Read Online The Burglar in the Rye by Lawrence Block - Free Book Online

really shovel the stuff out, Bernie. It’s a hell of a talent. If all we had was the report of a prowler, an’ if you’re really not carryin’ lockpicks an’ stolen goods on your person, I’d probably have to cut you loose. But there’s a dead woman in a room on the sixth floor, an’ it looks like she had help gettin’ that way, an’ you were spotted on Six, an’ what does that look like?”
    “It looks like sheer coincidence to me,” I said. “Whatever happened, I had nothing to do with it. And now what I’d like to do is go home. You’ve got no reason to hold me, and I know my rights.”
    “I’m sure you do,” he said. “You ought to by now. You’ve heard ’em enough times. But just in case your memory’s rusty, here’s how they go. You have the right to remain silent. Do you understand?”
    “Ray, I—”
    “Yeah, you understand. You have the right to an attorney. Do you understand? Yeah, you understand that, too…”

CHAPTER
Six
    I suppose I should begin at the beginning. It started the week before, on as perfect an autumn afternoon as anyone could wish for. New York had suffered through a long hot summer, capped with a truly brutal heat wave, and now the heat had broken with the arrival of some cool clean air from Canada, where it’s evidently a local specialty.
    My shop’s air-conditioned, of course, so it’s not a bad place to be even on a hellishly hot day. But heat can dull a person’s enthusiasm for browsing in a bookstore, even if the store itself is comfortable enough, and business had been off for the last week or so.
    The cool weather brought the browsers back. The store had people in it from the minute I opened up, and every once in a while someone actually bought a book. I was pleased when they did, but I can’t say I really minded if they didn’t, because in a sense I wasn’t really there at all. I was thousands of miles away, inthe jungles of Venezuela with the intrepid Redmond O’Hanlon.
    Specifically, I was reading about the candiru, the toothpick fish, a tiny catfish adapted for a parasitic life in the gills and cloaca of bigger fish. I’d read O’Hanlon’s earlier book, Into the Heart of Borneo, and when a copy of In Trouble Again turned up in a bag of books, I’d set it aside to read before shelving.
    And I was reading it now, in what I thought was the companionable silence suited to a bookshop, when I felt a hand on my arm. I looked at the person attached to the hand. It was a woman—slim, dark-haired, late twenties—and her long oval face was a mask of concern.
    “I didn’t want to disturb you,” she said, “but are you all right?”
    “Yes,” I said. She didn’t seem reassured, and I could understand why. Even I could tell that my voice lacked conviction.
    “You seem…anxious,” she said. “Unnerved.”
    “What makes you say that?”
    “The sounds you were making.”
    “I was making sounds? I hadn’t realized it. Like talking in one’s sleep, I suppose, except I wasn’t sleeping.”
    “No.”
    “I was caught up in my book, and maybe that amounts to more or less the same thing. What sort of sounds was I making?”
    She cocked her head. She was, I saw, a very attractive woman, a few years older than I’d thought. Early thirties, say. She was dressed in tight jeans and a man’s white dress shirt, and her brown hair was drawn back in a ponytail, and thus at first glance she looked younger than her years.
    “Troubled sounds,” she said.
    “Troubled sounds?”
    “I can’t think how else to describe them. ‘Arrrghhh,’ you said.”
    “Arrrghhh?”
    “Yes, but more like this: ‘Arrrghhh!’ As if you were trying to get the word out before you strangled.”
    “Oh.”
    “You said that two or three times. And once you said, ‘Oh my God!’ As if consumed with horror.”
    “Well,” I said, “I remember thinking both those things, arrrghhh and Oh my God. But I had no idea I was saying them out loud.”
    “I see.”
    But I could tell