Enough Rope

by Lawrence Block

  “How’s it work?”

  “It displaces the oxygen in the room,” I said. “I’m not enough of a scientist to know how it manages it, but the net effect is about the same as that great speckled bird you were talking about. The one with the pillows.”

  “That’d be consistent with the physical evidence,” Crittenden said. “But how would you get this halon in here?”

  “It was already here,” I said. I pointed to the jets on the walls and ceiling. “When I first saw them, I thought Bellermann had put in a conventional sprinkler system, and I couldn’t believe it. Water’s harder than fire on rare books, and a lot of libraries have been totaled when a sprinkler system went off by accident. I said something to that effect to Karl, and he just about bit my head off, making it clear he wouldn’t expose his precious treasures to water damage.

  “So I got the picture. The jets were designed to deliver gas, not liquid, and it went without saying that the gas would be halon. I understand they’re equipping the better research libraries with it these days, although Karl’s the only person I know of who installed it in his personal library.”

  Crittenden was halfway up a ladder, having a look at one of the outlets. “Just like a sprinkler head,” he said, “which is what I took it for. How’s it know when to go off? Heat sensor?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You said murder. That’d mean somebody set it off.”

  “Yes.”

  “By starting a fire in here? Be a neater trick than sending in the great speckled bird.”

  “All you’d have to do,” I said, “is heat the sensor enough to trigger the response.”

  “How?”

  “When I was in here earlier,” I said, “I caught a whiff of smoke. It was faint, but it was absolutely there. I think that’s what made me ask Karl about fire in the first place.”

  “And?”

  “When Mrs. Bellermann and I came in and discovered the body, the smell was gone. But there was a discolored spot on the carpet that I’d noticed before, and I bent down for a closer look at it.” I pointed to the Tabriz (which, now that I think about it, may very well have been an Isfahan). “Right there,” I said.

  Crittenden knelt where I pointed, rubbed two fingers on the spot, brought them to his nose. “Scorched,” he reported. “But just the least bit. Take a whole lot more than that to set off a sensor way up there.”

  “I know. That was a test.”

  “A test?”

  “Of the murder method. How do you raise the temperature of a room you can’t enter? You can’t unlock the door and you can’t open the window. How can you get enough heat in to set off the gas?”

  “How?”

  I turned to Eva. “Tell him how you did it,” I said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “You must be crazy.”

  “You wouldn’t need a fire,” I said. “You wouldn’t even need a whole lot of heat. All you’d have to do is deliver enough heat directly to the sensor to trigger a response. If you could manage that in a highly localized fashion, you wouldn’t even raise the overall room temperature appreciably.”

  “Keep talking,” Crittenden said.

  I picked up an ivory-handled magnifier, one of several placed strategically around the room. “When I was a Boy Scout,” I said, “they didn’t really teach me how to open locks. But they were big on starting fires. Flint and steel, fire by friction—and that old standby, focusing the sun’s rays though a magnifying glass and delivering a concentrated pinpoint of intense heat onto something with a low kindling point.”

  “The window,” Crittenden said.

  I nodded. “It faces north,” I said, “so the sun never comes in on its own. But you can stand a few feet from the window and catch the sunlight with a mirror, and you can tilt the mirror so the light is reflected through your magnifying glass and on through the window. And you can beam it onto an object in the room.”

  “The heat sensor, that’d be.”

  “Eventually,” I said. “First, though, you’d want to make sure it would work. You couldn’t try it out ahead of time on the sensor, because you wouldn’t know it was working until you set it off. Until then, you couldn’t be sure the thickness of the window glass wasn’t disrupting the process. So you’d want to test it.”

  “That explains the scorched rug, doesn’t it?” Crittenden stooped for another look at it, then glanced up at the window. “Soon as you saw a wisp of smoke or a trace of scorching, you’d know it was working. And you’d have an idea how long it would take to raise the temperature enough. If you could make it hot enough to scorch wool, you could set off a heat-sensitive alarm.”

  “My God,” Eva cried, adjusting quickly to new realities. “I thought you must be crazy, but now I can see how it was done. But who could have done such a thing?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose it would have to be somebody who lived here, somebody who was familiar with the library and knew about the halon, somebody who stood to gain financially by Karl Bellermann’s death. Somebody, say, who felt neglected by a husband who treated her like a housekeeper, somebody who might see poetic justice in killing him while he was locked away with his precious books.”

  “You can’t mean me, Bernie.”

  “Well, now that you mention it . . .”

  “But I was with you! Karl was with us at lunch. Then he went into the library and I showed you to the guest room.”

  “You showed me, all right.”

  “And we were together,” she said, lowering her eyes modestly. “It shames me to say it with my husband tragically dead, but we were in bed together until almost six o’clock, when we came down here to discover the body. You can testify to that, can’t you, Bernie?”

  “I can swear we went to bed together,” I said, “And I can swear that I was there until six, unless I went sleepwalking. But I was out cold, Eva.”

  “So was I.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “You stayed away from the coffee, saying how it kept you awake. Well, it sure didn’t keep me awake. I think there was something in it to make me sleep, and that’s why you didn’t want any. I think there was more of the same in the pot you gave Karl to bring in here with him, so he’d be dozing peacefully while you set off the halon. You waited until I was asleep, went outside with a mirror and a magnifier, heated the sensor and set off the gas, and then came back to bed. The halon would do its work in minutes, and without warning even if Karl wasn’t sleeping all that soundly. Halon’s odorless and colorless, and the air-cleaning system would whisk it all away in less than an hour. But I think there’ll be traces in his system, along with traces of the same sedative they’ll find in the residue in both the coffee pots. And I think that’ll be enough to put you away.”

  Crittenden thought so, too.

  When I got back to the city there was a message on the machine to call Nizar Gulbenkian. It was late, but it sounded urgent.

  “Bad news,” I told him. “I had the book just about sold. Then he locked himself in his library to commune with the ghosts of Rex Stout and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and next thing he knew they were all hanging out together.”

  “You don’t mean he died?”

  “His wife killed him,” I said, and I went on to tell him the whole story. “So that’s the bad news, though it’s not as bad for us as it is for the Bellermanns. I’ve got the book back, and I’m sure I can find a customer for it.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Well, Bernie, I’m sorry about Bellermann. He was a true bookman.”

  “He was that, all right.”

  “But otherwise your bad news is good news.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes. Because I changed my mind about the book.”

  “You don’t want to sell it?”

  “I can’t sell it,” he said. “It would be like tearing out my soul. And now, thank God, I don’t have to sell it.”

  “Oh?”

  “More good news,” he
said. “A business transaction, a long shot with a handsome return. I won’t bore you with the details, but the outcome was very good indeed. If you’d been successful in selling the book, I’d now be begging you to buy it back.”

  “I see.”

  “Bernie,” he said, I’m a collector, as passionate about the pursuit as poor Bellermann. I don’t ever want to sell. I want to add to my holdings.” He let out a sigh, clearly pleased at the prospect. “So I’ll want the book back. But of course I’ll pay you your commission all the same.”

  “I couldn’t accept it.”

  “So you had all that work for nothing?”

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “I guess Bellermann’s library will go on the auction block eventually,” I said. “Eva can’t inherit, but there’ll be some niece or nephew to wind up with a nice piece of change. And there’ll be some wonderful books in that sale.”

  “There certainly will.”

  “But a few of the most desirable items won’t be included,” I said, “because they somehow found their way into my briefcase, along with Fer-de-Lance.”

  “You managed that, Bernie? With a dead body in the room, and a murderer in custody, and a cop right there on the scene?”

  “Bellermann had shown me his choicest treasures,” I said, “so I knew just what to grab and where to find it. And Crittenden didn’t care what I did with the books. I told him I needed something to read on the train and he waited patiently while I picked out eight or ten volumes. Well, it’s a long train ride, and I guess he must think I’m a fast reader.”

  “Bring them over,” he said. “Now.”

  “Nizar, I’m bushed,” I said, “and you’re all the way up in Riverdale. First thing in the morning, okay? And while I’m there you can teach me how to tell a Tabriz from an Isfahan.”

  “They’re not at all alike, Bernie. How could anyone confuse them?”

  “You’ll clear it up for me tomorrow. Okay?”

  “Well, all right,” he said. “But I hate to wait.”

  Collectors! Don’t you just love them?

  Answers to Soldier

  Keller flew United to Portland. He read a magazine on the leg from JFK to O’Hare, ate lunch on the ground, and watched the movie on the nonstop flight from Chicago to Portland. It was a quarter to three local time when he carried his hand luggage off the plane, and then he had only an hour’s wait before his connecting flight to Roseburg.

  But when he got a look at the size of the plane he walked over to the Hertz desk and told them he wanted a car for a few days. He showed them a driver’s license and a credit card and they let him have a Ford Taurus with thirty-two hundred miles on the clock. He didn’t bother trying to refund his Portland-to-Roseburg ticket.

  The Hertz clerk showed him how to get on I-5. He pointed the Taurus in the right direction and set the cruise control three miles over the posted speed limit. Everybody else was going a few miles an hour faster than that but he was in no hurry, and he didn’t want to invite a close look at his driver’s license. It was probably all right, but why ask for trouble?

  It was still light out when he took the off-ramp for the second Roseburg exit. He had a reservation at the Douglas Inn, a Best Western on Stephens Street. He found it without any trouble. They had him in a ground-floor room in the front, and he had them change it to one in the rear, and a flight up.

  He unpacked, showered. The phone book had a street map of downtown Roseburg and he studied it, getting his bearings, then tearing it out and taking it with him when he went out for a walk. The little print shop was only a few blocks away on Jackson, two doors in from the corner between a tobacconist and a photographer with his window full of wedding pictures. A sign in Quik-Print’s window offered a special on wedding invitations, perhaps to catch the eye of bridal couples making arrangements with the photographer.

  Quik-Print was closed, of course, as were the tobacconist and the photographer and the credit jeweler next door to the photographer and, as far as Keller could tell, everybody in the neighborhood. Keller didn’t stick around long. Two blocks away he found a Mexican restaurant that looked dingy enough to be authentic. He bought a local paper from the coin box out front and read it while he ate his chicken enchiladas. The food was good, and ridiculously inexpensive. If the place were in New York, he thought, everything would be three and four times as much and there’d be a line in front.

  The waitress was a slender blonde, not Mexican at all. She had short hair and granny glasses and an overbite, and she sported an engagement ring on the appropriate finger, a diamond solitaire with a tiny stone. Maybe she and her fiancé had picked it out at the credit jeweler’s, Keller thought. Maybe the photographer next door would take their wedding pictures. Maybe they’d get Burt Engleman to print their wedding invitations. Quality printing, reasonable rates, service you can count on.

  In the morning he returned to Quik-Print and looked in the window. A woman with brown hair was sitting at a gray metal desk, talking on the telephone. A man in shirtsleeves stood at a copying machine. He wore horn-rimmed glasses with round lenses, and his hair was cropped short on his egg-shaped head. He was balding, and this made him look older, but Keller knew he was only thirty-eight.

  Keller stood in front of the jeweler’s and pictured the waitress and her fiancé picking out rings. They’d have a double-ring ceremony, of course, and there would be something engraved on the inside of each of their wedding bands, something no one else would ever see. Would they live in an apartment? For a while, he decided, until they saved the down payment for a starter home. That was the phrase you saw in real estate ads and Keller liked it. A starter home, something to practice on until you got the hang of it.

  At a drugstore on the next block he bought an unlined paper tablet and a black felt-tipped pen. He used four sheets of paper before he was pleased with the result. Back at Quik-Print, he showed his work to the brown-haired woman.

  “My dog ran off,” he explained. “I thought I’d get some flyers printed, post them around town.”

  lost dog, he’d printed. Part Ger. Shepherd. Answers to Soldier. Call 765-1904.

  “I hope you get him back,” the woman said. “Is it a him? Soldier sounds like a male dog, but it doesn’t say.”

  “It’s a male,” Keller said. “Maybe I should have specified.”

  “It’s probably not important. Did you want to offer a reward? People usually do, although I don’t know if it makes any difference. If I found somebody’s dog I wouldn’t care about a reward, I’d just want to get him back with his owner.”

  “Everybody’s not as decent as you are,” Keller said. “Maybe I should say something about a reward. I didn’t even think of that.” He put his palms on the desk and leaned forward, looking down at the sheet of paper. “I don’t know,” he said. “It looks kind of homemade, doesn’t it? Maybe I should have you set it in type, do it right. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Ed? Would you come and take a look at this, please?”

  The man in the horn rims came over and said he thought a hand-lettered look was best for a lost-dog notice. “It makes it more personal,” he said. “I could do it in type for you, but I think people would respond to it better as it is. Assuming somebody finds the dog, that is.”

  “I don’t suppose it’s a matter of national importance anyway,” Keller said. “My wife’s attached to the animal and I’d like to recover him if it’s possible, but I’ve a feeling he’s not to be found. My name’s Gordon, by the way. Al Gordon.”

  “Ed Vandermeer,” the man said. “And this is my wife, Betty.”

  “A pleasure,” Keller said. “I guess fifty of these ought to be enough. More than enough, but I’ll take fifty. Will it take you long to run them?”

  “I’ll do it right now. Take about three minutes, cost you three-fifty.”

  “Can’t beat that,” Keller said. He uncapped the felt-tipped pen. “Just let me put in something abo
ut a reward,” he said.

  Back in his motel room he put through a call to a number in White Plains. When a woman answered he said, “Dot, let me speak to him, will you?” It took a few minutes, and then he said, “Yeah, I got here. It’s him, all right. He’s calling himself Vandermeer now. His wife’s still going by Betty.”

  The man in White Plains asked when he’d be back.

  “What’s today, Tuesday? I’ve got a flight booked Friday but I might take a little longer. No point rushing things. I found a good place to eat. Mexican joint, and the motel set gets HBO. I figure I’ll take my time, do it right. Engleman’s not going anywhere.”

  He had lunch at the Mexican café. This time he ordered the combination plate. The waitress asked if he wanted the red or the green chili.

  “Whichever’s hotter,” he said.

  Maybe a mobile home, he thought. You could buy one cheap, a nice doublewide, make a nice starter home for her and her fellow. Or maybe the best thing for them was to buy a duplex and rent out half, then rent out the other half when they were ready for something nicer for themselves. No time at all you’re in real estate, making a nice return, watching your holdings appreciate. No more waiting on tables for her, and pretty soon her husband can quit slaving at the lumber mill, quit worrying about layoffs when the industry hits one of its slumps.

  How you do go on, he thought.

  He spent the afternoon walking around town. In a gun shop the proprietor, a man named McLarendon, took some rifles and shotguns off the wall and let him get the feel of them. A sign on the wall said, guns don’t kill people unless you aim real good. Keller talked politics with McLarendon, and socioeconomics. It wasn’t that tricky to figure out McLarendon’s position and to adopt it as one’s own.

  “What I really been meaning to buy,” Keller said, “is a handgun.”

  “You want to protect yourself and your property,” McLarendon said.

  “That’s the idea.”

  “And your loved ones.”

  “Sure.”

  He let the man sell him a gun. There was, locally, a cooling-off period. You picked out your gun, filled out a form, and four days later you could come back and pick it up.