The Burglar in the Closet - By Lawrence Block Page 0,25
them into the envelope, licked the flap, sealed it, and wrote something on its outside.
Jillian asked him what he was doing. “Evidence,” he said.
“The D.A.’ll want to show how the doc’s got other scalpels the same size and shape as the murder weapon. You get a good look at it, Miss Paar? Maybe there’s something about it, some nick or scratch you’ll recognize.”
“I saw it. I can’t identify it, if that’s what you mean. They all look alike.”
“Might notice something if you give it a close look. Todras, let Miss Paar here have another look at it, huh?”
Jillian didn’t much want to look at it. But she forced herself, and after a careful glance announced that there was nothing specifically familiar about the instrument, that it seemed identical to ones they used in the office. But, she added, dentists all over the country used Celniker tools, they were very common, and a search of the offices of dentists throughout New York would turn up thousands of them.
Nyswander said he was sure that was true but that only one dentist had a clear motive for killing Crystal Sheldrake.
“But he cared for her,” she said. “He was hoping to get back together with her again. I don’t think he ever stopped loving her.”
The cops looked at each other, and I couldn’t say I blamed them. I don’t know what had prompted her to start off in this direction but the cops dutifully followed it up, questioning her about this desire of Craig’s for a reconciliation. Then, after she’d improvised reasonably well, Todras took the wind out of her sails by explaining that this just furnished Craig with yet another motive for murder. “He wanted to get back together,” he said, “and she spurned him, so he killed her out of love.”
“‘Each man kills the thing he loves,’” Nyswander quoted. “‘By each let this be heard. The coward does it with a kiss. The brave man with a sword.’ And the dentist with a scalpel.”
“Pretty,” Todras said.
“That’s Oscar Wilde.”
“I like it.”
“Except that part about a dentist doing it with a scalpel. Oscar Wilde never said that.”
“No kidding.”
“I just put that in on my own.”
“No kidding.”
“’Cause it seemed to fit.”
“No kidding.”
I thought Jillian was going to scream. Her hands had knotted themselves into little fists. Just hang in there, I wanted to tell her, because this comedy routine of theirs takes their minds off more important things, and in a minute they’ll bow and scrape themselves offstage and out of our lives, and then we can work up an act of our own.
But I guess she wasn’t listening.
“Wait a minute!”
They turned and stared at her.
“Just one damn minute! How do I know you actually brought that thing with you? That scalpel? I never saw you take it out of your pocket. Maybe you picked it up off a tray while I was looking the other way. Maybe all those things you hear about police corruption are true. Framing people and tampering with evidence and—”
They were still staring at her and at about this point she just ran out of words. Not, I’d say, a moment too soon. I wished, not for the first time in my life, that there were a way to stop the celestial tape recorder of existence, rewind it a bit, and lay down a substitute track for the most recent past.
But you can’t do that, as Omar Khayyám explained long before tape recorders. The moving finger writes and all, and dear little Jillian had just gone and given us the moving finger, all right.
“This dental scalpel,” said Todras, showing it to us yet again. “This particular one wasn’t found in the chest of Crystal Sheldrake, as a matter of fact. Rules of evidence and everything, we don’t ever carry murder weapons around with us. The actual scalpel that snuffed the lady, it’s in the lab right now with a tag on it while the men in the white smocks check blood types and do all the things they do.”
Jillian didn’t say anything.
“The scalpel my partner’s showing you,” Nyswander put in, “was picked up on the way here when we stopped at Celniker Dental and Optical Supply. It’s an exact twin of the murder weapon and useful for us to carry around in the course of our investigation. That’s why my partner can keep it in his pocket and take it out when the spirit moves him. It’s not evidence so there’s no way he can be tampering with it.”
Todras, grinning