to start worryin’ about you. Nobody likes to look at dead bodies. Why do you think we bury ’em?”

“So we won’t have to look at them?”

“Reason enough,” he said. “Well? What do you think?”

I turned away. “I’ve never seen her before,” I said. “Can we go now?”

“I didn’t go home last night,” I said.

“Jeez, that comes as a shock to me, Bern.”

“I had a reason for saying I did.”

“Of course you did, an’ the reason’s you’re a liar. A guy lifts things for a livin’, you don’t hardly expect every word outta his mouth’s gonna be the truth. Half the questions I ask you, main reason I ask is to see what kind of a story you come up with.”

“You don’t expect the truth from me?”

“If I did,” he said, “it’d mean I ain’t learned a thing over the years, because you been tellin’ me lies since the day we met. An’ why should I hold it against you? We done each other a lot of good over the years, Bern.”

“That’s true.”

“Put a lot of dollars in our pockets. An’ I wound up makin’ a couple of righteous collars along the way, too.”

“Sometimes it was me you collared, Ray.”

“But nothin’ ever stuck, did it? You always came out okay.”

“So far.”

“You ever meet this Kassenmeier, Bernie?”

“No,” I said. “I thought I did. For a minute I thought she was someone else.”

“She looked familiar?”

I shook my head. “Earlier. Before I saw her, I thought the woman in my apartment might have been, uh, another woman.”

“And who would that be, Bern? Never mind, don’t strain yourself makin’ up a story. You changed your mind on that before you got anywhere near the morgue. If I was guessin’, I’d say that was her on the phone.”

He pulled up next to a hydrant-where would cops park without them?-and we walked around the corner to my store. Henry was ringing a sale as we entered. He’d returned from lunch around the time Ray started badgering me to take a look at the late Karen Kassenmeier, and I’d left him to mind the store.

I hadn’t introduced them before, so I did now. “This is Ray Kirschmann,” I said. “He’s a police officer. And this is Henry Walden. He used to own a clay factory.”

“I didn’t know clay was somethin’ you made in a factory,” Ray said. “I thought you just dug it up, like dirt.”

You did, Henry told him, but then you had to process it, which involved removing the impurities and adding compounds to keep it from drying out. Then you dyed it and packaged it and shipped it to the stores.

“An’ then people give it to their kids,” Ray said, “an’ the little bastards track it into the carpet, which you never get it out of. You workin’ for Bernie, Henry?”

“He lets me hang out here,” Henry said, “and I lend a hand when I can. It’s more interesting than making clay.”

“If you like books,” Ray said. Henry said he liked them a lot, and that he liked the kind of people you met in bookstores. You met all kinds, Ray agreed. Henry asked if I needed him for anything more, and I said no, that I’d be closing fairly soon. Henry said he’d most likely see me tomorrow, and stopped on his way out to give Raffles a pat.

“Nice enough fellow,” Ray said, when the door closed behind him. “Was he here the other day when I came by?”

“It’s hard to remember who was and who wasn’t. He’s been hanging around a lot.”

“Henry Clay. Wasn’t there somebody famous named Henry Clay?”

“He was the man who said he’d rather be right than be President.”

“There you go.”

“But his name’s not Henry Clay, Ray. It’s Henry Walden.”

“Same difference. What it did, it rang a bell. An’ so did his face, but then it didn’t. Like he was familiar at first glance, but at second glance you realized you were seeing him for the first time.”

“At second glance, you were seeing him for the first time.”

“You know what I mean. If you saw that beard you’d remember it, wouldn’t you? Extinguished an’ all. Bern, speakin’ of familiar. Namely the dame we just saw. I know she wasn’t who you thought she was, but are you sure she didn’t look the least bit familiar?”

“She looked dead.”

“Yeah. Well, there’s not a whole lot of doubt on that score.”

“She looked as though she’d been dead forever, Ray. As though she’d been born dead, and bad things happened to her ever since.”

“‘Cordin’ to what we got on her, she’s forty-six years old. The worst thing ever happened to her was gettin’ stabbed to death last night, but up until then she got arrested a whole batch of times an’ went away more than once.”

“For what?”

“Theft. She was a thief.”

“A thief in my apartment.”

“Yeah, that’s a first. She musta been lookin’ to steal somethin’.”

“I suppose so.”

“You don’t seem concerned. Why’s that?”

“Well, she didn’t get away with anything, did she, Ray?”

“No, but whoever killed her might have walked off with what she came to take.”

“I don’t know what she came to take,” I said, “and I didn’t have anything worth taking.”

“How about your life, Bern?”

“Huh?”

“She had a gun in her purse.”

“A gun,” I said.

“Little bitty one. Hadn’t been cleaned since the last time it was fired.”

“Maybe she shot the person who stabbed her.”

“An’ then put the gun back in her purse?” He made a face. “What it mighta been,” he said, “is the gun she got shot with a couple of days ago.”

“The shoulder wound.”

“Uh-huh. It’s the right size. Twenty-five-caliber, perfect if you want to stop a charging cockroach.”

“If somebody shot her in the shoulder,” I said, “how does the gun wind up in her purse?”

“Maybe the guy who shot her a while ago is the same guy who stabbed her last night. She falls down dead an’ he gets rid of the gun by stickin’ it in her purse.”

“That makes a lot of sense.”

“It makes no sense at all,” he said, “but what does?”

“Maybe she shot herself originally,” I suggested.

“Now that makes sense, Bern. Woman wants to kill herself, she shoots herself in the shoulder.”

“She shot herself accidentally.”

“It’s her gun an’ she has an accident with it.”

“Why not?”

He thought it over. “Whole lot of arrests on her sheet,” he said. “I didn’t see where she was ever charged with possession of a firearm.”

“People change.”

“So I keep hearin’, but I ain’t seen much evidence of it. She got charged twice with assault. Charges dropped both times. Didn’t use a gun, though.”

“She used a knife,” I said.

“How’d you know that, Bern?”

“The way you paused. I could sense the punch line looming in the distance. She did use a knife?”

“Yeah, she stabbed a couple of guys.”

“But I bet she didn’t have a knife in her purse.”

“Nope.”

“Or found on the premises.”

“Well, you got a drawer full of knives in your kitchen. But no, they didn’t find the murder weapon at the crime scene. The thinkin’ is the killer took it away with him.”

“Was it the same knife?”

He smiled approvingly. “Very good,” he said. “You’d make an okay cop, if you weren’t a crook instead.”

“Who says a person can’t be both? Was it the same knife used to kill Anthea Landau?”

“If we had the knife,” he said, “it’d be easier to say one way or the other. All they can tell so far is it’s possible. What do you say, Bern? Any ideas where we might find the knife? Any thoughts on who mighta stuck it in Kassenmeier?”

“No.”

“You know somethin’ about Kassenmeier, Bern. You say you never saw her, an’ you say you didn’t know nothin’ about her, but I saw the look on your face when I mentioned her name the first time. You didn’t look like you were hearin’ it for the first time.”

“I never heard it before,” I said, “but I’d seen it.”

“Seen it where?”

I thought about it. Was there any reason to hold out on him? There had to be, but I couldn’t think what it was.

“She was staying at the Paddington.”

“How would you know that? That’s where you were last night, isn’t it?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Lemme use your phone,” he said, and he was reaching for it when it rang. “Shit,” he said, and picked it up himself. “Bernie’s Bookstore,” he said. “Who’s this, Carolyn? Sorry, my mistake. Hold on.”

He handed me the phone. Alice Cottrell said, “Bernie? Is that you?” I said it was. “Who was that just now?” A police officer, I said.

“Oh, then you can’t talk,” she said. “That’s all right. Look, I wanted to let you know that everything’s taken care of. I got what we were looking for.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“It’s too complicated to explain. But I called Gully in Oregon, and he couldn’t be happier. I ran the whole batch through a shredder and fed the shreds to the incinerator. I’m at the airport myself. They’re about to call my flight to Charlottesville.”

“Uh…”

“Bye, Bernie.”

The phone clicked in my ear. I held it out to Ray.

“Your turn,” I said.

“Nothing,” he said. “No Kassenmeier. Not at the Paddington.”

While he was on the phone, I’d brought in my bargain table and begun the process of closing up. I could have waited for him to give me a hand, but I’d still be waiting. Cops, I’ve learned, tend to avoid heavy lifting.

“Maybe she checked out,” I suggested.

“We know she checked out,” he said, “because you generally do when somebody sticks a knife in your heart. But she didn’t check out of the hotel because she never checked in in the first place. What makes you so sure she was there?”

“I was in her room.”

“Last night?”

“And once before.”

“But you never met her.”

“No.”

“An’ you didn’t know who she was.”

“No.”

“Then how’d you know it was her room?”

“Her suitcase was in the closet.”

“An’ all you gotta do is look at a suitcase an’ you can tell whose it is?”

“I can if there’s a tag on it with her name and address. But maybe she used another name when she registered.”

“And had her own name on her luggage tag?” He frowned. “She had ID in her purse in three different names. I tried ’em all on that fruit at the hotel just now.”

“Which fruit would that be?”

“The lounge lizard with the Shinola hair. Carl Pittsburgh.”

“Pillsbury.”

“Whatever. He never heard of her, no matter what name she used.”

“Then she used a fourth name. And she couldn’t have checked out of the hotel, because the room was still occupied around four in the morning. She may have been at my place by then, but she must have planned on returning to the Paddington. Her suitcase was still in the closet and her clothes were still in the dresser drawers.”

“Maybe I oughta go have a look,” he said. “You wouldn’t happen to remember the room number, would you?”

I picked up the phone and tried a number. No one answered, and I can’t say I was surprised.

“Sure, I remember the number,” I told Ray. “Want to trade?”