CHAPTER Twenty-one

Everyone looked at Carl Pillsbury, and I have to hand it to him-he was as cool and as bold as a brass cucumber. He frowned in thought, took his chin between his thumb and forefinger, pursed his lips, and emitted a soundless whistle. “Someone who works for the Paddington and dyes his hair,” he said. “Now a couple of years ago we had a fellow who wore a toupee, but that’s not the same thing, is it? But I can’t think of anyone who uses hair coloring.”

“Then somebody musta turned you upside down,” Ray said, “an’ stuck your head in the inkwell, ’cause that mop of yours looks about as natural as Astroturf.”

“Me?” he said, his eyes widening. “You actually think I color my hair?”

“Everybody knows you do, Carl,” Isis said.

“Everybody?”

“Everybody in the tristate area.”

“It’s obvious?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I have a pretty good idea what happened,” I said, “although there are a few gaps here and there. I know you’re from the Midwest originally, and so was Karen Kassenmeier. The two of you aren’t that far apart in age. I think you knew each other way back when, or else you met here in New York.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I suppose it’s possible she approached you cold when she got here,” I said, “but that’s hard to believe. She must have known you.”

“That would explain something,” Hilliard Moffett said. “I certainly never suggested anything criminal when I met that woman in Seattle -”

“Whether you did or not,” Ray assured him, “we got bigger fish to fry. An’ whatever you did you did in Seattle, an’ this here’s New York, an’ I don’t see no Seattle cops in this room. So just say whatever you got to say.”

“All right,” Moffett said, and stuck out his jaw. “She had an interesting reaction when I mentioned the name of the hotel. Until then she’d seemed noncommittal, lukewarm to the whole notion, but then she brightened. ‘The Paddington,’ she said. ‘I wonder if he’s still there.’ I asked her what she meant, and she just shook her head and pressed me for more details.”

“That proves nothing,” Carl said. “She once knew someone who once worked or lived at the hotel. So what?”

“You’d be surprised what good police work can turn up,” Ray said. “Once we take a good long look at both your backgrounds, don’t you think we’re gonna find somethin’ puts you an’ her in the same place at the same time? You could cop to it right now an’ save everybody some trouble.”

“Even if I knew her once,” he said, “it still proves nothing.”

“Here’s what I think happened,” I said. “She showed up at the hotel and told you she wanted to check in under a false name. You had an even better idea: she wouldn’t register at all, and you’d stick her in a room. That would save her upwards of a hundred and fifty dollars a night.”

“What makes you think I would do anything like that?”

“It’s not exactly unheard-of in the business,” I said. “It’s a good way for a desk clerk to make a few dollars for himself. Like a bartender forgetting to charge for drinks, with the understanding that the customer will show his appreciation with an oversize tip. But Karen Kassenmeier was offering you more than the chance to knock down a few dollars on an off-the-books rental, wasn’t she? She could afford to, because you could provide more than a place to stay. You could get her into Anthea Landau’s room.”

“Why would she need me for that? You already said the woman was a professional thief.”

“She was a pro at liftin’ things,” Ray said, “but there’s nothin’ on her sheet shows she ever opened a door she didn’t have the key to.”

“You could get her in,” I said. “That had to be worth something to her. You could find a spare key to Landau’s room, or lend her your passkey. And you could tip her off as to when Landau was out of the hotel, so that she could get in and out without encountering the woman.”

“We had a case like that a couple of years back,” Ray said. “Big midtown hotel, an’ we started gettin’ reports of things missin’ from the rooms. No signs of forced entry, and it was almost always cash that was taken, an’ another thing-the victims were almost always Japanese businessmen.”

“At some midtown hotels,” Erica said, “that’s just about all you find.”

“This one got a lot of ’em,” Ray said, “but it was still pretty clear they were gettin’ targeted. An’ we looked into it, an’ we found it was worse than we figured, because a lot of the Japs was gettin’ knocked off an’ not botherin’ to report it. We knew it had to be somebody on the inside, an’ we narrowed it down to this one clerk, but we couldn’t make a case.”

“What happened?”

“You tell me. There was this one Jap we talked to. He got knocked off, an’ he knew some other people who got knocked off, an’ I guess maybe we let on which clerk we suspected.” He looked off into the distance, recalling the moment. “Funny guy,” he said. “Woulda made a hell of a poker player, ’cause he didn’t show nothin’ in his face. An’ when he stretched out his arms you could see he had tattoos on his wrists, an’ there was more tattooin’ that showed when he loosened his tie an’ unbuttoned his collar. An’ one more thing that was pretty funny. I mean, he was the kind of guy that if he was an American you’d figure him to have a pinkie ring. But there was no way in hell he could manage that.”

Somebody obligingly asked why.

“No place to put it,” Ray said. “Both his pinkies were gone. Funny, huh?”

“Yakuza,” I said. “Japanese gangsters. What happened to the clerk?”

“Well, must be he took the money an’ ran,” Ray said, “because he disappeared, an’ nobody ever saw him again.” He shrugged. “But just to be on the safe side, I stayed outta sushi bars for the next month or so.”

Carl had the look of someone who’d eaten a little too much Uzbek food. I guess he didn’t like stories where the hotel clerk disappeared.

“Maybe you’d worked a deal with her before,” I said to Carl. “For one reason or another she knew you weren’t an altar boy, and she made her pitch and you liked the sound of it. As a matter of fact, you had an idea of your own.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“People say that all the time,” I said, “and it’s hardly ever true. You know exactly what I’m talking about. You told her about a woman living right here at the Paddington, a fellow member of the theatrical profession, who was wearing an extremely valuable necklace with matching earrings.”

Isis ’s jaw dropped, and she wheeled on Carl. “You son of a bitch,” she said. “I thought we were friends.”

“Don’t believe him, Isis.”

“Tell me why I should believe you instead, Carl.”

“For God’s sake, he’s a self-proclaimed burglar.”

“Actually,” Carolyn put in, “I think ‘admitted’ would be a better word for Bernie than ‘self-proclaimed.’ It’s not as though he goes around making proclamations. If anything, he’s a little ashamed of being a burglar.”

“Then why doesn’t he stop burgling?” Isis wanted to know.

“Just between us, I think it’s an addiction.”

“Has the man tried therapy? Or some sort of twelve-step program?”

“Nothing seems to work.”

“But I live in hope,” I said. “Carl, you and Isis were both actors. You were still jockeying a desk in a hotel lobby and she was getting work and wearing rubies. Maybe that gave you a resentment, or maybe you just saw some easy money. You gave your friend Karen a key and a room number and told her what to look for. And I guess she was a pro, all right, because she got out with the jewelry and otherwise left the place the way she’d found it.”

“I didn’t know anyone had been in there,” Isis said. “I always thought burglars made a mess.”

“Only the low-level ones,” I said.

“All I knew was that the necklace and earrings were gone. I looked for them and they were gone. I thought I’d misplaced them, and then I started thinking the, uh, friend who gave them to me had taken them back. And finally I found out that you were a burglar, and I decided you must have taken them.”