CH01 - No Score by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block [Block, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-01-29T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

WHEN I RANG the doorbell, the chimes played the first two bars of a hymn. I couldn’t tell you which one. I stood there patiently, wanting to ring it again but holding off, and eventually I heard the pitter-patter of little old feet. I timed myself so that I was whipping off my little blue-visored cap just as she was opening the door.

She wasn’t the girl of my dreams. When you are young enough and horny enough (like me, Chip Harrison, for instance) you can’t even open a Coke bottle without hoping there will be a beautiful girl in it. And on this job I kept waiting for the time one of the doors would be opened by a Neglected Young Housewife, or a Wanton Suburban College Girl Home From School, or an Off Duty Whore. And instead the doors kept being opened by women who stopped thinking about sex the day Hayes beat Tilden.

This one must have gone to school with Tilden’s grandmother, from the looks of her. She was a tiny wrinkled little lady with bright eyes the color of frostbitten lips. Her face cracked into a smile.

She looked up at me and said, “Yes, young man? You’ve come for the bake sale donation, haven’t you?”

I said I was afraid I hadn’t, and I went into a little explanation of who I was and why I had turned up on her doorstep. While I talked I held my cap in both hands and squeezed it in and out of shape. I didn’t do this because I was nervous. That’s just the way it was supposed to look, because according to old Flickinger the more nervous and earnest you seemed the more trustworthy you were, at least as far as old ladies were concerned.

It was hard to look nervous without doing the little bit of business with the cap, because I actually delivered my set piece without even paying attention to what I was saying. I might as well have been a record player. While my mouth got all the words out, my mind thought about how little this woman had in common with the girl of my dreams, and that I might have guessed as much, because nymphomaniacs don’t go out of their way to have chimes that play hymns—at least most of them don’t—and while I didn’t recognize that tune, it certainly wasn’t “Roll Me Over in the Clover.”

“—free inspection with no obligation whatsoever,” I finished up, and gave my cap a final twist, and hung my head just the littlest bit, because you couldn’t go overboard and look too pathetic or you got tons of warm milk and cookies shoved down your throat.

“Rowrbazzle,” she said.

That seemed like a funny thing for anybody to say, let alone Tilden’s grandmother here, but then of course I saw that she wasn’t the one who said it. It was her cat. He was standing next to her, and he was as big for a cat as she was small for an old lady.

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