The Burglar in the Library

by Lawrence Block

  “Herstory?”

  “History for girls. Anyway, you can read about Queen Anne, or about just about anything else, with all these books staring us in the face. And we can drink fortified coffee, and sooner or later the police will turn up and rescue us. And then they can do all those sophisticated tests, DNA and blood spatters and autopsies, and they can run background checks on all the guests, and—”

  “And Bob’s your uncle,” I suggested.

  “Well, something like that.” She sighed. “You know something, Bern? I never thought I’d sit around wishing the police would turn up, but that’s exactly what I’m doing. Because right this minute I’d actually be happy to see that door burst open and Ray Kirschmann come lumbering through it. I…”

  “What’s the matter, Carolyn?”

  “Huh?”

  “You broke off what you were saying and started staring at something.”

  “The door,” she said.

  “What about it?”

  “I was sure it was gonna fly open,” she said, “and I was sure he was gonna be there.”

  “Who, Ray?”

  She nodded. “Dumb idea, Bern. He doesn’t even know we’re here, does he?”

  “I can’t see how he would even know we left town.”

  “Still, it shows you the state I’m in. You know what it all means, Bernie?”

  “No.”

  “It means the day of the amateur sleuth is over. If ever a case looked made to order for amateur sleuthing, this would have to be it. A snowbound English country house with corpses piling up faster than the snow? And here we are, throwing up our hands.”

  “I’m glad that’s all we’re throwing up,” I said. “When I got my first look at dinner tonight my heart sank. Does that dish have a name, do you figure? Something like Cobbett surprise?”

  “Oh, that reminds me,” she said, getting to her feet. “I promised I’d help.”

  “Help what?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  “That’s not what,” I said. “It’s where.”

  “I said I’d help with the cleanup.”

  “You?”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for one thing,” I said, “it’s not your job. For another, you happen to hate helping in the kitchen.”

  “It’s an emergency,” she said. “They’re shorthanded, what with the cook being dead and all.”

  “And all,” I said.

  “So I thought I’d help.”

  I noticed the way she was avoiding my eye, and light dawned. I asked who she’d be helping.

  “Whoever’s in there,” she said. “Look, I’ll just—”

  “Molly Cobbett,” I said.

  “She’s probably in there, yeah. So?”

  “And her cousin Earlene?”

  “She’s probably got other jobs to do.”

  “So Molly’s alone in the kitchen.”

  “She probably is,” she said, “and now that you mention it, that’s probably not safe. So that’s all the more reason for me to go keep her company.”

  “Maybe I should come too,” I said.

  “No need, Bern.”

  “Two’s dangerous, remember? Suppose Molly turns out to be the killer?”

  “Very funny.”

  “Or suppose you turn out to be the killer.”

  “Even funnier, Bern.”

  “I just don’t want to see you make the wrong move,” I said. “I know you dreamed about her, but—”

  “It was some dream, Bern. You have no idea.”

  Oh, no? “She’s a country girl,” I went on, “from a sheltered background, and she probably doesn’t know the first thing about lesbians.”

  “You didn’t see the way she was looking at me.”

  “Well, you’re exotic,” I said. “Hip and urban and—”

  “And gay,” she said. “And she’s a Cobbett, which means there’s probably not a whole lot she hasn’t done. The only thing that makes me exotic is that I’m not a blood relative. Listen, I’m not looking to put the moves on her. I just want to go keep her company in the kitchen.”

  I couldn’t think of anyone else I wanted to keep company with, in the kitchen or elsewhere. The only object of my affections in the neighborhood was Lettice Littlefield, and I wasn’t too sure how affectionately I felt toward her just now. Anyway, they were on their honeymoon and there was a killer on the premises, so her sneering husband was likely to be keeping her on a short leash.

  What I really wanted to do was escape, and there’s one tried-and-true way to manage that feat without actually going anywhere. I remembered Emily Dickinson’s words on the subject: There is no frigate like a book. “Frigate,” I said, more or less, and went into the library.

  I looked up at Raymond Chandler, looked over at the library steps, looked at the camel and the throw pillow. I wondered if a person could actually sit down and work out a murder scheme involving a camel and a pillow. It had to have been improvised, I decided, or else the whole thing had an impossibly Monty Python tone to it.

  It was a pity, I thought, that I hadn’t heard any of the conversation that had been murmured in this very room while I lurked in the doorway. One of the participants had almost certainly been Jonathan Rathburn, the other the person who cameled and pillowed him to death. Had I crept in a little way I might have found out what they were going on about, and might have learned the identity of the other party. Conversely, if I’d just blundered in noisily, switching on lights and begging pardon for the intrusion, I might have prevented a murder. And, if that first killing hadn’t taken place, perhaps the others would have been nipped in the bud as well.

  I could have saved them all, I thought. If only I’d been a little more furtive, or a little more oafish. Either extreme might well have done the trick. It was this middle-of-the-road crap that caused all the trouble.

  Well, as Emily D. would say, frigate. High time I sailed away from all this. I went over to the shelves and started looking at the books.

  I stayed there in the library, reading, then went upstairs to Aunt Augusta’s Room and ran into Millicent Savage in the hallway. She’d won, she told me triumphantly. She was going to be allowed to remain in Uncle Roger’s Room. I told her I thought she should stay with her parents.

  “Why?” she demanded. “So you can burglarize Uncle Roger?”

  “What’s he got to steal besides a pipe and slippers?”

  “And the pipe’s smelly,” she said, getting into the spirit of things. “And the slippers have holes in them.”

  “Poor old Uncle Roger.”

  “No, it’s Poor Miss McTavish! Gross old Uncle Roger.”

  “I still think you should stay in your parents’ room,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I just think it would be a good idea.”

  She looked at me. “You think there’s going to be another murder,” she said, “but you won’t come right out and say so because you don’t want me to be scared. But if I’m not scared, I’ll want to go on staying in my own room.”

  “It’s a poser,” I agreed.

  “I think you’re right,” she said. “I think there’s going to be another killing. But I won’t be the victim.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because I’m just a little kid,” she said. “Nobody’s going to bother killing me. You’re the one who should be scared.”

  “Me?”

  She nodded solemnly. “Somebody’s going to be murdered tonight,” she said, “and it might be you.”

  An hour or so later I was in yet another sitting room. This one boasted no antelopes on the wall, just a couple of edged weapons. One of them had a wave-shaped blade about eight inches long, and I took it down from the wall to admire it. I couldn’t swear to it, but what it looked like to me was a Malayan kris, a frequent denizen of the very same crossword puzzles that welcomed the oryx and the zebu. I ran my thumb across the blade, decided it was sharp enough for headhunting, and hung it back on the wall.r />
  I’d stopped at the bar first, where I’d poured myself a drink and made the appropriate notation in the book. I was making the drink last, just wetting my lips every few pages while I worked my way through Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s wonderful novel of journalists in Africa. There’s a passage fairly early on in which a dour newspaperman reminisces about once having made and launched a dugout canoe, whereupon the thing sank like a stone. I was a little vague on the details, but I remembered that I’d laughed for ten minutes the first time I read the book. I didn’t know when I’d be likely to hit it, and I was a little worried that it wouldn’t be as funny this time, and that I’d wind up wondering why I’d ever thought it was funny in the first place.

  Better to be anxious about that than to worry about being bridged and mushroomed and cameled and pillowed to death. While I couldn’t be sure how my favorite passage would hold up, so far the book was an excellent choice. There were, to be sure, hundreds if not thousands of books on the shelves that I hadn’t read, but this was a night to be reading something I could count on. I wanted to escape, but on familiar paths.

  I’d passed Raffles earlier in the upstairs hall, and you’d have thought I’d done something to offend him; he paid me no attention at all, and he’d have sailed on by with his tail held high if he’d had one. He turned up again after I’d been reading for half an hour, having undergone a personality transplant in the interim. He came over, rubbed against my ankle, draped himself over my feet, and purred with such energy that I felt the vibrations clear to my knees.

  He was still in place, still revving his motor, when I heard footsteps and looked up at Carolyn. “You know,” I said, “I’ve got a good book to read and good whisky to drink and a comfortable chair to sit in. I’ve got a cat who has the decency to act as though he loves me, even though we know how unlikely that is. It’s not a bad life. I hope I don’t get killed.”

  She stared. “Why even say something like that?”

  I told her what Millicent had said.

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “She’s just a creepy little kid, Bern. It’s not like she’s holding down the first chair at the Psychic Friends Network.”

  “I know that,” I said, “but it’s spooky all the same. It gives me a funny feeling.”

  “Don’t say that, Bern.”

  “Why not?”

  “It sounds ominous, that’s all. And I’m feeling pretty spooked to begin with. I went upstairs just now and the door to our room was locked.”

  “Well, sure,” I said. “That’s because neither of us was in it.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ve got a key, right? We’ve each got one. You didn’t lose yours, did you?”

  “Of course not. But I was scared to use it.”

  “Why?”

  “I was afraid of what might be inside.”

  “Like a dead body?”

  “Or a live one, waiting to kill me. I don’t know what I was afraid of, Bern. I knocked, hoping nobody would open the door, and nobody did, and I came downstairs to look for you.”

  “And here I am,” I said. “Let’s go upstairs. Maybe tomorrow’ll be better.”

  “That’s what people are always saying,” she said, “and it never is. But this time it almost has to be. Maybe the cops’ll come and we can all go home. Except I love it here, or at least I did until everybody started getting killed.”

  “Wait a minute, Bern.”

  We were skirting the library on our way to the stairs when she tugged at my sleeve. I waited, and she darted inside. She came out with a facial expression I recognized from Japanese films—the samurai, moments before committing hara-kiri.

  “Bern,” she said through clenched teeth, “go in there!”

  “Why? I’ve already got a book.”

  “Just do it. And look at the shelf.”

  “What shelf?”

  “The shelf.”

  I went and looked, knowing what I’d see. The shelf held no surprises. And it didn’t hold The Big Sleep, either. Just a space where the book had been until someone snatched it away.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty

  “I’m not surprised,” I said. “I don’t really want to talk about it, to tell you the truth, but I can’t say I’m surprised.”

  “I don’t suppose it’s really very important, Bern. With people getting killed left and right, a rare book doesn’t seem all that significant. But the idea that it could just disappear like that…”

  “You’re right,” I said. “It’s not important.”

  We were in our bedroom, and I didn’t want to talk about The Big Sleep, so I asked about Molly Cobbett. Carolyn’s expression turned wistful.

  “She’s sweet,” she said, “and she’s full of stories about this part of the country, and about the Cobbetts clear back to Revolutionary War days. But I guess she’s more innocent than I thought, Bern.”

  “You mean she’s only been sleeping with boy cousins?”

  “That’s about it. Remember how I told you she was looking at me before? Well, I’m beginning to get the sense that she just stares that way at everybody. It’s what passes for manners in Cobbett country.”

  “So I guess you won’t be sneaking off in the middle of the night to pay a visit the servants’ quarters.”

  “Only in my dreams,” she said, and grinned. “And if tonight’s dream is half as good as last night’s, I won’t have anything to complain about.”

  Getting ready for bed wasn’t all that much of a problem. Occasionally on a late night one of us stays over at the other’s apartment, and the business of changing to sleep-wear isn’t all that awkward, even in close quarters. It was being in the same bed together that was strange, and stranger still for my recollection of her dream of the night before.

  I sat up and read, willing Evelyn Waugh to take my mind off pretty much everything it was on, and Carolyn sat beside me reading a book of her own, and I wondered who’d be first to switch off the bedside lamp. And then, of course, there was the sound of scratching at the door.

  “Raffles,” she said.

  “I’m afraid you’re right.”

  “You want to let him in?”

  “If we let him in,” I said, “we’ll just have to let him out.”

  “Can’t we just leave the door open? That’s what we did last night.”

  “Sure,” I said. “In a house where three people have been murdered so far.”

  “You think a locked door could keep a murderer away?”

  “I’d prefer a clove of garlic on a string,” I said, “but I don’t want to go all the way down to the kitchen at this hour. I don’t know if a locked door would keep anybody out who was really determined to get in, but an open door’s an invitation. ‘Here I am, murder me.’”

  “Leave it locked, Bern. Maybe he’ll go away.”

  Fat chance. The scratching was repeated half a dozen times in the next few minutes, and at that point I gave up and let him in. And left the door ajar.

  He came in, made his rounds, nibbled some dried food, invited strokes and behind-the-ear scratches, and took his leave. I watched him go and stared for a long moment at the open door.

  Then I went back to my book.

  “Bern? When I was in the kitchen with Molly? I thought I might learn something that would help us figure out who the killer is. But I didn’t get anywhere.”

  I closed the book.

  “I’m completely lost,” she said. “Stumped. And I guess you’re the same way, huh?”

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  “What do you mean? Don’t tell me you know who did it.”

  “Well,” I admitted, “I sort of have an idea.”

  “Well, for crying out loud, let’s hear it!”

  I shook my head. “Not now,” I said.

  “What do you mean, not now?”

  “It’s just a hunch,” I said, “and I could be completely wrong. And I haven’t worked it all out in my mind yet.”

  “So what? Bern, t
here’s nobody in the room but you and me. Nobody’s gonna sue you for slander.”

  “I know.”

  “So?”

  I considered, then shook my head. “It wouldn’t be right.”

  “Bern!” She grabbed my arm. “Don’t you see what you’re doing? You’re refusing to act.”

  “I am?”

  “I’ve read hundreds of books,” she said, “where the detective does just what you’re doing. And he says the same kind of harebrained thing you just said, about how it’s too early to tell what he knows. And the next thing you know there’s another corpse on the floor, and he’s saying something like ‘Dash it all, it’s all my fault. I waited too long.’ And that’s what you’re doing, Bern. You’re waiting too long.”

  “But it’s just a hunch,” I said, “and I’m probably wrong, and the puzzle’s still got too many pieces missing.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  “And it’s the middle of the night.”

  “That’s not what they all say. But what difference does it make?”

  “Even if I’m right,” I said, “I can’t run out now and do anything about it. So what’s the point in talking about it?”

  “For one thing, it’ll keep me from going crazy.”

  “Maybe, but it would have been better if I hadn’t said anything in the first place.”

  She shook her head. “You’ve got to tell me, Bernie. Suppose that creepy little kid is right and you get killed tonight. If you don’t tell anybody, your secret will die with you.” She held up her index finger, pointing at nothing in particular. “That’s another thing you read about all the time,” she said. “Somebody has it all worked out and won’t tell anybody, and then he’s the next victim.”

  “I don’t want to be the next victim,” I said.

  “Don’t even say it, Bern.”

  “You’re the one who said it. You really think I’m in danger?”

  “You might be. Anybody might be.”

  “And you really think I’ll be safer if I tell you?”

  “All I know,” she said, “is I’ll never be able to sleep unless you do.”