The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling (7 page)

“Police! Open up in there!”

More furious pounding on the door. I raised my right hand. There was a gun in it. I stared stupidly at it, then raised it to my face and sniffed its muzzle. I smelled that particular mix of gun oil and gunpowder and burnt odor characteristic of a recently fired weapon.

I looked at the love seat again, hoping to find it empty, wishing what I’d seen earlier had been a mirage. But Madeleine Porlock was still there, and she hadn’t moved, and I could see now that she wasn’t likely to, not without more help than I could give her.

She’d been shot in the middle of the forehead, right where the horrid little girl had a little curl, and I had a fairly good idea what gun had done the deed.

I
got up quickly—too quickly—the blood rushed to my feet, or wherever it goes under such circumstances, and I very nearly fell back down again. But I stayed on my feet and fought to clear my head a little.

The radio was still playing. I wanted to turn it off but left it alone. The cops had left off knocking on the door and were slamming into it every few seconds. Any moment now the door would give and they’d come stumbling into the room.

I decided I didn’t want to be there when that happened.

I was still holding the damned gun. I dropped it, and then I picked it up and wiped my prints off it, and then I dropped it again and made my way past the radio and through a short hallway with a bathroom and closet on one side and a pullman kitchen on the other. At the end of the hallway a door opened into a fair-sized bedroom furnished with a four-poster spool bed and a Pennsylvania Dutch blanket chest. There was a window on the far wall over the bed, and
it
opened onto a fire escape, and I damn well opened it.

Fresh air, cold fresh air. I filled both lungs and felt some of the cobwebs leave my brain. I climbed out onto the fire escape and closed the window after me. With it shut I could just barely hear the sounds of police officers caroming off the apartment door.

Now what?

I looked down and a wave of vertigo hit me. I thought of all the drug labels with their warnings about driving or operating machinery.
If drowsiness occurs, stay off rickety fire escapes.

I took another look. Below me, the fire escape terminated in a courtyard walled off on all three sides. I might get into the basement, but there was sure to be a cop posted downstairs, most likely a fat one who hadn’t wanted to climb up two flights in the first place.

So I started up the fire escape, up past the fourth floor and on to the roof. Someone had built a redwood sundeck up there, and there were trees and shrubs in large redwood planters. It was all very lovely, but there was one trouble with it—I couldn’t get off it. The adjoining buildings were both a hundred or more feet taller than the one I was standing on, and the heavy fire door leading back into the building couldn’t be opened without a key. This wouldn’t have been a problem if I’d had my tools along, but who figured I’d need them?

Back down the fire escape. I paused at the fourth-floor landing, trying to decide if I wanted to take my chances with whoever was posted at ground level. I could always break into the basement and just hide there in the boiler room until the heat died down, but did I really want to do that? For that matter, did I want to scurry past the bedroom window of the Porlock apartment when the police were most likely already in there?

I took a moment to check the two fourth-floor apartments. The one on the right—4-D, I suppose, directly above the Porlock place—had its shade drawn. I pressed my ear to the windowpane and caught
Brady Bunch
reruns on the television set. The shade was drawn a few yards to the left at 4-C, but I couldn’t hear anything inside, nor could I see any light around the edges of the window shade.

Of course the window was locked.

If I’d had a glass cutter I could have drawn a neat freehand circle on the appropriate pane of glass, reached in and turned the window lock. If I’d had some tape I could have broken any pane I wanted with no more noise than you’d make snapping a dry twig. If I’d had…

If wishes were horses, burglars would ride. I kicked in a pane of glass and closed my eyes until the tinkling stopped. I put my ear to the opening I’d created and listened for a moment or two, then unlocked the window, raised it, and stepped through it.

A few minutes later I left that apartment in a more conventional manner than I’d entered it, departing through the door and walking briskly down a flight of stairs. I encountered a couple of uniformed patrolmen on the third floor. The door to 3-D was open now, with other cops making themselves busy inside the apartment, while these two stood in the hall with nothing to do.

I asked one what the trouble was. He jutted out his chin at me and told me it was just routine. I nodded, reassured, and went down the other two flights and out.

I wanted to go home. It may or may not be where the heart is but it’s where the burglar’s tools are, and a burglar, like a workman, is only as good as his tools, and I felt naked without mine. I wasn’t sure if the cops had a make on me yet. They’d get one before long, I was fairly sure of that, but I didn’t doubt my ability to get in and out of my apartment before they set about looking for me. I had my tools there, I had cash there, and I would have liked to make a quick pit stop and equip myself for whatever lay ahead.

Because what lay ahead didn’t look too good from where I sat. Madeleine Porlock had been left with more than the traditional number of holes in her head, and my fingerprints were undoubtedly plastered all over that apartment—on the cup I’d been drinking from, on the glass-topped table, and God knows where else. The same criminal genius that had wrapped my inert fingers around the murder gun would have seen to that.

The police would have a lot of questions for me, and they wouldn’t even pay attention to my answers. I, on the other hand, had some hard questions of my own.

Who was Madeleine Porlock? How did she fit into the whole business? Why had she drugged me, and where had her killer come from, and why had he murdered her?

Whatever had become of Rudyard Whelkin?

And, finally, how did the Sikh fit into all of this?

The last question was no more easily answered than the others, but it made me realize I couldn’t go home. By now the Sikh and whoever had sent him would know they’d been hoodwinked, which meant I had to avoid whatever places they might logically expect to find me. The store was out, obviously, and so was the apartment, since anyone with access to a Manhattan phone book can ferret out my address.

I flagged a cab heading downtown on Second Avenue. The driver was young and Hispanic, with alert eyes. Were those eyes registering me even as he asked my destination?

“The Village,” I said.

“What part of it?”

“Sheridan Square.”

He nodded shortly and away we went.

Carolyn Kaiser’s apartment was on Arbor Court, one of those side-goggled Village lanes I can only find if I start out from the right place. Sheridan Square was the wrong place, so I had to walk up to Greenwich Avenue and then west and south until I hit it. I didn’t remember which building was hers, so I went into the vestibules of several until I found her name on a mailbox and rang her bell.

Nobody home. I’d have called first but I didn’t have her number with me and it was unlisted, and it’s easier to pass a needle through the eye of a camel than to get an unlisted number out of an Information operator. It’s hard enough to get listed numbers. I rang a couple of top-floor bells until someone buzzed me into the building. Carolyn lived on the first floor. I took one look at the locks on her door and turned around and left.

I checked a couple of hardware stores on Hudson. All closed. There was a locksmith, but could I really ask him to sell me burglar’s tools? I didn’t even try. I went to a drugstore and bought masking tape and paper clips and hairpins and a couple of nail files. At the tobacco counter I added a pipesmoker’s gizmo equipped with different doohickeys for tamping, reaming, probing, and otherwise mistreating a pipe. It looked to be made of pretty decent steel.

I went back to Carolyn’s building and annoyed the top-floor tenants again and got buzzed in a second time. I went to her door and got busy.

With my ring of picks and probes, the operation wouldn’t have taken five minutes. With makeshift tools from the drugstore it took closer to ten, during which time two persons entered the building and one left it. If any of them took any notice of me they were too polite to make a scene, and I finished the task at hand and let myself into her place.

Cozy. Very Village, really. One room about fifteen feet square with a teensy lavatory added on in back, so small that your knees nudged the door when you sat on the potty. The bathtub, a large claw-footed relic, was over in the kitchen area with the sink and stove and fridge; Carolyn had had a plywood cover cut to fit it so that she could use it for chopping up vegetables. The walls were painted blue, a deep rich tone, and the window frames and exposed plumbing were a bright yellow.

I used the loo, lit a fire under the leftover coffee (with a match, the pilot didn’t work), and let one of the cats check me out. He was a Burmese and nothing intimidated him. His buddy, a wary-eyed Russian Blue, reposed on the double bed, where he tried to blend with the patchwork quilt. I scratched the Burmese behind the ear and he made that bizarre sound they make and rubbed his head against my ankle. I guess I passed inspection.

The coffee boiled. I poured a cup, took a taste, and got flashes of the mug of doctored coffee Madeleine Porlock had given me. I poured it out, heated some water and made some tea, and fortified the brew with an authoritative slug of California brandy from a bottle I found on the shelf over the sink.

It was six-thirty when I kept my appointment at Chez Porlock, and I’d bolted from the place during the seven o’clock newscast. I didn’t look at my watch again until I was sitting in Carolyn’s wicker chair with my feet up, the second cup of brandied tea half gone and the Russian Blue purring insanely in my lap. It was then just eighteen minutes after nine.

I moved the cat long enough to turn Carolyn’s radio to one of the all-news stations, then settled back on the chair again. The cat reclaimed his place and helped me listen to a report on the Turkish earthquake and the presidential veto. There was a disgruntled Albanian holding a couple of people hostage up in Washington Heights, and a reporter on the scene did more than was necessary to put me right in the picture. I stroked the Russian Blue patiently while his Burmese buddy sat on top of a bookcase and made yowling noises.

It was coming up on eleven o’clock when I heard Carolyn’s key in the lock. By then I’d switched to an FM jazz station and I had both cats on my lap. I stayed where I was while she unlocked the door, and as she opened it I said, “It’s me, Carolyn. Don’t panic.”

“Why should I panic?” She came in, closed the door, locked up. “Been here long? I was over at the Dutchess and you know what that’s like. Except you probably don’t, because they don’t allow men in there.” She slipped off her jacket, hung it on a doorknob, walked toward the coffeepot, then spun around suddenly and stared at me. “Hey,” she said. “Did we make a date that I forgot?”

“No.”

“Randy let you in? I thought she was visiting her goddam aunt in Bath Beach. What was she doing here? Did she go out to Brooklyn afterward or what?”

“I haven’t seen Randy.”

“Then how’d you get in, Bernie?”

“I sort of let myself in.”

“Yeah, but where’d you get a key?” She frowned at me. Then light dawned. “Oh,” she said, “
I
get it. Other people need keys. You’re like Casper the Ghost. You walk through walls.”

“Not exactly.”

The cats had deserted my lap and were brushing themselves passionately against her ankles, desperate to be fed. She ignored them.

She said, “Bernie?”

“The radio.”

“Huh?”

“It’ll answer part of your question.”

She listened, cocked her head. “Sounds like Monk,” she said. “But I don’t know, it’s not as choppy as Monk and he’s doing a lot of things with his left hand.”

“It’s Jimmy Rowles, but that’s not what I meant. After the record ends, Carolyn.”

After the record ended we got a quickie commercial for a jazz cruise to the Bahamas, and I had to explain that that wasn’t it either. Then they gave us the eleven o’clock news, and high time, too. The Turkish earthquake, the flaky Albanian, the probable presidential veto, and then the extraordinary news that a convicted burglar, Bernard Rhodenbarr by name, was sought in connection with the murder of one Madeleine Porlock, who had been shot to death in her own apartment on East Sixty-sixth Street.

The announcer moved on to other matters. Carolyn cut him off in the middle of a sentence, looked at me for a moment, then went over to the kitchen area and fed the cats. “Chicken and kidneys tonight,” she told them. “One of your all-time favorites, guys.”

She stood for a moment with her back to me, her little hands on her hips, watching the wee rascals eat. Then she came over and sat on the edge of the bed.

“I should have known it was Jimmy Rowles,” she said. “I used to catch him at Bradley’s all the time. I haven’t been going there lately because Randy hates jazz, but if we break up, which I think we’re in the process of doing, the hell, I’ll get to the jazz clubs more, so it’s an ill wind, right?”

“Right.”

“Madeleine Doorlock? Funny name.”

“Porlock.”

“Still unusual. Who was she, Bern?”

“Beats me. We were strangers until this afternoon.”

“You kill her?”

“No.”

She crossed her legs at the knee, planted an elbow on the upper knee, cupped her hand, rested her chin in it. “All set,” she announced. “You talk and I’ll listen.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s a long story.”

I
t
was
a long story, and she listened patiently through the whole thing, leaving the bed only to fetch the brandy bottle. When I finished she cracked the seal on a fresh bottle and poured us each a generous measure. I’d given up diluting mine with tea and she’d never started.

“Well, here’s to crime,” she said, holding her glass on high. “No wonder you almost spilled your club soda last time I said that. You were all set to go out and commit one. That’s why you weren’t drinking, huh?”

“I never drink when I work.”

“I never work when I drink. Same principle. This is all taking me a little time to get used to, Bernie. I really believed you were a guy who used to be a burglar, but now you’d put all of that behind you and you were selling used books. Everything you told that policeman—”

“It was all true up to a point. I don’t make a profit on the store, or maybe I do. I’m not much of an accountant. I buy and I sell, and I probably come out ahead, even allowing for rent and light bills and the phone and all. If I worked harder at it I could probably make enough to live on that way. If I hustled, and if I shelved paperbacks instead of wholesaling them, and if I read the want ads in
AB
every week and sent out price quotes all over the place.”

“Instead you go out and knock off houses.”

“Just once in a while.”

“Special occasions.”

“That’s right.”

“To make ends meet.”

“Uh-huh.”

She frowned in thought, scratched her head, sipped a little brandy. “Let’s see,” she said. “You came here because it’s a safe place for you to be, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, that’s cool. We’re friends, aren’t we? I know it means I’m harboring a fugitive, and I don’t particularly give a shit. What are friends for?”

“You’re one in a million, Carolyn.”

“You bet your ass. Listen, you can stay as long as you like and no questions asked, but the thing is I do have some questions, but I won’t ask them if you don’t want.”

“Ask me anything.”

“What’s the capital of South Dakota? No, seriously, folks. Why’d you wait until the Arkwrights came home? Why not just duck in and out quick like a bunny? I always thought burglars preferred to avoid human contact.”

I nodded. “It was Whelkin’s idea. He wanted the book to be stolen without Arkwright even realizing it was gone. If I didn’t take anything else and didn’t disturb the house, and if the book was still there when Jesse Arkwright played his bedtime game of pocket billiards, it would be at least a day before he missed it. Whelkin was certain he’d be the prime suspect, because he wants the book so badly and he’s had this feud with Arkwright, and an alibi wouldn’t really help because Arkwright would just figure he hired someone to do it.”

“Which he did do.”

“Which he did do,” I agreed. “But the longer it takes for Arkwright to know the book’s missing, and the harder it is for him to dope out how or when it disappeared, and the more time Whelkin has to tuck it away where it will never be found—”

“And that’s why you just took the book and left everything else.”

“Right.”

“Okay. That part makes sense now, I guess. But what happened to Whelkin?”

“I don’t know.”

“You figure he killed her?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not? He set up the meeting. He got her to drug you, and then when you were unconscious he killed her.”

“Why?”

“To frame you, I suppose. To get you out of the picture.”

“Why not just kill me?”

“I don’t know.” She gnawed at a knuckle. “She can’t just come out of the air, this Porlock babe. Whelkin sent you to her, she doped your coffee, and she must have been after the book because she was asking you for it before you had a chance to nod out. Then she frisked you and took it herself.”

“Or the killer did.”

“You never heard a gunshot?”

“I was really out cold. And maybe he used a silencer, but if he did he took it along with him. He also took the book, plus the five hundred dollars the Sikh gave me.” I shrugged. “I figured all along that was too much to charge for a reprint copy of
Soldiers Three.
Well, easy come, easy go.”

“That’s what they say. Maybe the Sikh killed her.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Maybe they were working together and he double-crossed her at the end.” She shrugged elaborately. “I don’t know, Bern. I’m just spinning my wheels a little. She must have been connected with Whelkin, though, don’t you think?”

“I suppose so. He did lead me straight to her apartment. But—”

“But what?”

“But why wouldn’t he just
buy
the book?”

“Maybe he couldn’t afford it. But you’re right that would have been the easiest thing for him to do. He already paid you some of it in advance, didn’t he? How much did he still owe you?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Bernie?”

I sighed. “Just yesterday,” I said, “I told a shoplifter he was too dumb to steal. He’s not the only one.”

“You didn’t—”

“I didn’t get
any
of the money in advance.”

“Oh.”

I shrugged, sighed, drank. “He was a member of the Martingale Club,” I said. “Had a sort of English accent. Dressed very tweedy.”

“So?”

“So his front snowed me, that’s all. He finessed the whole topic of advance payment. I don’t know how, but I walked into that house with nothing in my pocket but my hands. Jesus, Carolyn, I even dipped into my own funds for gasoline and bridge tolls. I’m beginning to feel really stupid.”

“Whelkin conned you. He set you up and she polished you off, and then he shot her and left you in the frame.”

I thought it over. “No,” I said.

“No?”

“I don’t think so. Why use her at all? He could slip me a mickey as easily as she could. And there’s something else. That last telephone conversation I had with him, when he set up the meeting at her apartment. He sounded out of synch. I thought at the time he’d been drinking.”

“So?”

“I bet they drugged him.”

“The way they drugged you?”

“Not quite. Not the same drug, or the poor bastard wouldn’t have been able to talk at all. I wonder what she gave me. It must have been powerful stuff. It had me hallucinating.”

“Like acid?”

“I never had any acid.”

“Neither did I.”

“And this wasn’t that kind of hallucination, with animals materializing on the walls and things like that. My perceptions just got distorted there before I blacked out. The music was getting loud and soft alternately, for example. And her face seemed to melt when I stared at it, but that was just before I went under.”

“And you said something about her hair.”

“Right, it kept turning orange. She had really short hair, dark brown, and I kept flashing that she had a head full of bright orange curls. Then I would blink and she’d have short dark hair again. Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“What is it, Bernie?”

“I know where I saw her before. And she
did
have curly orange hair. It must have been a wig.”

“The dark hair?”

The orange hair. She came to the shop and she must have been wearing an orange wig. I’m positive it was the same woman. Squared shoulders, blocky figure, a kind of a stern square-jawed face—I’m positive it was her. She must have come to the shop three or four times.”

“With Rudyard Whelkin?”

“No. He only came there once. Then we had lunch in the Martingale Club that same day, and I met him once more at the club for drinks and we talked several times over the phone. She came to the shop—well, I don’t know when I first noticed her, but it must have been within the past week. Then yesterday she bought a book from me. Virgil’s
Eclogues,
the Heritage Club edition. It was her. No question about it.”

“What was she doing?”

“Looking things over, I suppose. Same reason I went out to Forest Hills with a clipboard. Reconnaissance. Say, can I put the radio on?”

“What for?”

“Midnight news.”

“It’s that time already? Sure, put it on.”

I moved a cat and switched on the radio. I sat down and the cat returned to my lap and resumed purring. The news broadcast was a repeat of the eleven o’clock summary, except that the Albanian had surrendered without harming any of his hostages. He’d evidently gone bananas when he learned that his common-law wife had another common-law husband, which made them common-law husbands-in-law, or something. Madeleine Porlock was still dead and the police were still looking for one Bernard Rhodenbarr.

I moved the cat again, switched off the news, and sat down again. Carolyn asked me how it felt to be wanted by the police. I told her it felt terrible.

“How’d they know it was you, Bernie? Fingerprints?”

“Or the wallet.”

“What wallet?”

“My wallet. Whoever frisked me got it—Madeleine Porlock or her killer. The book, the five hundred bucks, and the wallet. Maybe somebody stashed it where the cops would be sure to find it.”

“Weren’t you supposed to be unconscious when they arrived?”

“Maybe the wallet was a form of insurance. Or maybe the killer took the wallet on the chance I had something incriminating in it, like the card Whelkin gave me or some notes to myself.” I shrugged. “I suppose the wallet could be anywhere right now. I suppose I should be all worked up about stopping my Master Charge card before someone charges a ton of airline tickets to my account. Somehow that’s way down on my list of priorities.”

“I can understand that.” She put her chin in her hand again and leaned forward to fasten her blue eyes on me. “What’s at the top of the list, Bernie?”

“Huh?”

“The priority list. What are you going to do?”

“Beats me.”

“How about another drink while you think about it?”

I shook my head. “I think I’ve had enough.”

“I had enough two or three drinks ago but I’m not going to let a little thing like that stop me.” She got the bottle and helped herself. “You can just know when you’ve had enough and then stop?”

“Sure.”

“That’s remarkable,” she said. She sipped her brandy, looked at me over the brim of the glass. “Did you know there was anybody else in the apartment? Besides the Porlock woman?”

“No. But I never got past the living room until she was dead. I thought it was just the two of us and we were waiting for Whelkin.”

“The killer could have been in the other room.”

“It’s possible.”

“Or she was alone, and she drugged you and took the book and the money and the wallet, and then she was on her way out the door and in came a man with a gun.”

“Right.”

“Who? The Sikh? Whelkin?”

“I dunno, Carolyn.”

“Why on earth would she wear a wig? I mean, she wasn’t anybody you knew to begin with, right? So why would she want to disguise herself?”

“Beats me.”

“How about the Sikh? Was that a disguise? Maybe the Sikh was Rudyard Whelkin.”

“He had a beard and a turban.”

“The beard could have been a fake. And a turban is something you can put on and then take off.”

“The Sikh was enormous. Six-four easy, maybe more.”

“You never heard of elevator shoes?”

“Whelkin wasn’t the Sikh,” I said. “Trust me.”

“All I do is trust you. But back to the other question. How do you get out of the mess you’re in? Can you go to the cops?”

“That’s the one thing I
can’t
do. They’ll book me for Murder One. I could try pleading to a lesser charge, or gamble that my lawyer could find a way to addle the jury, but the odds are I’d spend the next ten or twenty years with free room and board. I don’t really want to do that.”

“I can understand that. Jesus. Can’t you—”

“Can’t I what?”

“Tell them what you told me? Scratch that question, huh? Just blame it on the brandy. Because why on earth would they believe you? Nobody’d believe a story like yours except a dyke who shaves dogs. Bernie, there’s got to be a way out, but what the hell is it?”

“Find the real killer.”

“Oh, sure,” she said. She clapped a hand to her forehead. “Now why didn’t I think of that? Just find the real killer, solve the crime, get the stolen book back, and everything’s copasetic. Just like TV, right? With everything wrapped up in time for the final commercial.”

“And some scenes from next week’s show,” I said. “Don’t forget that.”

We talked for a while longer. Then Carolyn started yawning intermittently and I caught it from her. We agreed that we ought to get some sleep. We weren’t accomplishing anything now and our minds were too tired to work properly.

“You’ll stay here,” she said. “You take the bed.”

“Don’t be silly. I’ll take the couch.”

“Don’t
you
be silly. You’re six feet long and so’s the bed. I’m five feet long and so’s the couch. It’s good the Sikh didn’t drop in because there’s no place to put him.”

“I just thought—”

“Uh-huh. The couch is perfectly comfortable and I sleep on it a lot. I wind up there whenever Randy and I have a medium-level fight.”

“What’s a medium-level fight?”

“The kind where she doesn’t go home to her own apartment.”

“I didn’t know she had one. I thought the two of you lived together.”

“We do, but she’s got a place on Morton Street. Smaller than this, if you can believe it. Thank God she’s got a place of her own, so that she can move right back into it when we split up.”

“Maybe you should stay there tonight, Carolyn.” She started to say something but I pressed onward. “If you’re at her place, then you’re not an accessory after the fact. But if you’re here, then there’s no question but that you’re harboring a fugitive, and—”

“I’ll take my chances, Bernie.”

“Well—”

“Besides, it’s possible Randy didn’t go to Bath Beach. It’s possible she’s home.”

“Couldn’t you stay with her, anyway?”

“Not if someone else is staying with her at the same time.”

“Oh.”

“Uh-huh. We live in a world of infinite possibilities. You get the bed and I get the couch. Okay?”

“Okay.”

I helped her make up the couch. She went into the lavatory and emerged wearing Dr. Denton’s and scowling as if daring me to laugh. I did not laugh.