Around ten the next morning I was spreading rhubarb preserves on a piece of whole-wheat toast. I’d bought the preserves, imported from Scotland at great expense, because I figured anything in an octagonal jar with a classy label had to be good. Now I felt an obligation to use them up even though my figuring seemed to be wrong. I had the piece of toast nicely covered and was about to cut it into triangles when the phone rang.
When I answered it Jillian Parr said, “Mr. Rhodenbarr? This is Jillian. From Dr. Craig’s office?”
“Oh, hi!” I said. “Beautiful morning, isn’t it? How are things in dental hygiene?”
There was a funereal pause. Then, “You haven’t heard the news?”
“News?”
“I don’t even know if it was in the papers. I haven’t even seen the papers. I overslept, I just grabbed coffee and Danish on my way to the office. Craig had a nine-thirty appointment booked and he’s always at the office on time and he didn’t show up. I called his apartment and there was no answer, and I figured he must be on his way in, and then I had the radio on and there was a newscast.”
“Jesus,” I said. “What happened, Jillian?”
There was a pause and then the words came in a rush. “He was arrested, Bernie. I know it sounds crazy but it’s true. Last night someone killed Crystal. Stabbed her to death or something, and in the middle of the night the police came and arrested Craig for her murder. You didn’t know about this?”
“I can’t even believe it,” I said. I wedged the phone between ear and shoulder so that I could quarter the toast. I didn’t want it to get cold. If I have to eat rhubarb preserves I can damn well eat them on warm toast. “It wasn’t in the Times,” I added. I could have added that it wasn’t in the News either, but that it was all over the radio and television newscasts. But for some curious reason I didn’t mention this.
“I don’t know what to do, Bernie. I just don’t know what I should do.”
I took a bite of toast, chewed it thoughtfully. “I suppose the first step is to close the office and cancel his appointments for the day.”
“Oh, I already did that. You know Marian, don’t you? The receptionist? She’s making telephone calls now. When she’s done I’ll send her home, and after that-”
“After that you can go home yourself.”
“I suppose so. But there has to be something I can do.”
I ate more toast, sipped some coffee. I seemed to be developing a definite taste for the rhubarb jam. I wasn’t positive I’d go running out for another jar when this one was finally finished, but I was beginning to like it. Coffee, though, was not quite the right accompaniment. A pot of strong English breakfast tea, that would be more like it. I’d have to remember next time.
“I can’t believe Craig would kill her,” she was saying. “She was a bitch and he hated her but I can’t believe he would kill anyone. Even a rotten tramp like Crystal.”
I tried to remember that Latin phrase for speaking well of the dead, then gave it up. De mortuis ta-tum ta-tum bonum, something along those lines.
“If only I could talk to him, Bernie.”
“You haven’t heard from him?”
“Nothing.”
“What time did they pick him up?”
“They didn’t say on the radio. Only that he’d been arrested for questioning. If it was just a matter of questioning they wouldn’t have had to arrest him, would they?”
“Probably not.” I paused, chewed rhubarb-laden toast, considered. “When was Crystal killed? Did they happen to say?”
“I think they said the body was discovered shortly after midnight.”
“Well, it’s hard to say when they would have gotten around to picking Craig up. They might have questioned him without charging him for a while. He could have insisted they charge him, but he might not have thought of that. And he might not have bothered insisting on having a lawyer present. In any event, somewhere along the way he must have called an attorney. He wouldn’t have a criminal lawyer but his own lawyer would have referred the case to somebody and he’s almost certainly got counsel at hand by now.” I thought back to my own experiences. I used a couple of mouthpieces over the years before I finally settled on Herbie Tannenbaum. He’s always straight with me, I can call him at any hour, and he knows he can trust me to come up with his fee even if I don’t have anything in advance. He also knows how to reach the reachable judges and how to work trade-offs with the D.A.’s people. But I somehow doubted he’d be the kind of lawyer Craig Sheldrake would wind up with.
“You could get in touch with Craig’s lawyer,” I added. “Find out from him how things stand.”
“I don’t know who he is.”
“Well, maybe he’ll call you. The lawyer. If only to tell you to cancel the appointments. He shouldn’t take it for granted that you happened to catch the newscast.”
“Why hasn’t he called yet? It’s almost ten-thirty!”
Because you’re on the phone, I wanted to say. Instead I swallowed some food and said, “They may have waited until a decent hour before they arrested him. Don’t panic, Jillian. If he’s been arrested he’s certainly in a safe place. If the lawyer doesn’t call you sometime this afternoon, make some calls and find out where he’s being held. They might even let you see him. If not, at least they’ll give you the name of his attorney and you can take it from there. Don’t expect Craig to call you. They’ll let him call his lawyer and that’s generally the extent of his phone privileges.” Unless you bribe a guard, but he wouldn’t know how to go about doing that. “You don’t really have anything to worry about, Jillian. Either you’ll hear from the lawyer or you’ll get in touch with the lawyer and either way things’ll work out. If Craig’s innocent-”
“Of course he’s innocent!”
“-then things’ll get straightened out in no time at all. They always pick up the husband when the wife gets murdered. But Crystal led a rather loose life, from what I’ve heard-”
“She was a slut!”
“-so it’s likely there were any number of men with a good motive and opportunity to kill her; and she might even have brought home a stranger-”
“Like Looking for Mr. Goodbar!”
“-so I’m sure there are more suspects in this case than cockroaches on Eldridge Street, and the World’s Greatest Dentist ought to be back drilling and filling in no time at all.”
“Oh, I hope so!” She took a breath. “Can’t he get out on bail? People always get out on bail, don’t they?”
“Not when the charge is Murder One. There’s no bail allowable in first-degree murder cases.”
“That doesn’t seem fair.”
“Few things are.” More toast, more coffee. “I think you should just sit tight, Jillian. Either where you are or at your apartment, wherever you’ll be more comfortable.”
“I’m scared, Bernie.”
“Scared?”
“I don’t know why or what of but I’m terrified. Bernie?”
“What?”
“Could you come over? It’s crazy, maybe, but I don’t know who else to ask. I just don’t want to be alone by myself now.” I hesitated, at least partly because I had some unswallowed food on my tongue, and she said, “Forget I said all that, okay? You’re a busy man, I know that, and it’s an imposition, and-”
“I’ll be right over.”
There’s something to keep in mind. I didn’t agree to bop on over to Craig’s Central Park South office just because I have a penchant for sticking my head in the lion’s mouth, or into whatever orifice the beast chooses to present to me. Nor was I making the trip because I couldn’t help remembering how nice it felt when Jillian leaned against me during a cleaning, or how nice her fingers tasted.
On the surface, it might look as though I had a vested interest in staying uninvolved. I was after all a burglar, and am hence regarded generally as a Highly Suspicious Person. And I was, further, no more than a dental patient and casual acquaintance of Craig Sheldrake, nor was my relationship with Jillian such that she’d be likely to turn to me before all others for solace in time of stress. Why, she’d never called me anything but Mr. Rhodenbarr until this morning. So at first glance it certainly looked as though I ought to keep a low profile.
On the other hand-and there’s always another hand-whoever jammed Crystal ’s pump had taken a caseful of jewels along with him. I had taken to thinking of those jewels as my own, and I still thought of them as my own, and I damn well wanted to get them back.
I didn’t just want the jewels, as far as that goes. The precious pretties, you may recall, were in an attaché case I’d brought into the apartment with me. I was reasonably certain no one could trace that case to me-I, after all, had stolen it in the first place. But I couldn’t begin to be sure that the inside of the damn thing wasn’t covered with my fingerprints. The outside was Ultrasuede and would no more take a print than Crystal Sheldrake’s wrist would, but the inside was some sort of vinyl or Naugahyde, which might or might not take prints, and there was a lot of metal trim in the interior, and it wasn’t at all hard to conjure up scenarios in which a cadre of cops kicked my door in and sought to learn what a case with my prints on it, loaded with Crystal’s jewelry, was doing in the apartment of a murder suspect.
So if they caught him I might be in trouble. And if they didn’t catch him he’d be getting away with my loot. And if there was no one to catch because the World’s Greatest Dentist had indeed gone and committed the world’s dumbest murder, well, that was less than super for me, too. Because in that case Craig would hand me to them on a platter. “I was talking to him about all this jewelry she had around, see, and he seemed to be taking quite an interest, and later it dawned on me that I’d read something about him being a burglar and once being mixed up in a murder, and I never dreamed he’d actually burglarize poor Crystal’s apartment-”
I could just about write the script for him, and after the way he’d set me up a week ago, I didn’t doubt he had the acting talent to read his lines properly. It might not be enough to get him out of the soup but it would certainly put me in the kettle alongside of him.
In fact, even if he wasn’t guilty he might try that approach. If no other suspect turned up he could panic. Or he could have the same doubts about me that I was having about him, and he could decide I might have hit Crystal’s apartment two days earlier than I said I would-which in fact I did-and that I happened to kill her accidentally in a moment of panic. He might simply have figured that our arrangement might come out so he’d better put the best possible light on it in advance.
What it came down to was that there were far too many ways that I could wind up in trouble.
And there was the fact that I liked Craig Sheldrake. When you are a patient of the World’s Greatest Dentist you don’t readily give him up and walk in off the street to any clown with a sign in his window advertising painless extractions. The man was taking good care of my mouth and I wanted him to carry on.
And Jillian was certainly a charming young lady. And it was much nicer to be called Bernie by her than Mr. Rhodenbarr, which had always struck me as overly formal. And her fingers did have that nice spicy taste to them, and it seemed reasonable to assume that this was characteristic of more of her than her fingers alone. Jillian was Craig’s personal love interest, of course, and that was fine with me, and I had no intention of horning hornily in on another chap’s romance. That’s not my style. I only steal cash and inanimate objects. All the same, one needn’t have designs on a young lady to find her company enjoyable. And if Craig should prove to be guilty, Jillian would be out of a job and a lover just as I would be out of a dentist, and there was no reason for us to do other than console each other.
But why build sand castles? Some evil bastard had not stopped at killing Crystal Sheldrake. He’d gone on to steal jewels I’d already stolen.
And I intended to make him pay for that.