The Burglar in the Library (17 page)

“Why?” she demanded. “So you can burglarize Uncle Roger?”

“What’s he got to steal besides a pipe and slippers?”

“And the pipe’s smelly,” she said, getting into the spirit of things. “And the slippers have holes in them.”

“Poor old Uncle Roger.”

“No, it’s Poor Miss McTavish!
Gross
old Uncle Roger.”

“I still think you should stay in your parents’ room,” I said.

“Why?”

“I just think it would be a good idea.”

She looked at me. “You think there’s going to be another murder,” she said, “but you won’t come right out and say so because you don’t want me to be scared. But if I’m not scared, I’ll want to go on staying in my own room.”

“It’s a poser,” I agreed.

“I think you’re right,” she said. “I think there’s
going to be another killing. But I won’t be the victim.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because I’m just a little kid,” she said. “Nobody’s going to bother killing me. You’re the one who should be scared.”

“Me?”

She nodded solemnly. “Somebody’s going to be murdered tonight,” she said, “and it might be you.”

An hour or so later I was in yet another sitting room. This one boasted no antelopes on the wall, just a couple of edged weapons. One of them had a wave-shaped blade about eight inches long, and I took it down from the wall to admire it. I couldn’t swear to it, but what it looked like to me was a Malayan kris, a frequent denizen of the very same crossword puzzles that welcomed the oryx and the zebu. I ran my thumb across the blade, decided it was sharp enough for headhunting, and hung it back on the wall.

I’d stopped at the bar first, where I’d poured myself a drink and made the appropriate notation in the book. I was making the drink last, just wetting my lips every few pages while I worked my way through
Scoop,
Evelyn Waugh’s wonderful novel of journalists in Africa. There’s a passage fairly early on in which a dour newspaperman reminisces about once having made and launched a dugout canoe, whereupon the thing sank like a stone. I was a little vague on the details, but I remembered that I’d laughed for ten minutes the first time I read the book. I didn’t know when I’d
be likely to hit it, and I was a little worried that it wouldn’t be as funny this time, and that I’d wind up wondering why I’d ever thought it was funny in the first place.

Better to be anxious about that than to worry about being bridged and mushroomed and cameled and pillowed to death. While I couldn’t be sure how my favorite passage would hold up, so far the book was an excellent choice. There were, to be sure, hundreds if not thousands of books on the shelves that I hadn’t read, but this was a night to be reading something I could count on. I wanted to escape, but on familiar paths.

I’d passed Raffles earlier in the upstairs hall, and you’d have thought I’d done something to offend him; he paid me no attention at all, and he’d have sailed on by with his tail held high if he’d had one. He turned up again after I’d been reading for half an hour, having undergone a personality transplant in the interim. He came over, rubbed against my ankle, draped himself over my feet, and purred with such energy that I felt the vibrations clear to my knees.

He was still in place, still revving his motor, when I heard footsteps and looked up at Carolyn. “You know,” I said, “I’ve got a good book to read and good whisky to drink and a comfortable chair to sit in. I’ve got a cat who has the decency to act as though he loves me, even though we know how unlikely that is. It’s not a bad life. I hope I don’t get killed.”

She stared. “Why even say something like that?”

I told her what Millicent had said.

“Oh, come on,” she said. “She’s just a creepy
little kid, Bern. It’s not like she’s holding down the first chair at the Psychic Friends Network.”

“I know that,” I said, “but it’s spooky all the same. It gives me a funny feeling.”

“Don’t
say
that, Bern.”

“Why not?”

“It sounds ominous, that’s all. And I’m feeling pretty spooked to begin with. I went upstairs just now and the door to our room was locked.”

“Well, sure,” I said. “That’s because neither of us was in it.”

“I know.”

“You’ve got a key, right? We’ve each got one. You didn’t lose yours, did you?”

“Of course not. But I was scared to use it.”

“Why?”

“I was afraid of what might be inside.”

“Like a dead body?”

“Or a live one, waiting to kill me. I don’t
know
what I was afraid of, Bern. I knocked, hoping nobody would open the door, and nobody did, and I came downstairs to look for you.”

“And here I am,” I said. “Let’s go upstairs. Maybe tomorrow’ll be better.”

“That’s what people are always saying,” she said, “and it never is. But this time it almost has to be. Maybe the cops’ll come and we can all go home. Except I love it here, or at least I did until everybody started getting killed.”

“Wait a minute, Bern.”

We were skirting the library on our way to the stairs when she tugged at my sleeve. I waited, and she darted inside. She came out with a facial
expression I recognized from Japanese films—the samurai, moments before committing hara-kiri.

“Bern,” she said through clenched teeth, “go in there!”

“Why? I’ve already got a book.”

“Just do it. And look at the shelf.”

“What shelf?”

“
The
shelf.”

I went and looked, knowing what I’d see. The shelf held no surprises. And it didn’t hold
The Big Sleep,
either. Just a space where the book had been until someone snatched it away.

“I’
m not surprised,” I said. “I don’t really want to talk about it, to tell you the truth, but I can’t say I’m surprised.”

“I don’t suppose it’s really very important, Bern. With people getting killed left and right, a rare book doesn’t seem all that significant. But the idea that it could just disappear like that…”

“You’re right,” I said. “It’s not important.”

We were in our bedroom, and I didn’t want to talk about
The Big Sleep,
so I asked about Molly Cobbett. Carolyn’s expression turned wistful.

“She’s sweet,” she said, “and she’s full of stories about this part of the country, and about the Cobbetts clear back to Revolutionary War days. But I guess she’s more innocent than I thought, Bern.”

“You mean she’s only been sleeping with boy cousins?”

“That’s about it. Remember how I told you she was looking at me before? Well, I’m beginning to get the sense that she just stares that way at ev
erybody. It’s what passes for manners in Cobbett country.”

“So I guess you won’t be sneaking off in the middle of the night to pay a visit the servants’ quarters.”

“Only in my dreams,” she said, and grinned. “And if tonight’s dream is half as good as last night’s, I won’t have anything to complain about.”

Getting ready for bed wasn’t all that much of a problem. Occasionally on a late night one of us stays over at the other’s apartment, and the business of changing to sleep-wear isn’t all that awkward, even in close quarters. It was being in the same bed together that was strange, and stranger still for my recollection of her dream of the night before.

I sat up and read, willing Evelyn Waugh to take my mind off pretty much everything it was on, and Carolyn sat beside me reading a book of her own, and I wondered who’d be first to switch off the bedside lamp. And then, of course, there was the sound of scratching at the door.

“Raffles,” she said.

“I’m afraid you’re right.”

“You want to let him in?”

“If we let him in,” I said, “we’ll just have to let him out.”

“Can’t we just leave the door open? That’s what we did last night.”

“Sure,” I said. “In a house where three people have been murdered so far.”

“You think a locked door could keep a murderer away?”

“I’d prefer a clove of garlic on a string,” I said, “but I don’t want to go all the way down to the kitchen at this hour. I don’t know if a locked door would keep anybody out who was really determined to get in, but an open door’s an invitation. ‘Here I am, murder me.’”

“Leave it locked, Bern. Maybe he’ll go away.”

Fat chance. The scratching was repeated half a dozen times in the next few minutes, and at that point I gave up and let him in. And left the door ajar.

He came in, made his rounds, nibbled some dried food, invited strokes and behind-the-ear scratches, and took his leave. I watched him go and stared for a long moment at the open door.

Then I went back to my book.

“Bern? When I was in the kitchen with Molly? I thought I might learn something that would help us figure out who the killer is. But I didn’t get anywhere.”

I closed the book.

“I’m completely lost,” she said. “Stumped. And I guess you’re the same way, huh?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“What do you mean? Don’t tell me you know who did it.”

“Well,” I admitted, “I sort of have an idea.”

“Well, for crying out loud, let’s hear it!”

I shook my head. “Not now,” I said.

“What do you mean, not now?”

“It’s just a hunch,” I said, “and I could be completely wrong. And I haven’t worked it all out in my mind yet.”

“So what? Bern, there’s nobody in the room but you and me. Nobody’s gonna sue you for slander.”

“I know.”

“So?”

I considered, then shook my head. “It wouldn’t be right.”

“Bern!” She grabbed my arm. “Don’t you see what you’re doing? You’re refusing to act.”

“I am?”

“I’ve read hundreds of books,” she said, “where the detective does just what you’re doing. And he says the same kind of harebrained thing you just said, about how it’s too early to tell what he knows. And the next thing you know there’s another corpse on the floor, and he’s saying something like ‘Dash it all, it’s all my fault. I waited too long.’ And that’s what you’re doing, Bern. You’re waiting too long.”

“But it’s just a hunch,” I said, “and I’m probably wrong, and the puzzle’s still got too many pieces missing.”

“That’s what they all say.”

“And it’s the middle of the night.”

“That’s not what they all say. But what difference does it make?”

“Even if I’m right,” I said, “I can’t run out now and do anything about it. So what’s the point in talking about it?”

“For one thing, it’ll keep me from going crazy.”

“Maybe, but it would have been better if I hadn’t said anything in the first place.”

She shook her head. “You’ve got to tell me, Ber
nie. Suppose that creepy little kid is right and you get killed tonight. If you don’t tell anybody, your secret will die with you.” She held up her index finger, pointing at nothing in particular. “That’s another thing you read about all the time,” she said. “Somebody has it all worked out and won’t tell anybody, and then he’s the next victim.”

“I don’t want to be the next victim,” I said.

“Don’t even say it, Bern.”

“You’re the one who said it. You really think I’m in danger?”

“You might be. Anybody might be.”

“And you really think I’ll be safer if I tell you?”

“All I know,” she said, “is I’ll never be able to sleep unless you do.”

She was sleeping.

I’d been the first to turn out my bedside lamp, but I never even came close to dozing off. I lay there in the dark, listening to the creaking and groaning of the old house. I wasn’t any drowsier when Carolyn put her book aside and switched off her lamp, and I was still wide awake when her breathing slowed and deepened.

I was at least lost in thought, if not yet actually sleepy, when she stirred beside me and rolled over onto her side. Her arm reached out and draped itself over me, and she drew close, ready to start playing softball on the Field of Dreams.

Gently, gingerly, I disentangled myself and got quietly out of bed. Carolyn’s arm, deprived of a body to clutch, pawed at the air. I took the pillow I’d been using and slipped it into the circle of her
embrace. She held off for a moment, as if weighing the pillow’s merits as a Molly Cobbett surrogate, then decided in its favor.

I dressed in the darkness, quickly and silently. The door, I noted, was still ajar, and the game was afoot.

I let myself out.

I
t was around seven in the morning when Carolyn Kaiser awakened. Her eyes barely open, she put on a robe and walked down the hall to the bathroom. It was on her return to the bedroom that she noticed that the bed was empty.

“Hey, Bern,” she said. “Where’d you go?”

She glanced at the wooden chair where her friend had hung the clothes he’d been wearing the night before. It was empty. She got dressed herself and went out into the hallway again, where she saw Bettina Colibri a few doors down fitting a key into a lock.

“Have you seen Bernie?” she demanded.

“Bernie? Your uh friend?”

“Yeah, my uh friend. Bernie Rhodenbarr. Have you seen him?”

“I haven’t seen anybody,” the woman said. “I’m just on my way down to breakfast now. If there’s actually going to
be
breakfast, in the absence of the cook.”

“I don’t care about breakfast,” Carolyn said. “I’m just worried about Bernie.”

“Why, for heaven’s sake?”

“Why? Because he’s my best friend in the world, that’s why.”

“And friendship is a wonderful thing,” Mrs. Colibri said, “but what possible cause have you to worry? If he’s not in your room he’s very likely gone downstairs himself.”

“I hope you’re right.”

She hurried downstairs, and her state of mind was evident, because everyone she met asked her if something was the matter. “I’m trying to find Bernie,” she told them all. “I don’t know where he is and I’m worried.”

Downstairs, she made her way from room to room. Bernie Rhodenbarr was nowhere to be found. She checked the Breakfast Room, the Morning Room, the Great Library, the various parlors. She inquired of everyone she encountered.

No one mentioned having seen Bernie Rhodenbarr, not since the previous evening. No one had any idea where he might be.

“Maybe he got the hell out,” Dakin Littlefield suggested. “Which is what my wife and I are planning to do as soon as our breakfast has had time to settle. That’s what I told him I was planning yesterday, and maybe it gave him an idea.”

“He wouldn’t do that,” Carolyn insisted. “And he certainly wouldn’t leave without saying anything to me.”

“Well, you know him better than I do,” Littlefield said, with the sort of smirk on his face that suggested she didn’t really know Rhodenbarr well at all.

A more systematic search of the downstairs, wth others lending a hand, was no more successful. Colonel Blount-Buller was clearly troubled by Rhodenbarr’s disappearance, although his temperament was such that he showed far less agitation than Carolyn Kaiser. “You’re quite right,” he told her. “Rhodenbarr’s a level-headed chap. It’s not like him to disappear this way, without a word anyone.”

“I’m afraid,” Carolyn said.

“In the ordinary course of things,” Blount-Buller said, “there’d be no reason to suspect foul play. But in the present circumstances, with three suspicious deaths already—”

“Oh, no,” she cried. “Not Bernie!”

“He’s so alive,” Lettice Littlefield said. “I can’t imagine him being—”

“Don’t say it,” Carolyn begged her.

Lettice left her sentence unfinished. Millicent Savage, wearing bib overalls and rabbit slippers, finished the sentence for her. “Dead,” she said.

Everyone looked at her.

“I told him he might be the next to die,” the child said, her lower lip trembling. “I don’t know why I said it. It just came into my mind and I said it without thinking about it. And now it’s come true!”

It hadn’t necessarily come true, people rushed to tell her, and even if it had it wasn’t her fault. Millicent looked unconvinced.

There was more than a little confusion in the ranks. Nigel Eglantine snatched up the telephone and poked at its buttons, as if in the hope that the severed wires had somehow knitted themselves
back together during the night. Carolyn somehow got hold of the colonel and asked him if he could do something, and he took command, silencing the throng with an elaborate clearing of his throat, then summarizing the situation for them.

There were, he told them, insofar as Bernie Rhodenbarr was concerned, two possibilities. One, Rhodenbarr had quit the premises and gone home, without a word to his faithful companion or anyone else. Two, Rhodenbarr was somewhere in the house or on the grounds, but was deaf to the present hue and cry because he was in a deep sleep, or drugged and/or tied up, or…

“Or dead,” said Millicent Savage.

The thing to do, the colonel said, was muster everyone into a great body and give the house a systematic room-by-room search. Cissy Eglantine produced a master key that afforded entry to each of the second-floor bedrooms, including Young George’s Room, earlier occupied by the late Jonathan Rathburn.

“This was the son of a bitch who started the whole thing,” Dakin Littlefield remarked from the doorway to Young George’s Room. His wife, Lettice, objected that Rathburn was a victim, that he had been killed. “Serves him right,” Littlefield told her. “Look what he started. Look at the mess he created.”

But there was no mess within Rathburn’s room. It was neat as a pin, unlike more than a few of the bedrooms, whose occupants apologized for their untidy state. “You’ll pardon the disorder,” Rufus Quilp said dryly, “but I wasn’t expecting guests.” And Lettice Littlefield, on opening the door to their
bridal chamber, rushed to the window and threw it open, as if the room was in urgent need of airing out before anyone could set foot in it. “What’s that smell?” Millicent Savage wanted to know, while her father winced, her mother told her to be quiet, and Lettice herself managed an uncharacteristic blush. Her husband, Carolyn noticed, preened a little, looking pleased with himself.

The search moved to the servants’ quarters and storage areas on the top floor, then back to the ground floor, with its maze of public rooms, its kitchen and pantry, and the guest bedroom shared by the Misses Dinmont and Hardesty, as well as the Eglantines’ private suite. The whole mass of guests and staff trooped through room after room, like Japanese tourists at the White House, determined to see everything.

They didn’t find Rhodenbarr. Not a trace of him, living or dead.

“He’s not in the house,” the colonel told them. “It would seem that he’s cut out on his own, though how or why escapes me.”

“Maybe he went to get help,” Carolyn suggested. “But all by himself? In the middle of the night? Without a word to anybody?”

“It’s hard to credit,” Blount-Buller agreed. “But we’ve searched everywhere, and if he’s not here he must be elsewhere. Point of elementary logic, wot?”

“Unless…”

Everyone looked at Carolyn.

“Unless something’s happened to him,” she managed, “and he’s with…”

“With?”

“With the others,” she said.

“The others,” several people repeated, puzzled, and then Miss Dinmont, who’d missed the action on the upper two floors but had wheeled herself gamely from room to room on the ground door, said, “Oh, of course. The other victims.”

“Actually,” Greg Savage said, “I thought of that.”

“You did?” his wife said, surprised.

“It seemed like something a compulsive killer might do, keep all his victims together. So I looked out the back door, where we moved the bodies, and they’re right where we left them.”

“Untouched,” someone said.

“Far as I can see. The lawn chairs we used, each with a body on it and a bedsheet tossed over it. Actually I couldn’t swear about the bodies, or even about the bedsheets, on account of the snow, but that’s how we left them yesterday and that’s what it looks like today. Three lawn chairs out there in the snow.”

“Three,” someone said.

“Right. Three bodies, three lawn chairs.”

“There should only be two bodies,” Mrs. Colibri said.

Savage rolled his eyes. “One—Jonathan Rathburn. Two—Orris Cobbett. Three—the cook, and I
still
don’t know her name, but she makes three, and—”

“Orris fell off the bridge,” someone said.

“And we left him where he fell,” someone else said.

Earlene Cobbett let out a reflexive yelp at this last announcement, but no one paid much atten
tion. “My God,” Greg Savage said. “I figured three deaths, three bodies. But if Orris is still at the bottom of the gully, that means—”

And they rushed off to see just what it did mean.

Three lawn chairs, three bodies wrapped in sheets and covered with snow. They gathered around, no one quite daring to be the first to yank a sheet off a chair and display its contents. “Oh, somebody do something!” Carolyn cried, and the colonel cleared his throat and grabbed a sheet and gave a yank, sending powdery snow flying and displaying the frozen corpse of Jonathan Rathburn.

The second bedsheet went the way of the first, revealing the late cook.

“I can’t stand it,” Carolyn groaned, and the colonel tore away the third sheet, and somebody let out a scream, but it wasn’t Carolyn. Her worse fears went unrealized.

Because, while there was indeed a fresh corpse in the third chair, it wasn’t her uh friend Bernie Rhodenbarr.

It was Gordon Wolpert.

Rhodenbarr did it.

That was the clear consensus. Bernie Rhodenbarr, evidently some sort of crazed mass murderer, had claimed his fourth victim. While pretending to spearhead the investigation, he’d bided his time before adding one more to his chain of murders.

“But that’s impossible,” Carolyn said. “You people don’t know him. He’s a good, decent human being.”

“He proved that Mr. Rathburn had been murdered,” Cissy Eglantine remembered, “when we all thought it was an accident. Why would he do that?”

“To draw suspicion away from himself,” her husband suggested.

“But there was no suspicion, Nigel,” she said. “Not until he told us it was murder. You don’t suppose…”

“No,” he said firmly. “No, darling. It was not a tramp all along.”

“Rhodenbarr did indeed identify Rathburn as a murder victim,” the colonel said, picking up the ball. “And he went so far as to spearhead the investigation, if our amateur efforts were worthy of the label. The bloody cheek of the man!”

More than a few eyes turned toward Wolpert, their owners having taken the colonel literally. But there was no blood to be seen upon the dead man’s cheek. There were ligature marks on his throat, however, and it appeared that he had been strangled.

“And now he’s gone,” Rufus Quilp said. “Vanished, into thin air.”

“Why?” Carolyn demanded.

“Why?”

“Yeah, why? If he’s this diabolical killer who’s knocking people off and pretending to investigate all at the same time, why would he cut out and run? Did anybody see him kill Wolpert?” No one had. “So none of us would have had any reason to suspect him. So why wouldn’t he stick around and keep on playing the game?”

Someone asked her what she was getting at.

“The truth,” she said. “Bernie’s here somewhere. He’s got to be. He wouldn’t kill anybody. And he wouldn’t have left, not without me.”

“If he’s still here,” Dakin Littlefield said, “maybe you’d like to point him out to us.”

“I thought that was him on the third lawn chair,” she said, “and so did everyone else. We were all surprised when it turned out to be Mr. Wolpert.”

“I was surprised,” Millicent piped up. “But I didn’t think it would be Bernie. I thought it would be Orris.”

Everyone looked at her. “Orris is dead,” her father said patiently.

“I know that.”

“He’s at the bottom of the gully,” her mother put in. “Did you think somebody would go to the trouble to move him?”

“I thought he walked,” Millicent said. “You know how people sometimes walk in their sleep? Well, maybe sometimes they walk in their death the same way. It happens a lot in the movies.”

“You’re not supposed to watch those pictures,” Greg said, but Carolyn was wide-eyed, gesturing wildly with her hands.

“Sleepwalking,” she said. “That’s it! Bernie must have walked in his sleep.”

“And while he was sleepwalking,” Rufus Quilp murmured, “he went in for a bit of sleep-strangling.”

“He must have thought he was going to get help,” Carolyn went on, “and he must have forgotten the bridge was out, and—this way, everybody! Hurry!”

And off she went, and off they went after her.

“Look!”

But they were already looking—at a crumpled form down at the bottom of the gully. It lay a few yards distant from another crumpled form, the snow-covered remains of Orris Cobbett. The new crumpled form had a light dusting of snow on it, but not enough to obscure it completely. You could see the pants, the jacket, the shoes.

“That’s his jacket,” Carolyn cried. “That’s his pants. Those are his shoes. Ohmigod, it’s him!”

There was a certain amount of discussion as to what ought to be done next. Someone suggested that Rhodenbarr might still be alive. While the same fall had broken Orris’s neck, the gully’s latest victim might have landed differently, merely breaking a dozen bones and knocking himself senseless. But would he have died of exposure since then? Or might he be still alive, and might quick action prevent his dying of exposure?

“Before you rescue him,” Earlene Cobbett said doggedly, “you has got to rescue Orris. Orris fell in first.”

“But Orris is dead,” someone pointed out.

“Don’t matter,” Earlene said. “Fair is fair.”

“Wait a minute,” Carolyn said, pointing. “What’s that?”

“What’s what?”

“It looks like something poking out of his jacket. You see it? Sort of angling back?”

“Probably a stick,” someone said. “Probably a branch dislodged by his fall, so that it tumbled after him and landed on top of him.”

“It doesn’t look like a stick to me,” Carolyn said.

“It doesn’t,” the colonel agreed, and produced a small pair of field glasses from his jacket pocket. He peered through them, working the knob to adjust the focus. “I say,” he said.

“What is it?”

“Nigel,” he said, “have a look, why don’t you?” And he passed the binoculars to Eglantine.

“I say,” Nigel Eglantine said.

“Quite.”

“Isn’t that—”

“I believe it is, yes.”

“Bone handle fitted on a steel tang and wrapped with copper wire, it looks like to me.”