The Burglar in the Closet - By Lawrence Block Page 0,19

up and walk in off the street to any clown with a sign in his window advertising painless extractions. The man was taking good care of my mouth and I wanted him to carry on.

And Jillian was certainly a charming young lady. And it was much nicer to be called Bernie by her than Mr. Rhodenbarr, which had always struck me as overly formal. And her fingers did have that nice spicy taste to them, and it seemed reasonable to assume that this was characteristic of more of her than her fingers alone. Jillian was Craig’s personal love interest, of course, and that was fine with me, and I had no intention of horning hornily in on another chap’s romance. That’s not my style. I only steal cash and inanimate objects. All the same, one needn’t have designs on a young lady to find her company enjoyable. And if Craig should prove to be guilty, Jillian would be out of a job and a lover just as I would be out of a dentist, and there was no reason for us to do other than console each other.

But why build sand castles? Some evil bastard had not stopped at killing Crystal Sheldrake. He’d gone on to steal jewels I’d already stolen.

And I intended to make him pay for that.

CHAPTER

Five

“You’re fantastic, Bernie.”

I must admit I’d had fantasies in which Jillian spoke those very words to me, and in approximately that tone of voice, but I hadn’t been hanging up a telephone when it happened. I’d planned on being in a horizontal position at the time. Instead I was vertical, and I was replacing the receiver of the phone that perched on the desk of Marian the Receptionist. Marian was out for the day. Craig Sheldrake, on the other hand, was not. He was still behind bars—which was what my phone conversation had just determined.

A few other calls had revealed a few other things. Craig’s regular attorney was a man by the name of Carson Verrill, with offices somewhere downtown. Verrill had engaged a criminal lawyer named Errol Blankenship to represent Craig in this particular matter. (The choice of phrasing was that of someone in Verrill’s office.) Blankenship had an office listed in the phone book on Madison Avenue in the thirties. I tried his phone and no one answered it. If he had a home phone, either his home was outside of Manhattan or the number was unlisted. I let it go. I figured he was in court or something and his secretary had decided to celebrate by taking a long lunch hour.

Craig had been arrested in his own Upper East Side apartment around six-thirty in the morning. Not many good things happen at that time of day and being arrested certainly isn’t one of them. They’d let him shave and change from his pajamas into something more suitable for street wear. I hoped he’d known to wear loafers, but how many straight-arrow citizens would think of that? They don’t always take your shoelaces away from you in jail, but periodically some Yo-Yo decides you look like the suicidal sort, and there you are clumping around with your shoes falling off your feet.

Well, probably that was the least of his worries.

He was in a cell now in a hostile building downtown on Centre Street. I don’t suppose he was happy about it. I’ve never known anyone who was. I’d asked if he could have visitors and the person I talked to didn’t seem to be the voice of authority on the subject. He said he thought so, but why didn’t I drop around and make sure? Whatever the ruling, the last thing I wanted to do was drop around that grim establishment myself. My previous visits had not been the sort to make me anxious to return for old times’ sake.

“You’re fantastic, Bernie.”

Actually, she didn’t say it again. I’m repeating it so as to preserve the thread of this narrative. What I said in reply was that she shouldn’t be silly, that I was not fantastic, and even if I did happen to be moderately sensational in certain unspecified other areas, nevertheless I’d done nothing remarkable in her presence. Yet.

“You could have made the same calls and found out the same information,” I said. “You just don’t have experience with this sort of thing.”

“I wouldn’t have had any idea what to do.”

“You could have figured it out.”

“And I would have gotten all rattled on the phone. I sometimes get terribly nervous.