The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams

by Lawrence Block

  Some people have the same gift with gemstones that I have with locks. They barely have to look at a stone to know whether it came from the De Beers consortium in South Africa or the Home Shopping Network’s once-in-a-lifetime Cubic Zirconium Jamboree. They can tell lapis from sodalite and ruby from spinel more readily than I can distinguish amber from plastic or hematite beads from ball bearings. (It doesn’t really matter, neither one’s worth stealing, but a person ought to be able to tell the difference.)

  I don’t have that gift, but when you’ve been stealing the stuff long enough you develop a certain sense of what to take and what to leave. When in doubt, you take. I passed up the pieces that were obvious costume. There was one necklace, for example, with a stone so large it would have had to be the Kloppman Diamond if it was real. There were earrings made of African trading beads. I got some nice things, and I could describe them in detail and even provide a ballpark estimate of their value, but why?

  As you’ll see, it turned out to be academic.

  After half an hour in the Nugent apartment, I was ready to go home. I hadn’t slept in any of the beds or broken any chairs, and there was no porridge anywhere to be found. I’d used my two plastic bags for the jewelry, plus a watch and some cufflinks of Harlan’s, and then I’d tucked each bag into a pocket. Jewelry in each front trouser pocket, cash in the blazer’s inside breast pocket, the stethoscope in an outside blazer pocket, my picks and flashlight tucked here and there—I may have cut an ungainly silhouette, but I had my hands free.

  I took a last turn around my apartment, not in the hope of more booty but to make sure I hadn’t left any traces of my visit. As usual, I’d been compulsively neat. I was ready to call it a night, and a long one at that, when my eyes settled on a door I hadn’t noticed before. Another closet? The place was crawling with closets, and not a thing worth stealing in any of them.

  The door wouldn’t budge. And there was no keyhole, and thus no lock to pick.

  What had we here? Was this a permanently sealed door leading to another apartment, a vestigial aperture from a time when this and the adjoining apartment had been a single unit? It seemed unlikely. The door was on a side wall of the guest room, Mrs. Nugent’s studio. There was another door on that same wall leading to a large walk-in closet, into and out of which I had ambled a while earlier. Did the closet extend the whole length of the room, and had one of its two doors been closed off for some obscure reason?

  I checked. The closet was deep and wide, but it only ran half the length of the wall. Was the sealed door one that led into the rear of a closet in the next apartment? It seemed like a strange way to do things, but old buildings get partitioned in curious ways over the years, so maybe it was possible.

  What difference did it make?

  Well, it was curious, that was all. And I was curious, and never mind what it did to the cat.

  I got out my ring of picks and selected a flat steel strip four and a half inches long. I went up to the mystery door and slid my strip of steel between it and the jamb. I raised my hand to the top of the door, then lowered it again. I didn’t encounter any resistance until I’d brought it down a few inches below my waist, right about where you’d expect to find a lock. I eased the steel strip out, drawing it downward to trace the outline of what seemed to be a bolt. Below the bolt, the strip had smooth sailing again all the way to the floor.

  Curiouser and curiouser. If you were dividing one apartment into two, you didn’t just close a door and bolt it. That was okay with adjoining hotel rooms, when you wanted to preserve the option of access, but it wouldn’t do in this case, where you wanted privacy and security. At the very least, you’d seal the door all around with some sort of plaster compound.

  Besides, the lock wasn’t one of those add-on bolts you pick up at the hardware store. It was set right in the middle of a door two inches thick, which meant it was for a room designed to be locked and unlocked only from the inside. Closets don’t have locks like that.

  Bathrooms do.

  Well, sure. There was a bathroom off the master bedroom, and a half bath off the foyer. (“Halfbath, half-human. They call him…Tubman!”) So it made sense that there’d be one in the second bedroom as well. So that’s all it was, another bathroom, and if I’d wanted to steal towels I’d have gone to the Waldorf, so the hell with it. I could just—

  Wait a minute.

  A bathroom in an empty apartment that happened to be locked from the inside?

  I went back to the door and ran my hands over it, as if to assess its psychic energy. On the wall alongside it there was a switch plate set at shoulder height if your shoulders were set a tad lower than mine. I worked the single switch. No lights went on or off in the bedroom, and I couldn’t tell if anything happened in the bathroom. No light showed beneath the door.

  I flicked the switch back again, to undo whatever I might have done. I found a chair and sat down. I looked at the poor old harlequin in joan Nugent’s work-in-progress. On earlier inspection he’d looked sad. Now he looked confused.

  Was someone in there? Had I alerted him by buzzing the buzzer, and had he responded by…by locking himself in the bathroom?

  Why would anybody do that?

  Well, say I wasn’t the first burglar to come a-calling. I’d once been tossing a place when someone else broke in, and I’d found the whole thing something of a sticky wicket. I hadn’t locked myself in the bathroom, but I might have, if it had occurred to me.

  But did the apartment I entered look like one into which another housebreaker had recently broken? No way.

  Still…

  Logic, I thought. When all else fails, try logic.

  All right. There were two possibilities. There was someone in the bathroom or there wasn’t. If so, who could it be? A Nugent?

  If you were a Nugent, or anyone else legitimately present in the Nugents’ apartment, you might or might not choose to answer a doorbell at an ungodly hour. But if you didn’t go open the door, or at least peep through the peephole, would you instead lock yourself in the bathroom?

  You would not.

  Therefore if someone was there it was someone who didn’t belong and who would sit on the john in the dark for half an hour to avoid detection. All I had to do was slip out and go home now and let the mystery visitor remain anonymous. Anybody in there had to be aware of my presence, and eventually he (or she; maybe it was Doll Cooper, for God’s sake, trying out a third career) could emerge in his (or her) own good time. There was still silver for the taking, and thirty-odd dollars in the windmill canister, and, for all I knew, the legendary Kloppman Diamond.

  I went around the apartment turning off lights. In no time at all the whole place was dark except for the overhead light in the foyer. I turned that off, too, and opened the front door and stuck my head out into the hallway.

  And drew it back inside, and pulled the door shut, and padded noiselessly through the dark apartment, not even using my pen light. Moving slowly and silently, I slipped back into the guest room, where I hovered, barely breathing, and waited for the bathroom door to open.

  Ten minutes passed, arguably the longest ten minutes of my life. By the time they’d crept by, it was glaringly obvious that the bathroom was unoccupied.

  So why was it locked?

  And what was inside?

  The usual things, I told myself. A sink, a tub, maybe a stall shower. A commode. A medicine chest. Go home, I urged myself, and whatever’s in there can stay in there, and who cares?

  I did, evidently.

  Because what I did—after I had turned on the light again, so that I could at least see what I was doing even if I couldn’t satisfactorily explain it—what I did was get down on my hands and knees and try to pick the goddam lock. It was a nothing lock, it was a simple bolt of the sort you turn when you’re in the john and you don’t want someone to walk in on you. There were no tumblers, no pins, nothing, really, but a bolt that went back and forth when you turned the little gizmo on the back of the door.
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  I couldn’t pick the sonofabitch to save my soul.

  I could have popped it with one good kick, but I didn’t want to do that. I was a man who’d once been called “the Heifetz of the picklock,” and I certainly ought to be able to open a locked bathroom door. It wasn’t Fort Knox, for God’s sake. It was a bathroom, a guest bathroom, on West End Avenue.

  Couldn’t do it.

  I flicked the switch again, the one at the side of the bathroom door, the one that had previously caused nothing to happen. Predictably, nothing happened.

  Suppose I got married, suppose we had kids. Suppose one of them locked himself in the bathroom, the way the little bastards do, and then couldn’t unlock the door and panicked. Suppose Daddy rushed to the rescue, picks in hand, and then suppose Daddy had to tell Mommy to call a locksmith, because he couldn’t open the bloody door?

  Ridiculous.

  If it was my door, and my kid inside, I’d have taken it off its hinges. But that’s a lot of work, and a real messy job. You always get chips of paint off the hinge and onto the carpet, a mute testament to one’s continuing inability to draw back the bolt.

  See, there was no way to work my kind of magic on the thing. All I could do was try to get a purchase on it with my tools and snick it back into the door. The gap between door and jamb was pretty snug, so I didn’t have much room to work with. I could make a little progress, but sooner or later I’d be unable to maintain constant tension on the bolt, and my pick would slip and I’d be right back where I started, and not at all happy about it.

  One of the steel strips on my tool ring is a cut-down hacksaw blade, and it would have gone through the bolt like a knife through butter. Not a hot knife, and not warm butter either, but it would have done the job. I ruled it out, though, for the same reason I wouldn’t take the door off its hinges or kick it into the next county. I felt challenged, dammit.

  I took off my pliofilm gloves. I dragged over a gooseneck lamp and positioned it to best advantage. I gritted my teeth and went to work.

  And, by God, I opened the fucker.

  With the bolt drawn and one hand on the doorknob, I paused to note the time. Astonishingly, it was getting on for four in the morning. How long had I taken to open the bathroom door? I didn’t even want to know.

  What I did want to do—needed to do, in fact—was use the bathroom, and I figured I’d earned the right. Its utilitarian aspects aside, the john was the massive anticlimax I’d figured it to be. The usual porcelain fixtures, a medicine cabinet with nothing in it more exciting than aspirin, a tub with a drawn shower curtain—

  After all this buildup, you can see it coming, can’t you?

  Well, why not? It’s obvious, isn’t it? If a bathroom’s that hard to unlock from outside, how could anybody have locked it in the first place? Why, duhhhh, whoever it was must have locked it from inside. And, unless that person had subsequently jumped out the window, leaving a terrible mess on the pavement below, where could he be but in the bathroom? Where indeed but in the tub, say, behind the floral shower curtain?

  That’s where he was and that’s where I found him. Naked as the truth and dead as a pet rock, with a little round hole right in the middle of his forehead.

  CHAPTER

  Five

  You’re not here, I told the dead guy. You’re a figment of an overactive imagination, stressed beyond endurance by a rough day and a snootful of scotch and a nothing little deadbolt that took forever to open. You don’t exist, and I’m going to close my eyes, and when I open them you’ll be gone.

  It didn’t work.

  All right, I decided. In that case, I wasn’t there. More precisely, I would erase all traces of my visit, and once I’d vanished into the night—what there was left of it—it would be as if I had never been there in the first place.

  First, fingerprints. I’d taken off my gloves to get serious with the lock, and I hadn’t yet troubled to put them back on. I did so now, and snatched up a washcloth and wiped everything I might have touched during my interlude of glovelessness. The lamp, the door, the knob on either side. The toilet seat, which I’d raised (and hadn’t lowered afterward, what can I tell you, guys are like that). The flusher, which I’d flushed. The shower curtain, which I’d made the mistake of drawing open, and which I now returned to its original position. The light switch over the sink, which worked, and the light switch on the wall outside, which I tried again, and which still didn’t seem to do anything. And other things like the towel bar and the hamper, which I probably hadn’t touched, but why take chances?

  I backed out of the bathroom and closed the door. I put Joan Nugent’s gooseneck lamp back where I’d found it, took another look around her studio, and left it for the master bedroom, where I put all her jewelry back in her jewelry box. There was no way to make sure everything wound up in its original compartment, but I did the best I could. I’d been wearing gloves when I lifted the stuff and I was wearing them as I put everything back, so I didn’t have to worry about prints.

  I put Mr. Nugent’s watch where I’d found it on his night table, and replaced his diamond-and-onyx cufflinks in the little stud box in his sock drawer. That left me with two empty shopping bags from the deli. I carried them into the kitchen and filled them up with the cereal boxes and paper towels they’d held when I entered the apartment. I wasn’t entirely sure of the wisdom of this. Wasn’t it risky to carry anything out of the building? And did I really have to worry about the cops canvassing all the neighborhood delis and bodegas, trying to trace two rolls of Bounty and a box of Count Chocula? I decided to be guided by a modified version of the National Parks Service motto, updated for hapless burglars. Don’t even leave footprints, I told myself. Don’t even take snapshots.

  With my bags packed, I stood once again in the darkened foyer, filled this time with a different sort of anticipation. In another few minutes I’d be out of here, and I’d be leaving everything exactly as I’d found it—

  Oh yeah? a little voice demanded. What about the bathroom door?

  I just stood there. I gave it some thought, and then I gave it some more thought.

  Then I took out my picks and went back to the guest room.

  It was past five by the time I got out of there. I said good morning to Eddie as I sailed past him, face averted. “Hey, how ya doin’,” he said, for a change. I walked briskly southward for three blocks, nodded to my own doorman, got nodded at in return, and went upstairs. I stopped at the compactor chute and disposed of my disposable gloves. I almost added the two sacks of groceries, but what the hell, they were mine, bought and paid for. I let myself into my apartment and put my groceries away.

  I put away my burglar’s tools, too, and my stethoscope. I hung up my tie and jacket, kicked off my sneakers, and threw everything else into the hamper. I had a shower which nobody could have called premature, then jumped into bed and fell asleep.

  The phone woke me. It was Patience, my poetry therapist, calling to see if I was feeling better.

  Oh, right, the food poisoning. “I’m still a little rocky,” I said.

  “You were sleeping, weren’t you? I’m sorry I woke you. I tried you at the store, and when there wasn’t any answer I was concerned. Have you seen a doctor?”

  Had I? I couldn’t remember what Carolyn had told her.

  “Actually,” I said, “I’m feeling a lot better.”

  “But you said you were still a little rocky.”

  “I’d say the crisis has passed,” I said. “And as far as waking me is concerned, I’m glad you did. I should have been up hours ago.” That seemed safe to say, if it was late enough for her to have tried me at the store. What time was it, anyway? God, eleven-fifteen. I should have been up hours ago.

  “As a matter of fact,” I went on, “I really have to get moving. But it’s good you called, because I wanted to apologize for last night. I hated to cancel at the last minute like that.”

  “I’m just relieved you’re all right.”

  “Could we r
eschedule, Patience? Are you free for dinner this evening?”

  “This evening? Are you sure you’re well enough, Bernie?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “It’s one of those twenty-four-hour food-poisoning things. I still feel the slightest bit rocky because it’s only been about twenty-three hours, but an hour from now I’ll be ready to wrestle alligators.”

  “Is the timing really that precise?”

  “You can generally set your watch by it,” I said. “I had the same thing two or three years ago, I got it from a brown rice knish from the health food store. Thought I was going to die, and then twenty-four hours later I was whistling show tunes. How about dinner tonight?”

  “I have a client coming at seven,” she said, “so I should be through by eight, but the session might run over. He’s in the middle of a very tricky sonnet sequence and I hate to rush him. It’s not like Freudian analysis, where you hurry them out the door after fifty minutes. I’d hate to risk stifling somebody’s creativity.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “So do you want to come here? Come at eight, and if we’re not through you can sit in the waiting room and read a magazine. I’ll definitely be ready by eight-thirty, and that’s not too late, is it?”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  “We’ll eat someplace in the neighborhood,” she said. “No burritos, though.”

  “Please,” I said. “Don’t even say the B word.”

  It wasn’t going to be my day to find out how I liked Count Chocula. I was in too much of a hurry. I shaved, dressed, and got out of there, not even pausing to trade nods with my doorman. I legged it over to Broadway and caught the subway. I would have taken a cab but at that hour the subway figured to be quicker, even with a change of trains at Times Square and a three-block walk from Fourteenth Street.