The Burglar in the Library - By Lawrence Block Page 0,38

Sleep—and where I could see it still, I was pleased to note. He was dressed as he’d been the previous evening, wearing a camelhair blazer with leather buttons over a tattersall vest and dark brown corduroy slacks. His shoes were chukka boots, and one of the bootlaces had come untied.

He lay on his back, sprawled at the base of the library steps. His dark hair was still neatly combed, but blood had flowed from a scalp wound, staining the carpet beneath his head. His strong features were softened in death, and his dark eyes, which had gazed with such intensity in life, were as glassy as those in the stuffed oryx.

The oryx, of course, was nowhere to be seen, having remained on the wall of the East Parlour. This placed it in the minority, as almost every other resident of Cuttleford House had responded to the outcry the way automatic elevators respond to a fire in a high-rise office building. They rush right to it, mindless of the danger, and that was just what we had done.

The hour may have had something to do with it. It was the crack of dawn, and I don’t suppose Carolyn and I were the only ones who’d been sound asleep until the cry awakened us. If we’d been reading Jane Austen, say, or playing gin rummy, we might have responded in a more gradual fashion, instead of leaping out of bed, throwing on clothes, and plunging headlong down the stairs toward the source of the disturbance.

There were five folks in the library when we got there, not counting the dead man, and there were quite a few more by the time we’d caught our breath. The screamer, I learned, was a pretty little blonde named Molly Cobbett. She was the downstairs maid, and had come in to open the drapes and tidy the room, and had responded in traditional fashion when she suddenly came face to face with the late Jonathan Rathburn.

That, Nigel Eglantine informed us, was the name of the deceased. Eglantine had been in the library when Carolyn and I burst in, as had Molly Cobbett, of course, along with Colonel Edward Blount-Buller and the redoubtable Orris, whose eyes seemed to be set even closer together than I remembered them. Others were quick to join us—Millicent Savage, her parents, Gordon Wolpert, Cissy Eglantine. The cook stood off to one side, fussing with her apron and looking quite distraught, while a red-haired young thing with a complexion that was just one big freckle gaped at the fallen guest, at once appalled and delighted that life could be so like the tabloids. (She was the upstairs maid, I later learned, and a cousin of Molly’s, the daughter of Molly’s father’s brother Earl. Earlene Cobbett was her name.)

“Awful,” Nigel Eglantine was saying. “Hideous tragedy. Dreadful luck.”

“All of that,” the colonel said. “But not terribly difficult to reconstruct, eh? Easy to see what happened.” He cleared his throat. “Up late. Couldn’t sleep. Came down here, wanted something to read. Saw just the book he wanted but couldn’t reach it.” He laid a hand on the set of library steps. “Climbed these, didn’t he? Lost his balance. Took a tumble.” He pointed to the scalp wound. “Struck his head, didn’t he? Bled like a stuck pig, if the ladies will excuse the expression.”

The ladies looked as though they could handle it. One of them, the Hardesty woman, had entered the library during the colonel’s speech, pushing her companion’s wheelchair. Now she took up Blount-Buller’s account.

“No wonder he fell,” she said. “His shoelace had come undone. He must have tripped over it.”

“He should have tied it,” Miss Dinmont put in, “before climbing the steps. That was terribly careless of him.”

Carolyn looked at me and rolled her eyes. “I bet he learned his lesson,” she said dryly. “Bern—”

“A terrible accident,” Nigel Eglantine said, taking up the reconstruction. “I suppose the fall rendered the poor man unconscious. Then he must have expired from loss of blood, or perhaps the skull fracture killed him. If another person had been in the room, the tragedy could very likely have been averted.”

“Or if he’d tied his shoes,” Miss Dinmont said. For someone who didn’t walk much, she had a lot to say on the subject.

“They might not have been untied to start with,” Greg Savage offered. Interestingly enough, he himself was wearing loafers. “He might have stepped on the end of one shoelace while he was adjusting his position on the steps,”