The Burglar in the Library

by Lawrence Block

  “For all you know,” I said, “the county sheriff is a retired FBI agent with a law degree and a mind like a steel trap.”

  “What if he is? And what kind of mind has a steel trap got, anyway? Anyhow, he’s not here, and he’s not likely to get here for a while, either. Bern, we’re snowed in, and that means he’s snowed out.”

  “Hear that?”

  “Hear what, Bern?”

  I pointed. “The snowblower. He was having trouble getting it started, but it’s running now. Pretty soon he’ll have a path cleared to the bridge, and then he’ll be in the Jeep plowing the driveway clear to the highway. And before you know it this place’ll be crawling with cops.”

  “Retarded cops.”

  “Well-trained professional law enforcement officers,” I said, “led by an L.L.B. from Harvard Law.”

  “If he’s got an L.L.B.,” she said, “the chances are he got it from L. L. Bean. But even if he’s good, Bern, even if he’s another Ray Kirschmann—”

  “Bite your tongue,” I said.

  “—we can’t afford to wait for him. Because by the time he gets here it’ll be too late.”

  “Too late for what?”

  “Not what. Who.”

  “Huh?”

  “I mean whom. Too late for whom.”

  “What are you talking about, Carolyn?”

  She cocked her head. “That doesn’t sound right to me, Bern.”

  “Whom doesn’t sound right to you? It should, it’s the object of the preposition for. ‘Too late for whom.’ Sounds okay to me.”

  “The engine,” she said. “The snowblower. It’s making a horrible noise.”

  It was at that, cranking out an unpleasant metal-on-metal sound, a sort of mechanical death rattle.

  “Maybe that’s the way they’re supposed to sound,” I offered.

  “Fat chance, Bern.”

  “How can you be sure? When did you ever hear a snowblower before? Anyway, it stopped. It’s quiet now.”

  “Yeah,” she said, and looked around. She might have been sniffing the wind, like a cowboy in a celluloid western. “Too quiet,” she said ominously. “It’s too quiet, and it’s gonna be too late. Too late for…”

  “Whom,” I said, feeling like a grammatical owl.

  “For the next victim,” she said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it’s because I can’t believe I really heard you say that. ‘For the next victim’? What makes you think there’s going to be another victim?”

  “There has to be.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there always is.”

  “There always is?”

  “You’ve read the books, Bern.”

  “This isn’t a book, Carolyn.”

  “It’s not? Well, it might as well be. It’s got all the ingredients. It’s not Raymond Chandler’s mean streets, not by a long shot. It’s the kind of setting he despised, where people commit murders with tropical fish.”

  “How would you kill somebody with guppies?” I wondered.

  “Maybe you’d use swordtails,” she said, “and run them through. I don’t know. All I really know is the killer’s already used a camel and a pillow, and you can’t make me believe he’s going to stop there. He’s sure to strike again unless we do something.”

  “Do what?”

  “Catch him,” she said. “Unmask him.”

  “How?”

  “Why are you asking me, Bern? You’re the expert.”

  “The hell I am.”

  “Of course you are. Look at all the times you’ve solved the mystery and caught the murderer.”

  “Only because I had to. Every time it happened it was because I fumbled my way into a mess and so I had to fumble my way out of it.”

  “Well?”

  “I didn’t fumble my way here,” I said. “I came here on vacation.”

  “And to steal a book, which you haven’t stolen yet. And to forget a woman, who’s going to be hard to forget the way things are shaping up. Bern, some people would call this fumbling.”

  “I call it bad luck.”

  “Call it anything you want. Bern, you know what always happens in the books? The detective hesitates. He’s figured things out but he won’t tell anybody because he wants to wait until he’s absolutely certain. And then, after the killer strikes again, he feels terrible.”

  “They call that remorse.”

  “Not the killer, for God’s sake. The detective’s the one who feels terrible. ‘Soccer blew,’ he says. ‘It is my fault. If only—’”

  “Soccer blew?”

  “You know, soccer blew. It’s just an expression. Poirot says it all the time.”

  “Sacre bleu,” I said.

  “That’s what I said, soccer blew. Don’t ask me what it’s supposed to mean. Bern, all I know is you better do something, or there’s gonna be another dead body in the library and you’re gonna be saying soccer blew all over the place. Why are you looking at me like that, Bern?”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “You really think there’s going to be another murder.”

  “I’d bet anything there is.”

  “Unless I do something.”

  She nodded. “But even if you do,” she said, “it’s probably too late.”

  “Too late to keep the killer from striking a second time.”

  “Right.”

  “Who’s it going to be?”

  “The second victim? How can I answer that, Bern? Only one person knows, and…God, you don’t suspect me, do you?”

  “I don’t suspect anybody,” I said. “I just thought you might have a hunch, that’s all.”

  She leaned forward, lowered her voice another notch. “It’ll be somebody who’s staying here,” she said. “Somebody who was in the library earlier while you were explaining why Rathburn’s death had to be murder. Somebody who probably had important information but didn’t say anything at the time. Bern, it could be somebody here in this room right now.”

  Her first three speculations were on the money. But, as it turned out, the second victim wasn’t in the Breakfast Room when she spoke those words. He wasn’t even in the house.

  It was Orris.

  CHAPTER

  Fourteen

  Thinking back, I saw how close Carolyn had come to being right on all four points. Just moments after she’d said that the next victim might be in the room with us, he made his appearance, walking with cap in hands to the table where Nigel and Cissy Eglantine sat over coffee. He had removed his boots, I saw, and was wearing thick woolen socks. Snow clung to the lower portions of his trouser legs.

  After a whispered conference with his employers, young Orris clomped out again. Something—not a premonition, I assure you—urged me to ask Nigel Eglantine if anything was the matter, but I resisted the impulse. It turned out I didn’t have to ask, because Nigel came over to our table and made an announcement. There was, he reported, something wrong with the snowblower. Its engine appeared to be damaged. He was going to have a look at it, although he wasn’t terribly smart about engines, but even if he proved unable to fix it we were not to worry, because the machine wasn’t really essential. Although the snow was deep, with drifts in the yard well over three feet high, Orris was a stout fellow and had insisted he could wade through the snow clear to the bridge and across it. On its other side, of course, was the Jeep, and the Jeep, we could rest assured, was fully reliable.

  When he went off to reassure another table, I said to Carolyn, “I bet the truck won’t be there, either.”

  “Did I miss something, Bern? What truck?”

  “Oh, it’s an ancient joke,” I said, and told her about the young Marine making his first parachute jump. He’s told how the chute will open automatically, and that there’s an emergency ripcord if it doesn’t, and that when he lands a truck will pick him up to take him back to camp. So he jumps, and the ch
ute doesn’t open, and the ripcord comes off in his hand, and he says to himself, “Hell, I bet the damn truck won’t be there, either.”

  She looked at me. “It’s an old joke, huh?”

  “The old jokes are the best ones.”

  “Not necessarily,” she said.

  This time I didn’t hear the scream.

  Not the first scream, anyway. I was in a parlor—not the East Parlour, where Lettice and I had misbehaved in front of the stuffed oryx, but in the West Parlour, where I was sitting in a wing chair with my feet up on a needlepoint-covered ottoman, reading The Portable Dorothy Parker. The whole idea of a portable Dorothy Parker intrigued me. You could take her along on trips, and every once in a while her head would pop up out of your Gladstone bag and deliver some smartass remark.

  I was reading a short story about a woman who was waiting for a telephone to ring, but I wasn’t getting very far with it because Miss Dinmont kept interrupting me to ask for help with a crossword puzzle. Did I know a six-letter marsupial, the third letter an M? Could I complete the phrase “John Jacob Blank” with a five-letter word ending in R?

  Why, I’ve long wondered, would anyone want help on a crossword puzzle? And how does one deal with people who ask for it? If you supply an answer it only encourages them to ask for more, but if you plead ignorance it doesn’t seem to discourage them. In fact they seem to ask everything, even the ones where they know the answer themselves, as if determined to plumb the depths of your stupidity.

  What might work is to grab the puzzle out of the puzzler’s hands, fill in all the squares yourself at breakneck speed (right or wrong, who cares?), and hand it back in triumph. I might have tried it that morning—I was testy enough, even with my stomach full of kippers and porridge and toad-in-the-hole (or wind-in-the-willows, or whatever it was), but I just couldn’t be so mean to poor little Miss Dinmont. I was afraid she’d burst into tears. I’d feel terrible, and then Miss Hardesty would come along and beat me to a pulp.

  So I was reading, and I’d just been interrupted for perhaps the seventh time, and I’d tried saying, “Hmmm, that’s a tricky one, let me think about that one,” and there was a scream outside, or at least a great cry.

  As I said, I didn’t hear it. But Orris was not like Berkeley’s tree, and even though I didn’t hear him fall, someone else did. Millicent Savage, who was out in front of the house directing her father in the making of a snowman, heard Orris shout. So did her father. “Wait here,” Greg Savage told his daughter, and set off toward the source of the cry, walking literally in Orris’s footsteps through snow that came up higher than his knees.

  Millicent, of course, did not heed her father’s command to stay put, but set off in his wake. She found it slow going, however, her precocity being cerebral rather than altitudinal, and before she could reach the bridge, her father had already turned around and was headed back. He scooped her up in his arms and carried her back to Cuttleford House, walking as fast as he could and not bothering to respond to the stream of questions she directed at him.

  He reached the door, put her down, threw the door open, and cried out his news to the entire household.

  “It’s Orris! He’s fallen! The bridge is down! He had a long fall and he’s not moving! He’s just lying there! I think he’s dead!”

  I heard all that. I heard the scream that followed his announcement, too, but how could I help it? They probably heard it loud and clear in Vermont.

  If I’d first seen the bridge in daylight, I don’t think I could have crossed it. In the darkness, I’d been able to convince myself that the shallow waters of Cuttlebone Creek were but a few scant yards beneath our feet. In the unlikely event that we fell, at worst we’d get a soaking.

  But what I saw, after I’d joined the mad scramble to see what had happened to Orris, was a deep and rocky gorge, its sides near vertical. The suspension bridge dangled like limp spaghetti from its moorings on the far side of the gorge. The connective tissue on our side of the creek had given way before Orris could get himself across. Maybe he cried out the instant of the first snapping of the cable. Maybe he was already falling. He fell clear to the bottom, a drop of at least thirty feet, and when we saw him he lay utterly still on a heap of boulders, his head at an angle that would have been a stretch for Plastic Man.

  There was some sentiment for rescuing him. The sides of the gorge were too steep for a safe descent in good weather, and out of the question now, with snow covering everything and making it impossible to see where you could or could not get a decent foothold. According to Nigel, if you followed the creek a mile or so downstream, you’d reach a spot where the stream could be easily crossed, and from that point you could wade upstream until you reached Orris. Of course it would take a long time to walk a mile cross-country through two feet of snow, and it would take at least as long to return along a frozen creek bed, not to mention the risk of putting a foot wrong and spraining an ankle or breaking a leg.

  “Leave him,” Dakin Littlefield counseled.

  “But he’ll die!” one of the women wailed. (I believe it was Earlene Cobbett. Her cousin Molly had had a busy night, starring in Carolyn’s dream and then screaming when she discovered Jonathan Rathburn’s body. Now it was the heavily freckled Earlene’s turn, and she’d let out a scream of her own at Greg Savage’s report of Orris’s fall; a propensity for full-throated shrieking seemed to run in the Cobbett family.)

  “Not likely,” Littlefield said.

  “I don’t see how you can say that,” Mrs. Colibri said. “It seems to me that people die of exposure all the time. And they die of shock, too, when they suffer severe trauma and don’t receive medical attention.”

  “Happens all the time,” Littlefield agreed. “But only to people who are alive to begin with.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he’s already as dead as a doornail,” Littlefield said, his words as cruel as the mouth they came out of. “He had a long drop and a hard landing. He probably dashed out what brains he had on that rock, and if that didn’t kill him the broken neck did. See how he’s lying?”

  “It’s an awkward lie,” Colonel Blount-Buller allowed.

  “It’s not a hard position to get into,” Littlefield said, “as long as you’re a chicken and somebody’s already wrung your neck for you. Face it, the man’s toast. His future is all in the past. Anybody else goes after him, he’s odds-on to take the same kind of spill this guy took and wind up in the same kind of shape. We already have two men dead, which is on the high side for a quiet weekend in the country. Somebody else wants to round out the hat trick, be my guest, but I think you’re out of your mind.”

  “But what are we to do?” Nigel Eglantine asked. “We can’t just leave him there, can we?”

  “Why not? He’s not going anywhere.”

  Somebody said something about predatory scavengers, and a few heads looked heavenward, as if to spot a vulture circling patiently overhead. There was nothing up there but the sky.

  “He’s reasonably safe in this weather,” Dakin Littlefield said. “And the longer he lies there the safer he gets, because once he freezes solid he can quit worrying that something’s going to start gnawing on him. Not that he’s doing any worrying of his own as it is.”

  A sob, wrenching enough to melt a heart of stone, tore from the throat of Earlene Cobbett.

  It had no discernible effect on Lettice’s new husband. “Say a couple of us managed to get to him,” he went on mercilessly, “which’d be a neat trick, and say we got the body up, which’d be a neater one. Then what?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “We’d just have to leave him outside,” he said. “On the back porch, stacked like cordwood and with a rug tossed over him. We may be a few days waiting for the rest of the world to reach us, and he’ll keep a lot better outside in the cold than inside where it’s warm.” His nose wrinkled at the notion. “Where would we put him, anyway? The library’s already out of bounds because there’s a dead body in it. If that genius over there
”—a wave in my direction—“hadn’t managed to sell everybody on the idea that Rathburn was murdered, we could have moved him outside before he started to get ripe.”

  “I say,” the colonel reminded him. “There are ladies present, Littlefield.”

  “Did I curse without knowing it, Colonel? When did ‘ripe’ get to be a swear word?”

  Blount-Buller cleared his throat. “All a bit indelicate, wouldn’t you say?”

  The debate went on, but I’d lost interest in it. I didn’t much want to walk over to the gully’s rim, but I forced myself, and had a look at the rope cables that had given way, sending poor Orris to his death.

  I remembered the words of the clown who’d driven us from the station at Pattaskinnick. Good strong rope, he’d called it, and then he’d gone on to describe how rain could soak into the rope, and how it would swell when it froze, severing fibers, and go on thawing and freezing until it had sustained enough invisible damage that it would, as he’d put it, snap like a twig.

  I looked closely at the good strong rope and saw where it had snapped like a twig. And then I turned my head quickly, to make sure nobody was standing too close to me. I was, after all, right at the edge of the gorge, and a quick shove would send me plummeting to a fate worse than Orris’s.

  And someone might be inclined to supply that little push.

  No one was standing dangerously near me, but I drew back from the brink all the same. Greg Savage was saying something, but I wasn’t paying attention to the words, just waiting for a pause. When one came along I grabbed my chance.

  “The body has to stay where it is,” I said. “That’s the way the police will want it.”

  Someone wanted to know what the police had to do with it. “You don’t need the police when someone dies accidentally,” I was told. “Not when it’s an obvious accident, not out here in the country. All you need is for a doctor to sign a death certificate.”