Lawrence Block - The Burglar in the Rye

“You don’t expect the truth from me?”

“If I did,” he said, “it’d mean I ain’t learned a thing over the years, because you been tellin’ me lies since the day we met. An’ why should I hold it against you? We done each other a lot of good over the years, Bern.”

“That’s true.”

“Put a lot of dollars in our pockets. An’ I wound up makin’ a couple of righteous collars along the way, too.”

“Sometimes it was me you collared, Ray.”

“But nothin’ ever stuck, did it? You always came out okay.”

“So far.”

“You ever meet this Kassenmeier, Bernie?”

“No,” I said. “I thought I did. For a minute I thought she was someone else.”

“She looked familiar?”

I shook my head. “Earlier. Before I saw her, I thought the woman in my apartment might have been, uh, another woman.”

“And who would that be, Bern? Never mind, don’t strain yourself makin’ up a story. You changed your mind on that before you got anywhere near the morgue. If I was guessin’, I’d say that was her on the phone.”

He pulled up next to a hydrant-where would cops park without them?-and we walked around the corner to my store. Henry was ringing a sale as we entered. He’d returned from lunch around the time Ray started badgering me to take a look at the late Karen Kassenmeier, and I’d left him to mind the store.

I hadn’t introduced them before, so I did now. “This is Ray Kirschmann,” I said. “He’s a police officer. And this is Henry Walden. He used to own a clay factory.”

“I didn’t know clay was somethin’ you made in a factory,” Ray said. “I thought you just dug it up, like dirt.”

You did, Henry told him, but then you had to process it, which involved removing the impurities and adding compounds to keep it from drying out. Then you dyed it and packaged it and shipped it to the stores.

“An’ then people give it to their kids,” Ray said, “an’ the little bastards track it into the carpet, which you never get it out of. You workin’ for Bernie, Henry?”

“He lets me hang out here,” Henry said, “and I lend a hand when I can. It’s more interesting than making clay.”

“If you like books,” Ray said. Henry said he liked them a lot, and that he liked the kind of people you met in bookstores. You met all kinds, Ray agreed. Henry asked if I needed him for anything more, and I said no, that I’d be closing fairly soon. Henry said he’d most likely see me tomorrow, and stopped on his way out to give Raffles a pat.

“Nice enough fellow,” Ray said, when the door closed behind him. “Was he here the other day when I came by?”

“It’s hard to remember who was and who wasn’t. He’s been hanging around a lot.”

“Henry Clay. Wasn’t there somebody famous named Henry Clay?”

“He was the man who said he’d rather be right than be President.”

“There you go.”

“But his name’s not Henry Clay, Ray. It’s Henry Walden.”

“Same difference. What it did, it rang a bell. An’ so did his face, but then it didn’t. Like he was familiar at first glance, but at second glance you realized you were seeing him for the first time.”

“At second glance, you were seeing him for the first time.”

“You know what I mean. If you saw that beard you’d remember it, wouldn’t you? Extinguished an’ all. Bern, speakin’ of familiar. Namely the dame we just saw. I know she wasn’t who you thought she was, but are you sure she didn’t look the least bit familiar?”

“She looked dead.”

“Yeah. Well, there’s not a whole lot of doubt on that score.”

“She looked as though she’d been dead forever, Ray. As though she’d been born dead, and bad things happened to her ever since.”

“‘Cordin’ to what we got on her, she’s forty-six years old. The worst thing ever happened to her was gettin’ stabbed to death last night, but up until then she got arrested a whole batch of times an’ went away more than once.”

“For what?”

“Theft. She was a thief.”

“A thief in my apartment.”

“Yeah, that’s a first. She musta been lookin’ to steal somethin’.”

“I suppose so.”

“You don’t seem concerned. Why’s that?”

“Well, she didn’t get away with anything, did she, Ray?”

“No, but whoever killed her might have walked off with what she came to take.”

“I don’t know what she came to take,” I said, “and I didn’t have anything worth taking.”

“How about your life, Bern?”

“Huh?”

“She had a gun in her purse.”

“A gun,” I said.

“Little bitty one. Hadn’t been cleaned since the last time it was fired.”

“Maybe she shot the person who stabbed her.”

“An’ then put the gun back in her purse?” He made a face. “What it mighta been,” he said, “is the gun she got shot with a couple of days ago.”

“The shoulder wound.”

“Uh-huh. It’s the right size. Twenty-five-caliber, perfect if you want to stop a charging cockroach.”

“If somebody shot her in the shoulder,” I said, “how does the gun wind up in her purse?”

“Maybe the guy who shot her a while ago is the same guy who stabbed her last night. She falls down dead an’ he gets rid of the gun by stickin’ it in her purse.”

“That makes a lot of sense.”

“It makes no sense at all,” he said, “but what does?”

“Maybe she shot herself originally,” I suggested.

“Now that makes sense, Bern. Woman wants to kill herself, she shoots herself in the shoulder.”

“She shot herself accidentally.”

“It’s her gun an’ she has an accident with it.”

“Why not?”

He thought it over. “Whole lot of arrests on her sheet,” he said. “I didn’t see where she was ever charged with possession of a firearm.”

“People change.”

“So I keep hearin’, but I ain’t seen much evidence of it. She got charged twice with assault. Charges dropped both times. Didn’t use a gun, though.”

“She used a knife,” I said.

“How’d you know that, Bern?”

“The way you paused. I could sense the punch line looming in the distance. She did use a knife?”

“Yeah, she stabbed a couple of guys.”

“But I bet she didn’t have a knife in her purse.”

“Nope.”

“Or found on the premises.”

“Well, you got a drawer full of knives in your kitchen. But no, they didn’t find the murder weapon at the crime scene. The thinkin’ is the killer took it away with him.”

“Was it the same knife?”

He smiled approvingly. “Very good,” he said. “You’d make an okay cop, if you weren’t a crook instead.”

“Who says a person can’t be both? Was it the same knife used to kill Anthea Landau?”

“If we had the knife,” he said, “it’d be easier to say one way or the other. All they can tell so far is it’s possible. What do you say, Bern? Any ideas where we might find the knife? Any thoughts on who mighta stuck it in Kassenmeier?”

“No.”

“You know somethin’ about Kassenmeier, Bern. You say you never saw her, an’ you say you didn’t know nothin’ about her, but I saw the look on your face when I mentioned her name the first time. You didn’t look like you were hearin’ it for the first time.”

“I never heard it before,” I said, “but I’d seen it.”

“Seen it where?”

I thought about it. Was there any reason to hold out on him? There had to be, but I couldn’t think what it was.

“She was staying at the Paddington.”

“How would you know that? That’s where you were last night, isn’t it?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Lemme use your phone,” he said, and he was reaching for it when it rang. “Shit,” he said, and picked it up himself. “Bernie’s Bookstore,” he said. “Who’s this, Carolyn? Sorry, my mistake. Hold on.”