The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,14

most of, and what had kept her in panty hose and eyeliner, was waitressing. Law & Order is filmed in New York, not California, which is one reason the supporting actors and bit players on the show look like actual human beings, so it was by no means unlikely for a New York–based singer/writer/actor/waitress to turn up in the show’s jury box.

If the camera had stayed on her for any length of time I probably could have said one way or another if it was Francine. But it didn’t, and consequently I couldn’t. They just gave you a glimpse of the jurors every now and then, and it was enough to assure me each time that yes, there was a definite resemblance, but not enough to let me know for sure. And, because I figured maybe the next view would be conclusive, I kept waiting for a shot of the jury and paying next to no attention to the rest of the story.

And it ended with the jury reaching a decision (they acquitted the bastard, so McCoy’s ethical lapse was for naught) while I remained not a whit closer to one of my own. I was hoping someone would demand that the jury be polled, but no, instead they cut to a shot of Sam Waterston and Fred Thompson in their office, with Waterston embittered and Thompson philosophical. Then they rolled the credits at the speed of light, but it didn’t matter, because she wouldn’t be listed there anyway. Bit players with non-speaking parts don’t generally make the crawl.

So I sat around thinking about Francine, not that there was much to think, since we’d only been seeing each other for a couple of weeks, say a month at the outside. If I remembered correctly, the night we finally went to bed together was the last night of the relationship, not because it was a disaster but because we really weren’t destined for each other, and we’d both kept it going just long enough to get through the bedchamber door, just to make sure we weren’t missing anything. Once our mutual sexual curiosity was quenched, there was really no reason for either of us to hang around.

I tried to figure out just how many years had passed since Francine and I had our moment together, and I decided it was more than three and less than six, and that was the best I could do to narrow it down. And then I found myself working out just how many women had passed in and out of my life since then. I don’t remember what number I came up with, but it really didn’t matter, because any number, high or low, was going to be depressing. I mean, suppose I’d had thirty girlfriends since Francine. Suppose I’d had two. See what I mean?

What made it even more depressing was that lately I didn’t even seem to be playing the game. I wasn’t even coming up to bat anymore, let alone taking a good healthy cut at the ball. I hadn’t been out on a date since sometime the previous fall, when I chatted up a woman who’d dropped into my bookstore late one afternoon, closed up a few minutes early, took her for a drink and to a movie at the multiplex over on Third Avenue, and then put her in a cab and never saw her again. I had her phone number, and of course she knew how to reach me, but neither of us said “I’ll call you” and neither of us did. She’d never walked into my store before, and she never did afterward, either.

And the last time I’d actually been to bed with a woman…well, I don’t know when that was. I’d had a genuine girlfriend for several months, and that had come to a bitter end sometime during the winter, not this past winter but the winter before. Then sometime the next spring (which is to say last spring, which would make it approximately a year ago) I’d acted out.

Acting out. I’m not sure when we first started calling it that, or what we used to call it before that convenient term came into widespread use. Misbehaving, maybe. Whatever you want to call it, I reacted to having my heart broken by doing three things in dogged succession. First I stayed more or less drunk for the better part of a week, but all that did was give me head-banger hangovers and a perfectly suitable case of