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“I have a couple of his letters,” Hilliard Moffett said, “including one to a real estate agent in Hickory, North Carolina, inquiring about houses for rent. As far as literary correspondence is concerned, I don’t think he’s written anything of the sort in years. When he delivers a manuscript to his current agent, he just sends it by express mail with a false return address and no note enclosed.” He sighed. “He’s not an easy man to collect.”
“So the letters to Landau would be valuable,” I said. “Even priceless.”
“Nothing’s priceless,” said Harkness from Sotheby’s. He sounded as if he was quoting the firm’s motto, and who am I to say he wasn’t? “Except in the sense that the price could only be determined by discovering what the material would bring at public auction. I saw a sampling of the letters, and felt confident they would bring a substantial sum, certainly in the high five figures, and possibly well into six figures.”
“The letters haven’t been sold yet,” I said, “so we don’t know what they’ll bring. But we do know that they were valuable enough and desirable enough to bring some interesting people all the way to New York. Some of them are here now, in this room. There’s Hilliard Moffett, for instance, who already told you he has a couple of Gulliver Fairborn’s letters. He wanted the others.”
“I collect the man,” he said.
“And Lester Eddington, who knows a lot about Fairborn.”
“He’s my life’s work,” Eddington told us. “Moffett, I’d be interested in seeing that letter to the North Carolina realtor. I know he spent two years in the Smoky Mountains, and it would be useful to pin it down.”
“The letter’s not for sale,” Moffett snapped, and Eddington told him a copy would suit him just fine, or even a transcription. Moffett grunted in reply.
“And then there was Karen Kassenmeier,” I said.
I looked around, and every face I saw looked puzzled, except for Ray, who knew the name, and the other cop, who didn’t seem to be paying attention.
“Karen Kassenmeier was a thief,” I said. “She wasn’t a perfect thief, because she got caught a couple of times and went to prison for it, but she was pretty good at what she did, and she didn’t shoplift at the dime store. She stole high-ticket items, and the word was that she stole them to order.”
“And she came to New York, Bern?”
“From Kansas City,” I said, “according to the tag on her suitcase. But the airlines didn’t list a passenger named Kassenmeier on any of their Kansas City -to- New York flights in the past two weeks.”
“So she came earlier,” Moffett said, his jowls wagging.
“Or she used a false name,” Isis Gauthier suggested. “Criminals use aliases all the time, don’t they? Why, I met a man just the other day who called himself Peter Jeffries, or Jeffrey Peters. I can’t remember which, and neither could he.”
“It’s not that easy to use an alias on an airplane,” I said. “You have to show photo ID when you board, and you pretty much have to pay with a credit card or draw more attention from security than anyone would want, especially a thief. And if she used an alias, she wouldn’t have gone on using a luggage tag with her own name on it.”
“She might,” Erica said. “Criminals are stupid. Everybody knows that. Otherwise they wouldn’t get caught.”
“Sometimes they have bad luck,” I said, a little defensively. “Anyway, we know she used her own name because there’s a record of the flight she took. Three days before Anthea Landau was killed, Karen R. Kassenmeier was on a United flight from Seattle to JFK.”
“They got her name on the whatchacallit, the passenger manifest,” Ray said. “An’ there’s prolly a record of her flyin’ from Kansas City to Seattle, which’ll turn up if we look for it. What did she go an’ steal in Seattle, Bern? The dome off the stadium?”
“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 pla
“How do we know that?”
“We know what room she occupied,” I said. “Ray?”
“Actin’ on information received,” that worthy a
“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.”