The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling Read online

  “That’s too far.”

  “I don’t mind a walk.”

  “It’s still raining and it’s too far anyway, and why do we have to look at the ad?”

  “To make sure it’s there, I suppose.”

  “No point. Either somebody’ll see it or they won’t, and either the phone’ll ring or it won’t, and all we can do is wait and see what happens.”

  “I suppose so.” She sounded wistful. “It just seems as though there ought to be something active we can do.”

  “The night’s been active enough for me already.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “I feel like a little blissful inactivity, to tell you the truth. I feel like sitting here feeling clean. I feel like having maybe one more drink in a few minutes and then getting ready for bed. I don’t even know if people really read Personal ads in the Times, but I’m fairly sure they don’t race for the bulldog edition so they can read about missing heirs and volunteers wanted for medical experiments.”

  “True.”

  “I’m afraid so. The phone’s not going to ring for a while, Carolyn.”

  So of course it picked that minute to ring.

  We looked at each other. Nobody moved and it went on ringing. “You get it,” she said.

  “Why me?”

  “Because it’s about the ad.”

  “It’s not about the ad.”

  “Of course it’s about the ad. What else would it be?”

  “Maybe it’s a wrong number.”

  “Bernie, for God’s sake…”

  I got up and answered the phone. I didn’t say anything for a second, and then I said, “Hello.”

  No answer.

  I said hello a few more times, giving the word the same flat reading each time, and I’d have gotten more of a response from Archie. I stared at the receiver for a moment, said “Hello” one final time, then said “Goodbye” and hung up.

  “Interesting conversation,” Carolyn said.

  “It’s good I answered it. It really made a difference.”

  “Someone wanted to find out who placed the ad. Now they’ve heard your voice and they know it’s you.”

  “You’re reading a lot into a moment of silence.”

  “Maybe I should have picked it up after all.”

  “And maybe what we just had was a wrong number. Or a telephone pervert. I didn’t hear any heavy breathing, but maybe he’s new at it.”

  She started to say something, then got to her feet, popping up like a toaster. “I’m gonna have one more drink,” she said. “How about you?”

  “A short one.”

  “They know it’s you, Bernie. Now if they can get the address from the number—”

  “They can’t.”

  “Suppose they’re the police. The police could get the phone company to cooperate, couldn’t they?”

  “Maybe. But what do the police know about the Kipling book?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, neither do they.” She handed me a drink. It was a little heftier than I’d had in mind but I didn’t raise any objections. Her nervousness was contagious and I’d managed to pick up a light dose of it. I prescribed Scotch, to be followed by bed rest.

  “It was probably what I said it would be when I answered it,” I suggested. “A wrong number.”

  “You’re right.”

  “For all we know, the ad didn’t even make the early edition.”

  “I could take a quick run over to Fourteenth Street and check—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” I picked up the book again and found myself flipping through its pages, remembering how I’d done so on an earlier occasion, sitting in my own apartment with a similar drink at hand and flushed with the triumph of a successful burglary. Well, I’d stolen the thing again, but somehow I didn’t feel the same heady rush.

  Something nagged at me. Some little thought out there on the edge of consciousness…

  I finished my drink and tuned it out.

  Half an hour after the phone call we were bedded down for the night. I was bedded down, anyway; Carolyn was couched. The clock radio was supplying an undercurrent of mood music, all set to turn itself off thirty minutes into the Mantovani.

  I was teetering on the edge of sleep when I half heard footsteps approaching the door of the apartment. I didn’t really register them; Carolyn’s was a first-floor apartment, after all, and various feet had been approaching it all night long, only to pass it and continue on up the stairs. This time the steps stopped outside the door, and just as that fact was beginning to penetrate I heard a key in the lock.

  I sat up in bed. The key turned in the lock. Beside me, a cat sat quivering with excitement. As another key slipped into another of the locks, Carolyn stirred on the couch and whispered my name urgently.

  We were both on our feet by the time the door opened. A hand reached in to switch on the overhead light. We stood there blinking.

  “I’m dreaming,” Randy said. “None of this is really happening.”

  Shoulder-length chestnut hair. A high broad forehead, a long oval face. Large eyes, larger now than I’d ever seen them, and a mouth in the shape of the letter O.

  “Jesus,” Carolyn said. “Randy, it’s not what you think.”

  “Of course not. The two of you were playing canasta. You had the lights out so you wouldn’t disturb the cats. Why else would you be wearing your Dr. Denton’s, Carolyn? And does Bernie like the handy drop seat?”

  “You’ve got it all wrong.”

  “I know. It’s terrible the way I jump to conclusions. At least you’re dressed warmly. Bernie, poor thing, you’re shivering in your undershorts. Why don’t the two of you huddle together for warmth, Carolyn? It wouldn’t bother me a bit.”

  “Randy, you just don’t understand.”

  “You’re dead right about that. I figured you knew what you were by now. Aren’t you a little old for a sexual-identity crisis?”

  “Dammit, Randy—”

  “Dammit is right. Dammit is definitely right. I thought I recognized Bernie’s voice on the telephone. And I was struck tongue-tied. After I hung up I told myself it was probably innocent, the two of you are friends, and I asked myself why I reacted with such paranoia. But you know what they say, Carolyn. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean real little people aren’t following you.”

  “Will you please listen to me?”

  “No, you listen to me, you little shit. What I said was, well, screw it, Miranda, you’ve got a key, so go over and join the two of them and see how silly you’re being, or maybe you’ll get lucky and Carolyn’ll be alone and you can have some laughs and patch things up, and—God damn you, Carolyn. Here’s your set of keys, bitch. I won’t walk in on you two again. Count on it.”

  “Randy, I—”

  “I said here’s your keys. And I think you have my keys, Carolyn, and I’d like them back. Now, if you don’t mind.”

  We tried to say something but it was pointless. There was nothing she wanted to hear. She gave back Carolyn’s keys and pocketed her own and stormed out, slamming the door hard enough to rattle the dishes on the kitchen table, stamping her way down the hall, slamming the vestibule door on her way out of the building.

  Carolyn and I just stood there looking at each other. Ubi had gone to hide under the bed. Archie stood up on the chair and let out a tentative yowl. After a couple of minutes Carolyn went over to the door and set about locking the locks.

  CHAPTER

  Fourteen

  The Personal ads were on the penultimate page of the second section of the Times, along with the shipping news and a few other high-priority items. Ours was the third listing, following a plea for information from the parents of a fourteen-year-old runaway.

  I read our ad three or four times and decided that it did its job efficiently enough. It hadn’t brought any response yet, but it was still early; Carolyn had awakened at dawn and gone for the paper as soon as she’d fed the cats. At this
hour our presumably interested parties might well be snug in their beds. If, like me and Carolyn, they were already warming themselves over morning coffee, they’d still have the whole paper to wade through before they got to the Personals. True, it was a Saturday. The daily Times has added on feature sections in recent years, padding itself like a bear preparing to hibernate, but the Saturday paper remains fashionably slender. On the other hand, a good many people take a break from the Times on Saturdays, readying themselves for the onslaught of the enormous Sunday paper, so it was possible our prospective customers would never pick up the paper at all. The ad was set to run for a week, but now that I looked at it, a few lines of type on a remote back page, I wasn’t too cocky about the whole thing. We couldn’t really count on it, I decided, and it would be advisable to draft a backup plan as soon as possible.

  “Oh, wow. I’m glad I went out for the paper, Bernie.”

  “So am I,” I said. “I just hope you’re not the only person who took the trouble.”

  She had the first section and she was pointing to something. “You’d better read this,” she said.

  I took it and read it. A few inches of copy on one of the back pages, out of place among the scraps of international news but for its faintly international flavor. Bernard Rhodenbarr, I read, the convicted burglar currently sought by police investigating the slaying Thursday of Madeleine Porlock in her East Side apartment, had narrowly escaped apprehension the previous night. Surprised by an alert police officer while attempting to break into Barnegat Books on East Eleventh Street, Rhodenbarr whipped out a pistol and exchanged shots with the policeman. The officer, I read, suffered a flesh wound in the foot and was treated at St. Vincent’s Hospital and released. The burglar-turned-gunman, owner of the store in question, had escaped on foot, apparently uninjured.

  As an afterthought, the last paragraph mentioned that Rhodenbarr had disguised himself for the occasion by donning a turban and false beard. “But he didn’t fool me,” Patrolman Francis Rockland was quoted as saying. “We’re trained to see past obvious disguises. I recognized him right away from his photograph.”

  “The Sikh,” I told Carolyn. “Well, that’s one person who hasn’t got the book, or he wouldn’t have been trying to break into the store to search for it. I wonder if it was him you spotted watching the store yesterday.”

  “Maybe.”

  “The tabloids’ll probably give this more of a play. They like irony, and what’s more ironic than a burglar caught breaking into his own place? They should only know how ironic it is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the cop could have arrested the Sikh. That wouldn’t have cleared me on the murder rap but at least they wouldn’t be after me for this, too. Or the Sikh could have been a worse shot, so I wouldn’t be charged with shooting a cop. Wounding a police officer is a more serious crime than murdering a civilian, at least as far as the cops are concerned. Or, if he had to shoot him, the Sikh could have killed young Mr. Rockland. Then he wouldn’t have been able to tell them I was the one who did it.”

  “You wouldn’t really want the policeman dead, Bernie.”

  “No. With my luck he’d live long enough to tell a brother officer who shot him. Then I’d be a cop killer. What if Randy sees this? She must have missed the first story, or at least she never connected it with me, because she didn’t seem concerned last night about your harboring a fugitive. She was too busy feeling betrayed.”

  “She never looks at the Times. ”

  “It’ll be in the other papers, too.”

  “She probably won’t read them, either. I don’t even know if she knows your last name.”

  “She must.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Would she call the cops?”

  “She’s a good person, Bernie. She’s not a fink.”

  “She’s also jealous. She thinks—”

  “I know what she thinks. She must be a lunatic to think it, but I know what she thinks.”

  “She could decide to give the cops an anonymous tip. She could tell herself it was for your own good, Carolyn.”

  “Shit.” She gnawed a thumbnail. “You figure it’s not safe here anymore?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But the phone’s here. And the number’s in the paper, and how are we going to answer it from a distance?”

  “Who’s going to call, anyway?”

  “Rudyard Whelkin.”

  “He killed Madeleine Porlock Thursday night. I’ll bet he took a cab straight to Kennedy and was out of the country by midnight.”

  “Without the book?”

  I shrugged.

  “And the Sikh might call. What happened to his five hundred dollars?”

  “You figure he’ll call so he can ask me that question?”

  “No, I’m asking it, Bern. You had the money on you when Madeleine Porlock drugged you, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And it was gone when you came to.”

  “Right again.”

  “So what happened to it?”

  “She took it. Oh. What happened to it after she took it?”

  “Yeah. Where did it go? You went through her things last night. It wasn’t stashed with the book, was it?”

  “It wasn’t stashed anywhere. Nowhere that I looked, that is. I suppose the killer took it along with him.”

  “Wouldn’t he leave it?”

  “Why leave money? Money’s money, Carolyn.”

  “There’s always stories about killings in the paper, and they say the police ruled out robbery as a motive because the victim had a large sum of cash on his person.”

  “That’s organized crime. They want people to know why they killed somebody. They’ll even plant money on a person so the police will rule out robbery. Either the killer took the money this time or Porlock found a hiding place that didn’t occur to me. Or some cop picked it up when no one was looking. That’s been known to happen.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, sure. I could tell you no end of stories. But what’s the point? I’d be interrupted by the insistent ringing of the telephone.”

  And I turned to the instrument, figuring it would recognize a cue when it heard one. It stayed silent, though, for upwards of half an hour.

  But once it started ringing, I didn’t think it was ever going to stop.

  Rrrring!

  “Hello?”

  “Ah, hello. I’ve just read your notice in the Times. I’m only wondering if I’m interpreting it correctly.”

  “How are you interpreting it?”

  “You would appear to have something to sell.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Passage to, ah, Fort Bucklow.”

  “Yes.”

  “Would it be possible for me to know to whom I am speaking?”

  “I was going to ask you that very question.”

  “Ah. An impasse. Let me consider this.”

  An English inflection, an undertone of Asia or Africa. A slightly sibilant s. Educated, soft-spoken. A pleasant voice, all in all.

  “Very well, sir. I believe you may already have encountered an emissary of mine. If my guess is right, you overcharged him in a transaction recently. He paid five hundred dollars for a book priced at a dollar ninety-five.”

  “Not my fault. He ran off without his change.”

  An appreciative chuckle. “Then you are the man I assumed you to be. Very good. You have pluck, sir. The police seek you in connection with a woman’s death and you persist in your efforts to sell a book. Business as usual, eh?”

  “I need money right now.”

  “To quit the country, I would suppose. You have the book at hand? It is actually in your possession as we talk?”

  “Yes. I don’t believe I caught your name.”

  “I don’t believe I’ve given it. Before we go further, sir, perhaps you could prove to me that you have the volume.”

  “I suppose I could hold it to the phone, but unless you
have extraordinary powers…”

  “Open it to page forty-two, sir, and read the first stanza on the page.”

  “Oh. Hold on a minute. ‘Now if you should go to Fort Bucklow / When the moon is on the wane, / And the jackal growls while the monkey howls / Like a woman struck insane… Is that the one you mean?”

  A pause. “I want that volume, sir. I want to buy it.”

  “Good. I want to sell it.”

  “And your price?”

  “I haven’t set it yet.”

  “If you will do so…”

  “This is tricky business. I have to protect myself. I’m a fugitive, as you said, and that makes me vulnerable. I don’t even know whom I’m dealing with.”

  “A visitor in your land, sir. A passionate devotee of Mr. Kipling. My name is of little importance.”

  “How can I get in touch with you?”

  “It’s of less importance than my name. I can get in touch with you, sir, by calling this number.”

  “No. I won’t be here. It’s not safe. Give me a number where I can reach you at five o’clock this afternoon.”

  “A telephone number?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “It can be any telephone at all. Just so you’ll be at it at five o’clock.”

  “Ah. I will call you back, sir, in ten minutes.”

  Rrrring!

  “Hello?”

  “Sir, you have pencil and paper?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I will be at this number at five o’clock this afternoon. RH4-5198.”

  “RH4-5198. At five o’clock.”

  Rrrring! Rrrring!

  “Hello?”

  “Hello?”

  “Hello.”

  “Ah. If you could say something more elaborate than a simple hello …”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Very good. I’d hoped it was you. I won’t use your name aloud, and I trust you won’t use mine.”

  “Only if I want to call your club and have you paged.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “They said you weren’t a member. Extraordinary, isn’t it?”

  “Perhaps I haven’t been altogether straightforward with you, my boy. I can explain everything.”