Lawrence Block - The Burglar In The Closet

“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.

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.

Then all at once I was walking, and for the first time all night I was by myself. I’d finally lost Frankie, who’d been with me ever since the Recovery Room. I was walking, and there in front of me was Gramercy Park. I went over to the iron gate and held onto it. Not exactly for support, but it did seem like a good idea.

The park was empty, at least as much of it as I could see. I thought of picking the lock and letting myself in. I wasn’t carrying anything cumbersome like a pry bar, but I did have my usual ring of picks and probes and that was sufficient to get me inside, safe from dogs and strangers. I could stretch out on a nice comfortable green bench and close my eyes and count Cutties sailing over rocks, and in only a matter of time I’d be…what?

Under arrest, in all likelihood. They take a dim view of bums passing out in Gramercy Park. It’s frowned on.

I maintained my grip on the gate, which did seem to be swaying, although I knew it wasn’t. A jogger ran by-or a runner jogged by, or what you will. Perhaps he was the same one who’d run or jogged around the park while I’d been talking with Miss Whatserface. Taylor? Tyler? No matter. No matter whether it was the same jogger or not, either. What was it she’d said about jogging? “Nothing that appears so ridiculous can possibly be good for you.”

I thought about that, and thought too that I probably looked fairly ridiculous myself, clinging desperately to an iron gate as I was. And while I thought this the jogger circled round again, his canvas-clad feet tapping away at the concrete. Hadn’t taken him long to circle the park, had it? Or was it a different jogger? Or had something bizarre happened to my sense of time?

I watched him jog away. “Carry on,” I said, aloud or otherwise, I’m afraid I’ll never know. “Just so you don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.”

Then I was in a cab, and I must have given the driver my address because the next thing I knew we were waiting for a traffic light on West End Avenue a block below my apartment. “This is good enough,” I told the driver. “I’ll walk the rest of the way. I can use the fresh air.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll bet you can.”

I paid him and tipped him and watched him drive away, and all the while I was sorting through my brain, trying to think of a snappy retort. I finally decided the best thing would be to yell, “Oh, yeah?” but I told myself he was already several blocks distant and was thus unlikely to be suitably impressed. I filled my lungs several times with reasonably fresh air and walked a block north.