The Burglar in the Closet - By Lawrence Block Page 0,22

you better close the office for good,” Todras said.

“Maybe you should.”

“And find somebody else to work for.”

“Somebody who figures divorce is enough and stops short of murder.”

“Or someone who when he kills a former spouse finds a way to get away with it.”

“Yeah, that’s the idea.”

“Right.”

It was really something, the way the lines came back and forth from the two of them. It was as though they had a vaudeville act they were working on, and they wanted to break it in in the smaller rooms before they took it on the road. We were a sort of warm-up audience, and they were making the most of us.

Jillian didn’t seem to think they were all that hysterical. Her lower lip, which now carried less than its usual quantity of lipstick, trembled slightly. Her eyes looked misty. I’m your boyfriend, I thought, trying to beam the thought her way. Craig’s just your boss. And don’t for God’s sake call him Craig.

“I can’t believe it,” she said.

“Believe it, Miss Paar.”

“Right,” came the echo from Nyswander.

“But he wouldn’t do something like that.”

“You never know,” Todras said.

“They’ll fool you every time,” said Nyswander.

“But Dr. Sheldrake couldn’t kill anyone!”

“He didn’t kill just anyone,” Todras said.

“He killed somebody specific,” Nyswander said.

“Namely his wife.”

“Which is pretty specific.”

Jillian frowned and her lip quivered again. I had to admire the way she was using that lip-quiver. Maybe it was real, maybe she wasn’t even conscious of it, but she was fitting it into a generally effective act. It might not stun ’em in Peoria the way Todras & Nyswander might, but she got her point across.

“He’s such a good man to work for,” she said.

“Been working for him long, Miss Paar?”

“Quite a while. That’s how I met Bernie. Mr. Rhodenbarr.”

“You met Mr. Rhodenbarr here through the doc?”

She nodded. “He was a patient of the doctor’s. And we met here and started seeing each other.”

“And I suppose you had an appointment for some more dental work this morning. That right, Mr. Rhodenbarr?”

It wasn’t right. Tempting, perhaps, but not right, and if they checked the appointment book they’d know as much. Why tell an obvious lie when a less obvious one will do?

“No,” I said. “Miss Paar called me and I was able to get over to comfort her. She was anxious and didn’t want to be here alone.”

They nodded to each other and Nyswander wrote something down. The time and temperature, perhaps.

“I guess you been a patient of the doc’s for some time, Mr. Rhodenbarr.”

“A couple of years now.”

“Ever meet his former wife?”

Well, we were never formally introduced. “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“She was his nurse before they got married, wasn’t she?”

“His hygienist,” Jillian corrected. The two of them stared at her. I said that I understood Mrs. Sheldrake had retired upon marrying her employer, and that by the time I became his patient she was no longer working at the office.

“Nice deal,” Nyswander said. “You marry the boss, that’s even better’n marrying the boss’s daughter.”

“Unless the boss kills you,” Todras suggested.

The conversation drifted on in this fashion. I slipped in a tentative question now and again of the sort they could have fun doing macabre Smith-and-Dale routines with, and I managed to pick up an item here and an item there.

Item: The Medical Examiner had fixed the time of death at somewhere between midnight and one in the morning. Now you know and I know that Crystal Sheldrake died at 10:49, eleven minutes of eleven, but I couldn’t find a way to supply that bit of information.

Item: There were no signs of forced entry, no indication that anything had been removed from the apartment, and everything pointed to the supposition that Crystal had admitted her killer herself. Since she was rather informally attired, even to the bathing cap on her head, it was logical to suppose that the murderer was a close acquaintance at the very least.

No argument there. No signs of forced entry, certainly, because when I bamboozle the tumblers of a lock I don’t leave tracks. No indication of burglary if only because there was no mess, no drawers turned inside-out, none of the signals left behind by either an amateur at the game or a pro in a hurry. Whoever killed Crystal might well have left the apartment looking as though the Hell’s Angels had sublet it for a month, but I’d made things uncommonly easy for him, gathering all the loot in advance of his call and packing it up for him. God,