The Burglar in the Rye

“ Bern, guys don’t hit on me.”

“Not ever?”

“Once every couple of years,” she said, “some drunk wanders into the Cubby Hole or Henrietta Hudson’s and doesn’t realize he’s in a dyke bar, and if I’m standing in front of him and he’s drunk enough he’ll come on to me. But outside of that, no, guys leave me alone. Because it’s fairly obvious that I’m gay.”

“Well, you weren’t in the Cubby Hole last night.”

“No, and I wasn’t wearing slacks and a blazer, either, and my hair’s longer than I’ve worn it since I was a kid in pigtails, and I had lipstick on, Bernie, and eye shadow, for Christ’s sake.”

“No kidding. Eye shadow?”

“And things I don’t know the names of. Erica made me up. We were at her apartment, and you’d have thought we were teenagers at a slumber party, doing each other’s makeup. Except she did her own, because I wouldn’t have known what to do.”

“Eye shadow,” I said. “So they hit on you and you told them to get lost, and-”

“No.”

“No?”

“I started to, and Erica gave me a kick. Then she looked up at them with eyes big as saucers and said sure, we’d love it if they would buy us a drink. And they sat down at our table, and we quick drank our Rob Roys to make room for the round they were buying us.”

“That’s really weird,” I said. “What did she have in mind?”

“That’s what I wondered. I thought maybe the booze had hit her. You know how there are these people who never drink very much, and you wonder why not?”

“And then one night they have a few, and you find out.”

“Right. I thought maybe that was her story, in which case I was going to have to find a way to get her out of there. But then she went to the ladies’ room and motioned for me to come along.” She frowned. “Guys don’t do that, do they? Make a social event out of going to the bathroom?”

“Not the kind of guys I tend to hang out with.”

“I have to go along with the guys on this one, Bern. I don’t seem to develop a craving for company when I have to go to the jane. I just go and come back. But Erica didn’t even have to go. She just wanted a chance to talk in a male-free environment.”

“And?”

“And that was okay with me, because I had a question for her. Like what are we doing with these two clowns? And she told me to play along.”

“Play along?”

“It’ll be fun, she said. We can just sort of lead them on and jolly them along and then give them the slip.”

“You were wearing a slip?”

“Very fu

“So you went back to the two visiting firemen-”

“Meteorologists, Bern. They were two meteorologists from the Midwest, in town for the big meteorologists’ convention.”

“I didn’t know there was one.”

“Neither did we, and I’ll spare you the weather jokes, which is more than they did for us. They bought us some more drinks and then they bought us di

“At the Lorelei Room? It must have cost them…”

“In round numbers, a fortune. But what did they care? It was going on the old expense account, and it was bread on the water, because what girl would fail to show her appreciation to the guy who’d just spent a couple hundred dollars feeding her?”

“I’ve always operated at a lower financial level,” I said, “but a surprising number of women have failed to do just that.”

“Even when they’ve heard your Mel Tormé record?”

“Even then. You must have wondered how you were going to get rid of them.”

“I was too busy worrying about how I was go

“With a couple of weathermen.”

“You didn’t need them,” she said, “to know which way the wind was blowing. Actually, they were pretty decent fellows.”

“I bet their wives didn’t understand them.”

“I don’t know why not. God knows I did. What’s to understand? They were horny and wanted to get laid. I felt the same way, but with a difference.”

“And all the while Erica was flirting her head off.”

“Her head was the least of it. She kept leaning forward to give Ed a peek down her dress, and I’m positive he had a hand on her leg. Phil put his hand on my leg, and I wanted to stick a fork in it.”

“What did you do?”

“I had some more wine. I just poured it in there on top of the Rob Roys, and with coffee I had a pony of B amp;B.”

“I guess that’s more feminine than straight brandy.”

“I’d have preferred the brandy,” she said, “and instead of a pony I’d have had a whole horse. Because I had this horrible sense that we were going to go back to their hotel with them, or take them to Erica’s place, or something.”

“And-?”

“And that too,” she said, “because it wouldn’t be the first time a woman swore she was gay and turned out to be bisexual. Before the guys hit on us, I was actually starting to worry about you.”

“That I’d turn out to be bisexual after I swore up and down I was a lesbian?”

“Erica was full of questions about you,” she said. “Everything from how did we get to be friends to where you live and what you have for breakfast. It was enough to make me wonder, and then the guys turned up, and…”

“And you thought you’d wind up going home with them.”

“Right, and then we’d wake up the next morning, and Erica’d say, ‘Ohmigod, we sure were drunk last night, and I don’t remember a thing,’ and I’d have to pretend I didn’t remember, either, but I’d remember. I decided the hell with that, and I’d figure out some way to keep it from happening, but I didn’t have to. They paid the check, and we rode down on the elevator with them, and the next thing I knew Erica and I were in a cab and Phil and Ed were on the street, watching us go out of their lives.”

“Welcome to New York,” I said.

“We went to my place for a change,” she said, “and she was really excited by the whole thing. ‘Pretend I’m a man,’ she said. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘You’re a man. How about them Yankees, huh?’ But she made me play along, and it was really weird.”

“I can imagine.”

“And then it was her turn. ‘Now pretend you’re the man,’ she said, and that was weird, too. I don’t even like talking about this stuff, Bern.”

“Me neither. I’ve never been much on locker-room conversations.”

“Or powder-room conversations, either. But I didn’t have any more conversations with Erica, because I fell asleep right away. I woke up early, but she was already dressed and gone, so all I woke up with was a hangover.”

“Where do you think it’s going?”

“The hangover? I think it’s going away, thanks to Two Guys from Tashkent. Oh, you mean me and Erica? I don’t know. I guess time will tell. How about you and Alice?”

“I think it’s already gone.”

“And how about Gulliver Fairborn’s letters, and those rubies you found? And the murder of Anthea Landau? And everything else that’s been going on?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Once I realized that was Alice squealing with passion, I thought what a coincidence it was that she was in this room. But it wasn’t a coincidence at all, not if it was her room. And I thought about it some more, and I saw the real coincidence.”

“What was that?”

“The jewelry. John Considine stole it from himself and gave it to Isis.”

“On loan.”

“According to him, but either way she had it. And then it wound up in Alice Cottrell’s room. Now that’s a coincidence.”

“It wound up in your pocket,” she said, “and that’s not a coincidence. It’s theft, and maybe that’s how it got in Alice ’s room.”

“She’s a jewel thief?”

“Why not?”

“And, because she’s an accomplished thief herself, she has to rope me in to swipe some letters so she can return them to Gulliver Fairborn?”