The Burglar in the Rye (22 page)

“Oh, that’s right,” he said. “I forgot that part.”

“Well, a minor detail like that could slip a person’s mind easily enough. She called you, didn’t she? From Landau’s apartment, saying she’d just taken a bullet in the shoulder. You told her to stay where she was, and you went upstairs and took her to your own room, the one you’ve had since you moved into the Paddington twenty-odd years ago. It was closer than the room you’d put Kassenmeier in, and you had first-aid supplies there, tape and gauze pads and antiseptic. You bandaged her up and left her there to rest. And you went back to Landau’s apartment.”

“Why would I do that?”

“To see if there was anything you could do for
the woman. You wouldn’t just leave her there, would you?”

“No, of course not,” he agreed. “But there wasn’t anything I could do for her, so I—”

“Sure there was.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s funny about the gunshot,” I said. “I smelled gunpowder when I was in Landau’s place. I didn’t recognize it at first, but then I did, and that’s how I found out I was sharing space with a dead woman. I assumed she’d been shot, and I was puzzled when I learned later that she’d been hit over the head and stabbed. But of course it makes sense when you realize that Landau was the one who did the shooting. She surprised a burglar in her room and shot her.”

I paused, feeling the way Carl did when he heard how the Japanese gangster had made a hotel clerk disappear. I don’t like stories where somebody shoots a burglar.

“And Karen stabbed her,” I went on. “That’s interesting, when you stop to think about it. Somebody pulls a gun on you and takes a shot. It hits you in the shoulder. You want to make her stop shooting, so what do you do? You pull a knife and stab her.”

“It sounds like self-defense,” Ray said, “but it ain’t, not when you’re busy committin’ a felony at the time. It’s murder, no question about it.”

“It’s also unlikely. Someone’s shooting you so you go for a knife?”

“Karen carried a knife,” Carl said. “It had gotten her in trouble in the past.”

“I know,” I said, “but she never stabbed anybody while she was working. She saved it for her personal life. So she wouldn’t have been creeping around Landau’s apartment with a switchblade in her hand, would she?
It’d be in her purse, which she probably set down the minute she walked into the room, if she even brought it with her in the first place, which seems doubtful. Even if the purse was on her person when Landau started popping caps, do you suppose she’d start rooting around in it, looking for her trusty knife?”

“What’s the difference?” Isis wanted to know. “One way or another this Kassenmeier woman stabbed Anthea, didn’t she?”

I shook my head. “Nope,” I said. “Not a chance.”

“But—”

“She hit her over the head,” I said. “She picked up something with a little heft to it and swatted the old lady. It wouldn’t take much of a blow to knock her out.”

“And then she stabbed her,” Carl said.

“Why?”

“To make sure, I suppose.”

“To make sure she’d wind up facing homicide charges? All she wanted to do was get out of there and get her shoulder fixed. Landau was out cold, and was no danger to Kassenmeier. All she needed to do was scoop up the Fairborn file and go home.”

“Who else would have a reason to kill her?”

“Suppose she opened her eyes again after Kassenmeier got out of there. Maybe she picked up the phone and called the front desk. Or maybe she woke up after you’d already returned to the crime scene, Carl. To tidy up, or to pick up the Fairborn file if Kassenmeier hadn’t already grabbed it. Or maybe just to see what else you could steal.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“If you went through Kassenmeier’s purse and brought the knife along, that’s premeditation. If Kas
senmeier left the purse behind, and you went back for it, and then Landau woke up and you pulled the knife purely on impulse, well, you might have better luck with that story.”

The best pause I ever heard was Jack Benny’s, when a holdup man said, “Your money or your life.” Carl was almost as eloquent, standing there with his mouth hanging open.

“Well,” I said, “that’s saying a mouthful. But there’s no rush. You’ll have plenty of time to work up a story.”

“Wait,” he said. “I shouldn’t be saying anything, but I shouldn’t have said anything from the beginning, should I? For God’s sake, I’ve been on
Law & Order.
I know how you people work.”

“That just about makes you law enforcement personnel,” Ray said. “Which is why we’re givin’ you a chance to go on record.”

Carl rolled his eyes. “Spare me,” he said. “I know this is a trick, and I don’t care. I’ll tell you the truth, if only to get it clear in my own mind. It doesn’t matter. Nobody’s going to believe me.”

“I have a feeling you’re right about that,” I said, “but let’s hear it.”

“It was the way you said,” he told us. “Up to the time when I was on the desk and Karen called from Miss Landau’s room. She was hysterical, and all I could make out was that she’d been shot. I left the desk unattended and raced up there, and found her bleeding from a shoulder wound and Miss Landau unconscious on the floor. She was alive, though. One side of her face was bruised, I guess where Karen hit her with the Scotch tape.”

“She hit her with Scotch tape?”

“Miss Landau kept it in a heavy brass desktop dispenser, and that’s what Karen hit her with. She just picked it up and threw it, and it evidently hit Miss Landau and knocked her cold. It weighed a ton.”

“I know the thing he’s talkin’ about,” Ray confirmed. “We found it on the desk in the front room.”

“That’s where I put it,” Carl said, “when I was tidying up. Maybe that’s where Karen found it. Does it matter?”

“Not to me it don’t,” Ray said, “and not to Kasimir either, bein’ as nothin’ does at this point. Keep talkin’.”

“I moved Miss Landau,” he said. “I know you’re not supposed to, but I couldn’t just leave her lying on the floor like that. She was a little old lady, you know, and light as a feather. I picked her up and put her in the bed.”

“Which is where she was when I got there,” I said, “but there was a difference. She was dead.”

“I know,” he said. “She was dead when I went back. First I went to my room, with Karen, who was at least able to walk. I had first-aid supplies in my room, as you guessed, and I cleaned the wound and put on a sterile dressing. I had three weeks’ work a few years ago on
General Hospital,
so I’m not entirely without experience in such matters. I don’t know if any of you watch the show, but I was the lupus patient who wasn’t expected to live. I surprised everybody.”

“Not for the last time,” I said. “I suppose you put her to bed, too.”

“Of course. And then I rushed back down to the lobby, just to make sure prospective guests weren’t rushing the desk. It was quiet, so I went right back to the
sixth floor and into Miss Landau’s apartment. I didn’t even look at her right away, because I knew I’d have to call an ambulance and get her looked at, and before I did that I had to straighten up the place. I wiped off the Scotch tape dispenser and put it back on the desk, I closed the drawers Karen had left open, I found the gun where it had fallen and found Karen’s purse where she’d put it down. And, incidentally, she did take it with her when she entered the apartment, so that she could stuff the letters in it before she left. It was a big purse, large enough to accommodate a thick nine-by-twelve envelope.”

“Sounds like the one she had with her when she got killed,” Ray said. “She didn’t have no thick envelopes in there, but there was a handy little gun, and it coulda been the one she got shot with.”

“I did everything I could think of,” Carl said, “and then I went for a look at Miss Landau, and she was in the bed, right where I’d left her. And she was dead, stabbed in the heart with Karen’s knife.”

“How do you know it was Kassenmeier’s knife?”

“Because it was the kind she carried, a folding stiletto with mother-of-pearl sides and a four-inch blade. And it was sticking out of her chest.”

“I didn’t see a knife,” I said. “Of course the bedclothes might have covered it.”

“There was no knife stickin’ out of her when we got to the scene,” Ray said.

“I took the knife away,” Carl said. “I know you’re not supposed to do that, but—”

“For Chrissake,” the uniformed cop said, “you’re not supposed to do
any
of the shit you did.”

“I know.”

“Like taking the knife’s the least of it.”

“I know.”

“Well, go on,” the cop said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. Go on. You took the knife.”

“And washed the blood off it,” he said, “although I know there would have been traces that would have showed up under forensic examination. I know that.”

“Well, sure,” Ray said. “You were on
Law & Order.
”

“But it still seemed a worthwhile precaution.”

“After you took the knife—”

“I put it back in her purse.”

“Along with the gun,” I said.

“Well, yes.”

“What else was in there?”

“In the purse?”

“Right. There wasn’t a thick nine-by-twelve manila envelope by any chance, was there?” I shrugged. “I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it? How else would you have been so sure it would fit?”

“I looked for the envelope,” he said, “because she’d told me that she had had a chance to find the letters before Miss Landau confronted her. But I couldn’t find them, and I thought whoever had used the knife had found the letters at the same time. But the purse was heavier than it should have been, and I looked again, and there was a zippered section tucked away behind a flap. And that’s where the envelope full of letters was.”

“So you didn’t have to go through the files.”

“No. I got in and out as quickly as I could.”

“And what did you do with the letters?”

“I took the purse back to my room,” he said, “where Karen was resting. I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t know what had happened. Who stabbed Miss Landau? I was sure she was alive the first time I saw
her, and I know she was dead when I went back, and I swear to God it wasn’t me who stabbed her.” He stopped himself, frowned. “I,” he said. “It wasn’t I who stabbed her.”

“Well, it wasn’t me either,” Ray told him. “So keep talkin’.”

“You took the purse back to the room,” I said.

“Yes.”

“With the knife still in it.”

“Yes.”

“And the gun, of course. Landau’s gun.”

“Yes.”

“And what about the letters?”

“What about them?”

“What did you do with them? Because you couldn’t have given them to Kassenmeier or she’d have been out of there like a shot, mission accomplished. Where did you stash them, Carl?”

He sighed. “In the other room.”

“Which room? Room 303?”

“Yes. Karen was in my room, and I thought…well, I don’t know what I thought. I didn’t really have time to think.”

“And you stashed them there before you went back to your room.”

“Well, on my way. It wasn’t on my way, not literally, but…”

“I get the picture. I’ll be a son of a bitch. You must have been tucking them away while Isis and I were getting on a first-name basis in the sixth-floor corridor. You got the letters out of Landau’s room a few minutes before I let myself into it, and then you stashed them three floors below just before I came into that room off the fire escape. Why couldn’t you have put that
envelope in the underwear drawer? Look what a lot of trouble you’d have saved me.”

“I…”

“Where did you put them, anyway?”

“On a shelf in the closet.”

“And then you went back and told Karen where you’d put them.”

“Uh…”

“You didn’t, did you?”

“Not exactly.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That Miss Landau was dead. I didn’t mention the knife, though, so I guess she assumed she’d died from getting hit with the Scotch tape dispenser.”

“Hell of a way to go,” Carolyn said.

“So she thought she’d killed her.”

“I suppose she did, but then when the story came out on the TV news, she knew Miss Landau had been stabbed.”

“And then she must have thought
you
did it.”

“I told her I didn’t, that whoever got the letters must have found her knife at the same time, and used it on Miss Landau. I don’t know if she believed me.”

“So you didn’t tell her where you’d hidden the letters.”

“No. I thought she might find them when she went back to her room, but she didn’t. What she did find was that her rubies were missing.”

“My rubies,” Isis said.

“Well, yes, but by this time Karen thought of them as her rubies, and they were gone. I didn’t know what to think when she told me that. Was she lying, so that she wouldn’t have to share the proceeds with me? And if not, what had happened to them?”

“In the meantime,” I said, “I’d been arrested. And you knew I was a burglar.”

“But what would you be doing in Room 303? I decided it must have been the same person who stabbed Miss Landau.”

“Well, a person who’d stick a knife in a little old lady probably wouldn’t draw the line at jewel theft,” I said. “But let’s focus on that person and forget the rubies for a minute. Who do you figure it was?”

“I have no idea.”

“You know,” I said, “that’s hard for me to believe. I think you have a pretty good idea.”

He lowered his eyes. “I’ve thought about it,” he admitted.

“No kidding.”

“And I honestly don’t know.”

“But you honestly do have an idea.”

“No, I—”

“That person’s the reason you didn’t bring the letters back to your own room,” I said. “It’s the reason you didn’t tell your old buddy Karen that the envelope she swiped was on a shelf in her own closet. You were working an angle of your own, weren’t you?”

“I wasn’t double-crossing Karen,” he said. “I was planning on giving her the letters.”

“When?”

“In another day or two. After I’d had a chance to—”

“To have copies made,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Because a certain person wanted copies,” I said, “and made you an offer for them you really didn’t want to refuse.”