“That bothered me,” Nugent admitted. “The idea of making an actual profit on the man’s death. But once the burglary was a matter of record I could hardly fail to put in a claim.” He thought for a moment. “I could tell them I made a mistake. The jewelry actually turned up.”
“You sure you want to do that, Mr. Nugent? You sorta call attention to yourself that way. You’re in this deep, the shortest way’s straight ahead.” He put a companionable hand on the big man’s shoulder. “Far as makin’ a profit on all of this, believe me, sir, you got nothin’ to worry about. The rest of you folks, I’m thinkin’ maybe you all oughta clear outta here about now. The show’s over, an’ me an’ Mr. Nugent here need a little privacy to work out some of the details on how we’re gonna keep this whole matter private an’ personal.”
CHAPTER Twenty-three
I had a lunch date the following day, so I didn’t get a chance to sit down and talk with Carolyn until we met after work at the Bum Rap. I was a little late closing—a customer, a devout G. T. Henty collector, may his tribe increase—and by the time I got over there she was already at work on a scotch and soda. I asked Maxine to bring me a beer, and Carolyn told me that was a load off her mind.
“You’ve been working up a storm lately, Bern,” she said. “I was starting to worry about you.”
“Not to worry,” I said.
“I went on home by myself last night,” she said, “because I had the feeling you and Patience might want to creep off into the night.”
“On little iambic feet?” I shook my head. “I bought her a cup of coffee,” I said, “and put her in a cab.”
“I was wondering what she was doing there, Bern. I was trying to figure out how she could have stolen the cards or shot Luke Santangelo, and I came up with a couple of real winners. Why’d you have Ray bring her?”
“To save going through the whole thing another time,” I said. “I kind of owed her an explanation, after all the dates I broke and the fibs I told.”
“Lies, Bern. Once you’re past seven years old, you don’t get to call them fibs anymore.”
“Besides, I suppose I was showing off a little. And I thought it might cheer her up. She’s a nice woman, but she’s depressed all the time. She’ll come out of it for a minute or two to sing haiku to the tune of ‘Moonlight in Vermont,’ but then she’s off again, sinking into the Slough of Despond.”
She frowned. “Isn’t that what they called Babe Ruth?”
“That was the Sultan of Swat.”
“Right. It’s hard keeping them all straight. Bern, you gotta remember that Patience is a poet.”
“Who else would sing haiku?”
“And they’re all moody like that, especially the women. It’s a good thing most of ’em have to live in basement apartments or they’d be jumping out the window all the time. As it stands they kill themselves left and right.”
“Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton.”
“That’s just the tip of the ice cube, Bern. It’s a known phenomenon, poetic depression in women. There’s even a name for it.”
“The Edna St. Vincent Malaise,” I said. “I’ve heard of it, but this is the first time I ever encountered it in person. And I think Patience and I have had a parting of the ways. Still, it didn’t hurt having her there. There were enough chairs to go around.”
She took a sip of her drink and asked me what had happened after the rest of them left.
“What you’d expect,” I said. “Ray’s instincts are pretty good sometimes, I have to say that for him. He had a hunch I could clear it all up, and that there’d be something in it for him. He was right on both counts. You were there to watch me clear it up, and after you left he got his share.”
“Harlan Nugent paid him off?”
“That’s not the way Ray phrased it. According to him, some money had to be spread around to make sure the investigation didn’t go any further. Well, he can make sure of that simply by keeping his mouth shut and not filing a report, so there’s not a lot of spreading that has to be done. Ray’s idea of sharing is to divide the dough up and put it in different pockets.”
“How much did he get?”
“Eighty-three fifty for openers. That’s what cash Nugent had on hand. There’ll be more when the insurance company pays off on the Nugents’ jewelry. My guess is Ray’ll pick up another twenty or twenty-five.”
“Eighty-three fifty.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a familiar number.”
“Isn’t it,” I said sourly.
“It’s the money you took from Nugent’s desk the first time you went there, isn’t it?”
“To the penny,” I said. “I swear that’s the stupidest job I ever pulled in my life. I went in three times. The first time I took some money and jewelry and put back the jewelry. The second time I kept the money and went back for the jewelry. Then the night before last I went in for the last time and put the money back where I found it, and put the jewelry in the same drawer with it. It’s like that logic problem with cannibals and Christians.”
“I wouldn’t trust either of them, Bern. What did you do, go in in the middle of the night?”
“Around four in the morning. Not a Nugent was stirring. I came as Young Dr. Rhodenbarr, with my stethoscope in my pocket. It would have been pretty awful to get caught the one time I was making a delivery instead of a pickup, but I figured I had to set the stage.”
“You stole the key, right?”
I nodded. “You’d be surprised how often people keep the key to a locked drawer in one of the neighboring unlocked drawers. Well, it makes sense. Where else would you keep it? I don’t usually hunt for the key, because those locks are so easy to open, but I happened to come across it the other night and I figured it would be better theater if Nugent had to say he couldn’t open the drawer. It made it look as though he had something to hide. And, much to his own surprise, he did.”
“Why put back the eighty-three fifty?”
“I figured there could only be so many jokers in the deck. By the time we left last night, Nugent was beginning to recall moving the jewelry from his wife’s dresser to the desk. Since there was no other possible explanation, his memory was obligingly filling in the gaps. Poor bastard.”
“Well, he killed a guy, Bern.”
“And Doll stole a man’s baseball card collection, and how can we let such actions go unpunished? Well, the fact of the matter is that they did go unpunished. It didn’t cost either of them a dime. Doll walked out of there with her head held high, and Nugent gets to pay off Ray with money from an insurance company.”
“It was his money originally, Bern.”
“Right, and then it was mine for a while.” I shrugged. “I knew there was no point to this. That’s why I tried to get out of it. But between Ray’s nudging and your nagging, what chance did I have?”
“That wasn’t nagging, Bern. That was the advice of a caring friend.”
“Well, it had all the earmarks of nagging,” I said, “and it worked, so you can take the credit.”
“It wasn’t me, Bern. It was Raffles.”
I looked at her.
“Remember, Bern? Raffles leaped up in the air and arched his back and did all those weird things that he did, and it came to you in a flash.”
“Oh, right.”
“I mean, let’s give credit where it’s due, huh?” She waved to Maxine for another round. “Couple of things I’m not completely clear on, Bern. How’d you know Joan Nugent was drugged and unconscious when her husband came home? I never would have thought of that.”