The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling - By Lawrence Block Page 0,67

I came here to buy a book, Mr. Rhodenbarr. I read a newspaper advertisement and made a telephone call and came here prepared to spend substantial money to acquire an outstanding rarity. I’ve since heard some fascinating if hard-to-grasp story about genuine books with fake inscriptions, and some gory tales of double-crosses and swindles and murders, and now I find myself accused of homicide. I don’t want to buy your book, Mr. Rhodenbarr, whether it’s inscribed to Hitler or Haggard or Christ’s vicar on earth. Nor do I want to listen to any further rubbish of the sort I’ve heard here tonight. If you’ll excuse me…”

He started to rise from his chair. I held up a hand, not very threateningly, but it stopped him. I told him to sit down. Oddly enough, he sat.

“You’re Prescott Demarest,” I said.

“I thought we weren’t using names here tonight. Yes, I am Prescott Demarest, but—”

“Wrong,” I said. “You’re Jesse Arkwright. And you’re a murderer.”

CHAPTER

Nineteen

“I watched you this afternoon,” I told him. “I saw you leave an office building on Pine Street. I’d never seen you before in my life but I knew there was something familiar about you. And then it came to me. Family resemblance.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about the portraits in your library in Forest Hills. The two ancestors in the oval frames whose job it is to bless the pool table. I don’t know if you’re really a descendant of the guy who put the Spinning Jenny together, but I’m willing to believe the codgers on the wall are legitimate forebears of yours. You look just like them, especially around the jawline.”

I glanced at Whelkin. “You sold him a book,” I said. “Didn’t you ever meet him?”

“Maddy handled everything. She was the middleman.”

“Middleperson, I think you mean. I suppose you spoke to him on the telephone?”

“Briefly. I don’t recognize the voice.”

“And you?” I asked the Maharajah. “You phoned Mr. Arkwright this morning, didn’t you?”

“This could be the man whose voice I heard. I am unable to say one way or the other.”

“This is absurd,” Demarest said. Hell, let’s call him Arkwright. “A presumed resemblance to a pair of portraits, an uncertain identification of a voice supposedly heard over a telephone—”

“You forget. I saw you leave an office building on Pine Street. I called you there at a certain number, and the phone you answered was in the office of Tontine Trading Corp., and the owner of Tontine is a man named Jesse Arkwright. I don’t think you’re going to get very far insisting the whole thing’s a case of mistaken identity.”

He didn’t take much time to think it over. “All right,” he said. “I’m Arkwright. There’s no reason to continue the earlier charade. I received a call earlier today, apparently from this gentleman whom you call the Maharajah. He wanted to know if I still possessed a copy of Fort Bucklow.”

“I had seen the advertisement,” the Maharajah put in, “and I wondered at its legitimacy. When I was unable to obtain the book either from this store or from Miss Porlock, I thought it might remain in Mr. Arkwright’s possession. I called him before responding to the advertisement.”

“And he referred to the ad,” Arkwright went on. “I looked for myself. I called you on the spur of the moment. I thought I could poke around and find out what was going on. A book disappeared from my house in the middle of the night. I wanted to see if I could get it back. I also wanted to determine whether it was indeed the rarity I’d been led to believe it was. So I called you, and came here tonight to bid on the book if it came to that. But none of that makes me a killer.”

“You were keeping Madeleine Porlock.”

“Nonsense. I’d met her twice, perhaps three times. She knew of my interest in rare books and approached me out of the blue to offer me the Kipling volume.”

“She was your mistress. You had a kinky sex scene going in the apartment on East Sixty-sixth Street.”

“I’ve never even been there.”

“There are neighbors who saw you there. They recognized your photograph.”

“What photograph?”

I took it out and showed it to him. “They’ve identified you,” I said. “You were seen in Porlock’s company and on your own. Apparently you had a set of keys because some of the neighbors saw you coming and going, letting yourself in downstairs.”

“That’s circumstantial evidence, isn’t it? Perhaps they saw me when I collected