The Burglar in the Rye by Lawrence Block Page B

inviting. Now it was considerably elevated in volume, and urgent in tone. And the voice’s owner, a vision in bold primary colors, was just a few yards away, and she was pointing a finger and the finger was aimed at me.
    “He’s the man I saw,” she went on. “He was prowling around on the sixth floor, and he’d just come through a locked door, and he couldn’t give a good account of himself. He told one lie after another.”
    And you walked into the lobby this afternoon, I thought, with a man old enough to be your father, though I have reason to believe he wasn’t. But did I say anything?
    Her blue eyes flashed. “His name is Peter Jeffries,” she said. “At least that’s what he told me. I rather doubt that’s his real name.”
    “It’s close,” Carl Pillsbury said. He had a faint Southern accent I hadn’t noticed before, and I realized he’d put it on for the occasion, as if he was playing a part. “He’s a registered guest,” he continued, the accent quite convincing, and by no means overdone. “He’s in Room 415, and his name is Jeffrey Peters.”
    You dye your hair, I thought, and it couldn’t be more obvious. But do I say a word?
    “You’re both wrong,” said a voice I recognized. “This here’s somebody else altogether, an’ if he’s registered here it’s suspicious all by itself, on account of he’s got a perfectly good place of his own on West End Avenue. This here is nobody but Mrs. Rhodenbarr’s son Bernard. What’s the matter with you, Bernie? Aren’t you gonna say hello?”
    “Hello, Ray.”
    “‘Hello, Ray.’ Say it like you mean it, why don’t you?”
    “I did.”
    “Yeah, well, I guess you did at that. You can’t be too happy to see me, an’ I can understand that, but better me than someone who doesn’t know you in the first place. We’ll go downtown an’ book you an’ print you, an’ you can call up Wally Hemphill to come down an’ bail you out, an’ sooner or later we’ll get things sorted out. We always do, don’t we?”
    “Ray,” I said. “You’ve got no reason to take me downtown.”
    “You gotta be kiddin’, Bern.”
    “Miss Gauthier says I didn’t give a good account of myself,” I said. “Well, no law says I have to, not to her. I didn’t ask her what she was doing on the sixth floor, so what gave her the right to ask me?”
    “I live there,” Isis said.
    There was something familiar about the color scheme of her outfit, beyond the fact that I’d seen it a little while ago in the sixth-floor hallway. I realized what it was when I glanced at the Horvath painting over the fireplace. Her skirt was the same blue as his hat, and her bolero jacket matched his little jacket, and her blouse was as brilliantly yellow as his Wellington boots. It was uncanny, and while her skin tone was not the exact tan of his fur, it was close.
    “Because of my past history,” I said, “and because you’ve never been able to believe I’ve changed my ways—”
    “Which you haven’t,” Ray said, “not for a minute.”
    “—you think I was prowling around looking for something to steal. Well, even if that was what I had in mind, you can’t hang a man for his thoughts, or jail him, either. I didn’t take anything, and I’m not carrying burglar’s tools. You don’t have to take my word for it. You can search me.”
    “We will,” he said, “once we get you downtown. You can count on that, Bern.”
    “When you do,” I said, “you won’t find anything, and that’s something you can count on. So what have you got? I was on the premises of a hotel in which I happened to be a registered guest. Where’s the crime in that?”
    “You registered under a false name.”
    “So? That’s only a crime if it’s done with the presumed intent to defraud the innkeeper. I paid cash in advance, Ray. If you’re planning to skip out on a hotel bill, you don’t generally pay it ahead of time. I’m in the clear on this.”
    “You know,” he said, “you can