The burglar in the closet by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block [Lawrence Block]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Policier
ISBN: 9780060872731
Published: 2006-04-06T01:02:21+00:00

CHAPTER

Eleven

Spyder’s Parlor was dark and empty. The chairs perched on top of the tables. The stools had been inverted and set up on the bar. A menu in the window indicated that they opened for lunch during the week, but today was Saturday and they wouldn’t turn the lights on until mid-afternoon. I stayed with Lexington a block or two uptown to a hole in the wall where the counterman mugged and winked and called his female patrons dear and darling and sweets. They ate it up. I ate up a sandwich, cream cheese on date-nut bread, and drank two cups of so-so coffee.

Grabow, Grabow, Grabow. In a hotel lobby I went through the Manhattan telephone directory and came up with eight Grabows plus two who spelled it without the final letter. I bought dimes from the cashier and tried all ten numbers. Six of them didn’t answer. The other four didn’t know anything about any artist named Grabow. One woman said her husband’s brother was a painter, exteriors and interiors, but he lived upstate in Orchard Park. “It’s a suburb of Buffalo,” she said. “Anyway he didn’t change his name, it’s still Grabowski. I don’t suppose that helps you.”

I told her I didn’t see how it could but thanked her anyway. I started to leave the hotel and then something registered in my mind and I went back to the directory and started calling Grabowskis. It would have been cute if it worked but of course it didn’t, it just cost me a lot of dimes, and I called all seventeen Grabowskis and reached I don’t know how many, fourteen or fifteen, and of course none of them painted anything, pictures or interiors or exteriors, none of them even colored in coloring books or painted by number, and that was the end of that particular blind alley.

The nearest bank was a block east on Third Avenue. I bought a roll of dimes—you can still get fifty of them for five dollars, it’s one of the few remaining bargains—and I carried all fifty of them to another hotel lobby. I passed some outdoor phone booths on the way but they don’t have phone books anymore. I don’t know why. I called Spyder’s Parlor to make sure it was still closed and it was. I hauled out the Yellow Pages and looked up Attorneys. See Lawyers, said the book, so I did. I don’t know what I expected to find. There were eighteen pages of lawyers and plenty of them were named John, but so what? I couldn’t see any reason to call any of them. I sort of flipped through the listings, hoping something would strike me, and a listing for a firm called Carson, Kidder and Diehl made me flip to the V’s. I called Carson Verrill, Craig’s personal attorney, and managed to get through to him. He hadn’t heard anything since he’d referred Craig to Errol Blankenship and he wanted to know who I was and what I wanted.

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