The Burglar on the Prowl (16 page)

“No. What’s your sign?”

“Yeah, I can’t believe I asked a question like that. ‘Do you come here often?’ And anyway that’s not how it feels.”

“How what feels?”

“The feeling,” she said. “I have this feeling that I really know you on some almost mystic level. More than that, I have the feeling that you really know me.” She frowned. “This is ridiculous. I didn’t think I was feeling the drinks, but evidently I am. I’m babbling away like an idiot.”

“More like a brook.”

“What a sweet thing to say! Bernie?”

“Bernie.”

“If you drink up I’ll buy you another La-whatchamacallit.”

“Laphroaig,” I said. “But one’s plenty. Why don’t I buy you another of those instead?”

“Thanks, but no. I’m not really much of a drinker, although you wouldn’t know it by the way I made the first one disappear.”

“You needed it.”

“I guess. I’m in here more nights than I’m not, but it’s rare for me to have more than two drinks. Although the other night…”

“What?”

“Well, it was weird. I had my usual two drinks, nothing fancy, plain old gin and tonic, and I think I must have had a blackout.”

“Oh?”

“I can’t even remember leaving the bar. I woke up with the worst hangover I ever had in my life. I mean, I don’t have hangovers. I don’t have blackouts, either. I think the only time I had one before was in my freshman year in college, when we played this version of Truth or Dare where you kept having to take a drink. God only knows what I drank that time, but it was a whole lot more than I had the other night.”

“Ah, youth.”

“I was young, all right. And I didn’t have a hangover, I woke up
feeling fine, but I didn’t remember the last hour or so of the evening. But everybody told me I was perfectly fine, I didn’t do anything weird or outrageous.”

“No harm done, then.”

“But the night before last,” she said, and frowned. “You weren’t here that night, were you? Wednesday, it would have been.”

“The only other time I’ve been here,” I said, “was earlier this evening. I stopped in after work and had one drink.”

“Laphroaig?”

“Pellegrino water. You can’t really develop a taste for it, but you don’t need one.”

“You just drink it. And you liked it here and came back.”

“Uh-huh.”

“After work, you said. What kind of work?”

“I have a bookstore.”

“Really? Are you Mr. Barnes or Mr. Noble?”

“Well, nobody ever called me Mr. Noble. Actually I’d have to say I’m more like Mr. Strand. It’s a secondhand bookstore. But a whole lot smaller than the Strand.”

“It sounds like fun. Half the lawyers I know would love to quit and open a used bookstore. The other half can’t read. Where is it? Right here in the neighborhood?”

“Eleventh Street between Broadway and University.”

“And you dropped in here after work?”

She was wasted on real estate deals, I decided. She should have been taking depositions and cross-examining witnesses. I’d been in the neighborhood delivering a book to a good customer, I told her, and Parsifal’s had caught my eye.

“And you popped in for a Pellegrino.”

“For a Perrier, actually, but Pellegrino’s what they had.”

“And you’re adaptable.” She put her hand on mine. It was just conversational, but I’ve noticed something. When a woman starts touching you, it is a Good Sign.

“This is really strange,” she said. “See, I didn’t go home alone Wednesday night.”

“You’re just saying that to shock me.”

“Silly,” she said, and touched my hand again. “There’s no reason for you to be shocked, but
I
am, a little. Not at the idea of going home with somebody. I mean, if two grownups get a sort of mutual urge, what’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing that I can think of.”

“But I don’t
remember
it, Bernie! I don’t know who the guy was or what happened, and
that
shocks me. In fact it scares me a little. Who the hell did I bring home? It could have been Mr. Goodbar.” She’d been looking down, and now she raised her eyes to mine. “It wasn’t you, was it?”

“I wish.”

“That’s the second really sweet thing you’ve said in, what, ten minutes? Bernie, I know it wasn’t you, there’s no way it could have been you, you’ve never even been here before. But why do I have the feeling we’ve been—”

“Lovers?”

“Well, intimate, emotionally if not physically. I had that feeling the minute I walked in here.”

“Past lives,” I said. “Karmic ties.”

“You think?”

“What else could explain it?”

“Do you feel the same way, Bernie?”

Somehow I’d taken her hand, and I liked the way it felt in mine. There was something going on, and it had been so long that I didn’t recognize it at first.

“This apartment you took someone home to,” I said. “Is it nearby?”

“Right around the corner.”

“I wonder,” I said, “if I’ll have the feeling I’ve been there before.”

“Do you think it’s possible, Bernie?”

“I think we should find out.”

“I think you’re right,” she said. “I think we owe it to ourselves.”

I
f it’s all the same to you, or even if it’s not, I’ll omit details for the next half-hour or so. Suffice it to say that there are certain things which, unlike a taste for Laphroaig, don’t wear off and needn’t be reacquired. Things which, once learned, are never forgotten. Like falling off a bicycle, or drowning.

“One thing’s certain,” she said. “It wasn’t you.”

“What wasn’t me?”

“Wednesday night. I mean, I knew it wasn’t, but now I really know.”

“How’s that?”

“If it had been you,” she said, “I’d have remembered.”

“If it had been me,” I said, “I wouldn’t have waited until tonight to refresh your memory.”

“It was the damnedest thing, Bernie. I woke up with a splitting headache, and of course I’d forgotten to set the alarm, so I had to rush to get to the office. I swallowed some aspirin and took a quick shower and was out the door without my usual cup of coffee. I hopped in a cab, hit the Starbucks across the street from my office, and was at my desk at nine o’clock.”

“I’m impressed.”

“And I sat there wondering what had happened. I knew I’d been talking with somebody at the bar, but I couldn’t picture him or remember anything about him. And the next thing I remembered was waking up with a headache.”

“So maybe you didn’t bring him home after all.”

She shook her head. “I thought of that myself, but when I got home last night I could tell that someone had been here the night before. Whoever he was, he’d evidently made himself at home. It’s sort of creepy. I mean, he’d been in my things, and he’d moved stuff around.”

“Creepy’s the word for it.”

“My jewelry was arranged differently from the way I’d left it. But he must have just poked around, because he didn’t take anything. But you know what he did take?”

“What?”

“Well, you’re going to think I’m crazy, but he took my electric shaver.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy. I think he’s crazy. Why would he—”

“I know, it’s strange, isn’t it? But I looked everywhere and I can’t find it, and it’s always in the same spot, on the shelf in the bathroom. A little Lady Remington, shaped to fit a dainty feminine hand. I mean, what kind of man would want something like that?”

I took her dainty feminine hand in mine. “Not the kind who’d want to come home with you in the first place.”

“Exactly. The only thing I could think of is he took it home for his girlfriend.”

“Talk about creepy.”

“Well, if he wanted a souvenir, wouldn’t he take something more intimate, like panties or a bra?”

“That’s a point.”

“He went through my purse, but he didn’t take any money. I actually had more money than I thought I did. So he wasn’t your basic crook. Have you ever been robbed?”

A couple of times, but rather than recount either of them I made
one up. “A few years ago,” I said. “A burglar came in off the fire escape. He dragged my TV over to the window, but I guess he decided it was too heavy to carry and left it there. He took a combination radio and CD player that I’d just bought, along with the CD that was in it at the time, and which I had a hard time replacing.” It’s funny how a lie can build up a momentum all its own. I reined it in, and, if you’ll allow a change of metaphors, turned the wheel hard right. “He got a few dollars, too, whatever I had around the house. But the thing that bothered me, because there was no way I could replace it, is he took my high school ring.”

“That’s really funny.”

“It is? It didn’t seem funny at the time.”

“No, funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha. Because I can’t find
my
class ring.”

“You’re kidding. You don’t think it was the same guy, do you?”

We both laughed, and she said she wasn’t sure he’d taken it, that it might have disappeared a while ago. “Because he left a really good pair of earrings, and a watch, and a bracelet I never wear, but it’s gold, and there are all these gold coins on it. I mean, anyone who looked at it would know it was worth some money. And class rings, well, the gold is no better than ten karat, and the stone is glass.”

“Sounds like the one I lost. If it brought ten bucks in a hock shop, the pawnbroker was generous. What color was it? Maybe he liked the way it went with your pink electric shaver.” I rolled onto my side, put a hand on her. “Barbara, those GTs have worn off by now, right? I mean, you’ll remember this in the morning?”

“How could I forget?”

“I was just thinking that maybe we should make sure.”

“Oh,” she said, and reached for me. “Oh, my. What a lovely idea.”

Afterward I got into my clothes while she lay in bed with her eyes closed. She’d taken her hair down when we’d walked in the door, just before she turned to come into my arms, and it was spread out
on the pillow now the way it had been when I got my first look at her. She’d been naked then, too, but this time I didn’t feel the need to cover her with the sheet. Somehow it no longer felt invasive to enjoy the view.

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.”

T
he 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.