The Burglar on the Prowl

Nine

I tried not to listen.

I'd been willing enough to snoop around in Barbara Creeley's private life earlier, but that was different. She wasn't around at the time, and all I was doing was going through her things and getting what sense I could of the person who owned them. Now, though, she was in the apartment with me, and so was he. It wasn't hard to guess what they were going to do now that they'd managed to get through the door, and unless an excess of passion made them rip off their clothes and do it in the kitchen, they were going to do it right on top of me.

I'd been home, for God's sake. I'd put away my burglar's tools, I'd stowed them in my hidden compartment. I was all settled in for the night. Why couldn't I have gone to bed?

But no, that would have been too easy. So instead of lying comfortably in my own bed I was wedged underneath Barbara Creeley's. There was no room to spare, and there'd be even less when a pair of bodies piled on top of the mattress.

And if anybody looked under the bed, well, then I was sunk. It was not a refuge I could leave in a hurry. All I could do was stay there and wait for the cops to drag me out.

"Kinda sleepy," the woman said.

"Yeah, well, you're gonna get the best night's sleep you ever had," the man said.

"Ca' keep m'eyes open…"

"Roofies'll do that."

"How'd I get here?"

"You live here, you dizzy bitch. Jesus, you're built nice, aren't you? Hang on now, just let me get your clothes off."

"Sleeeeepy…"

In spite of myself I listened, and somewhere along the way it dawned on me what I was listening to. One thing he'd said-"Roofies'll do that"-was enough to clue me in, once I'd allowed it to register. Roofies is one of the names for Rohypnol, that miracle of modern medical science known as the date-rape drug. Barbara Creeley, who'd already been burglarized (even though she didn't know it yet), was about to get raped (even though she didn't know that, either).

It struck me that I ought to do something, but what? If I tried to squirm out from under the bed, I'd alert him long before I was in a position to do anything. I'd gone in headfirst, more or less, so I'd be coming out feet first, and by the time my head cleared the bedframe he'd be in a position to break something over it. And even if I somehow got out before he reacted, well, then what? I never studied martial arts, never put on a pair of boxing gloves, and the last time I was in a fight was when I was eleven years old. My opponent was Kevin Vogelsang, and he gave me a bloody nose, which I probably deserved for chirping "Tweet, tweet, tweet" at him. (His last name means Birdsong. If it had been Feldmaus I'd very likely have gone "Squeak, squeak, squeak" at him, and gotten the same bloody nose. I was a real pain in the ass when I was eleven.)

The point is I've never been much at physical combat, nor am I the hulking sort who can intimidate an opponent by his mere physical presence. In fact I had a feeling it might be the other way around. I hadn't had a look at the Roofies guy, but he had heavy footsteps and a deep and resonant voice, and I'd formed the image of a large fellow who spent a lot of time at the gym lifting heavy metal objects. There was always the chance that my strength would be as the strength of ten because my heart was pure, but what good would that do me? His strength was very likely the strength of eleven, even if his heart was darker than the inside of a cow.

My impulse was chivalrous, but you couldn't have told as much from what I did, which was stay right where I was, as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean, while the scoundrel had his way with her.

I'll draw a veil over the next ten or fifteen minutes, if it's all the same to you. I couldn't shut out the sounds, nor could I stop my mind from inventing pictures to go with them, but I'm going to keep all that to myself. Barbara Creeley had to endure it, but at least she didn't have to know about it, and neither should you.

I said she didn't know about it, but that's not to say she was unconscious throughout. At one point her voice rang out clear as a bell: "Who are you? What are you doing?"

"Shut up," he explained.

"What's going on?"

"You're getting laid," he said, "but you won't remember a thing in the morning. You'll just wonder why you're sore down there, and where the wet spot in the bed came from."

And he laughed savagely, but she didn't say anything, and I guess she must have slipped back under the fuzzy blanket of Rohypnol. According to what I'd heard and read about the drug, he was right that she wouldn't remember much, if anything. A couple of Roofies, ground up and stirred into a drink, made the drinker essentially comatose, albeit with occasional interludes of apparent lucidity. Sometimes the victim even participated in the lovemaking (if you want to call it that), making the usual moves and uttering the usual grunts and sighs, but not from a truly conscious plane, and without anything much imprinting itself on her memory.

There you have it-Rohypnol, clearly a drug for our times. What beats me is why anyone would want to use it. Where's the pleasure in having sex with someone who's not even capable of knowing what's going on, let alone matching your moves with moves of her own? Isn't it a little like romancing an inflatable doll?

Then again, they evidently sell quite a few of those dolls, enough to warrant mass-producing them. There would seem to be a substantial number of men who don't care if their partner's having a good time, or if she's even there at all. And I can see where a woman all goofy on Roofies might have it all over a plastic lady. You wouldn't get winded blowing her up, and you wouldn't have the worry that she might suddenly deflate atle moment critique.

I guess Barbara Creeley functioned satisfactorily in her role as a flesh-and-blood inflatable doll, because her partner seemed to be having a good time. He moaned and grunted a lot, and said "Baby, baby" and that sort of thing, and made a lot of noise as he reached the finish line. Then the bed stopped creaking and rocking above me, and all was mercifully silent for a moment, and then his weight shifted and he got up from the bed.

"Not bad," he said. "You're a pretty good piece of ass for a dead girl." And he laughed that deep-throated laugh I'd heard earlier, and said, his tone mock-earnest, "Well, darling? Was it good for you?" and started in laughing all over again.

I stayed where I was.Not bad for a dead girl. But it was just a drug, wasn't it? Just a couple of Roofies, enough to sedate her but not enough to kill her. He couldn't really mean it literally, could he?

While I lay there and wondered about it, he clomped around the apartment, making more noise than a man generally makes getting dressed. I heard him yanking drawers out, spilling things, and I had a pretty good idea what was going on. But I couldn't do anything about it. I kept knowing what the son of a bitch was doing, and I kept being unable to do anything about it.

Eventually he walked off, and I didn't hear him for a while and wondered if he might have left. Then his footsteps returned, and I heard a buzzing sound. I couldn't place it, until he spoke and cleared things up for me.

"Your name's Barbara," he said, with the air of having just discovered this fact. "Hey, Barbie Doll, how about if I give you a shave? Be a nice surprise for you when you wake up. Make things a little smoother and sweeter for the next man in your life, too."

The shaver went on buzzing.

"Nah, the hell with it," he said, and there was a noise which it didn't take too much imagination to identify as the sound of the electric shaver hitting the floor. "So long," he said. "Sleep tight, you stupid cow."

He slammed the door on his way out, and he didn't stop to lock the locks. I heard his heavy footsteps on the stairs, and I heard the door slam down on the first floor. And then, when I didn't hear anything more, I set about wriggling and squirming, and the heroic devil-may-care burglar got out from under the bed.

He'd left a godawful mess behind. I'd figured out the noise he was making was a by-product of a search for something to steal; having taken what he could sexually, he was looking to turn a cash profit on the night as well.

Her black leather handbag was on the floor where he'd flung it, its contents strewed all over the place. I scooped up a lipstick and a comb and her checkbook and a set of keys and returned them to her purse. Her wallet, a little French purse of green leather with gold tooling, lay in a corner where he'd flung it; I picked it up and saw that her driver's license was halfway out of its frame, and figured that's how he'd learned her name. The license identified her as Barbara Anne Creeley, gave a date of birth that made her thirty-two years old, and showed a picture of a pretty woman with dark hair and about as winning a smile as anyone can manage while being photographed by someschmendrick from the Department of Motor Vehicles.

I carried the wallet over to the bedside, past the heap of clothing she'd been wearing. She was sprawled on her back, her head angled to one side, and her mouth was open, which never helps one to look one's best, but it was the same woman, no question about it, and she'd have struck me as prettier if she'd been less pitiable. She was naked, and that bothered me enough so that I covered her with a sheet, even at the risk of waking her. But of course it didn't wake her. She was alive, her breathing was deep and even, and she was in no danger of waking up, not for hours.

I went through her wallet and saw that he'd left her credit cards. Her bank card was there, too. He couldn't use it at an ATM unless he knew her PIN number, but he might have taken it anyway, and I was glad to see he hadn't. He was an amateur, it was clear to me, and not a real thief at all. There are some burglars who will rape a woman if they encounter her in the course of a burglary, not because they're rapists by inclination but because she's there and they like her looks so what the hell. Similarly, there are some rapists who, having enjoyed a woman's favors, feel they might as well put a few dollars in their pocket. He was in the latter category, and that's why she still had her credit cards, but that's also why the place was such a mess; it was all part of the rape.

And of course there was no money in her wallet.

I put her purse in order, with the wallet in it. I found the various drawers he'd upended, restored their contents, and put them back where they'd come from. It seemed to me that he'd taken some of the jewelry I'd passed up, but I was glad to see he'd missed the locket with her parents' pictures, although he'd managed to take her class ring, the son of a bitch.

In her bathroom, he'd hurled a couple of bottles against the wall, but all but one were plastic and didn't break. I cleaned up the one broken bottle, and got rid of the shards of glass so she wouldn't cut herself. I found her Lady Remington that he'd switched on and then hurled to the floor, and wasn't surprised to discover that it no longer worked. The pink plastic case was cracked, and when I moved the switch nothing happened. I laid it in the wastebasket, then changed my mind, wrapped it in a paper towel, and tucked it away in a jacket pocket.

I got the place as neat as I could, short of scrubbing the floors on my hands and knees, and then I went in for a last look at her. It was the closest I'd been to a naked woman in longer than I cared to remember, and all I felt was sad.

I went to the door, opened it. Then I sighed heavily and returned to the bedroom for one final stab at chivalry. It didn't take long, maybe five minutes, after which I let myself out of Barbara Creeley's apartment, picked her locks shut, and went home.