The Burglar on the Prowl

by Lawrence Block

  I was heading for the door when she said, “Bernie? How’d you know it was pink?”

  I didn’t know what she was talking about. The only pink thing I could think of at the moment…well, never mind.

  “My shaver,” she said. “The one he took. How’d you know it was pink?”

  Oh, hell. “You said it was pink,” I said.

  “I did?”

  “You must have.”

  “But I always thought of it as fuchsia. That’s what the manufacturer called it, so if I described it that’s what I would have said.”

  “Maybe you did, and I just registered it as pink.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think I did.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Are you sure you didn’t black it out? No, really, I may have just assumed it was pink. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a woman’s razor that wasn’t. Do they even come in other colors?”

  “Sure.”

  “Oh. I thought they were all pink. Why? What difference does it make?”

  “No difference,” she said, sleepily. “I just wondered, that’s all.”

  Twenty-Six

  The trouble with Thank God It’s Friday, I’ve occasionally thought, is that it’s all too often followed by Oh Rats It’s The Weekend. Free time is only a godsend when you’ve got something interesting to do with it. If you’ve got nothing to do, decent weather lets you do it outdoors, and if you’ve got time on your hands at the beach or in the park, you may not even notice how bored you are. But when all it does is rain there’s no escaping it.

  It started raining an hour or two before dawn Saturday, just about the time I was getting out of a cab on West End Avenue. Edgar was manning the door, and he greeted me with a warm smile and an umbrella, though without a mustache. He told me I hadn’t had any visitors, and I was glad to hear it.

  I went to bed, and when I got up it was still raining, and the apologetic young woman on the local news channel said it was likely to keep on doing just that until Monday morning at the earliest. The sports guy said something about dampened enthusiasms, and the anchorman groaned, and I turned off the set.

  I went out for breakfast, although what they were serving by then was lunch. Whatever they wanted to call it, I ate an omelet and drank some coffee and read the Times. The news was boring or horrible or both, and the movie listings held nothing that I felt like seeing.

  When I got home the phone was ringing. It was Carolyn, reporting that no one had broken in to raid the bathtub while she slept. “But don’t think I didn’t check,” she said, “and I didn’t just lift the lid. I stuck my arm down into the Kitty Litter and made sure there were bags under there.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t haul them out and count the money.”

  “I might have, if I’d thought of it. Listen, when can we get rid of it?”

  “Get rid of it?”

  “You know what I mean. Oh, before I forget—I don’t know if you’re planning to open up the bookstore today, but I fed your cat, so don’t let him con you into opening a second can for him.”

  “That cinches it,” I said. “Nobody’s going to brave a downpour to buy a secondhand book. I’m not going to bother opening up. How about you? You doing any business?”

  “I’m not even trying. I decided to give myself a mental health day. And no, I didn’t make a special trip just to feed Raffles. I had some appointments booked, and I needed to call them and cancel. They were relieved, because who wants to take out a dog on a day like this?”

  “The Mets are rained out at Shea,” I said, “and I couldn’t find a movie I want to see.”

  “There’s always the John Sandford. Oh, you left it down here. And you’ve got another copy at the store, don’t you? But you’re not going there. Well, as of last night you’re in the chips, Bern. Do you feel rich enough to buy another copy?”

  “Rich enough, but not crazy enough. I don’t want three copies. I’ve only got two eyes.”

  “And one pair of lips to move. You should have taken my copy along with you last night. In fact I thought you did, but it’s right here where you left it.”

  “I didn’t want to carry it around.”

  “What, carry? Didn’t you just get in a cab?”

  “Right.”

  She thought about it. “But you didn’t go straight home.”

  “Right again.”

  “Oh, that’s right—you said you were going to a bar. You also said you weren’t going to get drunk.”

  “And I didn’t. And I know you’re going to find this contrary to nature, but all I had was one drink.”

  “So you got home at a reasonable hour.”

  “No,” I said, “because I didn’t go straight home from the bar.”

  “Oh, God. Don’t tell me you went on the prowl again, not after the haul we made last night. You’d have to be out of your mind.”

  “I went on the prowl,” I said, “but not to burgle.”

  “What else would you…oh, I get it. Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Well, did you get lucky?”

  “A gentleman never tells,” I said. “Yes, I got lucky.”

  “Anybody I know?”

  “Almost.”

  “Almost? What the hell does that mean?”

  “Well, she works at a law firm at 45th and Madison,” I said, “but not as a paralegal. She’s a full-fledged lawyer, insofar as lawyers get fledged, and she’s in the same firm with GurlyGurl.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Why? Because there are eight million people in New York?”

  “It’s just a pretty big coincidence, that’s all. I have a Date-a-Dyke date with one woman, and the same night you get to go home with somebody from the same law firm.”

  “I gather it’s a good-sized firm. Even so, it’s a pretty big coincidence. But I know a bigger one.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She took me home to her apartment,” I said, “but what she didn’t know was that I’d been there before.”

  “You’d been to her apartment but she didn’t know it. Oh, for God’s sake. Don’t tell me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you kidding? Tell me!”

  I told her in person, but before I made the trip downtown I called 1-800-FLOWERS, then hung up while they were telling me my call might be monitored. She lived in a brownstone, with no doorman and a grouch for a downstairs neighbor, so I didn’t want to send flowers unless I knew she’d be home to receive them.

  So I called her and caught her on her way out the door. She had a wedding to go to out on the island and she was running late. “But I thought it might be you,” she said, “so I picked up the phone.”

  I told her I just wanted to say what a good time I’d had, and she said the same, and I suggested dinner the following evening. She said she’d be staying over that night, and there was a brunch on Sunday she was supposed to go to, and it was hard to say how late it would run, or whether she’d get a ride back or have to take the train. We left it that she’d call when she got in, or knew when she was going to get in, and if it wasn’t too late and I hadn’t made other plans, we’d get together.

  So I didn’t have to call 1-800-FLOWERS after all. No point—they’d only waste their fragrance on the desert air.

  The way it was raining I’d have been happy to take a cab to Carolyn’s, but enough other New Yorkers felt the same way to drop the number of empty cabs below the Mendoza line. I couldn’t find one, and I didn’t waste too much time trying. I had my umbrella, and it kept me dry all the way to the subway.

  “It’s a pretty big coincidence that they both work at the same place,” Carolyn said, “but it’s not a coincidence you went home with her. Because you were looking for her, weren’t you?”

  “Well, kind of. Parsifal’s struck me as the kind of place she’d be likely to go, but I figured I was about as likely to run into him as her.”

  “Him? Oh, the date-rapist. How would you know it if you did?”

>   “By his voice, if I heard him talk. I have a feeling he was in there earlier, and that I didn’t miss him by much.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Just a hunch. Anyway, it’s not important. Boy, do I hate rainy weekends.”

  “You and everybody else, Bern.”

  “Especially this one. But I’d hate this weekend even if the sun were out. Everything’s just stuck.”

  “Stuck?”

  “The money’s stuck in the bathtub. We can’t rent a safe-deposit box and put it in the bank because the banks are all closed until Monday. And everything else is stuck, too. Barbara’s stuck out in Long Island at a wedding, and Ray’s not working. He sometimes works weekends, but not this one, naturally. I called the precinct, and they said he was off today, and I called his house in Sunnyside and nobody answered.”

  “What did you want him for?”

  “I thought he might know who the fat man was, or what the Lyles had that the perps wanted. He can’t know much less than I do, but I know something he doesn’t know, and that’s that the Conrad book, the false McGuffin, wound up at Mapes’s house.”

  “You can’t tell him about Mapes.”

  “I can’t tell him about Mapes the Burglary Victim, but why can’t I clue him in about Mapes the McGuffin Recipient? Besides, if I can give him something, maybe I can get something from him.”

  “What makes you think he knows anything?”

  “Even if he doesn’t there’s something he can find out for me. But not unless I ask him, and I can’t do that until I know where he is. I wish I could get in touch with him. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I just never thought I’d hear you say that, Bern.”

  “I hate weekends,” I said. “You know what we could do? We could go someplace.”

  “In this weather? Where would we go?”

  “How about Paris?”

  “For the weekend?”

  “Sure. We’ll take the Concorde. A suite at the George Cinq, dinner at Maxim’s, a cruise on the Seine, a stroll down the Boul’ St. Germain, a café au lait avec croissant at Les Deux Magots, then back on the plane and we’re home again.”

  “That would cost a fortune.”

  “As it happens, we’ve got a fortune. We could swing it. Say fifteen to twenty thousand apiece for round-trip Concorde tickets, a thousand a night for a decent suite, half that for dinner—I’ll tell you, for fifty thousand dollars we could have a memorable weekend.”

  “Uh, it sounds great, Bern, but—”

  “But we can’t do it,” I said, “because the Concorde isn’t flying anymore. And anybody who tries to buy any airplane ticket for cash, let alone thirty or forty thousand dollars’ worth of cash, is going to spend hours answering questions in a room full of uniforms. Besides, we’d need to take a cab out to JFK, and how would we get a cab on a day like this?”

  “And you’ve got a date tomorrow night with Barbara Creeley.”

  “She’ll never make it back from the island in time, not in this weather. Man, do I hate weekends.”

  There was one thing I could do, though not without getting wet again. While Carolyn was getting wet herself, picking up dry cleaning around the corner, I made a small withdrawal from the stash of money in her bathtub. I could have done it while she was there, but I wanted to avoid having to explain why I needed it. And not long after she got back I put the Sandford novel aside yet again and walked up to 14th Street and took one bus east to Third Avenue and another bus uptown. I got off at 34th, walked up and over, and let myself into Barbara’s brownstone.

  I went upstairs, past the Feldmaus apartment, and remembered to open only the two locks she was in the habit of locking, which saved me a little time. I was in and out in under five minutes, and when I hit the street I couldn’t think where to go next. Back to Carolyn’s? Down to the store? Uptown to my place?

  I went around the corner to Parsifal’s, wondering what kind of a crowd they’d get on a rainy Saturday afternoon, and found that they got a sort of rainy-Saturday-afternoon crowd. There’s something warm and welcoming about a bar on a day like that, but after you get over being warmly welcomed, you notice that everybody there gives off an air of desperation.

  I’m sure I was no exception myself. I took a stool at the bar, where Sigrid’s role was now being played by a black woman with short curly hair that either she or God had colored red. She was as tall as Sigrid and had the same cheekbones, along with the same subliminal message: Sleep with me and you’ll die, but it’ll be worth it.

  I ordered Laphroaig and took a long time drinking it, meting it out in small sips. I was making progress, or it was; by the fourth sip, it tasted pretty decent.

  While I sipped at it, I worked my way around the bar, talking to no one but listening to everybody. I was hoping to hear a particular low-pitched voice, but didn’t really expect to. There was no one in the place who looked like my image of the man, and there was no one there who sounded like him, either.

  Most of the time I wasn’t listening that hard, anyway, because I was busy thinking. You ought to be able to work this out, I told myself. The whole thing was full of coincidences, and when you have that many of them, sooner or later they start fitting together in meaningful ways. That’s what I told myself, anyway, but I kept turning the pieces around in my mind, and I couldn’t quite make anything out of them. It was like a jigsaw puzzle, I decided, with some pieces missing. If I got hold of the missing pieces I might still be stumped, but at least I’d have a shot at it.

  I went to the phone, dropped more coins into it than it used to cost, dialed a string of numbers that I remembered only because I’d dialed them twice already today, and listened to the phone ring in Ray Kirschmann’s house. If a phone rings and there’s no machine to answer it, does it make a sound? I decided it makes the sound of one hand clapping, which was about as much applause as I was capable of today, anyway. It rang until I was tired of listening to it, and then I hung up and went back to the bar. There’d been a sip or two left in my glass, and there’d been more cash on the bar than I would have left for a tip, but the bartender (whose name I hadn’t caught, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t Sigrid) had thought I’d left and taken it all away.

  I really hate weekends.

  Twenty-Seven

  The rain stopped sometime after midnight Saturday, too late to do most of the city any good, and started up again before dawn, in plenty of time to ruin Sunday. I went out for breakfast and came home with the paper. I still didn’t have either copy of Lettuce Prey at hand, but the Sunday Times was enough to see anybody through a rainy Sunday, and clear into the middle of the week. Even after I’d tossed all the advertising supplements in the recycling bin, and added those sections like Jobs (which I don’t want) and Automobiles (which I don’t need), I still had enough paper left to make a person have second thoughts about freedom of the press.

  I settled in with it, pausing now and then to try Ray Kirschmann in Sunnyside. Around eleven his wife answered, just home from church. No, she said, Ray wasn’t home. He’d had to work, he hadn’t even been able to go to services with her. I gave her my name and number, and she said she’d pass them on to him if he called in, but she sounded as though that wasn’t likely to happen.

  I tried the precinct and left a message there as well, and went back to the Real Estate section, where there was an inspiring story of a couple who’d searched high and low for a place that would accommodate both their hobbies, although they preferred to call them areas of interest. He built elaborate layouts for his model trains, while she collected weathervanes and old farm equipment. For a mere eight million dollars they’d bought an old warehouse in Nolita, which is not, as you might suppose, a Nabokovean tale about a prepubescent girl who won’t have anything to do with Humbert Humbert, but a realtors’ term for the emerging area north of Little Italy. By acting as their own general contractor and doing most of the work themselves, they’d managed to hold the cost of the gut rehab they’d
done to another four million, so—well, you can run the numbers yourself and see what a bargain they’d got, with enough square footage to give him the HO-gauge equivalent of fifty miles of railroad track, while she had plenty of room to show off her treasures, including one of the very first McCormick reapers.

  I called Carolyn. “What I want to know,” I said, “is where do they find these people?”

  “Huh? Where do who find what people?”

  “Page four of the Real Estate section.”

  “I’ll call you back,” she said.

  It was close to fifteen minutes before the phone rang, and I picked it up and said, “Well, it took you long enough. After we finish the remodeling, what do you want to do—play with your trains or go cut the wheat in the back forty?”

  There was a long, thoughtful pause, and then a voice not at all like Carolyn’s said, “It didn’t take me long at all, not once I got your message. An’ the rest of what you said must be in English, because I recognize all the words, but I don’t know what the hell you’re talkin’ about.”

  “Oh, Ray. I thought you were Carolyn.”

  “I’m a foot taller’n she is an’ a lot heavier, an’ I got a deeper voice. Not to mention the fact that she’s a woman, for all the good it does anybody. Most people don’t have a whole lotta trouble tellin’ the two of us apart. You called me, Bern. You got somethin’?”

  “I might,” I said.

  “It took a while findin’ out who he was, Bernie. He had a wallet with enough cash in it to choke a goat, but not a lick of ID anywhere in it, or anywhere else on him.”

  “No money belt?”

  “Not unless he was wearin’ it underneath his skin, because the last I seen him he was bareass naked on a metal table with a doctor diggin’ bullets out of him. We ran his prints, of course, but he didn’t have none.”

  “The man had no fingerprints?”

  “He had ’em on the tips of his fingers, like everybody else except your occasional visitor from outer space. But he didn’t have ’em on file, so when we ran ’em we didn’t get nowhere.”