The Burglar in the Rye Read online

  Maybe my mind, freed by rye whiskey from the rigid parameters of conventional thinking, had worked all of that out for me, all in the few seconds it took me to provide the cabdriver with an address. I considered the possibility, and then reluctantly shook my head. (A bad idea, aspirin or no aspirin. The last thing my head needed was a good shaking.)

  No, I hadn’t thought my way into the Paddington. I’d blundered, and come up lucky.

  I picked up Paddington, and he looked none the worse for wear. Either the cops had returned him after his x-ray ordeal, which seemed unlikely, or the hotel had replaced him, which also struck me as odd. Never mind. He was here and so was I, and he could stay here but I had work to do.

  I picked up my watch, and when I saw what time it was I held the thing to my ear to see if it was still ticking. It wasn’t, of course; it was digital, and had never ticked in its life. But the little seconds were passing visibly, so it was still working, and what it told me was that it was 3:37 in the morning.

  I’d somehow assumed it was later than that. I’d taken it for granted that, having found a quiet place to pass out, I’d have had the good sense to remain unconscious until a civil hour. Now, knowing it was still the middle of the night, I immediately felt exhausted.

  The bed beckoned. I glared at it and stalked out the door.

  The sign on the stairway entrance reminded me I couldn’t get back in. The warning was meant for lesser mortals, but suppose my tools were not where I’d left them? Oh, I could walk down to the lobby, but I remembered how much fun that had been the last time I did it. I patted my pockets and found a wooden toothpick, then pushed the snaplock back with my thumb and jammed the toothpick in next to it, wedging it in place. Now the door would close without locking, and anyone entering from the fourth-floor hall would notice nothing out of the ordinary.

  The stairwell still smelled of smoke. That was fine, just so long as no one had started a fire.

  And nobody had, as far as I could tell, at least not a serious fire, because the firehose mounted on the stairwell wall at the fifth-floor landing looked undisturbed. I unscrewed the heavy brass nozzle—what a fine blunt instrument it would make—and shook out my handy-dandy ring of picks and probes and my little flashlight, the whole array double-wrapped in a pair of plastic-film gloves. Then, from the canvas hose itself, I drew out the little jewelry case that still contained a ruby necklace and earrings. I slipped various articles into various pockets and finally screwed the nozzle back on the hose.

  I walked back down to Four, and I had the door open and was retrieving my toothpick when I changed my mind and let the door swing shut. If knowledge was power, I realized, I was a ninety-seven-pound weakling, and I didn’t even have to send in the coupon to Charles Atlas and get the secrets of Dynamic Tension going for me.

  I sat down on the top step and started ticking off the things I didn’t know. I didn’t write out a list, but if I had it might have looked something like this:

  THINGS I NEED TO KNOW AND DON’T

  1. Who killed Anthea Landau?

  2. Where did the knife come from, and what happened to it?

  3. Why hadn’t I heard from Alice Cottrell?

  4. Speaking of Alice, why couldn’t I reach her?

  5. How did the jewels get into that room on the third floor?

  6. Where were the Gulliver Fairborn letters?

  7. How was Isis Gauthier connected to Anthea Landau?

  8. How was I going to get out of this mess?

  I walked down one more flight of stairs, and it’s an indication of the efficiency of my mind that I searched my pockets for another toothpick to jam the lock, so I’d be able to return to the stairwell. Light dawned when I reached for the knob and there wasn’t one. I got out my tools and opened the door.

  When I emerged from that third-floor room, the proud possessor if not the lawful owner of a ruby necklace and earrings, I of course hadn’t bothered to note the room number. Why bother? I had other things on my mind, and it didn’t seem like something I would ever need to know. The room was just something I’d passed through, and I wouldn’t need to pass through it again. I’d already taken what was worth taking. Why go back?

  Still, it wasn’t terribly difficult to narrow it down. I’d been in Anthea Landau’s bedroom when I ducked out onto the fire escape. The room I’d wound up in was three floors below, and if it wasn’t directly beneath Landau’s it wasn’t that far from it. Landau’s room number was 602, so the place to start was 302, and if that didn’t pan out I could try the rooms on either side of it.

  I got my bearings and found Room 302, conveniently if unimaginatively tucked between Rooms 301 and 303. No light showed beneath any of their doors, but it was getting on for four in the morning, so the same could be said for most of the doors in the hotel, and indeed most of the bedroom doors in the whole city. New York may be the city that never sleeps, but at that hour a good number of its citizens tend to close their eyes.

  I’d have liked to join them. My headache was back, and I felt a great weariness. I couldn’t quite catch my breath, and wasn’t even sure it was worth catching. Once I caught it, what would I do with it?

  I stared at all three doors and felt like one of the dimmer contestants on Let’s Make a Deal. I had to pick one of those doors, and what was I going to trade for whatever was behind it? My freedom? My future?

  I stepped up to 302, put my ear to it to no particular purpose, then took out my tools and picked the lock. It yielded without a fuss, and I slipped inside and drew the door shut.

  I stood absolutely still, letting my eyes accustom themselves to the darkness. The curtains were drawn, but they were a less efficient lot than Anthea Landau’s, and once my pupils had had time to dilate I could see just about enough to keep from bumping into the furniture.

  But I could hear enough to keep me from moving.

  What I heard was breathing, the deep slow breathing of a sleeper. It was curiously reassuring, signifying as it did that the room’s occupant was alive. If I had to walk in on somebody, I’d just as soon the person was still oxygen-dependent.

  Get out, I told myself. Somebody’s home, and they don’t know you’re here, and if you leave quickly and quietly they may never find out. So what are you waiting for?

  But if I left, I still wouldn’t know if this was the right room. I’d just know somebody was in it, and what good did that do me?

  I got out my pocket flash and positioned my thumb over the little button. I wouldn’t need very much light, and I wouldn’t need it for very long. As soon as I saw Elvis on black velvet, I’d know I was in the right place. As soon as I’d assured myself he wasn’t there to be seen, I’d know I wasn’t.

  I aimed the flashlight at the wall, tapped the button, let go of it almost immediately, and repeated the procedure at intervals of a few feet, working my way around the room. There was, I managed to establish, no painting on black velvet on any of the room’s four walls, not of Elvis, not of a big-eyed waif, not of a sad-faced clown.

  Wrong room.

  I reached for the doorknob, turned it ever so gently, opened it a crack and paused to listen for signs of life in the hallway, then got out of there and closed the door. I played a little mental game of eeny meeny miney mo, trying to guess which of the remaining doors concealed Elvis on black velvet. I wondered, too, what version of Elvis the painting showed—Elvis Young or Elvis Old? Elvis lean and hungry or Elvis puffed up with too many peanut butter and banana sandwiches? Elvis bright-eyed and bushytailed or Elvis with a pharmaceutical glaze? I hadn’t seen the painting myself, and—

  Of course I hadn’t. I’d heard it described by Marty Gilmartin, and he’d seen it in Isis Gauthier’s room up on Six. So why was I looking for it down here on Three?

  I’ll tell you, a mind is a terrible thing to have, especially when it doesn’t work any better than mine did. I had a killer hangover, and that explained a lot, but I wondered if there might not be a little more to it than that. Could I still be drunk?
Was that possible?

  It didn’t seem the least bit fair. One or the other, okay, fair enough, I’d earned it. But both at once? Wasn’t it like lightning and thunder? They were both the result of the same phenomenon—in this case, strong drink and plenty of it—but the lightning got there first, and had disappeared by the time the thunder came rolling in.

  It occurred to me that I ought to go back to bed and sleep this off, whatever it was. But opportunity had knocked, hadn’t it? And wasn’t it my job to open the door?

  In this case, the door to 302. I’d already opened it, and now I opened it again. This time I didn’t actually enter the room. I stood at the door, using my pocket flash to supplement the light that slanted through the opening I’d created, and looked around for something familiar.

  I saw something unfamiliar, and that was just as good. When I’d come in from the fire escape, heading for the door to the hallway, the dresser had been on my right, the bed on my left. And the layout in this room was the mirror opposite. I went over it in my mind, like the guy in the tower of the Old North Church—Let’s see now, did Mr. Revere say one if by land and two if by sea, or was it the other way around?—and decided I had it right. This wasn’t the room where I’d found the rubies.

  I closed the door a second time. I thought of doing what Sleeping Beauty had neglected to do—i.e., fasten the chain lock to keep out people like me. That’s not hard if you have the tools for it, and I did, but it’s not the sort of task to undertake unnecessarily when you’re either drunk or hungover, or possibly both.

  Next I cracked 301, and the door moved only a couple of inches before the chain lock stopped it. I could have unlocked it—it’s slightly easier on balance than relocking the thing, and there’s more point to it—but I knew the room was occupied, so why barge in if I didn’t have to?

  I saw what I could through the narrow opening. The layout was as I remembered it, but this room had twin beds, and I realized now that the room I’d entered from the fire escape had a double. So this wasn’t it.

  That left Room 303, and it was the one lock that gave me a hard time. Don’t ask me why. It was the same basic mechanism as all the others, and it should have been every bit as easy to pick. But it wasn’t, lending further credence to my drunk-and-hungover-both-at-once hypothesis.

  I’d have been embarrassed if anyone had seen me fumbling with the damned lock, and the chances of being embarrassed in just that fashion increased with every minute I spent standing there in the hallway. There’d been no one coming or going—it was, after all, the middle of the goddam night—but it seemed to me I was pushing my luck.

  The lock was old, and some of its pins and tumblers were worn, and sometimes the result is a lock that just about falls open if you give it a hard look. In this case, though, my picks kept slipping around inside, and at one point I gave up and tried my room key. There was a chance it would work, albeit a slim one, but long shots do come in every once in a while, and wouldn’t it be nice if this was one of those times?

  Dream on….

  I put the key back in my pocket, got back to business, and had better luck this time around. I cracked the door and let my flashlight do the walking, and there was a double bed right where it was supposed to be, and no one was in it. I slipped in, drew the door shut, and collapsed into a chair.

  I used my flash again, less hurriedly this time, and was able to say with certainty that this was the room I’d been in the other night. I hadn’t been paying attention, and thus couldn’t consciously remember the room and its furnishings, but it turned out I was able to recognize them when I saw them. The litter on top of the highboy dresser was familiar, too. I opened a couple of drawers, and I was in the right place. The second drawer held feminine undergarments, but this time there was no jewelry stashed there.

  I could put the rubies back where I’d found them. If the room’s occupant hadn’t yet noticed their absence, I’d have concealed my actions entirely. If she’d realized they were gone, she’d find them and wonder if she was losing her mind.

  But was I losing mine? Why on earth would I want to put the jewels back? I wasn’t sure who the rightful owner was, or if the rubies had one. Cynthia Considine? Her husband, John? Isis Gauthier? I didn’t see that any of the three had anything approaching a moral equivalent of clear title. Ms. 303 had as good a claim as they did, and wasn’t my own claim every bit as good as hers?

  I decided it was, and the jewelry case stayed in my pocket.

  But another question arose. What exactly was I doing here?

  I had to sit down to think about that one. I’d never stopped to question the impulse to come to this room, and then I’d been so caught up in the process of finding the right room and picking my way past its lock that I hadn’t had time to wonder what I’d do once I was inside.

  And it was a logical place to be, wasn’t it? Now that I’d located the room, now that I was in it, I could look around until I learned whose room it was. And then I’d very likely know who had taken Isis Gauthier’s rubies, and then I’d know—

  What?

  I’d probably know the name of some morally bankrupt friend of Isis’s who’d cast a greedy eye on the rubies and seized an opportunity for theft when it presented itself. There wasn’t much I could do with that information, unless I wanted to convey it to Isis, in the hopes of getting back on a first-name basis with her.

  Would it bring me any closer to Gulliver Fairborn’s letters? Would it help me learn who killed Anthea Landau? I’d had eight questions on the little list I hadn’t written down, and the only one it might answer was How did the jewels get into that room on the third floor?

  Still, I couldn’t get away from the idea that everything was tied together. Otherwise coincidence played too large a role. And, if everything was indeed intertwined, then any bit of data I picked up might lead to something else.

  I put on my gloves—I’d already left no end of prints in this room, but that didn’t give me a reason to leave still more—and I got busy. There was a lamp on the little desk—brass, with a green glass shade, and now that I saw it I remembered it from my first visit. I switched it on and went around the room, looking at things, trying to find something that would identify the occupant.

  It would have been easier if I’d happened to be a cop. I’m sure some of the clothing had labels or laundry marks that could have been traced back to the purchaser. For that matter, all a cop would have had to do was flash his badge at the desk clerk and demand the name of the person registered in Room 303. That wasn’t foolproof, it might lead only to an alias in the Peter Jeffries mode, but it was yet another option that cops have and burglars don’t. (When you look at all their advantages, it’s amazing we ever get away with anything.)

  I was in the closet, examining the clothes as if in the hope that her mother might have sewn in name tapes before sending her to camp, and pondering laundry marks and labels as if they were going to tell me something. I popped the catches on a small suitcase, the kind with wheels and a pull-up handle. A few years ago nobody but stewardesses had them, and now it’s the only kind you see. This one was empty, and I closed it up and turned off the closet light, and I was on my way out of there when something flickered in my memory. I’d just seen something. Now what the hell was it?

  A luggage tag.

  Well, of course. People tie tags on their suitcases, with their names and addresses and phone numbers, so that the airlines, having lost their luggage for them, can, once in a blue moon, find it again. (It’s also handy if someone steals your bag. If he likes the general quality of your possessions, he knows right where to come to get more. And, if you tucked a set of keys in your bag, all the better.)

  I spun around, leaned over to peer at the luggage tag, and of course the light was too dim to make it out. I straightened up and reached to switch on the closet light, and as soon as it came on I switched it off again.

  Because I heard a key in the lock.

  Oh, God. Now what?

 
Stay in the closet? No, I couldn’t, the desk lamp was on. I got to it in a hurry and switched it off, while the key went on jiggling in the lock. The worn pins and tumblers evidently presented the same sort of problem even if you had a key, and what had been a nuisance a few minutes ago was a godsend now. Back to the closet? No, the bathroom was closer—and in less time than it took to have the thought I was in it with the door closed.

  And just in time, because I could hear the door open, and a moment later I could hear it close. I didn’t hear the light switch, but when she switched the light on in the room some of it showed under the bathroom door.

  Good I’d stayed out of the closet. I’ve been in closets a couple of times in the past when householders turned up unexpectedly, and I always managed to escape detection, but I didn’t like my chances this time around. It was a cool night, and she’d almost certainly have been wearing a jacket or a coat, and the first thing she’d do was take it off, and thus the first place she’d go was the closet.

  And where did I think was the second place she would go?

  The bathroom, of course, and what was I going to do when she burst in and found me there? I couldn’t pretend I was a plumber sent to fix a dripping faucet. I wasn’t dressed for it and I hadn’t brought the right tools for the job.

  Should I lock the door?

  Hell, she’d hear it if I did. Unless I covered the sound by coughing or flushing the toilet, and then she’d hear that. And even if she didn’t, she’d find out that the bathroom door was locked when she tried to open it. And she’d call downstairs, and they’d send somebody up, and the next thing you knew I’d be having my rights read to me. They’re important rights, but there’s a limit to how often I want to hear about them.

  There was a window, the glass frosted so that I couldn’t tell if it led to the fire escape. It didn’t look as though it had been opened since the last time it had been painted, and there was no guarantee I could open it, and no chance at all I could do so without making a lot of noise. It was a tiny window, too, and no cinch to climb through, and—