The Burglar in the Rye

CHAPTER Twenty-one

Everyone looked at Carl Pillsbury, and I have to hand it to him-he was as cool and as bold as a brass cucumber. He frowned in thought, took his chin between his thumb and forefinger, pursed his lips, and emitted a soundless whistle. “Someone who works for the Paddington and dyes his hair,” he said. “Now a couple of years ago we had a fellow who wore a toupee, but that’s not the same thing, is it? But I can’t think of anyone who uses hair coloring.”

“Then somebody musta turned you upside down,” Ray said, “an’ stuck your head in the inkwell, ’cause that mop of yours looks about as natural as Astroturf.”

“Me?” he said, his eyes widening. “You actually think I color my hair?”

“Everybody knows you do, Carl,” Isis said.

“Everybody?”

“Everybody in the tristate area.”

“It’s obvious?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I have a pretty good idea what happened,” I said, “although there are a few gaps here and there. I know you’re from the Midwest originally, and so was Karen Kassenmeier. The two of you aren’t that far apart in age. I think you knew each other way back when, or else you met here in New York.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I suppose it’s possible she approached you cold when she got here,” I said, “but that’s hard to believe. She must have known you.”

“That would explain something,” Hilliard Moffett said. “I certainly never suggested anything criminal when I met that woman in Seattle -”

“Whether you did or not,” Ray assured him, “we got bigger fish to fry. An’ whatever you did you did in Seattle, an’ this here’s New York, an’ I don’t see no Seattle cops in this room. So just say whatever you got to say.”

“All right,” Moffett said, and stuck out his jaw. “She had an interesting reaction when I mentioned the name of the hotel. Until then she’d seemed noncommittal, lukewarm to the whole notion, but then she brightened. ‘The Paddington,’ she said. ‘I wonder if he’s still there.’ I asked her what she meant, and she just shook her head and pressed me for more details.”

“That proves nothing,” Carl said. “She once knew someone who once worked or lived at the hotel. So what?”

“You’d be surprised what good police work can turn up,” Ray said. “Once we take a good long look at both your backgrounds, don’t you think we’re gonna find somethin’ puts you an’ her in the same place at the same time? You could cop to it right now an’ save everybody some trouble.”

“Even if I knew her once,” he said, “it still proves nothing.”

“Here’s what I think happened,” I said. “She showed up at the hotel and told you she wanted to check in under a false name. You had an even better idea: she wouldn’t register at all, and you’d stick her in a room. That would save her upwards of a hundred and fifty dollars a night.”

“What makes you think I would do anything like that?”

“It’s not exactly unheard-of in the business,” I said. “It’s a good way for a desk clerk to make a few dollars for himself. Like a bartender forgetting to charge for drinks, with the understanding that the customer will show his appreciation with an oversize tip. But Karen Kassenmeier was offering you more than the chance to knock down a few dollars on an off-the-books rental, wasn’t she? She could afford to, because you could provide more than a place to stay. You could get her into Anthea Landau’s room.”

“Why would she need me for that? You already said the woman was a professional thief.”

“She was a pro at liftin’ things,” Ray said, “but there’s nothin’ on her sheet shows she ever opened a door she didn’t have the key to.”

“You could get her in,” I said. “That had to be worth something to her. You could find a spare key to Landau’s room, or lend her your passkey. And you could tip her off as to when Landau was out of the hotel, so that she could get in and out without encountering the woman.”

“We had a case like that a couple of years back,” Ray said. “Big midtown hotel, an’ we started gettin’ reports of things missin’ from the rooms. No signs of forced entry, and it was almost always cash that was taken, an’ another thing-the victims were almost always Japanese businessmen.”

“At some midtown hotels,” Erica said, “that’s just about all you find.”

“This one got a lot of ’em,” Ray said, “but it was still pretty clear they were gettin’ targeted. An’ we looked into it, an’ we found it was worse than we figured, because a lot of the Japs was gettin’ knocked off an’ not botherin’ to report it. We knew it had to be somebody on the inside, an’ we narrowed it down to this one clerk, but we couldn’t make a case.”

“What happened?”

“You tell me. There was this one Jap we talked to. He got knocked off, an’ he knew some other people who got knocked off, an’ I guess maybe we let on which clerk we suspected.” He looked off into the distance, recalling the moment. “Funny guy,” he said. “Woulda made a hell of a poker player, ’cause he didn’t show nothin’ in his face. An’ when he stretched out his arms you could see he had tattoos on his wrists, an’ there was more tattooin’ that showed when he loosened his tie an’ unbuttoned his collar. An’ one more thing that was pretty funny. I mean, he was the kind of guy that if he was an American you’d figure him to have a pinkie ring. But there was no way in hell he could manage that.”

Somebody obligingly asked why.

“No place to put it,” Ray said. “Both his pinkies were gone. Funny, huh?”

“Yakuza,” I said. “Japanese gangsters. What happened to the clerk?”

“Well, must be he took the money an’ ran,” Ray said, “because he disappeared, an’ nobody ever saw him again.” He shrugged. “But just to be on the safe side, I stayed outta sushi bars for the next month or so.”

Carl had the look of someone who’d eaten a little too much Uzbek food. I guess he didn’t like stories where the hotel clerk disappeared.

“Maybe you’d worked a deal with her before,” I said to Carl. “For one reason or another she knew you weren’t an altar boy, and she made her pitch and you liked the sound of it. As a matter of fact, you had an idea of your own.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“People say that all the time,” I said, “and it’s hardly ever true. You know exactly what I’m talking about. You told her about a woman living right here at the Paddington, a fellow member of the theatrical profession, who was wearing an extremely valuable necklace with matching earrings.”

Isis ’s jaw dropped, and she wheeled on Carl. “You son of a bitch,” she said. “I thought we were friends.”

“Don’t believe him, Isis.”

“Tell me why I should believe you instead, Carl.”

“For God’s sake, he’s a self-proclaimed burglar.”

“Actually,” Carolyn put in, “I think ‘admitted’ would be a better word for Bernie than ‘self-proclaimed.’ It’s not as though he goes around making proclamations. If anything, he’s a little ashamed of being a burglar.”

“Then why doesn’t he stop burgling?” Isis wanted to know.

“Just between us, I think it’s an addiction.”

“Has the man tried therapy? Or some sort of twelve-step program?”

“Nothing seems to work.”

“But I live in hope,” I said. “Carl, you and Isis were both actors. You were still jockeying a desk in a hotel lobby and she was getting work and wearing rubies. Maybe that gave you a resentment, or maybe you just saw some easy money. You gave your friend Karen a key and a room number and told her what to look for. And I guess she was a pro, all right, because she got out with the jewelry and otherwise left the place the way she’d found it.”

“I didn’t know anyone had been in there,” Isis said. “I always thought burglars made a mess.”

“Only the low-level ones,” I said.

“All I knew was that the necklace and earrings were gone. I looked for them and they were gone. I thought I’d misplaced them, and then I started thinking the, uh, friend who gave them to me had taken them back. And finally I found out that you were a burglar, and I decided you must have taken them.”

“Well, I did,” I said, “but Kassenmeier took them first. She stuffed them in the back of her underwear drawer.” I shook my head. “The cobbler’s children go barefoot, all right. A pro like Kassenmeier goes and hides the rubies in the first place a burglar would look. I guess she was in a hurry to get back to work on the job that brought her here in the first place, the Fairborn-Landau letters.”

I drew a breath. “Now here’s where the timing gets a little tricky,” I said. “The day of Landau’s murder was the same day I first came to the Paddington. I checked in around lunchtime, collected my bear, and went to my room.”

“You took a bear?” Isis said. “You came here to commit burglary and you wanted a bear in your room?”

“I don’t see what one thing has to do with the other,” I told her. “It’s a cute bear. Point is, while I was checking in I picked up an envelope from the floor. It was there to be picked up because I had just that minute dropped it. It had Anthea Landau’s name on it, and it was my way of finding out which room she was in. All I had to do was watch where Carl put it.”

“I didn’t put it anywhere,” Carl said. “I left it on the desk.”

“For the moment,” I said. “But by the time I’d put my things away and went back downstairs, you’d tucked it in Landau’s pigeonhole.”

“How could you tell?” Lester Eddington asked. “There must have been a dozen envelopes in as many pigeonholes.”

“This one was purple.”

His eyes lit up at the news, as did Hilliard Moffett’s. “Like every letter Gulliver Fairborn ever wrote,” Moffett said.

“I wanted something distinctive,” I said, “so I’d be able to spot it. And I had purple on the brain because I knew it was Fairborn ’s favorite color for correspondence. So I bought some purple paper and envelopes at a stationery store.” I drew a folded sheet from my breast pocket, waved it around. “Like this,” I said, and put it back. “I put a blank sheet in an envelope and left it at the desk, and it was in Anthea Landau’s pigeonhole when I left my key on the way out. And when I picked up my key that evening, it was gone.”

“She picked up her mail.”

“That’s what I assumed. But Anthea Landau had become increasingly reclusive in recent years. She rarely left the hotel, and didn’t often leave her suite of rooms.”

“I had to go to her room to examine the letters she was going to consign to us,” Victor Harkness put in. “‘You’ll have to come to the hotel,’ she said, arranging to meet me in the lobby. When I called from the lobby she said, ‘You’ll have to come upstairs.’”

“So I hardly think she would come downstairs for her mail,” I said. “I think she would have it brought up to her.”

Everyone looked at Carl. “So?” he demanded. “What does that have to do with anything? When I was on my break I took her mail up and slid it under her door. There are a few guests who get that service. Miss Landau was one of them.”

“So you slid it under her door.”

“That’s right.”

“Is it? What if I told you someone saw you knocking on her door?”

“I slid the mail under her door. If I knocked, it was just to let her know I’d brought her mail. I did that sometimes.”

“And walked away without waiting for the door to be opened.”

“Yes.”

“What if I told you someone saw you wait until she opened the door?”

“Nobody saw me.” He colored. “Look, who can tell one day from the next? Maybe she opened the door. She sometimes did, if she was standing right next to it when I knocked. What difference does it make?”

“I’m guessing now,” I said, “but I think my guess is pretty close to the truth. I know you knocked and I’m sure she let you in, and then I think you did something to make sure she’d sleep soundly. Was she drinking a cup of tea? Did you put something in her tea?”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“It may not have been tea,” I said, “and she may not have been drinking it right there in front of you, whatever it was. But one way or another you slipped her some kind of a mickey.”

“If he did,” Ray said, “there’ll be traces somewhere. In the cup if she didn’t wash it, an’ in her if she drank it.” Marty asked if they’d found anything. “No,” Ray said, “on account of we didn’t look. When a woman’s been hit over the head an’ stabbed to death, you don’t generally order a toxicology scan to find out if she took poison. But I can order it now, an’ if she did we’ll know about it.”

“It wasn’t poison,” Carl said. “My God, I wouldn’t poison anybody.”

“It was just something to help her sleep.”

“She hadn’t been sleeping well,” he said, “and she never left those rooms, and I knew Karen was getting tired of waiting. She’d go in while Miss Landau was asleep, and if she wasn’t sleeping soundly-well, I was afraid of what might happen.”

“With good cause, as it turned out.”

“Oh, God,” Carl said. “I probably shouldn’t say any more. I’ve said too much already.”

“Well, you got the right to remain silent,” Ray said smoothly, and ran the whole Miranda warning past him. “An’ that goes for everybody in this room,” he added. “All of you’s got the right to remain silent, an’ all the rest I just read. But you want my opinion, you’d be crazy to quit talkin’ now.”

“I would?”

“You broke some laws,” he said, “an’ no question you were an accessory, but if you help us clear the case an’ tie the whole thing to Kasimir-”

“Kassenmeier,” I said.

“Whatever. You do that, you’re in good shape. And she’s dead as a doorknob, so what’s the harm in that?”

“She killed Miss Landau,” Carl said. “I mean, you already know that, don’t you?”

“Why don’t you tell us what happened?”

“There’s not much to tell. I gave the drug time to work, and then I called Miss Landau. She didn’t answer her phone, so I assumed she was sleeping soundly. Then I called Karen in her room and told her to come down and pick up a key. She did, and went upstairs with it. The next thing I knew, Miss Landau was dead.”

“What happened?”

“All I know is what Karen told me. She went in and Miss Landau woke up and confronted her. Karen stabbed her and got away without being seen.”

“Aren’t you leaving something out?”

“I don’t think so.”

“When they found Kassenmeier in my apartment,” I said, “she’d been shot in the shoulder, and it didn’t happen on West End Avenue, either, because the wound had been cleaned and dressed and was already starting to heal. Landau shot her, didn’t she?”

“Oh, that’s right,” he said. “I forgot that part.”

“Well, a minor detail like that could slip a person’s mind easily enough. She called you, didn’t she? From Landau’s apartment, saying she’d just taken a bullet in the shoulder. You told her to stay where she was, and you went upstairs and took her to your own room, the one you’ve had since you moved into the Paddington twenty-odd years ago. It was closer than the room you’d put Kassenmeier in, and you had first-aid supplies there, tape and gauze pads and antiseptic. You bandaged her up and left her there to rest. And you went back to Landau’s apartment.”

“Why would I do that?”

“To see if there was anything you could do for the woman. You wouldn’t just leave her there, would you?”

“No, of course not,” he agreed. “But there wasn’t anything I could do for her, so I-”

“Sure there was.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s funny about the gunshot,” I said. “I smelled gunpowder when I was in Landau’s place. I didn’t recognize it at first, but then I did, and that’s how I found out I was sharing space with a dead woman. I assumed she’d been shot, and I was puzzled when I learned later that she’d been hit over the head and stabbed. But of course it makes sense when you realize that Landau was the one who did the shooting. She surprised a burglar in her room and shot her.”

I paused, feeling the way Carl did when he heard how the Japanese gangster had made a hotel clerk disappear. I don’t like stories where somebody shoots a burglar.

“And Karen stabbed her,” I went on. “That’s interesting, when you stop to think about it. Somebody pulls a gun on you and takes a shot. It hits you in the shoulder. You want to make her stop shooting, so what do you do? You pull a knife and stab her.”

“It sounds like self-defense,” Ray said, “but it ain’t, not when you’re busy committin’ a felony at the time. It’s murder, no question about it.”

“It’s also unlikely. Someone’s shooting you so you go for a knife?”

“Karen carried a knife,” Carl said. “It had gotten her in trouble in the past.”

“I know,” I said, “but she never stabbed anybody while she was working. She saved it for her personal life. So she wouldn’t have been creeping around Landau’s apartment with a switchblade in her hand, would she? It’d be in her purse, which she probably set down the minute she walked into the room, if she even brought it with her in the first place, which seems doubtful. Even if the purse was on her person when Landau started popping caps, do you suppose she’d start rooting around in it, looking for her trusty knife?”

“What’s the difference?” Isis wanted to know. “One way or another this Kassenmeier woman stabbed Anthea, didn’t she?”

I shook my head. “Nope,” I said. “Not a chance.”

“But-”

“She hit her over the head,” I said. “She picked up something with a little heft to it and swatted the old lady. It wouldn’t take much of a blow to knock her out.”

“And then she stabbed her,” Carl said.

“Why?”

“To make sure, I suppose.”

“To make sure she’d wind up facing homicide charges? All she wanted to do was get out of there and get her shoulder fixed. Landau was out cold, and was no danger to Kassenmeier. All she needed to do was scoop up the Fairborn file and go home.”

“Who else would have a reason to kill her?”

“Suppose she opened her eyes again after Kassenmeier got out of there. Maybe she picked up the phone and called the front desk. Or maybe she woke up after you’d already returned to the crime scene, Carl. To tidy up, or to pick up the Fairborn file if Kassenmeier hadn’t already grabbed it. Or maybe just to see what else you could steal.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“If you went through Kassenmeier’s purse and brought the knife along, that’s premeditation. If Kassenmeier left the purse behind, and you went back for it, and then Landau woke up and you pulled the knife purely on impulse, well, you might have better luck with that story.”

The best pause I ever heard was Jack Benny’s, when a holdup man said, “Your money or your life.” Carl was almost as eloquent, standing there with his mouth hanging open.

“Well,” I said, “that’s saying a mouthful. But there’s no rush. You’ll have plenty of time to work up a story.”

“Wait,” he said. “I shouldn’t be saying anything, but I shouldn’t have said anything from the beginning, should I? For God’s sake, I’ve been on Law amp; Order. I know how you people work.”

“That just about makes you law enforcement personnel,” Ray said. “Which is why we’re givin’ you a chance to go on record.”

Carl rolled his eyes. “Spare me,” he said. “I know this is a trick, and I don’t care. I’ll tell you the truth, if only to get it clear in my own mind. It doesn’t matter. Nobody’s going to believe me.”

“I have a feeling you’re right about that,” I said, “but let’s hear it.”

“It was the way you said,” he told us. “Up to the time when I was on the desk and Karen called from Miss Landau’s room. She was hysterical, and all I could make out was that she’d been shot. I left the desk unattended and raced up there, and found her bleeding from a shoulder wound and Miss Landau unconscious on the floor. She was alive, though. One side of her face was bruised, I guess where Karen hit her with the Scotch tape.”

“She hit her with Scotch tape?”

“Miss Landau kept it in a heavy brass desktop dispenser, and that’s what Karen hit her with. She just picked it up and threw it, and it evidently hit Miss Landau and knocked her cold. It weighed a ton.”

“I know the thing he’s talkin’ about,” Ray confirmed. “We found it on the desk in the front room.”

“That’s where I put it,” Carl said, “when I was tidying up. Maybe that’s where Karen found it. Does it matter?”

“Not to me it don’t,” Ray said, “and not to Kasimir either, bein’ as nothin’ does at this point. Keep talkin’.”

“I moved Miss Landau,” he said. “I know you’re not supposed to, but I couldn’t just leave her lying on the floor like that. She was a little old lady, you know, and light as a feather. I picked her up and put her in the bed.”

“Which is where she was when I got there,” I said, “but there was a difference. She was dead.”

“I know,” he said. “She was dead when I went back. First I went to my room, with Karen, who was at least able to walk. I had first-aid supplies in my room, as you guessed, and I cleaned the wound and put on a sterile dressing. I had three weeks’ work a few years ago on General Hospital , so I’m not entirely without experience in such matters. I don’t know if any of you watch the show, but I was the lupus patient who wasn’t expected to live. I surprised everybody.”

“Not for the last time,” I said. “I suppose you put her to bed, too.”

“Of course. And then I rushed back down to the lobby, just to make sure prospective guests weren’t rushing the desk. It was quiet, so I went right back to the sixth floor and into Miss Landau’s apartment. I didn’t even look at her right away, because I knew I’d have to call an ambulance and get her looked at, and before I did that I had to straighten up the place. I wiped off the Scotch tape dispenser and put it back on the desk, I closed the drawers Karen had left open, I found the gun where it had fallen and found Karen’s purse where she’d put it down. And, incidentally, she did take it with her when she entered the apartment, so that she could stuff the letters in it before she left. It was a big purse, large enough to accommodate a thick nine-by-twelve envelope.”

“Sounds like the one she had with her when she got killed,” Ray said. “She didn’t have no thick envelopes in there, but there was a handy little gun, and it coulda been the one she got shot with.”

“I did everything I could think of,” Carl said, “and then I went for a look at Miss Landau, and she was in the bed, right where I’d left her. And she was dead, stabbed in the heart with Karen’s knife.”

“How do you know it was Kassenmeier’s knife?”

“Because it was the kind she carried, a folding stiletto with mother-of-pearl sides and a four-inch blade. And it was sticking out of her chest.”

“I didn’t see a knife,” I said. “Of course the bedclothes might have covered it.”

“There was no knife stickin’ out of her when we got to the scene,” Ray said.

“I took the knife away,” Carl said. “I know you’re not supposed to do that, but-”

“For Chrissake,” the uniformed cop said, “you’re not supposed to do any of the shit you did.”

“I know.”

“Like taking the knife’s the least of it.”

“I know.”

“Well, go on,” the cop said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. Go on. You took the knife.”

“And washed the blood off it,” he said, “although I know there would have been traces that would have showed up under forensic examination. I know that.”

“Well, sure,” Ray said. “You were on Law amp; Order.”

“But it still seemed a worthwhile precaution.”

“After you took the knife-”

“I put it back in her purse.”

“Along with the gun,” I said.

“Well, yes.”

“What else was in there?”

“In the purse?”

“Right. There wasn’t a thick nine-by-twelve manila envelope by any chance, was there?” I shrugged. “I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it? How else would you have been so sure it would fit?”

“I looked for the envelope,” he said, “because she’d told me that she had had a chance to find the letters before Miss Landau confronted her. But I couldn’t find them, and I thought whoever had used the knife had found the letters at the same time. But the purse was heavier than it should have been, and I looked again, and there was a zippered section tucked away behind a flap. And that’s where the envelope full of letters was.”

“So you didn’t have to go through the files.”

“No. I got in and out as quickly as I could.”

“And what did you do with the letters?”

“I took the purse back to my room,” he said, “where Karen was resting. I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t know what had happened. Who stabbed Miss Landau? I was sure she was alive the first time I saw her, and I know she was dead when I went back, and I swear to God it wasn’t me who stabbed her.” He stopped himself, frowned. “I,” he said. “It wasn’t I who stabbed her.”

“Well, it wasn’t me either,” Ray told him. “So keep talkin’.”

“You took the purse back to the room,” I said.

“Yes.”

“With the knife still in it.”

“Yes.”

“And the gun, of course. Landau’s gun.”

“Yes.”

“And what about the letters?”

“What about them?”

“What did you do with them? Because you couldn’t have given them to Kassenmeier or she’d have been out of there like a shot, mission accomplished. Where did you stash them, Carl?”

He sighed. “In the other room.”

“Which room? Room 303?”

“Yes. Karen was in my room, and I thought…well, I don’t know what I thought. I didn’t really have time to think.”

“And you stashed them there before you went back to your room.”

“Well, on my way. It wasn’t on my way, not literally, but…”

“I get the picture. I’ll be a son of a bitch. You must have been tucking them away while Isis and I were getting on a first-name basis in the sixth-floor corridor. You got the letters out of Landau’s room a few minutes before I let myself into it, and then you stashed them three floors below just before I came into that room off the fire escape. Why couldn’t you have put that envelope in the underwear drawer? Look what a lot of trouble you’d have saved me.”

“I…”

“Where did you put them, anyway?”

“On a shelf in the closet.”

“And then you went back and told Karen where you’d put them.”

“Uh…”

“You didn’t, did you?”

“Not exactly.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That Miss Landau was dead. I didn’t mention the knife, though, so I guess she assumed she’d died from getting hit with the Scotch tape dispenser.”

“Hell of a way to go,” Carolyn said.

“So she thought she’d killed her.”

“I suppose she did, but then when the story came out on the TV news, she knew Miss Landau had been stabbed.”

“And then she must have thought you did it.”

“I told her I didn’t, that whoever got the letters must have found her knife at the same time, and used it on Miss Landau. I don’t know if she believed me.”

“So you didn’t tell her where you’d hidden the letters.”

“No. I thought she might find them when she went back to her room, but she didn’t. What she did find was that her rubies were missing.”

“My rubies,” Isis said.

“Well, yes, but by this time Karen thought of them as her rubies, and they were gone. I didn’t know what to think when she told me that. Was she lying, so that she wouldn’t have to share the proceeds with me? And if not, what had happened to them?”

“In the meantime,” I said, “I’d been arrested. And you knew I was a burglar.”

“But what would you be doing in Room 303? I decided it must have been the same person who stabbed Miss Landau.”

“Well, a person who’d stick a knife in a little old lady probably wouldn’t draw the line at jewel theft,” I said. “But let’s focus on that person and forget the rubies for a minute. Who do you figure it was?”

“I have no idea.”

“You know,” I said, “that’s hard for me to believe. I think you have a pretty good idea.”

He lowered his eyes. “I’ve thought about it,” he admitted.

“No kidding.”

“And I honestly don’t know.”

“But you honestly do have an idea.”

“No, I-”

“That person’s the reason you didn’t bring the letters back to your own room,” I said. “It’s the reason you didn’t tell your old buddy Karen that the envelope she swiped was on a shelf in her own closet. You were working an angle of your own, weren’t you?”

“I wasn’t double-crossing Karen,” he said. “I was planning on giving her the letters.”

“When?”

“In another day or two. After I’d had a chance to-”

“To have copies made,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Because a certain person wanted copies,” I said, “and made you an offer for them you really didn’t want to refuse.”

“I never even met this man,” Lester Eddington asserted. “I need copies of all of Gulliver Fairborn’s correspondence, but I’m in no position to offer very much money, and I certainly wouldn’t be a party to a felony.”

“Relax,” I said. “It wasn’t you.”

“But who else would want copies? Moffett here is a collector. He wanted the originals, and anyway he was the one who brought in Karen Kassenmeier in the first place. Sotheby’s already had the right to auction the letters.”

“And I just wanted to give them back to the poor guy who wrote them,” I said. “But there was somebody else, somebody who wanted to write a book of her own. That’s why she recruited me, but she didn’t want to leave anything to chance, and she redoubled her efforts after I tried for the letters and came up empty. Well, Carl? Is she the one you think killed Anthea Landau?”

Carl didn’t say anything.

“Cat’s got his tongue,” I said, and turned to look long and hard at Alice Cottrell. “Well? Did you kill her?”