The Burglar in the Library (10 page)

T
he library, when I finally got to it, was dark. Someone had drawn the curtains and switched off the lights. I stood at the threshold, trying to determine the most natural way to go in there and get the book. I had packed a narrowbeam pocket flashlight, but I’d left it in my room (or our room, or Aunt Augusta’s, as you prefer). I could have gone upstairs to fetch it, but I’d had enough trouble already trying to find my way back to the library. I didn’t want to have to look for it again.

Besides, there was something impossibly furtive about skulking around with a flashlight. One transformed oneself into a bumbling burglar out of the Sunday comics, the sort always portrayed wearing a domino mask and carrying a burlap sack of swag over his shoulder.

Why bother? I was a paying guest at Cuttleford House, fully entitled to be there. In the absence of a posted curfew, I had every right to make use of the Great Library at any hour of the day. There was,
in short, no need to skulk. I could stride manfully in, bold as any base metal, switch on all the lamps I wanted, mount the library steps, fetch the book I wanted, and take it back to my room. Moreover, I could do all of that without committing the merest infraction of the house rules, let alone the criminal code. I wouldn’t even risk arousing suspicion. I was a guest, I wanted something to read before going to sleep, and where better to find the book of my choice than the library?

I would have to be on my way back to New York with the book tucked away in my luggage before I’d have done anything that could provoke so much as a raised eyebrow.

Still, there were precautions to be taken. Somewhere down the line, when the book went under the hammer at Christie’s or Sotheby’s, say, the volume’s provenance would best be established by citing the Lester Harding Ross memoir, and anyone else could do as I had done, walking back the cat (as the counterspies call it) all the way to Ferdinand Cathcart’s little pleasure dome in the Berkshires. It would be just as well if no one was in a position to remember seeing one Bernard Rhodenbarr striding through the halls of Cuttleford House with
The Big Sleep
clutched to his bosom.

First things first. Get the book, in an unobtrusive fashion, and tuck it away for safekeeping. Then get it off the premises and get it home. Sit on it for a while, thrilling in its possession, and then figure out a good cover story—how it had been at the bottom of a sack of book club editions and Grosset reprints that someone walked in off the street with, how I’d grabbed it up along with
a dozen other old books in a thrift shop in Staten Island, how it was part of a nondescript collection of volumes acquired at a garage sale somewhere in Nassau County. It wouldn’t be hard to tailor a story to fit the circumstances.

First, get the book.

And I was on my way. I was all set to enter the room, had in fact already extended one foot across the threshold, when I heard somebody talking.

I leaned forward and turned my head to aim an ear in the direction the sound had come from. It was impossible to make out, but someone was saying something, speaking in a hushed whisper at the far corner of the library from where I was standing. The very corner, in point of fact, where Raymond Chandler’s first novel reposed (or had when last I looked) on the uppermost shelf.

Rufus Quilp, muttering in his sleep? Not unless he’d moved from the site of his earlier slumber. I slipped a little deeper into the shadows and stopped trying to see in the darkness, which was plainly impossible. I closed my eyes entirely, with the thought that it might sharpen my hearing. It’s supposed to work for blind newsdealers, but I guess it takes years, because it had no immediate effect as far as I could tell. Just silence and murmuring and more silence and more murmuring.

More than one person. I was suddenly sure of that, because it seemed to me that one hushed whisper was responding to another hushed whisper. It remained impossible, though, to identify either whisperer, or to make out a word of what was being whispered.

Who could it be? The missing Miss Hardesty,
two-timing poor Miss Dinmont and cuddling on the sofa with the upstairs maid? That rotter Dakin Littlefield, out from under the goosedown coverlet of his marriage bed and getting some sauce for the gander? Were these two even lovers at all, or were they conspirators planning…planning what? The overthrow of a Balkan government? It seemed to me that was what conspirators used to plan in English-country-house mysteries, and, now that there are once again Balkan governments begging to be overthrown, perhaps those people are back to their old tricks.

But what difference did it make what was being said or who was saying it? I’d already decided that I didn’t want to call attention to myself, and that meant I couldn’t barge in on their hush-hush conversation, switching on lamps and dashing up ladders. In fact it probably meant I shouldn’t be lurking in the doorway, just waiting to be found out and exposed for what I so obviously was, a despicable eavesdropper manqué.

I was frozen there, wanting to leave but wishing I could see who they were and hear what they were saying. Then, from out of nowhere, something came and brushed against my ankle.

The cops,
I thought, because that’s the first thought that pops into my mind when something takes me by surprise. It was not an enduring thought, however, because it has been my experience that, while cops are apt to do many unsettling and sometimes inexplicable things, brushing up against your ankle is rarely one of them.

A ghost.
That was my next thought, prompted no doubt by Carolyn’s fears and Millicent Savage’s
mischief. I wasn’t sure that I believed in ghosts, but if such a thing existed, well, a ghost couldn’t ask for a better house to haunt, or a better night to walk the earth. Did ghosts rub up against one’s ankles?

While I was pondering the point, it did it again. And now I knew what it was, and it wasn’t the cops and it wasn’t a ghost. It made a sound, you see, and it wasn’t the sort of sound a cop would make (“Put your hands on the wall!”), nor was it the clanking of chains or the wail of a banshee.

The sound was akin to that of a very expensive and well-bred motorcar, its powerful engine idling, waiting for the light to change. In a word, it was purring.

I bent down and scooped it up in my arms, hoping it would stick to purring and not switch to anything as attention-getting as a full-throated miaow. And then, while a pair of invisible Anatrurian provocateurs went on inaudibly plotting a coup, I played the perfect counterspy—I walked the cat back to my room.

I guess he was hungry. That’s what it usually means when Raffles does his ankle-brushing number, although it’s tempting to interpret it as a display of affection. (Maybe that’s what any display of affection really means, regardless of the source—“Hi there! I want something from you!”)

Back in Aunt Augusta’s bedchamber, I found the red plastic bowl we’d brought along, and the box of Friskies, poured the latter into the former, and put it down where he could get at it. He stood there in the dark, eating, and I stood there and watched
him, and then he walked over to the door, which I’d closed, and made pathetic declawed scratching noises until I opened it and let him out.

I closed it again, took off clothes and put on pajamas, then opened it and left it ajar. In the double bed provided for us, Carolyn rolled over and snarled softly in her sleep. She’d been sleeping on one side of the bed, but now she was smack in the middle.

Outside our window, the snow went right on falling. If it had ever stopped or even slowed its pace, you couldn’t prove it by me; every time I’d looked out a window, there it was, great big flakes of it, falling in great profusion. From where I stood there was no way to gauge its depth, but I figured there had to be a foot of it out there at the very least.

I got into bed, trying to pick the side with the most room. I settled my head on the pillow and got an elbow in the ribs from Carolyn. I tried to make do with the space available to me, but that didn’t work. I’d start to drift, and then Carolyn would move around enough to rouse me with a knee or an elbow, or I’d draw so close to the edge of the bed that I’d start to fall out of it.

After a little of this I decided I had to risk waking her, and I put one hand on her hip and the other on her shoulder and shoved her gently but firmly over toward her side of the bed. That seemed to work, but then she came rolling back, and her arm wrapped around me as her face wound up nestled against my chest.

I had to lie there and decide how I felt about this. Carolyn is certainly an attractive woman,
but it’s safe to say she’s not my type, even as I am emphatically not hers. One of the ways in which women differ from men, it seems to me, is that the distinctions between gay and straight are a little more apt to blur for them. A lot of straight women seem inclined to experiment with a female lover now and then—Carolyn keeps getting involved with women of this sort, and keeps swearing it’s a mistake she’s made for the last time. And I’ve known lesbians with a similar inclination to try something different once in a blue moon.

Not Carolyn. She’s no more interested in having sex with a man than I am. That was clear from the day I met her, and it made it easier for our friendship to develop. We were best friends, we were buddies, and one thing we were not destined to do was share a pillow.

But that was what we were doing. She may have had a pillow of her own, but her head was on my pillow now, and so was mine.

No problem. If I hadn’t had that interlude with Lettice in the East Parlour, maybe my body would have had other ideas. But it was a tired and depleted old body by now, and all it wanted was a good night’s sleep. Toward that end, huddling together for warmth like this was just what the doctor ordered. Snug in the arms of my best friend, basking in her body heat, I felt myself drifting.

See, I had the edge here. I was awake.

Carolyn was not. Sound asleep, though not in sleep’s deepest stage, she had no idea the person she clung to was her good buddy Bernie, or indeed any man at all. She was probably dreaming, and I’m sure you know how a dream will change direc
tion in order to accommodate to circumstance. If the phone on the nightstand rings, the sleeper instantly inserts a ringing telephone into the scenario of his dream. Carolyn’s dream had to embrace not a ringing telephone but a warm body, and in her dream it became a female body, a lover’s body.

In the dream, she began to make love to this body to which she was clinging.

And not just in the dream.

It was unendurably weird. There I was, on the verge of sleep, and my best friend in the world was nuzzling my neck and moving her hands on my body. I wanted to wake her up, but I couldn’t think of a way to do so without making things worse. Wouldn’t it be better to wait it out?

Hard to say. On the one hand, the dream could quickly run its course. (They’re speedy little devils, always demanding far more time to recount than it takes to dream them in the first place.) On the other hand, there was always the chance that Carolyn’s wandering hand would fasten on a part of me not entirely consistent with the fabric of her dream, and that might give new meaning to the term “rude awakening.”

What to do? Suppose I just let out a scream and sprang out of bed. I could say I was having a nightmare, and by the time she’d calmed me down she would have lost all track of her own dream. Still, it wasn’t a very nice thing to do, and how would either of us be able to get back to sleep after that?

She moved, burrowing still closer, fitting herself against me. Her thighs wrapped around my leg, and she sort of rocked against me in a fairly basic rhythm. It took me a minute to realize what was
happening, and then I just lay there while it went on happening, with the pace picking up a little and growing a touch more urgent. Then her hands tightened their grip on my arms, and she gave a little terrier-like yelp and followed it with a sort of moan, and then she sighed and rolled away from me and was still.

You can never tell her about this, I told myself. In fact, I added, it would be best all around if you could manage to forget that it ever happened.

Fat chance, I thought. About as much chance as I had of getting to sleep, and I’d been so close to drifting off….

The next thing I knew it was morning, and somebody somewhere was screaming bloody murder.

A
ny number of things can set a person screaming. A mouse, say, emerging suddenly from behind a piece of furniture, is apt to coax a cry from the lips of the right sort of woman. (In my experience, it’s altogether useless to point out to such a woman that the mouse is more afraid of her than she is of it. Few women seem to find this information comforting, and I’m not even sure it’s true. You rarely hear a mouse scream when a woman pops out from behind the sofa.)

By the same token, a scream might indicate that the screamer had just seen a ghost, or a potential assailant, or a winning number on his lottery ticket. “Scream bloody murder” is, after all, just an expression, and just because you’ve heard such a scream doesn’t mean you’re going to find a body in the library.

But we did.

I’d seen the dead man before, although we hadn’t met. He’d been in the Great Library the first time
we visited that magnificent room. He was the one who had given Carolyn a bad moment when his gaze fixed on her. At the time he’d been seated on a fruitwood fiddleback chair in front of the little leather-topped writing desk, and he’d been writing letters, I’d assumed, scribbling away furiously, then pausing to cap his pen and gaze off into the middle distance, then uncapping the pen and scribbling anew.

Now he lay a few yards from the fireplace, and no farther than that from the shelf where I’d spotted
The Big Sleep
—and where I could see it still, I was pleased to note. He was dressed as he’d been the previous evening, wearing a camelhair blazer with leather buttons over a tattersall vest and dark brown corduroy slacks. His shoes were chukka boots, and one of the bootlaces had come untied.

He lay on his back, sprawled at the base of the library steps. His dark hair was still neatly combed, but blood had flowed from a scalp wound, staining the carpet beneath his head. His strong features were softened in death, and his dark eyes, which had gazed with such intensity in life, were as glassy as those in the stuffed oryx.

The oryx, of course, was nowhere to be seen, having remained on the wall of the East Parlour. This placed it in the minority, as almost every other resident of Cuttleford House had responded to the outcry the way automatic elevators respond to a fire in a high-rise office building. They rush right to it, mindless of the danger, and that was just what we had done.

The hour may have had something to do with it.
It was the crack of dawn, and I don’t suppose Carolyn and I were the only ones who’d been sound asleep until the cry awakened us. If we’d been reading Jane Austen, say, or playing gin rummy, we might have responded in a more gradual fashion, instead of leaping out of bed, throwing on clothes, and plunging headlong down the stairs toward the source of the disturbance.

There were five folks in the library when we got there, not counting the dead man, and there were quite a few more by the time we’d caught our breath. The screamer, I learned, was a pretty little blonde named Molly Cobbett. She was the downstairs maid, and had come in to open the drapes and tidy the room, and had responded in traditional fashion when she suddenly came face to face with the late Jonathan Rathburn.

That, Nigel Eglantine informed us, was the name of the deceased. Eglantine had been in the library when Carolyn and I burst in, as had Molly Cobbett, of course, along with Colonel Edward Blount-Buller and the redoubtable Orris, whose eyes seemed to be set even closer together than I remembered them. Others were quick to join us—Millicent Savage, her parents, Gordon Wolpert, Cissy Eglantine. The cook stood off to one side, fussing with her apron and looking quite distraught, while a red-haired young thing with a complexion that was just one big freckle gaped at the fallen guest, at once appalled and delighted that life could be so like the tabloids. (She was the upstairs maid, I later learned, and a cousin of Molly’s, the daughter of Molly’s father’s brother Earl. Earlene Cobbett was her name.)

“Awful,” Nigel Eglantine was saying. “Hideous tragedy. Dreadful luck.”

“All of that,” the colonel said. “But not terribly difficult to reconstruct, eh? Easy to see what happened.” He cleared his throat. “Up late. Couldn’t sleep. Came down here, wanted something to read. Saw just the book he wanted but couldn’t reach it.” He laid a hand on the set of library steps. “Climbed these, didn’t he? Lost his balance. Took a tumble.” He pointed to the scalp wound. “Struck his head, didn’t he? Bled like a stuck pig, if the ladies will excuse the expression.”

The ladies looked as though they could handle it. One of them, the Hardesty woman, had entered the library during the colonel’s speech, pushing her companion’s wheelchair. Now she took up Blount-Buller’s account.

“No wonder he fell,” she said. “His shoelace had come undone. He must have tripped over it.”

“He should have tied it,” Miss Dinmont put in, “before climbing the steps. That was terribly careless of him.”

Carolyn looked at me and rolled her eyes. “I bet he learned his lesson,” she said dryly. “Bern—”

“A terrible accident,” Nigel Eglantine said, taking up the reconstruction. “I suppose the fall rendered the poor man unconscious. Then he must have expired from loss of blood, or perhaps the skull fracture killed him. If another person had been in the room, the tragedy could very likely have been averted.”

“Or if he’d tied his shoes,” Miss Dinmont said. For someone who didn’t walk much, she had a lot to say on the subject.

“They might not have been untied to start with,” Greg Savage offered. Interestingly enough, he himself was wearing loafers. “He might have stepped on the end of one shoelace while he was adjusting his position on the steps,” he explained, “and then when he raised the other foot it would have untied the lace and tripped him up, all at the same time.”

“Exactly why I double-knot my own laces,” Miss Hardesty said.

“It could still happen,” Savage told her. “The lace wouldn’t come untied, but you could still step on the end and trip yourself up.”

Hardesty wasn’t having any. “When you double-knot the laces,” she said, “it shortens them. So the end’s not long enough to be stepped on.”

Savage admitted he hadn’t thought of that. Colonel Blount-Buller said it was all barn doors and stolen horses, wasn’t it, because no amount of double-knotted shoelaces would undo the harm that had befallen the poor chap. Mrs. Colibri, the older woman who’d been reading Trollope on the sofa while Mr. Rathburn was laboring at the writing desk, asked if the police had been called. No one answered right away, and then Nigel Eglantine said that they hadn’t, and that he supposed that would have to be done, wouldn’t it?

“Although one hates to bother them,” he added, “on a day like this. I suspect they have their hands full, what with better than two feet of snow on the ground.” He gestured at the wall of windows. “I couldn’t guess what state the roads will be in, and I know there’ll be no end of weather-related emergencies. I’m afraid an accidental death will be assigned rather a low priority.”

I glanced around. Rufus Quilp, the fat man who’d been reading or dozing the other times I’d seen him, had come in and was not only awake but on his feet. Even as I noted this, he eased his bulk onto a sofa. Off to the side, Lettice Littlefield stood next to her husband, her hand clasped in his. I smiled at her, then curled my lip at him. I don’t think either of them noticed.

The colonel was saying something about an unfortunate incident that had happened some years ago in Sarawak. I waited until he slowed down for a semicolon, then said, “Excuse me.”

The room went still.

“I’m afraid you ought to call the police right away,” I said. “I think they’ll want to get here just as soon as they can, no matter how deep the snow is.”

“What are you saying, Mr. Rhodenbarr?”

I turned to Molly Cobbett. “When you came in here this morning,” I said pleasantly, “just what did you do?”

“I never touched him, sir! I swear to God!”

“I’m sure you didn’t,” I said. “I believe you said you opened the drapes.”

“Sure I did, sir. I’m always to draw them open in the daytime, so as to let the light in.”

“And was the room dark before you drew them?”

“It was, sir. Not full dark, as some light came in through the open door, from the other room, like.”

“But there were no lights on in this room,” I said.

“No, sir.”

“No lamps lit.”

“No, sir.”

“And there was a little light from the open door,” I said, “because dawn was breaking. But earlier, when Mr. Rathburn had his tragic accident, it would have been full dark, wouldn’t it?”

She looked at me. “I wasn’t here, sir.”

“Of course you weren’t,” I agreed. “But if you had been, and it wasn’t dawn yet and there were no lamps turned on and the drapes were drawn shut, you’d have found the room dark, don’t you suppose?”

Molly stood openmouthed, thinking about it. Nigel Eglantine frowned in thought, looking reluctant to take the thought the next step down the trail. His wife said, “Why yes, of course. It would have been pitch dark in here when Mr. Rathburn fell.”

“That might explain his stepping on his shoelace,” I said. “He wouldn’t have seen it had come untied. But what it doesn’t explain is why he’d be up on the steps in the first place. It would have been far too dark in here for him to find the steps, let alone pick out a book to read.”

Blount-Buller cleared his throat. “What are you saying, Rhodenbarr?”

“I’m saying it’s more complicated than it looks. Jonathan Rathburn would not have had an accident of this sort in a dark room. Either a light was on when he fell or what took place was rather different from your reconstruction of it.”

Cissy Eglantine said, “Molly, are you sure you didn’t turn off a lamp?”

“I don’t remember,” the girl wailed. “I don’t
think
I did, but—”

“It doesn’t seem likely,” I said. “The room was dark when she entered it. If there had been a light burning, she’d have noticed it. If she didn’t notice it, how would she happen to turn it off?”

“We don’t know what step he was standing on,” Gordon Wolpert observed. “But suppose he was mounted on one of the top steps. That would be quite a tumble, enough to give him that cut on his head and knock him cold. Might he not have landed with sufficient impact to extinguish a lamp?”

“If he fell on the lamp,” I said, “then it would certainly be possible. Or even if he didn’t, assuming he landed so hard that a floor lamp was overturned, or a table lamp sent crashing to the floor.” Another possibility occurred to me. “Bulbs burn out,” I said. “Of their own accord. It’s not inconceivable that a bulb was lit when he had his accident and burned out before Molly found him.”

“That must be what happened,” Nigel Eglantine said.

“In that case,” I said, “it’s still burned out, because I think we can all agree that Molly hasn’t had a chance to replace it yet. Could we try all the lamps and light fixtures?”

“All of them?”

“All of them. A burned-out bulb won’t prove the theory, but the lack of one will rule it out.”

As indeed it did. Every bulb worked, and once we’d established as much I had them switch the lights off again. We didn’t need them; with the whole world outside snow-covered, more than enough light was reflected through the wall of windows.

“Well,” I said.

It was a choice moment. They were all looking my way, waiting for me to say something, and the phrase that came unbidden to my lips was
I suppose you’re wondering why I summoned you all here.
It’s a sentence I’ve had occasion to utter in the past, and the words have never failed to set my own pulse racing with the thrill of the hunt. But this time they weren’t really appropriate. I hadn’t summoned anyone, nor had they cause to wonder why they were here.

I was stuck for
le mot juste.
Cissy Eglantine helped me out.

“There must be an explanation,” she said.

“I can think of one,” I allowed. “Rathburn had a light on when he climbed the library steps and had his accident. He fell like Bishop Berkeley’s tree, without making a sound, so no one came running. But sometime afterward someone else passed the room and saw the light on. He or she realized the light shouldn’t be on, not in the middle of the night, and came in to turn it out. If it was this lamp, say, or that one, he or she couldn’t have missed seeing Rathburn’s body, because it would have been right in his or her line of sight. Damn it all, anyway.”

“What’s the matter, Bern?”

“He or she,” I said. “His or her. If nobody objects, I’m just going to use the masculine pronouns from here on.” Nobody objected. “Good,” I said. “The point is, there are other lamps that could have been lit that a passerby could have turned off without ever coming into line of sight of Jonathan Rathburn’s body. He could have walked in, turned
off the light, and left the room without the slightest idea there was a corpse on the floor.”

A murmur approved this line of thought. Even as it died down, Gordon Wolpert cleared his throat. “I wonder,” he said. “Would you turn out a light in the library without taking a look to make sure there was nobody curled up in a chair with a good book? I should think simple manners would demand it.”

“Good point,” I said.

“And when you looked round, you’d almost certainly see Rathburn.”

“If you actually looked,” Carolyn said. “But you might just call out, ‘I say, anybody here?’ And, unless Rathburn managed to say something, you’d figure you had the room all to yourself.”

Wolpert thought that made sense, and no one else offered any objection. “Fine,” I said. “So there’s only one question left to answer. Who turned off the light?”

No answer.

“It would have to have been one of us,” I said, “and I don’t think it’s the sort of thing we’d be likely to forget having done. Did anybody here come in late last night or early this morning and switch a light out? Any of you?”

They looked at me, they looked at each other, they looked at the floor. Leona Savage whispered discreetly to her daughter, and Millicent piped up to deny that she’d even been to the library at the time in question, let alone turned out any lights. Her father supported her claim, pointing out that the child had never voluntarily turned out a light in her life.