The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,70
I liked the way it felt in mine. There was something going on, and it had been so long that I didn’t recognize it at first.
“This apartment you took someone home to,” I said. “Is it nearby?”
“Right around the corner.”
“I wonder,” I said, “if I’ll have the feeling I’ve been there before.”
“Do you think it’s possible, Bernie?”
“I think we should find out.”
“I think you’re right,” she said. “I think we owe it to ourselves.”
Twenty-Five
If it’s all the same to you, or even if it’s not, I’ll omit details for the next half-hour or so. Suffice it to say that there are certain things which, unlike a taste for Laphroaig, don’t wear off and needn’t be reacquired. Things which, once learned, are never forgotten. Like falling off a bicycle, or drowning.
“One thing’s certain,” she said. “It wasn’t you.”
“What wasn’t me?”
“Wednesday night. I mean, I knew it wasn’t, but now I really know.”
“How’s that?”
“If it had been you,” she said, “I’d have remembered.”
“If it had been me,” I said, “I wouldn’t have waited until tonight to refresh your memory.”
“It was the damnedest thing, Bernie. I woke up with a splitting headache, and of course I’d forgotten to set the alarm, so I had to rush to get to the office. I swallowed some aspirin and took a quick shower and was out the door without my usual cup of coffee. I hopped in a cab, hit the Starbucks across the street from my office, and was at my desk at nine o’clock.”
“I’m impressed.”
“And I sat there wondering what had happened. I knew I’d been talking with somebody at the bar, but I couldn’t picture him or remember anything about him. And the next thing I remembered was waking up with a headache.”
“So maybe you didn’t bring him home after all.”
She shook her head. “I thought of that myself, but when I got home last night I could tell that someone had been here the night before. Whoever he was, he’d evidently made himself at home. It’s sort of creepy. I mean, he’d been in my things, and he’d moved stuff around.”
“Creepy’s the word for it.”
“My jewelry was arranged differently from the way I’d left it. But he must have just poked around, because he didn’t take anything. But you know what he did take?”
“What?”
“Well, you’re going to think I’m crazy, but he took my electric shaver.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy. I think he’s crazy. Why would he—”
“I know, it’s strange, isn’t it? But I looked everywhere and I can’t find it, and it’s always in the same spot, on the shelf in the bathroom. A little Lady Remington, shaped to fit a dainty feminine hand. I mean, what kind of man would want something like that?”
I took her dainty feminine hand in mine. “Not the kind who’d want to come home with you in the first place.”
“Exactly. The only thing I could think of is he took it home for his girlfriend.”
“Talk about creepy.”
“Well, if he wanted a souvenir, wouldn’t he take something more intimate, like panties or a bra?”
“That’s a point.”
“He went through my purse, but he didn’t take any money. I actually had more money than I thought I did. So he wasn’t your basic crook. Have you ever been robbed?”
A couple of times, but rather than recount either of them I made one up. “A few years ago,” I said. “A burglar came in off the fire escape. He dragged my TV over to the window, but I guess he decided it was too heavy to carry and left it there. He took a combination radio and CD player that I’d just bought, along with the CD that was in it at the time, and which I had a hard time replacing.” It’s funny how a lie can build up a momentum all its own. I reined it in, and, if you’ll allow a change of metaphors, turned the wheel hard right. “He got a few dollars, too, whatever I had around the house. But the thing that bothered me, because there was no way I could replace it, is he took my high school ring.”
“That’s really funny.”
“It is? It didn’t seem funny at the time.”
“No, funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha. Because I can’t find my class ring.”
“You’re kidding. You don’t think it was the same guy, do you?”
We both laughed, and she said she wasn’t sure he’d taken it, that it might have disappeared a while ago. “Because he left a really good pair of earrings, and a