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Music suddenly came from the speaker in the van.
“Sounds like WQXR, the classical radio station,” Cantor said. “Interesting lady; pity she’s not more of a looker.”
“Where are you going to park the recorder?” Stone asked.
“Right here; I’m in a legal parking spot, and I don’t have to move the van until tomorrow morning, when the alternate side parking rules change. I’ll just leave it until then.”
“Good. No point in surveilling when she’s at work, either. Just check her between quitting time and bedtime; let’s see if the guy really calls back or if he’s just handing her a line.”
“Okay. How long do you want me to keep the recorder going?”
“The rest of the week, if you can check out the other two names I gave you while the recorder listens.”
“Sure thing. Tell me, did you set your alarm when you left the house?”
“Damn it, I forgot.”
“They’ll come back, I promise you.”
“How will I know if they do?”
“You won’t, unless you know exactly what to look for.”
Stone opened the door of the van. “I think I’d better get home.”
The phone was ringing when he opened the front door.
“Hi,” Arrington said. “How about tonight?”
“I’ve got to do something tonight,” he said. “and I’m afraid you can’t help.”
“I can be very helpful,” she said.
“I know, but this one I need to do alone. How about tomorrow?”
“You’re on; see you later.” She hung up.
Stone walked around the house and took a good look at things; nothing seemed to have been disturbed in his absence. He switched on the living room lights and left the house by the front door, careful to set the alarm this time, then walked around to the other side of the block and rang the bell of a neighbor of his acquaintance.
“Hi,” he said to the woman. “I’ve forgotten my front door key; could I go out the back door of your house? I’ve got a kitchen door key hidden.”
“Sure,” the woman said, then let him into and out the rear of her house.
It was dark now, but the lights in the common garden had not yet come on. Stone stood very still for ten minutes, sweeping the entire garden, looking for any sign of movement. There was none. He walked slowly toward the back door of his own house, as if out for an evening stroll, then stopped again at his back gate. Still no movement in the garden.
He went to his kitchen door and let himself in, then disarmed the burglar alarm. Without turning on any lights, he went upstairs to his bedroom, changed into slippers, got the loaded riot gun, and went back downstairs to his study. He sat himself down in a comfortable chair and began to wait. The only light in the room filtered in from the living room, where a single lamp burned.
It had been a long time since he had been on a stakeout, and he tried to remember how he had dealt with the boredom without falling asleep. Reading was out; so was listening to music or watching television. Instead, he tried to remember things, things from a long time ago; that, he knew from experience, would keep him awake and wouldn’t interfere with his hearing. He tried to remember all the names of his high school graduating class, scoring about 80 percent, he reckoned.
The graduation memory done, he started on girls. He tried to remember each of the girls he had slept with from his freshman year at NYU, when he had had his first sexual experience, until he graduated. He began with Susan Bernstein, his first, who had invited him back to her dorm room and brazenly seduced him, cheerfully waiting until he had recovered from his first, premature ejaculation so that they could do it again, this time for a considerably longer period. He had slept with her throughout his freshman year; he tried to remember each experience. She didn’t come back his sophomore year; she had quit school to marry a jeweler in the diamond district.
He worked his way through the college years, lingering over the first experience he had had with two girls, at a summer house in East Hampton. The girls, he remembered, had been just as interested in each other as in him, something that had fascinated him to no end. Then there had been the assistant professor of English whom he had screwed late at night in the faculty lounge and on three other occasions, always in the same room. For some reason, doing it there had turned her on.
He was somewhere in the middle of his senior year, in the back seat of a Cadillac convertible parked on a dark Greenwich Village street, fucking the beautiful daughter of a New Jersey car dealer, when he was suddenly snapped back to the present. He had heard a noise from somewhere downstairs.
Chapter 31