The Burglar Who liked to Quote Kipling

CHAPTER Nineteen

“I watched you this afternoon,” I told him. “I saw you leave an office building on Pine Street. I’d never seen you before in my life but I knew there was something familiar about you. And then it came to me. Family resemblance.”

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

“I’m talking about the portraits in your library in Forest Hills. The two ancestors in the oval frames whose job it is to bless the pool table. I don’t know if you’re really a descendant of the guy who put the Spinning Jenny together, but I’m willing to believe the codgers on the wall are legitimate forebears of yours. You look just like them, especially around the jawline.”

I glanced at Whelkin. “You sold him a book,” I said. “Didn’t you ever meet him?”

“Maddy handled everything. She was the middleman.”

“Middleperson, I think you mean. I suppose you spoke to him on the telephone?”

“Briefly. I don’t recognize the voice.”

“And you?” I asked the Maharajah. “You phoned Mr. Arkwright this morning, didn’t you?”

“This could be the man whose voice I heard. I am unable to say one way or the other.”

“This is absurd,” Demarest said. Hell, let’s call him Arkwright. “A presumed resemblance to a pair of portraits, an uncertain identification of a voice supposedly heard over a telephone-”

“You forget. I saw you leave an office building on Pine Street. I called you there at a certain number, and the phone you answered was in the office of Tontine Trading Corp., and the owner of Tontine is a man named Jesse Arkwright. I don’t think you’re going to get very far insisting the whole thing’s a case of mistaken identity.”

He didn’t take much time to think it over. “All right,” he said. “I’m Arkwright. There’s no reason to continue the earlier charade. I received a call earlier today, apparently from this gentleman whom you call the Maharajah. He wanted to know if I still possessed a copy of Fort Bucklow .”

“I had seen the advertisement,” the Maharajah put in, “and I wondered at its legitimacy. When I was unable to obtain the book either from this store or from Miss Porlock, I thought it might remain in Mr. Arkwright’s possession. I called him before responding to the advertisement.”

“And he referred to the ad,” Arkwright went on. “I looked for myself. I called you on the spur of the moment. I thought I could poke around and find out what was going on. A book disappeared from my house in the middle of the night. I wanted to see if I could get it back. I also wanted to determine whether it was indeed the rarity I’d been led to believe it was. So I called you, and came here tonight to bid on the book if it came to that. But none of that makes me a killer.”

“You were keeping Madeleine Porlock.”

“Nonsense. I’d met her twice, perhaps three times. She knew of my interest in rare books and approached me out of the blue to offer me the Kipling volume.”

“She was your mistress. You had a kinky sex scene going in the apartment on East Sixty-sixth Street.”

“I’ve never even been there.”

“There are neighbors who saw you there. They recognized your photograph.”

“What photograph?”

I took it out and showed it to him. “They’ve identified you,” I said. “You were seen in Porlock’s company and on your own. Apparently you had a set of keys because some of the neighbors saw you coming and going, letting yourself in downstairs.”

“That’s circumstantial evidence, isn’t it? Perhaps they saw me when I collected the book from her. Perhaps she let me in with the buzzer and they thought they saw me using a key. Memories are unreliable, aren’t they?”

I let that pass. “Maybe you thought she loved you,” I said. “In any event, you felt personally betrayed. I’d robbed you, but that didn’t make you want to kill me. It was enough for you to get my prints on everything and leave me with a gun in my hand. But you wanted Madeleine Porlock dead. You’d trusted her and she’d cheated you.”

“This is all speculation. Sheer speculation.”

“How about the gun? A Marley Devil Dog, a. 32 automatic.”

“I understood it was unregistered.”

“How did you come to understand that? It wasn’t in the papers.”

“Perhaps I heard it over the air.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think the information was released. Anyway, sometimes an unregistered gun can be traced more readily than you might think.”

“Even if you could trace it to me,” he said carefully, “that wouldn’t prove anything. Just that you’d stolen it when you burglarized my house.”

“But it wasn’t in your house. You kept it in the lower left drawer of your desk in the Tontine office downtown.”

“That’s absolutely untrue.”

The righteous indignation was fetching. I’d seen that blued-steel automatic in the study on Copperwood Crescent. And now I was telling him it had been at his office, and it hadn’t, and he was steamed.

“Of course it’s true,” I said. “Anybody would keep the gun and the bullets in the same place. And I have the damnedest feeling that you’ve got an almost full box of.32 shells in that drawer, along with a cleaning cloth and a pair of spare clips for a Marley Devil Dog.”

He stared at me. “You were in my office!”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You-you planted those items. You’re framing me.”

“And you’re grabbing at straws,” I sailed on. “Do you still claim you weren’t keeping Madeleine Porlock? If that’s so, why did you buy her a lynx jacket? It’s not hard to guess why she’d want one. It’s a stunning garment.” Pace, Carolyn. “But why would you buy it for her if you were just casual acquaintances?”

“I didn’t.”

“I looked in your closets when I was checking out a book from your library, Mr. Arkwright. Your wife had a couple of pretty impressive furs there. They all had the same label in them. Arvin Tannenbaum.”

“What does that prove?”

“There’s a lynx jacket in the Porlock apartment with the same label in it.”

“I repeat, what does that prove? Tannenbaum’s a top furrier. Any number of persons patronize him.”

“You bought that jacket for Madeleine last month. There’s a record of the sale in their files with your name on it and a full description of the jacket.”

“That’s impossible. I never-I didn’t-” He paused and regrouped, choosing his words more carefully this time around. “If I were keeping this woman, as you put it, and if I did purchase a jacket for her, I would certainly have paid cash. There would surely be no record of the transaction.”

“You’d think that, wouldn’t you? But I guess they know you up there, Mr. Arkwright. You must be a treasured customer or something. I could be mistaken, but I have a hunch if the police looked through Tannenbaum’s files, they’d find the sales record I described. They might even find the actual bill of sale in your desk at Tontine, with your name and the notation that you’d paid cash.”

“My God,” he said, ashen-faced. “How did you-”

“Of course I’m just guessing.”

“You framed me.”

“That’s not a very nice thing to say, Mr. Arkwright.”

He put his hand to his chest as if in anticipation of a coronary. “All of these lies and half-truths,” he said. “What do they amount to? Circumstantial evidence at best.”

“Circumstantial evidence is sometimes all it takes. You were keeping Porlock and your gun killed her, and you had the strongest possible motive for her murder. What was the Watergate expression? The smoking pistol? Well, they didn’t catch you with the smoking pistol in your hand because you were considerate enough to leave it in my hand, but I think the D.A.’ll have enough to make your life difficult.”

“I should have killed you while I was at it,” he said. Positively venomous, his voice was. He was still holding onto his chest. “I should have tucked your finger around the trigger and put the gun in your mouth and let you blow your little brains out.”

“That would have been cute,” I agreed. “I killed her while committing a burglary, then took my own life in a fit of remorse. I haven’t had a remorse attack since the fifth grade, but who could possibly know that? How come you didn’t do it that way?”

“I don’t know.” He looked thoughtful “I… never killed anyone before. After I shot her I just wanted to get away from there. I never even thought of killing you. I simply put the gun in your hand and left.”

Beautiful. A full admission, and as much as anyone was likely to get without reading him his rights and letting him call his lawyer. It was about time for the Cavalry to make its appearance. I started to turn toward the rear of the store, where Ray Kirschmann and Francis Rockland were presumably taking in all of this, when the hand Arkwright had been clutching to his breast snaked inside his jacket and back out again, and when it reappeared there was a gun in it.

He pushed his chair back as he drew the gun, moving briskly backward so that he could cover the four of us at once-Whelkin and Atman Singh and the Maharajah. And me, at whom the gun was pointed. It was a larger gun than the one I’d come to clutching, far too large to be a Whippet or a Devil Dog. And a revolver, I noted. Perhaps, if he was partial to the Marley line, it was a Mastiff. Or a Rhodesian Ridgeback, or whatever.

“Let’s hold it right there,” he said, waving the gun around. “I’ll shoot the first person who moves a hair. You’re a clever man, Rhodenbarr, but it won’t do you any good this time. I don’t suppose the world will miss a burglar. They ought to gas people like you in the first place, loathsome vermin with no respect for property rights. As for you”-this to Whelkin-“you cheated me. You employed Madeleine to swindle me out of some money. You made a fool of me. I won’t mind killing you. You other gentlemen have the misfortune of being present at an awkward time. I regret the necessity of doing this-”

Killing women’s bad policy. Ignoring them can be worse. He’d forgotten all about Carolyn, and he was still running his mouth when she brained him with a bronze bust of Immanuel Kant. I’d been using it as a bookend, in the Philosophy and Religion section.