The Burglar in the Library - By Lawrence Block Page 0,2
woods. There’ll be a fire on the hearth and frost on the counterpane.”
“A counterpane’s like a bedspread,” I said, “and I hope there won’t be any frost on ours.”
“Well, you know what I mean. Now go ahead and tell me you wouldn’t rather be spending the weekend with a beautiful woman.”
“You’re a beautiful woman, Carolyn.”
“I’m reasonably attractive,” she allowed, “but I think beautiful is stretching it. Anyway, that’s beside the point. You don’t want a woman who’s apt to lose her head over some sweet young thing like Sherry Trifle. You want a woman who’ll lose her head over you.”
“Some other time,” I said. “Right now all I want is a friend.”
The conductor came through. “Next stop Whitham Junction,” he announced. “Change here for…” and he named a string of places no one ever heard of, Pattaskinnick among them. Carolyn nudged me and pointed out the window. Snow was falling.
“Well, they said it would snow north of the city,” I said. “And here we are, north of the city, and that’s what it’s doing.”
“I think it’s beautiful,” she said, “and I hope it doesn’t stop. I hope it snows all weekend.”
I might have bridled at that if I’d been paying attention. But my mind was otherwise engaged, so much so that I missed what she said next. When I’d let a couple of lines pass without comment, she said, “Bernie?”
“Sorry. I guess I was lost in space.”
“She’s been on your mind a lot, hasn’t she?”
“Who, Lettice?”
“Uh-huh. It’s okay, Bern. It’s only natural. You took a real shot to the heart, and now you’re on this trip with me instead of her, and it stands to reason you’re going to spend a certain amount of time mooning over the woman.”
“Mooning,” I said. “Is that what I was doing?”
“Well—”
“I don’t think I was mooning,” I said. “As a matter of fact I wasn’t thinking of Miss Lettice Runcible at all.”
“You weren’t?”
I stood up, got our bags down from the overhead rack. “As it happens,” I said, “I was thinking of Raymond Chandler.”
CHAPTER
Two
I should start at the beginning.
Well, near the beginning, anyway. At my apartment, say, some ten days before Carolyn and Raffles and I caught a train to Pattaskinnick by way of Whitham Junction. It was around eleven o’clock, and my Mel Tormé tape was about to reverse itself automatically once again, and I was trying to decide what to do about it.
“Would you like to hear it again?” I asked Lettice. “Or should I put on something else?”
“It doesn’t matter, Bernie.”
I reached out a hand, rested it on her flank, and let my fingers do the walking. “We could try silence,” I suggested, “interrupted only by our own heavy breathing, and occasional cries of passion.”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to do all the heavy breathing yourself,” she said. “It’s time I got on home.”
“You could stay.”
“Oh, not tonight, Bernie.” She sat up in bed and extended her arms overhead, stretching like a cat. “I have an early day tomorrow. I’d best be off. I don’t suppose you’ve seen my panties, have you?”
“Not since you took them off. At that point I lost interest in them.”
She hopped out of bed and looked for them, and I looked at her. This was an agreeable task, because she looked absolutely splendid. She was about five-six or-seven, and quite slender, but by no means angular. Curves everywhere, but they were all gentle curves with no hairpin turns; if she’d been a road, you wouldn’t have to downshift or, God forbid, hit the brake pedal. Her hair was the color of tupelo honey, and her skin was the color of cream, and her eyes were the color of an Alpine lake. The first time I laid eyes on her I’d been struck by her beauty, and she looked a hundred times better now. Because she’d had clothes on then, and now she didn’t, and I’ll tell you, it makes a difference.
She put a dainty hand on a gorgeous hip and studied the painting on the wall opposite the bed. “I’ll miss this,” she said idly. “It’s really quite a good copy, isn’t it?”
It’s a canvas some eighteen inches square, with black vertical and horizontal lines on a white field. Some of the squares are filled in with primary colors. I asked her how she could tell it was a copy.
She raised an eyebrow. “Well, its location’s a dead giveaway, wouldn’t you say? You’d hardly be apt to find an original Mondrian here.”