“What I can’t figure out,” I said, “is how he disappeared like that.”
“Magician walks down the street and turns into a drugstore.”
“It was something like that, wasn’t it? He wasn’t that far ahead of me when he turned the corner. Maybe a hundred feet? Not much more than that, and I would have cut the distance some, because I walked faster once the corner building blocked my view of him. And then I got there and he was gone.”
All the Flowers Are Dying
93
“Even if he turns the corner and starts bookin’, you’d get a look at him soon as you come round the corner yourself.”
“You would think so.”
“ ’Less he ducked into that building.”
“The apartment house on the corner? I thought of that. The street door’s not locked, anybody can get into the vestibule. Then you’d need a key, or for someone to buzz you in. I looked in and didn’t see him, but I didn’t do that right away, not until I’d spent some time trying to spot him on the street. You know, it seemed strange that he would walk to West End instead of Broadway, but if he lived there—”
“Then he just a man going home.”
“A man who lives around the corner from a woman and tells her he lives a couple of miles away in the East Thirties.”
“Maybe he don’t want her coming over every other day to borrow a cup of sugar.”
“More likely a pack of cigarettes. I can see that, actually. You go fishing for a girlfriend online, hoping she doesn’t live in the outer reaches of Brooklyn or Queens, some bus-and-subway combination away from you, and then you find out she’s right around the corner, and you realize there’s such a thing as too close.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Wouldn’t she recognize him? From seeing him in the neighborhood?”
“You’d think so. New Yorkers may not know our next-door neighbors, but we’re generally able to recognize them by sight. He made a phone call, let’s not forget that part.”
“Right before he lit up a cigarette.”
Elaine had come in to fix herself a cup of tea. “He was phoning his wife,” she said, “to find out if he should pick up a quart of milk on the way home.”
“Or a cup of sugar,” I said. “Or a carton of Marlboros. If he was married, would he get himself a girlfriend around the corner?”
“Not unless he had a well-developed death wish,” she said. “Who was he talking to on the phone, a man or a woman?”
“We couldn’t even hear him,” I said.
94
Lawrence Block
“Couldn’t you tell by his body language? Whether it was a man or a woman on the other end of the call?”
“No.”
“TJ?”
“I had to guess, I’d say a woman.”
“You would?” I said. “Why?”
“Dunno.”
“He was just with a woman,” I said, “and from what Louise said he gave a good account of himself. If he wasn’t calling his wife to say he’d had to stay late at the office—”
“And he wouldn’t,” TJ said, “not if he lived five minutes away. He’d just show up.”
“You’re right. So it wasn’t a wife he called.”
“ ’Less it was somebody else’s wife.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“He could have called his wife,” Elaine said. “In Scarsdale, to say he’d be late, or that he wasn’t going to make it home at all. And then he went to the building around the corner.”
“Who’s in the building around the corner?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “You’re the detective.”
“Thanks.”
TJ said, “Could be another woman.”
“In the corner building?”
“Everybody got to be someplace.”
“So he’s two-timing Louise with somebody who lives around the corner from her?”
“Three-timing, if he got that wife in Scarsdale.”
“Maybe she’s a working girl,” Elaine offered.
