The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,89

ask her. I assume she’s kept the apartment, although it’ll be up to the shitheel to send in the check each month. Would you like me to give you the address?”

That was the second conversation in a row to end the same way, with someone offering to furnish an address. One more and I’d be willing to add it to the list of coincidences, but for now it didn’t seem all that remarkable. But I did take down Marisol Maris’s address, and her phone number, too.

I went straight back to the store, and the most interesting thing that happened all afternoon took place between the covers of Lettuce Prey. I marked my place and closed the book with fifty pages to go, stopping only because I was late for my standing rendezvous at the Bum Rap. When I got there Carolyn was already at our regular table. She wasn’t alone, but looked as though she wanted to be.

I said, “Hi, Carolyn. Hi Ray,” and took a seat with her on my left and him on my right, perfectly placed to be the umpire if they decided to have a tennis match.

“It’s good you’re here,” Ray said. “Short Stuff an’ I was just beginnin’ to get on each other’s nerves.”

“It must be the weather,” I said. “The barometric pressure or something. You normally get along so well.”

“The more small talk you make,” she said, “the longer he’s gonna stick around.”

“I’m about to tear myself away,” he said. “Bernie, you remember those newspaper clippin’s in the fat guy’s wallet? Well, they translated the Russian ones, an’ they were all about the Black Scourge of Ringo.”

“Riga.”

“Whatever. They got somebody workin’ on the others, workin’ on findin’ someone who can translate ’em, but I’d give you odds they’re the same.”

“No bet.”

“Just as well, ’cause I’d be takin’ your money. See, they’re in our alphabet, an’ none of the words look like what you or I’d call a word, but there was one that I recognized from the translations, on account of it’s a name.”

“Kukarov.”

“Now how in hell did you know that?” He held up a hand to forestall an explanation. “Never mind, Bernie. You got somethin’ goin’, and that’s all I gotta know. Any minute now those rabbits are gonna be flyin’.”

When he cleared the door Carolyn said, “Of course he walked off without paying for his beer. You know something? I’d have bought him a whole case to get rid of him.”

“Oh, Ray’s all right.”

“No,” she said, “he’s not. Where did the flying rabbits come from, anyway?”

“He wants me to pull one out of my attaché case.”

“You’ve got a rabbit in your attaché case?”

“Or out of my hat, and I don’t have a hat, either. He wants me to get everybody in a room and unmask a killer, and I don’t see how I can.”

“Because you don’t know what happened.”

“Oh, I’ve got a pretty good idea what happened,” I said, “and how it happened, and who made it happen. But this isn’t the usual kind of case, where there are all of these suspects and one of them did it.”

“There aren’t really any suspects, Bern.”

“I know. Usually all sorts of people walk into the bookstore, and one of them turns out to be the killer. This time the only person who walked in was Valdi Berzins, the fat man from the Latvian embassy, and he can’t be a suspect because he got killed right away.”

“So what are you gonna do?”

“I shouldn’t have to do anything,” I said. “I already made a big score, and got away clean. I even got a girlfriend out of the deal. It’s not a great way to meet girls, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, but in this case it worked out fine. I actually told her the truth about myself, which is something I generally tend to avoid, but I had no choice, and so far she seems to be able to handle it. So I could stop now and let the police work it out or not work it out, and everything would be fine.”

“But you won’t, will you?”

“I might.”

“Yeah, right,” she said. “Fat chance, Bern.”

I called Barbara, and when the machine picked up I rang off and tried her at the office. It looked like a late night, she said, and I said that was probably just as well, as I had some things I ought to take care of. She was a sworn officer of the court, she reminded me, so if the things