The Burglar in the Closet

by Lawrence Block

  “‘Each man kills the thing he loves,’” Nyswander quoted. “‘By each let this be heard. The coward does it with a kiss. The brave man with a sword.’ And the dentist with a scalpel.”

  “Pretty,” Todras said.

  “That’s Oscar Wilde.”

  “I like it.”

  “Except that part about a dentist doing it with a scalpel. Oscar Wilde never said that.”

  “No kidding.”

  “I just put that in on my own.”

  “No kidding.”

  “’Cause it seemed to fit.”

  “No kidding.”

  I thought Jillian was going to scream. Her hands had knotted themselves into little fists. Just hang in there, I wanted to tell her, because this comedy routine of theirs takes their minds off more important things, and in a minute they’ll bow and scrape themselves offstage and out of our lives, and then we can work up an act of our own.

  But I guess she wasn’t listening.

  “Wait a minute!”

  They turned and stared at her.

  “Just one damn minute! How do I know you actually brought that thing with you? That scalpel? I never saw you take it out of your pocket. Maybe you picked it up off a tray while I was looking the other way. Maybe all those things you hear about police corruption are true. Framing people and tampering with evidence and—”

  They were still staring at her and at about this point she just ran out of words. Not, I’d say, a moment too soon. I wished, not for the first time in my life, that there were a way to stop the celestial tape recorder of existence, rewind it a bit, and lay down a substitute track for the most recent past.

  But you can’t do that, as Omar Khayyám explained long before tape recorders. The moving finger writes and all, and dear little Jillian had just gone and given us the moving finger, all right.

  “This dental scalpel,” said Todras, showing it to us yet again. “This particular one wasn’t found in the chest of Crystal Sheldrake, as a matter of fact. Rules of evidence and everything, we don’t ever carry murder weapons around with us. The actual scalpel that snuffed the lady, it’s in the lab right now with a tag on it while the men in the white smocks check blood types and do all the things they do.”

  Jillian didn’t say anything.

  “The scalpel my partner’s showing you,” Nyswander put in, “was picked up on the way here when we stopped at Celniker Dental and Optical Supply. It’s an exact twin of the murder weapon and useful for us to carry around in the course of our investigation. That’s why my partner can keep it in his pocket and take it out when the spirit moves him. It’s not evidence so there’s no way he can be tampering with it.”

  Todras, grinning furiously, made the scalpel disappear again. “Just for curiosity,” he said, “maybe you’d like to tell us how you spent the evening, Miss Paar.”

  “How I—”

  “What did you do last night? Unless you can’t remember.”

  “Last night,” Jillian said. She blinked, gnawed her lip, looked beseechingly at me. “I had dinner,” she said.

  “Alone?”

  “With me,” I put in. “You’re writing this down? Why? Jillian’s not a suspect, is she? I thought you had an open-and-shut case against Dr. Sheldrake.”

  “We do,” said Todras.

  “It’s just routine,” Nyswander added. His weasel face looked craftier than ever. “So you had dinner together?”

  “Right. Honey, what was the name of that restaurant?”

  “Belevedere’s. But—”

  “Belvedere’s. Right. We must have been there until nine o’clock or thereabouts.”

  “And then I suppose you spent a quiet evening at home?”

  “Jillian did,” I said. “I headed on over to the Garden myself and watched the fights. They already started by the time I got there but I saw three or four prelim bouts and the main event. Jillian doesn’t care for boxing.”

  “I don’t like violence,” Jillian said.

  Todras seemed to approach me without actually moving. “I suppose,” he said, “you can prove you were at the fights.”

  “Prove it? Why do I have to prove it?”

  “Oh, just routine, Mr. Rhodenbarr. I suppose you went with a friend.”

  “No, I went alone.”

  “That a fact? But you most likely ran into somebody you knew.”

  I thought about it. “Well, the usual ringside crowd was there. The pimps and the dope dealers and the sports crowd. But I’m just a fan, I don’t actually know any of those people except to recognize them when I see them.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The fellow who sat next to me, we were talking about the fighters and all, but I don’t know his name and I don’t even know if I’d recognize him again.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Anyway, why would I have to prove where I was?”

  “Just routine,” Nyswander said. “Then you can’t—”

  “Oh,” I said brightly. “Hell. I wonder if I have my ticket stub. I don’t remember throwing it out.” I looked at Jillian. “Was I wearing this jacket last night? You know, I think I was. I probably dropped the stub in the garbage, or when I was cleaning out my pockets before I went to bed. Maybe it’s in a wastebasket at my apartment. I don’t suppose—oh, here’s something.”

  And, amazingly enough, I showed Nyswander an orange stub from last night’s fight card at Madison Square Garden. He eyed it sullenly before passing it to Todras who didn’t seem any happier to see it, his smile notwithstanding.

  The ticket stub cooled things. They didn’t suspect us of anything, they knew they already had the murderer in a cell, but Jillian had irritated them and they were getting a little of their own back. They returned to a less intimidating line of questioning, just rounding out things in their notebooks before moving on. I could relax now, except that you can’t relax until they’re out the door and gone, and they were in the process of going when Todras raised a big hand, placed it atop his big head, and scratched diligently.

  “Rhodenbarr,” he said. “Bernard Rhodenbarr. Now where in the hell have I heard that name before?”

  “Gee,” I said, “I don’t know.”

  “What’s your line of work, Bernie?”

  A warning bell sounded. When they start calling you by your first name it means they’ve pegged you as a criminal. As long as you’re a citizen in their eyes it’s always Mr. Rhodenbarr, but when they call you Bernie it’s time to watch out. I don’t think Todras even knew what he’d said, but I heard him, and the ice was getting very thin out there.

  “I’m in investments,” I said. “Mutual funds, open-end real-estate trusts. Estate planning, that’s the real focus of what I do.”

  “That a fact. Rhodenbarr, Rhodenbarr. I know that name.”

  “I don’t know where from,” I said. “Unless you grew up in the Bronx.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  By your accent, I thought. Anybody who sounds like Penny Marshall in Laverne and Shirley could have grown up nowhere else. But I said, “What high school?”

  “Why?”

  “What school?”

  “James Monroe. Why?”

  “Then that explains it. Freshman English. Don’t you remember Miss Rhodenbarr? Maybe she’s the one who had you reading Oscar Wilde.”

  “She’s an English teacher?”

  “She was. She passed on—oh, I don’t know exactly how many years ago. Little old lady with iron-gray hair and perfect posture.”

  “Relative of yours?”

  “My dad’s sister. Aunt Peg, but she’d have been Miss Margaret Rhodenbarr as far as her students were concerned.”

  “Margaret Rhodenbarr.”

  “That’s right.”

  He opened his notebook, and for a moment I thought he was going to write down my aunt’s name, but he wound up shrugging his great shoulders and putting the book away. “Must be it,” he said. “A name like that, it’s distinctive, you know? Sticks in the mind and rings a
bell. Maybe I wasn’t in her class myself but I just have a recollection of the name.”

  “That’s probably it.”

  “It woulda come to me,” he said, holding the door for Nyswander. “Memory’s a funny thing. You just let it find its own path and things come to you sooner or later.”

  CHAPTER

  Seven

  Jillian and I left the office together ten or fifteen minutes after Todras and Nyswander. We joined the lunch crowd at a coffee shop around the corner on Seventh Avenue. We had coffee and grilled-cheese sandwiches, and I wound up eating half of her sandwich along with my own.

  “Crystal Sheldrake,” I said between bites. “What do we know about her?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Beside that. She was Craig’s ex-wife and somebody killed her, but what else do we know about her?”

  “What difference does it make, Bernie?”

  “Well, she was killed for a reason,” I said. “If we knew the reason we might have a shot at figuring out who did it.”

  “Are we going to solve the murder?”

  I shrugged. “It’s something to do.”

  But Jillian insisted it was exciting, and her blue eyes danced at the prospect. She decided we would be Nick and Nora Charles, or possibly Mr. and Mrs. North, two pairs of sleuths she had a tendency to confuse. She wanted to know how we would get started and I turned the conversation back to Crystal.

  “She was a tramp, Bernie. Anybody could have killed her.”

  “We only have Craig’s word that she was a tramp. Men tend to have strict standards when it comes to their ex-wives.”

  “She hung out in bars and picked up men. Maybe one of them turned out to be a homicidal maniac.”

  “And he just happened to have a dental scalpel in his pocket?”

  “Oh.” She picked up her cup, took a delicate sip of coffee. “Maybe the guy she picked up was a dentist and—but I guess most dentists don’t carry scalpels around in their pockets.”

  “Only the ones who are homicidal maniacs in their off hours. And even if she was killed by a dentist, he wouldn’t have left the scalpel sticking in her. No, somebody swiped a scalpel from the office deliberately to frame Craig for the killing. And that means the murderer wasn’t a stranger and the murder wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing. It was planned, and the killer was someone with a motive, someone who was involved in Crystal Sheldrake’s life. Which means we ought to learn something about that life.”

  “How?”

  “Good question. Do you want some more coffee?”

  “No. Bernie, maybe she kept a diary. Do women still keep diaries?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Or a stack of love letters. Something incriminating that would let us know who she was seeing. If you could break into her apartment—What’s the matter?”

  “The horse has already been stolen.”

  “Huh?”

  “The time to break into an apartment,” I said, “is before someone gets killed in it. Once a murder takes place the police become very efficient. They put seals on the doors and windows and even stake the place out now and then. And they also search whatever the killer left behind, so if there was a diary or a pile of letters, and if the killer didn’t have the presence of mind to carry it away with him”—like a caseful of jewels, I thought with some rancor—“then the cops already have it. Anyway, I don’t think there was a diary or a love letter in the first place.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t think Crystal was the type.”

  “But how would you know what type she was? You never even met her, did you?”

  I avoided the question by catching the waitress’s eye and making the usual gesture of scribbling in midair. I wondered, not for the first time, what diner had invented that bit of pantomime and how it had gone over with the first waiter who was exposed to it. Monsieur desires the pen of my aunt? Eh bien?

  I said, “She had a family somewhere, didn’t she? You could get in touch with them, pass yourself off as a friend from college.”

  “What college?”

  “I don’t remember, but you can get that from the newspaper article, too.”

  “I’m younger than she was. I couldn’t have been at college the same year.”

  “Well, nobody’s going to ask your age. They’ll be too overcome with grief. Anyway, you can probably do this over the phone. I just thought you could poke around the edges of her life and see if any male names come into the picture. The point is that she probably had a boyfriend or two or three, and that would give us a place to start.”

  She thought about it. The waitress came over with the check and I got my wallet out and paid it. Jillian, frowning in concentration, didn’t offer to pay her half of the check. Well, that was all right. After all, I’d polished off half her sandwich.

  “Well,” she said, “I’ll try.”

  “Just make some phone calls and see what happens. Don’t give your right name, of course. And you’d better stay pretty close to home in case Craig tries to get hold of you. I don’t know if he’ll be able to make any calls himself, but his lawyer may be getting in touch with you.”

  “How will I get ahold of you, Bernie?”

  “I may be hard to reach. I’m in the book, B. Rhodenbarr on West Seventy-first, but I won’t be hanging out there much. What I’ll do, I’ll call you. Is your phone listed?”

  It wasn’t. She searched her wallet and wrote her number and address on the back of a beautician’s appointment card. Her appointment had been nine days ago with someone named Keith. I don’t know whether or not she kept it.

  “And you, Bernie? What’ll you be doing?”

  “I’ll be looking for someone.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ll know her when I find her.”

  “A woman? How will you know her?”

  “She’ll be doing some serious drinking,” I said, “in a very frivolous bar.”

  The bar was called the Recovery Room. The cocktail napkins had nurse cartoons all over them. The only one I remember featured a callipygian Florence Nightingale asking a leering sawbones what she should do with all these rectal thermometers. There was a list of bizarre cocktails posted. They had names like Ether Fizz and I-V Special and Post Mortem and were priced at two or three dollars a copy. Assorted props of a medical nature were displayed haphazardly on the walls—Red Cross splints, surgical masks, that sort of thing.

  For all of this, the place didn’t seem to be drawing a hospital crowd. It was on the first floor of a brickfront building on Irving Place a few blocks below Gramercy Park, too far west of Bellevue to be catching their staff, and the clientele looked to be composed primarily of civilians who lived or worked in the neighborhood. And it was frivolous, all right. If it had been any more frivolous it would have floated away.

  Frankie’s drinking, on the other hand, was certainly serious enough to keep the Recovery Room anchored in grim reality. A stinger is always a reasonably serious proposition. A brace of stingers at four o’clock on a weekday afternoon is about as serious as you can get.

  I made several stops before I got to the Recovery Room. I’d started off with a stop at my own place, then cabbed down to the East Twenties and began making the rounds. A little gourmet shop on Lexington sold me a teensy-weensy bottle of imported olive oil, which I rather self-consciously opened and upended and drained around the corner. I’d read about this method of coating the old tumtum before a night of heavy drinking. I’ll tell you, it wasn’t the greatest taste sensation I ever experienced, and no sooner had I knocked it back than I began bar-hopping, hitting a few joints on Lexington, drifting over to Third Avenue, then doubling back and ultimately finding my way to the Recovery Room. In the course of this I had a white wine spritzer in each of several places and stayed long enough to determine that no one wanted to talk about Crystal Sheldrake. I did run into two fellows who would have been glad to talk about baseball and one old fart who wanted to talk ab
out Texas, but that was as much conversation as I could scrape up.

  Until I met Frankie. She was a tallish woman with curly black hair and a sullen, hard-featured face, and she was sitting at the Recovery Room’s bar sipping a stinger and smoking a Virginia Slim and humming a rather toneless version of “One for My Baby.” I suppose she was around my age, but by nightfall she’d be a lot older. Stingers’ll do that.

  I somehow knew right away. It just looked like Crystal’s kind of place and Frankie looked like Crystal’s kind of people. I went up to the bar, ordered my spritzer from a bartender with a sad, hung-over look to him, and asked Frankie if the seat next to her was taken. This was forward of me—there were only two other customers at the bar, a pair of salesmen types playing the match game at the far end. But she didn’t mind.

  “Welcome aboard, brother,” she said. “You can sit next to me long as you like. Just so you’re not a goddamned dentist.”

  Aha!

  She said, “I’ll tell you what she was, Bernie. She was the salt of the fucking earth is what she was. Well, hell, you knew her, right?”

  “Years ago.”

  “Years ago, right. ’Fore she was married. ’Fore she married that murdering toothpuller. I swear to God I’ll never go to one of those bastards again. I don’t care if every tooth I got rots in my head. The hell with it, right?”

  “Right, Frankie.”

  “I don’t have to chew anything anyway. The hell with food is what I say. If I can’t drink it I don’t need it. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Crystal was a lady. That’s what she was. The woman was a fucking lady. Right?”

  “You bet.”

  “Damn right.” She crooked a finger at the bartender. “Rodge,” she said. “Roger, honey, I want another of these, but let’s make it plain brandy and let’s cool it with the crème de menthe, huh? Because it’s beginning to taste like Lavoris and I don’t want to be reminded of dentists. Got that?”

  “Got it,” Roger said, and took her glass away and hauled out a clean one. “Brandy, right? Brandy rocks?”

  “Brandy no rocks. Ice cracks your stomach. Also it shrinks your blood vessels, the veins and the arteries. And the crème de menthe gives you diabetes. I oughta stay away from stingers, but they’re my downfall. Bernie, you don’t want to be drinking those spritzers all night.”