The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,53

from where Ray left me to sip the dregs of my four-dollar latte, but it seemed simpler to go to the place I knew about, and I did.

I gave the clerk some money and he gave me a phone that would stop working after I’d spent a certain number of minutes talking on it. I forget how many minutes I had coming, because I knew I wasn’t going to use more than the merest fraction of them. There was only one number I was planning to call, and I didn’t expect to call it more than once or twice, maybe three times at the outside.

I left the store with my new cell phone in my breast pocket, and I just started walking, and after I’d gone a couple of blocks I realized where I was headed. I looked at my watch, and I had plenty of time, and this seemed like a reasonable way to kill it. I let my feet keep on walking in the direction they seemed to have chosen for themselves, and before very long I was standing diagonally across the street from a white brick building at the corner of Third Avenue and 34th Street. I’d walked past that building Wednesday night, I’d walked all over the damn neighborhood, but I hadn’t had any reason to notice it.

I looked it over, and all it looked like was a white brick apartment building of the sort that went up all over the city around forty years ago. Ugly no-frills architecture, cheap construction, ceilings as low as the building code permitted, and walls you could detect a fart through, even if you were deaf. They don’t build ’em like that anymore, and it’s a damn good thing.

I considered going over and having a word with the doorman, who was on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette. But what could I ask him, and what would he be likely to tell me? Nothing, I was sure, that Ray didn’t already know.

Not that I expected anything to come of the partnership he’d proposed. Still, somebody had killed the Rogovins (whom I was going to have to learn to think of as Lyle and Schnittke). And the same people—the perps, if you will—had traumatized Edgar the Doorman, sacked my apartment, stolen my emergency fund, and shot holes in a good customer of mine. (I’d never seen the fat man before, but anybody who’s in my store for less than five minutes and manages to spend $1300 is a hell of a good customer. Besides, Raffles thought he was a prince.)

If I could help Ray nail the bastards, or if we could take some money away from them, or both—well, that was fine with me.

I walked around some more, wondering just how many security cameras were recording my movements. All of these infringements on our privacy are making it particularly difficult on people who are doing something they shouldn’t be doing, so I suppose it’s not surprising the crime rate is dropping. Pretty soon every criminal in a position to make a choice will choose to go straight, or at least to go into the world of big business, where criminal conduct rarely leads to anything so extreme as a jail sentence, and where security cameras aren’t a factor.

This is the sort of musing best done in a place where alcoholic beverages are sold, and before I knew it I was in just such a place myself, an upscale saloon called Parsifal’s on Lexington a few doors south of 37th Street. It was that transitional hour when the less hardy members of the local workforce were ready to head home, while the crowd of drinkers who lived in the neighborhood had not yet arrived in full force. Thus there were seats at the bar, and I took one and ordered a Perrier. The bartender, a tall blonde with cheekbones you could cut yourself on, brought Pellegrino, squeezed a wedge of lime in it, collected a couple of bucks for it, and left me to drink myself into a stupor.

It would have been in a place just like this, I thought, that Barbara Anne Creeley would have met the deep-voiced chap who’d slipped her her first Rohypnol and then a token of his esteem, or lack thereof. I wondered if he might be fishing the same waters again, and I looked around, wondering what I thought I was looking for. Since I hadn’t seen him and had nothing to go by but his voice,