The Burglar in the Closet - By Lawrence Block Page 0,56
it look as though Craig did the killing. He wouldn’t have any reason to get rid of his own Celniker tools because there’s nothing to connect him with Crystal in the first place, and once Craig’s tagged with the crime the cops won’t have any reason to look any further.”
“So he took the scalpel along with the intention of using it as a murder weapon?”
“He must have.”
“And he picked her up and went to bed with her first?”
“That would have been fiendish, wouldn’t it? I just met him briefly but I didn’t get the impression that he was that devious a person. He struck me as pretty direct, the strong and silent type. When she went out to the bar she probably met the Legal Beagle and brought him back. I don’t remember their conversation very well because I was making such a determined effort to ignore it, but it certainly wasn’t Grabow. At least I don’t think it was.
“No, here’s what I figure happened. Say Grabow was watching the house, or maybe he tracked her from the bar where she met the lawyer. Or whoever she met, it doesn’t have to be the lawyer. In fact we can forget the lawyer because I don’t think he really enters into it. The fact that Frankie Ackerman mentioned three men as friends of Crystal’s doesn’t mean all three of them are involved in her murder. It’s remarkable enough that two of them are.”
“Anyway,” Jillian prompted, “she brought home some man or other and Grabow was watching.”
“Right. Then the guy left. Grabow saw him leave. He gave him a minute or two to get lost, then came on over and leaned on the bell. When Crystal let him in, he did his strong and silent number and stuck the scalpel straight into her heart.”
Jillian clutched her own heart, her small hand pressing high on the left-hand side of the navy sweater. She was following the line as if it were a movie and she were seeing it on TV.
“Then he came on into the bedroom,” I went on. “First thing he saw was my attaché case standing against the wall under the French woman’s portrait. He went over and—”
“What French woman?”
“It’s not important. A picture on Crystal’s wall. But he didn’t see the picture because he only had eyes for the attaché case. See, he figured an attaché case is an attaché case. He assumed it was full of the counterfeit money and this was his chance to swipe it back.”
“But the money was in a black vinyl case, wasn’t it?”
“Black Naugahyde. Right. But how would Grabow know that?”
“Wouldn’t he have packed it like that to begin with?”
“Maybe, but how do we know that? Maybe he gave Crystal the money in a Bloomingdale’s shopping bag. That’s what I usually use on burglaries. It looks like you belong, striding along with a Bloomie’s bag full of somebody else’s property. Suppose he just knew someone had transferred it to an attaché case, and here was an attaché case, the very item he was looking for. The natural thing would be for him to grab it and get the hell out and worry later what was in it.”
“And later, when he opened the case—”
“It probably confused the daylights out of him. For a minute he must have thought Crystal was some kind of medieval alchemist who managed to transmute paper into gold and diamonds. Then when he had it figured he had to go back for the money. That would explain the second break-in, the burglary after the police had already sealed the apartment. Grabow went back for the money, broke the seals, searched the place, and went home empty-handed. Because the counterfeit bills were all packed up at Knobby Corcoran’s apartment, sitting on a shelf in the closet.”
Jillian nodded, then frowned. “What happened to the jewels?”
“I suppose Grabow held onto them. People tend to retain jewelry rather than leave it for the garbage man. I didn’t see them around his loft, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. The jewels are evidence and he wouldn’t leave them lying around because they’d lock him into the murder.”
“He kept the dental tools around.”
“That’s different. There’s no way to explain the jewelry and he’d have to realize that. He must have stashed it somewhere. It’s possible he tucked it away right there on King Street. It wouldn’t be terribly difficult to hide the jewels under the floorboards or inside the modular furniture where I wouldn’t find them on