“I’m out of the business, Ray.”
“What I was thinkin’, you might run into a coat in the course of things, know what I mean? I was thinkin’ that you and me, we go back a ways, we been through a lot, the two of us, and-”
“I’m not a burglar anymore, Ray.”
“I wasn’t countin’ on a freebie, Bernie. Just a bargain.”
“I don’t steal anymore, Ray.”
“I hear you talkin’, Bern.”
“I’m not as young as I used to be. Nobody ever is but these days I’m starting to feel it. When you’re young nothing scares you. When you get older everything does. I don’t ever want to go inside again, Ray. I don’t like prisons.”
“These days they’re country clubs.”
“Then they changed a whole hell of a lot in the past few years, because I swear I never cared for them myself. You meet a better class of people on the D train.”
“Guy like you, you could get a nice job in the prison library.”
“They still lock you in at night.”
“So you’re straight, right?”
“That’s right.”
“I been here how long? All that time you haven’t had a single person walk in the store.”
“Maybe the uniform keeps ’em away, Ray.”
“Maybe business ain’t what it might be. You been in the business how long, Bern? Six months?”
“Closer to seven.”
“Bet you don’t even make the rent.”
“I do all right.” I marked my place in Soldiers Three, closed the book, put it on the shelf behind the counter. “I made a forty-dollar profit from one customer earlier this afternoon and I swear it was easier than stealing.”
“Is that a fact. You’re a guy made twenty grand in an hour and a half when things fell right.”
“And went to jail when they didn’t.”
“Forty bucks. I can see where that’d really have you turning handsprings.”
“There’s a difference between honest money and the other kind.”
“Yeah, and the difference comes to somethin’ like $19,960. This here, Bern, this is nickels and dimes. Let’s be honest. You can’t live on this.”
“I never stole that much, Ray. I never lived that high. I got a small apartment on the Upper West Side, I stay out of night clubs, I do my own wash in the machines in the basement. The store’s steady. You want to give me a hand with this?”
He helped me drag the bargain table in from the sidewalk. He said, “Look at this. A cop and a burglar both doin’ physical work. Somebody should take a picture. What do you get for these? Forty cents, three for a buck? And that’s keepin’ you in shirts and socks, huh?”
“I’m a careful shopper.”
“Look, Bern, if there’s some reason you don’t wanna help me out on this coat thing-”
“Cops,” I said.
“What about cops?”
“A guy rehabilitates himself and you refuse to believe it. You talk yourselves hoarse telling me to go straight-”
“When the hell did I ever tell you to go straight? You’re a first-class burglar. Why would I tell you to change?”
He let go of it while I filled a shopping bag with hardcover mysteries and began shutting down for the night. He told me about his partner, a clean-cut and soft-spoken young fellow with a fondness for horses and a wee amphetamine habit.
“All he does is lose and bitch about it,” Ray complained, “until this past week when he starts pickin’ the ponies with x-ray vision. Now all he does is win, and I swear I liked him better when he was losin’.”
“His luck can’t last forever, Ray.”
“That’s what I been tellin’ myself. What’s that, steel gates across the windows? You don’t take chances, do you?”
I drew the gates shut, locked them. “Well, they were already here,” I said stiffly. “Seems silly not to use them.”
“No sense makin’ it easy for another burglar, huh? No honor among thieves, isn’t that what they say? What happens if you forget the key, huh, Bern?”
He didn’t get an answer, nor do I suppose he expected one. He chuckled instead and laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. “I guess you’d just call a locksmith,” he said. “You couldn’t pick the lock, not bein’ a burglar anymore. All you are is a guy who sells books.”
Barnegat Books is on East Eleventh Street between Broadway and University Place. When I’d finished locking up I carried my shopping bag two doors east to a dog-grooming salon called the Poodle Factory. Carolyn Kaiser had a skittish Yorkie up on the grooming table and was buffing its little nails. She said, “Hey, is it that time already? Just let me finish with Prince Philip here and I’ll be ready to go. If I don’t get a drink in me soon I’ll start yipping like a chihuahua.”
I got comfortable on the pillow sofa while Carolyn put the final touches on the terrier’s pedicure and popped him back in his cage. During the course of this she complained at length about her lover’s misbehavior. Randy had come home late the previous night, drunk and disheveled and marginally disorderly, and Carolyn was sick of it.
“I think it’s time to end the relationship,” she told me, “but the question is how do I feel about ending the relationship? And the answer is I don’t know how I feel because I can’t get in touch with my feelings, and I figure if I can’t get in touch with them I might as well not feel them altogether, so let’s go someplace with a liquor license, because all I want to feel right now is better. And how was your day, Bernie?”
“A little long.”
“Yeah, you do look faintly tuckered. Let’s go, huh? I’m so sick of the smell of this place. I feel like I’m wearing Wet Dog perfume.”
We ducked around the corner to a rather tired saloon called the Bum Rap. The jukebox leaned toward country and western, and Barbara Mandrell was singing about adultery as we took stools at the long dark bar. Carolyn ordered a vodka martini on the rocks. I asked for club soda with lime and got a nod from the bartender and a puzzled stare from Carolyn.
“It’s October,” she said.
“So?”
“Lent’s in the spring.”
“Right.”
“Doctor’s orders or something? Giving the old liver a rest?”
“Just don’t feel like a drink tonight.”
“Fair enough. Well, here’s to crime. Hey, did I just say something wrong?”
So that got me onto the subject of Ray Kirschmann and his mink-loving wife, and it became Carolyn’s turn to make sympathetic noises. We’ve become good at playing that role for one another. She’s crowding thirty, with Dutch-cut dark-brown hair and remarkably clear blue eyes. She stands five-one in high heels and never wears them, and she’s built like a fire hydrant, which is dangerous in her line of work.
I met her around the time I took over the bookshop. I didn’t know Randy as well because I didn’t see as much of her; the Poodle Factory was a solo venture of Carolyn’s. Randy’s a stewardess, or was until she got grounded for biting a passenger. She’s taller and thinner than Carolyn, and a year or two younger, and faintly flighty. Randy and I are friends, I suppose, but Carolyn and I are soulmates.
My soulmate clucked sympathetically. “Cops are a pain,” she said. “Randy had an affair with a cop once. I ever tell you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“She had this phase she went through, three months or so of panic before she was ready to come out as a lesbian. I think it was some kind of denial mechanism. She slept with dozens of men. This one cop was impotent and she made fun of him and he held his gun to her head and she thought he was going to kill her. Which somebody ought to, and why the hell am I talking about her again, will you tell me that?”
“Beats me.”
“You got anything on tonight? You still seeing the woman from the art gallery?”
“We decided to go our separate ways.”
“What about the crazy poet?”
“We never really hit it off.”
“Then why don’t you come by for dinner? I got something sensational working in the slow cooker. I put it in this morning before I remembered how mad I was. It’s this Flemish beef stew with beer and shallots and mushrooms and all kinds of good things. I got plenty of Amstel for us to wash it down with, plus some Perrier if you’re serious about this temperance bit.”