The Burglar who thought he was Bogart

CHAPTER Fourteen

“This man Candlemas,” Charles Weeks said. “It would seem obvious that he killed Cappy, wouldn’t it? But why leave the body in his own apartment?”

We were in his kitchen, sitting at an oval pine table and drinking more of his coffee. Once I’d told him about Hoberman there didn’t seem to be any reason not to tell him the rest of it.

“Unless,” he went on, “he didn’t expect it to be found.”

“It would have been hard to overlook,” I said. “The way I heard it, it was right in the middle of the room.”

“Bleeding into the carpet.”

“Right.”

“And writing a truncated form of his own name on an attaché case.”

“Yes.”

“Specifically, your attaché case, though I don’t imagine there was any significance in his choice of a writing surface. It was very likely the only thing at hand. I wonder if the murder was just as impulsive a choice.”

“What do you mean?”

“If I were Candlemas,” he said, “and you were Cappy Hoberman, and I wanted to kill you, I wouldn’t snatch up a knife and have at you right in the middle of my own living room. But suppose I wasn’t planning to kill you. Suppose I was suddenly presented with a strong motive for wishing you dead and a means for achieving it. Suppose time was very much of the essence. Awkward or not, inconvenient or not, I couldn’t afford to wait.”

“Hoberman was here,” I said.

“For ten minutes, fifteen at the outside.”

“When he left here, he probably went straight back to Seventy-sixth Street. I was going to be bringing the portfolio there directly, so he must have wanted to be there when I arrived.”

“But well before you could arrive, Candlemas struck him down. To avoid splitting the take, even before there was any take on hand to split?” He waved a hand, dismissing the question. “We don’t need to know the reason. It was a sudden and urgent one, so that Candlemas felt obliged to do what he would have greatly preferred to do at another time and in another place. In his own residence, and with you likely to appear at any moment, he plunged a knife into his fellow.”

“And left him there.”

“Left him to write his last words, quite as mysterious as the only trace of the original colonial settlement at Roanoke Island. They’d all utterly disappeared, you know, and they’d left the word CROATOAN carved in a tree trunk, and no one’s ever been able to make head or tail out of it. What could they possibly have meant? And what could Cappy have meant by CAPHOB, and why did Candlemas let him write it?”

“If somebody other than Candlemas killed him, it still doesn’t figure that he’d go away and leave the dying message behind.”

“No,” he agreed, “it doesn’t. But if it was Candlemas, he’d have a problem.”

“I’ll say. The problem would be lying right in the middle of his living room.”

“Exactly. What would he do about it?”

“He’d have to get rid of it.”

“How? Cappy was still a big man. Was Candlemas a huge brute, capable of slinging Cappy over his shoulder and carrying him downstairs?”

“Hardly. He was no more than medium height, and slightly built.”

“Not a weight lifter, certainly.”

“No.”

“Well, what was he going to do? What would you do in his position?”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. Suppose you found yourself with a dead body on your hands. It’s not like a stain on the wall, you can’t hide it by throwing a coat of paint over it. How are you going to get rid of it?”

“Actually,” I said, “I had that happen once.”

“Oh?”

“In my store,” I said quickly, “and I had nothing to do with it, but all the same I had to get the body out of there. I rented a wheelchair.”

“That was damned clever,” Weeks said admiringly. “Hard to manage in the middle of the night, however, and not terribly useful anyway on the fourth floor of a walk-up.”

“No.”

“Nothing for it, then. You’d have to make several trips.”

“How’s that?”

“Unpleasant subject,” he said, “but there’s no way around it, is there? You’d cut the corpse into manageable segments and carry them out one at a time, disposing of them wherever your ingenuity might suggest.”

“An arm here, a leg there. But Captain Hoberman wasn’t missing any pieces when the cops got there. Otherwise I’m sure they would have mentioned it.”

“Your Mr. Candlemas wouldn’t have begun the operation yet,” he said gently. “He’d need tools, wouldn’t he? And wouldn’t have them lying around unless he made a habit of this sort of thing. He’d need a saw or an ax or both. The average suburban householder might have such tools close at hand, but not the average New York apartment dweller.”

“So he goes out in the middle of the night looking for a meat saw?”

“That’s a point. He can’t have expected to find a restaurant supply outlet open at that hour. But a restaurant would be another matter. Perhaps he knows a friendly chef who will lend him the necessary items with no questions asked. Or perhaps he does own a heavy-duty knife equal to the task, and goes out to buy some stout plastic bags and tape to seal them up. He’s out of his apartment, poor Cappy’s stretched out on the floor, and you’re still stuck in a closet on the eighth floor.”

“And the cops turn up, roust the super, and wind up waiting around for a locksmith to open the door for them.”

“What brought the police in the first place? An anonymous call?”

“That’s what Ray Kirschmann said. Somebody heard a noise.”

“Hmmm. Candlemas comes home, I suppose, and sees that there are people in his apartment, or on the landing waiting for the locksmith. So what does he do?”

“Gets all the money he can out of his bank’s ATM,” I said, “and jumps ship for Australia, determined to make a new life for himself. Because he’s never been heard from since.”

“That’s true, he hasn’t. Why hasn’t he contacted you, do you suppose? As far as he knows, you got out of Eight-B with the portfolio. Wouldn’t he want to collect it?”

“Maybe he tried. Maybe he sent somebody.”

“The fellow with the unusual name?”

“They’ve all got unusual names,” I said. “I never ran into this many people with unusual names outside of a Ross Thomas novel. But if you mean Tiglath Rasmoulian, yes, Candlemas could have sent him. He wouldn’t want to show himself because the cops think they’ve got him neatly filed away at the morgue. In fact, when Rasmoulian came to my store, I hadn’t gone yet to identify the body.”

“So if Candlemas had walked into your store on his own-”

“I’d have thought I was seeing a ghost. Maybe Candlemas did send him. Who else knows I’m involved?”

“If there’s one thing I learned over there,” he said, waving a hand in what I suppose must have been the general direction of Europe, “it’s that more people know something than you would suspect. Information leaks out, you see. People play multiple roles. Very little remains a secret.”

“Candlemas walked into my store Tuesday, and the following night I committed illegal entry at about the same time that he was committing homicide. By Friday afternoon, Tiglath Rasmoulian knew enough about me to come into my shop and point a gun at me. For God’s sake, he even knew my middle name.”

“Grimes.”

“Right. Now what time was there for word to get around? The only two people who knew I was involved were Candlemas and Hoberman, and Hoberman was dead.”

“Aren’t you forgetting the girl?”

“Ilona.”

“Or course.”

After a moment I said, “I thought of that myself. That she didn’t walk into my shop by accident. It’s too much of a coincidence otherwise. But all we ever did was go to the movies, and all we ever talked about was what we’d just seen on the screen. If she was setting me up, she was taking her time about it. And then, when she had me ready to slay dragons, or at least jump through hoops for her, she disappeared. I don’t get it.”

“It’s puzzling. But then the Anatrurians are a puzzling people.”

“Evidently.”

“Candlemas is puzzling enough to be Anatrurian. Did he have an accent?”

I shook my head. “He spoke educated American English. I’d guess he was born here, though not necessarily in New York. His name certainly doesn’t sound Anatrurian.”

“He sounds like the sort of fellow who could have had many names over the course of a lifetime. Candlemas would be English. It’s a church holiday, you know. In the winter, if I’m not mistaken, after Twelfth Night but well before Lent. It celebrates the purification of the Virgin Mary and the presentation of the infant Christ in the temple. Early in the year, probably so many days before or after a new moon. Hugo Candlemas-perhaps it is indeed the name he was born with. It would be an odd one to invent.”

“Names,” I said. “Candlemas, Tsarnoff, Rasmoulian. All I’ve got is a batch of names and nothing to go with them. Maybe I should drop the whole thing.”

“Why don’t you?” he said. “You don’t have a great investment. A night’s work went for nothing, but I suspect that must happen now and then in your line of work.”

“More than now and then,” I said.

“I can understand your infatuation with the woman. But she would seem to have disappeared voluntarily. Have you any reason to suspect she’s in danger? Or in need of your assistance?”

“No. And if she wants to see me again I’m not that hard to find.”

“Exactly.” He leaned forward, eyes bright. “It can’t be hope of profit, can it? Since you don’t know who has the portfolio or even what’s in it, you can’t be counting on it to make you rich. The police aren’t after you, so you don’t need to solve the crime in order to clear yourself. So why don’t you go back to selling books and breaking into people’s houses?”

“I feel committed,” I said.

“Just that, then. You feel committed, irrespective of the illogic of it all, and without regard to the consequences. You’re in all the way, and devil take the hindmost.”

“I guess it sounds pretty stupid.”

“Stupid? By God, my boy, if we’d had a few more like you in Anatruria it might have been a different story.” He sat up straight, rubbed his hands together. “I have some ideas,” he said. “It’s been a while, but I’m not entirely without experience in these matters.”

He drew lines and circles on his note pad as he talked, suggesting avenues of approach, clarifying what we did and didn’t know so far. I didn’t see the point of the lines and circles, but his thinking was right on target.

“This is great,” I said at length, “but I’m taking up far too much of your time, and-”

“My time? You’ll be taking up far more of it before we’ve seen this through to the end. If you’re committed, so am I.”

“But why? I mean, you’re not remotely involved, so-”

“I don’t know if this will make any sense to you,” he said evenly. “But there was a time when Cappy Hoberman and I worked together as if our lives depended upon it, as indeed they did. I hadn’t seen him in years, I’d lost all contact with him, and when he turned up with that mouse like a Greek bearing gifts it turned out that we didn’t have a great deal to say to each other. Whatever we’d once been to one another, a vast stretch of years had passed. There was all that water under the bridge, or over the dam, or wherever it goes.

“Water.” He snorted. “If we’d been kin, I’d say that blood was thicker than water. But we were something else. We were partners in an enterprise, and that slender fact puts me under an obligation. I don’t expect you to understand this. I’m sure it’s hopelessly old-fashioned.” He sat up straighter, raised his voice a notch. “But when your partner is killed, you’re supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t matter how you felt about him, or what sort of man he was. He was your partner, and you’re supposed to do something about it.”

I looked at him. “Mr. Weeks,” I said, “this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”

“Indeed it could,” he said, and reached to pump my hand. “Indeed it could. But let’s forget Mr. Weeks and Mr. Thompson, shall we? I’ll call you Bill, and I’d like you to call me Charlie.”

“Uh,” I said.

“Is something the matter?”

“Charlie,” I said, “there’s one more thing I forgot to tell you.”