The Burglar in the Closet - By Lawrence Block Page 0,66
would certainly make the police put out a pick-up order on me, and of course that’s what they did.” I drew a breath, looked at each of them in turn, Jillian and Craig and Carson Verrill. “And that’s where we are,” I said, “and that’s why we’re here.”
The silence built up rather nicely. Finally Verrill broke it. He cleared his throat. “You see the problem,” he said. “You’ve developed a convincing case against this nameless attorney. But you don’t know who he is and I gather it’s not going to be terribly easy to track him down. You mentioned a woman, a friend of Crystal Sheldrake’s?”
“Frankie Ackerman.”
“But did you say she killed herself?”
“She died mixing alcohol and Valium. It could have been an accident or it could have been suicide. She’d been brooding about Crystal and something was on her mind. It’s not impossible that she got in touch with the lawyer directly. Maybe he fed her the booze and pills as part of his process of tying off loose ends.”
“That sounds a little farfetched, doesn’t it?”
“A little,” I admitted. “But either way she’s dead.”
“Exactly. And a chance to identify this lawyer seems to have died with her. Now this bartender. Corcoran? Is that his name?”
“Knobby Corcoran.”
“And he has the counterfeit money?”
“He had it the last I saw of it, but that was yesterday evening. I’d guess he still has it and I’d guess he and the money are a long ways from here. After he closed the bar last night he went home and grabbed a suitcase and left town. I don’t think he’ll be back. Either all the killings scared him or he’d been planning all along to cross his mob associates. He was living on tips and leavings and maybe the sight of all that money was too much for him. Remember, it looked like a quarter of a million bucks, even if you could only get twenty cents on the dollar for it. I’ll bet Knobby took a cab to Kennedy and a plane to someplace warm, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of counterfeit twenties turn up in the West Indies between now and next spring.”
Verrill nodded, frowning. “Then you don’t really have anything to work with,” he said slowly. “You don’t have any leads to the identity of this lawyer and you don’t know who he is.”
“Well, that’s not exactly true.”
“Oh?”
“I know who he is.”
“Really?”
“And I’ve even got some proof.”
“Indeed.”
I got up from the desk, opened the frosted glass door, motioned Dennis inside. “This is Dennis,” I announced. “He knew Crystal pretty well and he was a good friend of Frankie Ackerman.”
“She was a hell of a fine woman,” Dennis said.
“Dennis, that’s Jillian Paar. And this is Dr. Craig Sheldrake, and Mr. Carson Verrill.”
“A pleasure,” he said to Jillian. “Pleasure, Doc,” he said to Craig. And he smiled at Verrill.
To me—to all of us—he said, “That’s him.”
“Huh?”
“That’s him,” he said again, pointing now at Carson Verrill. “That’s Crystal’s boyfriend. That’s the Legal Beagle. That’s Johnny, all right.”
Verrill broke the silence. It took him a while to do it, and first he got up from the chair and extended himself to his full height, and when he spoke the words were on the anticlimactic side.
“This is ridiculous,” he said.
What I said wasn’t much better. “Murder,” I said, “is always ridiculous.” I’m not proud of it but that’s what I said.
“Ridiculous, Rhodenbarr. Who is this oaf and where did you find him?”
“His name’s Dennis. He runs a parking garage.”
“I don’t just run it. I happen to own it.”
“He happens to own it,” I said.
“I think he’s been drinking. And I think you’ve taken leave of your senses, Rhodenbarr. First you try to manipulate me into defending you and now you accuse me of murder.”
“It does seem inconsistent,” I allowed. “I guess I don’t want you defending me after all. But I won’t need anybody to defend me. You just have to confess to the two murders and the police’ll probably drop their charges against me.”
“You must be out of your mind.”
“I should be, with the kind of week I’ve had. But I’m not.”
“Out of your mind. In the first place, my name’s not John. Or hasn’t that occurred to you?”
“It was a problem,” I admitted. “When I first expected you I wondered if maybe your name was John Carson Verrill and you dropped the John. No such luck. Carson’s your first name, all right, and your middle name is Woolford. Carson Woolford Verrill, the