The Burglar in the Rye (25 page)

“Well,” I said.

“And then you gave up a small fortune to do a favor for a man you never even met. You stole my rubies and gave them back, and you’re not making a dime on the deal, are you?”

“I’m not a very good businessman,” I admitted. “I don’t do all that well at the bookshop, either.”

“I think you do just fine,” she said warmly. “You’re quite the fellow, Bernie Rhodenbarr. Quite the fellow.”

And she shook my hand, and held it a little longer than you might have expected.

S
ome days later I was in the bookstore, tossing balls of paper—white, not purple—for Raffles. He looked bored with the enterprise, but kept up his end out of loyalty. Then the door opened, and it was Alice Cottrell.

“You really have them,” she said. “Or do you? This wasn’t just a ruse to get me down here, was it?”

“Not at all,” I said, “but while we’re on the subject of ruses, suppose you show me the money.”

“First show me yours, Bernie.”

I shook my head. “Carl didn’t get the money first, and look what happened to him. All I’m getting is the same two grand you promised him, and until I have it in hand I’m not showing you a thing.”

“I suppose I deserve that,” she said, and took a sheaf of bills from her purse. They were hundreds, and there were twenty of them. I know because I counted.

I found a home for them in my wallet and drew a ma
nila envelope from under the counter. It was not unlike the one that had been at various times in Karen Kassenmeier’s purse, in the closet of Room 303 at the Paddington, and in Alice’s own East Side apartment. I opened it and drew out a stack of papers similar to that original envelope’s contents. These were plain white paper, however, like the balls I’d been throwing for Raffles.

She grabbed the stack, paged through it. “Here’s the last one you burned,” she said. “‘In high dudgeon, Gully.’ It sounds like a London suburb, doesn’t it? ‘Where do you live?’ ‘In High Dudgeon, just a stone’s throw from…’ from where?”

“Boardham,” I suggested.

“Perfect. You could say Gully Fairborn spends a lot of time in High Dudgeon. Bernie, I don’t know how to thank you.”

“You paid me.”

“You went through a lot for two thousand dollars. You know, that’s not all I promised Carl.”

“I know.”

“Did you really recognize my voice when you were hiding in the bathroom? I spoke very quietly, and I barely said a word.”

“What I recognized didn’t involve a lot of words.”

“You could probably hear those sounds again, you know.”

“Oh?”

“If you played your cards right.”

“I’ll call you,” I said.

“Have you got my number?”

“You could say that,” I said.

Within the hour the door opened again, and this time it was a gawky guy wearing a tweed jacket over a plaid
shirt. It was Lester Eddington, and I didn’t ask him for cash in advance. I handed him an envelope a lot like the one I’d handed Alice Cottrell, and he smiled apologetically as he withdrew its contents and had a careful look at them.

“One can’t be too careful,” he said. “I’d only had a look at one letter, and it was clearly authentic, but…” He frowned, nodded, clucked, and muttered to himself, looking up owlishly at last. “This is a gold mine,” he said. “It would have been absolutely tragic to have lost these.”

“That’s why I made a copy first.”

“And thank God you did,” he said fervently. “I shouldn’t say it, but I’m just as glad the originals are gone. I don’t need to worry about someone else using this material before I do.”

“And you won’t use it in Fairborn’s lifetime.”

“Absolutely not. I won’t publish a word until he’s not around to object. Or to bring suit.”

This time he was the one who counted the money, and there was a little more of it—a mixture of fifties and hundreds running to a total of three thousand dollars. I thought how hard he must have worked for that money, and it made me consider giving it back to him. And I did what I always do with thoughts like that. I squelched it mercilessly.

“You’ll be listed in the acknowledgments,” he said, “but I won’t specify what assistance you provided.”

“Well,” I said, “you can’t be too careful.”

Victor Harkness turned up in a suit and tie, and carrying a great-looking briefcase. It looked as though it cost the better part of a grand, but for all I knew it was a knockoff like the ones the Senegalese had tried to get me to carry. I mean, how can you tell?

I had a customer—an older fellow with a beret and a silver beard—so I led Harkness to the back room and got a nine-by-twelve manila envelope from the file cabinet. He took a seat and opened the envelope, drawing out a few dozen sheets of purple paper.

“Excellent,” he said.

“There’s one missing,” I said. “The one I had to burn to convince the others that I’d destroyed the lot.”

“The one about bocce and cappuccino?”

“And high dudgeon,” I said. “Everything else is here.”

“The firm is deeply grateful,” he said, “as am I. Our commission is the least of it. We’d announced that we were going to be offering these letters, and we’d look a little foolish if we were unable to do so.”

“We wouldn’t want that.”

“Certainly not. But there’s also the incalculable loss to literary history, and the dollars-and-cents loss to the worthy charities who are the beneficiaries of Anthea Landau’s estate. I’m only sorry they won’t know how much they owe a certain antiquarian bookseller.”

“I’ll let the credit go,” I said.

“And take the cash, eh?” He opened the briefcase, drew out a bank envelope. “Five thousand dollars, as agreed. I trust you’ll find this satisfactory.”

A little after twelve I picked up lunch at the deli and took it over to the Poodle Factory, and a little after one I walked out the door and turned left instead of right. I took another left at the corner of Broadway and walked to a coffee shop two blocks uptown. Hilliard Moffett was waiting for me in a booth at the back. I slid in opposite him and laid—surprise—a manila envelope on the table.

He’d already eaten, and all I wanted was a cup of coffee. While I waited for it to cool he examined the envelope’s contents with the care one would expect. He used a pocket magnifier and he took his time, and when he had concluded his examination he sat up straight in his seat and damn well glowed. He was a collector, and right in front of him was something to collect, and that was all it took to turn him positively radiant.

“When you burned that letter,” he said, “my heart sank. And when you drew the screen aside and showed all the other letters, letters that had turned to ash while you were establishing that one miserable woman had murdered two equally miserable women, I thought I was going to die of heartbreak.”

“I knew I was going to cause you some anguish,” I said, “but I didn’t know it would be that bad.”

“But you didn’t burn them after all.”

“I had to make it look that way,” I said, “or I’d never have been able to turn them over to you. Sotheby’s had a legitimate claim, and Victor Harkness wasn’t going to lie down and roll over just because you offered to scratch his stomach. But now that he’s convinced the letters are gone…”

“He’ll never know otherwise,” Moffett vowed. “No one will know about these, no scholars will ever secure access to them. I’ll cherish them in private.”

“You’ll have to.” I leaned forward, lowered my voice. “I heard a rumor,” I said, “that Sotheby’s will be offering a group of letters, allegedly from Fairborn to Landau.”

His eyes bulged slightly. “These letters?”

“Hardly. The same number, give or take a few, but different contents. Also on purple paper, and authentic-looking, but…”

“You’re saying they’re fakes, Rhodenbarr?”

“They’d have to be, wouldn’t they? I can’t say what I heard or where I heard it, but I gather they’re damned good fakes. You’ll want to look at them when they go on view, I would think.”

“Absolutely.”

“You might even want to buy them,” I said. “Even if you’re sure they’re fakes, if the price is right. Because—”

“Because then my ownership of the Fairborn-Landau correspondence becomes a matter of record, and I can display what I want when and where I want. Good thinking, Rhodenbarr. Good thinking indeed. I’m paying you a lot of money, but I have to say you earned it.”

“Speaking of which…”

He nodded and started reaching into pockets and coming out with envelopes.

“Well, well, well,” Ray Kirschmann said. “If my eyes was sore I swear you’d be a sight for ’em. Good to see you, Bern.”

“Always a pleasure, Ray.”

“So how’d it go? You see them people?”

“I did.”

“An’ you did a little business?”

“That too.”

“What I wish,” he said, “is I coulda been there to see the looks on their faces when they saw their pipe dreams go up in smoke. Why are you lookin’ at me like that, Bern?”

“Pipe dreams always go up in smoke,” I said. “Never mind. It was something to see, I’ll grant you that.”

“You show ’em a letter on purple paper, you burn it, they see you burned a shitload of other purple paper,
an’ what are they gonna think? But all you did was get some purple paper an’ burn it, along with one real letter to make it look good.”

“It seems to have worked,” I allowed.

“Then you sold ’em,” he said. “An’ we’re partners, right?”

“Even Steven,” I said, and handed him an envelope.

At six o’clock Henry helped me with the bargain table. I hung the
CLOSED
sign in the window and turned the lock, and the two of us went in the back room and sat down. I sighed, thinking what a long and busy day it had been, and how I could use a drink right about now. And Henry—I’ll go on calling him that, if it’s all the same to you—Henry drew a silver flask from the breast pocket of his jacket. I found a couple of glasses that were as clean as they needed to be, and he poured us a pair of straight shots.

I drank mine down and said no to a refill. “All done,” I said. “And I have to say it went well.”

“Thanks to you, Bernie.”

“No, thanks to you,” I said. “Typing out fifty phony letters and signing them, then starting over again and typing out fifty completely different letters and signing those.”

“It was fun.”

“All the same, it must have been work.”

“That was part of the fun. It was a challenge, I’ll grant you that. But it was so much easier than writing a novel. There was no plot, there was no continuity, there was no requirement but that the letters sound like me, and what could be easier than that?”

“I suppose.”

“I had the most fun with that awful Alice, knowing
that she’d be paying money for copies of letters that would only blacken her reputation. ‘Dear Anthea, I’m having no end of aggravation with an annoying little poseur named Alice Cottrell, of whom you may have heard, due to the appalling bad judgment of
The New Yorker.
She manages the neat trick of being at once precocious and retarded, while having the adhesive properties of a barnacle. She’s so pathetic one hates to hurt her, but so whining and physically unappealing one would like to gas her.’ Let’s see her paraphrase
that
for her fucking memoir.”

“I made sure it was in the batch I had photocopied.”

“Good.”

“And you don’t mind that all these people have letters of yours? Eddington? Moffett? And whoever buys the ones Sotheby’s will be offering?”

He shook his head. “Let them enjoy themselves,” he said. “They won’t be looking over my shoulder and reading my private thoughts. They’ll be enthralled by some fiction I spun out for the specific purpose of enthralling ’em. They’ll be all wrapped up in an epistolary novel and they won’t even know it.”

“You’re getting a kick out of the whole thing, aren’t you?”

“I haven’t had this much fun in years,” he said, and treated himself to another short one. “I’ve had trouble writing lately, you know. I think this happy chore may have broken right through my writer’s block. I can’t wait to get back to work.”

“That’s great.”

“It is,” he said, “and the only sad part is parting. Sweet sorrow, according to Shakespeare, and I’d say he nailed that one good. I’m all checked out of the Pad
dington, Bernie, and I’ve got a plane to catch. I consider you a genuine friend, but you know the kind of life I lead. The odds are we’ll never cross paths again.”

“You never know.”

“True enough. And maybe I’ll drop a line.”

“I’ll look for a purple envelope,” I said. “And burn it as soon as I finish reading it. But you’re forgetting something.”

“What?”

I handed him an envelope. “Put it someplace safe,” I said. “There’s thirty thousand dollars in there.”

“That’s too much.”

“Our deal was fifty-fifty, remember? I got two thousand from Alice, three thousand from Eddington, five thousand from Victor Harkness, and fifty thousand dollars from Hilliard Moffett of Bellingham, Washington. That adds up to sixty thousand bucks, and half of that is thirty, and that’s what you get.”

“You took all the risk, Bernie.”

“And you did all the work, and a deal’s a deal, and you can use the dough. So put it someplace safe and watch out for pickpockets.”

“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 Fair
born, 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.”