The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling - By Lawrence Block Page 0,68

the book from her. Perhaps she let me in with the buzzer and they thought they saw me using a key. Memories are unreliable, aren’t they?”

I let that pass. “Maybe you thought she loved you,” I said. “In any event, you felt personally betrayed. I’d robbed you, but that didn’t make you want to kill me. It was enough for you to get my prints on everything and leave me with a gun in my hand. But you wanted Madeleine Porlock dead. You’d trusted her and she’d cheated you.”

“This is all speculation. Sheer speculation.”

“How about the gun? A Marley Devil Dog, a. 32 automatic.”

“I understood it was unregistered.”

“How did you come to understand that? It wasn’t in the papers.”

“Perhaps I heard it over the air.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think the information was released. Anyway, sometimes an unregistered gun can be traced more readily than you might think.”

“Even if you could trace it to me,” he said carefully, “that wouldn’t prove anything. Just that you’d stolen it when you burglarized my house.”

“But it wasn’t in your house. You kept it in the lower left drawer of your desk in the Tontine office downtown.”

“That’s absolutely untrue.”

The righteous indignation was fetching. I’d seen that blued-steel automatic in the study on Copperwood Crescent. And now I was telling him it had been at his office, and it hadn’t, and he was steamed.

“Of course it’s true,” I said. “Anybody would keep the gun and the bullets in the same place. And I have the damnedest feeling that you’ve got an almost full box of .32 shells in that drawer, along with a cleaning cloth and a pair of spare clips for a Marley Devil Dog.”

He stared at me. “You were in my office!”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You—you planted those items. You’re framing me.”

“And you’re grabbing at straws,” I sailed on. “Do you still claim you weren’t keeping Madeleine Porlock? If that’s so, why did you buy her a lynx jacket? It’s not hard to guess why she’d want one. It’s a stunning garment.” Pace, Carolyn. “But why would you buy it for her if you were just casual acquaintances?”

“I didn’t.”

“I looked in your closets when I was checking out a book from your library, Mr. Arkwright. Your wife had a couple of pretty impressive furs there. They all had the same label in them. Arvin Tannenbaum.”

“What does that prove?”

“There’s a lynx jacket in the Porlock apartment with the same label in it.”

“I repeat, what does that prove? Tannenbaum’s a top furrier. Any number of persons patronize him.”

“You bought that jacket for Madeleine last month. There’s a record of the sale in their files with your name on it and a full description of the jacket.”

“That’s impossible. I never—I didn’t—” He paused and regrouped, choosing his words more carefully this time around. “If I were keeping this woman, as you put it, and if I did purchase a jacket for her, I would certainly have paid cash. There would surely be no record of the transaction.”

“You’d think that, wouldn’t you? But I guess they know you up there, Mr. Arkwright. You must be a treasured customer or something. I could be mistaken, but I have a hunch if the police looked through Tannenbaum’s files, they’d find the sales record I described. They might even find the actual bill of sale in your desk at Tontine, with your name and the notation that you’d paid cash.”

“My God,” he said, ashen-faced. “How did you—”

“Of course I’m just guessing.”

“You framed me.”

“That’s not a very nice thing to say, Mr. Arkwright.”

He put his hand to his chest as if in anticipation of a coronary. “All of these lies and half-truths,” he said. “What do they amount to? Circumstantial evidence at best.”

“Circumstantial evidence is sometimes all it takes. You were keeping Porlock and your gun killed her, and you had the strongest possible motive for her murder. What was the Watergate expression? The smoking pistol? Well, they didn’t catch you with the smoking pistol in your hand because you were considerate enough to leave it in my hand, but I think the D.A.’ll have enough to make your life difficult.”

“I should have killed you while I was at it,” he said. Positively venomous, his voice was. He was still holding onto his chest. “I should have tucked your finger around the trigger and put the gun in your mouth and let you blow your little brains out.”

“That would have been cute,” I agreed. “I killed her while committing a burglary, then