The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,57
just sort of incredulous, that’s all.”
“Whatever you say.”
“Her name’s Lacey Kavinoky,” she said, “and she’s cute and bright and genuinely nice. And she’s gay, Bern, and she knows it. She’s not one of those oh-I-always-thought-it-might-be-interesting-to-try-being-with-a-woman women. She’s not one of those variety’s-the-spice-of-life women, either. She’s like me, she’s got nothing against men, and high on the list of things she doesn’t hold against them is her beautiful body. You remember that song?”
“I remember.”
“ ‘If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?’ Well, if you told her, Bern, she wouldn’t.”
“Great.”
“But she might hold it against me. We’ll see. But there’s one thing I can tell you for sure, and that’s that she’s not Barbara Creeley. She’s Lacey, Lacey Kavinoky, and if anybody date-rapes her it’s gonna be me.”
Twenty-One
We stayed with the West Side Drive while it became the Henry Hudson Parkway, and we kept going north and crossed the Harlem River into the Bronx. I took the 232nd Street exit and wound up on Palisade Avenue. The long narrow green strip of Riverdale Park was on our left, with the Metro North tracks between the park and the Hudson River.
I’d studied the route on the map, but there were enough one-way streets to get me disoriented, and it took a little while to find Devonshire Close. While I drove around looking for it, I told her about my mission Wednesday night, scouting the terrain and probing the Mapes defenses. The doors were out, I said, because the alarm system was one I couldn’t sabotage from outside, and all the windows were wired into it, and the coal chute, my old ace in the hole, had been trumped by bricks and cement.
“I give up,” she said. “How are you gonna get in?”
I told her I’d show her when we got there, and shortly thereafter we did just that. Before I made the turn into Devonshire Close I got out my cell phone and tried the number again, and got the machine again. This time I waited for the beep and said, “Dr. Mapes? Are you there? Please pick up if you are. It’s pretty important.”
No one did, and I broke the connection. “In case he was screening his calls,” I said.
“That’s great,” she said, “but now your voice is on his answering machine. How smart is that?”
“If it’s still on there when I leave,” I said, “then it could be a problem.”
“You’re going to erase it. That’s fine if it’s digital, but the old machines that use tape don’t really erase anything. When you tell them to, you just program them to record over the old message when somebody leaves a new one. So what if it’s a tape machine?”
“I’ll steal the tape,” I said.
I drove into Devonshire Close and spotted Mapes’s house right away. While I couldn’t have sworn to it, it looked to have the same lights on as it had two nights ago. There was a parking spot open in front of the house, and another across the street, but I did what I’d already decided to do and made the turn into Mapes’s driveway. I drove all the way to the back and parked in front of the garage, leaving the motor running.
Carolyn was saying something, but I ignored her and got out of the car. The garage door was down, and didn’t budge when I tried to lift it. There was a little door on the side of the garage. It hadn’t been locked Wednesday night and it wasn’t locked now, though the kind of lock it was likely to have wouldn’t have delayed me long. Unlocked, it delayed me not at all, and I went inside and found first a light switch and then the button to raise the garage door. I killed the light once the door was up, got back in the car, drove into the garage, pulled up alongside (and felt insignificant next to) the Lexus SUV, and cut the engine.
I started to get out of the car. Carolyn hadn’t moved. She said, “Bern, are you sure about this? We’re in the belly of the beast.”
“Not the belly. The house, where I’m going, that’s the belly.”
“So what’s this? The jaw, and we’re wedged here like a wad of tobacco, with nothing to look forward to but a lot of chewing and spitting. We’re parked in the garage of the house you’re gonna break into. What if somebody comes?”