The Burglar in the Library Read online

  There was a long silence. Then Nigel said, “I say,” and I realized they were all staring at me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “It just seemed so decisive, putting it that way. You know what’s been wrong with this whole bloody business from the start? It’s too English.”

  “Too English?”

  “Too polite, too soft-spoken, too cozy for words. Of course Cissie keeps wanting the murderer to turn out to be a passing tramp. The alternative is to believe one of us did the dirty deed, and we’re all such jolly decent people it’s quite inconceivable. And I’ve been investigating the murders in the same decent earnest English manner, first trying to play Poirot and then turning amateur sleuth, asking dopey questions and looking for motives and probing alibis as if that’s going to tell me anything.”

  “And it’s not?”

  “No, because this isn’t a cozy little English murder case at all. It’s tough and hardboiled, and it’s not going to be solved by pussyfooting around like Miss Jane Marple or Lord Peter Wimsey. This is Philip Marlowe’s kind of caper.”

  “Philip Marlowe?” the colonel said. “Don’t believe I know the name.”

  “He was Raymond Chandler’s detective,” I said, “and he knew about mean streets, and that’s what we’ve got here in this house once you peel the veneer away. We may be miles away from any streets, mean or otherwise, but it all amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know, Bern,” Carolyn said. “Look at the murder weapons—a camel and a pillow to start with, and sugar in a gas tank and a dagger with a wavy blade. In Philip Marlowe’s cases they mostly just shot each other, didn’t they?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And he’d get hit over the head and fall down a flight of stairs. Nobody’s been shot, and nobody fell down a flight of stairs unless you count the library steps. The way things are going, I wouldn’t be surprised if the next person to die gets murdered with tropical fish, and you know what Chandler had to say about that.”

  “That’s all peripheral,” I said. “When you get to what really happened, it’s straightforward and it’s brutal. And there’s not a single tropical fish in it.”

  “Jonathan Rathburn,” I said. “He came here by himself, took up residence in Young George’s Room, and began behaving like a man with something on his mind. He scribbled away in a notebook and sat around writing letters that nobody ever saw. And he stared at people. Someone mentioned noticing him staring oddly at Leona Savage, but it wasn’t because they were long-lost lovers or twins separated at birth. Rathburn stared probingly at just about everybody, at one time or another.”

  “I just assumed he was interested in people,” Cissie Eglantine said.

  “There was another guest who was interested in people, too,” I said. “Gordon Wolpert. He was very different from Rathburn, tweedy and mousy where Rathburn was brooding and flamboyant. But he too came here alone, and he was a keen observer of his fellow guests, and he liked a bit of gossip, too.”

  “That’s true,” Miss Hardesty recalled. “He had a lot of questions about everybody, and he’d make dry comments.”

  “Pleasant enough fellow, though,” the colonel put in. “Seemed a decent chap.”

  “But he was a picky eater,” I said. “Isn’t that so, Mr. Quilp?”

  “He picked at his food,” Rufus Quilp agreed. “Pushed it around on his plate.”

  I looked to Molly Cobbett for confirmation. “He never ate much,” she said. “He would always say the food was good, but his plate would be half full when I brought it back to the kitchen. It bothered Cook some.”

  “It bothered me,” Quilp said. “I never trust a picky eater.”

  “Well, the man’s dead,” Greg Savage said, “so I think we can forgive him his lack of appetite. Maybe he was just watching his weight.”

  “But he was slender,” Leona said.

  “Well, honey, maybe that’s how he stayed slender. By resisting the temptation to eat like a horse.”

  “He wasn’t resisting temptation,” Quilp insisted. “He wasn’t tempted. The man simply did not care about food.”

  “Maybe there’s something intrinsically suspicious about a lack of appetite,” I said, “and maybe there isn’t. I couldn’t tell you one way or the other. What got my attention wasn’t that Gordon Wolpert would never qualify for the Clean Plate Club. I was more interested in the fact that he lied about it.”

  “What do you mean, Bern?”

  “You were there,” I told Carolyn. “I think it was the first conversation we had with him. Wolpert said he’d extended his stay at Cuttleford House and might extend it again, because the food was so good. He even patted his stomach and made some remark about his waistline.”

  “Maybe he was anorexic,” Millicent suggested. “I saw a program about that. These girls were starving themselves, but they thought they were fat.”

  “Somehow,” I said, “I don’t think he fits the profile. Anorexia’s pretty scarce in middle-aged males. No, I think there’s a basic principle involved. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but whenever a politician answers a question that you haven’t asked, he’s lying. Gordon Wolpert was doing essentially the same thing. He was staying on longer than he’d planned at Cuttleford House, and he was offering an explanation when none was required. And the explanation was untrue—the food wasn’t what was keeping him here. That meant something else was, and it was something he wanted to conceal.”

  “Brilliant,” Dakin Littlefield said dryly. “Only it’s a shame you didn’t ask him for an explanation before somebody tied a knot in his neck.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” I told him. “I did what amateur sleuths always do—I waited until I could be absolutely certain. I suppose it has to be that way in the books, or otherwise they’d end on page seventy-eight. What I should have done was shoulder my way in and ask impertinent questions. But I didn’t, and somebody strangled him.”

  The colonel cleared his throat. “So it was Wolpert who aroused your suspicions,” he said.

  “Right,” I said. “I knew someone was sitting right here in this room with Jonathan Rathburn. I was on my way to bed and they were in here.”

  “You never mentioned that,” Nigel said.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “And you saw them in here?” Lettice said. “Well, don’t keep us in suspense, Bernie. Who was it?”

  “The lights were out,” I said, “and it was pitch dark inside, so I didn’t see anybody. I could hear that there was a conversation going on, but it was too low-pitched to identify the speakers, and of course I didn’t want to eavesdrop.”

  “I wouldn’t have been able to resist,” Lettice admitted. “Didn’t you hear even a tiny bit, Bernie?”

  “Not a word, and I didn’t hang around long. I was tired, and I’d had that wee dram of the Drumnadrochit. Besides, I was being well-bred and English, and it wouldn’t have been the proper thing to do. But it’s a pity I didn’t listen a little more closely, or just waltz right in and turn on a light. I might have prevented a murder.”

  “Or watched it take place,” Miss Dinmont said with a little gasp. “If you’d walked in just as the murderer was swinging the camel—”

  She broke off, all atremble at the horror of the idea.

  “It would have been awkward,” I agreed, “but it never happened, and what did happen here at Cuttleford House this weekend has been awkward enough. What did we start out with? A perfectly delightful English country house—”

  “It’s nice of you to say so,” Cissie murmured.

  “—with a full complement of congenial if slightly dotty guests.”

  This brought a harrumph from the colonel.

  “Two men seemed out of place,” I went on. “Rathburn, with his penetrating stares and his furious bouts of scribbling, and Wolpert, at once praising the food and pushing it around on his plate. A picky eater, as Mr. Quilp has labeled him, and not to be trusted. My first thought was that one of them killed the other.”


  “Mr. Wolpert killed Mr. Rathburn,” Cissie said.

  “Well, it could hardly have been the other way around,” her husband pointed out.

  “That was my thought,” I said, “but I couldn’t be sure. I knew how Rathburn was killed—the camel and the pillow—and I knew why, but—”

  “Why?” Carolyn demanded.

  “To keep him quiet,” I said. “He came here looking for somebody and he knew something, and he was a threat to somebody with a secret. I figured Wolpert had a secret, or why would he be disguising his reason for lingering here? So it seemed logical to guess that Rathburn had stumbled on the secret, or ferreted it out, and Wolpert killed him to keep his secret safe.”

  “You know,” Dakin Littlefield said, “I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but I’ve got to hand it to you. It sounds to me as though you’ve got it cracked. Wolpert’s the killer.”

  “But Wolpert’s been killed himself,” Leona Savage objected.

  “But was it murder?”

  “What else could it have been?”

  “Suicide,” Littlefield said. “Are you with me in this, Rhodenbarr? Wolpert kills Rathburn to keep his mouth shut—and incidentally, did you happen to find out what secret Rathburn had picked up on? I assume there was more to it than Wolpert’s lack of appetite.”

  “I assume so too,” I said, “and I thought I might find a hint in Rathburn’s room. After all, he spent all his waking hours writing notes and letters. But either he found a great hiding place for them or the killer scooped them up before I got there.”

  “So the secret died with Rathburn,” Littlefield said. “Well, what difference does it make, anyway? Rathburn knew something and Wolpert wanted to keep it dark, so he killed the fellow. In the ordinary course of things he’d have checked out the next morning and gone on home, but the bridge was out and he couldn’t get away. Eventually remorse overtook him, and he probably realized he’d be caught sooner or later. Who knows what goes on inside a man’s mind?”

  “Who indeed?”

  “So he did himself in,” he said. “Took the easy way out and did the Dutch act.”

  “But there were marks on his neck,” somebody pointed out. “A sign that he’d been strangled.”

  “Or tried to hang himself,” Littlefield said. “You know how people who slash their wrists have hesitation marks, little cuts they make while they’re getting up their nerve? It seems to me you’d have the same thing if you were trying to work up the courage to hang yourself. Say you stood on a chair with a rope around your neck, and before you kicked the chair away you bent your knees, just to get an idea of what it was going to feel like. The noose tightens, you realize this isn’t gonna be much fun, so you decide it’s simpler to live. But by that time you’ve already got rope burns on your neck, or strangulation marks, or whatever you want to call it.”

  “Then what killed him?” Carolyn wanted to know. “He wound up parked on the lawn chair next to Rathburn and the cook. How did he get there and what did he die of?”

  “He still wanted to kill himself,” Littlefield said, “even after he lost his nerve with the rope trick. He went out back and sat down in the chair next to the man he killed.”

  “If memory serves,” the colonel said, “the cook was in the middle chair, with Wolpert and Rathburn on either side.”

  “What difference does it make? He probably killed her, too. Or she died of depression because he didn’t finish his dinner, and he felt responsible for depriving the rest of us of decent meals. Whatever it was, he pulled a blanket over himself and died.”

  “Of what?”

  “Search me,” Littlefield said. “My guess is he had a snootful before he tried to hang himself. He probably had a couple more pops by the time he went out and sat next to the other two stiffs. Wouldn’t have been a stretch for him to doze off and die of exposure.”

  “It happens all the time,” I agreed.

  “Or maybe he took poison. Wasn’t he the one who knew all about which mushrooms would kill you? I don’t think he ran around gathering mushrooms under the snow, but he probably knew a few other things you could take if you wanted to go to sleep and never wake up. He probably used poison to kill the cook, and he had a dose left and took it himself.” He shrugged. “When you come right down to it, what difference does it make? He killed a man and he’s dead himself now, and if we could just find a way out of here we could all go home.”

  “Wouldn’t that be nice,” I said.

  “Damn right it would,” Littlefield said, “and I’m about ready to take a shot at it. The sun’s up and the snow’s not falling, so I think it’s time Lettice and I hit the road. Not that it hasn’t been fun, but—”

  “Orris!”

  It was Earlene Cobbett who cried out the lad’s name, and by the tone and volume you’d have thought he’d risen from the dead and lurched into the library. The whole room went dead silent as we all stared at Earlene, who had the grace to blush behind her freckles.

  “For God’s sake,” Littlefield said, “give it a rest, will you? It’s pretty obvious your cousin was boinking you, and I guess you wound up with a cake in the oven, but all that wailing just gets on people’s nerves. It’s not going to bring him back, and he probably wouldn’t marry you anyway, but the kid’ll have his father’s name all the same. That’s the advantage of incest, plus it cuts down on small talk.” Another cry, this one wordless, issued from Earlene. “Hey, c’mon,” Littlefield said. “Can’t you do something, Eglantine? Fire her and send her home, say.”

  If Littlefield was trying to win friends, he was going about it the wrong way. The men frowned their disapproval, while the women glared murderously at him. He looked around, shrugged. “Bunch of bleeding hearts,” he said. “I give up. Scream your guts out, honey. Live a little.”

  “All Earlene is trying to say,” I said, “is that we mustn’t forget Orris. Isn’t that right, Earlene?” She nodded furiously. “And her point is a good one. Because there are a few elements your theory doesn’t cover, Littlefield.”

  “Like what? The kid in the gully? Hey, he wasn’t too swift. The bridge went and he went with it. It’s a shame, but what’s it got to do with Wolpert killing Rathburn?”

  “Why did the bridge go?”

  “According to you, somebody sabotaged it. Cut part of the way through the ropes.”

  “Why would somebody do that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “To kill Orris? It seems like a dumb way to go about it. Look, Rhodenbarr, I know it’s tempting to see foul play everywhere you look, but don’t you think it was possible those ropes just snapped of old age or something? Maybe they were ready to go for a while now, and the kid just had some bad luck.”

  “So Wolpert killed Rathburn and the cook and then took his own life,” I said. “And Orris’s death was accidental.”

  “Have you got a problem with that? Because I have to tell you it sounds reasonable to me.”

  “Well,” I said, “I might have a slight problem with it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Here’s how it looks to me,” I said. “As Cuttleford House settled in for a long winter weekend, there were two men in residence with a hidden agenda. The snow began falling. And, late in the evening, two more guests arrived to complete the party.”

  “The Littlefields,” Nigel said.

  “Lettice and Dakin,” I said, “pressing onward in spite of the worst winter storm in memory. The two of you were the last people to cross the bridge.”

  “Lucky us,” Littlefield said.

  “A couple of hours later,” I went on, “Rathburn was dead, bludgeoned and smothered.”

  “By Wolpert.”

  I let it pass. “A few hours after that, Molly discovered the body and raised the alarm, uttering the well-known Cobbett scream. We all came on the run, and when Nigel tried to call the police, the phone was dead.”

  “Because somebody cut the wires.”

  “We didn’t establish that until later,” I s
aid. “It wasn’t until after Orris’s death that Nigel walked around the house and determined that the phone wires had been cut. So it’s not inconceivable that the storm had knocked out the phones, and the wires weren’t cut until later. But it’s far-fetched, and it would seem more likely that the phone wires had already been cut by the time Jonathan Rathburn’s body was discovered.”

  That made sense to everyone.

  “The next thing that happened,” I said, “was that the snowblower wouldn’t work. It was presumably sabotaged, possibly with sugar in the gas tank. And the next thing that happened was the collapse of the bridge, spilling Orris into the gully and taking his life.”

  There was a small cry from Earlene, ignored by all.

  “Someone severed the phone wires,” I said. “Someone sugared the snowblower. Someone cut the bridge supports. And until we know who did each of those things, we haven’t solved the puzzle.”

  “Wolpert,” Littlefield said.

  “Gordon Wolpert?”

  “Why not? He’s the villain here. If he was desperate enough to beat a guy’s brains out with a bronze camel, I don’t suppose he’d draw the line at yanking out a couple of telephone wires.”

  “But when would he do it?” I wondered. “And why?”

  “Why cut the wires? There’s a no-brainer. To keep the cops from being called.”

  “So that they couldn’t investigate,” I said.

  “Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “Does it?” I frowned. “Maybe. Let’s let it go for a moment. What about the snowblower? Why sabotage it?”

  “So that What’s-his-face couldn’t clear the path and the driveway.”

  “Why would he want to prevent that?”

  “Same answer. To keep the cops from coming.”

  “But why would they even try to come?”

  He rolled his eyes. “You know, Rhodenbarr,” he said, “you made more sense when you were dead in the gully. The cops’d come because there was a dead man in the library.”

  “But the phones were out, so how would they know about Rathburn?”

  “For all he knew,” Littlefield said, “somebody here had a cell phone. I’ll grant you the snowblower bit was kind of lame, especially if he’d already knocked out the bridge. But maybe Wolpert was the kind of bird who’d wear a belt and suspenders. He wasn’t taking any chances.”