The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr) (15 page)

I had three visitors in the first twenty minutes, or five if you count the two out-of-towners who wanted directions to the Strand. I rang up a couple of sales, and then they cleared out and I picked up my book. I hadn’t read a page before I was no longer alone.

“Well, it’s about time, Bernie.”

“You think?” I looked at my watch. “Good afternoon, Ray.”

“I was here two hours ago,” he said, “and you weren’t. You keepin’ burglars’ hours?”

“Carolyn and I stayed up late,” I said, “drinking scotch and talking about sex-change operations.”

“Yeah? For you or for her?”

“We couldn’t decide.”

“Well, you’d want to talk it over first. I guess it musta been late by the time you got home.”

“You’re being sly, Ray.”

“How’s that?”

“Asking trap questions. You evidently know I didn’t get home until this morning, and that means you were probably looking for me late last night. Why?”

“Aw, last night I was sittin’ in front of the TV, and I had this idea. And I was gonna call you, but it was late, and besides I figured it was probably a stupid idea.”

“And you let that stop you?”

“Then I woke up this morning,” he said, “and the idea was still there, only it didn’t seem so stupid. So I figured I’d come by your place, maybe catch you before you had your breakfast.”

“When was this?”

“Maybe eight, eight-thirty. I pulled up in front of your building and called you on the phone, and I got the machine.”

“Did you leave a message?”

“Why would I do that? What I did was I had your doorman ring your apartment, and that didn’t get me anywhere either. So I went and had breakfast my own self, and then I went by the precinct and did a little of this and a little of that, and a little after ten I came down here, because I knew you’d be open.”

“But I wasn’t.”

“No, you weren’t. And that gave me more time to decide if my idea’s stupid, and I think it probably is, but I can’t seem to get it out of my head.”

“Perhaps it would help to share it.”

“What are you, Dr. Phil? I was gettin’ there.”

“Sorry.”

“It has to do with this other thing I can’t get out of my head, which is Mrs. Ostermaier up on Ninety-second Street.”

“You can’t seriously believe—”

“Jesus, no, Bernie. I know you didn’t have nothin’ to do with it. What I had was this feelin’ that somethin’ about the crime scene was starin’ me in the face, and I just couldn’t see it.”

“You want to describe it to me, Ray?”

He shook his head. “What I want to do,” he said, “is show it to you. You’re a burglar, right?”

“I used to be.”

He gave me a look. “What you are is a burglar, Bernie, and what I been thinkin’ is you could give me a burglar’s-eye view of the situation.”

“In what capacity? What would I be, some sort of civilian consultant to the NYPD?”

“I suppose you could think of it that way. What you’d be is doin’ me a favor. Over the years I seen you pull plenty of rabbits out of plenty of hats, and a few people went away for murder on account of some quick thinkin’ and fancy footwork on your part. Here’s a nice woman got killed just because she had the sense to leave an opera before the fat lady sang, and that’s not right.”

“No, it’s not.”

“So what do you say? I’m parked next to the hydrant down the block, we’ll take a quick run uptown on the FDR. I’ll have you back here in two hours.”

“They’re hours I can’t spare,” I said. “I just opened up, Ray. I’ve got a business to run.”

“Yeah, I can see how customers are stormin’ the place. It’s hard for you and me to have a conversation the way they keep interruptin’.”

“How’s six o’clock? I’ll skip drinks with Carolyn and go uptown with you instead. Does that work?”

“Actually,” he said, “it’s probably better. By then I’ll have the autopsy results. Not that knowin’ what killed her’s gonna make it easier to work out
who
killed her.”

“Still,” I said, “it can’t hurt.”

Bells tinkled, my door opened, and a customer walked in.

“See?” I said. “What did I tell you? I’ve got a business to run, Ray, just like I said. I’ll see you at six.”

He left, and I waited until the door had closed behind him, then approached my visitor.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Smith,” I said. “How can I help you?”

I followed Ray up the flight of stone steps leading to the parlor floor entrance. Yellow crime-scene tape sealed the door, backed up by an NYPD-applied padlock.

Ray peeled back the tape and reached into his pocket. “Now I know a man with your talents wouldn’t need this,” he said, producing a key, “but how would it look for the neighbors?”

Inside, the place smelled of air freshener, which was probably all to the good. The air held a trace of what the air freshener was there to mask, and you wouldn’t mistake it for Chanel No. 5. We walked through a mirrored foyer into the large living room, and my eyes went to where the woman had been lying. There was no chalk outline, they don’t even do that on TV anymore, but there might as well have been.

“On the chair,” I said. “Is that the coat she was wearing?”

“Musta been. Took it off, dropped it on the chair.”

“Nice coat,” I said. “Bottle green with a fur collar. She walked in the door, took off the coat, and she would have hung it up but instead she decided to drop dead on the carpet.”

“As far as anybody knows. Maybe she had it over her arm when she died, and it landed on the floor next to her.”

“And the intruder moved it? Maybe.” I had a closer look at where she’d fallen. “The carpet’s by Trent Barling,” I said. “American, Art Deco period.”

“See, that’s the kind of thing you would know, Bernie. But why bother learnin’ about rugs? You have any idea what that thing must weigh? A man’d be better off stealin’ a hot stove.”

On the other hand, the smaller orientals are readily portable, and there’s an eager aftermarket for the better ones. But I didn’t feel compelled to point this out.

“It’s easy to see where you found her,” I said, “because the rest of the carpet’s covered with stuff. Books, knickknacks, framed photographs. And a nice clear space for a body. Her head was at that end? Was she prone or supine?”

“I can never remember which is which. She was layin’ face up.”

Lying
face up, I thought, but how many people get that right? “Supine,” I said. “Face down would be prone.”

“Like I’ll remember, Bern. What’s it matter, anyway?”

“It doesn’t.” I knelt down next to a carving, three inches tall, of a man with Chinese features and a wispy beard. He was leaning on a cane.

“Ivory,” I said.

“You can’t bring that stuff into the country. On account of the elephants.”

“You could back when this was made. She also had an elephant-foot umbrella stand, Ray. Over there next to the piano, and what do you bet the piano keys are ivory?”

“Not the black ones.”

“Ivory and ebony,” I said. “They stopped using ivory for piano keys years ago. I wonder if they still use ebony. You can get it without killing elephants, but for all I know it’s an endangered tree.”

“Everything’s endangered nowadays,” he said, “except for the crap nobody wants.”

“Playing cards,” I said. “All over the place. Did anybody bother to count them? It’s not hard to believe there are fifty-two of them here.”

“Assumin’ she was playin’ with a full deck.”

“An empty gift box,” I said, continuing the inventory. “The lid’s over there. I wonder what was in the box.”

“Take your pick, Bernie. Coulda been any of the crap that’s all over the floor. Or maybe it was just an empty box she was keepin’.”

“See the tissue paper? I bet it was in the box. And there’s a yard or so of blue ribbon. The box is light blue, so dark blue ribbon would be a good choice.”

“Bernie, what the hell difference does it make?”

“Who knows? You brought me here to observe, didn’t you? So that’s what I’m doing. Right now I’m observing a cigarette lighter, one of those sterling silver table lighters. Ronson must have sold a million of them.”

“My folks had one.”

“Mine had two. I remember we had one, and then somebody gave us another for a present, and my mother had to pretend it was just what she always wanted. You had to have lighters handy for your guests, and plenty of ashtrays, and you’d have cigarette dishes on all the tables, with cigarettes in them, getting stale while your guests smoked their own.”

“They didn’t get stale in our house, Bernie. You can probably guess who smoked ’em.”

“And you can probably guess who smoked ours. I remember when you quit, Ray. You had a tough time.”

“The worst. Did you ever smoke? I’m tryin’ to picture you with a cigarette.”

“I quit when I went away.”

“You’re not talkin’ about college.”

“No, though some people call it that.”

“I guess you can get an education there. Why’d you pick that time to quit? You’d think they’d help pass the time. Couldn’t afford ’em?”

I shook my head. “They were too valuable to smoke. The joint I was in, cigarettes were currency. It would have been like burning up dollar bills.”

“It’s like that now, and you don’t have to be in the joint either. You seen what a pack goes for nowadays?”

We talked about the price of cigarettes, and the cost of a gallon of gas, and I started to feel like my father, remembering when a buck ninety-five would get you a four-course steak dinner in the dining room of the Hotel Claypool.

“All this stuff,” I said, waving a hand at it. “How’d it get here?”

“The perp pulled things off the shelves. Yanked out drawers, turned ’em upside-down. See that drawer? It came out of that end table there.”

“Nothing’s broken.”

“Huh?”

“Look at all these china ornaments. Intact, every one of them. The little dog was broken once in the past, you can see where it’s been mended, but nothing got damaged the other night. These are fragile items. You’d think at least one of them would have had a crash landing.”

“It’s a soft carpet, Bernie.”

“Or they could have gotten crushed underfoot. How’d Mrs. Ostermaier make it all the way to the middle of the carpet without stepping on anything?”

“My guess? Most of the stuff got tossed around after he killed her.”

“That’s
if
he killed her.”

“It’s hard to figure what happened,” he admitted. “She had heart problems, and the autopsy said her heart stopped beatin’.”

“But we sort of knew that.”

“Yeah, bein’ as she was dead. They said somethin’ I never heard before. They said she had an empty heart.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m not too clear on it,” he said. “You know how your heart’s a pump, and it pumps blood out your arteries, and then it flows back?”

“Through your veins.”

“Right. Well, if the veins don’t pull their weight, blood can’t get back to the heart the way it’s supposed to. So there you are with an empty heart.”

“What would make that happen?”

“The veins dilate too much,” he said, “or not enough, I forget which. The reason they do that, or don’t do it—”

“Whatever.”

“—is different in different cases, but their best guess at this stage is a kind of shock.”

“Shock at spotting an intruder?”

“Naw, it’s a certain kind of shock, and I can’t think of the word. It’s why they don’t give you peanuts on airplanes.”

“Because that kind of random act of kindness would leave you with an empty heart?”

“No, because kids are allergic, and isn’t that a hell of a thing? How can anybody make it through childhood without peanut butter?”

“Peanut allergy,” I said.

“Or any other kind, and there’s a name for that kind of shock, and—”

“Anaphylactic.”

“Thank you, Jesus. That’s the word I was lookin’ for. It’s the same thing you get from a bee sting, or whatever it is you’re allergic to.”