Free The Burglar in the Library by Lawrence Block Page B

sanitarium. Do you think Miss Dinmont has TB?”
    “I don’t know what’s wrong with her,” he said. “Not TB, I wouldn’t think, but most likely something else with initials. She just seems to me to have the air of somebody who came here to die.”
    I had that sentence echoing in my mind for a while, so I missed most of what he had to say about the Eglantines and the handful of people who worked for them—Orris, a pair of chambermaids, and the cook. We’d met Orris, for all that was worth, and hadn’t yet set eyes on the others, although the cook had made her wondrous presence known.
    “Nigel and Cissy Eglantine have made a good thing of this sprawling old pile,” he said. “I don’t know what he did before this, but he certainly has the knack for playing hotelier. I suppose you’ve seen his array of single-malt whiskies.”
    “He has quite a collection.”
    “I don’t know that you can label a Scotch ‘rare,’ but I gather some of them are the product of distilleries with extremely limited production. There are more varieties than you might imagine. I’d have thought it a confined area of expertise.” His eyes sought mine. “A small field indeed,” he saiddeliberately. “Nigel has developed quite a palate for them.”
    “Oh?”
    “Late in the evening,” he said carefully, “or at times of stress, there’s something about him that will remind you of Basil Fawlty. But most of the time he’s the perfect host.” He cocked his head. “Of course, he’s not the first person to make a show of appearing sober when he’s three sheets to the wind. Everybody does it. But it’s a sham, isn’t it?”
    “I suppose you could call it that,” I agreed.
    “And a petty sham at that,” he said, his eyes on mine. “You could call it that, couldn’t you? A petty sham?”
    I gave a noncommittal nod, and it seemed to me that he looked just the slightest bit disappointed.
     
    There were books in the Morning Room, too, and after Gordon Wolpert had left us I picked up one of them and turned its pages. “Frances and Richard Lockridge,” Carolyn read over my shoulder. “Writing about Pam and Jerry North. Maybe we’ll be like Mr. and Mrs. North, Bernie. Isn’t there a book where they go on a vacation?”
    “It wouldn’t surprise me.”
    “And while they’re off somewhere, there’s a murder. And they solve it.”
    “I should hope so,” I said, “or otherwise there’s no book.”
    “So maybe that’ll happen to us.”
    “Maybe what’ll happen to us?”
    “Maybe somebody’ll get killed, and we’ll solve it.”
    “No one will get killed,” I said. “There won’t be anything to solve.”
    “Why’s that, Bern?”
    “Because we’re on vacation.”
    “So were Mr. and Mrs. North, and then murder took a holiday.”
    “Well, this time around murder better take a siesta. I want to kick back and relax, and I want to eat three great meals a day and sleep eight hours a night, and then I want to go home with Raymond Chandler. I don’t want cops poring through my luggage, and that’s exactly what I’ll get if we wind up in the middle of a murder investigation. And why should that happen in the first place? We’re in a perfectly peaceful place with perfectly charming people.”
    “That’s how it starts, Bern.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Perfectly nice people, some of them slightly wacky, but all of them well-bred and well-spoken. Some of them may not be what they seem, and a couple of them have a dark secret in their past, and they’re isolated somewhere, and somebody gets killed. And then somebody says, ‘Oh, it must have been some passing tramp who did it, because otherwise it would have to have been one of us, and that’s plainly impossible because we’re all such nice people.’ But guess what, Bern?”
    “It’s really one of them?”
    “Every last time. And it’s not the butler, either.”
    “Well, that part’s right,” I said, “because that’s where