The Burglar on the Prowl by Lawrence Block Page A

that she’d spent much of the previous night dreaming about delicatessen.
    “I missed dinner,” she said. “I was on the computer for hours, browsing the listings on Date-a-Dyke, and I figured instead of wasting time eating I’d go over to the Cubby Hole and snack on the bar food. So I went to bed with nothing in my stomach but a couple handfuls of Beer Nuts, and I had this endless dream where they kept making my sandwich but never got around to bringing it to the table. And by the time I woke up I knew just what we were gonna have for lunch today. It’s good, isn’t it?”
    We were working on the sandwiches and sipping our Cel-Ray tonic, and it turned out to be just what I wanted, even if I hadn’t had a dream to tell me so. Corned beef is Raffles’s favorite thing in all the world, and Carolyn had brought a little extra and slipped it into his food dish, where he was at once eating it and talking to it, a ritual he goes through with kosher corned beef and nothing else. Siamese talk to their food occasionally, or so Carolyn tells me, but Raffles is a tailless tabby, allegedly a Manx but lacking the characteristic body shape and rabbity gait of the typical Manx. His only Manx trait, really, is the tail he doesn’t have, and I’ve often suspected that he’s a Manx manqué, but I could be wrong about that. He’s certainly not Siamese, but he sounded like one when he had corned beef in his dish, so that’s how you might have pictured him if you’d been hiding under the bed, with nothing to go by but his voice.
    Carolyn said, “How do you figure a guy like that, anyway? I mean, it goes without saying that he hates women, but why would he want her unconscious?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe conscious partners tend to give him bad reviews.”
    “I guess Barbara Creeley couldn’t tell him he was a lousy lover, since she didn’t have a clue what was going on. Still, you’d thinkhe’d want someone capable of responding. Maybe his first girlfriend was English.”
    “I suppose it’s possible.”
    She put down her sandwich. “That was a joke, Bern. You know the old one about the Frenchman who finds a girl on the beach and starts making love to her?”
    “I know the joke.”
    “Someone comes along and tells him she’s dead and he’s horrified. ‘Soccer blew,’ he said. ‘I thought she was English!’ ”
    “I know the joke. Soccer blew, huh?”
    “That’s what they say. Frenchmen, they say it all the time. Soccer blew. Don’t ask me what it means.”
    “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
    “Bern? That was pretty decent of you, straightening up before you left. You must have been anxious to get out of there.”
    “Well, I felt sorry for her. I wanted to do something.”
    “It sounds as though you did everything but wash the windows.”
    I shook my head. “All I did was straighten up a few things. I was going to put her clothes away, but I figured I’d just put them in the wrong place. Besides, there was no way to keep her from knowing she’d been out of it when she got home, or that she’d had sex. But I couldn’t leave her stuff in a heap on the floor, so I folded her things and put them on a chair.”
    “And put the stuff in her purse, and so on. Bern, do you suppose he left her any souvenirs?”
    “Souvenirs?”
    “Like a pregnancy she wasn’t counting on, or an STD.”
    “Oh,” I said. “I’d say probably not. He used a condom.”
    “Really? You wouldn’t figure him to be that considerate, would you?”
    “I think he was considering himself,” I said, “and practicing safe sex more for his own benefit than for hers.”
    “And maybe to keep from leaving evidence.”
    “Evidence?”
    “You know, DNA. She could go to the police and they’d take aswab and be able to identify him if they ever caught him. From his DNA.”
    “If he was concerned about that,” I said, “he’d probably have taken the condom away with him.”
    “He left it there?”
    “On the floor.”
    “Yuck. What did