Страница 25 из 44
Then I went back to the living room and began sifting through the pile of books. At least half of them had their bindings wholly or partially demolished by the treatment they’d been given. I paid as little attention to this as possible, merely going through the heap until I’d found three individual volumes. These were the book-club edition of The Guns of August, the second volume of the three-volume Heritage Press edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and something called The Romance of Beekeeping, which I’d bought because the title struck me as a contradiction in terms. All three books had seen much better days and the cover of the beekeeping book was now attached to the text by a thread and a prayer, but that was all right. I didn’t care. I toted the three books into the bedroom and put them on top of my dresser. There was plenty of room there because my visitors had tipped everything that used to be on the top of the dresser onto the floor. Considerate of them to make room for the books.
There was a smallish canvas suitcase in the closet. My leather suitcase had been carved up by a lunatic looking for a secret compartment, I suppose, but the canvas bag was so flimsy that it was obviously hiding nothing. I put my three books in it and added clean clothing from the pile on my bed and the other pile on the bedroom floor. I left myself a change of clothes, packed enough socks and shirts and underwear to last a few days, zipped up the suitcase, then took off the clothes I’d been wearing. I dropped them on the floor along with everything else and went into the bathroom to take a shower.
It was a sloppy shower because my good friends had pulled down the rod that holds the shower curtain in place. They’d also yanked the towel bars loose from their moorings. Some of these bars are hollow and some people hide things in them. I’ve never been able to understand why; the stash winds up being hard for its owner to get at, while a prowler or cop can reach it in a second by ripping the bar off the wall.
I’ve noticed over the years that your average person is not terribly good at hiding things.
Anyway, I had to shower without the benefit of shower curtain, which meant that an awful lot of water wound up on the floor. There were clothes and things there to absorb most of it as it landed. Somehow I just couldn’t bring myself to care what happened to the floor or the clothes or the whole apartment, because I was never going to have anything to do with any of them again. I couldn’t live in the apartment even if I wanted to, and now I no longer wanted to, so the hell with all of it.
I finished my shower, kicked clothing aside until I found a couple of towels to dry myself with, put on my clean clothes and slid my feet into my best pair of scotch-grain loafers. Then I added a few more things to my suitcase-my own razor, some other toilet articles, a vial of hay fever pills (although it wasn’t the season) and a rabbit’s foot key chain with no keys on it that I’d given up for lost ages ago. It must have been hiding out in the back of a dresser drawer or something and my guests had located it for me in the process of dumping the drawer. An ill wind that blows no good, said I to myself, and paused in my labors to transfer the rabbit’s foot from the suitcase to my pocket, then paused again and attached it to my little ring of picks and keys and such. As little good as the foot may have done its original rabbit owner, it had always been lucky for me, and nowadays I seemed to need all the help I could get. I took a last look around, wondering what I hoped to find. I picked up my telephone, wondered if it was tapped, decided that it probably wasn’t. But who was I going to call? I hung up and found the phone book, which had received the dump and shake treatment like every other book in the apartment. I picked it up and looked for Elaine Christopher without success. There were several E Christophers listed but none on Bank Street. I decided that the lady’s listing or lack thereof was one of an ever-increasing number of things I couldn’t be bothered to think about.
So I hefted my suitcase, killed the lights, opened the door, stepped out into the hallway, and there was Mrs. Hesch.
She was wearing a shapeless housedress with faded flowers on it. (Printed on it, that is. Not pi
“Mr. Rhodenbarr,” she said. “I thought I heard you moving around in there. Meaning I thought I heard somebody. I didn’t know it was you.”
“Uh,” I said. “Well, it was.”
“Yeah.” Her bright little eyes took in the suitcase. “Going someplace? Not that I blame you. Poor boy, you got some kind of trouble for yourself, huh? The years we live across the hall from each other, you and me, and whoever would guess a nice boy like you would be a burglar? You never bothered anybody in this building, did you?”
“Of course not.”
“Exactly what I said. You know the kind of conversations you hear in the laundry room. There are crazy women in this building, Mr. Rhodenbarr. One the other day, she’s ru
“I’m really in sort of a rush, Mrs. Hesch.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You always got time for a cup of my coffee. Since when are you in such a rush?”
I followed her into the apartment as if hypnotized. She poured me a cup of really excellent coffee and while I sipped it she stubbed out her cigarette and replaced it immediately with a fresh one. She went on to tell me how I’d brought no end of excitement to the building, how the police had been in and out of my apartment, and how there had been other visitors as well.
“I didn’t see them,” she said, “but the door was wide open when they left. It was yesterday afternoon when Jorge put the new lock on it. I saw what they did to your apartment. Like animals, Mr. Rhodenbarr. Except an animal wouldn’t do nothing like that. Who was it? Cops?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You know who it was?”
“No, I wish I did. You didn’t see them?”
“I don’t even know when they were there. Such a mess they made you’d think I’d of heard them, but when I got the set going I don’t hear nothing. You don’t know who did this thing? Is it mixed up with the man you killed?”
“I never killed anybody, Mrs. Hesch.”
She nodded thoughtfully, neither buying nor rejecting the statement. “I can imagine you a burglar,” she said slowly. “But killing somebody is something else again. I said as much to the cop that questioned me.”
“They questioned you?”
“They questioned the building, believe me. Listen, I didn’t tell them a thing. I’ll be honest with you, I got no use for the momsers. The time my niece Gloria was raped all they did was ask her stupid questions. What I told them about you was you’re a nice boy who would never hurt a cockroach. I wouldn’t tell a cop if his pants was on fire, believe me. But what he told me, the cop, he told me you ran into this Flaxford-that’s his name?”