The Burglar in the Closet - By Lawrence Block Page 0,24

each implement on hand because you have to have the right tool for the job. I’m the hygienist, I don’t handle paperwork, but I know we reorder individual items from time to time.”

“But they’re all the same,” Nyswander said.

“Oh, they may look it, but the picks will be angled in slightly different ways, or—”

She stopped because he was shaking his head, but it was Todras who spoke. “They all have these six-sided handles,” he said. “They all come from the same manufacturer is what he means.”

“Oh. Yes, that’s right.”

“Who’s the manufacturer, Miss Paar? You happen to know?”

“Celniker Dental and Optical Supply.”

“You want to spell that, Miss Paar?” She did, and Nyswander wrote something in his notebook, capped his pen, turned a page. While he was doing this Todras brought a large hand out of his pocket and opened it to disclose yet another dental implement. It looked to me quite like the one Jillian had identified as a dental scalpel. I’d had something similar in appearance once, though undoubtedly inferior in quality. It had been part of an X-acto knife kit I had as a boy, and I’d used it to whittle sad little wingless birds from balsa blocks.

“You recognize this, Miss Paar?”

“It’s a dental scalpel. Why?”

“One of yours?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible.”

“You wouldn’t know how many of this model the doc happens to have on hand?”

“I wouldn’t have any idea. Quite a few, obviously.”

“He ever carry them with him when he leaves the office?”

“Whatever for?”

Again they exchanged presumably meaningful glances.

“We found this one in Crystal Sheldrake’s apartment,” Nyswander said.

“Actually it was some other cop found it. He’s using ‘we’ in the departmental sense.”

“Actually it was found in Crystal Sheldrake herself.”

“Actually it was in her heart.”

“Actually,” said Todras (or perhaps it was Nyswander), “this pretty much frosts the cupcake, don’t it? Looks to me like your boss is up every creek in town.”

It rattled Jillian. It didn’t do a thing to me or for me, as I’d seen that hexagonal handle protruding from between Crystal’s breasts while I was fumbling mindlessly for a pulse. I’d more or less known it would turn out to be one of Craig’s tools, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, and I’d even toyed with the idea of carrying it off with me.

But there had been abundant reasons for not doing so. The most obvious one was that it would have been just my luck to pocket the deadly device and walk straight into the arms of a cop. It’s bad enough when they catch you with burglar’s tools. When you’re carrying murderer’s tools as well they take a dim view indeed.

Besides, as far as I was concerned the scalpel proved Craig was innocent, not guilty, and that someone had only succeeded in setting up the world’s clumsiest framing job. Why would Craig use a dental scalpel to kill his wife, knowing it would point immediately to him? And why, if he did have a sufficient lapse of taste and sense to do so, would he leave the scalpel sticking out of her instead of retrieving it and carrying it away with him? Whatever line they took officially, the cops would have to reason along these lines themselves sooner or later, whereas if I had removed the scalpel and some brilliant lab work had later proved that a dental scalpel had inflicted the wound, well, then Craig would really be in a bind.

So I’d left it there, and now I was doing my best to appear as though I was seeing it for the first time. “Gee,” I said, mouth agape. “That was the murder weapon?”

“You bet it was,” Todras said.

“Plunged right into her heart,” Nyswander added. “That’s a murder weapon, all right.”

“Death musta been instant.”

“Hardly any bleeding. No muss, no fuss, no bother.”

“Gee,” I said.

Jillian was on the edge of hysteria, and I was hoping she wouldn’t overreact. It was logical to assume she’d be shocked at the idea of her boss committing murder, but if their relationship was just that of dentist and hygienist there was a limit to the extent of her shock.

“I just can’t believe it,” she was saying. She reached out her hand to touch the scalpel, then drew back at the last moment, her fingertips just avoiding contact with the bright metal. Todras smiled fiercely and returned the scalpel to his pocket, while Nyswander drew a manila envelope from his inside jacket pocket and commenced selecting other dental scalpels from a tray of implements. He put four or five of