"Block, Lawrence - collection - The Collected Mystery Stories - 03 - Bernie Rhodenbarr - The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke - with Lynne Wood (b)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Block Lawrence)

"By starting a fire in here? Be a neater trick than sending in the great speckled bird."

"All you'd have to do," I said, "is heat the sensor enough to trigger the response."

"How?"

"When I was in here earlier," I said, "I caught a whiff of smoke. It was faint, but it was absolutely there. I think that's what made me ask Karl about fire in the first place."

"And?"

"When Mrs. Bellermann and I came in and discovered the body, the smell was gone. But there was a discolored spot on the carpet that I'd noticed before, and I bent down for a closer look at it." I pointed to the Tabriz (which, now that I think about it, may very well have been an Isfahan). "Right there," I said.

Crittenden knelt where I pointed, rubbed two fingers on the spot, brought them to his nose. "Scorched," he reported. "But just the least bit. Take a whole lot more than that to set off a sensor way up there."

"I know. That was a test."

"A test?"

"Of the murder method. How do you raise the temperature of a room you can't enter? You can't unlock the door and you can't open the window. How can you get enough heat in to set off the gas?"

"How?"

I turned to Eva. "Tell him how you did it," I said.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said. "You must be crazy."

"You wouldn't need a fire," I said. "You wouldn't even need a whole lot of heat. All you'd have to do is deliver enough heat directly to the sensor to trigger a response. If you could manage that in a highly localized fashion, you wouldn't even raise the overall room temperature appreciably."

"Keep talking," Crittenden said.

I picked up an ivory-handled magnifier, one of several placed strategically around the room. "When I was a Boy Scout," I said, "they didn't really teach me how to open locks. But they were big on starting fires. Flint and steel, fire by friction-and that old standby, focusing the sun's rays though a magnifying glass and delivering a concentrated pinpoint of intense heat onto something with a low kindling point."

"The window," Crittenden said.

I nodded. "It faces north," I said, "so the sun never comes in on its own. But you can stand a few feet from the window and catch the sunlight with a mirror, and you can tilt the mirror so the light is reflected through your magnifying glass and on through the window. And you can beam it onto an object in the room."

"The heat sensor, that'd be."

"Eventually," I said. "First, though, you'd want to make sure it would work. You couldn't try it out ahead of time on the sensor, because you wouldn't know it was working until you set it off. Until then, you couldn't be sure the thickness of the window glass wasn't disrupting the process. So you'd want to test it."

"That explains the scorched rug, doesn't it?" Crittenden stooped for another look at it, then glanced up at the window. "Soon as you saw a wisp of smoke or a trace of scorching, you'd know it was working. And you'd have an idea how long it would take to raise the temperature enough. If you could make it hot enough to scorch wool, you could set off a heat-sensitive alarm."

"My God," Eva cried, adjusting quickly to new realities. "I thought you must be crazy, but now I can see how it was done. But who could have done such a thing?"

"Oh, I don't know," I said. "I suppose it would have to be somebody who lived here, somebody who was familiar with the library and knew about the halon, somebody who stood to gain financially by Karl Bellermann's death. Somebody, say, who felt neglected by a husband who treated her like a housekeeper, somebody who might see poetic justice in killing him while he was locked away with his precious books."

"You can't mean me, Bernie."

"Well, now that you mention it..."