The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,99
to fill the living room with chairs, and we’d barely finished before the early birds began to show up for their worms. They kept coming, by ones or twos or threes, and I took over the duties of our reluctant host, meeting them at the door and ushering them to their seats. Most of them just went where I pointed them and waited in patient silence, but now and then somebody wanted to know just what the hell was going on. I told them more would be revealed.
Barbara Creeley was there, and so was Lacey Kavinoky, and neither knew what to make of the other’s presence. GurlyGurl turned out to be every bit as attractive as Carolyn had said, and closer to Laura Ashley than L. L. Bean. She sat next to Carolyn on the love seat, but had drawn a few inches away from her when Barbara arrived.
Ray showed up with a trio in tow, including William Johnson (the date-rape artist, not the safe-deposit boxholder) and a pair of police officers, out of uniform but unmistakable all the same. One was a woman, and you could still tell she was a cop. I don’t know what it is that gives them away. Maybe it’s the way they stare at people without the least embarrassment.
The pair split up, each electing to remain standing, one alongside the front door, the other in the archway separating the living and dining rooms, and stared hard at the rest of us. Meanwhile Ray took an armchair and put his feet on the matching ottoman, pointing Johnson to the straight-backed wooden chair on his left. Johnson looked all right—he’d had thirty-six hours to shake off the effects of the Rohypnol—but he walked carefully, rather like a man who’d been kicked in the groin.
Next through the door was Marisol Maris, living up to her name, with her sea-washed blue eyes and her sun-warmed brown skin. Wally Hemphill had brought her, on my instructions. There were a few people who might need a lawyer by the time the day was over, but she was the only one who deserved a good one, and he might as well be with her from the jump.
They chose the couch, with Wally on one end and Marisol in the middle, and the seat beside her was claimed in a heartbeat by the next person who entered. He was a wispy young man with a wispy blond beard, and you probably would have guessed he was a painter even if he hadn’t used his blue jeans as a drop cloth. He was Marisol’s first cousin, from the old neighborhood in Brooklyn, and you’ll know which side of the family he was on when I tell you his name, Karlis Shenk.
So far everybody had rung the bell, but the next person used the knocker. I got the door, and in came three men in suits. The first and third were young and muscular, and if they didn’t spend as much time in the gym as William Johnson, they still looked capable of holding their own in a shoving match. Their suits were bargain specials from Men’s Wearhouse, while the man in the middle’s had been made to measure. He was well-groomed and clean-shaven, and he looked like a successful businessman, and I suppose that’s what he was. He was also Johnson’s uncle, and his name was Michael Quattrone. He looked around, and the seat he picked was one that gave him a good view of the room while presenting his back to the room’s sole unbroken wall. His two companions stayed on their feet, and posted themselves alongside the two standing cops.
They were followed moments later by two more men in suits, but the new arrivals looked like neither businessmen nor muscle. They had to be government employees, and they were, as I learned when one of them showed me his federal ID. He withdrew it before I could catch his name, and I never did learn it, so I can’t give it to you. His partner didn’t show me any ID, or much respect, either, and they both found seats and sat on them like wannabe models in posture class.
Next came a tall, wraithlike man with a precise black goatee and close-cropped black hair topped with a beret, also black, which he took off upon entering the house. His slacks and turtleneck were black, as were the carpet slippers on his feet. He might have been a monk of some particularly ascetic