Lawrence Block: The Burglar in the Rye

“She’s an attractive woman,” he said, “and seductive, and very persuasive. She offered me two thousand dollars, which I’m still waiting for, incidentally-”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Alice said.

“-and she indicated that we’d celebrate success in a manner I’d find very gratifying. The morning after Miss Landau was killed, she called to find out what had happened. And I told her I had the letters.”

I turned to Alice. “I wondered why I didn’t hear from you,” I said. “Everybody else called or dropped in, but you stayed away. If nothing else, I figured you’d want to know whether or not I had the letters. But you already knew.”

“All that’s true,” she said. “But I didn’t kill the Landau woman. I wasn’t even there that night.”

“You could have been,” I said. “You could have sashayed right past the desk while Carl was running around breaking laws and betraying old friends.”

“But why would I kill Anthea Landau?”

“She was an agent,” I said. “Didn’t you say she turned you down once? Maybe you were harboring a resentment.”

“You can’t believe that.”

“Not for a moment,” I said. “Because how would you have known to look for a knife in Karen Kassenmeier’s purse? Besides, the person who killed Landau is almost certainly the same person who killed Kassenmeier. The killer probably used the same knife. And that pretty much lets you out, because Kassenmeier was up at my apartment getting stabbed to death at just about the same time that you were knocking off a quickie with Carl in Room 303.”

“While you were hiding behind the shower curtain,” she said, and the trace of a smile appeared on her lips. “Just like Polonius, except you didn’t get stabbed. And you recognized my voice, Bernie. That’s sweet.”

“You got dressed in a hurry,” I said. “You didn’t waste time unmaking the bed, so you didn’t have to waste more time making it. Carl got the letters from the shelf where he’d stashed them, and he gave them to you and you got out of there. Now I can’t be dead certain you wouldn’t have had time to cab up to my place, meet Karen, and stick a knife in her, but why the hell would you want to? You already had the letters and you were home free.”

“That’s right.”

“And what did you care about her, anyway? And how would you know about the knife in her purse?”

“Carl could have mentioned the knife,” Erica Darby said. “Who knows what kind of pillow talk they had?”

“But I didn’t,” Carl said. “I never even mentioned Karen’s name. We were in Karen’s room when we, uh, made love, because that’s where the letters were. But I didn’t tell Alice whose room it was.”

“You told me it belonged to a permanent resident who was out on the Coast doing a guest shot in a sitcom,” she said, “so you knew the letters would be safe there, and we wouldn’t be disturbed.”

“Let’s get back to Karen Kassenmeier,” I said. “What did you tell her about the letters?”

“I didn’t tell her anything. She told me they were missing from her purse, and I told her the same person must have taken them as killed Miss Landau.”

“This was after she realized she hadn’t done it herself with the Scotch tape dispenser.”

“Right.”

“And what did she decide to do?”

“Well, she decided the letters were gone,” he said, “and there was no sense crying over spilled milk, or spilled blood, either. At least she had the rubies. Then she went to her room and the rubies were gone, and I just couldn’t believe it. She thought maybe I took them, because who else knew they were there? But I hadn’t known where they were, and I couldn’t say if they’d been there when I was in the room leaving the letters in the closet. But I didn’t say that, because she didn’t know about the letters in the closet.”

“No.”

“And then she decided you had them.”

“The letters?”

“No, the rubies. You were a burglar, she said, and the rubies were stolen from a locked hotel room, so of course you were the logical suspect. Anyway, she heard that you had them. I don’t know who told her.”

“It wasn’t me,” Isis said. “I never met the woman, and I wouldn’t have said anything to her anyway.”

“And she knew where you lived,” Carl went on. “She told me she was going to make one last try for the rubies, and if that didn’t work she’d catch the first flight she could get to Kansas City. It was late at night when she told me all this, and she went out, and I immediately called Alice and we went to her room, because I knew she’d be away for at least a couple of hours.”

“And she never came back,” I said. “Somebody met her at my apartment, probably after luring her there in the first place. Somebody who could open the door for her, because she couldn’t do it herself. Karen was a pretty good thief, but she didn’t have burglar skills.”

“Who did?” Ray wondered. “There’s a lot of doors openin’ an’ closin’ in this story, Bern, but so far the only person with burglar skills is you. An’ you wouldn’t need ’em to open your own door.”

“That’s true,” I agreed. “And neither would the person who killed Karen Kassenmeier.”

“You know who it is?”

“Yes,” I said. “I know who it is.”

“Well, you’d better tell us,” Carolyn piped up, “because I for one haven’t got a goddam clue. I followed most of what you’ve said so far, Bern, although it’s pretty complicated. But I can’t see how anybody could have done it. Maybe Karen Kassenmeier killed Anthea Landau after all, and when she got to your apartment she had a fit of remorse and stabbed herself.”

“And ate the knife?”

“What, it was gone? So somebody else came along before the body was discovered and thought it’d be just the thing for peeling apples. All right, somebody murdered her. But it couldn’t have been anybody in this room, and I can’t think of anybody else it could be, so-”

“It was somebody in this room,” I said. “And I wish I didn’t have to do this, Carolyn, but what choice have I got? It was the woman sitting next to you. It was Erica.”

“A longstanding resentment,” I said. “Maybe they were lovers whose affair ended badly. Maybe they both went after the same woman. Whatever the cause, Erica Darby hated Karen Kassenmeier, and she nursed that hatred over the years.”

Erica looked at me. Her expression was hard to read, and she hadn’t said a word since I’d named her as the killer. Maybe she remembered that Ray had Mirandized everybody in the room, albeit in a casual manner. Maybe she just didn’t have anything to contribute.

“Erica wanted revenge,” I went on, “and she was evidently familiar with the Sicilian maxim about revenge being a dish that’s best eaten cold, because she let things cool off so completely that Kassenmeier didn’t even know the resentment was still alive. She got in touch when she hit town, and she let her old friend know what brought her to town and where she was staying.

“And Erica came to the hotel the night Karen was going to make her move. I don’t know how much she’d planned and how much she improvised on the spot, but she must have gotten to the lobby while Carl was away from the desk. She already knew what room Karen was going to hit, so all she had to do was grab a key from the board and go upstairs with it. She got to the sixth floor while Carl was downstairs demonstrating his medical training, and she went into Landau’s room and found the scene as the two of them had left it-Landau in bed unconscious, a gun on the floor, and Karen’s purse on a chair.

“Maybe Landau woke up and started making a fuss, and Erica had to shut her up. But I don’t think the old lady ever opened her eyes. I think Erica saw her lying there, and she remembered the knife her old friend always carried and got it from the purse, wrapping her hand in a handkerchief so only Karen’s prints would be on it. And then she stuck it in Landau’s chest and left it there.