Lawrence Block - A Ticket To The Boneyard

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"It's just as well. I made it an early night and slept like a log."

"You probably needed it."

"I probably did." A pause. "Your flowers are beautiful today."

I kept my voice neutral. "Are they?"

"Absolutely. I think they're like homemade soup, I think they're actually better on the second day."

Across the street two teenagers leaned against the steel shutter of an army-surplus store, alternately scanning the street and sending casual glances toward me. I said, "I'd like to come over."

"I'd like that. Can you give me an hour or so?"

"I suppose so."

She laughed. "But you don't sound happy about it. Let's see, it's a quarter to twelve. Why don't you come over at one o'clock or a few minutes after. Is that all right?"

"Sure."

I hung up the phone. The two boys across the street were still keeping an eye on me. I had the sudden urge to go over there and ask them what the hell they were staring at. That would have been asking for trouble, but I felt like it all the same.

Instead I turned and walked away. When I'd gone half a block I turned and looked over my shoulder at them. They were still lounging against the same steel shutter, and they didn't appear to have moved.

Maybe they hadn't been looking at me at all.

I gave her the hour and fifteen minutes she'd asked for. I spent half of it as productively as the two idlers on Eighth Avenue, lurking in a doorway of my own across the street from Elaine's apartment building. People came and went, all of them strangers to me. I don't know what I was looking for. Motley, I suppose, but he didn't show.

I made myself wait until precisely one o'clock before I went over there and presented myself to her doorman. He called upstairs, handed me the phone. She asked me who had drawn the sketch, and I went blank for an instant, then told her it was Galindez. I gave the phone back to the doorman and let her tell him it was okay to let me come up. When I knocked on her door she checked the judas first, then unfastened all the locks.

"Sorry," she said. "I suppose it's silly to go through all that—"

"That's all right." I walked over to the coffee table, where a floral arrangement was a riot of color among all that black and white. I didn't know the names of all the flowers, but I recognized a couple of exotics, bird-of-paradise and antherium, and I figured I had to be looking at seventy-five dollars' worth of floral affection.

She came over and kissed me. She was wearing a yellow silk blouse over black harem pants, and her feet were bare. She said, "See what I mean? They're prettier than yesterday."

"If you say so."

"Some of the buds are starting to open, I think that's what it is." Then I guess she picked up on the tone of what I'd said and she looked at me and asked if something was the matter.

"They're not my flowers," I said.

"Did you pick out something different?"

"I didn't send any flowers, Elaine."

It didn't take her long. I looked at her face and watched the wheels turn in her mind. She said, "Jesus Christ. You're not kidding around, are you, Matt?"

"Of course not."

"There was no note, but it never even occurred to me that they weren't from you. For God's sake, I thanked you for them. Yesterday. I called you, remember?"

"You didn't mention flowers."

"I didn't?"

"Not specifically. You thanked me for being romantic."

"What did you think I meant?"

"I don't know. I was a little groggy at the time, I'd dozed off in front of the TV set. I guess I just thought you were referring to the night we'd had together."

"Well, I was," she said. "Sort of. The night and the flowers. In my mind they more or less went together."

"There was no note?"

"Of course not. I figured you didn't bother with a note because you knew I'd know who sent them. And I did, but—"

"But I hadn't."

"Evidently not." She had paled at the news, but her color was back now. She said, "I'm having a little trouble adjusting to this. I've spent the past twenty-four hours enjoying the flowers and thinking warm thoughts about you for having sent them, and now they're not your flowers at all. I suppose they're from him, aren't they?"

"Unless someone else sent them to you."

She shook her head. "My gentlemen friends don't send flowers, I'm afraid. God. I feel like throwing them out."

"They're the same flowers they were ten minutes ago."

"I know, but—"

"What time did they get here?"

"When did I call you, around five o'clock?"

"Something like that."

"They came an hour or two before then."

"Who delivered them?"

"I don't know."

"Well, was it a kid from the florist or what? And did you happen to get the name of the florist? Was there anything on the wrapper?"

She was shaking her head. "Nobody delivered them."

"What do you mean? They couldn't have just turned up on your doorstep."

"That's exactly what they did."

"And you opened the door and there they were?"

"Just about. I had a visitor, and when I let him in he handed them to me. For a split second I thought they were from him, which didn't make any sense, and then he explained they'd been sitting on my welcome mat when he arrived. At which point I immediately assumed they were from you."

"You figured I just dropped them on your doorstep and left?"

"I thought you probably had them delivered. And then I was in the shower and didn't hear the bell, so the delivery boy left them. Or he left them with the doorman, and the doorman left them there when I didn't respond to the bell." She laid a hand on my arm. "To tell the truth," she said, "I didn't give the matter that much thought. I was just, well, moved, you know? Impressed."

"And touched that I had sent you flowers."

"Yes, that's right."

"It certainly makes me wish they were mine."

"Oh, Matt, I don't—"

"It does. And they're beautiful flowers, you can't get around it. I should have kept my mouth shut and taken credit for them."

"Think so, huh?"

"Why not? They're a hell of a good romantic gesture. I can see where a guy could get laid on the strength of something like that."

Her face softened, and her arm moved to circle my waist. "Ah, baby," she said. "What makes you think you need flowers?"

Afterward we lay quietly together for a long while, not asleep but not entirely awake. At one point I thought of something and laughed softly to myself. Not softly enough, because she asked me what was so funny.

I said, "Some vegetarian."

"Some what? Oh." She rolled onto her side and opened her big eyes at me. "A person who abstains entirely from animal matter," she said, "runs the risk over a long period of time of developing a vitamin B-12 deficiency."

"Is that serious?"

"It can lead to pernicious anemia."

"That doesn't sound good."

"It shouldn't. It's fatal."

"Really?"

"So they tell me."

"Well, you wouldn't want to chance that," I said. "And you can get that on a strict vegetarian diet?"

"According to what I've read."

"Can't you get B-12 from dairy products?"

"I think you can, yes."

"And don't you eat dairy? There's milk in the fridge, and yogurt, as I recall."

She nodded. "I eat dairy," she said, "and you're supposed to be able to get B-12 from dairy products, but I figure you can't be too careful, you know what I mean?"

"I think you're right."

"Because why leave something like that to chance? Pernicious anemia just doesn't sound like something a person would want to have."

"And an ounce of prevention—"

"I don't think it was an ounce," she said. "I think it was more like a spoonful."

I must have drifted off because the next thing I knew I was alone in the bed and the shower was running in the bathroom. She emerged from it a few minutes later wrapped in a towel. I took a shower myself, dried off, and got dressed, and when I went into the living room there was coffee poured for me and a plate on the table with cut-up raw vegetables and bite-size chunks of cheese. We sat at the dinette table and nibbled at the food. Across the room, the floral arrangement was as dazzling as ever in the soft light of late afternoon.

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