Lawrence Block - The Burglar In The Closet

“Nice deal,” Nyswander said. “You marry the boss, that’s even better’n marrying the boss’s daughter.”

“Unless the boss kills you,” Todras suggested.

The conversation drifted on in this fashion. I slipped in a tentative question now and again of the sort they could have fun doing macabre Smith-and-Dale routines with, and I managed to pick up an item here and an item there.

Item: The Medical Examiner had fixed the time of death at somewhere between midnight and one in the morning. Now you know and I know that Crystal Sheldrake died at 10:49, eleven minutes of eleven, but I couldn’t find a way to supply that bit of information.

Item: There were no signs of forced entry, no indication that anything had been removed from the apartment, and everything pointed to the supposition that Crystal had admitted her killer herself. Since she was rather informally attired, even to the bathing cap on her head, it was logical to suppose that the murderer was a close acquaintance at the very least.

No argument there. No signs of forced entry, certainly, because when I bamboozle the tumblers of a lock I don’t leave tracks. No indication of burglary if only because there was no mess, no drawers turned inside-out, none of the signals left behind by either an amateur at the game or a pro in a hurry. Whoever killed Crystal might well have left the apartment looking as though the Hell’s Angels had sublet it for a month, but I’d made things uncommonly easy for him, gathering all the loot in advance of his call and packing it up for him. God, that rankled!

Item: Craig couldn’t account for his time while his ex-wife was getting herself murdered. If he’d mentioned anything about having dinner with Jillian, the news didn’t seem to have found its way to Todras amp; Nyswander. It would eventually, of course, and sooner or later they’d know Jillian was the boss’s girlfriend and I was nothing more than your friendly neighborhood burglar. Which would, sooner or later, constitute a problem, a thorn in the side, a pain in the neck. But not yet, thank you. Meanwhile, Craig was telling them that he’d spent a quiet evening at home. A lot of people spend a lot of their evenings quietly at home, but those are the hardest sort of evenings to prove.

Item: Someone, some neighbor I suppose, had seen a man answering Craig’s description leaving the Gramercy building at around the time the murder was supposed to have been committed. I couldn’t tell just what time the person had been seen, or whether he’d been leaving merely the building or the specific apartment, or just who had seen him or just how certain the witness was about the time and the identification. Someone or anyone could have spotted the man who’d made love to Crystal, or the man who killed her, or even Bernard Rhodenbarr himself, beating a hasty retreat from the premises after the horse was stolen.

Or it could have been Craig. All I knew about the killer was he had two feet and he didn’t talk much. If Gary Cooper were still alive he could have done it. Maybe it was Marcel Marceau. Maybe it was Craig, uncharacteristically silent.

“Wondered if we could just go into the office,” Todras said. And when Jillian explained that that’s where we were, in the office, he said, “Well, I don’t know the name for it, maybe. The room where he does what he does.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“With the chair that goes back,” Nyswander said.

“And all the drills.”

“And the instruments, those cute little mirrors on the ends of sticks, and the things for picking the crud out from underneath your gums.”

“Oh, right,” Todras said, smiling at the memory. His own teeth were large and white and even, like the snow when Good King Wenceslas looked out. (That’s not exactly right, but you must know what I mean.) His wide-set eyes gleamed like high-beamed headlights over the grillwork of his smile. “And that slurpy thing that sucks up all your spit. Don’t forget the slurpy thing.”

“That’s Mr. Thirsty,” I said.

“Huh?”

Jillian led us to the room where Craig did his handiwork, solving people’s problems and sending them out to do battle with tough steaks and nougat-centered chocolates. The two cops amused themselves by tilting the chair to and fro and making Dr. Kronkheit passes at each other with the drill, but then they got down to serious business and opened the cabinet with the drawers of steel implements.

“Now these here are interesting,” little Nyswander said, holding a nasty little pick at arm’s length. “What’s this called, anyway?”

Jillian told him it was a pick for scraping tartar from the teeth. He nodded and said it must be important to do that, huh? She said it was vital; otherwise you got irritation and bone erosion and periodontal disease, and you wound up without any teeth. “People think cavities are the big thing,” she explained, “but your teeth can be in perfect shape and you’ll lose them anyway because of the gums.”

“Those teeth are beauties,” Todras said heartily, “but I’m afraid those gums have to come out.”

We all laughed it up over that one. Nyswander and Todras took turns holding up implements and wanting to know what they were. This one was another pick, that one was a dental scalpel, and there were no end of others, the names and functions of which have mercifully slipped my mind.

“All these gizmos,” Todras said, “there’s a basic similarity, right? Like they’re all part of a set, but instead of being in a case or something so you can be sure they’re all here, they’re just sort of lined up in the drawer. The doc buy ’em all in a set or something?”

“You can buy them in sets.”

“Is that what he did?”

Jillian shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. He had the office set up a good many years before I came to work for him. Of course the individual implements are available singly. These are fine-quality steel, but accidents happen. Picks drop and get bent. Scalpels get nicks. And we keep several of each implement on hand because you have to have the right tool for the job. I’m the hygienist, I don’t handle paperwork, but I know we reorder individual items from time to time.”

“But they’re all the same,” Nyswander said.

“Oh, they may look it, but the picks will be angled in slightly different ways, or-”

She stopped because he was shaking his head, but it was Todras who spoke. “They all have these six-sided handles,” he said. “They all come from the same manufacturer is what he means.”

“Oh. Yes, that’s right.”

“Who’s the manufacturer, Miss Paar? You happen to know?”

“Celniker Dental and Optical Supply.”

“You want to spell that, Miss Paar?” She did, and Nyswander wrote something in his notebook, capped his pen, turned a page. While he was doing this Todras brought a large hand out of his pocket and opened it to disclose yet another dental implement. It looked to me quite like the one Jillian had identified as a dental scalpel. I’d had something similar in appearance once, though undoubtedly inferior in quality. It had been part of an X-acto knife kit I had as a boy, and I’d used it to whittle sad little wingless birds from balsa blocks.

“You recognize this, Miss Paar?”

“It’s a dental scalpel. Why?”

“One of yours?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible.”

“You wouldn’t know how many of this model the doc happens to have on hand?”

“I wouldn’t have any idea. Quite a few, obviously.”

“He ever carry them with him when he leaves the office?”

“Whatever for?”

Again they exchanged presumably meaningful glances.

“We found this one in Crystal Sheldrake’s apartment,” Nyswander said.