“Pretty,” she said. “What’s it worth?”
“I could probably get a few hundred for it. Art Deco’s the rage these days. But I just took it because I liked the looks of it.”
“Uh-huh. What did the coat look like?”
“I never even looked in the closets. Oh, you thought-” I shook my head. “More evidence of the moral decline of the nation,” I said. “All I took was the cash and the bracelet, Carolyn. The rest was a little insurance scam the Blinns decided to work.”
“You mean-”
“I mean they decided they’ve been paying premiums all these years, so why not take advantage of the burglary they’ve been waiting for? A coat, a watch, some miscellaneous jewelry, and of course they’ll report a higher cash loss than they actually sustained, and even if the insurance company chisels a little, they’ll wind up four or five grand to the good.”
“Jesus,” she said. “Everybody’s a crook.”
“Not quite,” I said. “But sometimes it seems that way.”
I made up the bed while she did up the breakfast dishes. Then we sat down with the last of the coffee and tried to figure out where to start. There seemed to be two loose ends we could pick at, Madeleine Porlock and J. Rudyard Whelkin.
“If we knew where he was,” I said, “we might be able to get somewhere.”
“We already know where she is.”
“But we don’t know who she is. Or was. I wish I had my wallet. I had his card. His address was somewhere in the East Thirties but I don’t remember the street or the number.”
“That makes it tough.”
“You’d think I’d remember the phone number. I dialed it enough yesterday.” I picked up the phone, dialed the first three numbers hoping the rest would come to me, then gave up and cradled the phone. The phone book didn’t have him and neither did the Information operator. There was an M. Porlock in the book, though, and for no particular reason I dialed the listed number. It rang a few times and I hung up.
“Maybe we should start with the Sikh,” Carolyn suggested.
“We don’t even know his name.”
“That’s a point.”
“There ought to be something about her in the paper. The radio just gives you the surface stuff, but there ought to be something beyond that in the Times. Where she worked and if she was married, that kind of thing.”
“And Whelkin belonged to the Martingale Club.”
“True.”
“So we’ve each got a place to start, Bernie. I’ll be back in a minute.” It was closer to ten minutes when she returned with both papers. She read the News while I read the Times. Then we switched.
“Not a whole lot,” I said.
“Something, though. Who do you want, Whelkin or Porlock?”
“Don’t you have to trim a poodle or something?”
“I’m taking Whelkin. You’ve got Porlock, Bernie. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“I guess I’ll go over to his club. Maybe I can learn something that way.”
“Maybe.”
“How about you? You won’t leave the apartment, will you?”
I shook my head. “I’ll see what I can find out over the phone.”
“That sounds like a good idea.”
“And maybe I’ll pray a little.”
“To whom? St. Dismas?”
“Wouldn’t hurt.”
“Or the lost-objects guy, because we ought to see about getting that book back.”
“Anthony of Padua.”
“Right.”
“Actually,” I said, “I was thinking more of St. Raymond Nonnatus. Patron saint of the falsely accused.”
She looked at me. “You’re making this up.”
“That’s a false accusation, Carolyn.”
“You’re not making it up?”
“Nope.”
“There’s really a-”
“Yep.”
“Well, by all means,” she said. “Pray.”
The phone started ringing minutes after she left the apartment. It rang five times and stopped. I picked up the Times and it started ringing again and rang twelve times before it quit. I read somewhere that it only takes a minute for a telephone to ring twelve times. I’ll tell you, it certainly seemed longer than that.
I went back to the Times. The back-page story gave Madeleine Porlock’s age as forty-two and described her as a psychotherapist. The Daily News had given her age but didn’t tell what she did for a living. I tried to imagine her with a note pad and a faint Viennese accent, asking me about my dreams. Had she had an office elsewhere? The Victorian love seat was a far cry from the traditional analyst’s couch.
Maybe Whelkin was her patient. He told her all about his scheme to gain possession of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow, and then she hypnotized him and got him to make the call to me, and then he got unhypnotized and killed her and took the book back, and…
I called the Times, got through to someone in the city room. I explained I was Art Matlovich of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. We thought the Porlock woman might be a former resident of Cleveland, and did they have anything on her besides what they’d run in the paper?
What they had was mostly negative. No information about next of kin. No clue as to where she’d lived before taking the Sixty-sixth Street apartment fourteen months ago. If she’d ever been in Cleveland, or even flown over the State of Ohio, they didn’t know anything about it.
The same call to the News was about as unproductive. The man I talked to said he didn’t know where the Times got off calling Porlock a psychotherapist, that he had the impression she was somebody’s mistress, but that they weren’t really digging into it because all she was was the victim of an open-and-shut burglary turned homicide. “It’s not much of a story for us,” he said. “Only reason we played it at all is it’s the Upper East Side. See, that’s a posh neighborhood and all. I don’t know what the equivalent would be in Cleveland.”
Neither did I, so I let it pass.
“This Rhodenbarr,” the News man went on. “They’ll pick him up tomorrow or the next day and that’s the end of the story. No sex angle, nothing colorful like that. He’s just a burglar.”
“Just a burglar,” I echoed.
“Only this time he killed somebody. They’ll throw the key away on him this time. He’s a guy had his name in the papers before. In connection with homicide committed during a job he was pulling. Up to now he always managed to weasel out of it, but this time he’s got his dick in the wringer.”
“Don’t be too sure of that,” I said.
“Huh?”
“I mean you never know,” I said quickly. “The way criminals manage to slip through cracks in the criminal-justice apparatus these days.”
“Jesus,” he said. “You sound like you been writin’ our editorials.”
I no sooner hung up the phone than it started ringing. I put up a fresh pot of coffee. The phone stopped ringing. I went over to it, about to make a call, and it rang again. I waited it out, then used it to call the police. This time I said I was Phil Urbanik of the Minneapolis Tribune. I was tired of Cleveland for the time being. I got bounced from one cop to another, spending a lot of time on Hold in the process, before I managed to establish that nobody around the squad-room knew more about Madeleine Porlock than that she was dead. The last cop I spoke with was sure of one other thing, too.
“No question,” he said. “Rhodenbarr killed her. One bullet, close range, smack in the forehead. M.E.’s report says death was instantaneous, which you don’t have to be a doctor to tell. He left prints in both apartments.”
“He must have been careless,” I suggested.
“Getting old and sloppy. Losing his touch. Here’s a guy, his usual M.O.’s to wear rubber gloves with the palms cut out so he don’t leave a print anywhere.”