I’ll tell you, it gave me a thrill. But then it always does, whenever I let myself into another’s residence or place of business, getting past all the devices aimed at keeping me out. Burglary pays the rent and keeps Raffles in cat food, but it’s always been more than a livelihood to me. It’s a vocation, a sacred calling. The thrill I got in my early teens when I first wriggled through a neighbor’s milk chute has never entirely gone away, and I recapture the rapture every time I break and enter. I’m a born burglar, God help me, and I love it. I always have and I’m afraid I always will.
But this room would have thrilled me if I’d visited it legitimately, with its door opened for me by its tenant herself. Like every other secretive and half-literate American adolescent, I’d been caught up in and utterly transported by Nobody’s Baby, sure that its tortured protagonist, Archer Manwaring, was a lifelong friend I’d somehow never met before, and that he was drawling his story right into my ear.
Right here, in this room, a much younger Anthea Landau had read the opening pages of Nobody’s Baby and at once recognized a new and important voice in American fiction. She read the book at one sitting, pausing halfway through to call a publisher and tell him she had something he had to read.
And the rest was publishing history, and it all started here, in this room.
This smoke-filled room. So many people have quit smoking, and the pastime is off-limits in so many public and private spaces, that I’m not much used to smelling cigarette smoke. Oh, I’ll get a whiff of somebody’s cigarette on the street, and there are always a few people puffing away in the Bum Rap, but this was different. Anthea Landau had lit up a cigarette when she first moved into these rooms, and she’d kept at it ever since. And she never ducked into the stairwell, either. She stayed home and smoked like a chimney.
If I ran into Isis Gauthier again, God forbid, she wouldn’t be able to dilate her nostrils and tell that I wasn’t a smoker. I couldn’t tell how much of the odor my clothes were picking up, not while I was standing there in the midst of it, but I could hardly expect to escape unscathed.
There was another smell, too, along with the cigarette smell. It was distinct from it and yet somehow akin to it, and I recognized it but couldn’t place it.
And why was I standing here drinking in odors, like a dog with his head out a car window? Burglary’s thrilling, all right, but it’s a lot less satisfying if you get caught in the act.
I went straight to the top drawer of the second file cabinet, the one marked F-G. It was unlocked. I held my flashlight in one hand and riffled file folders with the other. There were a couple of overflow E files—Ewing, J. Foster, and Exley, Oliver—and then came Fadiman, Gordon P., and Faffner, Julian. If these were writers, I thought, they weren’t notable success stories, because I hadn’t heard of any of them. Then came Farmer, Robert Crane, and I’d heard of him, and had put a book of his on my bargain table. Unless someone had bought or stolen it, it was still there.
I kept going, on the chance that Fairborn, Gulliver, was present but slightly misplaced, but it was no go, and I was not much surprised. Nothing’s quite that easy, is it?
It was going to take a more intensive search to turn up Gully Fairborn’s file, and first I did what I probably should have done right away, before checking the file cabinet. I found my way to the bedroom to make sure I was alone in the apartment.
The bedroom door was a few inches ajar. I eased it open and went in. The curtains were drawn in here, too, and with my flashlight switched off the place was as dark as the inside of a cow. And, like the rest of the place, it stank of cigarette smoke.
The smell of smoke masked other smells, a base of sleep and face powder and eau de cologne. And there was that other top note to the scent, even more noticeable in here. I wrinkled my nose at it, still unable to say just what it was.
Maybe the Fairborn file was on the bedside table. The wish, I’m sure, was father to the thought—I wanted to scoop it up and get the hell out of there—but it seemed more than remotely possible. Landau could sit up in bed sipping a hot chocolate and poring over the letters from her most remarkable client. She could warm herself with the memories, or with the thought of all the money those letters were going to bring.
I was pretty sure the place was empty—I didn’t hear breathing, didn’t have the sense of another person’s presence—but even so I shaded my flashlight with my free hand before I switched it on.
And switched it off in a hurry when I saw a white-haired head on the pillow.
I stood still and held my breath, alert for any sound to indicate I’d disturbed her sleep. I couldn’t hear a thing, and I backed to and through the bedroom door, taking little steps on tiptoe, careful not to make a sound. If that file was on her nightstand—and I hadn’t seen it, hadn’t even noticed if she had a nightstand—if it was there, then it could stay there. I wasn’t going to risk waking the woman. If she opened her eyes and saw me, it might scare her to death. If she let out a scream, it might scare me to death.
Back in the other room, I went to the desk and went to work on the drawers. There were seven of them, three on each side and one center drawer. I opened and closed them one after the other until I found the locked one. The drawer that’s worth locking generally turns out to be the one worth unlocking.
The locks on desk drawers are never much of a challenge. It’s a little trickier when the light’s not good and you’re wearing gloves and trying not to make any noise, but it’s still easy work.
I hoped there wouldn’t be a gun in there. The locked desk drawer is where you generally find a handgun, if there’s one to be found. That way, if the householder needs to protect himself, he can start by trying to remember where he put the key.
I’ve never liked guns, and I especially dislike the guns you find in desk drawers. They’re there so that people can shoot burglars, and I’m opposed to that. I hate the very idea of it.
I opened the drawer, and I didn’t find a gun in it, but neither did I find the Fairborn file. I closed the drawer, and if I had all the time in the world I’d have locked up after myself, but I didn’t. I opened and closed the other drawers, just taking time for a quick glance within, and I didn’t find Gully Fairborn’s letters, and I didn’t find any guns, either, and—
Gunpowder.
That’s what I’d smelled. Gunpowder, cordite, call it what you will. I’d smelled what you smell in a room where a gun’s been fired. And I could smell it now, and that’s definitely what it was, and it had been stronger in the bedroom, and I hadn’t heard any breathing, and the way she smoked you’d think her breathing would be a pretty audible affair, and—
I went back to the bedroom. I was more concerned with speed and less with stealth this time around, and I walked right up to the side of the bed. I still couldn’t hear any breathing, and at this range that meant there wasn’t any to hear.
I reached out a hand and touched her forehead.
She was dead. She wasn’t up there at 98.6, but she wasn’t all the way down to room temperature, either. She hadn’t been dead long, but then I’d guessed that much before I laid a hand on her. If she’d been dead any length of time, I’d have smelled more than cordite and cigarette smoke in that little room.
Didn’t I tell you? nagged an inner voice. Didn’t I say to abort the mission? Didn’t I tell you to pull the plug? But did you listen? Do you ever listen?
I was listening now, but not to inner voices. I was listening to sounds outside the apartment, sounds in the hallway. I could hear footsteps, and it took a lot of feet to make that sort of sound, and flat feet at that. I heard voices, too, and I heard men knocking on doors and calling out. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but I didn’t think it was anything I wanted to hear.
And now someone was pounding on my door—well, Ms. Landau’s door—and calling out “Police!” and “Open up in there!” I knew it was the police, and opening up was the last thing I wanted to do.
I drew the curtains, looked out the
window. No fire escape, and the street was a long way down.
I heard a key in the lock, Carl’s passkey, and the lock turned. By the time the door opened a crack I was in the bedroom, and the chain lock kept them out while I fumbled behind the drawn curtains. I flung open the window, and, thank God and St. Dismas, there was a fire escape out there.
I climbed out onto it, and I was just shutting the window behind me when I heard them crashing through the door.
CHAPTER
Five
I didn’t bide my time on the fire escape. I passed nothing but lighted windows on the fourth and fifth floors. A lighted room is not necessarily an occupied room, but I didn’t want to waste time on a closer look. I kept going until I found a dark room on the third floor. The window was closed but not locked, and I opened it and clambered over the sill and pulled it shut behind me.
I drew the curtain, turned on the light, and took a moment to catch my breath. The room had been rented—to either a woman or a male transvestite, judging from the array of cosmetics on the dresser top—and whoever it was had gone out for a night on the town. Unless a sudden fit of homesickness sent her straight to the airport, she’d be back sooner or later. So I couldn’t stay indefinitely, but for the time being I was perfectly safe.
Perfectly safe, and in somebody else’s abode. Under such circumstances it’s second nature for me to look around for something to steal. I had entered the premises illegally. I was where I clearly did not belong. While I was there, why not take something?
The necklace and earrings, for example.
If I wasn’t supposed to take them, what the hell were they doing out in plain sight? I mean, there they were, in a palm-sized jewelry case tucked underneath the bras and panties in the second drawer of the dresser. Well, maybe that’s not exactly in plain sight, but still…
Each earring sported a ruby of about a carat, ringed with diamond chips. The necklace’s ruby was larger—three or four carats, at a guess. There are, alas, a lot of fake rubies around, and I didn’t have a jeweler’s loupe with me, or time for a good look, but my guess was that these were the real thing. Good color, no obvious inclusions. And the settings were gold, at least eighteen-karat and probably twenty-two.
If they were fakes, they’d be larger. And who’d set fake rubies in solid twenty-two-karat gold? They looked real to me, and if so they were worth enough to put the evening in the plus column.
After all, I had an investment to protect. I was out better than six hundred dollars for my room. Gully Fairborn’s letters were gone. Someone else had beat me to them, and killed a woman to get them. I’d had a bad night, and it wasn’t over yet, and why not grab at an opportunity to turn a small profit?
Still, I was going to be walking through a lobby crawling with cops. I was a registered guest, and there was nothing inherently suspicious in my dropping the key at the desk and walking out of the lobby. My belongings could stay in Room 415 until the chambermaid collected them and cleaned up after me. I’d probably left a few fingerprints there, along with my socks and underwear, but so what? No one was going to bother dusting an empty room for prints. Given the Paddington’s casual approach to housekeeping, they’d probably find a whole collection, all the way back to Stephen Crane.
So what was I supposed to do? Just put the rubies back where I’d found them? Just abandon them?
I took a last look at them, sighed, and closed the case with a snap. It was the sort of case that would slip right into your pocket, and wasn’t that a sign?
I thought so.
I went out the door to a blissfully empty hallway, then passed up the elevator in favor of the stairs. At the bottom of the last flight I walked through an unlocked door into a lobby full of people, a good number of them wearing blue uniforms. Others were citizens, trying to loiter long enough to determine what all the fuss was about, while some of the uniforms urged them to get on about their business. And that’s what I was planning to do, and the business I planned to get on about was escape.
I didn’t slink and I didn’t scamper. I did my best to saunter, room key in hand, passing the desk on my way out, and—
“That’s him!”
The last time I’d heard that voice, low-pitched and husky, it had been at once irritating and inviting. Now it was considerably elevated in volume, and urgent in tone. And the voice’s owner, a vision in bold primary colors, was just a few yards away, and she was pointing a finger and the finger was aimed at me.
“He’s the man I saw,” she went on. “He was prowling around on the sixth floor, and he’d just come through a locked door, and he couldn’t give a good account of himself. He told one lie after another.”
And you walked into the lobby this afternoon, I thought, with a man old enough to be your father, though I have reason to believe he wasn’t. But did I say anything?
Her blue eyes flashed. “His name is Peter Jeffries,” she said. “At least that’s what he told me. I rather doubt that’s his real name.”
“It’s close,” Carl Pillsbury said. He had a faint Southern accent I hadn’t noticed before, and I realized he’d put it on for the occasion, as if he was playing a part. “He’s a registered guest,” he continued, the accent quite convincing, and by no means overdone. “He’s in Room 415, and his name is Jeffrey Peters.”
You dye your hair, I thought, and it couldn’t be more obvious. But do I say a word?
“You’re both wrong,” said a voice I recognized. “This here’s somebody else altogether, an’ if he’s registered here it’s suspicious all by itself, on account of he’s got a perfectly good place of his own on West End Avenue. This here is nobody but Mrs. Rhodenbarr’s son Bernard. What’s the matter with you, Bernie? Aren’t you gonna say hello?”
“Hello, Ray.”
“‘Hello, Ray.’ Say it like you mean it, why don’t you?”
“I did.”
“Yeah, well, I guess you did at that. You can’t be too happy to see me, an’ I can understand that, but better me than someone who doesn’t know you in the first place. We’ll go downtown an’ book you an’ print you, an’ you can call up Wally Hemphill to come down an’ bail you out, an’ sooner or later we’ll get things sorted out. We always do, don’t we?”
“Ray,” I said. “You’ve got no reason to take me downtown.”
“You gotta be kiddin’, Bern.”
“Miss Gauthier says I didn’t give a good account of myself,” I said. “Well, no law says I have to, not to her. I didn’t ask her what she was doing on the sixth floor, so what gave her the right to ask me?”
“I live there,” Isis said.
There was something familiar about the color scheme of her outfit, beyond the fact that I’d seen it a little while ago in the sixth-floor hallway. I realized what it was when I glanced at the Horvath painting over the fireplace. Her skirt was the same blue as his hat, and her bolero jacket matched his little jacket, and her blouse was as brilliantly yellow as his Wellington boots. It was uncanny, and while her skin tone was not the exact tan of his fur, it was close.
“Because of my past history,” I said, “and because you’ve never been able to believe I’ve changed my ways—”
“Which you haven’t,” Ray said, “not for a minute.”
“—you think I was prowling around looking for something to steal. Well, even if that was what I had in mind, you can’t hang a man for his thoughts, or jail him, either. I didn’t take anything, and I’m not carrying burglar’s tools. You don’t have to take my word for it. You can search me.”
“We will,” he said, “once we get you downtown. You can count on that, Bern.”
“When you do,” I said, “you won’t find anything, and that’s something you can count on. So what have you got? I was on the premises of a hotel in which I happened to be a registered guest. Where’s the crime in that?”
“You registered under a false name.”
“So? That’s only a crime if it’s done with the presumed intent to defraud the
innkeeper. I paid cash in advance, Ray. If you’re planning to skip out on a hotel bill, you don’t generally pay it ahead of time. I’m in the clear on this.”
“You know,” he said, “you can really shovel the stuff out, Bernie. It’s a hell of a talent. If all we had was the report of a prowler, an’ if you’re really not carryin’ lockpicks an’ stolen goods on your person, I’d probably have to cut you loose. But there’s a dead woman in a room on the sixth floor, an’ it looks like she had help gettin’ that way, an’ you were spotted on Six, an’ what does that look like?”
“It looks like sheer coincidence to me,” I said. “Whatever happened, I had nothing to do with it. And now what I’d like to do is go home. You’ve got no reason to hold me, and I know my rights.”
“I’m sure you do,” he said. “You ought to by now. You’ve heard ’em enough times. But just in case your memory’s rusty, here’s how they go. You have the right to remain silent. Do you understand?”
“Ray, I—”
“Yeah, you understand. You have the right to an attorney. Do you understand? Yeah, you understand that, too…”
CHAPTER
Six
I suppose I should begin at the beginning. It started the week before, on as perfect an autumn afternoon as anyone could wish for. New York had suffered through a long hot summer, capped with a truly brutal heat wave, and now the heat had broken with the arrival of some cool clean air from Canada, where it’s evidently a local specialty.
My shop’s air-conditioned, of course, so it’s not a bad place to be even on a hellishly hot day. But heat can dull a person’s enthusiasm for browsing in a bookstore, even if the store itself is comfortable enough, and business had been off for the last week or so.