The Burglar on the Prowl (20 page)

T
he Pretenders have a rule against conducting business on club premises. Obviously they don’t monitor conversations at the bar or around the billiard table to make sure no one’s talking about auditions or offering a look at a script. What they want to avoid is the appearance that business is being done, and toward that end they make you check your briefcase at the door. Accordingly, I’d left the attaché case at the shop, having transferred Marty’s share to a pair of plain white envelopes. I handed them to him once we were settled in with our drinks.

“These are yours,” I said, and he lifted the flap on one just enough to see that it was full of currency. His eyes widened the slightest bit, and he put the envelopes in his pockets and patted them through the fabric of his suit jacket.

“Now there’s a surprise,” he said. “I hadn’t even known you’d, uh, taken up the good fight.”

“Friday night.”

“Extraordinary. And I gather you were successful. Highly successful, judging from the girth of those envelopes.”

“They could be all singles,” I said, “but they’re not. Yes, I’d call it a great success.” I told him how much he’d find in the envelopes, and that it represented fifteen percent of the total sum.

“How marvelous,” he said. “All of it a total loss for the shitheel, that’s the best part of it.”

“For me,” I admitted, “the best part is the money.”

“You had every right to keep all of it, Bernie. I’m quite certain I offered to waive my own interest.”

“You did, but why should you? It wouldn’t have happened without you.”

“I’m glad you feel that way.” He patted an envelope. “It’s not as though I’ll have trouble finding a use for it.”

We worked on our drinks—a martini for him, white wine for me—and chose our lunch selections, which Marty wrote down on a check for the waiter. I’m not sure why they do it that way, the waiters can hear as well as anybody else, and could presumably either remember the orders or write them down themselves. I think they like to have things they do differently just so the members will be in no danger of forgetting that they’re in a private club, not just another restaurant.

After the waiter had left, slip of paper in hand, I asked Marty if he’d had any further contact with Marisol.

“No,” he said, “nor do I expect to. That’s a closed chapter, Bernie. She chose another man, and it’s a choice she was entirely free to make. I emerged from the experience with a strong desire to punish him, which I have to say we’ve done, but no desire to chastise her, or to get her back. As I said, a closed chapter.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” I said, “but I wonder if we could peek at a page or two.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have a question or two about Marisol. Her mother’s from Puerto Rico?”

“Well, of Puerto Rican descent. I believe she was born in Brooklyn.”

“And the father’s from northern Europe.”

“One of the Baltic republics. Quite a mixture, wouldn’t you say? Fire and ice.”

“You don’t remember which Baltic republic, do you?”

“There are three, aren’t there? Two of them start with
L,
and it’s
one of those, which is just as well as I can’t recall the name of the third. Eritrea? No, that can’t be right.”

“Estonia.”

“Estonia, of course. Where’s Eritrea? No, don’t tell me, because wherever it is, her father’s not from it, or Estonia either. Does that help?”

“It could. Did you ever tell me her last name? Because I can’t seem to recall it.”

“I probably didn’t, and you’ll understand why. It’s Maris.”

“Maris? What’s the matter with Maris? I mean, Roger did all right with it.” I thought for a moment. “Oh.”

“Oh indeed. Marisol Maris. I thought she might change it, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She thought it would look distinctive on a marquee or in a list of credits without striking one as absurd. And I suppose she’s right. Now that her name’s no longer going to be coupled with mine, I can view it more objectively.”

I could see his point. There was something almost irresistibly awful about the conjunction of Marisol Maris and Martin Gilmartin.

“She wanted to honor both parts of her heritage, the Puerto Rican and the Lithuanian. Or is it Latvian?”

“It would almost have to be.”

“It would?” He frowned, then shrugged it off. “She told me she was lucky, that her mother had wanted to name her Imaculata Concepción, but her father drew the line at that. Good for him, I’d say.”

“And how old is she, Marty?”

“Unsuitably young,” he said, and smiled. I asked him what that came to in human years, and he said she was somewhere in her mid-twenties. I did the math and put her date of birth somewhere in the late Seventies, which ruled out a conclusion I’d been about to jump to. Unless—

How, I asked, had her parents met? In this country? Or, uh, somewhere else?

“In Brooklyn,” he said, too polite to ask why the hell I wanted to know. “He came over in the late Sixties or early Seventies. He was
in Toronto for a chess tournament and defected, and then managed to immigrate to the States. He was living in Bay Ridge, and she was in Sunset Park, just a few blocks away, and they met and fell in love.” He cocked his head and looked at me. “If you want to know more,” he said, “you’d have to ask her. I assume she’s kept the apartment, although it’ll be up to the shitheel to send in the check each month. Would you like me to give you the address?”

That was the second conversation in a row to end the same way, with someone offering to furnish an address. One more and I’d be willing to add it to the list of coincidences, but for now it didn’t seem all that remarkable. But I did take down Marisol Maris’s address, and her phone number, too.

I went straight back to the store, and the most interesting thing that happened all afternoon took place between the covers of
Lettuce Prey.
I marked my place and closed the book with fifty pages to go, stopping only because I was late for my standing rendezvous at the Bum Rap. When I got there Carolyn was already at our regular table. She wasn’t alone, but looked as though she wanted to be.

I said, “Hi, Carolyn. Hi Ray,” and took a seat with her on my left and him on my right, perfectly placed to be the umpire if they decided to have a tennis match.

“It’s good you’re here,” Ray said. “Short Stuff an’ I was just beginnin’ to get on each other’s nerves.”

“It must be the weather,” I said. “The barometric pressure or something. You normally get along so well.”

“The more small talk you make,” she said, “the longer he’s gonna stick around.”

“I’m about to tear myself away,” he said. “Bernie, you remember those newspaper clippin’s in the fat guy’s wallet? Well, they translated the Russian ones, an’ they were all about the Black Scourge of Ringo.”

“Riga.”

“Whatever. They got somebody workin’ on the others, workin’
on findin’ someone who can translate ’em, but I’d give you odds they’re the same.”

“No bet.”

“Just as well, ’cause I’d be takin’ your money. See, they’re in our alphabet, an’ none of the words look like what you or I’d call a word, but there was one that I recognized from the translations, on account of it’s a name.”

“Kukarov.”

“Now how in hell did you know that?” He held up a hand to forestall an explanation. “Never mind, Bernie. You got somethin’ goin’, and that’s all I gotta know. Any minute now those rabbits are gonna be flyin’.”

When he cleared the door Carolyn said, “Of course he walked off without paying for his beer. You know something? I’d have bought him a whole case to get rid of him.”

“Oh, Ray’s all right.”

“No,” she said, “he’s not. Where did the flying rabbits come from, anyway?”

“He wants me to pull one out of my attaché case.”

“You’ve got a rabbit in your attaché case?”

“Or out of my hat, and I don’t have a hat, either. He wants me to get everybody in a room and unmask a killer, and I don’t see how I can.”

“Because you don’t know what happened.”

“Oh, I’ve got a pretty good idea what happened,” I said, “and how it happened, and who made it happen. But this isn’t the usual kind of case, where there are all of these suspects and one of them did it.”

“There aren’t really any suspects, Bern.”

“I know. Usually all sorts of people walk into the bookstore, and one of them turns out to be the killer. This time the only person who walked in was Valdi Berzins, the fat man from the Latvian embassy, and he can’t be a suspect because he got killed right away.”

“So what are you gonna do?”

“I shouldn’t have to do anything,” I said. “I already made a big
score, and got away clean. I even got a girlfriend out of the deal. It’s not a great way to meet girls, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, but in this case it worked out fine. I actually told her the truth about myself, which is something I generally tend to avoid, but I had no choice, and so far she seems to be able to handle it. So I could stop now and let the police work it out or not work it out, and everything would be fine.”

“But you won’t, will you?”

“I might.”

“Yeah, right,” she said. “Fat chance, Bern.”

I called Barbara, and when the machine picked up I rang off and tried her at the office. It looked like a late night, she said, and I said that was probably just as well, as I had some things I ought to take care of. She was a sworn officer of the court, she reminded me, so if the things I had to do weren’t legal, she’d prefer not to have fore-knowledge of them. I told her not to worry her pretty little head, and she gave me a suggestion which, on the face of it, struck me as physically impossible. “Pardon my Latvian,” she added, and we agreed we’d talk tomorrow.

I took a bus to 34th Street, had a slice of pizza and a Coke, and transferred to a crosstown bus to Lexington. I walked into and out of half a dozen saloons, including Parsifal’s, but didn’t spend more than a couple of minutes in any of them. I did make a few phone calls, including one to Crandall Mapes in Riverdale. A man answered, and I said, “I’m not sure I have the right number. I’m trying to reach Clifford Mapes, the composer.”

“I never heard of him,” he said. “I didn’t even know there
was
a composer named Mapes. What sort of music does he compose?”

“Oh, no music,” I said. “He composes limericks. He’s brilliant at it.”

“Good for him,” he said, and rang off, and I wasted a good twenty minutes fiddling around with the rhymed saga of a poor fellow named Mapes, who got into some terrible scrapes. Either that
or he had a few narrow escapes, as you prefer. The last line might have involved women with curious shapes, or pissing all over the drapes, but the couplet in the middle was hopeless and I finally ordered myself to drop it. It’s yours, if you want to mess with it. Feel free.

The other calls were to the number Marty had given me, and I got to hear the recorded voice of Marisol Maris, inviting me to leave a message. She had a nice voice, and if there was any trace of San Juan or Riga in it, I couldn’t hear it. She sounded like any sweet young thing from Oakmont, PA.

I didn’t leave a message, not even a fake one to see if she was screening her calls. She was an actress, she wouldn’t screen her calls, she’d grab the phone the minute it rang, as sure as hope springs eternal. If the machine was picking up, that meant she was out—and not with Mapes, who was home in his big old house on Devonshire Close, trying not to think of a limerick with his name in it.

I walked uptown and west, passing through Times Square, and stopping whenever I found a working pay phone to try her number again. I had my finger poised to break the connection the instant I knew it was the machine answering. If you’re quick about it, you get your coins back. I got it right all but one time, which struck me as pretty good, since you only get your coins back somewhere around sixty percent of the time from a New York pay phone even if there’s no answer at all.

I got so good at it that, when I called from a phone mounted on the exterior wall of a bodega at Ninth Avenue and 46th Street, I rang off and scooped up my quarters only to realize belatedly that it wasn’t a machine that had just answered. It was the same voice as the one on the machine, but it was live and in person, and I’d hung up on it all the same.

I tried the number again—I was in no danger of forgetting it—and this time her “Hello?” had an edge to it. “Sorry,” I said. “That was me a moment ago, and I’m afraid we got disconnected.”

“I wondered what happened.”

“It’s good you’re home,” I said. “Stay right where you are. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

I got over there in a hurry. The building was your basic Hell’s Kitchen tenement, with four apartments to a floor, and the bell for 3-C was marked
MARIS
. I rang, and her voice over the intercom was inaudible over all the static. “It’s me,” I said, accurately if not helpfully, and she found that sufficiently reassuring to buzz me in.

I took the stairs two at a time, and the door marked 3-C opened just as I was reaching to knock on it. The young woman who opened it was tall and slender, with the sort of awkward grace that gets called coltish. She had Baltic blue eyes and honey blonde hair and high cheekbones and rich tawny brown skin and a generous, full-lipped mouth that made you grateful the Supreme Court knocked out all those dumb laws against the very thing that mouth put you in mind of.

She looked frightened, but not necessarily of me. “Who are you?” she demanded. “Why are you here? What do you want?”

“My name is Bernie Rhodenbarr,” I said. “And I want to talk to you about Valentine Kukarov.”

She took a step backward, put her hand to her remarkable mouth, and burst into tears.

I
t was after ten when I left Marisol’s apartment. I walked back to Ninth Avenue and hailed a cab, something I seemed to have been doing a lot that day. Sometimes I’ll go weeks without taking a taxi, and all of a sudden I was flagging them left and right.

This one let me off in front of Parsifal’s, where an owlish young fellow looked as though he couldn’t believe his luck, either at having a cab drop right into his lap that way or at the young woman who was draped on his arm and ready to share it with him. I wished them well and went on inside.

Sigrid’s shift hadn’t started yet when I’d come in earlier, but she was behind the bar now, serving drinks to the Thank God Monday’s Over crowd. I eyeballed the room, then went and found a spot at the bar. She came over and said, “It’s either Laphroaig or Pellegrino. What kind of a mood are we in tonight?”

I felt more like a glass of brandy—it had been a long day—but it would have been gauche to suggest it. I went with the Laphroaig, and when she brought it I crooked a forefinger and motioned her in close. “Late Friday night,” I said, “I was talking with a woman named Barbara. Dark hair, had it up in a bun—”

“I remember.”

“You were starting to tell us about a guy who came on strong earlier
in the evening,” I said, “and then you did a quick one-eighty and changed the subject.”

“Oh?”

“It was pretty smooth,” I said. “She didn’t notice it, but I did, and that might be because I was looking for it. My guess is you were behind the stick two nights earlier, and he was the same guy she went home with that night, and as soon as you made the connection you dropped the subject.”

“That’s your guess, is it?”

“It’s an educated guess.”

“Well, you seem like an educated guy. Maybe you’re even smart enough to tell me why you and I are having this conversation.”

“I’m hoping you’ll help me find him.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“I know his name,” I said. “Mine is Bernie Rhodenbarr, and that’s all you’d have to know in order to track me down. But his is William Johnson, and he’s not the only one in Manhattan.”

“You know more about him than I do,” she said. “I didn’t even know his name until just now. And you still haven’t said why I should help you find him.”

“He took Barbara home and fed her a couple of Roofies, and when she passed out he raped her.”

“Christ in the foothills.”

“Then he helped himself to a few souvenirs and went home.”

“What a son of a bitch,” she said. “I wondered what his game was. I knew there was something creepy about him, but that goes beyond creepy.”

“I don’t think it’s the first time he’s used that kind of pharmaceutical assistance,” I said, “and I don’t think it’ll be the last. I’d like to do something about it.”

“Jesus, I’ll say. Something that involves surgery, I would hope. Hang on a second.”

She went down the bar to attend to someone who’d run dry, and I worked on my Laphroaig. “I don’t know how you can drink that,” she said on her return. “It tastes like medicine to me.”

“Strong medicine,” I agreed.

“The thing about alcohol,” she said, “is it doesn’t wear out its welcome. You work in a pizza place, within a couple of months you lose your taste for pizza. You tend bar, you drink as much as ever.”

“Have something.”

“Not till my shift ends, but thanks. You said you wanted me to help you find God’s gift to women. I’m game, but I can’t think how. You’re not a cop, are you?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. You could be a private eye. I’ve known six of them, and I swear the only thing they’ve got in common is the state gave all six of them a license.”

“That lets me out,” I told her. “They’d never give me one.”

“Bad moral fiber?”

“Worse than that. A felony conviction.”

“No kidding. It wasn’t rape, was it, or something nasty like that? Then I won’t ask what for. I still don’t know how I can help.”

“You could describe the guy. I don’t have a clue what he looks like.”

“Barbara won’t tell you?”

“Barbara doesn’t remember a thing.”

“Then how in hell do you know his name? And how do
I
know it’s the same guy as the one who hit on me?”

“You saw the two of them leave the bar together, remember?”

“Oh, right. But maybe she ditched him and went somewhere else and picked up some other boy wonder, and he was the one who fed her the Roofies. I just wish you could mention one thing about him so I was sure we were talking about the same person.”

“He has a very deep voice.”

“Yeah, that’s him, the son of a bitch. Now how on earth do you happen to know that?”

“That’s confidential.”

“Confidential, huh? Hang on.” She went away and came back just as I was having another sip of my medicine. “I could describe him,” she said. “He’s about six-three, very big in the chest and shoulders, with the kind of muscular development you get in the
gym, and probably not without anabolic steroids. Biceps like Popeye when he’s full of spinach.”

“Tall and muscular,” I said.

“Dark complexion, as if he goes straight from the gym to the tanning salon. Black hair, and he parts it on the side and slicks it down with mousse or goo or something, so it wouldn’t move in a hurricane. Has a big jaw, not enough to remind you of Jay Leno, but it’s out there. Eyes are set deep, with a little bit of a slant to them.”

“That’s a pretty good description.”

“You think? It seems to me it would fit a lot of people. You couldn’t pick him out of a lineup, could you? Oh, I know!”

She turned around and came back with an order pad and a pencil, tore a sheet from the pad and turned it over on top of the bar. “I took a course,” she said. “Drawing on the right side of the brain. The trick is getting into a right-brain mode. Do you mind?” She picked up my glass of Laphroaig and downed it in a single swallow. “Yuck, I don’t know how you can stand that stuff. Just give it a minute. Okay, I think I’m shifting into a right-brain frame of mind.”

She began sketching, and I watched, fascinated, as Barbara’s date-rape date took shape upon the slip of paper. “He’s a good-looking guy,” I noted. “You wouldn’t think he’d have trouble getting girls on his own.”

“I suppose so. Not my type, though.” She turned the pencil around, erased an area around the mouth, then tried it again. “I like older men.”

“He’s thirty-four.”

“Well, he was born about thirty years too late. ‘If you’re not gray, please go away.’ That’s my motto.”

“Really.”

“Older men know how to treat a woman,” she said. “On the one hand they pamper you, and at the same time they see right through your bullshit. They may think it’s charming, but they know it’s crap. The worst thing about this job is the crowd’s too young. I never meet anybody I’m interested in.”

“The only older guys I know,” I said, “are either married or gay.”

“You can keep the gay ones, but married’s fine. I’m a lot happier with a man who’s got a wife to go home to.” She frowned at the drawing, turned it to face me. “It’s getting close,” she said, “but it’s not quite right, and—well, fuck me with a stick.” She picked up her drawing, crumpled it in her fist, and flipped it over her shoulder onto the back bar, where it nestled between bottles of Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark.

“Hey,” I said. “Even if it’s not Van Gogh, I could use it.”

“You don’t need it. Don’t turn around, not just yet. You’ll never believe who just walked in the door.”

Of course I believed it. I should have expected it. With the long arm of coincidence rolling the dice, how could William Johnson fail to make an appearance just as Sigrid was putting the finishing touches on his portrait?

And, granted a look at the original, I have to say she’d turned out an excellent likeness. Up close and in living color, there was a quality of spoiled self-indulgence she hadn’t quite captured, a look around the mouth reminiscent of some of the Roman emperors. And not Marcus Aurelius, either. More like Nero, say, or Caligula.

He was wearing a muscle tee, sleeveless to display his delts and triceps and skintight to showcase his pecs, along with tight black jeans to show off his glutes. He had a deep tan already, and it wasn’t even summer yet. He surveyed the room purposefully, then headed for the back, where two women were seated together at the bar.

“Here we go,” Sigrid said. “He’s found his quarry.”

“That’s if he can split them up.”

“If he drugs them,” she said, “he may not have to. He can take them both home.”

“They’ve got short hair,” I pointed out.

“So? Oh, they might be gay? I don’t think so, but once he slips them the Roofies, does it really matter?”

“Good point. What do we do?”

“I don’t know. Don’t you have a plan?”

“I was going to follow him home,” I said, “and find out where he lives. But that won’t work if he goes home with them instead.”

“And it won’t be the evening they’re hoping for, either. C’mon.”

“C’mon? C’mon and do what?”

“Improvise,” she said. “Go help him hit on them while I take care of everybody’s drinks.”

She was, as I already knew, an actress and a model. She’d also demonstrated an enviable facility for drawing faces. I was willing to believe she had multiple talents, some of the more interesting of which I’d never learn about because I was too young for her. One of them, it turned out, was close-up magic. I don’t know how she did it, but after two rounds of drinks Audrey and Claire and I were clearheaded enough to drive an obstacle course, while William Johnson was a coma looking for a place to lie down.

The two women, who’d thought Johnson and I were at least promising, found his sudden lapse into word-slurring eye-rolling idiocy more than a little disconcerting. Sigrid acted as though he pulled this all the time.

“Oh, not again,” she said, in a voice that carried throughout the room. “He’s a nice enough guy, but that’s the last time he’s getting a drink in here. Bernie, grab him, will you? Before he slides off the stool and lands on his empty head.”

She came around from behind the bar, deputized one of her regulars to cover for her, and the two of us each got an arm under one of his and walked him out the door. He was a big guy, but she was a big girl, and must have had muscles even if they didn’t show the way his did. Between the two of us, we had surprisingly little trouble walking him down the block and around the corner. There was a narrow alley on 37th Street, running between a pair of apartment buildings; I’d spotted it while on the prowl, and that’s where we took him now.

Some of the city’s native fauna scuttled out from among the
garbage cans when we maneuvered him to the rear of the alley. We got maybe three-fourths of the way there, turned him around, and gave him a light shove, and he landed on his rear end and clunked his head on the brick wall. He wound up sprawled there, his oversized jaw slack, with drool leaking out of the side of his mouth.

“Jesus, what a charmer,” she said.

I bent over him, came up with his wallet. Without thinking I scooped out the bills, gave half to her, and stuck the rest in my pocket. “He got drunk,” I explained, “and passed out in an alley, and some lowlife rolled him.” She looked at the money for a moment, then put it away, while I went through his wallet looking for a current address. His driver’s license had him living on 40th just off Lexington, and he’d renewed it less than a year ago, so it was probably current. I was going to write it down, but it was easier to take the license along with me, and while I was at it I took his credit cards.

That brought a raised eyebrow from Sigrid. “I’m not going to use them,” I said, “but he won’t know that, will he? He’ll have to go through the hassle of calling the card companies.”

“Good,” she said. “Look at him, the misogynistic son of a bitch. I could kick him in the balls and he wouldn’t even feel it. Or would he?” She decided to find out, and the result of the experiment was inconclusive. He groaned, but didn’t really stir.

“He’ll feel it when he wakes up,” I said.

“God, I hope so. Look at him, will you? He makes an almost perfect picture. It’s just a shame he didn’t puke on himself.” She thought a moment, said, “Well, I can fix that,” and stuck a finger down her throat, anointing him generously with the missing element.

“Adolescent bulimia,” she explained. “I outgrew it years ago, but you never forget how. Like falling off a bicycle.”

“Or drowning.”

“Exactly. I’d better get back to Parsifal’s before Barry gives away the store.” She pinched my cheek. “You’re cute. It’s a shame you’re not twenty years older.”

“I’m aging as fast as I can.”

“You haven’t got an uncle with a roving eye, have you? Oh, I know what I wanted to ask you. That noise when we first walked into the alley, sort of something scuttling away? Was that rats?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Good,” she said. “Let’s hope they’re hungry.”