“I can imagine.”

“But if you got run over by a car, the odds are you’d be unconscious.”

“Or dead.”

“Either way, you wouldn’t even know your underwear was dirty. And if you were awake, would you care? I’d have too much on my mind to be embarrassed about my underwear.”

“It was embarrassing last night, huh?”

“Getting searched? I’ll tell you, it would have been a lot worse if they’d found anything. And I’m not talking about dirty underwear.”

“Good,” she said, “because we’ve talked plenty about it already and it’d be fine with me if we never talked about it again. They didn’t find anything, Bern?”

“Not a thing. They didn’t find my tools, or they’d have had more charges to bring. And they didn’t find Gulliver Fairborn’s letters to his agent, which figured, because neither did I. And they also didn’t find-”

The door opened.

“-out what happened to the Mets last night,” I said innocently. “That young left-hander they just called up from Sarasota was supposed to start last night, but I never heard how he made out.”

Carolyn was looking at me as though I’d lost my mind, or at the very least misplaced it. Then she glanced over at the doorway and got the picture.

CHAPTER Nine

It was Ray Kirschmann, wearing a dark blue suit and a red-and-blue-striped tie and, in all likelihood, clean underwear, which I hoped for his sake fit him better than the suit did. He looked at me, shook his head, looked at Carolyn, shook his head again, and came over to lean on my counter.

“I heard they let you out,” he said. “I’m sorry I had to lock you up in the first place. I didn’t have a whole lotta choice in the matter.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t suppose you did.”

“No hard feelin’s, Bern?”

“No hard feelings, Ray.”

“Glad to hear it. Bern, I gotta tell you, you’re gettin’ a little old to be creepin’ around hotels. That’s a young man’s game, and you ain’t a kid no more. What you are, you’re knockin’ on the door of middle age.”

“If I am,” I said, “I’m knocking gently. And if they don’t let me in, I’m not going to pick the lock.”

“Then it’d be the first one in ages that you didn’t,” he said. “You were in the old lady’s room last night, weren’t you?”

“What gives you that idea?”

His expression turned crafty. “Nothin’,” he said.

“Nothing?”

“Nothin’ at all, Bern. No burglar tools, no wad of cash, no coin collection, no jewelry. What did the English guy say about a dog that never barks?”

What indeed? I’ve thought about that sentence, and I have to assume the Englishman in question was Sherlock Holmes, and that the dog in question was not the titular Hound of the Baskervilles (a common mistake) but the beast in “Silver Blaze” who remains silent as a basenji. But at the time the only English guy I could think of was Redmond O’Hanlon, who when last I looked had enough on his mind with jaguars and scorpions and biting flies, not to mention our friend the toothpick fish. What did he care about dogs?

“I don’t know, Ray,” I said. “What did he say about the dog?”

“It bites, Bern. An’ so does your story, rentin’ a hotel room to meet some girl. There’s only one reason a guy like you’d shell out good money for a room, an’ it goes by the name of grand larceny. You were on those premises lookin’ for somethin’ to steal.”

“Maybe I was.”

“ Bern…”

“Carolyn,” he said, “didn’t they learn you not to interrupt?”

“They tried hard to learn me,” she said, “but I was always a slow teacher. Bern, he Mirandized you last night, remember? So watch what you say, because it can be used as evidence. He could stand up in court and swear you said it.”

“I could anyway,” he said reasonably, “whether Bernie here said it or not. A man who’s not willin’ to stretch a point on the witness stand is a man’s got no business bein’ a cop. But this ain’t about court, Bern. It’s about you an’ me comin’ out of this in good shape. Now do you want me to keep talkin’ or should I take a hike?”

“Do I get to vote?”

He glared at Carolyn, and I took a last sip of my cream soda. “Keep talking,” I said.

“You were in this hotel,” he said, “an’ it wasn’t romance brought you there. An’ you were up on the sixth floor, ’cause that’s where you ran into Goat Ear.”

“Goat Ear?”

“You forget her already? The black girl, the one that hollered when you tried to sneak out through the lobby.”

“Isis Gauthier.”

“Right, like I said. Goat Ear.”

“I met her in the hall,” I said, “and I thought we hit it off reasonably well.”

“Let’s say you made an impression, Bern. She went straight to the desk clerk and told him to quit puttin’ shoe polish on his hair an’ call 911, because there’s a suspicious person creepin’ the place.”

“I don’t know how she could call me suspicious,” I said. “I never suspected a thing.”

“What you were,” he said, “is cooler than a cucumber, even if it’s a dill pickle. Speakin’ of which, you gonna eat that one?” I shook my head and he snatched it off my plate, polishing it off in a couple of chomps. “Thanks,” he said. “What you did, Bern, you heard about this Landau woman and these letters of hers. You went lookin’ for ’em, an’ you walked in on a corpse.”

“You mean it wasn’t me who killed her.”

“Of course not, Bern. You ain’t a killer. What you are’s a burglar, an’ you’re one of the best, but when it comes to violence you’re Mahatma Gandhi rolled into one.”

“That’s me,” I said.

“So there’s Landau,” he said, “an’ she’s dead. And you let yourself out an’ lock up after yourself, chain bolt an’ all, same as you always do. It’s a trademark of yours, Bern.”

“I’m neat by nature,” I admitted, “but-”

“Lemme finish. You let yourself in, find a dead woman, an’ let yourself out. An’ run smack into a live one.”

“Isis Gauthier.”

“The black one,” he agreed, “with the French name. She’s on her way out. Now why don’t you hop on the elevator with her an’ get away from the crime scene? That way you’re home in your own bed by the time the blue uniforms hit the hotel lobby.”

“I’m sure you have the answer, Ray.”

“Sure,” he said. “The dog.”

“What dog?”

“The quiet one. We searched you, Bern. Turned you upside down an’ turned your room on the fourth floor inside out. An’ you know what we came up with?”

“Some socks and underwear,” I said. “And a teddy bear, unless one of New York ’s Finest stole it for himself.”

“You got some high opinion of the police, Bern. Nobody stole your teddy bear, which ain’t yours in the first place, bein’ as it’s the property of the hotel. What we came up with was empty hands, an’ what we didn’t find none of was burglar’s tools.”

“So?”

“So where were they?”

“Search me.”

“We did, remember?”

“Vividly.”

“You didn’t leave ’em home,” he said, “or how would you open Landau’s door, or lock up after you left? Anyhow, they’re your American Express card. You never leave home without ’em. But you knew you stood a chance of bein’ frisked, so you dumped ’em somewhere.”

“And if we only knew where they were,” I said, “we could use them to break into the Pentagon and steal government secrets.”

“If we knew where they were,” he said, “we could find more’n a set of burglar’s tools. We could find those letters, too. An’ don’t ask what letters, Bern. You’d know from reading the papers this morning, as if you didn’t know in the first place. Letters from this famous writer I never heard of, so how famous can he be? It’s not like you see the guy on the talk shows. How’s anybody supposed to know who he is?”

“You could try reading his books.”

“If I want to read, I’ll stick with Wambaugh and Caunitz and Ed McBain. Guys who know what it’s all about, not some jerk who writes all his letters on purple paper. The letters were gone, Bern. We searched her rooms the way you’d expect, it bein’ a crime scene an’ all. No letters.”