The Burglar in the Library Read online

  “You don’t, eh, Rhodenbarr? Well, what do I care what you think? I don’t know who picked you to be the head wallaby in this kangaroo court, but I don’t have to listen to any more of it. The cook’s dead, our room’s drafty, and I’m not having a good time. And I don’t particularly appreciate being tagged as a murderer. The only crime I’ve ever committed was ignoring a couple of overdue parking tickets. Oh, and I jaywalked a few times, and years ago I tore off that little tag on the mattress that you’re not supposed to remove, though I’ve never been able to figure out why. But aside from that—”

  “What about the bearer bonds?”

  That stopped him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he managed, sounding about as convincing as if he’d said he never inhaled.

  “You’ve got an envelope full of them in your suitcase,” I said. “I didn’t have time to count them carefully, but the total runs to a few million dollars. It’s a nice little nest egg to start married life.”

  Lettice looked horror-struck. “Bearer bonds,” she said. “What bearer bonds? Where did they come from?”

  She may have meant the question for her husband, but I answered when he didn’t. “From your employer,” I said. “I’m afraid that’s why Dakin came along looking to sweep you off your feet. You provided him with access to the back rooms of the brokerage house you worked for, and it didn’t take him long to find something to steal.”

  “But that’s crazy,” she said. “I know what bonds you’re talking about. They were in the safe in Mr. Sternhagen’s office. If they turn up missing right after I go away on my honeymoon, I’m the first person the police would look for.” She turned to her husband. “How could you do it?” she asked him. “What made you think you could get away with it?”

  “You were planning a honeymoon in Aruba,” I said. “Isn’t that what you told me?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I think you were supposed to have an accident in Aruba,” I told her. “A mishap while swimming or boating, say. And your bereaved husband, traveling under a different name and carrying a different passport, would have returned to the States alone, perhaps stopping off in the Caymans to deposit funds in an offshore account. The authorities would be looking for you, all right, but you’d be dead and your husband would have ceased to exist.”

  “That’s absolutely crazy,” Littlefield said. “You know how I feel about you, Lettice.”

  “Do I?”

  “Of course you do. The bonds were to give us a good start in our life together, and—”

  “A good start! Eight million dollars is more than a good start.”

  “Call it a start and a retirement fund all in one,” he said. “It would be a cinch for us to change identities in Aruba and go someplace together where they’d never find us. And it’ll still be easy, once we get out of here.”

  “When were you planning on telling her, Littlefield?”

  “When we got to Aruba.” He turned to her. “I wanted to make it easy for you to act natural on the plane. As soon as we got there, I was planning to tell you everything.”

  “But you didn’t go to Aruba,” I said. “You let her talk you into coming here.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “and don’t ask me why. There’s people knocking each other off left and right, and I’m the one who winds up getting accused of murder.”

  “You didn’t want to come here when I first mentioned it,” Lettice remembered, “and then you decided you liked the idea.”

  “I saw how much it meant to you.”

  “It didn’t mean that much to me. I thought it would be a lark, that’s all. And I said since we already had reservations in Aruba maybe we should go, and you said—”

  “Jesus,” he said, “I just wanted to make you happy.”

  “You thought you could hide out better here than you could in Aruba,” I cut in. “Especially if you didn’t bother to cancel the reservations. By the time the authorities figured out that you never boarded the plane, you’d have had a chance to cover your tracks pretty thoroughly. You’d stay here a few days until the trail got cold, and then you’d head on out. It wasn’t a bad idea, but you picked the wrong place to come to.”

  “We all did,” he said with feeling. “Why anyone would want to stay at this pesthole is beyond me.”

  There was a cry from Cissie Eglantine, hardly the sort of utterance one had come to expect from Earlene, but expressive all the same.

  “I liked the place just fine myself,” I said, “until people started dropping like flies. But the minute you got here, everything went haywire.”

  “Why?” the colonel wondered. “I’m not surprised this chap’s a thief. I thought him a bad hat and supposed he lived off women. He has that air about him.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Littlefield said.

  “But what was the connection between him and the other two, Rathburn and Wolpert? Why should his arrival put the match to the powder keg?”

  “They must have all three been in on it,” Miss Dinmont said. “Conspiring together, thick as thieves.”

  “That’s crap,” Littlefield said. “I never met either of those birds before in my life.”

  The colonel cleared his throat. “And we’re to take your word for that, eh, sir?”

  “I’ll take his word,” I said. “Whatever his plans might have been for after he left Cuttleford House, Littlefield came here planning nothing more than a quiet honeymoon weekend. But he walked right into the kind of coincidence that’s evidently damn near inescapable in English country houses.”

  I glanced at Lettice. “Coming here was Mrs. Littlefield’s idea. She’d heard that there had been a late cancellation. She called, and she learned that there had indeed been a party who’d called to cancel, and she got the room.”

  “So?”

  “But I hadn’t canceled,” I said.

  “You?”

  “There was a point where I thought I would have to cancel,” I said, “but things worked out after all. I mentioned something to somebody, and word got to Mrs. Littlefield through the grapevine. You know how things get around.”

  I hurried on, before it occurred to them to wonder how a bit of news could find its way from my lips to Lettice’s ears. “Here’s the point—someone else did call up to cancel, just in time for the Littlefields to get his room.”

  “Cousin Beatrice’s Room,” Cissie said. “And a gentleman did call. I don’t know why I can’t remember his name.”

  “Pettisham.”

  “That’s it,” she said. “I remember he had an accent, and I thought that was odd, because the name is very English, isn’t it? Or at least it sounds English, although I don’t know that I’ve ever actually known anyone named Pettisham. Petty, certainly, and Pettibone, but not Pettisham.”

  “Pettibone’s definitely an English name, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, I would say so,” Nigel told me. “An old name, too. I’d guess there was a Pettibone came over with the Conqueror.”

  “That would figure,” I said, “because the name’s an anglicization of the French. It combines two French words, petit and bon.”

  “Small and good,” Mrs. Colibri translated. “Do you suppose the implication is that good things come in small packages?”

  I glanced at Carolyn, who beamed at the very notion. “Pettisham’s been anglicized, too,” I said, “although I don’t know that there were any Pettishams among William’s troops at Hastings.”

  “It would be possible to find out,” the colonel offered.

  I told him I didn’t think we had to go back that far. “My guess is that it’s a much more recent name,” I said, “and that the two words it combines are petit and champ.”

  “Small champion,” Carolyn said.

  “Small plot of land,” Mrs. Colibri corrected. “Or, you know, like a field or meadow.”

  “Sounds like the name of a smallholder or yeoman,” the colonel said. “And thus not terribly likely to have been one of the Conqueror’s Norman knigh
ts.”

  “That’s some coincidence,” Littlefield said. “Not only did we call for a reservation, but the guy who canceled didn’t cross the Channel with the bastard king of England. What do you figure the odds would be on something like that?”

  “The coincidence,” I said, “is that you both had the same last name.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Pettisham,” I said. “Petit champ. Small plot of land. Little field.”

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “The first time I met Gordon Wolpert, he got to talking about malt whisky. There were a lot of distilleries, he told me, although he’d always supposed it was a small field. That was the phrase he picked, though it didn’t fit the conversation that well, and he bore down on it, too, to stress it. Then he went on and used the phrase ‘a petty sham,’ and looked disappointed when I failed to react to it. When Pettisham called and canceled his booking, Mrs. Eglantine got the chart of room assignments and crossed out his name. A few hours later she wrote ‘Littlefield’ in the same space.”

  “Who was Pettisham?” Millicent wanted to know.

  “Cissie says he sounded foreign,” I said, “and he was certainly mixed up in some sort of foreign intrigue. I don’t know whether he was actually an agent of a foreign power, and I couldn’t say whether he was buying or selling, and whether the transaction involved secrets or valuables. The two men who could tell us are both dead.”

  “Rathburn and Wolpert,” Carolyn said.

  “That’s right. They were both waiting for him to turn up. Rathburn was keeping an eye on everybody and I guess Wolpert was keeping an eye on Rathburn. And then Dakin Littlefield arrived, with a glamorous companion and an arrogant manner and a guilty secret, and they both took action. Wolpert wasn’t sure how he was going to handle things, but he knew he didn’t want anyone getting away before he made his move. So he cut the ropes and dumped the bridge in the gully.”

  “And Rathburn?”

  “Made an approach to Littlefield. He was always scribbling away, so my guess would be he wrote out a note and passed it to you in the hallway.”

  “He slipped it under the bedroom door,” Lettice said.

  “I never saw any note,” her husband said.

  “Don’t you remember? There was a folded sheet of yellow paper under our door when we went to the room. You picked it up and read it, and when I asked you what it was you said it was nothing.”

  “Oh, that. Well, it was nothing. I couldn’t make head or tail out of it. Looking back, I guess this guy did have me mixed up with somebody else. I just thought he was a crank, or he stuck his little love note under the wrong door. So I crumpled it up and forgot about it.”

  “You turned pale,” Lettice said.

  “Because you thought he knew something,” I put in. “You had eight million dollars’ worth of negotiable bonds in your possession, and just when you thought you were free and clear somebody slips you a cryptic note demanding a secret meeting in the middle of the night. You couldn’t say anything to your wife, and you couldn’t just ignore the note. You had to meet him.”

  “Not to harm him,” Littlefield said. “Just to find out what he knew, and to tell him he was barking up the wrong tree. The room was pitch dark when I got there. I figured it was empty. I started to switch on a light and a voice told me to leave it dark.”

  “And?”

  “And I wound up sitting in a chair next to his. I guess there was something Pettisham was supposed to turn over to him, but all I could make out at the time was that he wanted something from me, and I figured that meant the bonds. I wasn’t about to give them up to some joker I couldn’t even see. But I never meant to kill him.”

  “Why else would you brain him with the camel?”

  “I didn’t know it was a camel.”

  “With a hump like that? What did you think it was, the hunchback of Notre Dame?”

  “I didn’t even see it,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, it was darker than the inside of a cow. I just grabbed the first thing I touched and clocked him with it.”

  “If you’d grabbed the pillow instead of the camel,” I said, “poor Rathburn would be alive today. How’s that for rotten luck?”

  “I just wanted to stun him,” Littlefield said. “You know, to knock him out. I figured I could tie him up and stick him in a closet where nobody’d find him until we had a chance to get out of here.”

  “And then you smothered him with the pillow.”

  “There was some blood on his face. I used the pillow to sponge it off.”

  “Very considerate of you.”

  “And I guess I held it there too long. Or maybe he was already dead from the blow to the head. Or maybe—”

  “Yes?”

  “You want to know what I think, Rhodenbarr? I bet he had a heart attack before I ever touched him with the camel. See, that would explain how I hit him on the back of the head, even though I was aiming at his forehead. He must have been pitching forward, and I hit him after he’d croaked.”

  I looked at my watch. I had to admit the heart-attack notion showed a resourceful imagination, but if he could even try on a line like that it was a waste of time letting him talk. Right now, though, wasting time wasn’t a bad idea.

  “What about the pinpoint hemorrhages?” the colonel demanded, wasting some time himself. “Don’t they prove the man was smothered?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” Littlefield said. “I’m not a doctor, but then neither is anybody else in the room. Maybe there’s more than one way to get those pinpoint hemorrhages.”

  “Entirely possible,” I agreed. “Maybe they’re a natural consequence of the synergistic effect of getting crowned with a camel seconds after you’ve died of a heart attack. What about Wolpert?”

  “Wolpert?”

  “The second man you killed.”

  “Didn’t I already explain how that was suicide? First time around I thought it was Rathburn’s death he was feeling guilty about—”

  “But it couldn’t have been, because you’re the one who killed Rathburn.”

  “Well, I was there when he died. I’ll admit that much, although I still think it was a heart attack that finished him. What Wolpert was feeling guilty about was cutting the bridge ropes so that the boy genius did his Wile E. Coyote impression and tried to walk on air.”

  “And he tried to hang himself, then wandered outside and died of shock and exposure.”

  “You got it. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “I’ll tell you what happened,” I said. “Gordon Wolpert never had any doubt what happened to Rathburn. He kept it to himself and bided his time before he made his pitch to you. What did he want? The same thing Rathburn was after?”

  “If he was planning anything, he never followed through with it. There were a couple of times I noticed him giving me the eye, as if he wanted to tell me something, but he never got around to it. And then the next thing I knew he was out there on the third lawn chair this morning, dead as a doornail.”

  I looked at my watch again. Where were they when you wanted them?

  “I saw you,” Millicent Savage said suddenly.

  “Huh?”

  “Talking to Mr. Wolpert,” the little darling insisted. “And you said something about meeting him later. I heard you say it.”

  “That’s crap,” he said, disgusted. “There was nobody within earshot.” He realized what he’d said, then made a face and shrugged and gave up. “Oh, the hell with it,” he said. “I could spin it out a little more, but what’s the point? I thought we could work something out, like you’d all go along with it for a share of the bonds, but there’s too many of you and somebody’d be sure to hold out. Anyway, why share? I don’t have to share.”

  And he pulled out a gun.

  Don’t ask me what kind of gun it was. Guns make me nervous—people keep them in drawers so that they can shoot burglars with them, and I’m opposed to that—so I’ve never taken the trouble to learn anyth
ing much about them. I could tell that this one was an automatic, not a revolver, and that was about all I could tell. I could also tell that it was big (though probably not as big as it looked) and that it was pointed at me.

  “Nobody move,” Littlefield said.

  Nobody did.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I killed them both, and I don’t know why you had to make a federal case out of it, because they both asked for it. Rathburn thought I was somebody else, and I couldn’t manage to stall the son of a bitch. I didn’t mean to kill him, not at first, but then when I switched a light on and saw him lying there I got a look at the library steps and saw how easy it would be to make it look like an accident. But that would only work if he was dead, so I picked up the pillow and put him out of my misery.”

  “And Wolpert?”

  “He knew I’d killed Rathburn. I don’t think he even knew what it was Rathburn wanted from the guy who never showed up, but he saw an opportunity to do himself some good by putting the squeeze on me. I tried fencing with him, but the little bastard was pretty slick. Before I knew it he’d managed to worm out of me that I had a briefcase full of stolen bonds, and he was all set to cut himself in.”

  “Until you cut him out instead.”

  “I lost my temper,” he said. “That’s the same thing that happened with Rathburn, when you come right down to it.”

  “But you didn’t grab a camel this time around.”

  “What I grabbed was his necktie,” he said. “Grabbed one end of it in each hand and pulled until his face got purple. I couldn’t figure out what to do with him, so I took him outside and parked him on a lawn chair and threw a sheet over him. I didn’t figure anyone would notice.”

  “You didn’t figure anyone would notice?”

  “Well, maybe I wasn’t thinking too clearly. It was late and I’d had a hell of a day, plus I’d helped myself to a couple of glasses of that Drum stuff. And I didn’t write it down in the book, either, Nigel. I’m afraid your honor system doesn’t work too well with guys like me.” He gestured sharply with the gun. “Hold it right there, Colonel. That’s as close as you get if you don’t want a bullet.”