The Burglar in the Library (18 page)

“It does, yes.”

“Tapering hilt with a slight flare.”

“A slight flare, yes.”

“And the blade. You can only see two inches of it, but wouldn’t you say it’s…”

His hand scalloped the air.

“Wavy,” the colonel said. “Quite.”

“I say,” Nigel said.

“But you don’t,” Carolyn cried. “Or if you do say, I can’t figure out what you’re saying. What’s that sticking out of Bernie?”

“It would appear to be a kris,” Nigel Eglantine said.

“A crease? You mean it’s a shadow where his jacket’s creased? It looks like more than that to me.”

“K-R-I-S,” the colonel said. “It’s a dagger, traditional weapon in the Malay States. Saw my share of them in my time, in Sarawak and Penang and
other Eastern hellholes. Catch a bleeder skulking around with one of those, you knew he was up to no good.”

“I never knew what it was,” Nigel put in, “until the colonel identified it for me. It came with the house, you see, like almost all of the decorations, and was hanging on the wall when we bought the place. I’m quite certain it’s our kris, though I couldn’t swear to it, not from this distance in this light. But it does look as though someone’s gone and thrust it into Mr. Rhodenbarr.”

The reaction was what you might expect—except, curiously enough, for Ms. Carolyn Kaiser. You might have missed it unless you were watching carefully, but for a moment her expression was one of genuine relief.

A
t least that’s how I figure it went.

Oh, come on now. You didn’t actually think that was
me,
did you? Down at the bottom of the gully? Don’t tell me you figured I’d developed a late enthusiasm for body piercing, and the Malayan kris was my idea of a fashion statement.

No, of course not. The crumpled form a few yards from Orris Cobbett’s wasn’t me. It was a dummy—no cracks, please—a quickly wrought creation consisting of some of my clothing stuffed with the pillows from Jonathan Rathburn’s room. I’d fetched the kris from the wall on which I’d noticed it earlier, and it was not without a pang of regret that I stabbed my inoffensive parka in the back. I’d found a spool of fishing line in one of the cupboards, and I’d attached an end of it to the faux Rhodenbarr and lowered it—him?—to the bottom of the gully.

Then I cut the line and tossed the end I was holding into the abyss, figuring nobody would be
able to see it. I certainly couldn’t, but then I could barely see the dummy, either; it was full dark when I performed these maneuvers, and the little pencil-beam flashlight that goes wherever I go is for peering into drawers and safes in dark apartments, not for gazing into near-bottomless ravines. Its narrow little beam had pretty much petered out by the time it got all the way down there.

I had a reason for all of this.

A good reason, too. It stemmed from more than an urge to be present, à la Tom Sawyer, at my own funeral, or to assert, à la Mark Twain, that reports of my death were greatly exaggerated.

If I was dead, I could move around a little.

Officially dead, that is. Generally Regarded as Dead, say. If everyone took it for granted that I was sprawled lifeless in a frozen creek bed at the bottom of a ravine, I could have the run of the place without people wondering where I was and what I was up to.

Because the immobility was driving me nuts.

At a glance, it might seem odd that I was feeling cramped at Cuttleford House. I’m a New Yorker, and it’s not as though I have the space requirements of a rancher in Montana. I live in a small one-bedroom apartment and spend my days in a cluttered bookstore, and I get from one place to the other in a subway car, generally packed shoulder to shoulder among my fellow citizens.

At Cuttleford House, on the other hand, there were more rooms than anyone knew what to do with, and acres of grounds, and plenty of country all around. All of this capaciousness was occupied
by a scattering of guests and a small staff, and this human aggregate was itself shrinking on a daily basis. So why was I feeling claustrophobic?

Well, see, in New York the people you see all over the place are strangers. They don’t know you and you don’t know them, and thus even when you’re crammed sardine-style into the rush-hour IRT, you’re essentially alone. Anonymous, really. The next thing to invisible.

So I was used to zipping around the city, dashing to and fro, slipping in and out of offices and residences, not always with the tenant’s knowledge or permission. That was how I operated. It was the way I earned my living, and it had served me well on the handful of occasions when I’d found myself up to my ears in a homicide investigation.

Carolyn had called me an amateur sleuth, and if I’m any kind of a sleuth at all I’m certainly an amateur. I’m a pro in two other areas, burglary and bookselling, and I know the difference between amateurs and professionals, and when it comes to sleuthery I’m not about to hang out a shingle. I know what detectives do—I ought to, I’ve read enough books about them. They knock on doors and ask impertinent questions and check alibis and gather evidence and do all sorts of things I’d be no good at.

I don’t do that. I sort of slip around and sneak around and stir things up, and sometimes things work out.

But at Cuttleford House everybody was right there. There was never a question of rounding up the usual suspects, because they never strayed very far. They couldn’t. The bridge was out and the
phone lines were down and the whole place was piled deep with snow.

So what had I done? Well, I’d tried approaching the situation like a real detective, interrogating everybody one at a time, and that hadn’t been a great success. Even so, by the end of the day I had a couple of ideas buzzing in my brain. I even had a strong hunch as to the identity of the killer, but it seemed impossible. I needed more information than I had, and I couldn’t get it because there were all these people all over the place, watching my every move even as I was watching theirs. (And who could blame them? For all they knew, I was the murderer and they were next on my list.)

And so I worked out a different approach. While the rest of the household slept, I’d skulk around with my flashlight, like Diogenes looking for a dishonest man. While I was at it, I’d take a shot at faking my own death, leaving an apparent corpse in a spot inaccessible enough to discourage close investigation. That would give me a chance to continue skulking in the daytime.

I explained what I had in mind to Carolyn before we turned out our respective bedside lamps. At first she thought I was going to lie down at the bottom of the gully and play dead, and she was concerned that I might catch a bad cold and wind up with pneumonia.

“I might even freeze to death,” I told her.

“Then don’t do it,” she said. “Why take the chance, Bern? It’s not worth it.”

The news that it wouldn’t actually be me down there reassured her, and when I’d run through it a couple of times she said she had it down pat. “The
tricky part,” I said, “is getting somebody to think of looking in the gully.”

“Why don’t I just say, ‘Hey, guys, maybe he fell in the gully’?”

“That would work,” I allowed, “but it would be better if someone else thought of it.”

“So they don’t think it’s a setup.”

“Right.”

“I’ll work on it,” she said. “And you’ll be out of the way somewhere while we’re all running around searching the house?”

“Snug,” I said, “as a bug in a rug.”

“But that’s hours from now. What’ll you be doing between now and then?”

“Setting the stage,” I said. “Going places. Doing things.”

“Going where? Doing what?”

“Here and there,” I said. “This and that.”

“And you’re not gonna tell me who the killer is.”

“Not until I know for sure.”

She yawned. “I’d argue the point,” she said, “if I weren’t so tired. Aren’t you tired, Bern?”

“Exhausted.”

“Can I ask a dumb question? How are you gonna stay up all night sneaking around in the dark? You’ll be dead on your feet tomorrow.”

“Never mind tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll be dead on my feet tonight.”

“So why not forget it, Bern? Get a good night’s sleep. Sleep late, in fact, and take a nap tomorrow during the day, and if the police don’t turn up by then you can stay up tomorrow night.”

“You’re tempting me.”

“So? Do what I always do when I’m tempted.”

“Surrender to it?”

“Hey,” she said. “Works for me, Bern.”

I said I’d let my body decide. I read for a few minutes and turned off the light, and there was a moment when I almost drifted off, but it passed and I knew it wasn’t going to happen. But I waited until Carolyn was sleeping, snug in the arms of Morpheus or Molly Cobbett, before I got out of bed.

And then I got dressed in the darkness and let myself out of the room. But I already told you about that, didn’t I?

I had things to do and I got busy doing them. My first stop was Young George’s Room, way down at the other end of the long hallway. I didn’t have to worry that someone would catch sight of me, because I wasn’t doing anything all that suspicious. I could always say I was looking for an unoccupied bathroom, or stretching my legs, but I didn’t encounter anyone so it didn’t matter.

The only thing that would have been hard to explain was picking the lock and letting myself into Rathburn’s room, and to minimize the chance of discovery I spent as little time at the task as possible. Earlier I’d tried my own key in the lock for starters, and I wouldn’t have been much surprised if it had worked. Those old skeleton keys are often virtually interchangeable, especially when the locks are old and well used.

The key didn’t work, but my picks did, and in not much more time than it would take to turn a key. I darted inside, closed and locked the door,
and stopped myself even as I was fumbling for the light switch. No need to let light leak out into the hallway from underneath the door. The average person would never notice, but there was a murderer in our midst. He was the one person likely to notice, and the one whose attention I most particularly wanted to escape.

I stayed put for about an hour and a half, going through the effects of the late Jonathan Rathburn and searching for something in writing that he might have left behind. I found enough to keep me interested until I figured the household had had a chance to settle in for the night. Then I raided the closet for clothes and took the pillow from the bed and let myself out of there.

I was downstairs and headed out the door when I remembered the kris. I remembered what room it was in but wasn’t sure how to get there, and I was tempted to settle for some other imperial artifact—an assegai spear, say, or a horn from the oryx. But I found the kris in due course. Next I rifled a pantry, looking for some kind of twine or cord, and couldn’t come up with anything better than a ball of cotton thread. It didn’t seem very strong to me. Then I came across the fishing line, and took them both.

The line was what I used for actually lowering the dummy, but the thread came in handy for stitching the thing together. I used the pillow and some of Rathburn’s clothes for stuffing, and I tied a pair of his shoes to the pants cuffs by their laces, and tied the cuffs of the jacket sleeves tight around a pair of my own gloves. (If he’d had any gloves, I couldn’t find them.) I couldn’t get the head so
it looked right—it was just a ball of clothes tied in shape with string—and up close it was about as deceptive as a scarecrow, which, come to think of it, it rather resembled.

I reminded myself that no one was going to get a close look at it, but all the same I retied it. I wrapped a dark shirt around the top portion, so that it looked like a cap of dark hair over the white undershirt that was supposed to look like a face. Lowering the sucker turned out to be one of those things that are easier said than done, and it wasn’t made any easier by the fact that (a) I was lying on my belly with my arms out over the edge and the flashlight in my mouth and (b) I was still petrified of falling. I had to lower it slowly, too, because I knew how amateurishly I had constructed it. If it landed with any impact I was sure it would come apart, and while that may also happen with real people dropped from a great height, I somehow didn’t think the results would be convincing in the present instance.

So I lowered the dummy slowly and gently, resisting the impulse to jiggle the line and adjust its position once it had come to rest. I gave the end of the fishing line a toss, transferred the little flashlight from my mouth to my hand, and looked at what I’d done.

Was it deceptive?

Hard to say. It didn’t fool me, but then how could it? I knew better. It could pass for a bundle of rags, certainly, but so could the mortal remains of poor Orris. Could it pass for a body?

Not if some passing animal pawed at it, like a mad laundress bent on separating whites and colors.

Not if anyone took a really close look.

On the other hand, what would happen if my little subterfuge was spotted? The logical assumption, it seemed to me, would be that I had done the faking. And why would I have done such a thing? Because I was a murderer, obviously, and because I had hotfooted it, and wanted to delay pursuit.

In which case they’d assume I was off the premises, which, for my purposes, was the next best thing to being dead.

No time to brood about it, though. No time to worry and wonder. I had things to do.

I got busy doing them.

I’d been on the verge of sleep earlier, lying next to Carolyn in Aunt Augusta’s Room, but once I was up and dressed I’d caught a second wind, and it carried me a long ways. I was still going strong when the eastern sky began to show the first signs that eternal night had not yet descended upon the planet. There would indeed be a dawn, and it looked as though I’d be around to see it.

I was perhaps fifty yards from the front door of Cuttleford House when I noticed that faint glow in the east. You might think it would have heartened me, but all it really did was make me aware of the lateness of the hour, which in turn served to remind me that I’d been awake for almost twenty-four hours, that I was cold and wet and exhausted, and that if I didn’t get into a warm bed soon I might very well drop in my tracks.

I walked the rest of the way along the path to the front door, past the sugar-sabotaged snowblower, past the little red wagons. I used my picks on the
lock and tickled it open, but the door wouldn’t budge. A close look showed why. Someone had slid the heavy bolt across.

It was hard to imagine why. There we were, out in the middle of nowhere, cut off utterly from the rest of the world and snowbound in the bargain. Cissy Eglantine’s fixation on the proverbial passing tramp notwithstanding, I had a hunch the nearest indigent wayfarer was hustling passersby in Boston Common, trying to raise busfare to Miami. So why bolt the door?

Habit, I guessed. It had been bolted until I let myself out earlier, and evidently someone had passed it during the night, noticed the unbolted state in which I’d left it, and shot the bolt home. Had I world enough and time I could have dealt with it, but it was simpler by far to walk around the house and find an unbolted door.

There was always the kitchen door, which may or may not have been bolted, but I didn’t get to find out. Before I reached it, in fact just after I’d passed the three lawn chairs with their grisly burden, I came to the door of a glassed-in back porch, the sort of room where people go to take the sun without having to endure fresh air. The door was all small panes of glass, and there’s not much point fastening elaborate hardware on a door like that, as anyone who wants to get in can just break one of the panes and reach in. So the lock was about what you’d expect. A clever woman could have opened it with a bobby pin. I used my picks. There was a latch as well, one of those hook-and-eye arrangements. All you have to do to defeat them is slip a wallet-size plastic calendar between the door
and the frame and give a flick upward, lifting the hook from the eye, and that is precisely what I did.