The Burglar in the Rye

“Well, I did,” I said, “but Kassenmeier took them first. She stuffed them in the back of her underwear drawer.” I shook my head. “The cobbler’s children go barefoot, all right. A pro like Kassenmeier goes and hides the rubies in the first place a burglar would look. I guess she was in a hurry to get back to work on the job that brought her here in the first place, the Fairborn-Landau letters.”

I drew a breath. “Now here’s where the timing gets a little tricky,” I said. “The day of Landau’s murder was the same day I first came to the Paddington. I checked in around lunchtime, collected my bear, and went to my room.”

“You took a bear?” Isis said. “You came here to commit burglary and you wanted a bear in your room?”

“I don’t see what one thing has to do with the other,” I told her. “It’s a cute bear. Point is, while I was checking in I picked up an envelope from the floor. It was there to be picked up because I had just that minute dropped it. It had Anthea Landau’s name on it, and it was my way of finding out which room she was in. All I had to do was watch where Carl put it.”

“I didn’t put it anywhere,” Carl said. “I left it on the desk.”

“For the moment,” I said. “But by the time I’d put my things away and went back downstairs, you’d tucked it in Landau’s pigeonhole.”

“How could you tell?” Lester Eddington asked. “There must have been a dozen envelopes in as many pigeonholes.”

“This one was purple.”

His eyes lit up at the news, as did Hilliard Moffett’s. “Like every letter Gulliver Fairborn ever wrote,” Moffett said.

“I wanted something distinctive,” I said, “so I’d be able to spot it. And I had purple on the brain because I knew it was Fairborn ’s favorite color for correspondence. So I bought some purple paper and envelopes at a stationery store.” I drew a folded sheet from my breast pocket, waved it around. “Like this,” I said, and put it back. “I put a blank sheet in an envelope and left it at the desk, and it was in Anthea Landau’s pigeonhole when I left my key on the way out. And when I picked up my key that evening, it was gone.”

“She picked up her mail.”

“That’s what I assumed. But Anthea Landau had become increasingly reclusive in recent years. She rarely left the hotel, and didn’t often leave her suite of rooms.”

“I had to go to her room to examine the letters she was going to consign to us,” Victor Harkness put in. “‘You’ll have to come to the hotel,’ she said, arranging to meet me in the lobby. When I called from the lobby she said, ‘You’ll have to come upstairs.’”

“So I hardly think she would come downstairs for her mail,” I said. “I think she would have it brought up to her.”

Everyone looked at Carl. “So?” he demanded. “What does that have to do with anything? When I was on my break I took her mail up and slid it under her door. There are a few guests who get that service. Miss Landau was one of them.”

“So you slid it under her door.”

“That’s right.”

“Is it? What if I told you someone saw you knocking on her door?”

“I slid the mail under her door. If I knocked, it was just to let her know I’d brought her mail. I did that sometimes.”

“And walked away without waiting for the door to be opened.”

“Yes.”

“What if I told you someone saw you wait until she opened the door?”

“Nobody saw me.” He colored. “Look, who can tell one day from the next? Maybe she opened the door. She sometimes did, if she was standing right next to it when I knocked. What difference does it make?”

“I’m guessing now,” I said, “but I think my guess is pretty close to the truth. I know you knocked and I’m sure she let you in, and then I think you did something to make sure she’d sleep soundly. Was she drinking a cup of tea? Did you put something in her tea?”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“It may not have been tea,” I said, “and she may not have been drinking it right there in front of you, whatever it was. But one way or another you slipped her some kind of a mickey.”

“If he did,” Ray said, “there’ll be traces somewhere. In the cup if she didn’t wash it, an’ in her if she drank it.” Marty asked if they’d found anything. “No,” Ray said, “on account of we didn’t look. When a woman’s been hit over the head an’ stabbed to death, you don’t generally order a toxicology scan to find out if she took poison. But I can order it now, an’ if she did we’ll know about it.”

“It wasn’t poison,” Carl said. “My God, I wouldn’t poison anybody.”

“It was just something to help her sleep.”

“She hadn’t been sleeping well,” he said, “and she never left those rooms, and I knew Karen was getting tired of waiting. She’d go in while Miss Landau was asleep, and if she wasn’t sleeping soundly-well, I was afraid of what might happen.”

“With good cause, as it turned out.”

“Oh, God,” Carl said. “I probably shouldn’t say any more. I’ve said too much already.”

“Well, you got the right to remain silent,” Ray said smoothly, and ran the whole Miranda warning past him. “An’ that goes for everybody in this room,” he added. “All of you’s got the right to remain silent, an’ all the rest I just read. But you want my opinion, you’d be crazy to quit talkin’ now.”

“I would?”

“You broke some laws,” he said, “an’ no question you were an accessory, but if you help us clear the case an’ tie the whole thing to Kasimir-”

“Kassenmeier,” I said.

“Whatever. You do that, you’re in good shape. And she’s dead as a doorknob, so what’s the harm in that?”

“She killed Miss Landau,” Carl said. “I mean, you already know that, don’t you?”

“Why don’t you tell us what happened?”

“There’s not much to tell. I gave the drug time to work, and then I called Miss Landau. She didn’t answer her phone, so I assumed she was sleeping soundly. Then I called Karen in her room and told her to come down and pick up a key. She did, and went upstairs with it. The next thing I knew, Miss Landau was dead.”

“What happened?”

“All I know is what Karen told me. She went in and Miss Landau woke up and confronted her. Karen stabbed her and got away without being seen.”

“Aren’t you leaving something out?”

“I don’t think so.”

“When they found Kassenmeier in my apartment,” I said, “she’d been shot in the shoulder, and it didn’t happen on West End Avenue, either, because the wound had been cleaned and dressed and was already starting to heal. Landau shot her, didn’t she?”

“Oh, that’s right,” he said. “I forgot that part.”

“Well, a minor detail like that could slip a person’s mind easily enough. She called you, didn’t she? From Landau’s apartment, saying she’d just taken a bullet in the shoulder. You told her to stay where she was, and you went upstairs and took her to your own room, the one you’ve had since you moved into the Paddington twenty-odd years ago. It was closer than the room you’d put Kassenmeier in, and you had first-aid supplies there, tape and gauze pads and antiseptic. You bandaged her up and left her there to rest. And you went back to Landau’s apartment.”

“Why would I do that?”

“To see if there was anything you could do for the woman. You wouldn’t just leave her there, would you?”

“No, of course not,” he agreed. “But there wasn’t anything I could do for her, so I-”

“Sure there was.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s fu

I paused, feeling the way Carl did when he heard how the Japanese gangster had made a hotel clerk disappear. I don’t like stories where somebody shoots a burglar.