The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling Read online

  “There’s another muffin, Bernie.”

  “Thanks.” I took it, buttered it. “It’s all tied into the moral decline of the nation,” I said. “Lottery tickets. Off-track betting. Gambling casinos in Atlantic City. Can you tell me what in the hell a thirty-percent chance of rain means? What do I do, carry a third of an umbrella?”

  “Here comes the news, Bernie.”

  I ate my muffin and sipped my coffee and listened to the news. My reaction to the weather report notwithstanding, I felt pretty good. My sleep had been deep and uninterrupted, and Carolyn’s morning coffee, unadulterated with chicory or knockout drops, had my eyes all the way open.

  So I sat wide-eyed and heard how I’d gained access to the house on Sixty-sixth Street via the fire escape, first visiting the fourth-floor apartment of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Blinn, where I’d stolen an undisclosed sum of money, a diamond bracelet, a Piaget wristwatch, several miscellaneous pieces of jewelry, and a full-length Russian sable coat. I’d descended a flight to 3-D, where Madeleine Porlock had interrupted my larcenous labors, only to be shot dead with a .32-caliber automatic for her troubles. I’d left the gun behind, escaping with my loot, scampering down the fire escape moments before the police arrived on the scene.

  When the announcer moved on to other topics I switched him off. Carolyn had a funny expression on her face. I reached into my pants pocket and came up with the bracelet, plopping it down on the table in front of her. She turned it in her hand so that light glinted off the stones.

  “Pretty,” she said. “What’s it worth?”

  “I could probably get a few hundred for it. Art Deco’s the rage these days. But I just took it because I liked the looks of it.”

  “Uh-huh. What did the coat look like?”

  “I never even looked in the closets. Oh, you thought—” I shook my head. “More evidence of the moral decline of the nation,” I said. “All I took was the cash and the bracelet, Carolyn. The rest was a little insurance scam the Blinns decided to work.”

  “You mean—”

  “I mean they decided they’ve been paying premiums all these years, so why not take advantage of the burglary they’ve been waiting for? A coat, a watch, some miscellaneous jewelry, and of course they’ll report a higher cash loss than they actually sustained, and even if the insurance company chisels a little, they’ll wind up four or five grand to the good.”

  “Jesus,” she said. “Everybody’s a crook.”

  “Not quite,” I said. “But sometimes it seems that way.”

  I made up the bed while she did up the breakfast dishes. Then we sat down with the last of the coffee and tried to figure out where to start. There seemed to be two loose ends we could pick at, Madeleine Porlock and J. Rudyard Whelkin.

  “If we knew where he was,” I said, “we might be able to get somewhere.”

  “We already know where she is.”

  “But we don’t know who she is. Or was. I wish I had my wallet. I had his card. His address was somewhere in the East Thirties but I don’t remember the street or the number.”

  “That makes it tough.”

  “You’d think I’d remember the phone number. I dialed it enough yesterday.” I picked up the phone, dialed the first three numbers hoping the rest would come to me, then gave up and cradled the phone. The phone book didn’t have him and neither did the Information operator. There was an M. Porlock in the book, though, and for no particular reason I dialed the listed number. It rang a few times and I hung up.

  “Maybe we should start with the Sikh,” Carolyn suggested.

  “We don’t even know his name.”

  “That’s a point.”

  “There ought to be something about her in the paper. The radio just gives you the surface stuff, but there ought to be something beyond that in the Times. Where she worked and if she was married, that kind of thing.”

  “And Whelkin belonged to the Martingale Club.”

  “True.”

  “So we’ve each got a place to start, Bernie. I’ll be back in a minute.” It was closer to ten minutes when she returned with both papers. She read the News while I read the Times. Then we switched.

  “Not a whole lot,” I said.

  “Something, though. Who do you want, Whelkin or Porlock?”

  “Don’t you have to trim a poodle or something?”

  “I’m taking Whelkin. You’ve got Porlock, Bernie. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I guess I’ll go over to his club. Maybe I can learn something that way.”

  “Maybe.”

  “How about you? You won’t leave the apartment, will you?”

  I shook my head. “I’ll see what I can find out over the phone.”

  “That sounds like a good idea.”

  “And maybe I’ll pray a little.”

  “To whom? St. Dismas?”

  “Wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Or the lost-objects guy, because we ought to see about getting that book back.”

  “Anthony of Padua.”

  “Right.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I was thinking more of St. Raymond Nonnatus. Patron saint of the falsely accused.”

  She looked at me. “You’re making this up.”

  “That’s a false accusation, Carolyn.”

  “You’re not making it up?”

  “Nope.”

  “There’s really a—”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, by all means,” she said. “Pray.”

  The phone started ringing minutes after she left the apartment. It rang five times and stopped. I picked up the Times and it started ringing again and rang twelve times before it quit. I read somewhere that it only takes a minute for a telephone to ring twelve times. I’ll tell you, it certainly seemed longer than that.

  I went back to the Times. The back-page story gave Madeleine Porlock’s age as forty-two and described her as a psychotherapist. The Daily News had given her age but didn’t tell what she did for a living. I tried to imagine her with a note pad and a faint Viennese accent, asking me about my dreams. Had she had an office elsewhere? The Victorian love seat was a far cry from the traditional analyst’s couch.

  Maybe Whelkin was her patient. He told her all about his scheme to gain possession of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow, and then she hypnotized him and got him to make the call to me, and then he got unhypnotized and killed her and took the book back, and…

  I called the Times, got through to someone in the city room. I explained I was Art Matlovich of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. We thought the Porlock woman might be a former resident of Cleveland, and did they have anything on her besides what they’d run in the paper?

  What they had was mostly negative. No information about next of kin. No clue as to where she’d lived before taking the Sixty-sixth Street apartment fourteen months ago. If she’d ever been in Cleveland, or even flown over the State of Ohio, they didn’t know anything about it.

  The same call to the News was about as unproductive. The man I talked to said he didn’t know where the Times got off calling Porlock a psychotherapist, that he had the impression she was somebody’s mistress, but that they weren’t really digging into it because all she was was the victim of an open-and-shut burglary turned homicide. “It’s not much of a story for us,” he said. “Only reason we played it at all is it’s the Upper East Side. See, that’s a posh neighborhood and all. I don’t know what the equivalent would be in Cleveland.”

  Neither did I, so I let it pass.

  “This Rhodenbarr,” the News man went on. “They’ll pick him up tomorrow or the next day and that’s the end of the story. No sex angle, nothing colorful like that. He’s just a burglar.”

  “Just a burglar,” I echoed.

  “Only this time he killed somebody. They’ll throw the key away on him this time. He’s a guy had his name in the papers before. In connection with homicide committed during a job he was pulling. Up to now he always managed to weasel out of it, but this time he’s g
ot his dick in the wringer.”

  “Don’t be too sure of that,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “I mean you never know,” I said quickly. “The way criminals manage to slip through cracks in the criminal-justice apparatus these days.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “You sound like you been writin’ our editorials.”

  I no sooner hung up the phone than it started ringing. I put up a fresh pot of coffee. The phone stopped ringing. I went over to it, about to make a call, and it rang again. I waited it out, then used it to call the police. This time I said I was Phil Urbanik of the Minneapolis Tribune. I was tired of Cleveland for the time being. I got bounced from one cop to another, spending a lot of time on Hold in the process, before I managed to establish that nobody around the squad-room knew more about Madeleine Porlock than that she was dead. The last cop I spoke with was sure of one other thing, too.

  “No question,” he said. “Rhodenbarr killed her. One bullet, close range, smack in the forehead. M.E.’s report says death was instantaneous, which you don’t have to be a doctor to tell. He left prints in both apartments.”

  “He must have been careless,” I suggested.

  “Getting old and sloppy. Losing his touch. Here’s a guy, his usual M.O.’s to wear rubber gloves with the palms cut out so he don’t leave a print anywhere.”

  “You know him?”

  “No, but I seen his sheet. You’d figure him to be pretty slick, plus he always stayed away from violence, and here he’s sloppy enough to leave prints and he went and killed a woman. You know what I figure? What I figure is drugs.”

  “He’s involved with drugs?”

  “I think he musta been high on them. You get hopped up and you’re capable of anything.”

  “How about the gun? Was it his?”

  “Maybe he found it there. We didn’t trace it yet. Could be the Porlock woman had it for protection. It wasn’t registered, but what does that mean? Maybe he stole it upstairs. The couple up there said no, but if it was an unregistered weapon they’d deny it. What’s your interest in the gun, anyway?”

  “Just making conversation.”

  “Minneapolis, you said?”

  “That’s right,” I said smoothly. “Well, I guess that gives us a good hometown angle on the story. All right to say you’re close to an arrest?”

  “Oh, we’ll get him,” he assured me. “A crook like Rhodenbarr’s a creature of habit. He’ll be what they call frequenting his old haunts and we’ll pick him up. Just a question of time.”

  I was standing behind the door when she opened it. She moved into the room saying my name.

  “Behind you,” I said, as gently as possible. She clapped her hand to her chest as if to keep her heart where it belonged.

  “Jesus,” she said. “Don’t do that.”

  “Sorry. I wasn’t sure it was you.”

  “Who else would it be?”

  “It could have been Randy.”

  “Randy,” she said heavily. Cats appeared and threaded figure eights around her ankles. “Randy. I don’t suppose she called, did she?”

  “She might have. It rang a lot but I wasn’t answering it.”

  “I know you weren’t. I called twice myself, and when you didn’t answer I figured you weren’t picking up the phone, but I also figured maybe you got cabin fever and went out, and then I came home and you weren’t here and all of a sudden you were behind me. Don’t do that again, huh?”

  “I won’t.”

  “I had a busy day. What time is it? Almost two? I’ve been running all over the place. I found out some stuff. What’s this?”

  “I want you to make a phone call for me.”

  She took the sheet of paper I handed her but looked at me instead. “Don’t you want to hear what I found out?”

  “In a minute. I want you to call the Times and insert the ad before they close.”

  “What ad?”

  “The one I just handed you. In the Personal column.”

  “You got some handwriting. You should have been a doctor, did anyone ever tell you that? ‘Space available on Kipling Society charter excursion to Fort Bucklow. Interested parties call 989-5440.’ That’s my number.”

  “No kidding.”

  “You’re going to put my number in the paper?”

  “Why not?”

  “Somebody’ll read it and come here.”

  “How? By crawling through the wires? The phone’s unlisted.”

  “No, it’s not. This place is a sublet, Bernie, so I kept the phone listed under Nathan Aranow. He’s the guy I sublet from. It’s like having an unlisted number except there’s no extra charge for the privilege, and whenever I get a call for a Nathan Aranow I know it’s some pest trying to sell me a subscription to something I don’t want. But it’s a listed number.”

  “So?”

  “So the address is in the book. Nathan Aranow, 64 Arbor Court, and the telephone number.”

  “So somebody could read the ad and then just go all the way through the phone book reading numbers until they came to this one, right, Carolyn?”

  “Oh. You can’t get the address from the number?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. I hope nobody does go through the book, because Aranow’s right in the front.”

  “Maybe they’ll start in the back.”

  “I hope so. This ad—”

  “A lot of people seem to be anxious to get their hands on this book,” I explained. “All different people, the way it looks to me. And only one of them knows I don’t have it. So if I give the impression that I do have it, maybe one or more of them will get in touch and I’ll be able to figure out what’s going on.”

  “Makes sense. Why didn’t you just place the ad yourself? Afraid somebody in the Times classified department would recognize your voice?”

  “No.”

  “And they’d say, ‘Aha, it’s Bernard G. Rhodenbarr the burglar, and let’s go through the telephone wires and take him into custody.’ My God, Bernie, you thought I was being paranoid about the number, and you’re afraid to make a phone call.”

  “They call back,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “When you place an ad with a phone number. To make sure it’s not a practical joke. And the phone was ringing constantly, and I wasn’t answering it, and I figured the Times would call to confirm the ad and how would I know it was them? Paranoia, I suppose, but it seemed easier to wait and let you make the call, although I’m beginning to wonder. You’ll place the ad for me, won’t you?”

  “Sure,” she said, and the phone rang as she was reaching for it.

  She picked it up, said, “Hello?” Then she said, “Listen, I can’t talk to you right now. Where are you and I’ll call you back.” Pause. “Company? No, of course not.” Pause. “I was at the shop. Oh. Well, I was in and out all day. One thing after another.” Pause. “Dammit, I can’t talk now, and—” She took the receiver from her ear and looked beseechingly at me. “She hung up,” she said.

  “Randy?”

  “Who else? She thought I had company.”

  “You do.”

  “Yeah, but she thought you were a woman.”

  “Must be my high-pitched voice.”

  “What do you mean? You didn’t say anything. Oh, I see. It’s a joke.”

  “It was trying to be one.”

  “Yeah, right.” She looked at the telephone receiver, shook her head at it, hung it up. “She called here all morning,” she said. “And called the store, too, and I was out, obviously, and now she thinks—” The corners of her mouth curled slowly into a wide grin. “How about that?” she said. “The bitch is jealous.”

  “Is that good?”

  “It’s terrific.” The phone rang again, and it was Randy. I tried not to pay too much attention to the conversation. It ended with Carolyn saying, “Oh, you demand to know who I’ve got over here? All right, I’ll tell you who I’ve got over here. I’ve got my aunt from Bath Beach over here. You thin
k you’re the only woman in Manhattan with a mythical aunt in Bath Beach?”

  She hung up, positively radiant. “Gimme the ad,” she said. “Quick, before she calls back. You wouldn’t believe how jealous she is.”

  She got the ad in, then answered the phone when they called back to confirm it. Then she was getting lunch on the table, setting out bread and cheese and opening a couple bottles of Amstel, when the phone rang again. “Randy,” she said. “I’m not getting it.”

  “Fine.”

  “You had this all morning, huh? The phone ringing like that?”

  “Maybe eight, ten times. That’s all.”

  “You find out anything about Madeleine Porlock?”

  I told her about the calls I’d made.

  “Not much,” she said.

  “Next to nothing.”

  “I learned a little about your friend Whelkin, but I don’t know what good it does. He’s not a member of the Martingale Club.”

  “Don’t be silly. I ate there with him.”

  “Uh-huh. The Martingale Club of New York maintains what they call reciprocity with a London club called Poindexter’s. Ever hear of it?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither. The dude at the Martingale said it as though it was a household word. The Martingale has reciprocity with three London clubs, he told me. White’s, Poindexter’s, and the Dolphin. I never heard of any of them.”

  “I think I heard of White’s.”

  “Anyhow, that’s how Whelkin got guest privileges. But I thought he was an American.”

  “I think he is. He has an accent that could be English, but I figured it was an affectation. Something he picked up at prep school, maybe.” I thought back to conversations we’d had. “No,” I said, “he’s American. He talked about making a trip to London to attend that auction, and he referred to the English once as ‘our cousins across the pond.’ ”

  “Honestly?”

  “Honestly. I suppose he could be an American and belong to a London club, and use that London membership to claim guest privileges at the Martingale. I suppose it’s possible.”

  “Lots of things are possible.”