“Absolutely.”

“So you ain’t been back to that hotel, the padded bears.”

“The Paddington,” I said, “and no, I haven’t. How could I? I don’t think they’d let me in.”

“When did anybody ever have to let you in, Bern?”

The phone rang again. I made a face and picked it up, and it was Lester Eddington, the Fairborn scholar, to say that he perhaps ought to stress how important it was that he receive copies of the Fairborn-Landau correspondence, and that on consideration he realized he could pay quite a bit more than the cost of making copies. Several thousand dollars, in fact, and-

It helps when you know your lines, and I didn’t have any trouble remembering mine. “I don’t have the letters,” I said, “and I never will. And I’m a little busy right now.”

I hung up. “You keep tellin’ people that,” Ray said, “an’ pretty soon you’re gonna believe it yourself. Tell me somethin’, Bern. What did you do last night?”

“What did I do?”

“Uh-huh. You hang out with Carolyn?”

“No, she had a date.”

“So what did you do?”

“I had a few drinks at the Bum Rap,” I said.

“All by your lonesome? You know what they say about drinkin’ all by yourself.”

“I suppose it’s better than being all by yourself and not drinking,” I said, “but I had company.”

“An’ then?”

“And then I went home.”

“To your place on West End an’ Seventy-first.”

“That’s where I live,” I said. “That’s my home, so when I decide to go home, that’s where I go to.”

“You coulda gone home with whoever you were drinkin’ with,” he said. “To her home, is what I mean.”

“It was a guy.”

“Well,” he said, “I never thought you were that way, Bern, but what’s it to me who you go home with?”

“I went home alone,” I said, “to my own home, and all by myself, and-”

And the phone rang. I picked it up and barked into the receiver, and there was a pause, and a Mr. Victor Harkness of Sotheby’s said he’d been trying to reach me, and he guessed I hadn’t had an opportunity to call him back.

“This is unofficial,” he said, “so let’s just call it an exploratory inquiry. Miss Anthea Landau had made arrangements for us to handle the sale of the Fairborn letters. She’d brought in some representative letters, so we’d had a look at them, but she wouldn’t leave them with us. But we gave her an advance, and she signed our standard agreement, and it’s binding on her heirs and assigns.”

“I doubt that would include me,” I said. “I can’t imagine why she would mention me in her will. I never met the woman.”

There was a long pause, and then Mr. Harkness tried again. “My point, Mr. Rhodenbarr, is that we have a vested interest in the material. It will be the highlight of our January sale of books and documents. Its value to us thus exceeds somewhat the commissions we’d expect to collect on the sale, which would in themselves be substantial.”

“That’s interesting, but-”

“Consequently,” he said, “we could pay a finder’s fee. In cash. No questions asked.”

“And you can do that?”

“The letters remain the legal property of Miss Landau,” he said, “no matter in whose hands they may be at the moment. And our arrangement with her remains in force. Should we succeed in recovering the letters, we’d be under no obligation to account for the manner in which they came into our possession.”

I took a deep breath. “I don’t have the letters,” I said, “and I never will. And I’m a little busy right now.”

I hung up. “You’re repeatin’ yourself,” Ray said. “I’ll tell you, Bern, you sound like a broken record.”

“Records are made to be broken.”

“Uh-huh. So you went straight home last night, huh?”

Where was he going with this? “I went to the Bum Rap,” I said. “I already told you that.”

“Having drinks with some fag friend of yours.”

“His name’s Henry,” I said, “and he’s not gay, or at least I don’t think he is. What difference does it make?”

“It don’t make none to me. I didn’t go home with him.”

“And neither did I.”

“No, you went home alone. What time?”

“I don’t know. Eight or nine o’clock, I guess. Something like that.”

“An’ you went right home.”

“I stopped at the deli and bought a quart of milk. Why?”

“Prolly to put in your coffee. Oh, why am I askin’? Just makin’ conversation, Bern. So you went home an’ you were there alone all night, is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“An’ this mornin’…”

“I got up and came to the store.”

“An’ opened up, an’ fed your cat, an’ did the things you always do.”

“Right.”

“An’ you just walked out your door, right? You didn’t notice a thing?”

Oh, God. I had to ask, even though I didn’t want to hear the answer. “Didn’t notice what, Ray?”

“The dead girl,” he said, “lyin’ smack in the middle of your living-room floor. There was hardly room enough to walk around her, so I guess you musta stepped right over her. Funny you didn’t even notice.”

CHAPTER Seventeen

“A dead woman,” I said.

“Girl, woman. Suit yourself, Bern. It don’t matter what you call her on account of she ain’t likely to answer. Poor dame’s dead as a hangnail.”

“In my apartment.”

“Unless you moved out an’ somebody else moved in. You still livin’ in the same place, Bern?”

“Uh,” I said.

“I guess it ain’t a bad place to live,” he said, “or you wouldn’t be livin’ there, an’ it must be a good place to die, too, ’cause that’s what she used it for. Not that she didn’t have help.”

“She was murdered?”

“I’d say so. People’ll shoot themselves now an’ then, and sometimes they’ll stab themselves, but it’s rare for somebody to do both.”

“She was…”

“Shot an’ stabbed, right. Shot in the shoulder an’ stabbed in the heart, or close enough to it to be just as good. The ME says death was pretty much instantaneous.”

“At least she didn’t suffer,” I said, “whoever she was. Was it the knife wound that killed her?”

“For the gunshot to kill her,” he said, “it woulda had to be blood poisoning, because she had the wound all bandaged up. The doc wouldn’t go out on a limb, but what he said was it was a minimum of twenty-four hours old. She got shot, she got patched up, and she went over to your place and got herself stabbed to death.”

“When did this happen, Ray?”

“Sometime last night, from the looks of things. While you were home sleepin’, Bern.”

“Who found the body?”

“Couple of uniforms.”

“They were just passing through my apartment and happened to notice her there?”

“Respondin’ to a call.”

“When was this?”

“Around eleven this mornin’. Some neighbor told your doorman there was suspicious sounds comin’ from your apartment in the middle of the night.”

“So he waited until morning? And then he told the doorman?”

“She. You know a Mrs. Hesch?”

“Down the hall from me. A nice lady.”

“Well, she heard something in the middle of the night, but don’t ask her when. Because I already asked an’ I got everything but a straight answer. She went back to sleep an’ woke up wonderin’, so she knocked on your door an’ you didn’t answer, an’ then she called you on the phone an’ you still didn’t answer, so she told your doorman.”

“And he called it in?”

“He tried you on the intercom, and then he went upstairs and banged on the door, but you didn’t answer, and neither did she.”

“She?”

“The dead girl. So he went an’ phoned it in.”

“And a couple of uniforms came and forced my lock,” I said. “Damn it, anyway.”

“Relax, Bern.”

“If you knew how many times I’ve had to replace that lock…”

“You don’t have to replace it this time, because nobody forced it. The doorman had a key.”

“He did?”

“The one you left with him.”

“I figured it must have disappeared. If he had a key, why didn’t he open up right away?”