The Burglar in the Rye (16 page)

R
emarkably enough, I was open for business a few minutes after ten. Raffles met me at the door and rubbed up against my ankles, assuring me he was on the brink of starvation. It was a convincing performance, but it didn’t stop me from calling Carolyn at the Poodle Factory.

“I didn’t feed him,” she said. “I just opened up myself a few minutes ago. It was a long night.”

“For me, too.”

“I know,” she said, “because I tried to reach you and I couldn’t. I called late, too. Where were you, anyway?”

Someone was at the door. “I’ll tell you during lunch. What kind of food should I get?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Nothing too far out, okay? I couldn’t face breakfast this morning, so that’ll give you an idea. Lean towards bland.”

I don’t know what kind of a night Raffles had had, but he had no trouble facing breakfast. My first customer
was joined by a second, and while they poked around in different corners of the shop I went through the bag of books Henry Walden had persuaded a woman to leave for my appraisal. They’d looked good at first glance the previous afternoon, and they looked even better after a thorough examination. No great rarities, no
Tamerlane and Other Poems,
but good salable books in decent shape, the sort that look good on my shelves and move quickly off of them.

I made notes and jotted down numbers and worked out how high I could safely go for the books, and I’d just come up with a figure when Henry Walden stepped over my threshold, looking as though he’d spent the previous night meditating at a Zen temple instead of knocking them back at the Bum Rap. He was wearing a different sport jacket and a clean shirt, and his eyes were bright and his skin clear. His silver beard and mustache were, as always, perfectly groomed, and his tan beret was cocked at a rakish angle.

“Good morning,” he said. “That was enjoyable last evening.”

“I enjoyed it myself,” I said. “As much as I remember of it, anyway. The drinks hit me pretty hard.”

“Really? You didn’t show it.”

That was nice to hear, but I didn’t want to put too much stock in it. People say it all the time.
“Oh, really? Both the dog and your mother-in-law? That’s funny, because you didn’t seem drunk at all.”
Yeah, right.

We chatted a bit, and then he found some books to look at while I made a couple of phone calls. I reached Marty Gilmartin at his office and told him the books he was looking for—I didn’t want to say rubies—were in a safe place. I didn’t add that the safe place was halfway to the bottom of a sack of dry cat food in my back room.

“But don’t say anything,” I said. “To either of them.”

“John or Isis,” he said. “Not until we know what we’re going to do with the, uh, books.”

I rang off and tried Alice Cottrell’s number, or at least the number she had given me, which now seemed no more credible than anything else she’d told me. There was no answer, and I can’t say I was surprised.

The woman who’d left the bag of books still hadn’t turned up at noon. I hung the cardboard clock face in the window, indicating I’d be back at one, and asked Henry if he felt up to giving me a hand with the table. I wound up leaving the table out on the sidewalk and retrieving my clock sign.

“I’ve got a shop-sitter,” I told Carolyn. “A customer with time on his hands. I can’t afford to pay him anything, but he doesn’t seem to want to be paid. He likes hanging around, and he says he’s learning the business.”

“I had that guy Keith,” she said. “Remember him? He wanted to be my apprentice. He was happy to do all the shit work if I’d just teach him the dog-grooming game. It would have been a good deal, but I couldn’t stand having him around. He got on my nerves.”

“I don’t think Henry’ll get on my nerves,” I said. “He didn’t this morning, and they’re pretty raw.”

“Your nerves?”

I nodded. “Rough night.”

“You and me both.”

“I thought you were with Erica.”

“I was.”

“I thought you stayed with Lavoris and soda when you were with her.”

“I thought so, too,” she said. “What’s for lunch, Bern? I couldn’t face breakfast, so I’m pretty hungry.”

“Me too,” I said. “I don’t know what’s for lunch.”

“You bought it and you don’t know what it is?”

“I went to the Uzbek place.”

“Two Guys from Tashkent?”

“Right, and you know what that’s like. The menu’s on the blackboard, but who knows what any of the words mean? I just pointed at things and handed them money, and one guy gave me food and the other guy gave me change.”

“That makes two guys, all right.” She opened a container, sniffed. “Somehow,” she said, “I don’t think this is going to be bland.”

“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.”

“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.”