The Burglar in the Rye

CHAPTER Twenty

Isis Gauthier’s room was a lot nicer than mine. It was larger, of course, and better furnished, and the window afforded a nice view of Madison Square. Elvis gazed down from above the mantel, and the fireplace beneath that mantel, unlike mine, had escaped being bricked up. It was in fact a working fireplace, and it was working now. You couldn’t really see the fire, it was out of sight behind an almost opaque fire screen, but you could smell woodsmoke in the air, even as you could hear the occasional crackle.

The room would have been warm enough without the fire. It had been cool earlier when I laid the fire, but it was warm now, and I don’t know that it was the fire on the hearth that made the difference. Jam enough people into a room and they’re going to be warm, especially if some of them are a little hot under the collar to begin with.

We had a full house, all right. Isis Gauthier was there, looking much as she had on our first meeting, her hair in cornrows and her clothes a Paddingtonian riot of primary colors. Marty Gilmartin was nearby, more quietly dressed in muted tweed. Alice Cottrell wore a business suit and looked businesslike, and so did a man I’d never seen before, a very tall and very thin fellow with a narrow nose. I recognized everybody else in the room, so I worked it out that he had to be Victor Harkness from Sotheby’s, and I’d say he looked the part.

Gulliver Fairborn wasn’t there, with or without his silver beard and tan beret, with or without his wig and sunglasses. But the World’s Foremost Authority on the author and his works was present in the person of Lester Eddington. He had his shirt buttoned right for a change, but he still looked gawky and geeky, and no doubt would until Glamour magazine gave him a makeover.

Hilliard Moffett, the World’s Foremost Collector, was present as well, his bulk stuffed into gray flannel trousers and a houndstooth jacket, both of which he’d outgrown. He sat forward in his chair, looking more like a bulldog than ever. I have my checkbook, he looked to be thinking, so what are we waiting for?

There were only so many places to sit, and a couple of people were standing. Carl Pillsbury, star of stage, screen, and hotel lobby, was leaning against a wall, and managing to look as though he leaned against walls all the time. His white silk shirt was spotless and his dark slacks were sharply creased, but his black shoes were due for a shine. I guess he’d used up all the shoe polish on his hair.

Ray Kirschmann was standing, too, in-big surprise-an ill-fitting blue suit, and there was another cop posted next to the door. I hadn’t met him before and never did get his name, but it wasn’t hard to tell he was a cop, given that he was in uniform. And Carolyn Kaiser was there, of course, along with her friend Erica Darby. They both looked so feminine it was hard to believe nobody had rushed to give them a seat.

I went over and took center stage, which put me right in front of the oriental screen, which in turn was in front of the fireplace. I could hear the fire, which gives you an idea how quiet the room was. You’d have thought these people would have plenty to say to each other, but nobody was saying a word. They were all looking at me and waiting for me to say something.

I wasn’t sure how to begin. So I began the way I always do, given half a chance.

“I suppose you’re wondering why I summoned you all here,” I said. “It’s hard to know where to begin, and I’m not sure that the answer is to begin at the beginning. In the beginning, a man named Gulliver Fairborn wrote a book called Nobody’s Baby. If you feel it changed your life, well, you’re not alone. A lot of people feel that way, including most of the ones in this room.

“It certainly changed Fairborn ’s life, for better and for worse. It enabled him to make a living doing the only thing he really cared about-writing. But it made it difficult if not impossible for him to lead the anonymous life he longed for. He stayed out of the limelight, he shunned correspondence and interviews, he never allowed himself to be photographed, and he lived under assumed names. Even so, his privacy got violated from time to time.

“And a major violation was looming on the horizon. A woman named Anthea Landau, a longtime resident here at the Paddington, had been Fairborn ’s first literary agent. Now she made arrangements to offer the letters he’d written her for sale to the highest bidder. Anything with Fairborn ’s signature on it is rare, and actual letters from him are right up there with hen’s teeth.”

“I have a couple of his letters,” Hilliard Moffett said, “including one to a real estate agent in Hickory, North Carolina, inquiring about houses for rent. As far as literary correspondence is concerned, I don’t think he’s written anything of the sort in years. When he delivers a manuscript to his current agent, he just sends it by express mail with a false return address and no note enclosed.” He sighed. “He’s not an easy man to collect.”

“So the letters to Landau would be valuable,” I said. “Even priceless.”

“Nothing’s priceless,” said Harkness from Sotheby’s. He sounded as if he was quoting the firm’s motto, and who am I to say he wasn’t? “Except in the sense that the price could only be determined by discovering what the material would bring at public auction. I saw a sampling of the letters, and felt confident they would bring a substantial sum, certainly in the high five figures, and possibly well into six figures.”

“The letters haven’t been sold yet,” I said, “so we don’t know what they’ll bring. But we do know that they were valuable enough and desirable enough to bring some interesting people all the way to New York. Some of them are here now, in this room. There’s Hilliard Moffett, for instance, who already told you he has a couple of Gulliver Fairborn’s letters. He wanted the others.”

“I collect the man,” he said.

“And Lester Eddington, who knows a lot about Fairborn.”

“He’s my life’s work,” Eddington told us. “Moffett, I’d be interested in seeing that letter to the North Carolina realtor. I know he spent two years in the Smoky Mountains, and it would be useful to pin it down.”

“The letter’s not for sale,” Moffett snapped, and Eddington told him a copy would suit him just fine, or even a transcription. Moffett grunted in reply.

“And then there was Karen Kassenmeier,” I said.

I looked around, and every face I saw looked puzzled, except for Ray, who knew the name, and the other cop, who didn’t seem to be paying attention.

“Karen Kassenmeier was a thief,” I said. “She wasn’t a perfect thief, because she got caught a couple of times and went to prison for it, but she was pretty good at what she did, and she didn’t shoplift at the dime store. She stole high-ticket items, and the word was that she stole them to order.”

“And she came to New York, Bern?”

“From Kansas City,” I said, “according to the tag on her suitcase. But the airlines didn’t list a passenger named Kassenmeier on any of their Kansas City -to- New York flights in the past two weeks.”

“So she came earlier,” Moffett said, his jowls wagging.

“Or she used a false name,” Isis Gauthier suggested. “Criminals use aliases all the time, don’t they? Why, I met a man just the other day who called himself Peter Jeffries, or Jeffrey Peters. I can’t remember which, and neither could he.”

“It’s not that easy to use an alias on an airplane,” I said. “You have to show photo ID when you board, and you pretty much have to pay with a credit card or draw more attention from security than anyone would want, especially a thief. And if she used an alias, she wouldn’t have gone on using a luggage tag with her own name on it.”

“She might,” Erica said. “Criminals are stupid. Everybody knows that. Otherwise they wouldn’t get caught.”

“Sometimes they have bad luck,” I said, a little defensively. “Anyway, we know she used her own name because there’s a record of the flight she took. Three days before Anthea Landau was killed, Karen R. Kassenmeier was on a United flight from Seattle to JFK.”

“They got her name on the whatchacallit, the passenger manifest,” Ray said. “An’ there’s prolly a record of her flyin’ from Kansas City to Seattle, which’ll turn up if we look for it. What did she go an’ steal in Seattle, Bern? The dome off the stadium?”

“I don’t think she stole anything, although she may have. My sense of Karen is that temptation was one of the things she found hard to resist. But she went to Seattle to meet with somebody who wanted those letters very badly. Somebody who lived in Seattle, say, or who drove in from someplace an hour or so away. Bellingham, for instance.”

Hilliard Moffett thrust out his jaw. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “Pure conjecture. Bellingham ’s a considerable distance from Seattle, a stone’s throw from the Canadian border. And you say this woman is a thief, and comes from Kansas City. How would I know her?”

“You’re a collector,” I said. “When Landau was killed and I was arrested, you came straight to my shop. You as much as told me you’d buy the letters, even if they were stolen, even if I’d killed to get them. I didn’t have the sense that you’d never made that kind of offer before.”

“You’ve no proof for any of this.”

“I don’t suppose it would be hard to find,” I said. “Kassenmeier probably stayed at a hotel in Seattle, and it wouldn’t be hard to find out which one. If she made any telephone calls, there’ll be a record. If she met a pudgy fellow with Brillo hair and a face like a bulldog-”

“I beg your pardon!”

“Make that a heavyset gentleman,” I said smoothly, “with curly hair and an assertive jawline. If she met a fine-looking fellow like that, in the hotel lobby or at the coffee shop or in a bar in the neighborhood, somebody’s sure to remember. But why fight it? Nobody’s asking you to cop to conspiracy. You just let her know how important the letters were to you, and where they might be found.”

“There’s nothing illegal about that.”

“Certainly not. And maybe you advanced her some money for expenses.”

He thought about it. “That sounds as though it might be illegal,” he said, “so I’m sure I did nothing of the sort. And if anybody did give her expense money, I’m sure it must have been cash, so there’d be no record of it.”

“So she came to New York,” I went on, “and she took a room here in the Paddington. But here’s a curious thing. After she turned up dead, the police checked to see if she was registered here. And she wasn’t.”

“What’s so curious about that?” Lester Eddington wondered. “It may be difficult to use a false name on an airplane, but how hard is it at a hotel?”

“Not that hard,” Isis said. “Bernie did it, even if he did have a little trouble keeping it straight.”

I brightened. We were back to first names!

“It’s a nuisance,” I said. “Unless you have a fake credit card to match your fake name, you have to pay cash and leave deposits. She still might have done that, just to keep her name away from the scene of the crime she was planning, but we know she didn’t.”

“How do we know that?”

“We know what room she occupied,” I said. “Ray?”

“Actin’ on information received,” that worthy announced, “I made a check of the hotel records concernin’ recent registrations in the room in question. The room was on the hotel’s books as unoccupied for the entire past week.”

“Wait a minute,” Isis said. “If there was no record, how did you happen to know what room she was in?”

“Information received,” Ray said.

“Received from whom?”

“From me,” I said.

“And how did you happen to stumble on the information?”

“I happened to be in that room, and-”

“You happened to be in it.”

“Twice,” I said. “The first time I didn’t know whose room it was, and I didn’t really care. I was on my way from the fire escape to the hall, and all I wanted was to get out of the building altogether, because I’d just come from Anthea Landau’s apartment.”

“That’s the dame who got killed,” the uniformed cop said. “You were in her apartment?”

“That’s right, and-”

“Am I missing something?” He turned to Ray. “Why isn’t he in a cell?”

“He’s out on bail,” Ray said.

“He’s out on bail and he’s putting on a show for us?” Ray gave him a look, and he shrugged. “Hey,” he said, “I just asked. I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

The room went quiet, and I let it stay that way for a moment. Then I said, “There was something I noticed in that room on my first pass through it. As a matter of fact, I found something in that room on my first visit, and, uh, I took it along with me.”

“Ray,” the uniformed cop said, “did you happen to read this guy his rights? Because he just admitted to a Class D felony.” Ray gave him another look, and he opened his mouth and closed it.

“It was a piece of jewelry,” I said, and glanced at Isis, who registered this information and nodded thoughtfully. “I subsequently found out that it had been the property of one of the hotel’s permanent residents, and that she didn’t live in the room I’d taken it from. Someone had evidently stolen it from her and put it in the room where I found it.”

“That’s interesting,” Hilliard Moffett said, “if a bit hard to follow. But what does it have to do with two murders and the disappearance of the Fairborn-Landau correspondence?”

“I’ll get to that.”

“Well, I wish you’d speed it up,” he said, a little testily. “And could someone open a window? Between the body heat and the fireplace, it’s getting awfully warm in here.”

I looked at Isis, and she turned to Marty, and he walked over to the window and opened it.

“What I did,” I said, “was put two and two together, which is to say I put 602 and 303 together. The room numbers,” I explained, when I saw some puzzled faces. “Landau was in 602, and someone entered her room and killed her, and made off with the letters from Fairborn. And 303 was the room where Karen Kassenmeier was living, and where I found the stolen jewelry. Of course I didn’t know the jewelry was stolen when I, uh, picked it up, and I didn’t know it was Kassenmeier’s room until I went back to it a second time.”

“You went back to it…”

“To find out whose room it was. I figured there had to be a connection between the theft and homicide on the sixth floor and the missing jewels that turned up three floors below. Anyway, I went there and found a suitcase in the closet with Karen Kassenmeier’s luggage tag on it. I might have found more, but I heard somebody at the door.”

“Kassenmeier?”

“That’s what I assumed,” I said. “I didn’t know her name yet, I hadn’t had time to read the luggage tag, but I assumed the person at the door was the room’s current occupant. It was the middle of the night, so it didn’t figure to be a friend paying a call.”

“It could have been another burglar,” Isis suggested. “Like you.”

“Not like me,” I said, “because this burglar had a key. What I did was hide.”

“In the closet?”

I looked at Alice, whose question it was, and who seemed surprised at having raised it. “Not the closet,” I said. “And a good thing, because I have a feeling they looked in the closet.”

“‘They’?”

I nodded at Isis. “There were two of them,” I said. “A man and a woman. I was in the bathroom, behind the shower curtain, and I didn’t get a look at either of them. I stayed where I was, and they used the bedroom and left.”

“They used the bedroom?” Erica said. “How?”

“Well, not to sleep.”

“They had sex in it,” Carolyn said. “Right, Bern?”

“They did,” I said, “and then they left.”

“Kassenmeier and some guy,” Ray Kirschmann said, and glanced at Carolyn. “Or maybe it wasn’t a guy.”

“It was,” I said.

“What did you do, hear his voice?”

I shook my head. “He left the toilet seat up,” I said.

“The pig,” Isis said.

“I never really heard his voice,” I went on, “except in an undertone, and I certainly didn’t recognize it. But I recognized her voice, and it wasn’t Kassenmeier’s.”

“How could you tell? You said you never met Kassenmeier.”

“I never did,” I said, “so if I recognized this voice-”

“Then you knew who the person was,” Marty said. “The woman.”

“Yes. She was the person who got me interested in Anthea Landau and her file folder full of letters. And now she turned up in a room where I’d found some stolen jewelry, and then she left and I checked the luggage tag and read the name Karen Kassenmeier. So my first thought was that this was her room, and that she and Kassenmeier were the same person, even if I had met her under another name. One of the names was an alias, and they were both the same person.”

“Maybe you were right,” Alice Cottrell said levelly. “How can you be sure they weren’t the same person?”

Because Karen Kassenmeier’s dead, I thought, and you’re sitting here trying to look innocent. But what I said was, “I saw Karen Kassenmeier at the morgue, and she wasn’t anyone I’d seen before. But even before then, I had the feeling the woman I overheard wasn’t the same person whose room it was.”

Ray said, “Why’s that, Bern?”

“The bed was made.” That put a puzzled look on every face in the room, so I explained. “The two visitors made love in Room 303, and then they left, and when I saw the bed it had been made up.”

The man from Sotheby’s, Victor Harkness, cleared his throat. “All that would seem to establish,” he said, “is that they’re neat.”

“I couldn’t see how they’d had time to make the bed,” I said, “and it was very professionally made, as if the chambermaid had done it. In fact it looked the same as it had looked before they got there, and there was a reason for it. They’d never unmade the bed in the first place.”

“You mean they…”

“Had sex on top of the bedspread,” Isis Gauthier finished for him, and made a face. “That’s even worse than leaving the toilet seat up.”

“I suppose they were in a hurry,” I said, “and they probably wanted to avoid leaving evidence of their visit to the room, evidence Karen Kassenmeier might notice when she returned to it. But they did leave some evidence, and it enabled me to determine who the man was.”

“DNA,” the uniformed cop said. “But how would you get samples for comparison, and when did you have time to run tests, and-”

“Not DNA,” I said, “and that wasn’t the kind of evidence that was left behind. Maybe they practiced safe sex.”

“I hope so,” Isis said. “Everybody ought to.”

“Who was the man?” Carolyn asked. “And what was the evidence that pointed to him?”

“It was a black mark.”

“On his record?” Victor Harkness suggested. “A blot on his copybook?”

“Don’t forget his escutcheon,” I said. “But this was a black mark on the bedspread. At the top, over the pillow. Right where his head would be.” While they thought about it, I added, “Remember what I said earlier, about hearing a key in the lock? That was one of the reasons I assumed it was the room’s occupant coming home. But it wasn’t, yet it was somebody with a key. Of the two people in that room, I knew the woman, and I couldn’t think of any reason she would have a key to another person’s hotel room. But maybe the man had access to a key. A key to Room 303, say, or a master key, a key that would open any room in the hotel.”

“A key to the door,” Carolyn said, “and a black mark on the bedspread.”

“A picture begins to emerge,” I said. “A picture of a hotel employee. Someone who could put Karen Kassenmeier in a room without officially registering her. Someone who would thus know what room she was in, and would be able to get in and out with no trouble. Someone whose hair is as black as the telltale mark on the bedspread, and not because that’s the way Mother Nature made it. Carl, you’ve been at the Paddington for years. Is there anyone you know of who fits that description?”