The Burglar in the Rye

CHAPTER Twenty-five

“I don’t know, Bern,” Carolyn said. “I’m confused.”

“Well, there’s a lot of that going around,” I said. “I think I might have picked up a touch of it myself.”

“I know it’s ‘Feed a cold and starve a fever,’ or else it’s the other way around, but neither one of them applies here. What do you do with confusion?”

“You could always try drowning it.”

“Now that’s an idea,” she said, and waved desperately for Maxine, who sometimes took a long time to get our order. “Hi, Max,” she said, when the dear girl showed up. “Let me have a double scotch, and don’t even think about bringing any of that mouthwash to this table. Bern, what about you? You still drinking rye?”

“I think I’ve had my last taste of rye for a while,” I said. “Scotch for me too, Maxine.”

“Henry went home, huh, Bern?”

“Henry hasn’t really got a home,” I said, “so how could he go there? But yes, he’s moved on. I saw him for the first time without his silver beard. Well, unless you count the times I saw him in the Paddington lobby, when he was just an anonymous gent reading a magazine. This afternoon he went into the john at the store and came out clean-shaven, with his beard all wrapped up in tissue paper. He said he’d grow a real one if only it would come in that color.”

“He could always dye it.”

We talked about Carl, and how people said they could always tell a dye job, the same as they could always tell when a guy was wearing a toupee. But all that meant, we agreed, was that you could tell a bad dye job, or an obvious toupee. And we asked each other why it was that it was all right for a woman to dye her hair, or get a little surgical help hiding time’s ravages, but that it was somehow Not The Thing for a man to do so.

“Or makeup,” I said. “Speaking of which, I see you’re not wearing any. And I like your haircut.”

“It’s the way I always wear it, Bern. I’ve been wearing it this way as long as we’ve known each other.”

“Until recently,” I said.

“That was a phase I was going through,” she said, “and I’m through it, and the hell with it. My fingernails don’t look short to me now. They just look like my fingernails.”

“And I like your shirt,” I said. “What is it, L. L. Bean?”

“So?”

“Their stuff holds up,” I said, “and plaid’s always in style, isn’t it?”

She gave me a look. “I know I look dykier than usual,” she said, “and I don’t give a rat’s ass. I’m reacting, okay? Overcompensating. I’ll get over it. Meanwhile, Bern, I’m still confused, and I’m not talking wardrobe.”

“What’s confusing you?”

“The knife.”

“Which knife? The one Erica used to kill both victims, or the one the police found in her apartment?”

“Then it wasn’t the same knife.”

“How could it be? She took it with her, and she must have had the sense to get rid of it. I went into one of the few remaining stores on Times Square that hasn’t died of Disneyfication and bought a knife to plant in her apartment.”

“I figured you did, Bern. And you left it soaking in Clorox to account for the lack of bloodstains. But how did you know what kind of knife to get? Carl said it was a stiletto with pearl trim, but you had already been in and out of Erica’s apartment by then. Did you have a little talk with him earlier?”

I shook my head. “I was just guessing.”

“You were just guessing? And you just intuitively bought a knife that was a perfect match for the murder weapon?”

“It wasn’t a perfect match,” I said. “It wasn’t even all that close. It was your basic generic Times Square switchblade, with a blade a little longer than the murder weapon. It didn’t have a stiletto-type hilt, and the sides were black, not pearl.”

“Oh.”

“But it was a knife the approximate size and shape of the one used to kill the two women, and it was soaking in a bowl of bleach in Erica’s kitchen, and I figured it would be hard for her to explain. What’s she going to say? ‘That’s not the knife I used! My knife was trimmed in mother-of-pearl!’”

“‘I’d never in my life use such a butch knife!’ I see what you mean.”

“I just wanted to shake her up,” I said, “and get her so she didn’t feel in control of the situation.”

“Well, it worked. Bern, I was sleeping with a murderer. I’d say ‘murderess,’ but that’s sexist, isn’t it?”

“Whatever.”

“Whichever word you use,” she said, “that’s what I was doing. And I never suspected a thing. I knew she was over the top, especially that last night, when we picked up those two meteorologists and then rained on their parade.” She shuddered, then reached gratefully for her drink. “It still shakes me up to think of it,” she said. “But that’s not what I’m confused about.”

“Oh?”

“You burned up Gulliver Fairborn’s letters in the fireplace in Isis ’s room,” she said. “Everybody saw you do it.”

“Right.”

“Except all they actually saw,” she said, “was one letter that they’d had a chance to examine get fed to the flames. And they saw the burnt fragments of a lot of other letters on purple paper. But you didn’t burn the letters after all.”

“Well, you already knew that,” I reminded her. “You bought the purple paper and typed out a batch of dummy letters for me, remember?”

“I’m not about to forget the lazy dog,” she said, “or the rabid brown fox. I typed ’em up and you burned ’em.”

“Right.”

“Meanwhile, Henry got to work writing fake letters. I still think of him as Henry, Bern.”

“So do I,” I said. “But he wasn’t writing fake letters, because they were genuine enough. He’s Gulliver Fairborn, so any letter he writes is a real Gulliver Fairborn letter.”

“I don’t see how you can call them genuine, Bern.”

“Well, how about fictional? Not genuine, maybe, but not fake, either.”

“Okay. He went to work writing fictional letters. Then you took the fictional letters and made photocopies.”

“Of one set,” I said. “He fabricated-”

“That’s good, ‘fabricated.’ I like that.”

“-two sets of letters, and I took one set to Kinko’s, call it the A set, and ran two sets of copies.”

“For Lester Eddington and Alice Cottrell.”

I nodded. “I didn’t bother to tell either of them that the other was also getting a copy,” I said. “One of those little white lies of omission.”

“ Alice would probably call it a fib of omission, Bern.”

“She might. Anyway, the A set was the one I gave to Victor Harkness. That way, if Eddington or Alice should happen to show up when Sotheby’s offers the lot for viewing, they’ll see a set of originals that are a perfect match for their copies. And they’ll have one thing the Sotheby’s set doesn’t.”

“What’s that, Bern?”

“A photocopy of the letter everybody saw me burn, the one from High Dudgeon. Proof positive that the photocopies were made before the letters were burned.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“Well, it wasn’t all that hard. I copied the letter that afternoon, before we all got together in Isis Gauthier’s room.”

“Oh, right.”

I sampled my drink. “The other set of letters,” I said, “the B set, went to Hilliard Moffett, and I didn’t make any photocopies of that one. So he’s got a unique item, and it’s only fair, because he paid five times as much as the other three people combined. But look how he’ll treasure what he’s got. I’d call it money well spent.”

“You would? That’s where I really get confused, Bern.”

“What’s so confusing?”

“What’s confusing,” she said, “is how all this money changes hands, and you come out with nothing to show for it. Did you make anything on the rubies?”

“I made a friend,” I said, “and I returned a favor. The favor was Marty’s. He bailed me out, which is one of the nicest things anybody ever did for me, and I managed to do him a favor in return. Cynthia Considine has her necklace and earrings back, and John Considine’s enjoying married life, at least until the next hot-looking actress comes along. Isis doesn’t have the earrings, but she’s got a nest egg that’s immune to whatever impact synthetic stones may have on the price of rubies. And Marty enjoyed a brief fling with Isis and came out of it with good feelings all around.”

“That’s the favor. Who’s the new friend?”

“ Isis,” I said. “We got off to a bad start when I ran into her in the hallway, and it got worse when she found out I stole her rubies, but during the showdown scene in her room the other night I came off a lot better in her eyes.”

“Plus she liked that you had a bear.”

“And one that matched her outfit, too. I’ve got a date with her tomorrow night, and if all goes well she’ll get to see Paddington up close.”

“Where?”

“In my apartment,” I said. “That’s where he lives these days. I suppose I could have returned him and asked for my deposit back, but I decided I’d rather keep the little guy. So that’s something else I got out of the deal, Carolyn. I returned a favor, made a new friend, and acquired a teddy bear.”

“And your new friend gets to meet the bear tomorrow night. Maybe she’ll get to hear Mel Tormé, too.”

“One can but hope,” I said.

“All of that’s great,” she said, “but what about money? Isis Gauthier got money, Henry aka Gulliver Fairborn got money…”

“And don’t forget Ray.”

“He got money, too?”

“We had a deal, remember? Even Steven.”

“Go through the numbers for me, Bern.”

“ Alice paid two thousand dollars,” I said, “and Lester Eddington paid three, which was a little better than his original offer of covering the tab at the copy shop. And Victor Harkness paid five grand on behalf of Sotheby’s.”

“And Hilliard Moffett shelled out fifty K.”

“That’s right.”

“Two and three is five and five is ten and fifty is sixty. Sixty thousand dollars?”

“It’s amazing you can do that without pencil and paper.”

“And you gave Henry…”

“Half. Thirty thousand.”

“And then you went fifty-fifty with Ray?”

“That was our deal.”

“Half of what you had left after Henry got his share, right?”

I shook my head. “Ray didn’t know about Henry,” I said, “beyond the fact that this dapper old guy was hanging around the shop a lot and even spelled me once or twice behind the counter. As far as Ray knew, there was only one set of letters, and it was written twenty years ago by some famous author he never heard of. I faked burning the letters, then sold photocopies to two people and gave the originals to a third. So I couldn’t tell him I’d paid out thirty thousand dollars to Henry. It would only have confused him.”

“So instead you gave the other thirty thousand to him? And wound up with nothing?”

“I never expected anything,” I pointed out. “ Alice flimflammed me, telling me we were doing this big favor for Gulliver Fairborn, but it turned out to be true. I did manage to do him a big favor.”

“So you’ve got a nice warm fuzzy feeling in the pit of your stomach,” she said. “And outside of that you’ve got zilch.”

“Well,” I said, “not exactly zilch.”

“How come?”

“Ray only knew about one set of letters,” I said, “so it would have confused him even further to bring up the second set. I gave him half of the ten grand I got from Alice and Eddington and Sotheby’s, and I didn’t deduct anything for expenses, not even the cost of making copies. He got exactly five thousand dollars, and he seemed very happy with it, and I figure that’s about as even as Steven has to get.”

“So you wound up with…”

“Twenty-five thousand dollars,” I said, “which is not the biggest possible payoff for the kind of high-risk work I put in, but it’s a far cry from zilch. I have to sell a lot of books to net twenty-five large.”

“I have to wash a lot of dogs. It’s not a fortune, but you’re right, it’s way more than zilch. You know what? It’s the same amount Isis got.”

“You’re right,” I agreed. “One more thing we’ve got in common.”

“Mel Tormé, start warming up your tonsils. Bern, you’ve got something else.”

“I do?”

“The letters.”

“What letters?”

“The real letters, Bern. The original originals, the ones Karen Kassenmeier stole from Anthea Landau and Carl Pillsbury took from Karen Kassenmeier’s purse and gave to Alice Cottrell and you stole from her apartment and pretended to burn but didn’t.”

“Oh,” I said. “Those letters.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“You’ve got them, don’t you? Nobody else does, and they didn’t go in the fire.”

“Henry thinks they did. He doesn’t know you typed up a dummy set for me to burn.”

“And you kept them.” She grinned. “Another souvenir, Bern? Like the Mondrian in your apartment, that everybody assumes is a fake, but you and I know is the real deal? Like the copy of The Big Sleep in your personal library, the one Raymond Chandler inscribed to Dashiell Hammett, that nobody can ever know exists?”

“They’d be in that class,” I said. “I couldn’t sell them, couldn’t even show them to anybody. But I could have the pleasure of possession, the same as I have with the book and the painting. But I couldn’t do it.”

“What do you mean, Bern?”

“I don’t suppose there’s any way Henry would ever find out,” I said, “and I’ll probably never see him again, but I’d know, and it would bother me. He thought those letters were destroyed, and he’d be unhappy to know that they weren’t. He’d feel betrayed.” I frowned. “If he’s never going to find out, does it still constitute betrayal? I don’t know. All I can say is it bothered me. If I had a working fireplace I’d have burned them.”

“So what are you gonna do?”

“I already did it. Did you know there are companies in New York that’ll rent you a shredder?”

“I’m not surprised. There are companies in New York that’ll rent you an elephant. You rented a shredder?”

“They delivered it yesterday,” I said, “and last night I fed it the Fairborn-Landau letters a sheet at a time. One of Alice ’s fibs was that she shredded the letters and burned what came out of the shredder, but there was no need. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t have reconstituted those fragments. I bundled them up and dropped them down the compactor chute.”

“So the letters no longer exist.”

“Not in a readable form, no.”

“But you read them before you shredded them, right?”

“I was going to,” I said.

“And?”

“And I decided against it,” I said. “I decided it would be a violation of privacy.”

“You violate people’s privacy all the time,” she said. “ Bern, you break into their houses and go through their drawers and closets, and when you find something you like you take it home with you. Reading some old letters seems pretty minor by comparison.”

“I know,” I said, “but this is Gulliver Fairborn, Carolyn. This is the man who wrote Nobody’s Baby.”

“And that book changed your life.”

“It did,” I said. “And I figured I owed him something.”