“Yes.”
“And left with what you’d gone to get?”
“No. I was interrupted,” I said, and explained how I’d hid in the closet, emerging to find the portfolio gone.
“You must still have been trapped there when Cappy left. He didn’t stay any time at all. I’d expected a longish visit, but I’d guess he was in and out of here in ten minutes. For my part, I can’t say I pressed him to stay. His presence brought up memories, not all of them welcome. His gift had much the same effect. The mouse. I always thought it the best of Letchkov’s carvings, but that may have been because it was mine. My code name, I mean. Now the actual carving’s mine, isn’t it, and I’m glad to have it, but I find I care less and less about possessions with each passing year. What’s happened to Cappy?”
The question caught me off-balance, but I didn’t have to hesitate. I’d known it was coming sooner or later and had made up my mind how I was going to answer it.
“He’s dead,” I said. “Somebody killed him.”
CHAPTER Fourteen
“This man Candlemas,” Charles Weeks said. “It would seem obvious that he killed Cappy, wouldn’t it? But why leave the body in his own apartment?”
We were in his kitchen, sitting at an oval pine table and drinking more of his coffee. Once I’d told him about Hoberman there didn’t seem to be any reason not to tell him the rest of it.
“Unless,” he went on, “he didn’t expect it to be found.”
“It would have been hard to overlook,” I said. “The way I heard it, it was right in the middle of the room.”
“Bleeding into the carpet.”
“Right.”
“And writing a truncated form of his own name on an attaché case.”
“Yes.”
“Specifically, your attaché case, though I don’t imagine there was any significance in his choice of a writing surface. It was very likely the only thing at hand. I wonder if the murder was just as impulsive a choice.”
“What do you mean?”
“If I were Candlemas,” he said, “and you were Cappy Hoberman, and I wanted to kill you, I wouldn’t snatch up a knife and have at you right in the middle of my own living room. But suppose I wasn’t planning to kill you. Suppose I was suddenly presented with a strong motive for wishing you dead and a means for achieving it. Suppose time was very much of the essence. Awkward or not, inconvenient or not, I couldn’t afford to wait.”
“Hoberman was here,” I said.
“For ten minutes, fifteen at the outside.”
“When he left here, he probably went straight back to Seventy-sixth Street. I was going to be bringing the portfolio there directly, so he must have wanted to be there when I arrived.”
“But well before you could arrive, Candlemas struck him down. To avoid splitting the take, even before there was any take on hand to split?” He waved a hand, dismissing the question. “We don’t need to know the reason. It was a sudden and urgent one, so that Candlemas felt obliged to do what he would have greatly preferred to do at another time and in another place. In his own residence, and with you likely to appear at any moment, he plunged a knife into his fellow.”
“And left him there.”
“Left him to write his last words, quite as mysterious as the only trace of the original colonial settlement at Roanoke Island. They’d all utterly disappeared, you know, and they’d left the word CROATOAN carved in a tree trunk, and no one’s ever been able to make head or tail out of it. What could they possibly have meant? And what could Cappy have meant by CAPHOB, and why did Candlemas let him write it?”
“If somebody other than Candlemas killed him, it still doesn’t figure that he’d go away and leave the dying message behind.”
“No,” he agreed, “it doesn’t. But if it was Candlemas, he’d have a problem.”
“I’ll say. The problem would be lying right in the middle of his living room.”
“Exactly. What would he do about it?”
“He’d have to get rid of it.”
“How? Cappy was still a big man. Was Candlemas a huge brute, capable of slinging Cappy over his shoulder and carrying him downstairs?”
“Hardly. He was no more than medium height, and slightly built.”
“Not a weight lifter, certainly.”
“No.”
“Well, what was he going to do? What would you do in his position?”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. Suppose you found yourself with a dead body on your hands. It’s not like a stain on the wall, you can’t hide it by throwing a coat of paint over it. How are you going to get rid of it?”
“Actually,” I said, “I had that happen once.”
“Oh?”
“In my store,” I said quickly, “and I had nothing to do with it, but all the same I had to get the body out of there. I rented a wheelchair.”
“That was damned clever,” Weeks said admiringly. “Hard to manage in the middle of the night, however, and not terribly useful anyway on the fourth floor of a walk-up.”
“No.”
“Nothing for it, then. You’d have to make several trips.”
“How’s that?”
“Unpleasant subject,” he said, “but there’s no way around it, is there? You’d cut the corpse into manageable segments and carry them out one at a time, disposing of them wherever your ingenuity might suggest.”
“An arm here, a leg there. But Captain Hoberman wasn’t missing any pieces when the cops got there. Otherwise I’m sure they would have mentioned it.”
“Your Mr. Candlemas wouldn’t have begun the operation yet,” he said gently. “He’d need tools, wouldn’t he? And wouldn’t have them lying around unless he made a habit of this sort of thing. He’d need a saw or an ax or both. The average suburban householder might have such tools close at hand, but not the average New York apartment dweller.”
“So he goes out in the middle of the night looking for a meat saw?”
“That’s a point. He can’t have expected to find a restaurant supply outlet open at that hour. But a restaurant would be another matter. Perhaps he knows a friendly chef who will lend him the necessary items with no questions asked. Or perhaps he does own a heavy-duty knife equal to the task, and goes out to buy some stout plastic bags and tape to seal them up. He’s out of his apartment, poor Cappy’s stretched out on the floor, and you’re still stuck in a closet on the eighth floor.”
“And the cops turn up, roust the super, and wind up waiting around for a locksmith to open the door for them.”
“What brought the police in the first place? An anonymous call?”
“That’s what Ray Kirschmann said. Somebody heard a noise.”
“Hmmm. Candlemas comes home, I suppose, and sees that there are people in his apartment, or on the landing waiting for the locksmith. So what does he do?”
“Gets all the money he can out of his bank’s ATM,” I said, “and jumps ship for Australia, determined to make a new life for himself. Because he’s never been heard from since.”
“That’s true, he hasn’t. Why hasn’t he contacted you, do you suppose? As far as he knows, you got out of Eight-B with the portfolio. Wouldn’t he want to collect it?”
“Maybe he tried. Maybe he sent somebody.”
“The fellow with the unusual name?”
“They’ve all got unusual names,” I said. “I never ran into this many people with unusual names outside of a Ross Thomas novel. But if you mean Tiglath Rasmoulian, yes, Candlemas could have sent him. He wouldn’t want to show himself because the cops think they’ve got him neatly filed away at the morgue. In fact, when Rasmoulian came to my store, I hadn’t gone yet to identify the body.”
“So if Candlemas had walked into your store on his own-”
“I’d have thought I was seeing a ghost. Maybe Candlemas did send him. Who else knows I’m involved?”
“If there’s one thing I learned over there,” he said, waving a hand in what I suppose must have been the general direction of Europe, “it’s that more people know something than you would suspect. Information leaks out, you see. People play multiple roles. Very little remains a secret.”