Lawrence Block - The Burglar Who liked to Quote Kipling

“You were keeping Madeleine Porlock.”

“Nonsense. I’d met her twice, perhaps three times. She knew of my interest in rare books and approached me out of the blue to offer me the Kipling volume.”

“She was your mistress. You had a kinky sex scene going in the apartment on East Sixty-sixth Street.”

“I’ve never even been there.”

“There are neighbors who saw you there. They recognized your photograph.”

“What photograph?”

I took it out and showed it to him. “They’ve identified you,” I said. “You were seen in Porlock’s company and on your own. Apparently you had a set of keys because some of the neighbors saw you coming and going, letting yourself in downstairs.”

“That’s circumstantial evidence, isn’t it? Perhaps they saw me when I collected the book from her. Perhaps she let me in with the buzzer and they thought they saw me using a key. Memories are unreliable, aren’t they?”

I let that pass. “Maybe you thought she loved you,” I said. “In any event, you felt personally betrayed. I’d robbed you, but that didn’t make you want to kill me. It was enough for you to get my prints on everything and leave me with a gun in my hand. But you wanted Madeleine Porlock dead. You’d trusted her and she’d cheated you.”

“This is all speculation. Sheer speculation.”

“How about the gun? A Marley Devil Dog, a. 32 automatic.”

“I understood it was unregistered.”

“How did you come to understand that? It wasn’t in the papers.”

“Perhaps I heard it over the air.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think the information was released. Anyway, sometimes an unregistered gun can be traced more readily than you might think.”

“Even if you could trace it to me,” he said carefully, “that wouldn’t prove anything. Just that you’d stolen it when you burglarized my house.”

“But it wasn’t in your house. You kept it in the lower left drawer of your desk in the Tontine office downtown.”

“That’s absolutely untrue.”

The righteous indignation was fetching. I’d seen that blued-steel automatic in the study on Copperwood Crescent. And now I was telling him it had been at his office, and it hadn’t, and he was steamed.

“Of course it’s true,” I said. “Anybody would keep the gun and the bullets in the same place. And I have the damnedest feeling that you’ve got an almost full box of.32 shells in that drawer, along with a cleaning cloth and a pair of spare clips for a Marley Devil Dog.”

He stared at me. “You were in my office!”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You-you planted those items. You’re framing me.”

“And you’re grabbing at straws,” I sailed on. “Do you still claim you weren’t keeping Madeleine Porlock? If that’s so, why did you buy her a lynx jacket? It’s not hard to guess why she’d want one. It’s a stunning garment.” Pace , Carolyn. “But why would you buy it for her if you were just casual acquaintances?”

“I didn’t.”

“I looked in your closets when I was checking out a book from your library, Mr. Arkwright. Your wife had a couple of pretty impressive furs there. They all had the same label in them. Arvin Tannenbaum.”

“What does that prove?”

“There’s a lynx jacket in the Porlock apartment with the same label in it.”

“I repeat, what does that prove? Tannenbaum’s a top furrier. Any number of persons patronize him.”

“You bought that jacket for Madeleine last month. There’s a record of the sale in their files with your name on it and a full description of the jacket.”

“That’s impossible. I never-I didn’t-” He paused and regrouped, choosing his words more carefully this time around. “If I were keeping this woman, as you put it, and if I did purchase a jacket for her, I would certainly have paid cash. There would surely be no record of the transaction.”

“You’d think that, wouldn’t you? But I guess they know you up there, Mr. Arkwright. You must be a treasured customer or something. I could be mistaken, but I have a hunch if the police looked through Tannenbaum’s files, they’d find the sales record I described. They might even find the actual bill of sale in your desk at Tontine, with your name and the notation that you’d paid cash.”

“My God,” he said, ashen-faced. “How did you-”

“Of course I’m just guessing.”

“You framed me.”

“That’s not a very nice thing to say, Mr. Arkwright.”

He put his hand to his chest as if in anticipation of a coronary. “All of these lies and half-truths,” he said. “What do they amount to? Circumstantial evidence at best.”

“Circumstantial evidence is sometimes all it takes. You were keeping Porlock and your gun killed her, and you had the strongest possible motive for her murder. What was the Watergate expression? The smoking pistol? Well, they didn’t catch you with the smoking pistol in your hand because you were considerate enough to leave it in my hand, but I think the D.A.’ll have enough to make your life difficult.”

“I should have killed you while I was at it,” he said. Positively venomous, his voice was. He was still holding onto his chest. “I should have tucked your finger around the trigger and put the gun in your mouth and let you blow your little brains out.”

“That would have been cute,” I agreed. “I killed her while committing a burglary, then took my own life in a fit of remorse. I haven’t had a remorse attack since the fifth grade, but who could possibly know that? How come you didn’t do it that way?”

“I don’t know.” He looked thoughtful “I… never killed anyone before. After I shot her I just wanted to get away from there. I never even thought of killing you. I simply put the gun in your hand and left.”

Beautiful. A full admission, and as much as anyone was likely to get without reading him his rights and letting him call his lawyer. It was about time for the Cavalry to make its appearance. I started to turn toward the rear of the store, where Ray Kirschmann and Francis Rockland were presumably taking in all of this, when the hand Arkwright had been clutching to his breast snaked inside his jacket and back out again, and when it reappeared there was a gun in it.

He pushed his chair back as he drew the gun, moving briskly backward so that he could cover the four of us at once-Whelkin and Atman Singh and the Maharajah. And me, at whom the gun was pointed. It was a larger gun than the one I’d come to clutching, far too large to be a Whippet or a Devil Dog. And a revolver, I noted. Perhaps, if he was partial to the Marley line, it was a Mastiff. Or a Rhodesian Ridgeback, or whatever.

“Let’s hold it right there,” he said, waving the gun around. “I’ll shoot the first person who moves a hair. You’re a clever man, Rhodenbarr, but it won’t do you any good this time. I don’t suppose the world will miss a burglar. They ought to gas people like you in the first place, loathsome vermin with no respect for property rights. As for you”-this to Whelkin-“you cheated me. You employed Madeleine to swindle me out of some money. You made a fool of me. I won’t mind killing you. You other gentlemen have the misfortune of being present at an awkward time. I regret the necessity of doing this-”

Killing women’s bad policy. Ignoring them can be worse. He’d forgotten all about Carolyn, and he was still running his mouth when she brained him with a bronze bust of Immanuel Kant. I’d been using it as a bookend, in the Philosophy and Religion section.

At a quarter to twelve Monday morning I hung the Out to Lunch sign in the window and locked up. I didn’t bother with the iron gates, not at that hour. I went to the place Carolyn had patronized Thursday and bought felafel sandwiches and a container of hummus and some flat crackers to scoop it up with. They were oddly shaped and reminded me of drawings of amoebae in my high-school biology textbook. I started to order coffee too but they had mint tea and that sounded interesting so I picked up two containers. The counterman put everything in a bag for me. I still didn’t know if he was an Arab or an Israeli, so instead of chancing a shalom or a salaam I just told him to have a nice day and let it go at that.