The Burglar in the Closet - By Lawrence Block Page 0,41

close to the truth. Todras and Nyswander knew the story about my aunt was a lot of crap and that I was a burglar. I had no idea if they knew there was a lot of jewelry involved in the case, and I couldn’t begin to guess what they had told Jillian or what Jillian had said to them. Nor did I know anything much about Craig’s situation. He was probably still in jail, and if Blankenship was any good he’d told his client to button his lip, but how many lawyers are any good? At any moment Craig might decide to start singing a song about Bernie the Burglar, and where would that leave me? I had a ticket stub between me and a homicide charge, and I couldn’t make myself believe it amounted to an impregnable shield.

I walked around. It was a medium-nice fall day. The smog had dimmed the sun somewhat but it was still nice and bright out, the kind of day you don’t take the trouble to appreciate until the only fresh air you get to breathe is out in the exercise yard.

Damn it, who killed the woman? W. I. Grabow? Knobby? Lawyer John? Had the murderer and the lover been one and the same? Or had the murderer killed her because he was jealous of the lover, or for an entirely different reason? And where did the jewels fit in? And where did Craig fit in? And where, damnitall, did I fit in?

What I kept fitting in was phone booths, and the next time I tried the Koltnow Gallery a woman answered on the second ring. She sounded older than Denise Raphaelson, and her conversation was less playful. I said I understood she represented Walter Grabow, that I was an old friend and wanted to get in touch.

“Oh, we used to have some paintings of his, though I can’t remember that we ever made a sale for him. He was trying to get together enough grade-A material for a show and it never materialized. How did you know to call us?”

“Gotham Artists’ Guild.”

“Oh, Gag,” she said. “They’ve still got us listed as Wally’s gallery? I’m surprised. He never really caught on with anybody, you know, and then he got involved with graphics and became more interested in printmaking techniques than anything else. And he stopped painting, and I thought that was insane because his forte was his color sense, and here he was wrapping himself up in a straitjacket of detail work. Are you an artist yourself?”

“Just an old friend.”

“Then you don’t want to hear all this. You just want to know where he’s at, as the children say. Hold on a moment.” I held, and after a little while the operator told me to put in another nickel. I dropped a dime in the slot and told her to keep the change. She didn’t even thank me, and then the woman at Koltnow Gallery read off a number on King Street. I couldn’t remember where King Street was at. As the children say.

“King Street.”

“Oh, I’ll bet you’re from out of town. Are you?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, King Street is in SoHo, but just barely. It’s one block So of Ho.” She laughed mechanically, as if she used this little play on words frequently and was getting sick of it. “South of Houston, that is.”

“Oh,” I said. I now remembered where King Street was, but she went on to explain just what subways I should take to get there, all that crap, none of which I needed to hear.

“This is the most recent address I have for him,” she said. “I couldn’t swear that he’s still there, but we’ve kept him on our mailing list for invitations to gallery openings and the mail doesn’t come back, so if you write to him the Post Office’ll forward it, but—”

She went on and on. She didn’t have a telephone number listed, but I could look in the phone book, unless of course I’d already done so, and maybe he had an unlisted number, and of course if I went to the King Street address and he wasn’t there I could always check with the super, that was occasionally helpful, and all of this stupid advice that any fourth-grader could have figured out by himself.

The operator cut in again to ask for more money. They’re never satisfied. I started to drop yet another dime in the slot, then came abruptly to my senses. And hung up.

I still had the