Lawrence Block - The Burglar in the Rye

“I didn’t have any kind of a breakfast,” I said, “now that you mention it. I fed Raffles, which was the only way to get him out from underfoot. The poor guy was starving. So was I, and I still am, so I certainly don’t want to skip lunch.”

“That pig,” she said.

“What pig are we talking about?”

“Your pig of a cat, Bern. Did he eat his breakfast?”

“Every morsel.”

“Well, he’s two meals ahead of you. I fed him around nine-fifteen, before I opened up. I bet he didn’t say a word, did he?”

“He said ‘Meow.’ Does that count?”

“The animal’s a real con artist. Look, I’ll see you in a little while. What would you say to some pastrami sandwiches and a couple of bottles of cream soda?”

“Meow,” I said.

“That was really sweet of Marty,” she said. “Go figure, huh? You start out by stealing a man’s baseball cards, and he winds up getting you out of jail.”

“I didn’t steal his cards.”

“Well, he thought you did. My point is the relationship didn’t exactly get off on the right foot, and look at it now.”

“I’m seeing him in a couple of hours,” I said. “At his club.”

“I guess it’s been a while since you’ve seen him, huh?”

“Quite a while,” I said, and glanced at my watch. “Something like twenty-two hours.”

“Where did you-”

“At the Paddington,” I said. “Not last night, but earlier in the day. When I was on my way out of the place, he was on his way in.”

“What was he doing there?”

“He didn’t say,” I said, “because we didn’t speak. But my guess would be that he was committing adultery.”

“Is it that kind of a hotel, Bern?”

“The kind you commit adultery in? What other kind is there?”

“I mean is it crawling with hookers? Because I didn’t think it had that kind of reputation.”

“It doesn’t,” I said, “and it wasn’t, but you don’t need a hooker for adultery. All you need is a partner you’re not married to.”

“And he had one?”

“Right there on his arm. I got a good look at her, and she was worth looking at. But I don’t think she looked at me, or if she did she wasn’t paying attention. Because she didn’t recognize me.”

“She was someone you knew?”

“No.”

“Oh. For a minute there I thought…”

“Thought what?”

“That you were going to say it was Alice Cottrell.”

“Nope.”

“Not if you didn’t know her. But in that case why would you expect her to recognize you?”

“Not then,” I said. “Later.”

“Later?”

“When I met her in the sixth-floor hallway,” I said. “God knows I remembered her, even if she was dressed up like Paddington Bear this time around. And she remembered me later on in the lobby. ‘That’s him!’ she sang out, the little darling.”

“She’s the one you saw with Marty?”

“The very same,” I said, “and I’ve got to say I admire the man’s taste. Her name’s Isis Gauthier and she lives right there at the hotel.”

“And she turned you in to the cops, and Marty bailed you out.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What does it all have to do with the letters?”

“I don’t know.”

“Or the murder. Is it all connected?”

“Good question.”

“There’s nothing like pastrami, is there, Bern?”

“Nothing like it.”

“And I don’t know why cream soda goes with it. It doesn’t go with anything else.”

“You’re right about that.”

“ Bern, what happened last night?”

“I wish I knew,” I said, “because I was there when it happened, and I got scooped up in the net, and I’d be a lot happier if I knew what was going on.”

I went over it again, from my own arrival at the Paddington the previous evening to my departure a little while later, handcuffs on my wrists and Ray’s singular version of the Miranda warning ringing in my ears.

“My mother always told me to wear clean underwear,” I said. “In case I got hit by a car.”

“Mine told me the same thing, Bern, but she never said why. I just figured it was one of the things decent people did. Anyway, what good would it do? If you got hit by a car, wouldn’t your underwear get messed up along with everything else?”

“I never thought of that,” I admitted. “But I’ve taken her advice and put on clean underwear every morning, and in all these years I’ve never been hit by a car.”

“What a waste.”

“But what she should have said,” I went on, “is to wear clean underwear in case you get strip-searched by the cops.”

“Because that’s a lot more likely than getting mowed down by a Toyota?”

“It’s certainly worked out that way for me. The thing is, though, what would be really embarrassing is if you had dirty drawers when you were being strip-searched. I mean, it’s embarrassing enough with clean ones.”

“I can imagine.”

“But if you got run over by a car, the odds are you’d be unconscious.”

“Or dead.”

“Either way, you wouldn’t even know your underwear was dirty. And if you were awake, would you care? I’d have too much on my mind to be embarrassed about my underwear.”

“It was embarrassing last night, huh?”

“Getting searched? I’ll tell you, it would have been a lot worse if they’d found anything. And I’m not talking about dirty underwear.”

“Good,” she said, “because we’ve talked plenty about it already and it’d be fine with me if we never talked about it again. They didn’t find anything, Bern?”

“Not a thing. They didn’t find my tools, or they’d have had more charges to bring. And they didn’t find Gulliver Fairborn’s letters to his agent, which figured, because neither did I. And they also didn’t find-”

The door opened.

“-out what happened to the Mets last night,” I said innocently. “That young left-hander they just called up from Sarasota was supposed to start last night, but I never heard how he made out.”

Carolyn was looking at me as though I’d lost my mind, or at the very least misplaced it. Then she glanced over at the doorway and got the picture.

It was Ray Kirschmann, wearing a dark blue suit and a red-and-blue-striped tie and, in all likelihood, clean underwear, which I hoped for his sake fit him better than the suit did. He looked at me, shook his head, looked at Carolyn, shook his head again, and came over to lean on my counter.

“I heard they let you out,” he said. “I’m sorry I had to lock you up in the first place. I didn’t have a whole lotta choice in the matter.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t suppose you did.”

“No hard feelin’s, Bern?”

“No hard feelings, Ray.”

“Glad to hear it. Bern, I gotta tell you, you’re gettin’ a little old to be creepin’ around hotels. That’s a young man’s game, and you ain’t a kid no more. What you are, you’re knockin’ on the door of middle age.”

“If I am,” I said, “I’m knocking gently. And if they don’t let me in, I’m not going to pick the lock.”

“Then it’d be the first one in ages that you didn’t,” he said. “You were in the old lady’s room last night, weren’t you?”

“What gives you that idea?”

His expression turned crafty. “Nothin’,” he said.

“Nothing?”

“Nothin’ at all, Bern. No burglar tools, no wad of cash, no coin collection, no jewelry. What did the English guy say about a dog that never barks?”

What indeed? I’ve thought about that sentence, and I have to assume the Englishman in question was Sherlock Holmes, and that the dog in question was not the titular Hound of the Baskervilles (a common mistake) but the beast in “Silver Blaze” who remains silent as a basenji. But at the time the only English guy I could think of was Redmond O’Hanlon, who when last I looked had enough on his mind with jaguars and scorpions and biting flies, not to mention our friend the toothpick fish. What did he care about dogs?