The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,90

I had to do weren’t legal, she’d prefer not to have fore-knowledge of them. I told her not to worry her pretty little head, and she gave me a suggestion which, on the face of it, struck me as physically impossible. “Pardon my Latvian,” she added, and we agreed we’d talk tomorrow.

I took a bus to 34th Street, had a slice of pizza and a Coke, and transferred to a crosstown bus to Lexington. I walked into and out of half a dozen saloons, including Parsifal’s, but didn’t spend more than a couple of minutes in any of them. I did make a few phone calls, including one to Crandall Mapes in Riverdale. A man answered, and I said, “I’m not sure I have the right number. I’m trying to reach Clifford Mapes, the composer.”

“I never heard of him,” he said. “I didn’t even know there was a composer named Mapes. What sort of music does he compose?”

“Oh, no music,” I said. “He composes limericks. He’s brilliant at it.”

“Good for him,” he said, and rang off, and I wasted a good twenty minutes fiddling around with the rhymed saga of a poor fellow named Mapes, who got into some terrible scrapes. Either that or he had a few narrow escapes, as you prefer. The last line might have involved women with curious shapes, or pissing all over the drapes, but the couplet in the middle was hopeless and I finally ordered myself to drop it. It’s yours, if you want to mess with it. Feel free.

The other calls were to the number Marty had given me, and I got to hear the recorded voice of Marisol Maris, inviting me to leave a message. She had a nice voice, and if there was any trace of San Juan or Riga in it, I couldn’t hear it. She sounded like any sweet young thing from Oakmont, PA.

I didn’t leave a message, not even a fake one to see if she was screening her calls. She was an actress, she wouldn’t screen her calls, she’d grab the phone the minute it rang, as sure as hope springs eternal. If the machine was picking up, that meant she was out—and not with Mapes, who was home in his big old house on Devonshire Close, trying not to think of a limerick with his name in it.

I walked uptown and west, passing through Times Square, and stopping whenever I found a working pay phone to try her number again. I had my finger poised to break the connection the instant I knew it was the machine answering. If you’re quick about it, you get your coins back. I got it right all but one time, which struck me as pretty good, since you only get your coins back somewhere around sixty percent of the time from a New York pay phone even if there’s no answer at all.

I got so good at it that, when I called from a phone mounted on the exterior wall of a bodega at Ninth Avenue and 46th Street, I rang off and scooped up my quarters only to realize belatedly that it wasn’t a machine that had just answered. It was the same voice as the one on the machine, but it was live and in person, and I’d hung up on it all the same.

I tried the number again—I was in no danger of forgetting it—and this time her “Hello?” had an edge to it. “Sorry,” I said. “That was me a moment ago, and I’m afraid we got disconnected.”

“I wondered what happened.”

“It’s good you’re home,” I said. “Stay right where you are. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

I got over there in a hurry. The building was your basic Hell’s Kitchen tenement, with four apartments to a floor, and the bell for 3-C was marked MARIS. I rang, and her voice over the intercom was inaudible over all the static. “It’s me,” I said, accurately if not helpfully, and she found that sufficiently reassuring to buzz me in.

I took the stairs two at a time, and the door marked 3-C opened just as I was reaching to knock on it. The young woman who opened it was tall and slender, with the sort of awkward grace that gets called coltish. She had Baltic blue eyes and honey blonde hair and high cheekbones and rich tawny brown skin and a generous, full-lipped mouth that made you grateful the Supreme Court knocked out all those dumb laws against