The Burglar in the Library - By Lawrence Block Page 0,102
on his face. I used the pillow to sponge it off.”
“Very considerate of you.”
“And I guess I held it there too long. Or maybe he was already dead from the blow to the head. Or maybe—”
“Yes?”
“You want to know what I think, Rhodenbarr? I bet he had a heart attack before I ever touched him with the camel. See, that would explain how I hit him on the back of the head, even though I was aiming at his forehead. He must have been pitching forward, and I hit him after he’d croaked.”
I looked at my watch. I had to admit the heart-attack notion showed a resourceful imagination, but if he could even try on a line like that it was a waste of time letting him talk. Right now, though, wasting time wasn’t a bad idea.
“What about the pinpoint hemorrhages?” the colonel demanded, wasting some time himself. “Don’t they prove the man was smothered?”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Littlefield said. “I’m not a doctor, but then neither is anybody else in the room. Maybe there’s more than one way to get those pinpoint hemorrhages.”
“Entirely possible,” I agreed. “Maybe they’re a natural consequence of the synergistic effect of getting crowned with a camel seconds after you’ve died of a heart attack. What about Wolpert?”
“Wolpert?”
“The second man you killed.”
“Didn’t I already explain how that was suicide? First time around I thought it was Rathburn’s death he was feeling guilty about—”
“But it couldn’t have been, because you’re the one who killed Rathburn.”
“Well, I was there when he died. I’ll admit that much, although I still think it was a heart attack that finished him. What Wolpert was feeling guilty about was cutting the bridge ropes so that the boy genius did his Wile E. Coyote impression and tried to walk on air.”
“And he tried to hang himself, then wandered outside and died of shock and exposure.”
“You got it. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“I’ll tell you what happened,” I said. “Gordon Wolpert never had any doubt what happened to Rathburn. He kept it to himself and bided his time before he made his pitch to you. What did he want? The same thing Rathburn was after?”
“If he was planning anything, he never followed through with it. There were a couple of times I noticed him giving me the eye, as if he wanted to tell me something, but he never got around to it. And then the next thing I knew he was out there on the third lawn chair this morning, dead as a doornail.”
I looked at my watch again. Where were they when you wanted them?
“I saw you,” Millicent Savage said suddenly.
“Huh?”
“Talking to Mr. Wolpert,” the little darling insisted. “And you said something about meeting him later. I heard you say it.”
“That’s crap,” he said, disgusted. “There was nobody within earshot.” He realized what he’d said, then made a face and shrugged and gave up. “Oh, the hell with it,” he said. “I could spin it out a little more, but what’s the point? I thought we could work something out, like you’d all go along with it for a share of the bonds, but there’s too many of you and somebody’d be sure to hold out. Anyway, why share? I don’t have to share.”
And he pulled out a gun.
Don’t ask me what kind of gun it was. Guns make me nervous—people keep them in drawers so that they can shoot burglars with them, and I’m opposed to that—so I’ve never taken the trouble to learn anything much about them. I could tell that this one was an automatic, not a revolver, and that was about all I could tell. I could also tell that it was big (though probably not as big as it looked) and that it was pointed at me.
“Nobody move,” Littlefield said.
Nobody did.
“You’re right,” he said. “I killed them both, and I don’t know why you had to make a federal case out of it, because they both asked for it. Rathburn thought I was somebody else, and I couldn’t manage to stall the son of a bitch. I didn’t mean to kill him, not at first, but then when I switched a light on and saw him lying there I got a look at the library steps and saw how easy it would be to make it look like an accident. But that would only work if he was dead, so I picked up the pillow and put him out of my misery.”