The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza

CHAPTER Eight

Denise Raphaelson is long-legged and slender, although Carolyn insists on describing her as gawky and bony. Her hair is dark brown and curly and worn medium-long, her complexion fair with a dusting of unobtrusive freckles. Her blue-gray eyes are artist's eyes, always measuring and assessing and seeing the world as a series of framed rectangles.

There was no end of rectangles, albeit unframed, on the walls of Narrowback Gallery, where she lived and worked. It's on the third floor of a loft building on West Broadway between Grand and Broome, and its name derived from the loft's unusual shape, narrow at the back and wider at the front. Denise subsequently discovered that narrowback is a term of contempt applied by native Irish to those kinsmen of theirs who have emigrated to America. No one has yet satisfactorily explained the term to her, although speculation on the subject has sparked any number of drunken conversations at the Broome Street Bar.

I looked at a couple of paintings she'd done since I was last at the loft, including the one she'd been working on that day. I exchanged a few sentences with Jared, her twelve-year-old genius son, and gave him the stack of paperback science fiction I'd been setting aside for him. (I don't handle paperbacks in the store, wholesaling the ones that come in to a store that sells nothing else.) He seemed happy with what I'd brought, especially an early Chip Delaney novel that he'd been wanting to read, and we had the sort of stilted conversation one has with the precocious and overly hip child of a woman with whom one occasionally beds down.

I'd gone home to shave and change clothes before trekking down to SoHo. I had my Weejuns on my feet again and was comfortably casual in Levi's and a flannel shirt. Denise was wearing a lime turtleneck and a pair of those forty-dollar jeans with an over-the-hill debutante's autograph on a rear pocket. Remember when clothes had their labels on the inside?

We had a glass of wine each at the gallery, then moved on to an Ethiopian place in Tribeca where you bring your own wine and eat unpronounceable dishes at your peril. We brought a rosé to see if it really does go with anything, and it did, but not terribly well. Our dishes, hers made with chicken and mine with lamb, were identically sauced and hot enough to blister paint. They came with a disc of spongy bread the size of a small pizza, and we tore off hunks of this gooey muck and used it to scoop up mouthfuls of the hot stuff. In the name of ethnic authenticity, a whole lot of New Yorkers are relearning the table manners of messy children.

When we got out of there-and not a moment too soon-we walked around for a while and wound up listening to a jazz trio on Wooster Street. We had a couple of Scotches there and Denise worked her way through a pack of Virginia Slims. I tried Abel once or twice, and then we walked north a ways and caught Lance Hayward's ten o'clock set at the Village Corner. Denise knows him, so we chatted with him after the set and it turned out there was another pianist we simply had to hear at a new club in my neighborhood. I dialed Abel's number again and we had a quick drink with Lance-we were drinking stingers by this time-before grabbing a cab uptown.

The new club was on Columbus Avenue in the low eighties and the piano player was a young black kid who kept reminding me of a Lenni Tristano record I hadn't listened to in years. We got out of there when the set ended and cabbed to my place, where I dug out the record in question and put it on. We had a nightcap and threw our clothes on the floor and dived into bed.

I did not find her to be gawky and bony. I found her to be warm and soft and quick and eager, and the music's eccentric harmonies and offbeat rhythm didn't interfere with the pleasure we took with one another. If anything, it gave a nice brittly atonal edge to our lovemaking.

The tone arm had just dropped to begin replaying the record for the third time when she yawned and stretched and reached for the inevitable cigarette. She got it lit and said something about going home.

"Stay over," I suggested.

"I didn't say anything to Jared. I figured we'd wind up at my place."

"And if you're not there when he wakes up?"

"He'll figure I'm here, which is cool, but if I'd known I would have called him earlier. I'd call now but I don't want to wake him."

I thought of trying Abel again but it would have involved moving.

"I think I will stay," she said, after a moment's reflection. "Mind if I change the record?"

"Not at all. Put on a stack."

She crouched at the record rack, her bare behind tilted charmingly in my direction. Bony? Gawky? Pfui.

When she came back to bed I slipped an arm around her and told her I was glad she was staying.

"Me too," she said.

"You said earlier that you went to the movies last night."

"Right. I took the kid and we saw the new Woody Allen picture."

"And you loved it but he thought it was superficial."

"Yeah, the little wiseass."

"Do anything afterwards?"

She shifted around, glanced up at me. "A little dancing," she said, "but no fooling around. What do you mean?"

"You went to the movies and then you and Jared went home and you stayed there?"

"Right. Except that we stopped on the way home for frozen yogurt. Why?"

"When did he go to sleep?"

"Around eleven, maybe a little later."

"It won't come up," I said, "but if it does, I was over at your place last night. I got there around midnight after the kid went to bed and left first thing in the morning."

"I see."

"What do you see?"

She sat up, lit another Virginia Slim. "I see why you called me this afternoon."

"You do like hell."

"Oh? You burgled somebody last night and you need an alibi, so Denise is elected. I thought you gave up stealing, you swore you gave up stealing, but what does it mean when a thief takes an oath? Good old Denise. Take her out for a meal, pour a few drinks into her, hit a few jazz clubs, then throw her a friendly fuck-"

"Cut it out."

"Why should I? Isn't that about how it goes?"

Jesus, why had I brought it up? Well enough seems to be the one thing I'm incapable of leaving alone.

I said, "You're wrong, but maybe you're too mad to listen to an explanation. I called you because we had a date for tonight." The best defense is a good offense, isn't it? "Don't blame me for your bad memory. I can't help that."

"I didn't-"

"I did give up burglary, and I'm not exactly in trouble, but someone committed a crime last night and used the type of gloves I used to use, and the police found one on the scene and think I'm involved. And I don't happen to have an alibi because I happened to spend the night alone, because who knew I was going to need an alibi? When you don't do anything criminal you don't bother to arrange an alibi in advance."

"And you just sat home in front of the television set?"

"As a matter of fact I was reading Spinoza."

"I don't suppose anyone would make that up. Except you might." She fixed those artist's eyes on me. "I don't know how much of your word to take. Where was the burglary? Oh, wait a minute. It wasn't the one I read about in the paper? That poor woman in Chelsea?"

"That's the one."

"You didn't do that, did you, Bernie?" Her eyes probed mine for a long moment. Then she took one of my hands in both of hers and looked at my fingers. "No," she said, more to herself than to me. "You're very gentle. You couldn't kill someone."

"Of course I couldn't."

"I believe you. You said they found a glove? Does that mean you're in trouble?"

"Probably not. They'll probably catch the guys who did it within a couple of days. But in the meantime I figured it wouldn't hurt to have someone back up my story, in case anybody ever leans on it."

She asked what story I'd told them and I repeated my conversation with Richler.

"You didn't tell them my name," she said. "That's good. So I won't come into it unless they give you more trouble and you need a backup."

"That's right."

"Why didn't you just tell them the truth? That you were home watching TV?"

"I tend to lie to cops."

"Oh?"

"Old habits die hard."

"I guess." She leaned over to stub out her cigarette in the ashtray on the bedside table. In that position the curve of her pendant breast was particularly appealing, and I reached out a hand and stroked her. Bony? Gawky?

"I feel manipulated," she said lazily. "And as though I've been lied to a little."

"Maybe a very little," I conceded.

"Well, nobody's perfect."

"That's the prevailing opinion, anyway."

"And I'm a little sleepy and the least bit horny, and isn't Duke Ellington divine? Thief that you are, why don't you steal a little kiss?"

"God knows where that might lead."

"He's not the only one."