Lawrence Block - The Burglar In The Closet

“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 crème 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 crème 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.”