Lawrence Block - The Burglar in the Library

“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.”