The Burglar in the Library (22 page)

“Because it seems entirely gratuitous,” she said. “What effect did it have? It simply inconvenienced us.”

“It inconvenienced Orris,” I said. “The person who poured the sugar in the engine—let’s call her C—”

“Her, Bern?”

“Well, him or her,” I said. “I thought I’d give the male pronoun a rest. C didn’t have the slightest idea that A was going to kill Rathburn, or that B was planning to bring down the bridge. All C knew was that it was snowing to beat the band, and that it would be a good joke on young Orris Cobbett if his beloved snowblower could be rendered
hors de combat.
It was his job to keep the path clear of snow, and the snowblower made that task an easy one, whereas it involved a lot of heavy
lifting if you had to do it the old-fashioned way, with a snow shovel.”

“All my fault!” cried C. “I swear I never meant for nuffin bad to happen to him! Never! I
loved
him, an’ now he be dead, and it be all my fault!”

I
t was Earlene Cobbett, of course, and I’ll spare you the fits and starts in which she told her story, along with the exclamation points that! accented! virtually! every! word! of it. She had not meant to injure Orris, nor had she intended any lasting harm to the inoffensive snowblower. As she understood it, a cup of sugar in its gas tank would just stop it from running, and eventually someone would have to drain it and supply it with clean gas, at which time it would be as good as new.

And Orris would be as good as new, too. She was a bit peeved with him, less for his having managed to impregnate her than for the attentions he’d been paying to her cousin Molly. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world, for after all boys will be boys, and at least it was all in the family, and not as if he’d been misbehaving with a guest, or some stranger. But he still deserved to be taught a lesson, and an hour or so of snow shoveling did not seem inappropriate.

“You didn’t do any harm,” I told Earlene, “except to the snowblower, and in a couple of weeks it’d be useless anyhow. It could probably do with a good overhaul between now and next winter.”

“Need a new engine now,” the colonel murmured.

“As far as Orris is concerned,” I went on, “if anything, you gave him a few extra minutes of life. If the snowblower had started up right away, he’d have cleared the path in a few minutes’ time, and that means he’d have wound up in the gully that much sooner. I know you miss him, Earlene—”

“I loved him!”

“—and he’s gone, and nothing can bring him back, but there’s no use crying over spilled milk, and at least you don’t have to worry that you were the one who kicked the pail over.” The metaphor stopped her tears, anyway; she stood there blinking, trying to figure out what the hell I was talking about.

“Well, so much for C,” Greg Savage said. “It’s upsetting for the poor girl, but she didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Orris, or any of the rest of it, either. So we’re back to A and B. B cut the bridge supports shortly before or shortly after A murdered poor Rathburn.”

“Matters would be greatly simplified,” the colonel announced, “if B would identify himself.” An eloquent silence greeted this remark, and he broke it himself by elaborating. “After all,” he said, “while B’s action had the awful luck of causing an accident, it’s not in the same category as murder. B just wanted to keep us all here.”

“A fate worse than death,” Littlefield muttered.

Cissie gave him a look, and Rufus Quilp piped up with the observation that cutting the ropes was hardly an innocent prank. “He didn’t just disable the bridge,” he reminded us. “He booby-trapped it, cutting partway through the ropes so that the bridge would collapse as soon as someone set foot on it. If he merely wanted to isolate us here, why not cut all the way through the ropes?”

“He was trying to murder someone,” Miss Hardesty said. “But he couldn’t have meant to kill Orris. And if he had someone else in mind, how could he know that person would be the next one to try to cross the bridge?”

“He couldn’t,” I said.

“My goodness,” Mrs. Colibri said. “Do you mean to say that he didn’t even care which one of us he killed?”

“No,” I said. “I mean to say he wasn’t trying to kill anybody.”

“But Mr. Quilp just said—”

“I know what Mr. Quilp just said, and his point is well taken. Here’s what I think, although I admit I can’t prove it. I think B slashed all the way through the cables. He didn’t set any traps, booby or otherwise. He cut the ropes and dumped the bridge in the gully.”

They looked at me. Leona Savage said, “Then when Orris gave up on the snowblower and walked to the bridge—”

“It was already out.”

“And he kept walking?”

“It bothered me,” I said, “that nobody actually heard the bridge fall. Greg, you and Millicent were outside when Orris had his accident. You both
heard him cry out. But did you hear the bridge crash into the gully?”

“I might have,” he said. “I don’t remember.”

“All I remember,” Millicent said, “is Orris screaming.”

You’d have thought this would bring some sort of outcry from Earlene Cobbett, but it didn’t.

“It’s not as clear-cut as the dog that didn’t bark,” I told them, “and there’s no way to run an experiment, but I’d have to guess that the bridge made a lot of noise when it fell. But if it fell during the night, when most of us were sleeping and all of us were inside the house with the windows shut, and the snow was coming down thick and fast, well, I’d say it would have fallen as silently as Bishop Berkeley’s tree.”

Millicent looked baffled by the reference. “It was a tree that fell in the forest,” her mother told her, “and it didn’t make a sound because there was no human ear there to hear it.”

“But it would still make a sound,” Millicent said. “Anyway, Orris made a sound, and both my ears were there to hear it. Bernie, if the bridge was out already, why didn’t Orris turn around and come back to the house?”

“Ah,” I said. “That’s a delicate point.”

“But I’m sure you have the answer,” Littlefield said dryly.

“I didn’t know Orris terribly well,” I said, “but my sense of him was that his SATs weren’t quite high enough to get him into Harvard.”

“He was a hard worker,” Nigel said, “and a stout-hearted lad.”

“A good man in a tight spot,” the colonel put in.

“But not, uh, terribly quick in an intellectual sense.”

“I think we get the point,” Littlefield said. “Old Orris was dumb as the rocks he landed on. Where are you going with this, Rhodenbarr? You saying he didn’t notice the bridge was missing until he was standing in the middle of the air?”

“He was very likely snowblind,” I said in Orris’s defense. “He was frustrated, too, from trying to get the snowblower to work, and worn out from slogging through deep snow. And how many times had Orris walked that path and crossed that bridge? Hundreds, surely. It was automatic for him. He didn’t have to think about it.”

“He must have been even dumber than I thought,” Littlefield said. “Even now, after lying in the snow all night, I’ll bet his body temperature’s still ten points higher than his IQ.”

“It was a mistake anyone could have made,” I said, with more conviction than I felt. “But the point is that B wasn’t trying to kill Orris or anyone else. He slashed the ropes clear through.”

“All the more reason why he should identify himself,” said the colonel, returning to his earlier argument. “He’s not a murderer, and his testimony could help us.”

“That’s true,” I said, “but we’re not going to hear it.”

“Why not? All he needs to do is speak up. After all, he’s right here in this room.”

That brought it home. They looked at each other, trying to guess which one of them had slashed the ropes and unwittingly sent Orris to the
bottom of Cuttlebone Creek. I let them dart questioning glances back and forth.

Then I said, “No.”

“No?”

“No, he’s not in the room.”

“But—”

“B’s in a lawn chair,” I said.

The colonel stared. “You’re saying he’s dead.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“There are three dead bodies in lawn chairs, Rhodenbarr. Unless you’re saying—”

“No,” I said, “we haven’t lost anybody else. Three bodies, and one of them’s B.”

“The cook?
She
slashed the ropes supporting the bridge, and killed herself out of remorse at having caused Orris’s death?”

“I suppose now and then somebody commits suicide out of remorse,” I said, “but it sounds as though we’ve got an epidemic of it here. I’m sure the cook had a kitchen knife that could have sliced right through those ropes, but the only way she tried to keep everybody here was by cooking wonderful meals. She wasn’t B.”

“Then it must have been Mr. Rathburn,” Mrs. Colibri said. “You said the ropes might have been cut before the murder, so I suppose Mr. Rathburn might have cut them. He must have gone outside, and then when he came back Mr. Wolpert was waiting for him in the library.”

“Perfect,” Littlefield said. “All the perpetrators are dead and there’s nobody here but us chickens. Can we go home now?”

I said, “It wasn’t Rathburn.”

“That leaves Wolpert,” Rufus Quilp said, fold
ing his hands on his stomach. “But how can he be B when he’s already A? He can’t be both letters, can he?”

“There’s twenty-six letters in the alphabet,” Millicent said. “Enough for everybody to have two.”

“But Wolpert only gets one,” I said. “He’s B, because he was the one who cut the bridge supports to seal off Cuttleford House. He’d been keeping an eye on things for days, waiting to see how the hand played out, and once everybody was here he wanted to make sure nobody left. But he didn’t kill anybody. He didn’t murder Jonathan Rathburn and he didn’t kill himself.”

“Then who did, Bern?”

“Someone who’s right in this room now,” I said, “and maybe he’d like to accept Colonel Blount-Buller’s invitation and identify himself. No? Well, in that case I’ll identify him. It’s Dakin Littlefield.”

“T
hat’s it,” Littlefield said. “Lettice, grab your coat. We’re out of here.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t, eh, Rhodenbarr? Well, what do I care what you think? I don’t know who picked you to be the head wallaby in this kangaroo court, but I don’t have to listen to any more of it. The cook’s dead, our room’s drafty, and I’m not having a good time. And I don’t particularly appreciate being tagged as a murderer. The only crime I’ve ever committed was ignoring a couple of overdue parking tickets. Oh, and I jaywalked a few times, and years ago I tore off that little tag on the mattress that you’re not supposed to remove, though I’ve never been able to figure out why. But aside from that—”

“What about the bearer bonds?”

That stopped him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he managed, sounding about as convincing as if he’d said he never inhaled.

“You’ve got an envelope full of them in your suitcase,” I said. “I didn’t have time to count them carefully, but the total runs to a few million dollars. It’s a nice little nest egg to start married life.”

Lettice looked horror-struck. “Bearer bonds,” she said. “What bearer bonds? Where did they come from?”

She may have meant the question for her husband, but I answered when he didn’t. “From your employer,” I said. “I’m afraid that’s why Dakin came along looking to sweep you off your feet. You provided him with access to the back rooms of the brokerage house you worked for, and it didn’t take him long to find something to steal.”

“But that’s crazy,” she said. “I know what bonds you’re talking about. They were in the safe in Mr. Sternhagen’s office. If they turn up missing right after I go away on my honeymoon, I’m the first person the police would look for.” She turned to her husband. “How could you do it?” she asked him. “What made you think you could get away with it?”

“You were planning a honeymoon in Aruba,” I said. “Isn’t that what you told me?”

“Yes, but—”

“I think you were supposed to have an accident in Aruba,” I told her. “A mishap while swimming or boating, say. And your bereaved husband, traveling under a different name and carrying a different passport, would have returned to the States alone, perhaps stopping off in the Caymans to deposit funds in an offshore account. The authorities would be looking for you, all right, but you’d
be dead and your husband would have ceased to exist.”

“That’s absolutely crazy,” Littlefield said. “You know how I feel about you, Lettice.”

“Do I?”

“Of course you do. The bonds were to give us a good start in our life together, and—”

“A good start! Eight million dollars is more than a good start.”

“Call it a start and a retirement fund all in one,” he said. “It would be a cinch for us to change identities in Aruba and go someplace together where they’d never find us. And it’ll still be easy, once we get out of here.”

“When were you planning on telling her, Littlefield?”

“When we got to Aruba.” He turned to her. “I wanted to make it easy for you to act natural on the plane. As soon as we got there, I was planning to tell you everything.”

“But you didn’t go to Aruba,” I said. “You let her talk you into coming here.”

“Yeah,” he said, “and don’t ask me why. There’s people knocking each other off left and right, and I’m the one who winds up getting accused of murder.”

“You didn’t want to come here when I first mentioned it,” Lettice remembered, “and then you decided you liked the idea.”

“I saw how much it meant to you.”

“It didn’t mean that much to me. I thought it would be a lark, that’s all. And I said since we already had reservations in Aruba maybe we should go, and you said—”

“Jesus,” he said, “I just wanted to make you happy.”

“You thought you could hide out better here than you could in Aruba,” I cut in. “Especially if you didn’t bother to cancel the reservations. By the time the authorities figured out that you never boarded the plane, you’d have had a chance to cover your tracks pretty thoroughly. You’d stay here a few days until the trail got cold, and then you’d head on out. It wasn’t a bad idea, but you picked the wrong place to come to.”

“We all did,” he said with feeling. “Why anyone would want to stay at this pesthole is beyond me.”

There was a cry from Cissie Eglantine, hardly the sort of utterance one had come to expect from Earlene, but expressive all the same.

“I liked the place just fine myself,” I said, “until people started dropping like flies. But the minute you got here, everything went haywire.”

“Why?” the colonel wondered. “I’m not surprised this chap’s a thief. I thought him a bad hat and supposed he lived off women. He has that air about him.”

“Thanks a lot,” Littlefield said.

“But what was the connection between him and the other two, Rathburn and Wolpert? Why should his arrival put the match to the powder keg?”

“They must have all three been in on it,” Miss Dinmont said. “Conspiring together, thick as thieves.”

“That’s crap,” Littlefield said. “I never met either of those birds before in my life.”

The colonel cleared his throat. “And we’re to take your word for that, eh, sir?”

“I’ll take his word,” I said. “Whatever his plans might have been for after he left Cuttleford House, Littlefield came here planning nothing more than a quiet honeymoon weekend. But he walked right into the kind of coincidence that’s evidently damn near inescapable in English country houses.”

I glanced at Lettice. “Coming here was Mrs. Littlefield’s idea. She’d heard that there had been a late cancellation. She called, and she learned that there had indeed been a party who’d called to cancel, and she got the room.”

“So?”

“But I hadn’t canceled,” I said.

“You?”

“There was a point where I thought I would have to cancel,” I said, “but things worked out after all. I mentioned something to somebody, and word got to Mrs. Littlefield through the grapevine. You know how things get around.”

I hurried on, before it occurred to them to wonder how a bit of news could find its way from my lips to Lettice’s ears. “Here’s the point—someone else did call up to cancel, just in time for the Littlefields to get his room.”

“Cousin Beatrice’s Room,” Cissie said. “And a gentleman did call. I don’t know why I can’t remember his name.”

“Pettisham.”

“That’s it,” she said. “I remember he had an accent, and I thought that was odd, because the name is very English, isn’t it? Or at least it sounds English, although I don’t know that I’ve ever actually known anyone named Pettisham. Petty, certainly, and Pettibone, but not Pettisham.”

“Pettibone’s definitely an English name, isn’t it?”

“Oh, I would say so,” Nigel told me. “An old name, too. I’d guess there was a Pettibone came over with the Conqueror.”

“That would figure,” I said, “because the name’s an anglicization of the French. It combines two French words,
petit
and
bon.
”

“Small and good,” Mrs. Colibri translated. “Do you suppose the implication is that good things come in small packages?”

I glanced at Carolyn, who beamed at the very notion. “Pettisham’s been anglicized, too,” I said, “although I don’t know that there were any Pettishams among William’s troops at Hastings.”

“It would be possible to find out,” the colonel offered.

I told him I didn’t think we had to go back that far. “My guess is that it’s a much more recent name,” I said, “and that the two words it combines are
petit
and
champ.
”

“Small champion,” Carolyn said.

“Small plot of land,” Mrs. Colibri corrected. “Or, you know, like a field or meadow.”

“Sounds like the name of a smallholder or yeoman,” the colonel said. “And thus not terribly likely to have been one of the Conqueror’s Norman knights.”

“That’s some coincidence,” Littlefield said. “Not only did we call for a reservation, but the guy who canceled didn’t cross the Channel with the bastard king of England. What do you figure the odds would be on something like that?”

“The coincidence,” I said, “is that you both had the same last name.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Pettisham,” I said. “
Petit champ.
Small plot of land. Little field.”

“Jesus,” he said.

“The first time I met Gordon Wolpert, he got to talking about malt whisky. There were a lot of distilleries, he told me, although he’d always supposed it was a small field. That was the phrase he picked, though it didn’t fit the conversation that well, and he bore down on it, too, to stress it. Then he went on and used the phrase ‘a petty sham,’ and looked disappointed when I failed to react to it. When Pettisham called and canceled his booking, Mrs. Eglantine got the chart of room assignments and crossed out his name. A few hours later she wrote ‘Littlefield’ in the same space.”

“Who was Pettisham?” Millicent wanted to know.

“Cissie says he sounded foreign,” I said, “and he was certainly mixed up in some sort of foreign intrigue. I don’t know whether he was actually an agent of a foreign power, and I couldn’t say whether he was buying or selling, and whether the transaction involved secrets or valuables. The two men who could tell us are both dead.”

“Rathburn and Wolpert,” Carolyn said.

“That’s right. They were both waiting for him to turn up. Rathburn was keeping an eye on everybody and I guess Wolpert was keeping an eye on Rathburn. And then Dakin Littlefield arrived, with a glamorous companion and an arrogant manner and a guilty secret, and they both took action. Wolpert wasn’t sure how he was going to handle things, but he knew he didn’t want anyone getting
away before he made his move. So he cut the ropes and dumped the bridge in the gully.”

“And Rathburn?”

“Made an approach to Littlefield. He was always scribbling away, so my guess would be he wrote out a note and passed it to you in the hallway.”

“He slipped it under the bedroom door,” Lettice said.

“I never saw any note,” her husband said.

“Don’t you remember? There was a folded sheet of yellow paper under our door when we went to the room. You picked it up and read it, and when I asked you what it was you said it was nothing.”

“Oh, that. Well, it
was
nothing. I couldn’t make head or tail out of it. Looking back, I guess this guy did have me mixed up with somebody else. I just thought he was a crank, or he stuck his little love note under the wrong door. So I crumpled it up and forgot about it.”

“You turned pale,” Lettice said.

“Because you thought he knew something,” I put in. “You had eight million dollars’ worth of negotiable bonds in your possession, and just when you thought you were free and clear somebody slips you a cryptic note demanding a secret meeting in the middle of the night. You couldn’t say anything to your wife, and you couldn’t just ignore the note. You had to meet him.”

“Not to harm him,” Littlefield said. “Just to find out what he knew, and to tell him he was barking up the wrong tree. The room was pitch dark when I got there. I figured it was empty. I started to switch on a light and a voice told me to leave it dark.”

“And?”

“And I wound up sitting in a chair next to his. I guess there was something Pettisham was supposed to turn over to him, but all I could make out at the time was that he wanted something from me, and I figured that meant the bonds. I wasn’t about to give them up to some joker I couldn’t even see. But I never meant to kill him.”

“Why else would you brain him with the camel?”

“I didn’t know it was a camel.”

“With a hump like that? What did you think it was, the hunchback of Notre Dame?”

“I didn’t even see it,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, it was darker than the inside of a cow. I just grabbed the first thing I touched and clocked him with it.”

“If you’d grabbed the pillow instead of the camel,” I said, “poor Rathburn would be alive today. How’s that for rotten luck?”

“I just wanted to stun him,” Littlefield said. “You know, to knock him out. I figured I could tie him up and stick him in a closet where nobody’d find him until we had a chance to get out of here.”

“And then you smothered him with the pillow.”

“There was some blood on his face. I used the pillow to sponge it off.”

“Very considerate of you.”

“And I guess I held it there too long. Or maybe he was already dead from the blow to the head. Or maybe—”

“Yes?”

“You want to know what I think, Rhodenbarr?
I bet he had a heart attack
before
I ever touched him with the camel. See, that would explain how I hit him on the back of the head, even though I was aiming at his forehead. He must have been pitching forward, and I hit him after he’d croaked.”

I looked at my watch. I had to admit the heart-attack notion showed a resourceful imagination, but if he could even try on a line like that it was a waste of time letting him talk. Right now, though, wasting time wasn’t a bad idea.

“What about the pinpoint hemorrhages?” the colonel demanded, wasting some time himself. “Don’t they prove the man was smothered?”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Littlefield said. “I’m not a doctor, but then neither is anybody else in the room. Maybe there’s more than one way to get those pinpoint hemorrhages.”

“Entirely possible,” I agreed. “Maybe they’re a natural consequence of the synergistic effect of getting crowned with a camel seconds after you’ve died of a heart attack. What about Wolpert?”

“Wolpert?”

“The second man you killed.”

“Didn’t I already explain how that was suicide? First time around I thought it was Rathburn’s death he was feeling guilty about—”

“But it couldn’t have been, because you’re the one who killed Rathburn.”

“Well, I was there when he died. I’ll admit that much, although I still think it was a heart attack that finished him. What Wolpert was feeling guilty about was cutting the bridge ropes so that the boy genius did his Wile E. Coyote impression and tried to walk on air.”

“And he tried to hang himself, then wandered outside and died of shock and exposure.”