The Burglar in the Closet - By Lawrence Block Page 0,28
could poke around the edges of her life and see if any male names come into the picture. The point is that she probably had a boyfriend or two or three, and that would give us a place to start.”
She thought about it. The waitress came over with the check and I got my wallet out and paid it. Jillian, frowning in concentration, didn’t offer to pay her half of the check. Well, that was all right. After all, I’d polished off half her sandwich.
“Well,” she said, “I’ll try.”
“Just make some phone calls and see what happens. Don’t give your right name, of course. And you’d better stay pretty close to home in case Craig tries to get hold of you. I don’t know if he’ll be able to make any calls himself, but his lawyer may be getting in touch with you.”
“How will I get ahold of you, Bernie?”
“I may be hard to reach. I’m in the book, B. Rhodenbarr on West Seventy-first, but I won’t be hanging out there much. What I’ll do, I’ll call you. Is your phone listed?”
It wasn’t. She searched her wallet and wrote her number and address on the back of a beautician’s appointment card. Her appointment had been nine days ago with someone named Keith. I don’t know whether or not she kept it.
“And you, Bernie? What’ll you be doing?”
“I’ll be looking for someone.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll know her when I find her.”
“A woman? How will you know her?”
“She’ll be doing some serious drinking,” I said, “in a very frivolous bar.”
The bar was called the Recovery Room. The cocktail napkins had nurse cartoons all over them. The only one I remember featured a callipygian Florence Nightingale asking a leering sawbones what she should do with all these rectal thermometers. There was a list of bizarre cocktails posted. They had names like Ether Fizz and I-V Special and Post Mortem and were priced at two or three dollars a copy. Assorted props of a medical nature were displayed haphazardly on the walls—Red Cross splints, surgical masks, that sort of thing.
For all of this, the place didn’t seem to be drawing a hospital crowd. It was on the first floor of a brickfront building on Irving Place a few blocks below Gramercy Park, too far west of Bellevue to be catching their staff, and the clientele looked to be composed primarily of civilians who lived or worked in the neighborhood. And it was frivolous, all right. If it had been any more frivolous it would have floated away.
Frankie’s drinking, on the other hand, was certainly serious enough to keep the Recovery Room anchored in grim reality. A stinger is always a reasonably serious proposition. A brace of stingers at four o’clock on a weekday afternoon is about as serious as you can get.
I made several stops before I got to the Recovery Room. I’d started off with a stop at my own place, then cabbed down to the East Twenties and began making the rounds. A little gourmet shop on Lexington sold me a teensy-weensy bottle of imported olive oil, which I rather self-consciously opened and upended and drained around the corner. I’d read about this method of coating the old tumtum before a night of heavy drinking. I’ll tell you, it wasn’t the greatest taste sensation I ever experienced, and no sooner had I knocked it back than I began bar-hopping, hitting a few joints on Lexington, drifting over to Third Avenue, then doubling back and ultimately finding my way to the Recovery Room. In the course of this I had a white wine spritzer in each of several places and stayed long enough to determine that no one wanted to talk about Crystal Sheldrake. I did run into two fellows who would have been glad to talk about baseball and one old fart who wanted to talk about Texas, but that was as much conversation as I could scrape up.
Until I met Frankie. She was a tallish woman with curly black hair and a sullen, hard-featured face, and she was sitting at the Recovery Room’s bar sipping a stinger and smoking a Virginia Slim and humming a rather toneless version of “One for My Baby.” I suppose she was around my age, but by nightfall she’d be a lot older. Stingers’ll do that.
I somehow knew right away. It just looked like Crystal’s kind of place and Frankie looked like Crystal’s kind of people. I went up to the bar, ordered my spritzer