Lawrence Block - The Burglar in the Rye

“I don’t think she stole anything, although she may have. My sense of Karen is that temptation was one of the things she found hard to resist. But she went to Seattle to meet with somebody who wanted those letters very badly. Somebody who lived in Seattle, say, or who drove in from someplace an hour or so away. Bellingham, for instance.”

Hilliard Moffett thrust out his jaw. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “Pure conjecture. Bellingham ’s a considerable distance from Seattle, a stone’s throw from the Canadian border. And you say this woman is a thief, and comes from Kansas City. How would I know her?”

“You’re a collector,” I said. “When Landau was killed and I was arrested, you came straight to my shop. You as much as told me you’d buy the letters, even if they were stolen, even if I’d killed to get them. I didn’t have the sense that you’d never made that kind of offer before.”

“You’ve no proof for any of this.”

“I don’t suppose it would be hard to find,” I said. “Kassenmeier probably stayed at a hotel in Seattle, and it wouldn’t be hard to find out which one. If she made any telephone calls, there’ll be a record. If she met a pudgy fellow with Brillo hair and a face like a bulldog-”

“I beg your pardon!”

“Make that a heavyset gentleman,” I said smoothly, “with curly hair and an assertive jawline. If she met a fine-looking fellow like that, in the hotel lobby or at the coffee shop or in a bar in the neighborhood, somebody’s sure to remember. But why fight it? Nobody’s asking you to cop to conspiracy. You just let her know how important the letters were to you, and where they might be found.”

“There’s nothing illegal about that.”

“Certainly not. And maybe you advanced her some money for expenses.”

He thought about it. “That sounds as though it might be illegal,” he said, “so I’m sure I did nothing of the sort. And if anybody did give her expense money, I’m sure it must have been cash, so there’d be no record of it.”

“So she came to New York,” I went on, “and she took a room here in the Paddington. But here’s a curious thing. After she turned up dead, the police checked to see if she was registered here. And she wasn’t.”

“What’s so curious about that?” Lester Eddington wondered. “It may be difficult to use a false name on an airplane, but how hard is it at a hotel?”

“Not that hard,” Isis said. “Bernie did it, even if he did have a little trouble keeping it straight.”

I brightened. We were back to first names!

“It’s a nuisance,” I said. “Unless you have a fake credit card to match your fake name, you have to pay cash and leave deposits. She still might have done that, just to keep her name away from the scene of the crime she was planning, but we know she didn’t.”

“How do we know that?”

“We know what room she occupied,” I said. “Ray?”

“Actin’ on information received,” that worthy announced, “I made a check of the hotel records concernin’ recent registrations in the room in question. The room was on the hotel’s books as unoccupied for the entire past week.”

“Wait a minute,” Isis said. “If there was no record, how did you happen to know what room she was in?”

“Information received,” Ray said.

“Received from whom?”

“From me,” I said.

“And how did you happen to stumble on the information?”

“I happened to be in that room, and-”

“You happened to be in it.”

“Twice,” I said. “The first time I didn’t know whose room it was, and I didn’t really care. I was on my way from the fire escape to the hall, and all I wanted was to get out of the building altogether, because I’d just come from Anthea Landau’s apartment.”

“That’s the dame who got killed,” the uniformed cop said. “You were in her apartment?”

“That’s right, and-”

“Am I missing something?” He turned to Ray. “Why isn’t he in a cell?”

“He’s out on bail,” Ray said.

“He’s out on bail and he’s putting on a show for us?” Ray gave him a look, and he shrugged. “Hey,” he said, “I just asked. I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

The room went quiet, and I let it stay that way for a moment. Then I said, “There was something I noticed in that room on my first pass through it. As a matter of fact, I found something in that room on my first visit, and, uh, I took it along with me.”

“Ray,” the uniformed cop said, “did you happen to read this guy his rights? Because he just admitted to a Class D felony.” Ray gave him another look, and he opened his mouth and closed it.

“It was a piece of jewelry,” I said, and glanced at Isis, who registered this information and nodded thoughtfully. “I subsequently found out that it had been the property of one of the hotel’s permanent residents, and that she didn’t live in the room I’d taken it from. Someone had evidently stolen it from her and put it in the room where I found it.”

“That’s interesting,” Hilliard Moffett said, “if a bit hard to follow. But what does it have to do with two murders and the disappearance of the Fairborn-Landau correspondence?”

“I’ll get to that.”

“Well, I wish you’d speed it up,” he said, a little testily. “And could someone open a window? Between the body heat and the fireplace, it’s getting awfully warm in here.”

I looked at Isis, and she turned to Marty, and he walked over to the window and opened it.

“What I did,” I said, “was put two and two together, which is to say I put 602 and 303 together. The room numbers,” I explained, when I saw some puzzled faces. “Landau was in 602, and someone entered her room and killed her, and made off with the letters from Fairborn. And 303 was the room where Karen Kassenmeier was living, and where I found the stolen jewelry. Of course I didn’t know the jewelry was stolen when I, uh, picked it up, and I didn’t know it was Kassenmeier’s room until I went back to it a second time.”

“You went back to it…”

“To find out whose room it was. I figured there had to be a connection between the theft and homicide on the sixth floor and the missing jewels that turned up three floors below. Anyway, I went there and found a suitcase in the closet with Karen Kassenmeier’s luggage tag on it. I might have found more, but I heard somebody at the door.”

“Kassenmeier?”

“That’s what I assumed,” I said. “I didn’t know her name yet, I hadn’t had time to read the luggage tag, but I assumed the person at the door was the room’s current occupant. It was the middle of the night, so it didn’t figure to be a friend paying a call.”

“It could have been another burglar,” Isis suggested. “Like you.”

“Not like me,” I said, “because this burglar had a key. What I did was hide.”

“In the closet?”

I looked at Alice, whose question it was, and who seemed surprised at having raised it. “Not the closet,” I said. “And a good thing, because I have a feeling they looked in the closet.”

“‘They’?”

I nodded at Isis. “There were two of them,” I said. “A man and a woman. I was in the bathroom, behind the shower curtain, and I didn’t get a look at either of them. I stayed where I was, and they used the bedroom and left.”

“They used the bedroom?” Erica said. “How?”

“Well, not to sleep.”

“They had sex in it,” Carolyn said. “Right, Bern?”

“They did,” I said, “and then they left.”

“Kassenmeier and some guy,” Ray Kirschmann said, and glanced at Carolyn. “Or maybe it wasn’t a guy.”

“It was,” I said.

“What did you do, hear his voice?”