"Uh-huh, and then they say 'I think I'll have another.'A drink is just the stepping-off point. Anyway, we had two each, and I ate a whole dish of mixed nuts to soak up the alcohol, and I'm fine."
"You seem okay."
"That's because I am okay. And I'm not driving, so I don't have to worry about a Breathalyzer test, and I'm not going into the house, so what's the problem?"
"I don't think there is any. I gather the two of you hit it off."
"I like her, Bern. And I think she likes me."
"You made a good impression."
"And a good thing, because that's something you only get one crack at."
"Where does she live?"
" Manhattan. Hey, I knew that going in. I didn't want to meet her and be crazy about her and then discover she's GU."
"Geographically undesirable. It's a curse, all right. I met a girl once and we hit it off, and she wouldn't tell me where she lived. She'd always meet me places, or come over to my place."
" Brooklyn?"
"Way the hell out in Queens," I said. "You had to take the subway for days, and then you took a bus, and then you walked ten blocks. That was the end of that."
"But if she was willing to come into the city all the time-"
"When they're that GU," I said, "you wind up under all this pressure to live together, because otherwise one person's spending half their life in transit. I figured it would save a whole lot of aggravation to break up."
"Wow."
"Besides," I said, "she had this whiny voice, and I thought I could get used to it, and then one day I realized I didn't want to get used to it. In fact what I didn't want was to hear it long enough to get used to it." I took the cell phone from my pocket, put through a call to the number I'd programmed in earlier. "So that was that," I said, while the phone rang in the house on Devonshire Close. It rang four times before a machine picked up, and I listened to what I supposed was the recorded voice of Crandall Rountree Mapes, inviting me to leave a message. I hung up in mid-invitation.
"Well, GG's not GU," Carolyn said.
"GG?"
"As in GurlyGurl. In fact she's pretty desirable all across the board."
"No whiny voice, huh?"
"A nice voice. Kind of throaty."
"She could live in Manhattan and still be a long ways away. Washington Heights, say."
" Washington Heights isn't that far. I had a girlfriend in Washington Heights."
"That's what I was referring to."
"Well, it was a disaster, but you couldn't blame it on the neighborhood. It was just a disaster. Anyway, she lives closer than that, because she walks to work, and it only takes her fifteen minutes."
"Where does she work?"
"Forty-fifth and Madison. That's why she picked the Algonquin. Why?"
"I just wondered. So if she lives fifteen minutes from there, she could live in the East Sixties."
"I suppose."
"Or the West Fifties."
"So?"
"Or the East Thirties."
"What are you getting at, Bern?"
"I just want to make sure," I said.
"You want to make sure of what?"
"That she's not who I'm afraid she is."
"Huh?"
"Because it would be a coincidence," I said, "but coincidences happen all the time, and I've had the feeling one's on its way right about now. And if it turns out that she's who I think she is-"
"Who do you think she is?"
"This would be a lot easier," I said, "if the two of you had told each other your names, but as it stands-"
"We did."
"You did?"
"Of course we did, Bern. You only keep it anonymous until you actually meet. We told each other our names right away. Before the old guy brought the drinks, even."
"What did you say your name was?"
"I said it was Carolyn, Bern. Carolyn Kaiser. Not very imaginative, I know, but I just went and pulled a name out of the air, and-"
"What did she say?"
"She said, 'Hi, Carolyn.' Taking me at my word, not suspecting for a moment that I'd lie about a thing like that, and-"
"What did she say her name was?"
"Lacey Kavinoky," she said, "which rhymes with okie-dokey."
"You're sure?"
"That it rhymes? Positive, Bern. No question in my mind."
"I mean-"
"I know what you mean. Am I sure it's her name? I'm sure it's what she said. Was I supposed to ask to see her driver's license? Are you gonna tell me who you were afraid she was?"
"Barbara Creeley."
"Barbara Creeley. The one who got-"
"Burgled and date-raped. Yeah, you don't have to tell me. I know it's ridiculous."
"I think it would have to make a lot more sense," she said, "in order to be no worse than ridiculous. There are eight million people in New York, Bern. What are the odds?"
"Eight million in the five boroughs," I said. "Only two million in Manhattan, if that many."
"One in two million?"
"Half of the two million are male," I said. "Of the one million left, by the time you cross out the ones who are under twenty and over fifty, and the married ones, and-"
"I see where you're going with this," she said, "and you're still nuts."
"You're right."
"Anyway, forget it. Lacey's not Barbara."
"I know."
"It would not only be a coincidence, it'd be a dumb one."
"I know."
"I sound like I'm pissed off, don't I? I'm not. I'm just sort of incredulous, that's all."
"Whatever you say."
"Her name's Lacey Kavinoky," she said, "and she's cute and bright and genuinely nice. And she's gay, Bern, and she knows it. She's not one of those oh-I-always-thought-it-might-be-interesting-to-try-being-with-a-woman women. She's not one of those variety's-the-spice-of-life women, either. She's like me, she's got nothing against men, and high on the list of things she doesn't hold against them is her beautiful body. You remember that song?"
"I remember."
" 'If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?' Well, if you told her, Bern, she wouldn't."
"Great."
"But she might hold it against me. We'll see. But there's one thing I can tell you for sure, and that's that she's not Barbara Creeley. She's Lacey, Lacey Kavinoky, and if anybody date-rapes her it's gonna be me."
Twenty-One
We stayed with the West Side Drive while it became the Henry Hudson Parkway, and we kept going north and crossed the Harlem River into the Bronx. I took the 232nd Street exit and wound up on Palisade Avenue. The long narrow green strip of Riverdale Park was on our left, with the Metro North tracks between the park and the Hudson River.
I'd studied the route on the map, but there were enough one-way streets to get me disoriented, and it took a little while to find Devonshire Close. While I drove around looking for it, I told her about my mission Wednesday night, scouting the terrain and probing the Mapes defenses. The doors were out, I said, because the alarm system was one I couldn't sabotage from outside, and all the windows were wired into it, and the coal chute, my old ace in the hole, had been trumped by bricks and cement.
"I give up," she said. "How are you gonna get in?"
I told her I'd show her when we got there, and shortly thereafter we did just that. Before I made the turn into Devonshire Close I got out my cell phone and tried the number again, and got the machine again. This time I waited for the beep and said, "Dr. Mapes? Are you there? Please pick up if you are. It's pretty important."
No one did, and I broke the connection. "In case he was screening his calls," I said.
"That's great," she said, "but now your voice is on his answering machine. How smart is that?"
"If it's still on there when I leave," I said, "then it could be a problem."
"You're going to erase it. That's fine if it's digital, but the old machines that use tape don't really erase anything. When you tell them to, you just program them to record over the old message when somebody leaves a new one. So what if it's a tape machine?"