The Burglar in the Rye

by Lawrence Block

  “Oh, hell,” I said. “I forgot.”

  She took a forkful and her eyes widened. “A long way from bland,” she announced.

  “Leave it. I’ll get you something else.”

  “No, stay where you are. Maybe that’s the wrong move entirely, eating bland food when you feel like this. Maybe spicy food is what you really need.”

  “Well, this is spicy. I think it would take rust off old pipes.”

  “My pipes are getting older even as we speak. This is tasty, isn’t it? I bet it fixes me right up.”

  “I hope so.”

  “And if it makes me any worse, I’ll go home. And that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, either. What do you figure this is, Bern?”

  “No idea.”

  “Maybe we’re happier not knowing. That’s probably a lot of crap, bland food for an upset stomach. Like bland food for an ulcer.”

  “You haven’t got an ulcer.”

  “I will,” she said, “if we keep eating Uzbek food. How come you had a rocky morning?”

  “I had drinks with Marty,” I said, “and then I had drinks with Henry.”

  “Henry the shop-sitter.”

  “Right. Marty and I had Kessler’s, and Henry and I had Old Overcoat.”

  “Old Overholt.”

  “Whatever. They both liked rye just fine, and they both handled it okay, too. But I wound up with a snootful.”

  I told her how the night had ended, only to begin again at half past three in the morning and end a second time when I got back to bed an hour or so later.

  “Gee,” she said. “I thought I had a wild evening.”

  “What happened?”

  “Erica had a business triumph to celebrate,” she said. “So she took me to the Lorelei Room.”

  “Sixty floors up? Posher than posh? Views beyond description? That Lorelei Room?”

  “That’s the one. I was wearing this outfit she made me buy, and I felt really weird, but she kept telling me I looked beautiful, and halfway through my second Rob Roy I started to believe her.”

  “Where did the Rob Roys come from?”

  “The waiter brought them. Oh, why Rob Roys and not Campari? Because it was a celebration. That made it a special occasion, so it was okay for us to get a little tiddly.”

  “Tiddly.”

  “And the views were amazing. You could see Jersey, you could see Queens. Though what’s such a big deal about being able to see a couple of places you wouldn’t dream of going to?” She shrugged. “Anyway, it was swank, Bern. It makes a pretty dramatic change from washing rottweilers.”

  “All part of being in New York.”

  “Rottweilers, the Lorelei Room, and Two Guys from Tashkent.” She helped herself to one of the little fried dumplings, popped it into her mouth, chewed, and reached for her iced tea. “People outside of New York,” she said, “will live a lifetime without getting to taste Uzbek food. They don’t know what they’re missing.”

  “Poor bastards.”

  “Whereas we, on the other hand, don’t know what we’re eating. Bern, where was I?”

  “Sixty stories high, not counting the Rob Roys.”

  “And that’s what we were doing, too. Not counting the Rob Roys. But this is the part I gotta tell you. A couple of guys came over and hit on us.”

  “Oh?”

  “‘Oh?’ Is that all you can say?”

  “What else do you want me to say? You’re a couple of attractive women, and it’s not that hard to believe that a couple of guys might put the moves on you.”

  “Bern, guys don’t hit on me.”

  “Not ever?”

  “Once every couple of years,” she said, “some drunk wanders into the Cubby Hole or Henrietta Hudson’s and doesn’t realize he’s in a dyke bar, and if I’m standing in front of him and he’s drunk enough he’ll come on to me. But outside of that, no, guys leave me alone. Because it’s fairly obvious that I’m gay.”

  “Well, you weren’t in the Cubby Hole last night.”

  “No, and I wasn’t wearing slacks and a blazer, either, and my hair’s longer than I’ve worn it since I was a kid in pigtails, and I had lipstick on, Bernie, and eye shadow, for Christ’s sake.”

  “No kidding. Eye shadow?”

  “And things I don’t know the names of. Erica made me up. We were at her apartment, and you’d have thought we were teenagers at a slumber party, doing each other’s makeup. Except she did her own, because I wouldn’t have known what to do.”

  “Eye shadow,” I said. “So they hit on you and you told them to get lost, and—”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I started to, and Erica gave me a kick. Then she looked up at them with eyes big as saucers and said sure, we’d love it if they would buy us a drink. And they sat down at our table, and we quick drank our Rob Roys to make room for the round they were buying us.”

  “That’s really weird,” I said. “What did she have in mind?”

  “That’s what I wondered. I thought maybe the booze had hit her. You know how there are these people who never drink very much, and you wonder why not?”

  “And then one night they have a few, and you find out.”

  “Right. I thought maybe that was her story, in which case I was going to have to find a way to get her out of there. But then she went to the ladies’ room and motioned for me to come along.” She frowned. “Guys don’t do that, do they? Make a social event out of going to the bathroom?”

  “Not the kind of guys I tend to hang out with.”

  “I have to go along with the guys on this one, Bern. I don’t seem to develop a craving for company when I have to go to the jane. I just go and come back. But Erica didn’t even have to go. She just wanted a chance to talk in a male-free environment.”

  “And?”

  “And that was okay with me, because I had a question for her. Like what are we doing with these two clowns? And she told me to play along.”

  “Play along?”

  “It’ll be fun, she said. We can just sort of lead them on and jolly them along and then give them the slip.”

  “You were wearing a slip?”

  “Very funny, Bern. I tried to talk her out of it but she was taking charge and topping the whole scene. ‘We’re celebrating,’ she reminded me, and they could pay for the celebration, and that would really be something to celebrate.”

  “So you went back to the two visiting firemen—”

  “Meteorologists, Bern. They were two meteorologists from the Midwest, in town for the big meteorologists’ convention.”

  “I didn’t know there was one.”

  “Neither did we, and I’ll spare you the weather jokes, which is more than they did for us. They bought us some more drinks and then they bought us dinner.”

  “At the Lorelei Room? It must have cost them…”

  “In round numbers, a fortune. But what did they care? It was going on the old expense account, and it was bread on the water, because what girl would fail to show her appreciation to the guy who’d just spent a couple hundred dollars feeding her?”

  “I’ve always operated at a lower financial level,” I said, “but a surprising number of women have failed to do just that.”

  “Even when they’ve heard your Mel Tormé record?”

  “Even then. You must have wondered how you were going to get rid of them.”

  “I was too busy worrying about how I was gonna get through the next five minutes. I just sat there feeling dopey, and I guess that was all I had to do. Meanwhile, Erica was flirting like crazy.”

  “With a couple of weathermen.”

  “You didn’t need them,” she said, “to know which way the wind was blowing. Actually, they were pretty decent fellows.”

  “I bet their wives didn’t understand them.”

  “I don’t know why not. God knows I did. What’s to understand? They were horny and wanted to get laid. I felt the same way, but with a difference.”

&nb
sp; “And all the while Erica was flirting her head off.”

  “Her head was the least of it. She kept leaning forward to give Ed a peek down her dress, and I’m positive he had a hand on her leg. Phil put his hand on my leg, and I wanted to stick a fork in it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I had some more wine. I just poured it in there on top of the Rob Roys, and with coffee I had a pony of B&B.”

  “I guess that’s more feminine than straight brandy.”

  “I’d have preferred the brandy,” she said, “and instead of a pony I’d have had a whole horse. Because I had this horrible sense that we were going to go back to their hotel with them, or take them to Erica’s place, or something.”

  “And—?”

  “And that too,” she said, “because it wouldn’t be the first time a woman swore she was gay and turned out to be bisexual. Before the guys hit on us, I was actually starting to worry about you.”

  “That I’d turn out to be bisexual after I swore up and down I was a lesbian?”

  “Erica was full of questions about you,” she said. “Everything from how did we get to be friends to where you live and what you have for breakfast. It was enough to make me wonder, and then the guys turned up, and…”

  “And you thought you’d wind up going home with them.”

  “Right, and then we’d wake up the next morning, and Erica’d say, ‘Ohmigod, we sure were drunk last night, and I don’t remember a thing,’ and I’d have to pretend I didn’t remember, either, but I’d remember. I decided the hell with that, and I’d figure out some way to keep it from happening, but I didn’t have to. They paid the check, and we rode down on the elevator with them, and the next thing I knew Erica and I were in a cab and Phil and Ed were on the street, watching us go out of their lives.”

  “Welcome to New York,” I said.

  “We went to my place for a change,” she said, “and she was really excited by the whole thing. ‘Pretend I’m a man,’ she said. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘You’re a man. How about them Yankees, huh?’ But she made me play along, and it was really weird.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “And then it was her turn. ‘Now pretend you’re the man,’ she said, and that was weird, too. I don’t even like talking about this stuff, Bern.”

  “Me neither. I’ve never been much on locker-room conversations.”

  “Or powder-room conversations, either. But I didn’t have any more conversations with Erica, because I fell asleep right away. I woke up early, but she was already dressed and gone, so all I woke up with was a hangover.”

  “Where do you think it’s going?”

  “The hangover? I think it’s going away, thanks to Two Guys from Tashkent. Oh, you mean me and Erica? I don’t know. I guess time will tell. How about you and Alice?”

  “I think it’s already gone.”

  “And how about Gulliver Fairborn’s letters, and those rubies you found? And the murder of Anthea Landau? And everything else that’s been going on?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Once I realized that was Alice squealing with passion, I thought what a coincidence it was that she was in this room. But it wasn’t a coincidence at all, not if it was her room. And I thought about it some more, and I saw the real coincidence.”

  “What was that?”

  “The jewelry. John Considine stole it from himself and gave it to Isis.”

  “On loan.”

  “According to him, but either way she had it. And then it wound up in Alice Cottrell’s room. Now that’s a coincidence.”

  “It wound up in your pocket,” she said, “and that’s not a coincidence. It’s theft, and maybe that’s how it got in Alice’s room.”

  “She’s a jewel thief?”

  “Why not?”

  “And, because she’s an accomplished thief herself, she has to rope me in to swipe some letters so she can return them to Gulliver Fairborn?”

  “Maybe she’s not a jewel thief, Bern.”

  “Then what is she? And how did she wind up with the jewels? And, and…”

  “And what, Bern?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but it’s getting complicated.”

  CHAPTER

  Sixteen

  In the time I was gone, Henry had made a couple of sales and settled with the woman who’d left the bag of books. He paid her in cash from the register and got her to write out a receipt, and he even saved me money; he’d offered her twenty-five dollars less than I’d been prepared to go, and she’d taken it without argument.

  Mr. Harkness from Sotheby’s had called again. I didn’t feel like calling him back, nor could I see the point in trying Alice Cottrell’s number, because I’d figured out that it wasn’t her number after all. So what I did instead was stand there talking books with Henry, who leaned on my counter with his chin in his hand and talked about the impression Thomas Wolfe had made on him at an admittedly impressionable age. “I thought Look Homeward, Angel was just wonderful,” he said, “and then a few years ago I tried rereading it, and I couldn’t get anywhere with it.”

  “Well, you can’t go home again,” I said.

  “Maybe that’s it, although there are some books I can read over and over. But I think you have to be young when you read Wolfe.”

  “It’s the same with Dr. Seuss.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I like The Cat in the Hat better than ever. And the one about the kid with all those hats.”

  “Bartholomew Cubbins,” I said. “Maybe you just like books about hats. I’ve got a copy of The Green Hat around here somewhere. By Michael Arlen. I’ve had it for years, and if you read it you can tell me if it’s any good. What about Nobody’s Baby? If you’d read it when you were seventeen you’d be saying it changed your life, but I don’t suppose you did.”

  “I was well past seventeen when it was published.”

  “But you read it?”

  “When it came out, and I’ve looked at it a few times since then.”

  “But I don’t suppose it changed your life, did it?”

  “I suppose everything does,” he said thoughtfully. “Even the morning paper, even the quiz on the back of the Special K box. One’s a different person for having read it, whatever it happens to be.”

  That got us into a nice philosophical conversation. I’d bought the bookshop in the hope of conversations like this one, and I gave myself over to it wholeheartedly. I stopped in midsentence and turned at the sound of the door opening, and there was a woman who looked familiar. I couldn’t place her until she said, “Hi! What are you doing here?”

  It was Isis Gauthier, and I didn’t recognize her until she spoke because she looked very different. She wasn’t dressed like Paddington Bear this time around, but looked just fine in jeans and a pink Brooks Brothers shirt. Her cornrows had transformed themselves into straight shoulder-length hair with red highlights, which, clever fellow that I am, I realized had to be a wig.

  “I come here all the time,” I said. “It’s my store. What are you doing here?”

  “Not you,” she said. She was looking at Henry, who straightened up, his hand dropping to his side. “Oh, sorry. I thought you were somebody else.” Now she turned to me. “I know it’s your store,” she said. “And I know what you do when you’re not running it, too. And I think we ought to have a talk.” Then she turned and looked at Henry again.

  “Time I got some lunch,” Henry said diplomatically.

  She was silent until the door closed behind him. Then she said she’d spoken to Marty, who told her he’d spoken to me. “He says you didn’t kill Miss Landau,” she said, “but that’s the same thing that policeman said. You went there to steal something but you couldn’t find it.”

  “I hate the way that sounds,” I said. “As if I’m a crook, and incompetent in the bargain.”

  I gave her my best disarming smile, but I couldn’t see that it had any effect. “You’re a burglar,” she said, “and you came to my hotel to steal some
thing. And somebody got into my room and stole my rubies. Now it doesn’t seem like much of a leap to think you had something to do with it.”

  “I see your point, but—”

  “Marty says you didn’t,” she went on. “But here’s the thing, see. When I first told him my rubies were missing, I could tell he wasn’t buying it. He thought it was a way for me to keep them without flat out refusing to give them back. ‘Oh, Ah’d be happy to give dem back so poor Miz Considine don’t be pinin’ away for dem, but Ah cain’t, on account of somebody done stole dem.’”

  “‘Glory be, Miz Scarlett, what do Ah know about birfin’ babies?’”

  She gave me a look. “But now he believes me,” she said. “He had a conversation with you, and now he believes me. What does that tell you, Mr. Rhodenbarr?”

  “I guess he came to his senses.”

  “What it tells me,” she said, “is that he knew I hadn’t faked the theft of the rubies, because you admitted taking them. You must have made an earlier visit to the hotel, before the night I ran into you in the hallway.”

  “And then I returned to the scene of the crime?”

  “You found out the Paddington’s security wasn’t that great, and you wanted to see what some of the other rooms might hold. But what I want to know is how you came to my room in the first place. Did John Considine send you?”

  “I’ve never met the man. And if I’d already stolen the rubies on his behalf, why would he send Marty to talk you out of them?”

  “Maybe he didn’t know you were successful. Maybe you decided not to tell him, because you thought you could do better selling the rubies to somebody else than settling for whatever he promised you for them.”

  “That’s a lot of maybes for one sentence.”

  “It’s two sentences, with one maybe in each.”

  “Is that all? Well, it still seems like a lot.”

  “Too hypothetical for you?”

  “Call me hypothetical,” I said.

  “Is that a song cue?” She braced one hand on her hip and cocked her head. To the tune of “Call Me Irresponsible” she crooned, “Call me hypothetical. Toss in… toss in what?”

  “Alphabetical,” I suggested.