the Sikh and whoever had sent him would know they’d been hoodwinked, which meant I had to avoid whatever places they might logically expect to find me. The store was out, obviously, and so was the apartment, since anyone with access to a Manhattan phone book can ferret out my address.
I flagged a cab heading downtown on Second Avenue. The driver was young and Hispanic, with alert eyes. Were those eyes registering me even as he asked my destination?
“The Village,” I said.
“What part of it?”
“Sheridan Square.”
He nodded shortly and away we went.
Carolyn Kaiser’s apartment was on Arbor Court, one of those side-goggled Village lanes I can only find if I start out from the right place. Sheridan Square was the wrong place, so I had to walk up to Greenwich Avenue and then west and south until I hit it. I didn’t remember which building was hers, so I went into the vestibules of several until I found her name on a mailbox and rang her bell.
Nobody home. I’d have called first but I didn’t have her number with me and it was unlisted, and it’s easier to pass a needle through the eye of a camel than to get an unlisted number out of an Information operator. It’s hard enough to get listed numbers. I rang a couple of top-floor bells until someone buzzed me into the building. Carolyn lived on the first floor. I took one look at the locks on her door and turned around and left.
I checked a couple of hardware stores on Hudson. All closed. There was a locksmith, but could I really ask him to sell me burglar’s tools? I didn’t even try. I went to a drugstore and bought masking tape and paper clips and hairpins and a couple of nail files. At the tobacco counter I added a pipesmoker’s gizmo equipped with different doohickeys for tamping, reaming, probing, and otherwise mistreating a pipe. It looked to be made of pretty decent steel.
I went back to Carolyn’s building and annoyed the top-floor tenants again and got buzzed in a second time. I went to her door and got busy.
With my ring of picks and probes, the operation wouldn’t have taken five minutes. With makeshift tools from the drugstore it took closer to ten, during which time two persons entered the building and one left it. If any of them took any notice of me they were too polite to make a scene, and I finished the task at hand and let myself into her place.
Cozy. Very Village, really. One room about fifteen feet square with a teensy lavatory added on in back, so small that your knees nudged the door when you sat on the potty. The bathtub, a large claw-footed relic, was over in the kitchen area with the sink and stove and fridge; Carolyn had had a plywood cover cut to fit it so that she could use it for chopping up vegetables. The walls were painted blue, a deep rich tone, and the window frames and exposed plumbing were a bright yellow.
I used the loo, lit a fire under the leftover coffee (with a match, the pilot didn’t work), and let one of the cats check me out. He was a Burmese and nothing intimidated him. His buddy, a wary-eyed Russian Blue, reposed on the double bed, where he tried to blend with the patchwork quilt. I scratched the Burmese behind the ear and he made that bizarre sound they make and rubbed his head against my ankle. I guess I passed inspection.
The coffee boiled. I poured a cup, took a taste, and got flashes of the mug of doctored coffee Madeleine Porlock had given me. I poured it out, heated some water and made some tea, and fortified the brew with an authoritative slug of California brandy from a bottle I found on the shelf over the sink.
It was six-thirty when I kept my appointment at Chez Porlock, and I’d bolted from the place during the seven o’clock newscast. I didn’t look at my watch again until I was sitting in Carolyn’s wicker chair with my feet up, the second cup of brandied tea half gone and the Russian Blue purring insanely in my lap. It was then just eighteen minutes after nine.
I moved the cat long enough to turn Carolyn’s radio to one of the all-news stations, then settled back on the chair again. The cat reclaimed his place and helped me listen to a report on the