The Burglar in the Library - By Lawrence Block Page 0,101
on something like that?”
“The coincidence,” I said, “is that you both had the same last name.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Pettisham,” I said. “Petit champ. Small plot of land. Little field.”
“Jesus,” he said.
“The first time I met Gordon Wolpert, he got to talking about malt whisky. There were a lot of distilleries, he told me, although he’d always supposed it was a small field. That was the phrase he picked, though it didn’t fit the conversation that well, and he bore down on it, too, to stress it. Then he went on and used the phrase ‘a petty sham,’ and looked disappointed when I failed to react to it. When Pettisham called and canceled his booking, Mrs. Eglantine got the chart of room assignments and crossed out his name. A few hours later she wrote ‘Littlefield’ in the same space.”
“Who was Pettisham?” Millicent wanted to know.
“Cissie says he sounded foreign,” I said, “and he was certainly mixed up in some sort of foreign intrigue. I don’t know whether he was actually an agent of a foreign power, and I couldn’t say whether he was buying or selling, and whether the transaction involved secrets or valuables. The two men who could tell us are both dead.”
“Rathburn and Wolpert,” Carolyn said.
“That’s right. They were both waiting for him to turn up. Rathburn was keeping an eye on everybody and I guess Wolpert was keeping an eye on Rathburn. And then Dakin Littlefield arrived, with a glamorous companion and an arrogant manner and a guilty secret, and they both took action. Wolpert wasn’t sure how he was going to handle things, but he knew he didn’t want anyone getting away before he made his move. So he cut the ropes and dumped the bridge in the gully.”
“And Rathburn?”
“Made an approach to Littlefield. He was always scribbling away, so my guess would be he wrote out a note and passed it to you in the hallway.”
“He slipped it under the bedroom door,” Lettice said.
“I never saw any note,” her husband said.
“Don’t you remember? There was a folded sheet of yellow paper under our door when we went to the room. You picked it up and read it, and when I asked you what it was you said it was nothing.”
“Oh, that. Well, it was nothing. I couldn’t make head or tail out of it. Looking back, I guess this guy did have me mixed up with somebody else. I just thought he was a crank, or he stuck his little love note under the wrong door. So I crumpled it up and forgot about it.”
“You turned pale,” Lettice said.
“Because you thought he knew something,” I put in. “You had eight million dollars’ worth of negotiable bonds in your possession, and just when you thought you were free and clear somebody slips you a cryptic note demanding a secret meeting in the middle of the night. You couldn’t say anything to your wife, and you couldn’t just ignore the note. You had to meet him.”
“Not to harm him,” Littlefield said. “Just to find out what he knew, and to tell him he was barking up the wrong tree. The room was pitch dark when I got there. I figured it was empty. I started to switch on a light and a voice told me to leave it dark.”
“And?”
“And I wound up sitting in a chair next to his. I guess there was something Pettisham was supposed to turn over to him, but all I could make out at the time was that he wanted something from me, and I figured that meant the bonds. I wasn’t about to give them up to some joker I couldn’t even see. But I never meant to kill him.”
“Why else would you brain him with the camel?”
“I didn’t know it was a camel.”
“With a hump like that? What did you think it was, the hunchback of Notre Dame?”
“I didn’t even see it,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, it was darker than the inside of a cow. I just grabbed the first thing I touched and clocked him with it.”
“If you’d grabbed the pillow instead of the camel,” I said, “poor Rathburn would be alive today. How’s that for rotten luck?”
“I just wanted to stun him,” Littlefield said. “You know, to knock him out. I figured I could tie him up and stick him in a closet where nobody’d find him until we had a chance to get out of here.”