The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (Bernie Rhodenbarr)

by Lawrence Block

  “Unofficial,” Jackson said. “Well, in that case I’ll admit I’d like to hear the rest, Rhodenbarr. I have a brother and two sisters in this room, and it sounds as though you’re accusing one or more of them of murdering our mother.”

  “All three of them,” I said. “It was very much a joint effort. Meredith, you went to a storefront clinic on Avenue A and obtained a prescription for an epinephrine pen of the type your mother carried. You filled it at a drugstore a block away. The clinic gave you a receipt, and so did the drugstore, and you kept them both.”

  “Brilliant,” Nils said.

  “Not that the receipts are necessary,” I said. “Everything’s on record. There’s probably security camera coverage of your visits to both establishments, as far as that goes. But never mind. You bought the pen and gave it to your brother Boyd.”

  Boyd rolled his eyes. “And no doubt you can point to security camera footage showing my sister handing me this pen.”

  I shook my head. “What I can point to,” I said, “is a six-ounce bottle of Nature’s Best Cold-Pressed Peanut Oil, guaranteed on its label to have been produced exclusively from organically grown peanuts, and with minute peanut particles present in suspension in order to maximize authentic peanut flavor. That’s not an exact quote, but it’s close, because phrasing like that does tend to linger in the mind.”

  “I’m a cook and a caterer,” he said. “I have a great array of ingredients in my kitchen.”

  “But this wasn’t stored with the other oils, was it? It was tucked away in another cupboard. And, on the basis of the sell-by date, it must have been purchased quite recently.”

  “You can’t prove it’s the same oil you found in the syringe.”

  “Matter of fact,” Ray said, “we probably can. You got a specialty product like that, well, it won’t have DNA, but what it’s got is close enough. You put a couple of lab technicians on it and they’ll make a good case.”

  “You emptied the epinephrine out of the pen Meredith gave you,” I told Boyd, “and replaced it with peanut oil. Then you gave it back to Meredith, who had a lunch date with her mother.” I turned to Meredith. “The two of you spent what must have been a pleasant hour and a half at Le Soupçon du Jour, in the course of which you got hold of your mother’s purse long enough to switch pens. You left her a pen loaded with peanut oil and took away the one containing epinephrine. What did you do with it?”

  “I’m not going to answer that.”

  “I wish you would,” Boyd said. “If you’d done what you were supposed to do with it, we wouldn’t all be having this conversation.”

  “I was wondering about that,” I said. “Meredith, weren’t you supposed to get the good pen to your sister? That way Deirdre could have switched pens again after she discovered your mother’s body.”

  Meredith froze with her mouth open, unable to find words. Nils put a hand on her arm. “Hypothetically,” he said. “Okay?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Hypothetically, let’s say that no one had told Meredith what to do after she switched the pens. Let’s say that she was so upset by what she’d just done that she couldn’t bear to have the pen on her person. So on the way home she dropped it into a subway trash barrel.”

  “Actually it was a sewer, honey.”

  “I was keeping it hypothetical.”

  “It’s a nice hypothesis,” I said. “Boyd, you had one more task to perform. You pulverized a couple of ounces of peanuts in a blender and delivered them to Deirdre. Deirdre, you wrapped them in tissue paper, packed them up in a gift box, and tied it with a ribbon. Shortly after your mother left her house on her way to the Met, you let yourself in and put the box on the coffee table where it would be the first thing she saw when she walked in the door.

  “Then you went home. You knew when the opera would let out, and when your mother would be likely to get home. You waited until then and dialed her number. What would you have done if she answered?”

  “How could she?”

  “Well, who was to say that the plan would work? Suppose the smell of the peanuts wasn’t enough to generate an allergic reaction? She’d have no reason to give herself a shot of epinephrine, and she’d be in perfectly good shape to pick up the telephone.

  “But you wouldn’t be able to tell what happened just by hearing her voice on the phone. You’d have to ask her a couple of questions. ‘Mom, did you see the blue box on the coffee table? Did you open it?’

  “And if she hadn’t opened it, then you’d have a choice to make. What would you tell her? To open it right away? Or to leave it unopened?”

  “Oh, God,” Deirdre said. “She didn’t answer, she couldn’t answer, she was already—”

  “Dead,” I said, “which makes it a real The-Lady-or-the-Tiger question, doesn’t I? Of course you couldn’t be absolutely certain she was dead, you wouldn’t know that until you went over and discovered her body, and you had to hold off until enough time had passed. You made a couple more phone calls—to your mother’s friend, who told you she’d left early. That made it a little more likely that your plan had worked, but you still had to bide your time and call your mother’s number another time or two. Then you went to the house you’d already visited earlier that evening, when you delivered the package.

  “And there was your mother, on the floor, her forehead cool to the touch. Was the syringe still in her leg?”

  “It was on the rug next to her.”

  “If Meredith had given you the original pen,” I said, “you could have switched them. But she hadn’t, and you couldn’t leave things as they were, because there was too great a chance that someone would check the pen’s contents. And it was still half-full of peanut oil, because it was designed to dispense only one small dose at a time.

  “So what could you do with it? Send it to join its brother in the city’s sewer system? No, she always carried a pen with her, and its disappearance would invite suspicion. So you took it to the kitchen or the bathroom and worked the plunger, pumping its contents a dose at a time into the sink or toilet.”

  “Thus getting it into the sewers after all,” Stephen Cairns said, then clapped his hand to his mouth. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Just thinking aloud. This is all just like something you’d see on TV, and I have this dreadful habit of talking during the performance.”

  “Back to the living room,” I said to Deirdre, “where you were about to put the empty syringe back where you’d found it. And then you got a better idea.

  “Without the syringe, and without any evidence that she’d given herself a shot, how would anyone know how your mother died? Especially if you provided them with a good alternate scenario. A burglar, for example.”

  “But a burglar had been there,” Jackson said. “Alton Ogden Smith had let himself in to steal a portrait. You just established as much a few minutes ago.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But how did your sister know that?”

  “Maybe because the place looked like a trailer camp in tornado season,” Ray said.

  “It did,” I said, “and one had to wonder why any burglar would make such a mess. It becomes even less comprehensible when we know the burglar’s identity. Smith had a key, he was able to get in and out without leaving any evidence of his visit, and the presence of a dead woman at the scene gave him even more reason to keep it a secret. So why would he scatter the contents of the living room all over the place?

  “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.

  Monday morning started with a visit from Mowgli, who was disappointed when he couldn’t find the Vogelsang biography of Dvorak. He couldn’t believe I’d sold it.

  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.”