The Burglar In The Closet (10 page)

"Why not?"

"I don't think Crystal was the type."

"But how would you know what type she was? You never even met her, did you?"

I avoided the question by catching the waitress's eye and making the usual gesture of scribbling in midair. I wondered, not for the first time, what diner had invented that bit of pantomime and how it had gone over with the first waiter who was exposed to it. Monsieur desires the pen of my aunt?
Eh bien?

I said, "She had a family somewhere, didn't she? You could get in touch with them, pass yourself off as a friend from college."

"What college?"

"I don't remember, but you can get that from the newspaper article, too."

"I'm younger than she was. I couldn't have been at college the same year."

"Well, nobody's going to ask your age. They'll be too overcome with grief. Anyway, you can probably do this over the phone. I just thought you could poke around the edges of her life and see if any male names come into the picture. The point is that she probably had a boyfriend or two or three, and that would give us a place to start."

She thought about it. The waitress came over with the check and I got my wallet out and paid it. Jillian, frowning in concentration, didn't offer to pay her half of the check. Well, that was all right. After all, I'd polished off half her sandwich.

"Well," she said, "I'll try."

"Just make some phone calls and see what happens. Don't give your right name, of course. And you'd better stay pretty close to home in case Craig tries to get hold of you. I don't know if he'll be able to make any calls himself, but his lawyer may be getting in touch with you."

"How will I get ahold of you, Bernie?"

"I may be hard to reach. I'm in the book, B. Rhodenbarr on West Seventy-first, but I won't be hanging out there much. What I'll do, I'll call you. Is your phone listed?"

It wasn't. She searched her wallet and wrote her number and address on the back of a beautician's appointment card. Her appointment had been nine days ago with someone named Keith. I don't know whether or not she kept it.

"And you, Bernie? What'll you be doing?"

"I'll be looking for someone."

"Who?"

"I don't know. But I'll know her when I find her."

"A woman? How will you know her?"

"She'll be doing some serious drinking," I said, "in a very frivolous bar."

The bar was called the Recovery Room. The cocktail napkins had nurse cartoons all over them. The only one I remember featured a callipygian Florence Nightingale asking a leering sawbones what she should do with all these rectal thermometers. There was a list of bizarre cocktails posted. They had names like Ether Fizz and I-V Special and Post Mortem and were priced at two or three dollars a copy. Assorted props of a medical nature were displayed haphazardly on the walls-Red Cross splints, surgical masks, that sort of thing.

For all of this, the place didn't seem to be drawing a hospital crowd. It was on the first floor of a brickfront building on Irving Place a few blocks below Gramercy Park, too far west of Bellevue to be catching their staff, and the clientele looked to be composed primarily of civilians who lived or worked in the neighborhood. And it was frivolous, all right. If it had been any more frivolous it would have floated away.

Frankie's drinking, on the other hand, was certainly serious enough to keep the Recovery Room anchored in grim reality. A stinger is always a reasonably serious proposition. A brace of stingers at four o'clock on a weekday afternoon is about as serious as you can get.

I made several stops before I got to the Recovery Room. I'd started off with a stop at my own place, then cabbed down to the East Twenties and began making the rounds. A little gourmet shop on Lexington sold me a teensy-weensy bottle of imported olive oil, which I rather self-consciously opened and upended and drained around the corner. I'd read about this method of coating the old tumtum before a night of heavy drinking. I'll tell you, it wasn't the greatest taste sensation I ever experienced, and no sooner had I knocked it back than I began bar-hopping, hitting a few joints on Lexington, drifting over to Third Avenue, then doubling back and ultimately finding my way to the Recovery Room. In the course of this I had a white wine spritzer in each of several places and stayed long enough to determine that no one wanted to talk about Crystal Sheldrake. I did run into two fellows who would have been glad to talk about baseball and one old fart who wanted to talk about Texas, but that was as much conversation as I could scrape up.

Until I met Frankie. She was a tallish woman with curly black hair and a sullen, hard-featured face, and she was sitting at the Recovery Room's bar sipping a stinger and smoking a Virginia Slim and humming a rather toneless version of "One for My Baby." I suppose she was around my age, but by nightfall she'd be a lot older. Stingers'll do that.

I somehow knew right away. It just looked like Crystal 's kind of place and Frankie looked like Crystal 's kind of people. I went up to the bar, ordered my spritzer from a bartender with a sad, hung-over look to him, and asked Frankie if the seat next to her was taken. This was forward of me-there were only two other customers at the bar, a pair of salesmen types playing the match game at the far end. But she didn't mind.

"Welcome aboard, brother," she said. "You can sit next to me long as you like. Just so you're not a goddamned dentist."

Aha!

She said, "I'll tell you what she was, Bernie. She was the salt of the fucking earth is what she was. Well, hell, you knew her, right?"

"Years ago."

"Years ago, right. 'Fore she was married. 'Fore she married that murdering toothpuller. I swear to God I'll never go to one of those bastards again. I don't care if every tooth I got rots in my head. The hell with it, right?"

"Right, Frankie."

"I don't have to chew anything anyway. The hell with food is what I say. If I can't drink it I don't need it. Right?"

"Right."

" Crystal was a lady. That's what she was. The woman was a fucking lady. Right?"

"You bet."

"Damn right." She crooked a finger at the bartender. "Rodge," she said. "Roger, honey, I want another of these, but let's make it plain brandy and let's cool it with the creme de menthe, huh? Because it's beginning to taste like Lavoris and I don't want to be reminded of dentists. Got that?"

"Got it," Roger said, and took her glass away and hauled out a clean one. "Brandy, right? Brandy rocks?"

"Brandy no rocks. Ice cracks your stomach. Also it shrinks your blood vessels, the veins and the arteries. And the creme de menthe gives you diabetes. I oughta stay away from stingers, but they're my downfall. Bernie, you don't want to be drinking those spritzers all night."

"I don't?"

"First of all, the soda water's bad for you. The bubbles get into your veins and give you the bends, same as the sandhogs get when they don't go through decompression chambers. It's a well-known fact."

"I never heard that, Frankie."

"Well, you know it now. Plus the wine rots your blood. It's made out of grapes and the enzymes from the grapes are what screw you up."

"Brandy's made from grapes."

She gave me a look. "Yeah," she said, "but it's distilled. That purifies it."

"Oh."

"You want to get rid of that spritzer before it ruins your health. Have something else."

"Maybe a glass of water for now."

She looked horrified. "Water? In this town? You ever see blow-up photos of what comes out of the tap in New York City? My God, they got these fucking microscopic worms in New York water. You drink water without alcohol in it, you're just asking for trouble."

"Oh."

"Let me look at you, Bernie." Her eyes, light brown with a green cast to them, fought to focus on mine. "Scotch," she said authoritatively. "Cutty rocks. Rodge, sugar, bring Bernie here a Cutty Sark on the rocks."

"I don't know, Frankie."

"Jesus," she said, "just shut up and drink it. You're gonna drink to Crystal 's memory with a glass of wormy water? What are you, crazy? Just shut up and drink your scotch."

"Now take Dennis here," Frankie said. "Dennis was crazy about Crystal. Weren't you, Dennis?"

"She was an ace-high broad," Dennis said.

"Everybody loved her, right?"

"Lit up the joint when she walked in the door," Dennis said. "No question about it. Now she's deader'n Kelsey's nuts and ain't it a hell of a thing? The husband, right?"

"A dentist."

"Wha'd he do, shoot her?"

"Stabbed her."

"A hell of a thing," Dennis said.

We had left the Recovery Room a drink or two ago at Frankie's insistence and had moved around the corner to Joan's Joynt, a smaller and less brightly lit place, and there we had met up with Dennis, a thickly built man who owned a parking garage on Third Avenue. Dennis was drinking Irish whiskey with small beer chasers, Frankie was staying with straight Cognac, and I was following orders and lapping up the Cutty Sark on the rocks. I was by no means convinced of the wisdom of this course of action, but with each succeeding drink it seemed to make more sense. And I kept reminding myself of the little bottle of olive oil I had swigged earlier. I imagined the oil coating my stomach so that the Cutty Sark couldn't be absorbed. Drink after drink would slide down my throat, hit the greased stomach and be whisked on past into the intestine before it knew what hit it.

And yet it did seem as though a wee bit of the alcohol was getting into the old bloodstream after all...

"Another round," Dennis was saying heartily. "And have something for yourself, Jimbo. And that's another brandy for Frankie here, and another Cutty for my friend Bernie."

"Oh, I don't-"

"Hey, I'm buying, Bernie. When Dennis buys, everybody drinks."

So Dennis bought and everybody drank.

In the Hen's Tooth, Frankie said, "Bernie, want you to meet Charlie and Hilda. This is Bernie."

"The name's Jack," Charlie said. "Frankie, you got this obsession my name's Charlie. You know damn well it's Jack."

"The hell," Frankie said. "Same thing, isn't it?"

Hilda said, "Pleasure to meetcha, Bernie. You an insurance man like everybody else?"

"He's no fucking dentist," Frankie said.

"I'm a burglar," said six or seven Cutty Rockses.

"A what?"

"A cat burglar."

"That a fact," said someone. Jack or Charlie, I suppose. Perhaps it was Dennis.

"What do you do with them?" Hilda wanted to know.

"Do with what?"

"The cats."

"He holds 'em for ransom."

"There any money in it?"

"Jesus, lookit who's askin' if there's any money in pussy."

"Oh, you're terrible," said Hilda, clearly delighted. "You're an awful man."

"No, seriously," Charlie/Jack said. "What do you do, Bernie?"

"I'm in investments," I said.

"Terrific."

"Thank God my ex was an accountant," Hilda said. "I never thought I'd hear myself saying that and just listen to me. But you never have to worry about an accountant killing you."

"I don't know," Dennis said. "My experience is they nickel and dime you to death."

"But they don't stab you."

"You're better off with a stabbing. Get the damn thing over and done with. People look at a parking garage, all they see is that money coming in every day. They don't see the constant headaches. Those kids you gotta hire, they scrape a fender and you hear about it, believe me. Nobody appreciates the amount of mental strain in a parking garage."

Hilda put a hand on his arm. "They think you got it easy," she said, "but it's not that easy, Dennis."

"Damn right. And then they wonder why a man drinks. A business like mine and a wife like mine and they wonder why a man needs to unwind a little at the end of the day."

"You're a hell of a guy, Dennis."

I excused myself to make a phone call, but by the time I got to the phone I couldn't remember who I'd intended to call. I went to the men's room instead. There were a lot of girls' names and phone numbers written over the urinal but I didn't notice Crystal 's. I thought of dialing one of the numbers just to see what would happen. I decided it was not the sort of thought to which a sober man is given.

When I got back to the bar Charlie/Jack was ordering another round. "Almost forgot you," he said to me. "Cutty on the rocks, right?"

"Er," I said.

"Hey, Bernie," Frankie said. "You okay? You look a little green around the gills."

"It's the olive oil."

"Huh?"

"It's nothing," I said, and reached for my drink.

Chapter Eight

There were a lot of bars, a lot of conversations, a lot of people threading their separate ways in and out of my awareness. My awareness, come to think of it, was doing some threading of its own. I kept going in and out of gray stages, as if I were in a car driving through patches of fog.