The Burglar in the Closet - By Lawrence Block Page 0,3

’em both.” No kidding. “I useta beg her to keep some of that stuff in a safe-deposit box. She said it’s too much trouble. She wouldn’t listen to me.”

“Let’s hope she didn’t start listening recently.”

“Not Crystal. She never listened to anybody.”

I took my attaché case into the bedroom with me and had a look for myself. Earrings, finger rings, bracelets, necklaces. Brooches, pendants, watches. Modern jewelry and antique jewelry. Fair stuff, good stuff, and a couple things that looked, to my reasonably professional eye, to be very good indeed. Dentists take in a certain amount of cash along with the checks, and hard as it may be to believe this, some of that cash doesn’t get reported to the Internal Revenue people. Some of it gets turned quietly into jewelry, and that jewelry could now get turned just as quietly right back into cash again. It wouldn’t bring in what it had cost in the first place, since your average fence is a rather more careful customer than your average dentist, but it would still amount to a fairly impressive sum when you consider that it all started out with nothing but a whole lot of toothaches and root-canal work.

I searched very carefully, not wanting to miss anything. Crystal Sheldrake kept a very neat apartment on the surface, but the interiors of her drawers were a scandal, with baubles and beads forced to keep company with rumpled panty hose and half-full make-up jars. So I took my time, and my attaché case grew heavier as my fingers grew lighter. There was plenty of time. She had left the house at seven-fifteen and would probably not return until after midnight, if indeed she returned before dawn. Her standard operating procedure, according to Craig, called for a drink or two at each of several neighborhood watering holes, a bite of dinner somewhere along the way, and then a few hours devoted to a combination of serious drinking and even more serious cruising. Of course there were nights that got planned in advance, dinner engagements and theater dates, but she’d left the house dressed for a casual night’s entertainment.

That meant she’d either bring home a stranger or go to a stranger’s home, and either way I’d be long gone before she recrossed her own threshold. If they settled on his place, the jewels might be fenced before she knew they were missing. If she brought the guy home and they were both too sloshed to notice anything was missing, and if he in turn let himself out before she woke up, she might just tag the crime on him. Either way I looked to be in the clear, and enough thousands of dollars ahead so that I could coast for the next eight or ten months, even after I gave Craig his share. Of course it was hard to tell just what the attaché case contained, and it’s a long, long way from jewelry to cash, but things were looking good for Mrs. Rhodenbarr’s boy Bernard, no question about it.

I remember having that thought. I can’t begin to tell you what a comfort it was a little later when Crystal Sheldrake locked me in the bedroom closet.

CHAPTER

Two

The problem, of course, derived from an offshoot of Parkinson’s Law. A person, be he bureaucrat or burglar, tends to take for a task as much time as is available for it. Because I knew Crystal Sheldrake would be absent from her apartment for hours on end, I was inclined to spend several of those hours divesting her of her possessions. I’ve always known that burglars should observe the old Playboy Philosophy—i.e., Get In and Get Out—but there’s something to be said for making use of the available time. You can miss things if your work is rushed. You can leave incriminating evidence behind. And it’s a kick, going through another person’s things, participating vicariously (and perhaps neurotically) in that person’s life. The kicks involved are one of the attractions of burglary for me. I can admit that, even if I can’t do anything much about it.

So I lingered. I could have tossed the Sheldrake pied-à-terre in twenty efficient minutes if I put my mind to it. Instead I took my precious time.

I’d finished picking the second Sheldrake lock at 7:57—I happened to note the time before easing the door open. At 9:14 I closed my attaché case and fastened the snaps. I picked it up and noted its increased weight with approval, trying to think of