The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams

by Lawrence Block

  Her doorman was perched on a folding chair, his attention largely given over to a supermarket tabloid. The headline of the article he was reading hinted at a connection between extraterrestrials and the California lottery. “Hi, Eddie,” she said.

  “Hey, how ya doin’,” he said, without raising his eyes from the page.

  She turned to me, rolled her eyes, then turned to him again. “Eddie, do you know when the Nugents are coming back?” This time he actually glanced up at her, his own face unsullied by a look of comprehension. “Mr. and Mrs. Nugent,” she said. “Apartment 9-G.” As in spot, I thought. “As in gerbil,” she said. “They went to Europe. Do you know when they’re due back?”

  “Hey, ya got me,” he said. “Have to ask one of the day guys.”

  “I keep forgetting,” she said, probably to me, since the tabloid had reclaimed his attention. “I’m in such a fog when I walk out of here in the morning that it’s all I can do to find the subway. Oh, God, look at the time! I’ll be in a worse fog than usual. Bernie, you’re an angel.”

  “And you’re a doll.”

  “I am now, thanks to you.” She smiled, showing a mouthful of perfect teeth. Then she stood up on her toes, kissed the corner of my mouth, and disappeared into the building.

  Three blocks south of there, I gave my own night doorman a nod and got a nod in return. I’ve been a little less effusive with the building staff ever since I found out the guy I’d been gamely practicing my Spanish on was from Azerbaijan. Nowadays I just nod, and they nod back, and that’s as much of a relationship as anybody really needs.

  I went upstairs to my own apartment. For a long moment I just stood there in the darkness, feeling like a diver on a high platform.

  Well, at least I could get a little closer to the edge. Even curl my toes around it.

  I turned on the light and got busy. I stepped out of my Florsheim wingtips and into an old pair of running shoes. From a cubbyhole at the rear of the bedroom closet I equipped myself with a little ring of instruments which are not, strictly speaking, keys. In the right hands, however, they will do all that a key can do and more. I put them in my pocket, and I added a tiny flashlight that throws a very narrow beam, and does not throw it terribly far. In the kitchen, in the drawer with the Glad bags and the aluminum foil, I found a roll of those disposable gloves of plastic film, much favored these days by doctors and dentists, not to mention those gentle souls for whom the word “fist” is a verb.

  I used to use rubber gloves, cutting the palms out for ventilation. But you have to change with the times. I tore off two of the plastic gloves and tucked them in a pocket.

  I’d been wearing a baseball jacket over a blue button-down shirt open at the collar and a pair of khakis. I added a tie and swapped the baseball jacket for a navy blazer. For a final touch I got a stethoscope from a dresser drawer and stuck it in a blazer pocket, so that the earpieces were just barely visible to the discerning eye.

  On my way out the door I took a minute to look up a listing in the White Pages. I didn’t call it, though. Not from my own phone.

  At 1:24, dressed for success, I left my building. I walked up to Seventy-second Street, and then I walked a block out of my way to the corner where I’d met Doll Cooper. I dropped a quarter in a phone slot and dialed the number I’d looked up.

  Four rings. Then a computer-generated voice, inviting me to leave a message for Joan or Harlan Nugent. I hung up instead and headed up Broadway to the Korean deli at Seventy-fifth Street, where I picked out enough groceries to fill a couple of bags. I went for low weight and high volume, choosing three boxes of cereal, a loaf of bread, and a couple of rolls of paper towels. No point in weighing oneself down.

  I got out of there and took a left, walked a block to West End Avenue, turned left again, and walked to her building at the corner of Seventy-fourth. The same old stalwart was still manning his post. “Hi, Eddie,” I said.

  This time he looked up. He saw a well-dressed chap, tired from a long day removing spleens, performing one final domestic chore before settling in for some brief but well-deserved rest. Did he happen to note the stethoscope peeping out of the side pocket? Would he have known what it was if he did? Your guess is as good as mine.

  “Hey, how ya doin’,” he said.

  I breezed past him and went up to call on the Nugents.

  CHAPTER

  Four

  The elevator huffed and puffed getting me to the ninth floor, as if the operation that had years ago converted it to self-service had somehow sapped its strength in the process. I emerged at last into a conveniently empty hallway, turned to the right, walked past doors marked 9-D and 9-C, and saw the error of my ways. I did an about-face, walked on past the elevator, and found 9-G (as in Goldilocks) all the way at the end. I walked there, set down my bags of groceries on either side of the jute doormat, and tried to divine the presence of anyone within.

  Because you never know. Maybe the Nugents had come home early. Maybe Harlan had got word of an emergency at the widget factory, maybe Joan couldn’t bear to spend one more hour away from her beloved split-leaf philodendron. Or maybe Doll Cooper had got the apartment number wrong, and they lived one floor below in 8-G, just downstairs from the kung fu master who only left his apartment to walk his rottweiler.

  I took out my stethoscope, fitted the earpieces in my ears, pressed the business end against the very heart of the door, and listened hard.

  You didn’t think the stethoscope was just camouflage, did you? If all I’d intended was to look like a doctor, I’d have carried a beat-up old Gladstone bag and pretended I was making a house call. No, I was using the stethoscope for the same reason a doctor does: to get a clue what was going on inside.

  If 9-G had been a human being, I’d have closed its eyelids and put a tag on its toe. I couldn’t hear a thing.

  But what did that mean? The Nugents could be sleeping. The kung fu master could be sleeping. Even the rottweiler could be sleeping.

  Let them lie, I told myself. You don’t have to be here, risking life and liberty in the pursuit of happiness. You can pick up your groceries and go home. You’ll eat the bread and the cereal sooner or later. Who knows, maybe you’ll actually like Count Chocula. And paper towels last forever, they’ve got almost as long a shelf life as Twinkies. So—

  I rang the bell.

  It was a buzzer, actually, and with the stethoscope’s assistance I heard it clear as…well, clear as a buzzer. I let up on it, listened to the silence, then buzzed again, a little longer this time. And listened to more silence.

  That little Jiminy Cricket voice was silent now, too. I was on automatic pilot, doing what I do best. Putting the stethoscope back in my pocket, taking out the little ring of picks and probes, and getting down to business.

  It’s a gift. Some guys can hit a curveball. Others can crunch numbers.

  I can open locks.

  Anybody can learn. I taught Carolyn once, and in a pinch she can open her apartment door without her keys. But for most people, even those who work at it, even the sort who make a precarious living at it, picking a lock is a very laborious process. You pick and pick and pick, almost as if you were trying to nag the lock into submission, and your fingers get clumsy and you get cramps in your hands, and sometimes you say the hell with it and jimmy the thing, or rear back and kick the door in.

  Unless you happen to have the touch.

  There were two locks on the Nugents’ door. One was a Poulard, and you may have seen their ads, guaranteeing their product as pick-proof. The other was a Rabson; no guarantee, but a solid reliable lock.

  I had them both open in under two minutes.

  What can I tell you? It’s a gift.

  Strictly speaking, I don’t think they should call it breaking and entering. If you’re really good at it, you never actually break anything.

  Unless there’s a burglar alarm. Then, the instant you open a door or window that’s wired into the circuit, you break the electrical connection. When this
happens there’s generally a high-pitched sort of whine, and you have a certain amount of time—generally forty-five seconds or thereabouts—to find the keypad and punch in the code that tells the system you’ve got every right to be there. After that you get the full treatment with bells and whistles and, sooner or later, a couple of private cops making an armed response.

  By then, of course, any burglar in his right mind has gone home.

  I took a deep breath, turned the knob, and opened the door.

  No alarm.

  Well, I couldn’t know that for sure. There’s also such a thing as a silent alarm. Open the door and there’s no warning whine, no sound at all beyond the music of the spheres. There’s a keypad concealed somewhere, but you’ve got no reason to go looking for it, and after forty-five seconds it’s too late, because by that time an alarm has registered in the office of the security firm, and they turn up with guns in their hands while you’re filling a pillowcase with the good sterling.

  The thing is, hardly anybody installs a silent alarm these days, except as a supplementary system. What you want a burglar alarm to do is keep burglars out, not give you a shot at catching them once they’re already inside. Most burglars, it pains me to say, are just looking for the easy dollar. They’ve got no calling for the profession. The great majority, once they breach the system and hear the telltale whine, are out of there like a shot. A certain number, including the junkies and crackheads who get in by breaking a window or kicking in a door, will take a few minutes to grab a radio or go through a top dresser drawer. Then they’re gone.

  If the only alarm’s a silent one, the burglar doesn’t know it’s there—which, after all, is the point of the thing. So the burglar goes about his business, and if he’s a junkie or even if he’s not, he’ll very likely finish up and go home before the armed-response guys turn up. Even when traffic’s light, it takes a while to answer a call. In rush hour, forget it.

  Besides, a silent alarm is a pain in the neck for the householder. Because it’s silent, there’s nothing to remind you that you’re supposed to key in your code. A certain amount of the time you forget, and the rent-a-cops turn up while you’re sitting there switching back and forth between Leno and Letterman. After that happens a few times you stop setting the alarm in the first place.

  Groceries in hand, I crossed the threshold and moved into the entering phase of breaking and entering. I nudged the door closed with my hip, cutting off the light from the hallway. It was pitch dark where I was standing, and silent as a tomb.

  Lord, what a feeling! A quickening of the pulse, a tingling in the fingertips, a lightness in the chest—but that doesn’t begin to describe what I felt, and always feel in such circumstances. I’d told Carolyn about the excitement, the thrill of it all, but there was more. I felt an abiding sense of satisfaction, as if I was doing what I’d been placed on earth to do. I was a born burglar, and I was aburgling, and whatever had led me to think I could possibly give it all up?

  I set down my grocery bags and put on my disposable gloves. I got hold of my tiny flashlight, dropped it, and fumbled around on the floor for it, cursing the darkness. I found it, finally, and switched it on, then got to my feet and followed the straight and narrow beam all around the apartment. Once I’d established that every window was heavily curtained, I turned on a few lights and took another deliberate tour of the premises.

  Walking from room to room, I felt like a gentleman farmer riding his fences, master of all he surveyed. But there was method in it. Long ago, in a nice apartment on East Sixty-seventh Street, I had amused myself looting a living room while the apartment’s bona fide occupant was lying dead on the other side of the bedroom door. He had died, it must be said, of natural causes; someone had murdered him. The police, who conveniently turned up while I was still busy with my looting, jumped to the completely unwarranted conclusion that I ought to be listed as the proximate cause of death, and I had a hell of a time getting it all straightened out.

  It’s not the sort of thing anybody would want to go through twice, believe me. So I’ve learned to spend my first moments in a burglary checking around for dead bodies, and of course I never find any. They’re like cops and cabs, never there when you’re looking for them.

  What I found instead was what realtors call a Classic Six, by no means a scarce item in prewar apartment buildings on the Upper West Side. An entrance foyer, where I’d groped for my flashlight. A living room, a formal dining room, a windowed kitchen. Two good-sized bedrooms, one with twin beds, the other a guest room which evidently doubled as an artist’s studio for Joan Nugent. There was an easel with a half-finished painting of a man in harlequin drag playing the pipes of Pan. Pablo Picasso, eat your heart out.

  That’s six rooms right there if you count the foyer, but I don’t think you do, because there was another room off the kitchen. I don’t know what it was supposed to be originally. A pantry, I suppose, or else a maid’s room. Now it was Harlan Nugent’s den. There was a desk with a computer and a fax modem on it, and a bookcase that ran heavily to technothrillers, along with nonfiction along the lines of How You Can Profit from the Coming Ice Age. Above the desk hung a rural landscape which I was able to recognize as the work of Mrs. Nugent.

  There was a moment, I have to admit, when I was overtaken by a feeling of infinite sadness. This was an unutterably serene apartment, with its heavy draperies and its thick carpet topped here and there by oriental area rugs, its graceful French furniture and torchère lamps, its old-fashioned wall molding and ceiling medallions, and even the art on its walls, the hand-tinted steel engravings of faraway places that shared wall space with Mrs. Nugent’s oddly comforting thrift-shop acrylics. Why couldn’t I relish for an hour or so the joy of illegal entry; then, having done so to my heart’s content, why couldn’t I leave everything exactly as I found it?

  I suppose because photographic safaris are great for you and me, but they feel kind of lame to a born hunter. I could try telling myself to treat the Nugent apartment like a National Park, taking only snapshots, leaving only footprints, but it wasn’t going to work. I was a burglar, and no burglar worthy of the name counts the night a success when he comes home empty-handed.

  So I went to work. I started in the kitchen, where I unpacked the groceries I’d bought, wiped them free of fingerprints, and stowed them in the cupboards. (Maybe the Nugents would like Count Chocula.) Then I checked the refrigerator. It was empty of perishables, which suggested Joan and Harlan had gone off for a week or more. It was, alas, also empty of cash, as was the freezer compartment. A lot of people stash money in the fridge, and I guess it’s as good a place as any, or at least it was until everybody started doing it. No cold cash in the Nugent icebox, however, so I moved on.

  Nothing worth taking in the kitchen. There was an eight-piece canister set on the cupboard, white china with blue trim in a Dutch motif—windmills, tulips, a boy on ice skates, a girl with fat cheeks and one of those soup-bowl haircuts. One container held around thirty dollars in change and small bills, handy for tipping delivery boys, I suppose. I left it as I found it.

  There was a locked drawer in the desk in the den, so it was the one I opened first. Locks like that are never terribly serious, and this one was child’s play. Inside there was a diary, which I supposed was locked away so that Mrs. Nugent wouldn’t get her hands on it. I read a few pages, hoping for a little prurient interest, and it may have been there for the finding, but not on the pages I happened to hit. There all I ran into was Harlan Nugent’s personal ruminations on life and death, and as soon as I realized that’s what I was getting I put the little book down like a hot brick. Pillaging the man’s apartment was enough of an invasion of privacy for me. I couldn’t bring myself to ransack his soul.

  Besides the diary, the once-locked drawer held three manila envelopes a little larger than lettersize. The first one contained an insurance policy, the second a will. I did no more than look at each before returning it to its envelope, and I almost didn’t bother wit
h the third envelope, which would have been a mistake. It was full of money.

  Hundred-dollar bills, and a thick sheaf of them. I took off my gloves to give the money a fast count, figuring it didn’t matter if I left fingerprints on the bills. They’d be coming home with me.

  Eighty-three of them, plus a stray fifty in the middle of the stack. $8,350 in perfectly anonymous used bills. A little off-the-books income old Harlan didn’t want to report? Or was there a perfectly legitimate explanation? It is, after all, still legal for Americans to possess actual money.

  Well, if it was unreported income, Nugent would bear its burden no longer. I pocketed the bills and returned the empty envelope to the drawer.

  Then, just to show off, I took out my picks and locked the drawer after myself.

  I moved a lot of pictures without uncovering a wall safe. I didn’t find any loose bricks in the fireplace, either. Actually I didn’t really expect to encounter a safe or a hidey-hole; if the apartment had had one, that’s where he’d have stashed the $8,350, not in a desk drawer you could have opened with eyebrow tweezers.

  There was some nice silver on top of the sideboard in the dining room, English by the look of it, Georgian if I had to guess. There was more of the same in the drawers. Over the years I’ve known three good customers for fine silver. One’s dead, one’s in jail, and the third retired to Florida two years ago. (He may still buy the odd soup tureen now and again, but you wouldn’t want to shlep a load of stolen silver onto a plane. How would you get it through the metal detector?)

  I passed up the silver, and some nice lace and linen, and went into the master bedroom, where Mrs. Nugent kept her jewelry in a miniature brassbound chest on top of her Queen Anne dresser. The chest had a lock, but she hadn’t locked it, which showed good sense on her part. I’d have opened it in a wink, and a cruder sort of yegg would have simply tucked the whole thing under his arm and hauled it off to open at leisure.