Lawrence Block - The Burglar In The Closet

When I got to the attaché case she made oohing sounds. When it was Naugahyde instead of Ultrasuede she groaned, and when I opened it up and found all the money she gasped. “So much money,” she said. “Where is it? You don’t have it with you, do you?”

“It’s in a safe place. Or else I wasted fifty cents.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing important. I stashed the attaché case but I held onto a few bills because I thought they might come in handy.” I took out my wallet. “I’ve got two left. See?”

“What about them?”

“Nice, aren’t they?”

“They’re twenty-dollar bills. What’s so special about them?”

“Well, if you saw a whole suitcase full of them you’d be impressed, wouldn’t you?”

“I suppose, but-”

“Compare the serial numbers, Jillian.”

“What about them? They’re in sequence. Wait a minute, they’re not in sequence, are they?”

“Nope.”

“They’re…Bernie, both of these bills have the same serial number.”

“Really? Jesus, that’s remarkable, isn’t it?”

“Bernie-”

“A world where no two snowflakes are the same, where every human being has a different set of fingerprints, and here I go and take two twenties out of my wallet and I’ll be damned if they don’t both have the same serial number. It makes you think, doesn’t it?”

“Are they-?”

“Phony? Yeah, that’s what it means, I’m afraid. Hell of a note, isn’t it? All that money and all it is is green paper. Take a close look, Jillian, and you’ll see it’s a long way from perfect. The portrait of Andy Jackson is damn good compared to most counterfeits I’ve seen, but if you really look at the bill it doesn’t look wonderful.”

“Around the seal here-”

“Yeah, the points aren’t sharp. And if you turn the bill over you’ll see some other faults. Of course these bills are new ones. If you age them and distress them a little, give ’em fold lines and take the newness out of the paper by cooking them with a little coffee-well, there are tricks in every trade and I don’t pretend to know some of the ones counterfeiters have come up with lately. I have enough work staying ahead of the locksmiths. I’ll tell you, though, those bills you’ve got in your hand would pass banks nineteen times out of twenty. The serial number’s about the only obvious fault. Would you look twice at one of these if you got it in change?”

“No.”

“Neither would anybody else. As soon as I saw the money was counterfeit I went straight back to Grabow’s place. One step inside the door and I knew I was on the right track. He was an unsuccessful artist who’d turned to printmaking and had made no big success of that, and here he was living in a loft most New Yorkers would kill for, tons of space, beautiful furniture, a few thousand dollars’ worth of primitive artifacts on the wall. I poked around and found enough inks and paper to make better money than the Bureau of Engraving and Printing turns out, and if there was any doubt it vanished when I found the actual printing plates. He does beautiful line work. It’s really high-quality engraving.”

“Grabow’s a counterfeiter?”

“Uh-huh. I wondered why he was so suspicious when he had me trapped in the vestibule of his building. I did a pretty good job of looking like a dumb schmuck who was chasing the wrong Grabow, but he was full of questions. Who was I? How’d I get his address? How come I was working on a Saturday? He came up with questions faster than I could come up with answers, that’s why I had to run out on him, but why would he have so many suspicions if he didn’t have something to hide? Yes, he’s a counterfeiter. I can’t swear that he made the plates himself, but he’s got them now. And he certainly did the printing.”

“And then he gave the money to Knobby Corcoran? I don’t understand what happened next.”

“Neither do I, but I can make a few guesses. Suppose Crystal brought Knobby and Grabow together. Grabow was her boyfriend and maybe she took him around the bars a few times. That’s what she did with the Legal Beagle, her other boyfriend, so why wouldn’t she do the same thing with Grabow?

“Anyway, Grabow and Corcoran set something up. Maybe Grabow was going to produce the counterfeit twenties and Knobby was going to find a way to turn them into real money. There was some kind of a doublecross. Say Knobby wound up with the twenties and Grabow wound up talking to himself. Maybe Crystal crossed him one way or another, maybe she wound up with the money.”

“How?”

I shrugged. “Beats me, but it could have happened. Or maybe the deal with the counterfeit went fine but Grabow found out she was just using him, two-timing him with other men and stringing him along for the sake of the counterfeiting deal. Maybe he learned she was sleeping with Knobby, maybe he found out about the other boyfriend. He got jealous and he got mad and he picked up a dental scalpel and went after her.”

“Where would he get a dental scalpel?”

“Celniker Dental and Optical, same as Craig.”

“But why would he-”

“He’s got a whole collection of them. All sorts of picks and probes and scalpels, and it looks to me as though they’re all made by Celniker unless other manufacturers also put hexagonal shafts on their instruments. I suppose they’re handy for printing and printmaking, cutting linoleum blocks, making woodcuts, any of that sort of detail work. Either he took one along as a murder weapon or he just happened to have one in his pocket.”

“That seems strange, doesn’t it?”

It did at that. “Try it this way, then. He’d had Crystal up to his loft and she spotted the tools and mentioned that Craig had the same kind at his office. After all, she was his hygienist back before she married him. Matter of fact, that could explain the coincidence of Grabow having the same kind of tools as Craig. Maybe he was using something else, X-acto knives or God knows what, and Crystal told him he should get a set of dental instruments because the steel’s high quality or whatever the hell she told him. Anyway, if he knew Craig used Celniker instruments, he could have taken the scalpel along to make it look as though Craig did the killing. He wouldn’t have any reason to get rid of his own Celniker tools because there’s nothing to connect him with Crystal in the first place, and once Craig’s tagged with the crime the cops won’t have any reason to look any further.”

“So he took the scalpel along with the intention of using it as a murder weapon?”

“He must have.”

“And he picked her up and went to bed with her first?”

“That would have been fiendish, wouldn’t it? I just met him briefly but I didn’t get the impression that he was that devious a person. He struck me as pretty direct, the strong and silent type. When she went out to the bar she probably met the Legal Beagle and brought him back. I don’t remember their conversation very well because I was making such a determined effort to ignore it, but it certainly wasn’t Grabow. At least I don’t think it was.

“No, here’s what I figure happened. Say Grabow was watching the house, or maybe he tracked her from the bar where she met the lawyer. Or whoever she met, it doesn’t have to be the lawyer. In fact we can forget the lawyer because I don’t think he really enters into it. The fact that Frankie Ackerman mentioned three men as friends of Crystal’s doesn’t mean all three of them are involved in her murder. It’s remarkable enough that two of them are.”

“Anyway,” Jillian prompted, “she brought home some man or other and Grabow was watching.”

“Right. Then the guy left. Grabow saw him leave. He gave him a minute or two to get lost, then came on over and leaned on the bell. When Crystal let him in, he did his strong and silent number and stuck the scalpel straight into her heart.”