The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,96
I couldn’t find out without opening the door, and if they’d changed the setting—well, that was a sentence I didn’t want to finish.
That left the milk chute. Let’s just say I didn’t get stuck this time. Not on the way in, and not on the way out, either.
I drove home, parked the car right where I’d found it—who’d grab a parking space away from me at that hour? I got myself home, exchanged a friendly word with Edgar, and went straight to bed.
Thirty-Five
Bern, I hate to say it, but you don’t look so hot.”
“That’s good.”
“It is?”
“I don’t feel so hot, either, and I’d just as soon be consistent. I ran myself ragged until daybreak, and I was tired enough to sleep until nightfall, but I made myself set the alarm and forced myself to get out of bed when it rang. Don’t ask me how.”
“I won’t,” she said. We were at the Poodle Factory. I’d opened up at eleven, having stopped on my way down to pick up a new prepaid cell phone on 23rd Street. I made a few calls with it, then picked up lunch at Two Guys from Kandahar, and brought Carolyn up to date while we ate.
She said she couldn’t believe I’d gotten so much done in one night, and when I thought about it, neither could I. “I kept wanting to call it quits,” I said. “When the poor bastard showed up from Twenty-four/Seven Pizza, I wanted to walk in there, pay him for it, take it home, eat it, and go to bed.”
“Instead you broke into Mapes’s office. Swipe any drugs while you were there?”
“I told you, I didn’t take anything.”
“You went through all that just to look at his appointment book.”
“I had to, in order to schedule things. I couldn’t set up a big showdown at a time when he was going to be busy giving some kid from Larchmont a new nose in time for her Sweet Sixteen party. I needed to know his schedule before I did anything else.”
“And you called him this morning? How did you know what to say?”
“I didn’t. I played it by ear. ‘Mapes? I think you know who this is.’ And evidently he thought so, too, because we went on from there.”
“Was that the voice you used, Bern? Were you trying to sound like anybody in particular?”
I thought about it. “Maybe Broderick Crawford,” I said. “Playing a heavy, not being one of the good guys in Highway Patrol. Basically I was trying to sound menacing.”
“Well, you picked a good voice for it. Did you use it for the other calls?”
“No, because I wasn’t sure menacing was the way to go. With some of them I wanted to sound ingratiating, and with others I just wanted to sound like a reasonable man with a reasonable proposition. It was strange, because I was calling people I didn’t know.”
“Telemarketers do that all the time, Bern.”
“ ‘Hello, Mr. Quattrone. How are you today?’ ”
“I know, I can’t figure out why they do that. The only person who ever starts a conversation by asking me how I am is some dimwit on Montserrat trying to sell me a time share in Omaha.”
“Are you sure it’s not the other way around? The thing is, they want you to think they’re having a conversation with you, but most of them have never had one, so they’re at a loss. I was at a loss of my own, because I was cold-calling people without knowing whether they were interested in what I had to sell. If not, I just wanted to move on to somebody else. The hard part was deciding whether they were expressing genuine bafflement or just playing dumb. Anyway, I told them the time and the place, and we’ll see who shows up.”
“How many people are coming?”
I hauled out my list. “The names with a check mark are ones I called this morning. I’ll ask Ray to round up the ones with a star.”
“Hey, I’m on the list. You want me there?”
“Of course.”
“How come I don’t get a check mark or a star?”
“Because I didn’t call you this morning,” I said patiently, “and I didn’t think it would be necessary to have Ray bring you. I figured I’d just tell you about it, and you’d come.”
“No problem,” she said, scanning the list. “ ‘Barbara Creeley.’ I guess you’ll tell her, right? She’s a lawyer, she’s got meetings and closings all the time. Will she be able to come?”