The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr)

by Lawrence Block

  “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.”

  “So maybe a bee actually did fly up her nose.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind,” I said.

  “If it was an allergic reaction that induced anaphylactic shock,” I said, “maybe she never saw the intruder.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Say he came, found what he wanted, and left. Then she comes home—no, that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “’Cause why’s he leave the place lookin’ like a bomb went off? Where’s the sense in that?”

  “So let’s say she came home, and her house was just as she’d left it a couple of hours earlier. And she walks in, she takes off her coat, she sets it down—”

  “And a bee flies up her nose.”

  “Or a stewardess hands her a bag of peanuts. There’s no way to know what happens, but something does, and she falls down dead.”

  “All alone in her own livin’ room.”

  “And then, a little later, someone opens her door and walks in on her. What’s the time frame, Ray? How long was she dead before you guys got the call?”

  “Coulda been a long time, Bernie. We know what time she got home.”

  “From when she left the Met, and what time Philippe dropped her.”

  “The cabbie, right. There was an intermission at 9:15, and that’s when she left, and Philippe’s trip sheet says he picked her up at 9:28 and dropped her ten minutes after that. A straight shot through the park, and no traffic to speak of at that hour.”

  “So if she walked right in, and had time to take off her coat but not enough time to hang it in the closet—”

  “That’d set time of death anywhere after say a quarter of ten. It was just past two in the morning when the daughter discovered the body.”

  “What daughter?”

  “The old lady’s daughter. Who’d you think? The woman had four children, two of each. More or less.”

  “Huh?”

  “Well, one of the sons is a little light on his feet, but it was one of the daughters who walked in and found her mother. The younger daughter, Deirdre’s her name.”

  “She didn’t live here, did she?”

  “No, didn’t I tell you the old lady lived here alone? They were tryin’ to get her to move. But the daughter wasn’t too far away. One of them high-rises on York Avenue. What she did, she tried to call her mother at half-past twelve.”

  “That late?”

  “Well, she knew she was gonna be at the opera, and it wasn’t set to end until close to midnight.”

  “No wonder Mrs. Ostermaier left early.”

  “Yeah, that’s a long time to listen to all that screechin’. So if it ends around midnight, 12:30’s a good time to call. She’s home by then but she’s still awake.”

  “But there was no answer.”

  “No, so she waited fifteen minutes and called again, and still no answer, so she tried her mother’s friend, the one she went to the opera with.”

  “And found out her mother should have been home hours ago.”

  “ ‘Oh, she left early, I bet she went straight to bed and never heard the phone.’ Except the daughter knows the mother’s a light sleeper.”

  “So she came over to check for herself.”

  “Said she was too worried to sleep. She called again and let it ring a long time, and then she came over here and leaned on the doorbell, and finally she unlocked the door and walked in.”

  “She had a key.”

  “They all had keys. She used hers, and I don’t think she messed up the crime scene much. She touched the body, of course, but she knew right away her mother was dead.”

  “Cold to the touch.”

  “Well, cool, anyway. She used her cell phone to call 911, and stayed here to let in the uniforms.”

  “And I assume she was still here when you showed up.”

  “Uh-huh. Anyway, there’s your time frame. You got four hours between the woman gettin’ home and her daughter showin’ up. You coulda had all the burglars you want in that amount of time.”

  I thought about it. “So he comes in, and she’s already dead. She’s right there on the rug, she’s got to be the first thing he sees. Why doesn’t he turn around and walk out?”

  “Must be somethin’ he really wants, Bernie.”

  “I guess.”

  “And he’s in a hell of a rush to find it and get out, which explains the mess. He hasn’t got time to be neat.”

  “So he takes a few extra minutes to make the place look like a bomb went off?”

  “You don’t want to leave without what you came for, do you? But you don’t want to waste time lookin’ f
or it, either. So you dump the drawers, you brush things off table tops—”

  “And nothing breaks. And then what? You find what you came for and leave?”

  “Or you don’t find it,” he said, “and you leave anyway, because not gettin’ caught’s even more important than findin’ whatever it was.”

  “And what do you suppose that was?”

  “Jesus, Bernie. How the hell should I know?”

  “You talked to the daughter.”

  “The young one, Deirdre. I talked to her that night, and the rest of ’em yesterday. One son’s a partner in a catering business, he lives with his partner in Chelsea. Not the catering partner, the living-together partner.”

  “Okay.”

  “His name’s Boyd. The son, I mean. Not either of his partners. The other son’s Jackson, he’s a tax lawyer, married, lives in Brooklyn. Park Slope, I think it is. He works downtown at the Financial Center. And what the hell is the name of the other daughter?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I wasn’t askin’ you, Bernie. I was tryin’ to bludgeon my memory. The other daughter’s married, but she keeps her old last name. Her and her husband live in Alphabet City on a block you wouldn’t walk down a few years ago, and now you can’t afford to live there. And her name’s Meredith.”

  “I guess that bludgeon worked,” I said. “You must have been chasing all over town.”

  He shook his head. “Brought ’em all here, so I could get ’em to look around a little. Not too much, on account of it’s still an active crime scene. I’m breakin’ ten or a dozen rules havin’ you here, by the way.”

  “But I begged and pleaded and you just couldn’t say no to me.”

  “Hey, it’s my idea, and you’re the one doin’ me a favor. But I’m still breakin’ the rules.”

  “I’m not about to rat you out, Ray.”

  “No, I figured my secret was safe with you. What you were askin’, nobody had a clue what the thief mighta been after. There’s a wall safe upstairs in the bedroom, and she used to stow the good jewelry there when it wasn’t in the safe deposit box at the bank. But after the husband died she said it was too much trouble chasin’ back and forth to the bank, so she just left it there.”

  “In the safe?”

  “At the bank. Nobody quite said it, but I got the sense the safe was mostly for the husband’s use. He was in real estate and worked with construction guys, and sometimes he had to be able to get his hands on serious cash.”

  “And that’s where he kept it.”

  “Uh-huh. And when he died, the wife and kids made the cash disappear before the IRS took an interest. The safe’s still there, and it’s locked.”

  “And nobody had the combination?”

  “Written down at home, one of ’em said. I had a look at it, and either the burglar didn’t know about it or he never got upstairs before she came home and surprised him. They kept a picture hangin’ over it to hide it.”

  “Because who’d ever think to look for a safe behind a portrait of a Spanish nobleman?”

  “It’s a woman,” he said, “and don’t ask me if she’s Spanish. It’s like these here. Not that one, Bernie. That’s a couple of cows in a field.”

  Black and white dairy cattle, with a barefoot milkmaid eyeing them. “Holsteins,” I said.

  “I guess he’s famous,” he said, “if you recognize the artist.”

  “Actually,” I said, “it looks like a Constable. Holstein’s the breed of cattle.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. The rest are all pictures of people, and from the looks of them they’ve all been dead for a while. That guy over there looks like somebody stuffed him.”

  Could that really be a Constable? At closer range I could see that I had the artist right, but that it wasn’t a painting at all. It was a high-quality reproduction, the sort you find in museum gift shops, tastefully framed and ready to hang.

  I studied it and the wall around it, and then I went over for a closer look at the portrait of the man. It, like others in the room, were what decorators call ancestors—though rarely of the people on whose walls they now repose.

  “Stuffed,” I agreed.

  “Or maybe embalmed. He’s a pretty good match for the dame upstairs.”

  “Then why isn’t she down here keeping him company?”

  “Somebody’s got to hide the safe. I suppose the burglar coulda moved the picture and put it back, but would this guy take the trouble? The same guy who left the livin’ room lookin’ like a cyclone hit it?”

  “That cyclone,” I said. “Did it blow any bric-a-brac on top of Mrs. Ostermaier?” When he looked puzzled, I rephrased my question. Had any of the living room litter been on the woman’s body when she’d been found there?

  “You’d have wanted to keep the scene intact,” I said, “but you’d have had to clear off the body before removing it from the scene.”

  “So was there anything layin’ on her that got moved?” He frowned, squeezing out a memory. “I don’t think so, Bernie. If there was, it’d be in the crime scene photos. Does it make a difference?”

  “Does anything? But if he threw everything every which way, and nothing got broken and nothing landed on the dead woman in the middle of the Trent Barling carpet—”

  “Or one of those china dogs hit her and bounced off. That’s what woulda happened, Bernie.”

  “You think?”

  “We could try an experiment,” he said. “You stretch out on the floor and I’ll throw things at you.”

  “Wouldn’t we be compromising the crime scene?”

  “And wastin’ our time, but it might be worth it to peg that silver table lighter at you. And you’d get to stretch out on Whatsisname’s rug.”

  “Trent Barling. Ray, a house like this, there has to be a burglar alarm.”

  “Key pad’s on the wall next to the door.”

  I looked and wondered how I’d missed it. My eyes must have gone straight to the heart of the crime scene. “Four digits, right? One-one-one-one?”

  “One-two-three-four.”

  “That would have been my second choice.”

  “So Mrs. O. turned it off when she walked in the door, or just as likely she never armed it in the first place. According to her kids, she didn’t always bother.”

  “When the daughter let herself in—”

  “It hadn’t been reset.”

  “But it may not have been set in the first place, so that doesn’t tell us much, does it? She came in, she threw her coat on a chair. He’s already here, and she smells peanuts on his breath and falls on the floor with an empty heart.”

  “Could that happen?”

  “I have no idea. But if she walks in on him, why does she pause to take off her coat? Ray, it’s hard to make sense out of this.”

  “No kiddin’.”

  “She walks in, and he’s already been here and gone. The place is a mess. ‘What a dump,’ she says, just like Bette Davis, and she shucks her coat, clears off a place on the rug, and collapses. No, that’s crazy. I’m just wasting our time, Ray.”

  “No, you’re doin’ good, Bern. Don’t stop now.”

  “She comes home, she’s all alone, nobody’s been here. If she ever did set the alarm, one-two-three-four, she disarms it. Walks in here, place is the way she left it. Takes off her coat, puts it on the chair. Is that how you’d lay down a coat, Ray? Wouldn’t you straighten it out more?” I dropped to one knee. “Unusual buttons. I think they’re porcelain, or some kind of ceramic.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Very ornate. Art Nouveau, I’d say. And one’s missing. See? There used to be ten of them, five on the left and five on the right, and one’s missing. It used to be right there.”

  “Maybe it popped off at the opera house. Or in the cab.”

  “There’d be broken thread where it came off. No thread, so I guess it’s not a clue after all. It’s probably been gone for months. And she wouldn’t have been able to replace it, becaus
e where would she find a button to match?”

  “You know, Bernie, when you and I get to be her age—”

  “We’ll probably be missing a few buttons ourselves. I just thought it might have gotten torn off in a struggle, but then there’d be thread, and there isn’t, so forget the whole thing. She puts her coat down, and then she has an allergic reaction to something. What?”

  “Maybe she ate something at the Met.”

  “What, popcorn? They have operas there, not movies.”

  “I bet you can buy snacks at intermission. Maybe she got the peanut M&Ms instead of the plain.”

  “Maybe. It would help if we knew more about anaphylactic shock. Whatever it is, it comes on fast. Next thing she knows she’s on the rug.”

  “Next thing she knows, she’s dead.”

  “Does it work that fast? Maybe. She’s there, she’s dead, an hour goes by. If she’s dead at ten and the opera’s supposed to get out around midnight—”

  “Then a burglar could show up at eleven and figure he’s got plenty of time to go through the place.”

  “Instead he walks in on a corpse. Now he’s in a hurry, and he tosses the place, and finds it or doesn’t, whatever it is.”

  Outside on the stoop, I finally got a good look at the lock. I straightened up and told Ray that our intruder had a key.

  “It wasn’t forced,” I said. “It’s a good lock, it’d be tough to pick, and you’d probably leave scratches around the keyhole. And would you want to stand out there in plain sight poking around at a lock? I’ll bet he had a key.”

  “Maybe he made himself really small, Bernie.”

  “And slithered through the keyhole? Didn’t Plastic Man do that in the comics?”

  “It sounds like something he’d pull, all right.”

  “And what would he see when he did?”

  I stepped inside for a minute, and the air freshener smell hit me anew, along with its undercurrent. What the hell was that? Not the smell of death and decomposition, which you’d expect, but something else.

  “Bernie?”

  “Oh, right,” I said, and returned to the stoop. “ ‘Rats, I can’t take the carpet, because somebody went and left a dead woman on it. I’ll throw things around until I find something else to steal.’ ”

  “You’re hipped on that carpet, aren’t you? Is it really good enough to steal?”