the Musette Theater.”
“All right, so I planned it. Is that a crime?”
“No.”
“I got there a few minutes before the show let out and stood where I could keep an eye on the entrance. For a minute there I thought I’d missed you. The two of you were just about the last people out.”
“We like to stay and watch the credits.”
“She’s a real beauty, Bern. And the way she was holding your arm, and the looks she was giving you. Forget Humphrey Bogart. I figured you were in like Flynn.”
“How long were you spying on us, anyway?”
“I don’t see why you have to call it spying,” she said. “I was just acting on some perfectly justifiable friendly concern. You’d do the same for me, wouldn’t you?”
“I wouldn’t dare,” I said. “If I lurked around a dyke bar like that I’d get arrested.”
“Not true, Bern. Beat up, maybe, but not arrested. Anyway, I didn’t lurk for very long. As soon as the two of you went across the street for coffee I went home.”
“And read the new Sue Grafton.”
She shook her head. “I’m saving it until my tooth is filled. I lost the filling toward the end of the cheeseburger. I think I must have swallowed it. It won’t poison me, will it?”
“It’s probably better for you than the cheeseburger.”
“That’s what I figured. I read the blurbs on the new book, and I think it’s going to be great, but I’ll wait and read it over the weekend. In the meantime I’m rereading one of her early books. I’m about halfway through it. It’s the one with the horticultural background.”
“I don’t think I read it.”
“Really? I thought you read them all. This one’s about the Chinese landscape architect who gets strangled with his own pigtail.”
“I’d remember that. I must have missed it. What’s the title?”
“‘Q’ Is for Gardens. I’ll lend it to you when I’m done with it. I gotta run, I got a springer spaniel coming any minute for a wash and set. Did she cook you breakfast or did you take her out?”
“I didn’t stay over.”
“Probably a good move. You know me, one flop in the feathers and I want us to go pick out drapes together. You called her, though, right?”
“No answer. I don’t think she spends much time around the apartment. If you were ever there you’d know why.”
“What’s on the program for tonight? More Bogart?”
“What else?”
“So afterward you’ll take her to your place.”
“Maybe.”
“Bernie? Look at me, Bern. Are you in love?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Does that mean yes?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think it does.”
The rest of the morning passed without incident. With Carolyn off getting a tooth filled, I didn’t want to make a big deal out of lunch. I ducked around the corner and ate a slice of pizza standing up (I was standing up, the pizza was essentially horizontal). I wasn’t away from the store for more than ten minutes, but that was long enough for Ray Kirschmann to make his appearance. I found him leaning against my bargain table, thumbing a Fodor guide to West Africa.
“Some security system you got here,” he said. “I wasn’t as honest as the day is warm, I coulda walked off with all of these here.”
“You’d get yourself a hernia before you hurt me much financially,” I pointed out. “The books on that table are three for a dollar.”
“Even this here?”
“It’s four years old.”
“You got books a lot older than that an’ charge ten, twenty bucks for ’em. Sometimes more’n that.”
“What you’ve got is a guidebook for travelers,” I explained, “and they don’t improve with age. They actually depreciate pretty rapidly, because people planning trips generally want up-to-date information. How would you like to fly all the way to Gabon and find out your hotel went out of business a year ago?”
“You’d never get me there in the first place,” he said. “You gotta be crazy to go someplace like that. You’re layin’ on the beach there, drinkin’ somethin’ with fruit in it, and the next thing you know they’re havin’ theirselves a cootie tah.”
“A what?”
“You know, where they overthrow the government. Before you know it you’re the main course at a cannibal banquet.” He tossed Fodor back on my table, where it glanced off Vol. II of The Life and Letters of Hippolyte Taine—God alone could tell you what had become of Vols. I and III—and skidded the length of the table before dropping to the pavement.
“Don’t know my own strength,” he said. “Sorry about that.”
I had the