"It's a pretty big coincidence that they both work at the same place," Carolyn said, "but it's not a coincidence you went home with her. Because you were looking for her, weren't you?"
"Well, kind of. Parsifal's struck me as the kind of place she'd be likely to go, but I figured I was about as likely to run into him as her."
"Him? Oh, the date-rapist. How would you know it if you did?"
"By his voice, if I heard him talk. I have a feeling he was in there earlier, and that I didn't miss him by much."
"What makes you say that?"
"Just a hunch. Anyway, it's not important. Boy, do I hate rainy weekends."
"You and everybody else, Bern."
"Especially this one. But I'd hate this weekend even if the sun were out. Everything's just stuck."
"Stuck?"
"The money's stuck in the bathtub. We can't rent a safe-deposit box and put it in the bank because the banks are all closed until Monday. And everything else is stuck, too. Barbara's stuck out in Long Island at a wedding, and Ray's not working. He sometimes works weekends, but not this one, naturally. I called the precinct, and they said he was off today, and I called his house in Sunnyside and nobody answered."
"What did you want him for?"
"I thought he might know who the fat man was, or what the Lyles had that the perps wanted. He can't know much less than I do, but I know something he doesn't know, and that's that the Conrad book, the false McGuffin, wound up at Mapes's house."
"You can't tell him about Mapes."
"I can't tell him about Mapes the Burglary Victim, but why can't I clue him in about Mapes the McGuffin Recipient? Besides, if I can give him something, maybe I can get something from him."
"What makes you think he knows anything?"
"Even if he doesn't there's something he can find out for me. But not unless I ask him, and I can't do that until I know where he is. I wish I could get in touch with him. Why are you looking at me like that?"
"I just never thought I'd hear you say that, Bern."
"I hate weekends," I said. "You know what we could do? We could go someplace."
"In this weather? Where would we go?"
"How about Paris?"
"For the weekend?"
"Sure. We'll take the Concorde. A suite at the George Cinq, dinner at Maxim's, a cruise on the Seine, a stroll down the Boul' St. Germain, acafé au lait avec croissant at Les Deux Magots, then back on the plane and we're home again."
"That would cost a fortune."
"As it happens, we've got a fortune. We could swing it. Say fifteen to twenty thousand apiece for round-trip Concorde tickets, a thousand a night for a decent suite, half that for dinner-I'll tell you, for fifty thousand dollars we could have a memorable weekend."
"Uh, it sounds great, Bern, but-"
"But we can't do it," I said, "because the Concorde isn't flying anymore. And anybody who tries to buy any airplane ticket for cash, let alone thirty or forty thousand dollars' worth of cash, is going to spend hours answering questions in a room full of uniforms. Besides, we'd need to take a cab out to JFK, and how would we get a cab on a day like this?"
"And you've got a date tomorrow night with Barbara Creeley."
"She'll never make it back from the island in time, not in this weather. Man, do I hate weekends."
There was one thing I could do, though not without getting wet again. While Carolyn was getting wet herself, picking up dry cleaning around the corner, I made a small withdrawal from the stash of money in her bathtub. I could have done it while she was there, but I wanted to avoid having to explain why I needed it. And not long after she got back I put the Sandford novel aside yet again and walked up to 14th Street and took one bus east to Third Avenue and another bus uptown. I got off at 34th, walked up and over, and let myself into Barbara's brownstone.
I went upstairs, past the Feldmaus apartment, and remembered to open only the two locks she was in the habit of locking, which saved me a little time. I was in and out in under five minutes, and when I hit the street I couldn't think where to go next. Back to Carolyn's? Down to the store? Uptown to my place?
I went around the corner to Parsifal's, wondering what kind of a crowd they'd get on a rainy Saturday afternoon, and found that they got a sort of rainy-Saturday-afternoon crowd. There's something warm and welcoming about a bar on a day like that, but after you get over being warmly welcomed, you notice that everybody there gives off an air of desperation.
I'm sure I was no exception myself. I took a stool at the bar, where Sigrid's role was now being played by a black woman with short curly hair that either she or God had colored red. She was as tall as Sigrid and had the same cheekbones, along with the same subliminal message:Sleep with me and you'll die, but it'll be worth it.
I ordered Laphroaig and took a long time drinking it, meting it out in small sips. I was making progress, or it was; by the fourth sip, it tasted pretty decent.
While I sipped at it, I worked my way around the bar, talking to no one but listening to everybody. I was hoping to hear a particular low-pitched voice, but didn't really expect to. There was no one in the place who looked like my image of the man, and there was no one there who sounded like him, either.
Most of the time I wasn't listening that hard, anyway, because I was busy thinking. You ought to be able to work this out, I told myself. The whole thing was full of coincidences, and when you have that many of them, sooner or later they start fitting together in meaningful ways. That's what I told myself, anyway, but I kept turning the pieces around in my mind, and I couldn't quite make anything out of them. It was like a jigsaw puzzle, I decided, with some pieces missing. If I got hold of the missing pieces I might still be stumped, but at least I'd have a shot at it.
I went to the phone, dropped more coins into it than it used to cost, dialed a string of numbers that I remembered only because I'd dialed them twice already today, and listened to the phone ring in Ray Kirschmann's house. If a phone rings and there's no machine to answer it, does it make a sound? I decided it makes the sound of one hand clapping, which was about as much applause as I was capable of today, anyway. It rang until I was tired of listening to it, and then I hung up and went back to the bar. There'd been a sip or two left in my glass, and there'd been more cash on the bar than I would have left for a tip, but the bartender (whose name I hadn't caught, but I was pretty sure it wasn't Sigrid) had thought I'd left and taken it all away.
I really hate weekends.
Twenty-Seven
The rain stopped sometime after midnight Saturday, too late to do most of the city any good, and started up again before dawn, in plenty of time to ruin Sunday. I went out for breakfast and came home with the paper. I still didn't have either copy ofLettuce Prey at hand, but the SundayTimes was enough to see anybody through a rainy Sunday, and clear into the middle of the week. Even after I'd tossed all the advertising supplements in the recycling bin, and added those sections likeJobs (which I don't want) andAutomobiles (which I don't need), I still had enough paper left to make a person have second thoughts about freedom of the press.
I settled in with it, pausing now and then to try Ray Kirschmann in Sunnyside. Around eleven his wife answered, just home from church. No, she said, Ray wasn't home. He'd had to work, he hadn't even been able to go to services with her. I gave her my name and number, and she said she'd pass them on to him if he called in, but she sounded as though that wasn't likely to happen.
I tried the precinct and left a message there as well, and went back to theReal Estate section, where there was an inspiring story of a couple who'd searched high and low for a place that would accommodate both their hobbies, although they preferred to call them areas of interest. He built elaborate layouts for his model trains, while she collected weathervanes and old farm equipment. For a mere eight million dollars they'd bought an old warehouse in Nolita, which is not, as you might suppose, a Nabokovean tale about a prepubescent girl who won't have anything to do with Humbert Humbert, but a realtors' term for the emerging area north of Little Italy. By acting as their own general contractor and doing most of the work themselves, they'd managed to hold the cost of the gut rehab they'd done to another four million, so-well, you can run the numbers yourself and see what a bargain they'd got, with enough square footage to give him the HO-gauge equivalent of fifty miles of railroad track, while she had plenty of room to show off her treasures, including one of the very first McCormick reapers.