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“Even if you could trace it to me,” he said carefully, “that wouldn’t prove anything. Just that you’d stolen it when you burglarized my house.”
“But it wasn’t in your house. You kept it in the lower left drawer of your desk in the Tontine office downtown.”
“That’s absolutely untrue.”
The righteous indignation was fetching. I’d seen that blued-steel automatic in the study on Copperwood Crescent. And now I was telling him it had been at his office, and it hadn’t, and he was steamed.
“Of course it’s true,” I said. “Anybody would keep the gun and the bullets in the same place. And I have the damnedest feeling that you’ve got an almost full box of.32 shells in that drawer, along with a cleaning cloth and a pair of spare clips for a Marley Devil Dog.”
He stared at me. “You were in my office!”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You-you planted those items. You’re framing me.”
“And you’re grabbing at straws,” I sailed on. “Do you still claim you weren’t keeping Madeleine Porlock? If that’s so, why did you buy her a lynx jacket? It’s not hard to guess why she’d want one. It’s a stu
“I didn’t.”
“I looked in your closets when I was checking out a book from your library, Mr. Arkwright. Your wife had a couple of pretty impressive furs there. They all had the same label in them. Arvin Ta
“What does that prove?”
“There’s a lynx jacket in the Porlock apartment with the same label in it.”
“I repeat, what does that prove? Ta
“You bought that jacket for Madeleine last month. There’s a record of the sale in their files with your name on it and a full description of the jacket.”
“That’s impossible. I never-I didn’t-” He paused and regrouped, choosing his words more carefully this time around. “If I were keeping this woman, as you put it, and if I did purchase a jacket for her, I would certainly have paid cash. There would surely be no record of the transaction.”
“You’d think that, wouldn’t you? But I guess they know you up there, Mr. Arkwright. You must be a treasured customer or something. I could be mistaken, but I have a hunch if the police looked through Ta
“My God,” he said, ashen-faced. “How did you-”
“Of course I’m just guessing.”
“You framed me.”
“That’s not a very nice thing to say, Mr. Arkwright.”
He put his hand to his chest as if in anticipation of a coronary. “All of these lies and half-truths,” he said. “What do they amount to? Circumstantial evidence at best.”
“Circumstantial evidence is sometimes all it takes. You were keeping Porlock and your gun killed her, and you had the strongest possible motive for her murder. What was the Watergate expression? The smoking pistol? Well, they didn’t catch you with the smoking pistol in your hand because you were considerate enough to leave it in my hand, but I think the D.A.’ll have enough to make your life difficult.”
“I should have killed you while I was at it,” he said. Positively venomous, his voice was. He was still holding onto his chest. “I should have tucked your finger around the trigger and put the gun in your mouth and let you blow your little brains out.”
“That would have been cute,” I agreed. “I killed her while committing a burglary, then took my own life in a fit of remorse. I haven’t had a remorse attack since the fifth grade, but who could possibly know that? How come you didn’t do it that way?”
“I don’t know.” He looked thoughtful “I… never killed anyone before. After I shot her I just wanted to get away from there. I never even thought of killing you. I simply put the gun in your hand and left.”
Beautiful. A full admission, and as much as anyone was likely to get without reading him his rights and letting him call his lawyer. It was about time for the Cavalry to make its appearance. I started to turn toward the rear of the store, where Ray Kirschma
He pushed his chair back as he drew the gun, moving briskly backward so that he could cover the four of us at once-Whelkin and Atman Singh and the Maharajah. And me, at whom the gun was pointed. It was a larger gun than the one I’d come to clutching, far too large to be a Whippet or a Devil Dog. And a revolver, I noted. Perhaps, if he was partial to the Marley line, it was a Mastiff. Or a Rhodesian Ridgeback, or whatever.
“Let’s hold it right there,” he said, waving the gun around. “I’ll shoot the first person who moves a hair. You’re a clever man, Rhodenbarr, but it won’t do you any good this time. I don’t suppose the world will miss a burglar. They ought to gas people like you in the first place, loathsome vermin with no respect for property rights. As for you”-this to Whelkin-“you cheated me. You employed Madeleine to swindle me out of some money. You made a fool of me. I won’t mind killing you. You other gentlemen have the misfortune of being present at an awkward time. I regret the necessity of doing this-”
Killing women’s bad policy. Ignoring them can be worse. He’d forgotten all about Carolyn, and he was still ru
CHAPTER Twenty
At a quarter to twelve Monday morning I hung the Out to Lunch sign in the window and locked up. I didn’t bother with the iron gates, not at that hour. I went to the place Carolyn had patronized Thursday and bought felafel sandwiches and a container of hummus and some flat crackers to scoop it up with. They were oddly shaped and reminded me of drawings of amoebae in my high-school biology textbook. I started to order coffee too but they had mint tea and that sounded interesting so I picked up two containers. The counterman put everything in a bag for me. I still didn’t know if he was an Arab or an Israeli, so instead of chancing a shalom or a salaam I just told him to have a nice day and let it go at that.
Carolyn was hard at work combing out a Lhasa Apso. “Thank God,” she said when she saw me, and popped the fluffy little dog into a cage. “Lunchtime, Dolly Lama. I’ll deal with you later. Whatcha got, Bern?”
“Felafel.”
“Sensational. Grab a chair.”
I did and we dug in. Between bites I told her that everything looked good. Francis Rockland wouldn’t be hassling either me or the Sikh, having accepted three thousand of the Maharajah’s American dollars as compensation for his erstwhile toe. It struck me as a generous settlement, especially so when you recalled that he’d shot the toe off all by his lonesome. And I gather a few more rupees found their way into Ray Kirschma
Rudyard Whelkin, who incredibly enough proved to have a walletful of identification in that unlikely name, was booked as a material witness and released in his own recognizance. “I’m pretty sure he’s out of the country,” I told Carolyn. “Or at least out of town. He called me last night and tried to talk me into parting with the Hitler copy of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow.”
“Don’t tell me he wants to sell it to the Sheikh.”
“I think he knows what that would get him. Flayed alive, for instance. But there are enough other weirdos who’d pay a bundle for an item like that, and Whelkin’s just the man to find one of them. He may never make the big score he’s trying for but he hasn’t missed many meals so far in life and I don’t figure he’ll start now.”