“That’s pretty imaginative.”
“I’ll say. Well, the woman’s a writer, Bern. Anyway, I’ve got a signed copy of one of her books, but I don’t suppose it’ll ever be worth a thousand dollars, because there must be a ton of them. The line that day reached all the way to the corner. It’s the book about the doctor. Have you read it yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, you can’t borrow my copy, because it’s autographed. You’ll have to wait for the paperback. Since you haven’t read it I won’t say anything about the murder method, but I have to tell you it’s a shocker. The guy’s a proctologist, if that gives you a hint. Why can’t I ever remember the titles?”
“‘H’ Is for Preparation.”
“That’s it. Wonderful book. I think she’s gay, though, Bern. I really do.”
“Carolyn.”
“What?”
“Carolyn, she’s a character. In a book.”
“I know that. Bern, just because somebody happens to be a character in a book, do you think she can’t have a sexual preference?”
“But—”
“And don’t you think she might decide to keep it to herself? Do you figure there aren’t any closets in books?”
“But—”
“Never mind,” she said. “I understand. You’re upset about the rent, about maybe losing the store. That’s why you’re not thinking clearly.”
It was around six in the evening, some three hours after Borden Stoppelgard had paid me a fifth of fair market value for my copy of the second novel about that notorious dyke Kinsey Millhone, and I was with Carolyn Kaiser in the Bum Rap, a shabby little ginmill at Eleventh and Broadway. While it may hearken back to the days when Fourth Avenue was given over largely to dealers in secondhand books, Barnegat Books itself is situated on Eleventh Street about halfway between Broadway and University Place. (You could say it’s a stone’s throw from Fourth Avenue, but it’s a block and a half, and if you can throw a stone that far you don’t belong on Fourth Avenue or East Eleventh Street. You ought to be up in the Bronx, playing right field for the Yankees.)
Also on Eleventh Street, but two doors closer to Broadway, is the Poodle Factory, where Carolyn earns a precarious living washing dogs, many of them larger than herself. We met shortly after I bought the store, hit it off from the start, and have been best friends ever since. We usually have lunch together, and we almost always stop at the Bum Rap after work for a drink.
Typically I’ll nurse a bottle of beer while Carolyn puts away a couple of scotches. Tonight, though, when the waitress came over to ask if we wanted the usual, I started to say, “Yeah, sure,” but stopped myself. “Wait a second, Maxine,” I said.
“Oh-oh,” Carolyn said.
“Eighty-six the beer,” I said. “Make it scotch for both of us.” To Carolyn I said, “What do you mean, ‘oh-oh’?”
“False alarm,” she said. “Eighty-six the oh-oh. You had me worried for a second, that’s all.”
“Oh?”
“I was afraid you were going to order Perrier.”
“And you know that stuff makes me crazy.”
“Bern—”
“It’s the little bubbles. They’re small enough to pierce the blood-brain barrier, and the next thing you know—”
“Bern, cut it out.”
“Most people,” I said, “would be apprehensive if they thought a friend was about to order scotch, and relieved if he wound up ordering soda water. With you it’s the other way around.”
“Bern,” she said, “we both know what it means when a certain person orders Perrier.”
“It means he wants a clear head.”
“And nimble fingers, and quick reflexes, and all the other things you need if you’re about to go break into somebody’s house.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Plenty of times I’ll have a Coke or a Perrier instead of a beer. It doesn’t always mean I’m getting ready to commit a felony.”
“I know that. I don’t pretend to understand it, but I know it’s true.”
“So?”
“I also know you make it a rule not to drink any alcohol whatsoever before you go out burgling, and—”
“Burgling,” I said.
“It’s a word, isn’t it?”
“And a colorful one at that. Here are our drinks.”
“And not a moment too soon. Well, here’s to crime. Scratch that, I didn’t mean it.”
“Sure you did,” I said, and we drank.
We talked about my landlord, the book lover, and then we talked about Sue Grafton and her closeted heroine, and somewhere along the way we ordered a second round of drinks. “Two scotches,” Carolyn said. “I guess I don’t have to worry about you tonight.”
“You can sleep easy,” I said, “knowing that I’m half in the bag.” I looked down at the tabletop, where I’d been busy making interlocking rings with the bottom of my glass, trying to duplicate the Olympics logo. “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I had a reason to order scotch tonight.”
“I always order scotch,” she said, “and believe me, I always have a reason. But I’ve got to admit you had a particularly good reason after that scene with your friend Stoppelgard.”
“That’s not the reason.”
“It’s not?”
I shook my head. “I’m drinking,” I said, “to make sure I don’t commit a burglary tonight. For ten days now I’ve been fighting the urge.”
“Because of—”
“The rent increase. You know, I never got into the book business to make money. I just figured I could come close to breaking even. I made my real money stealing, and the store gave me a respectable front and provided me with all the reading material I could possibly want. And I thought it would be a good place to meet girls.”
“Well, you met me.”
“I’ve met a lot of people, and most of the meetings have been pleasant ones. A nice thing about the book business is your clientele tends to be literate and your relationships with them are rarely adversarial, today’s episode notwithstanding. And, amazingly, the store has actually become profitable as I’ve learned more about the business. Oh, it’ll never be a gold mine. Nobody gets rich doing this. But for the past year I’ve been able to live on what I take home from the shop.”
“That’s great, Bern.”
“I guess so. I never actually decided to give it up. I just kept putting it off, and then one day I realized it had been over six months since my last burglary, and then the next thing I knew it was a year. And I thought, well, maybe I’ve reformed, maybe the good moral upbringing I had as a child has finally taken hold, or maybe it’s just adulthood creeping up on me, but whatever it was I seemed ready to be a decent law-abiding citizen. Then I found out what my new landlord wanted in the way of rent and I suddenly couldn’t see the point of it all.”
“I can imagine.”
“The rent increase was on my mind all the time, and I couldn’t figure out what to do about it. Believe me, there’s no way to pick up an extra ten grand a month selling more books. What am I going to do, hike the price of the books on my three-for-a-buck table? So I found myself thinking, well, maybe I could cover the increase by stealing a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year.”
“To plow back into the business.”
“I know it doesn’t make any sense, but I just hate the thought of giving up the store. Still, I was all right until ten days ago.”
“What happened ten days ago?”
“Maybe it was nine days.”
“So what happened nine days ago?”
“No, I was right the first time. Ten days.”
“Jesus, Bernie.”
“I’m sorry. What happened was I was standing in line to get tickets for If Wishes Were Horses. I picked up a pair for the following night’s performance, but the woman in front of me was getting tickets ten days in advance. She was wearing fur and a lot of jewelry, and she was having a very la-di-da conversation with another similarly pelted and bejeweled woman, and it struck me that I knew her name and address and that she and her husband would be away from the apartment on a particular September evening.”