The Burglar in the Library

by Lawrence Block

  In the dining room, Quilp took a seat at a table set for two. He tucked in his napkin and lifted a fork. “‘It is a far, far better thing that I do,’” he said, “‘than I have ever done,’ and I fear that’s all I remember of that passage. I’d say grace, but if the stew turns out to be laced with arsenic, that might be a thumb in the eye for the Man Upstairs. So without further ado…”

  He speared a morsel with his fork, put it in his mouth, chewed thoughtfully. He took another bite, smacked his lips.

  “There,” he said with satisfaction. “As you can see—”

  He broke off the sentence and a look of alarm spread on his florid face. The hand not clutching his fork moved to the middle of his chest, just over his heart. His lower lip trembled and he slumped in his chair.

  Why hadn’t I stopped him? How could I let the man kill himself like this? Oh, in a sense he’d been doing so for years, digging his grave with his knife and fork, but…

  “Ha!” He straightened up in his seat, gave a little yelp of laughter, and looked positively delighted by the expressions on our faces. “Oh my,” he said. “Oh my, oh my. Terrible of me, I know, but I couldn’t resist. You will forgive me my little joke, won’t you?” He plunged the fork into the bowl of stew. “It’s wonderfully flavorful, I assure you,” he said, “and it couldn’t possibly harm anyone. May I urge you all to fill bowls for yourselves and join me?”

  “We can’t be sure it’s safe,” Miss Hardesty said. “There are slow-acting poisons, aren’t there?”

  “If Cook was poisoned,” said Quilp, “the poison seems to have worked at the speed of light. But I’m sure you’re right. The stew contains a slow-acting poison, and I’m doomed. In fifty years’ time I’ll be stone dead.” He rolled his eyes. “With that timetable, young Millicent might want to hold off. The rest of you can afford to take your chances.”

  Mrs. Colibri said she thought she’d wait, not fifty years but, oh, fifteen minutes or so, just to be on the safe side. Several others murmured their agreement. Quilp told us to suit ourselves, but by then he’d very likely have had a second helping, and perhaps even a third. “And if Molly or Earlene could bring me a plate of that salad,” he said, “and some of the seven-grain bread, I think there must be some left. And some butter, of course. And beer, I think, would provide a better accompaniment than wine. Is there some of that nice brown ale, Nigel?”

  CHAPTER

  Eighteen

  “Jonathan Rathburn,” Nigel Eglantine said, and put the tips of his long fingers together. “I’m afraid I don’t know much about him at all. He rang up early in the week to ask if he could come up for a short stay. You both arrived yesterday, didn’t you? Mr. Rathburn preceded you by a day. It was Wednesday when he turned up, early in the afternoon.”

  “How did he get here?”

  “I don’t know that he said. If he drove, his car would be parked on the other side of the bridge. But we can’t get there to look for it, and we wouldn’t know it if we saw it, would we?”

  “We wouldn’t even see it,” I said, “under all that snow.”

  It was snowing again, though not as heavily as before. Carolyn and I were in the Great Library, along with Nigel and Colonel Blount-Buller. That room was pretty much as we’d left it, down to the copy of The Big Sleep still perched on the topmost shelf. There was, however, one significant change. Jonathan Rathburn was no longer crumpled at the foot of the library steps. The steps remained, and his blood still discolored the carpet, but Rathburn was gone.

  He hadn’t risen from the dead, nor had he been mysteriously spirited away. The decision to move the body had been a collective one, taken up with not much argument in the aftermath of a satisfying if initially unnerving lunch of lamb stew and salad and seven-grain bread, all washed down with Newcastle brown ale or California zinfandel or Deer Park spring water, as one preferred. Someone, I’m not sure who, made the point that we now had two rooms off-limits and out of bounds because there were bodies in them. While it was no more than a nuisance to be unable to go into the library, we would be hard-pressed to make do without the kitchen.

  Furthermore, it was noted, our initial decision to give up the library to the late Mr. Rathburn had been founded on the belief that the police would be appearing shortly. With the phone disabled and the bridge down, and with more snow falling, there was no way to guess when the police would actually show up. In the meantime, neither corpse was improving with age.

  “Rathburn’s gone off,” the colonel reported, “and the cook can’t be far behind. It’s unfortunate about young Orris, but there’s no denying he’s a good deal more conveniently placed than the other two.”

  Now, halfway through the afternoon, Rathburn and Cook were conveniently situated as well—outside, though not at the bottom of the gully. They reposed side by side in lawn chairs immediately to the rear of Cuttleford House, each covered with a bedsheet that was being covered in its turn by a fresh fall of snow.

  We’d taken crime-scene photographs before we moved the bodies, making use of a Polaroid camera the Savages had brought. Greg had snapped half a dozen shots of each of them from a variety of angles. He had more film in his room, he assured us, but thought he ought to save some. For the next victim, I suppose.

  Someone proposed outlining the bodies before moving them, either with chalk or strips of tape, but both were in short supply. Nor could anyone quite say what point there was in outlining the corpses. We’d all seen them do it on TV and figured you were supposed to.

  Once the library was clear, we opened a window to air it out, then assembled there and divided into groups of three. It was the colonel’s suggestion that he make up a trio with Carolyn and me, and that the three of us initiate an investigation, interviewing each of the others in turn and holding our interviews in the library, at the very scene of the first murder. “I do have a lifetime of military experience,” he said, “and sat on my share of courts-martial over the years. And Rhodenbarr here has had investigative experience.”

  What sort, someone wondered. Millicent, bless her heart, piped up again that I was a burglar. “Maybe the police investigated him,” she said. “And he assisted them in their inquiries.”

  “Cut the crap,” Carolyn told her. “If you want to know what Bernie is, he’s what you could call an amateur sleuth. With a house like this, I’m surprised you haven’t got an amateur sleuth on staff year-round.” Someone wanted to know just what an amateur sleuth was, and what they did. “Sometimes they’re busybodies,” Carolyn explained. “But other times they’re ordinary people like Bernie, just minding their own business, and getting mixed up in murder investigations through no fault of their own. That’s what keeps happening to Bernie. He can’t go away for a quiet weekend in the country without stumbling over dead bodies.”

  “And then he solves the crime?”

  “I’ve had some good luck in the past,” I admitted.

  “Is it a hobby?” someone wanted to know. I felt like saying that staying out of jail was a hobby, and solving other people’s crimes had occasionally served as a means toward that end. But I just lowered my head and tried to look modest.

  And now our investigation was under way. We’d begun with Nigel, and had learned that he didn’t know much about Rathburn, except that Nigel had thought he’d said over the phone that he was calling from New York, but that he’d written “Boston, Mass.” in the guest register. “Of course he could have called from New York even if he lived in Boston,” Nigel added.

  “Or he could have lied over the phone,” Carolyn said, “and remembered it wrong when it was time to sign in. For all we know he’s from Ames, Iowa.”

  “I don’t think we’ve ever had a guest from Iowa,” Nigel said. “That’s not the same as Omaha, is it?”

  The colonel asked him where he’d been at the time of the first murder, and Nigel said he didn’t know when the murder took place, but he rather thought he must have been asleep at the time. “In our own private quarters,” he said, “which
isn’t one of the named rooms, I’m afraid. Cissy and I have a suite on the other side of the kitchen.”

  “On the ground floor?”

  “Yes.”

  “And do you know when you retired for the night?”

  He frowned. “It’s difficult to be precise,” he said. “Last night you’ll recall we had a sort of informal trial of the Glen Drumnadrochit.” I said I remembered it well. “I remember it well enough,” he said, “but I find that when I drink a good deal over a period of several hours, the tail end of the evening tends to be the slightest bit difficult to recall. The details blur, as it were.”

  “No need to apologize,” the colonel said. “It could happen to a bishop.”

  “It seems to me I had a walk round the downstairs,” Nigel said, “to see the house was settled in for the night. Cissy was already in bed when I returned to our room, and I joined her and, well, I must have dropped off right away. Next thing I knew it was morning.”

  He’d been awake and dressed when Molly Cobbett discovered the body, he said, but hadn’t yet left the bedroom quarters. “We’ve our own en-suite bathroom,” he explained. “I say, I hope you won’t need to mention that to the others? All of the guests have to share, and they might resent it.”

  “It’s your house, Nigel,” the colonel said. “You’re in it twelve months a year. I don’t imagine anyone would begrudge you a bog of your own. Was Cissy there when you awoke?”

  “She woke up before me. But she was in our quarters, yes.”

  “And neither of you left your quarters during the night?” I asked.

  “Well, we wouldn’t have had occasion to, would we? Having the bath en suite and all.”

  Cissy was next. She’d had hardly any contact with Rathburn beyond taking the imprint of his credit card when he checked in. She was quick to assure us, though, that he had seemed like a very nice man. All of the guests were nice people, she added, which was what made things so impossibly difficult.

  “I know you’re all quite certain it couldn’t be a tramp,” she said wistfully, “and I do understand, believe me. But it would be ever so much nicer if it were. You can see that, can’t you?”

  We agreed that we could.

  “Because all of us here at Cuttleford House, guests and staff alike, are unassailably nice, don’t you see? And this is just not the sort of thing nice people do.”

  I thought about this, while Carolyn and the colonel asked various logistical questions in an attempt to determine who was where when various acts occurred. I found myself contemplating various murderers over the years, trying to determine if any of them had been what you could legitimately call “nice.” Murder itself was not nice, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it seemed to me that it was occasionally committed by nice people, or at least by people who appeared unequivocally nice on the surface.

  Such was the case in my own experience, and such was most definitely the case in what I’d read, especially when English country houses came into the picture. A good part of the appeal of books set in English country houses, it seemed to me, lay in the fact that one wasn’t forced to read about the sort of person with whom one wouldn’t care to associate in real life. All of the characters were just as nice as you could hope, and yet you always seemed to wind up with dead bodies all over the place.

  “Mrs. Eglantine,” I said. “Or should I call you Cecilia?”

  “Or Cissy,” she said. “Everyone calls me that.”

  “Cissy,” I said, “I’m sure you’re an observant woman. You’d have to be, running an establishment like Cuttleford House.”

  “One has to keep one’s eyes open,” she agreed.

  “So I’m sure you’ve noticed some unusual behavior.”

  “Unusual behavior?”

  “Perhaps some of the guests are not quite what they seem.”

  “Not quite…”

  “Or a little more than appears on the surface.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” she said.

  “Some of the others have noticed things,” I said. “Inconsistencies, odd behavior.”

  “They have?”

  “And reported them to us.”

  “Oh, dear,” she said, frowning. “But you’ve only just spoken with Nigel, haven’t you?”

  “There were some other informal discussions earlier. With some of the others.”

  “I see.”

  “And I can’t violate a confidence, but—”

  “No, of course not.”

  “But if everyone adds a little piece to the puzzle, soon the whole picture may emerge.”

  “Yes, I see what you mean,” she said. “And there is something.”

  “I thought there might be.”

  “Except it’s really nothing, you see.”

  “Well, of course it would seem like nothing.”

  “It would?”

  “It always does.”

  “Ah,” she said. “I see. It always seems like nothing.”

  “Always.”

  “Well,” she said, “it was a look.”

  “A look?”

  “A glance, really. One person glanced at another.”

  “And who did the glancing?”

  “Mr. Rathburn. Poor Mr. Rathburn.”

  “And he glanced at—”

  “Mrs. Savage.”

  “Leona Savage.”

  “Yes. Millicent’s mother.”

  “And Greg’s wife,” I said. “And Mr. Rathburn glanced at her?”

  “He did.”

  The colonel cleared his throat. “Men do glance at women,” he said, “although with every passing year I find it a little more difficult to remember why. But they do, and Mrs. Savage is an attractive young woman, and Mr. Rathburn is a vigorous young man. Or was, that is to say. So if Mr. Rathburn glanced at Mrs. Savage the way a man glances at a woman—”

  “I’m sure that’s all it was,” Cissy Eglantine said.

  “No,” Carolyn said, “you’re not. Are you?”

  Cissy sighed, set her shoulders. “No,” she admitted. “I’m not. It wasn’t that sort of glance at all.”

  “It couldn’t have been, or you wouldn’t have mentioned it. What sort of glance was it?”

  “It was just a glance,” Cissy said, “and perfectly innocent, I’m certain, but the thought that came to me—”

  “Yes?”

  “—was that they knew each other, and that they weren’t keen that anyone else should know this. But I’m sure there was nothing to it. I’m sure there was just something about her that reminded him of someone he’d known years ago, but only from a certain angle. And then when she turned her head the resemblance was gone. That happens all the time, doesn’t it? You think you recognize someone, but once you take a second glance you realize there’s really no resemblance at all.”

  “That fellow Wolpert,” Rufus Quilp said. “He talks like a lawyer. You may have noticed.”

  “Everyone talks like a lawyer,” Carolyn said. “I think Court TV’s what did it, that and the OJ trial.”

  “Perhaps that’s all it is,” Quilp said with a sigh, settling his clasped hands upon his ample stomach. “He can’t actually be an attorney, can he? Because they’re all terribly busy, and Wolpert has the time to come here for a lengthy holiday.”

  “He was talking about extending his stay,” I remembered.

  “We’re all extending our stay now, aren’t we? Like it or not. No TV to be watched, either, Court or otherwise, so perhaps our Mr. Wolpert will lose his lawyerly aspect. If that’s where he got it.” He sniffed. “He certainly doesn’t dress like a lawyer. No Brooks Brothers suits in his closet. Tweed jackets with elbow patches, that’s more his line. Knows a lot about poisons, did you notice?”

  “About mushrooms, anyway.”

  “About everything. Could be a professor. Dresses like a professor, wouldn’t you say? Ought to be fiddling about with a pipe, forever taking it apart and cleaning it. Fit the image to a T.”

  “You don’t
like him,” Carolyn said.

  “Don’t dislike him, either,” Quilp said. “No need to feel one way or the other about him, actually. Wouldn’t have said boo about him, but you did ask about little suspicions and observations.” He leaned forward. “I’ll tell you what it is. I’ve watched him eat.”

  “You have?”

  “I have. He picks at his food. I never trust a man who picks at his food.”

  “Miss Dinmont can walk,” Millicent Savage reported.

  “I think she said as much,” I said. “She was telling me that she has a first-floor room because of the wheelchair. She can manage stairs if she absolutely has to, but then somebody has to carry the wheelchair upstairs. If she can get up a flight of stairs, I suppose she can walk.”

  “She was dancing,” the child said.

  “Dancing?”

  “In her room. She was all by herself, too, in her room with the door locked and the curtain drawn.”

  “If the door was locked and the curtain drawn,” said the colonel, “then how could you possibly have seen her?”

  “Maybe I was wrong and the door was open,” Millicent suggested.

  “And maybe it wasn’t,” Carolyn said. “Maybe you looked through the keyhole.”

  Millicent giggled. “Maybe I did.”

  “I say,” the colonel said. “That’s no way to behave, young lady.”

  “I know,” she said. “But I’m only ten years old. It would be a lot worse if a grown-up did it. And I never would have done it except for the music.”

  “The music?”

  “That she was dancing to. It was all dreamy and gooey and romantic, and I heard it coming through the door, and that’s what made me look.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Carolyn said. “I bet you look in keyholes all the time.”

  “Not all the time.” The imp giggled. “You’d be surprised what you can see that way.”

  “And what did you see this time?”

  “Miss Dinmont dancing, and she was very graceful, too. She had her arms held out as if she was dancing with a partner, but she was all by herself. Unless she was dancing with a ghost. But I’m sure she wasn’t.”