The Burglar in the Library Read online

  I listened at the door, fairly certain Carolyn had not yet gone into her act. I couldn’t detect anything out of the ordinary, so I drew back the bolt and started to ease the door open a crack, but of course I couldn’t. I’d picked it shut. Now I could pick it open again, only to pick it shut once more in a minute or two, and for what? So that I could watch Rufus Quilp waddle across the floor to the bathroom? It hardly seemed worth it.

  I grabbed a chair and sat on it. A pair of walkie-talkies, I thought, would have simplified operations considerably. I could get Carolyn out of bed and into action. The sooner she got moving, the sooner I’d be able to move. I could get to work. I could get to business. I could go to the bathroom.

  Ah, yes. There’s that bit of business Ben Franklin stole from George Herbert: “For want of a nail a shoe was lost, for want of a shoe a horse was lost, for want of a horse a rider was lost.” I don’t know how many riders—and battles, and wars—have actually been lost for a nail, but I’ve sometimes wondered how often the course of history has been changed in one direction or another because somebody had to pee. I don’t know if its results are quite as dire as losing a nail out of a horseshoe, but I have a feeling it comes up more often.

  It would have been nice if Cuttleford House’s commitment to quaintness included a chamber pot beneath the bed, but if such a thing had ever existed, some prior occupant of Young George’s Room had taken it home for use as a soup tureen.

  Of course, I thought, if Carolyn would quit dreaming about unavailable chambermaids and raise the alarm for her absent best friend, the problem would soon be resolved. Once everyone gathered together, all I had to do was wait until the group had removed to the ground floor. Then I could have my pick of bathrooms, but until then it wasn’t safe to set foot in the hallway.

  And how long, really, could a person be expected to wait?

  I don’t want to dwell on this subject, it’s not a fit one for polite discourse, but neither do I want to leave you wondering.

  So how will it be if I simply state that there was a time when I opened the window and held out a shoe that had once belonged to Jonathan Rathburn, and for which he could be presumed to have no further use? I turned the shoe upside down, and then I brought it back in again, and closed the window.

  So much for that. Now all I had to do was wait for Carolyn to wake up, and hope she hadn’t forgotten what she was supposed to do. We’re none of us at our best first thing in the morning, and Carolyn had had the odd wee dram of malt the night before. I could picture her wondering where I’d disappeared to and dismissing the question with a shrug as she tucked into a hearty breakfast of fly-in-the-oatmeal or some such traditional British treat.

  “And wherever is your uh husband, Mrs. Rhodenbarr?”

  “You mean Bernie? Gee, I dunno…. Omigod, we’ve got to find him! He’s disappeared!”

  She’d get it right, I assured myself. And until she did, all I could do was wait.

  No problem. I had something to read.

  No problem at all, as it turned out. Carolyn did wake up, and did remember her lines, and did succeed in communicating her feigned panic to the rest of the household. My door (or Rathburn’s, if you prefer, or Young George’s) was unbolted but still locked when they got to it, and the lock yielded readily enough to the master key.

  “No one here,” Nigel Eglantine announced, and the horde gathered itself and prepared to head elsewhere. I distinguished various voices in the throng—Carolyn sounding on the brink of panic, Leona Savage murmuring reassurance—and then Dakin Littlefield’s voice rang out like a cracked bell.

  “Not so fast,” he said. “Nobody checked the closet.”

  “Why bother?” Carolyn said quickly. “He’s not here. What would he be doing in the closet?”

  “Dropping down to room temperature,” Littlefield said. “If he’s dead somebody must have stowed him somewhere, and the closet’s as good a place as any. If it was worth looking in this room, it’s worth looking in the closet.”

  “Let me,” Carolyn said. “Bernie? Bernie, are you in there?”

  “If he’s dead,” Littlefield told her, “you’ll be a long time waiting for an answer. Open the door, why don’t you?”

  “It’s stuck. This is ridiculous, he’s not in here, and we’re wasting time when we could be—”

  “Stuck?” Littlefield did a lot with the one syllable, making it clear somehow that an inability to open the closet door indicated not only physical but mental and moral weakness. “Let’s just see how stuck it is,” he said, and flung the thing open.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-three

  There was a sound that may have been Carolyn catching her breath, then a snort of disappointment from Littlefield. “Zilch,” he announced. “Just poor Rathburn’s clothes. He bought cheap crap, didn’t he?” He sniffed. “Smells a little funky in here, like somebody took a leak in one of his shoes. Probably that damned cat.”

  “Raffles is toilet trained,” Carolyn said.

  “Good for him. Anyway, it’d smell a lot worse if there was a body turning sour in here. We’re wasting time.”

  And off they went. The last person out closed the door, remarkably enough, and nobody bothered to lock it, which would save me a minute or two, and spare that much wear on my burglar’s tools.

  I waited another minute, just to make sure nobody came back for a last look, and crawled out from under the bed.

  See, you had nothing to worry about. You were not fooled. You already knew they were still looking for me when they spotted the dummy at the bottom of the ravine. So your heart didn’t threaten to seize when Littlefield opened the closet.

  Carolyn’s did. She was sure I was in Rathburn’s room, because I’d said that was where I’d probably be. They might very well pass up searching the room altogether, I’d told her, but if they looked they wouldn’t find me, because I’d be tucked away somewhere, probably in the closet.

  I don’t know what made me dive under the bed instead. Maybe I was reluctant to share close quarters with Rathburn’s shoes. More likely I remembered all the closets I’d stowed away in over the years and figured I’d be pushing my luck to try that old trick yet again. I’d been under Rathburn’s bed earlier, looking for the chamber pot that wasn’t there, so I knew I’d fit, albeit snugly. So that’s where I was, and a good thing, too.

  If I’d thought of it, I’d have left the closet door wide open. They wouldn’t have had to cross the threshold to see that the room was empty, and after a glance or two they’d have been on their way. But I’d left the door closed—Rathburn’s shoes may have had something to do with it—and that was enough to catch Littlefield’s interest. Carolyn was certain I was in the closet, and thus tried to keep the door closed. For my part, I wished they would open the damn thing and be done with it, before someone else got the bright idea to look under the bed.

  Later, when they uncovered the corpses on the three lawn chairs, Carolyn didn’t have to work at it to look frightened. Because if I wasn’t in Rathburn’s closet she didn’t know where I was, so it was entirely possible that was me on one of those lawn chairs.

  Once they were done checking the bedrooms and had begun the process of searching for me on the ground floor, it was my turn to return the favor and give their rooms a toss. I’d gone door-to-door in much the same fashion many years ago, when a fellow named Louis Lewis sold me a passkey that would open every room in the old Taft Hotel. I’d considered spacing my visits over a week or two, hitting a half-dozen rooms each time, but this was a while ago, and the fires of youth burned in my blood. I was impatient. I wanted instant gratification, and I didn’t want to wait for it, either.

  So I booked a room at the Taft under a name selected for the occasion and let a bellhop bring my two large suitcases to my room. I checked in at three in the afternoon and checked out at seven the following morning, and by the time I left I’d been in more rooms than the Gideon Bible. The Taft was a huge hotel, and there was no way to hit every room, b
ut I did my best. I’d go up to a door, knock gently, wait a moment, knock again, and then let myself in. It doesn’t take long to search a hotel room—the occupants haven’t been there long enough to build up an accumulation of clutter—so it’s just a matter of checking the drawers and closet, going through the luggage, and dipping into the pockets of clothes in the closet.

  More often than not there was nothing to take. But here and there I found jewelry, some of it worth lifting, and here and there I found cash. During the early-evening hours most of the rooms I hit were empty, but as the night wore on guests came back to the hotel and turned in for the night. Some growled at my knock, or came to the door; a simple apology sent them back to bed. Others didn’t hear me knocking, nor did they hear me open their doors and pad softly around their carpeted floors. My visits were briefer when the occupants were in, but they were also more profitable, because if they were home so were their purses and wallets. I didn’t have to look hard to find them, either.

  Then back to my room to stow my prizes. Then off, passkey in hand, eager as a kid on Christmas morning, wondering what the next pretty package would hold.

  Ah, youth! When I left the next morning I’d jettisoned the phone books that had given my suitcases a feeling of respectable substance, and I’d filled both bags with well-gotten gains. I don’t know how I wound up after I’d tallied the cash and fenced the rest of the swag, and I’m sure it didn’t add up to what I’d expect to net nowadays from a single halfway decent stamp or coin collection, but it was a decent night’s work all the same. And I felt like a hero, a veritable superman of burglars. I’d pulled not one job but dozens of jobs, one right after the other.

  Of course, it’s not all that tricky when you’ve got a key.

  I didn’t have a key this time, and it would have speeded things up, no question about it. No matter how quick you are with your picks and probes, a key makes it quicker. Still, a couple of guests had leveled the playing fields for me a bit by neglecting to lock their doors. I was grateful, if a touch bemused. It’s nice, I suppose, to go about assuming one’s fellow guests are as honest as oneself, but doesn’t the illusion get harder to maintain when people are getting bumped off left and right? I suppose a properly brought up murderer will still draw the line at entering another person’s private quarters, but even so…

  I went about my work. I had to remind myself not to steal—old habits die hard—but the situation was urgent enough to keep me pretty well focused on the business at hand. I made sure I stayed a floor away from the rest of them, and I ducked out of sight when I heard someone on the stairs. When they were all on the ground floor I had a quick look at the servants’ quarters up above. A little later, when I looked out the window and saw them heading down the path toward the fallen bridge, I seized the moment and made a foray into a couple of rooms on the ground floor.

  I came out of the Eglantine apartment knowing I wasn’t going to have much more time. It was cold out, and they’d been in too much of a hurry to bundle up, so they’d want to get back inside the house as soon as possible. I was counting on it, as a matter of fact; the more uncomfortable they were out there, the less time they’d waste on a good look at the late Bernard Grimes Rhodenbarr.

  But I wanted a look at those lawn chairs.

  The voices had been too muffled earlier for me to tell what had excited them, though I suspected it might be the lawn chairs out behind the house. Was there a fresh corpse on one of those chairs? And, if so, whose was it?

  I found my way to the sunroom. Through its windows I saw the three chairs, and I could tell I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. The snow was tamped down all around them, and the snow-covered sheets that shrouded them had been removed.

  But, alas, they’d been replaced. They weren’t covered with snow now, but they still hid the chairs’ contents from view.

  Three bodies. I could tell that much, given a good look in decent light. But who was the latest victim?

  All I had to do was go out and have a look. But I could already hear them on their way back to the house, all talking at once, their voices a discordant blur. By the time I got out the door and ran over to the chairs and had a look—

  No time.

  I raced for the stairs.

  Back in Young George’s Room, which I found myself regarding less and less as Jonathan Rathburn’s and more and more as my own, I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to figure out what to do next. I had a pad of paper in front of me and I had drawn a rough diagram, with a lot of circles and X’s and arrows. It was supposed to represent how the sequence of killings had taken place, and a look at my handiwork suggested that the killer must have been a geometry teacher. No one else could have made sense of it.

  When I wasn’t looking at the diagram or off into space, I was checking my watch. Sooner or later I was going to have to leave my comfy little hiding place and show my face in the world, or at least in the more populated regions of Cuttleford House. I’d bought some time by faking my own death, and I’d spent some of it to good effect in my room-by-room tour of the place. Now I had all the data I was likely to get, and I had things figured out.

  Well, almost figured out.

  Sort of.

  And now it seemed to me that timing was critical. I didn’t want to make my move too early, nor did I want to leave it too late. After breakfast, say, but before they’d all scattered to different parts of the house. And certainly before anyone could take it into his head to leave.

  Tricky.

  So I kept glancing at my watch, and an ineffectual gesture it was, since I couldn’t have told you what time I was waiting for it to be. And then, just sitting there like that, it became evident to me that I wasn’t going to be able to allow myself the relative luxury of waiting until it was time to leave.

  I needed to go to the bathroom.

  Well, it happens, for God’s sake. It never happens in Agatha Christie’s books, and I can’t recall it ever posing a problem for an earthy guy like Philip Marlowe, either, but that’s not a whole lot of consolation when the necessity arises.

  It had arisen before, you’re probably thinking, and I dealt with it, if not elegantly, at least effectively. Couldn’t I just do again as I did before? And, preferably, without talking about it?

  Believe me, I’d just as soon not talk about it. And, not to put too fine a point on it, let me just state that the function I needed to perform was different in kind from the previous instance, and that the shoe-and-window number simply would not do at all.

  I’ve thought about this since, and it seems to me that one’s behavior in such a situation varies with the direness of one’s circumstances. If I’d been hiding from the Nazis in war-torn Belgium, say, I’d have fouled my nest and learned to live with it. But I just wasn’t that desperate. I didn’t know who might be lurking in the hallway outside my door, but I could be fairly sure it wasn’t the Gestapo.

  I eased the door open a crack and took a look-see. I couldn’t spot anybody, and the only sounds of human activity I could make out were a floor away. I opened the door a little farther and scanned the long hall. I caught a trace of movement out of the corner of my eye, and that might have inspired more in the way of reconnaissance at a less urgent moment, but I couldn’t wait. I rushed down the hall to the bathroom, darted inside, and, well, let’s for God’s sake draw the curtain on the next several moments, shall we?

  Thanks. I feel better already.

  I’d closed the bedroom door when I left it, but of course I hadn’t wasted time locking it, so I didn’t have to waste time unlocking it on my return. I slipped inside, heaved a great sigh, and slid the bolt across. Then I sat down once again on the edge of the bed and tried to remember what I’d been thinking about before Nature had called.

  Timing, that was part of it. And some of the details about the string of murders. A thought came along and I frowned at it, trying to pin it down and think it through. I was getting somewhere in the old ratiocination process, it seemed to me, a
nd then Raffles brushed against my ankle and began purring, and my train of thought was shunted off on a sidetrack.

  I patted my lap, a clear invitation for him to spring up, but he didn’t seem to notice. His purring picked up in volume, and he was really busy rubbing his head against my ankles, which meant either that he was damned glad to see me or that his ear itched and this was the best way he could think of to scratch it.

  Of course, I thought, the two possibilities were not mutually exclusive. He could have an itching ear and still entertain a feeling of abiding affection for the chap who kept him in Meow Mix. For my part, I was pleased to discover that I was glad to see him. So I reached down and scooped him up and plopped him down on my lap, where he continued to purr up a storm.

  “Good old Raffles,” I said aloud, and gave him a scratch behind the ear. “Didn’t see much of you last night. How’d you get through the hours?”

  He didn’t answer, but then he never does. But I went on looking at him and petting him, and another far more unsettling question came to me.

  How the hell did he get in the room?

  He would have had to come in while I was in the john down the hall. Because he certainly hadn’t been in the room before then, and here he was, big as life.

  But how did he do it?

  Simple—he followed me home. He was in the hallway when I finished up in the bathroom. I hadn’t noticed him because I wasn’t looking at the floor when I scanned the area, being on the lookout for a taller specimen.

  Could he have done that? Scooted in right behind me without my noticing?

  No, I decided. I would have noticed.

  He couldn’t have managed it when I first eased the door open a crack, either, or when I let myself out. And then I’d closed the door.