The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr) (42 page)

“Well, he wouldn’t, and he didn’t. But it struck Deirdre that a burglary was a perfect disguise for what had just happened, and a burglar the perfect murderer. Falling, wouldn’t her mother have struck her head? And mightn’t that have been the result of a burglar’s assaulting her?

“So she set the stage. After she’d flushed away the pulverized peanuts, she tossed the empty box and the tissue paper on the floor, where they could just be part of the litter. She flung a deck of cards into the air and let them float all over the room. She took objects from table tops and out of drawers and scattered them here and there.

“And she put the empty syringe back in her mother’s purse, because that’s where it would be if there’d been no peanuts and no peanut oil and no occasion for her mother to give herself a shot. It might hold traces of peanut oil, but who would even take the trouble to look for them?”

“We didn’t,” Ray said, “until a certain somebody suggested it to me.”

“And that,” I said, “was because it didn’t smell right.”

“You smelled peanuts,” Carolyn said.

“I did, although I didn’t recognize it at the time. But more than that I smelled a rat, because it didn’t look like any burglary I ever saw. It looked staged.”

“Staged?”

“You trashed the place,” I told Deirdre, “except you didn’t. All those delicate objects all over the floor and nothing got broken. Not a single chip out of a single china dog. It was as though everything had been very carefully and methodically set in place, even if it wasn’t the place it belonged.”

They were all looking at Deirdre.

“They were her things,” she said. “You know how Mother felt about her things. I couldn’t just throw them, I couldn’t let them get broken.” She set her jaw. “I couldn’t,” she said.

He found other things to buy, and so did my other customers, and then just after eleven a fortyish woman brought in two shopping bags full of science fiction novels. I asked her if she had a price in mind.

“Anything you want to give me,” she said. That’s probably not the best way to open negotiations, but she was motivated more by anger than avarice. Her live-in lover had left, alliteratively enough, and the books were his. “I wouldn’t read this crap on a bet,” she said, “and I want it gone before he can decide to come back for it. Who gives a shit about A. E. Van Vogt?”

Someone would. Quite a few of the books were hardcover first editions, and even the paperbacks were mostly out-of-print and desirable as reading copies. I priced and shelved a few and set the rest aside, and I waited on a sad-eyed little man who’d found something on the bargain table and wondered how firm my price of two dollars was. I told him to give me a dollar, and he did, and took his book and went away. He still looked sad to me. Maybe the cheap bastard was wondering if he could have gotten it for fifty cents.

And then Carolyn came in with our lunch.

“Juneau Lock!” she sang out—unnecessarily, as the aroma filled the store, leaving no room for doubt. “I have to tell you, Bern. I was worried.”

“About what?”

“About lunch,” she said. “You went to the concert yesterday, didn’t you? At Juilliard?”

“Well, at Alice Tully Hall. It was very enjoyable. Dvorak, Bach, Boccherini, and some modern composer whose name I can’t remember. I think he was Estonian.”

“Then the odds are he still is, Bern. You take her to dinner afterward?”

“Café Luxembourg.”

“Very nice. And definitely not Chinese.”

“True on both counts.”

“So,” she said. “You have a good time?”

“I did.”

“And Katie? She have a good time?”

“Well, I think so,” I said. “You’d have to ask her.”

“I wouldn’t ask her anything like that while she’s on the job, Bern. And if I did I wouldn’t understand what she said to me. I’ll tell you, I was nervous when I walked in there. But I swear she was the same person she’s always been, smiling that smile and gurgling in broken English. So I picked up my cue and acted the same way I always do, and it’s a load off my mind, because I was afraid we were going to have to start getting our lunches somewhere else.”

“It was just one date,” I said.

“I know.”

“Not even a date. I went to a concert where she performed, and we had dinner together afterward.”

“At Café Luxembourg.”

“Right.”

“Not so fancy you have to dress for it, but pretty swank in an Upper West Side kind of way.”

“Well,” I said. “Not to change the subject—”

“Which is something people say when they’re about to change the subject.”

“Not to change the subject,” I said, “but I heard from Ray.”

“And?”

“You remember how funny Jackson got at the end? On the one hand he couldn’t believe the other three had done what they did. At the same time, it bothered him that they left him out of it.”

“Well, Boyd told him he was an officer of the court. They were afraid of compromising his integrity.”

“Which was in short supply,” I said, “since he’d been planning to sell the ancestor portraits out from under everybody. Anyway, afterward Ray went off together with all four of them.”

“What about Nils and Stephen?”

“They either tagged along or went home, I’m not sure which. I don’t think it matters. Jackson pointed out that nothing anybody said could be used in court, and Ray said maybe there was a way to keep any of this from going to court, and I can’t know for sure just what was said after that, and by whom, but you can probably guess.”

She put down her chopsticks. “I don’t believe it. It all gets swept under the rug?”

“And not just any rug. That’s a Trent Barling carpet we’re talking about.”

“Jesus, Bern! The three of them hatched a plot and followed through on it, and a very nice lady—”

“Nice to Haitian cabdrivers, anyway.”

“The woman’s dead, Bern. They killed her.”

“It does look that way.”

“And they just walk away from it?”

“It looks that way, too,” I said. “But it’s not that simple.”

“It’s not? It seems pretty simple to me.”

“Well, maybe it’s simple,” I allowed, “but in a complicated kind of a way. Take a minute and imagine that you’re an overworked Assistant District Attorney and this case lands on your desk.”

“Well, okay,” she said. “I can see how it might be a tough case to explain to a jury.”

“A jury? First you’d have to convince your boss to prosecute a case he’d tell you was unwinnable. Then you’d have to persuade a grand jury to indict. And then you’d have to explain to twelve people, none of them bright enough to get out of jury duty, just what happened in that house on Ninety-second Street. Carolyn, I was dealing with some very bright people, and they still had trouble following what happened.”

“But they were the ones who did it, Bern.”

“Right,” I said. “Case closed. They did it, and we know they did it, and
they
even know they did it. But aside from the three of them, and their brother Jackson, and a couple of not entirely insignificant others, and you and I and Ray Kirschmann, who else knows? Not the two cops, because they went off with Smith. And not Smith, because we were still maintaining the fiction that it was a natural death until after he’d been taken away.”

“So they get away with it.”

“With Ray’s help,” I said.

“For which he’ll probably be reimbursed.”

“That seems only fair, wouldn’t you say?”

“Well, he put in the hours,” she said, “and got the crime lab to do what they should have done in the first place. And if he doesn’t get to arrest anybody, I suppose a couple of dollars in his pocket wouldn’t be out of line. But aren’t they all broke? Isn’t that why they cooked up the scheme in the first place?”

“They won’t be broke forever. Ray’s willing to wait for his share.”

“Got to give him credit,” she said. “But you said he didn’t get to arrest anybody. What about the Button guy?’

“Smith.”

“Alton Ogden himself. He got arrested, didn’t he?”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?”

“I don’t know if you remember,” I said, “but Ray made a point of picking fellow officers he could work with. It turns out Mr. Smith had some cash on hand in his Brooklyn Heights home. If I had to guess, I’d say it was in the neighborhood of forty-five thousand dollars.”

“That just a ballpark figure, Bern?”

“Well—”

“Because it just happens to be the amount of money Smith had in his briefcase when he hightailed it out of the Bum Rap. Some coincidence, huh?”

“I looked for it in his study. My guess would be he put it in his safe as soon as he got home. I didn’t spot a safe on the parlor floor, and I couldn’t have cracked it if I had, not with him sleeping a few feet over my head.”

“How do you figure they split it, Bern? Even shares of fifteen apiece?”

“I wouldn’t presume to guess,” I said. “And that’s another case nobody would want to take to court. You couldn’t really convict Smith of anything. About the most you could manage to do is embarrass him, and a lot of other people would be embarrassed in the process. Jackson Ostermaier, obviously, and also a certain bookseller with a shop on East Eleventh Street.”

She nodded, thinking it through. “So all it cost Smith,” she said, “was the money he’d already agreed to pay for the spoon. Bern, why did he run off like that? He brought fifty thousand dollars, he was happy to get the spoon for that price, so why did he cut and run when you went to the men’s room?”

“Because he could.”

“That’s it?”

“He had the spoon,” I said, “and I was in the other room counting hundred-dollar bills, and before I could get all the way to fifty he’d be long gone. He’d used me twice, to get the Benjamin Button manuscript from the Galtonbrook and the spoon from Edwin Leopold, and that’s as much use as he was ever going to have for me, so why let me have forty-five thousand dollars of his money if he didn’t have to? I didn’t know his name or how to find him. Once he was out the door he was out of my life, and I was out of his.”

“He didn’t know I was just waiting to say, ‘Follow that cab!’ ”

“Why should he? He thought I bought his Burton Barton story. And I did, until I let Google have a go at his name. You couldn’t be the fifth of a long line of Burton Bartons without showing up in an online search. And of course the phone book never heard of him either, or the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the Bureau of Vital Statistics. Maybe I didn’t know his name, but I knew it wasn’t what he said it was, and that was reason enough to put you on his tail.”

“Where I stuck like a burr,” she said proudly. “But if you didn’t go to the men’s room—”

“He’d have been happy enough to pay the full price for the spoon.”

“But you gave him a chance to cheat you.”

“I did, didn’t I?”

“And you knew he would.”

“I didn’t see why he wouldn’t.”

“Why, Bern? Not so he’d have cash on hand to pay off Ray.”

“No.”

“So?”

“This is going to sound stupid,” I said. “But you asked. Smith and I had a deal. We’d already done business—the Fitzgerald manuscript—and it had worked out well. We conspired in the commission of a felony, so it was a long way from legal, but given who we were, it was an ethical transaction.”

“Okay, I guess I follow you.”

“Meanwhile, I knew what he’d done over on East Ninety-second Street. I wanted to set him up and expose him, but what moral right did I have to do that?”

“So you set him up. You baited the trap with his forty-five thousand dollars, and he went for the bait, and now you had an excuse to go after him.”

“And an excuse to steal the spoon back from him. That part bothered me, too.”

“Stealing the spoon back?”

I shook my head. “Stealing it in the first place. Edwin Leopold was a nice fellow. Mad as a hatter, but a gentleman. If I hadn’t met him I could have stolen spoons from him without turning a hair, but we sat together and had coffee and talked, and I liked him.”

“And how can you rob someone you like?”

“Well, there’s a way to rationalize these things,” I explained. “I never would have come to know him in the first place if I hadn’t intended to steal his spoon. So any feeling of friendship was an illusion, and a result of a plan already in motion.”

“I guess I understand.”

“I also tried to tell myself he was a dirty old man, exploiting an innocent young girl sexually. But in point of fact he was the best boss she ever had, and all she was doing was providing a daily massage, and what was wrong with a happy ending? Anyway, when I had a chance to get the spoon back where it belonged, I took it.”

“And Chloe got to keep the money.”

“Well, sure. She did her part.”

“Wow,” she said. “I better get back, I got somebody bringing in a Keeshond any minute. There’s something else I was wondering about, but I can’t think what it was.”

“Not to worry,” I said. “It’ll come to you.”