The Burglar on the Prowl (15 page)

T
he fat man took the book.”

“Right.”

“But he didn’t have it long. Whoever shot him took it and drove off with it.”

“Right.”

“The fat man thought it was something else, and so did whoever killed him and took it away from him.”

“Right.”

“And then it wound up in Mapes’s den. Was it Mapes in the car? Did Mapes kill him?”

“He’s a shitheel,” I said, “but Marty never called him a thug. The man’s a plastic surgeon. He uses a scalpel, not an AK-47.”

“Is that what the fat man was shot with?”

“It was some kind of automatic weapon. You hold the trigger and the bullets keep coming out. All I know about guns is that I like to stay away from them.”

“Me too. Either Mapes was in the car, or the guy in the car took the book to Mapes.”

“That sounds logical.”

“But the book’s connected to the Rogovins, except that’s not their real name. I forget their real names.”

“Lyle and Schnittke.”

“What have they got to do with Mapes?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I don’t know anything. Who were the people in the car? I mean, were they the same ones who killed the Rogovins? Lyle and Schnittke, I mean. Are they the ones who killed Lyle and Schnittke?”

“That’s what I thought. Now I’m not so sure. My apartment was tossed by the people who killed Lyle and…you know what? I’m going to call them the Lyles. I don’t know if they were married or living together or just good friends, but I’m sick of saying Schnittke.”

“It doesn’t roll trippingly off the tongue, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t. Anyway, the same people did those two things, because they gave both doormen the same treatment.”

“Sort of a signature. They’re the ones we’ve been calling the perps.”

“Right, the perps. I don’t know who’s who, Carolyn. It’s all too deep for me. All I know is the book was in Mapes’s den, and it shouldn’t have been there.”

“And you took it.”

“I know, and don’t ask me why. It may not have been the brightest thing I ever did. I broke into his house and emptied his safe, and I was nice and anonymous about it, and then I took the book, and that narrows the suspect list from all burglars to a burglar with a particular interest in a particular book by Joseph Conrad. I might as well have taken along an etching tool and signed the safe.”

“Bern, he just lost a quarter of a million dollars.”

“Not quite.”

“Close enough. He just lost the price of a studio apartment—”

“Well, a pretty nice studio apartment, in a good neighborhood.”

“—and you think he’s even going to notice the book is missing, or give a rat’s ass about it if he does? Besides, the book’s not the McGuffin. It’s a fake McGuffin, and people only want it until they find out it’s not what they want.”

“Isn’t that true of everything?”

“Bern—”

I got to my feet, holding my hands palm-outward to ward off more questions. “It’s too deep for me,” I said. “All of it.”

“Where are you going, Bern?”

“A bar.”

“You’re gonna get drunk? You can stay right here, Bern. I’ve got plenty of booze in the house.”

“But no softballs.”

“Huh?” She waved the thought away, like a pesky fly. “You just drank a quart of coffee, and now you’re going out drinking? You’ll get falling-down drunk, and you’ll lie there with the shakes from the coffee. I don’t think it’s a great idea, Bern.”

“I’m not going to get drunk,” I told her. “I’m barely going to drink. I’m going to a bar in Murray Hill. I want to see just how far coincidence goes these days.”

I took a cab to Parsifal’s. That’s the only sensible way to get there from the West Village, especially at that hour, and when I thought about the money in Carolyn’s bathtub, I figured I could afford it.

It was late, but when I’d been there earlier, guzzling Pellegrino, it had felt like the kind of joint that keeps selling booze as long as the law allows. The law in New York lets you keep going until four every night but Saturday, when the bars have to close an hour early, at three in the morning. (When you’re dealing with drinking laws in New York, counterintuitive is definitely the way to go.)

The crowd at Parsifal’s was a little lighter than it had been earlier, but these people made up for it in volume, as their alcohol intake raised their personal decibel levels. Collectively, they added up to something well below your average wide-open motorcycle engine, but a long ways up from the well-bred purr of a Rolls-Royce. I could still hear myself think, though why I would want to was another question.

The same blonde bartender was on duty, and I don’t know how she remembered me, but she proved she did by asking me if I wanted a Pellegrino. I shook my head and said I’d have scotch.

“Good for you,” she said. “Any particular brand? The bar pour is Teacher’s.”

“You don’t have Glen Drumnadrochit, do you?”

She wrinkled her nose and said she’d never even heard of it, and I wasn’t hugely surprised. I’d only come across it once, at an eccentric bed-and-breakfast in the Berkshires,
*
and when I came home I had three bottles of it in my suitcase. I made them last as long as I could, but they were gone now, and I wondered if I’d ever taste anything that good again.

The thought alone spoiled me for Teacher’s, and I asked for a single malt, and they had a decent selection of them. I settled on Laphroaig, perhaps out of pride in my ability to pronounce it, and ordered a double. It’s got a distinctive taste, one that you have to acquire. I’d acquired it some years ago, but it had gone the way of the Drumnadrochit, so I took a sip and set about acquiring it all over again. Slow sipping, that’s the way to do it. You take little sparrow-sized sips, and you keep telling yourself you like the taste, and by the time you get to the bottom of the glass, it’s true.

I took a first sip, and thought
Yes, that’s Laphroaig, all right. I’d forgotten what it tastes like, but that’s it, and I’d know it anywhere.
Later I took a second sip, and was able to decide how I felt about the taste. I decided that I didn’t like it. Somewhere around the fifth sip, it had achieved the virtue of familiarity. I was accustomed to it, and the question of whether I actually liked it no longer seemed pertinent. It was like, say, a cousin.
The man’s your cousin, for God’s sake! What do you mean, you don’t like him? You don’t have to like or dislike him. He’s your cousin!

I was almost ready for a sixth sip of Cousin Laphroaig when a woman marched up to the bar and settled herself on a seat two stools from mine. It was getting on for two in the morning, but she looked as though she’d just come from the office. She was wearing a pants suit of charcoal gray flannel, and her dark hair was done up in a knot on the top of her head, and you already know who she was,
but it took me a minute, because the last time I saw her—the only time I saw her—she had her hair down and her clothes off and her mouth open.

The big blonde knew her, and knew her drink. “Hi,” she said. “G and T?”

“Heavy on the G,” the brunette said. “Just a splash of T.”

“You got it. Little late for you, isn’t it?”

I was watching out of the corner of my eye, so I didn’t actually see the brunette roll hers, but I think she probably did. “I didn’t think I was going to get here at all,” she said, “and I was starting to wonder if you did takeout.”

“I don’t think the State Liquor Authority would go for that.”

“I wonder if the time is right for a test case?” By now the gin and tonic was mixed and on the bar before her, and she took it up and put away more in one swallow than I’d managed in my five delicate sips. “Ahhhh,” she said, with real appreciation. “I needed that. Sigrid, back in the days before you decided on a career behind the stick—”

“Hold it right there, huh? Being a bartender’s not a career, and I didn’t decide on it.”

“You didn’t?”

“Of course not. Nobody does, not in New York. You decide on a career in the arts, and you wait tables to make ends meet, and it begins to dawn on you that bartenders make more money and don’t have to work as hard, plus they never get yelled at for dropping a whole tray of pasta dishes on a table full of people from Ridgeway, New Jersey—”

“Did that happen to you?”

“No, but it could have. So you go take the course at the American Bartenders School, which isn’t exactly rocket science, and you get a job when you graduate, and you mix martinis and screwdrivers, which isn’t exactly brain surgery, and you quit when the boss puts his hand up your skirt—”

“Did that happen?”

“No, but it could have. So you get another job, and you finally
find a place where they treat you right, and one day you notice you haven’t been on an audition or a go-see in months, and for a while you feel guilty about it, and then you feel guilty that you don’t, and then that’s it, you’re a lifer, you’ll be mixing Salty Dogs and Harvey Wallbangers until the cows come home. But that doesn’t make it a career.”

“Wow.”

“I’m sorry,” Sigrid said. “Way too much information, huh?”

“No, actually it was pretty interesting.” She drank some more of her gin and tonic, and I seized the moment to take a sip of my Laphroaig. It was definitely improving.

“I don’t know what got me started,” Sigrid said. “Except it’s been a long night, and it didn’t help that there was a guy hitting on me about an hour ago.”

“Oh, come on. That must happen to you all the time.”

“It does, but most of them take no for an answer, and the rest generally take
fuck you
for an answer. This guy thought he was God’s gift, and he couldn’t believe I didn’t see it. Come to think of it, he’s been in here before, and—”

“And what?”

“And nothing.” She grinned. “My train of thought just pulled out of the station, and I wasn’t on it. You know, you were starting to ask me something, before I went into my rant.”

“I was? Oh, right. I just wondered if you ever gave any thought to going into the law, and I guess you already answered that. You set out to be an actress.”

“Actress and model, actually.”

“Oh? I can’t believe you didn’t get modeling jobs.”

“The camera likes you to be really thin, and so do the misogynists behind the cameras. I got work anyway, but nobody ever wanted to use me more than once. I had a bad attitude.”

“Oh.”

“I still do, but it’s okay for a bartender, especially if you’ve got the tits to go with it. But no, I never thought about becoming a lawyer. Why?”

“Because tonight I was beginning to wish I hadn’t, either. Though this”—she raised her now-empty glass—“is definitely helping.”

“Another? You got it. And how about you? You all right with the Laphroaig?”

I said I was fine, and she went off to assemble another gin and tonic.

“What did she just call your drink?”

“Laphroaig,” I said.

“That’s what it sounded like. Is it some kind of cordial?”

“It’s scotch. It’s a single malt from the Isle of Islay.”

“Is that near the Firth of Forth?”

“It would have to be, don’t you think?”

“I guess. Is it good?”

“It’s getting there. I figure another three sips and it’ll be excellent.”

She nodded judiciously. “It’s an acquired taste, and you haven’t quite acquired it yet.”

“No.”

“But you’re getting there.”

“It improves with each sip.”

“Thus the small sips,” she said. “If you were doing shots, you’d be blotto before you got anywhere close to liking it.”

“That’s exactly right. What was so horrible about your evening?”

“Just that I never thought I was going to get out of the damn office. I’m a lawyer. You probably figured that out.”

“I took two and two,” I said, “and I put ’em together.”

“I’m with this firm about ten blocks from here. Very convenient, walk to work, and most of the time the work’s fine, but every now and then you get one of those deals that has to close, if it goes past deadline everything’s screwed up and you have to start over, and sometimes it’s even worse than that, so we had one that had to close by midnight, and of course everything went wrong.”

“Of course.”

She reached and picked up the gin and tonic that had magically appeared in front of her. Sigrid, having noticed that the two of us
had struck up a conversation, had set it down and moved off without a word. I don’t know if they teach that in American Bartenders School, but they should.

“It was a transaction involving a hotel in Shreveport, Louisiana, and it could have been worse. We could have had to go to Shreveport for the closing. But since the buyer and seller both live within a few blocks of each other on the Upper East Side, we decided, hey, whatthehell, we’ll do it right here.”

“And whom were you representing? The buyer or the seller?”

“The lender. Like, who cares who gets the better of the deal, because our client’s just holding paper. Anyway, wheels are coming off left and right, and it has to close but it looks like it won’t, and on top of everything the paralegal I’m working with is a moron, because the one I like, the one who always gets everything right, has to leave the goddam office at six oh fucking clock to go on a date.” She held her glass aloft. “Pardon my Latvian, but I get carried away just thinking about it.”

“Latvian?”

“I got in the habit of not saying French. You know, like Freedom Fries?”

“Oh, right.”

“Which is getting old now, but I like the way it sounds. ‘Pardon my Latvian.’ You take really small sips, don’t you? How was it that time?”

“Almost delicious. I’d offer you a taste, but you’d hate it.”

“Never mind then.” She looked at me, her brown eyes intent. “I’m Barbara,” she announced.

“Bernie.”

She thought about it. “Barbara Creeley.”

“Bernie Rhodenbarr.”

“I don’t know that name.”

“You’re not alone. Millions of people don’t. Why, in China alone—”

“And you don’t look familiar, either. I could swear I’ve never laid eyes on you before.”

“You and all those folks in Shanghai.”

“Unless I saw you in my peripheral vision or something. Do you come here often?”