The Burglar in the Closet - By Lawrence Block Page 0,23

that rankled!

Item: Craig couldn’t account for his time while his ex-wife was getting herself murdered. If he’d mentioned anything about having dinner with Jillian, the news didn’t seem to have found its way to Todras & Nyswander. It would eventually, of course, and sooner or later they’d know Jillian was the boss’s girlfriend and I was nothing more than your friendly neighborhood burglar. Which would, sooner or later, constitute a problem, a thorn in the side, a pain in the neck. But not yet, thank you. Meanwhile, Craig was telling them that he’d spent a quiet evening at home. A lot of people spend a lot of their evenings quietly at home, but those are the hardest sort of evenings to prove.

Item: Someone, some neighbor I suppose, had seen a man answering Craig’s description leaving the Gramercy building at around the time the murder was supposed to have been committed. I couldn’t tell just what time the person had been seen, or whether he’d been leaving merely the building or the specific apartment, or just who had seen him or just how certain the witness was about the time and the identification. Someone or anyone could have spotted the man who’d made love to Crystal, or the man who killed her, or even Bernard Rhodenbarr himself, beating a hasty retreat from the premises after the horse was stolen.

Or it could have been Craig. All I knew about the killer was he had two feet and he didn’t talk much. If Gary Cooper were still alive he could have done it. Maybe it was Marcel Marceau. Maybe it was Craig, uncharacteristically silent.

“Wondered if we could just go into the office,” Todras said. And when Jillian explained that that’s where we were, in the office, he said, “Well, I don’t know the name for it, maybe. The room where he does what he does.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“With the chair that goes back,” Nyswander said.

“And all the drills.”

“And the instruments, those cute little mirrors on the ends of sticks, and the things for picking the crud out from underneath your gums.”

“Oh, right,” Todras said, smiling at the memory. His own teeth were large and white and even, like the snow when Good King Wenceslas looked out. (That’s not exactly right, but you must know what I mean.) His wide-set eyes gleamed like high-beamed headlights over the grillwork of his smile. “And that slurpy thing that sucks up all your spit. Don’t forget the slurpy thing.”

“That’s Mr. Thirsty,” I said.

“Huh?”

Jillian led us to the room where Craig did his handiwork, solving people’s problems and sending them out to do battle with tough steaks and nougat-centered chocolates. The two cops amused themselves by tilting the chair to and fro and making Dr. Kronkheit passes at each other with the drill, but then they got down to serious business and opened the cabinet with the drawers of steel implements.

“Now these here are interesting,” little Nyswander said, holding a nasty little pick at arm’s length. “What’s this called, anyway?”

Jillian told him it was a pick for scraping tartar from the teeth. He nodded and said it must be important to do that, huh? She said it was vital; otherwise you got irritation and bone erosion and periodontal disease, and you wound up without any teeth. “People think cavities are the big thing,” she explained, “but your teeth can be in perfect shape and you’ll lose them anyway because of the gums.”

“Those teeth are beauties,” Todras said heartily, “but I’m afraid those gums have to come out.”

We all laughed it up over that one. Nyswander and Todras took turns holding up implements and wanting to know what they were. This one was another pick, that one was a dental scalpel, and there were no end of others, the names and functions of which have mercifully slipped my mind.

“All these gizmos,” Todras said, “there’s a basic similarity, right? Like they’re all part of a set, but instead of being in a case or something so you can be sure they’re all here, they’re just sort of lined up in the drawer. The doc buy ’em all in a set or something?”

“You can buy them in sets.”

“Is that what he did?”

Jillian shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. He had the office set up a good many years before I came to work for him. Of course the individual implements are available singly. These are fine-quality steel, but accidents happen. Picks drop and get bent. Scalpels get nicks. And we keep several of