The Burglar in the Closet - By Lawrence Block Page 0,4

the avoir-dupois more in terms of carats than ounces.

Then I set the case down again and gave the premises another careful contemplative toss. I don’t even know if I was really looking for anything at this point. A person younger than I might have said I was trying to pick up vibrations. Come to think of it, I might have said that myself, but not aloud. What I was probably trying to do, in truth, was prolong the delicious feeling of being where I wasn’t supposed to be and where no one knew I was. Not even Craig knew I was there. I’d told him I would go in a night or two later, but it was such a pleasant evening, such a propitious night for breaking and entering…

So I was in the bedroom, examining a pastel portrait of a youngish woman elegantly coiffed and gowned, with an emerald at her throat that looked to be head and shoulders above anything I’d stolen from Crystal Sheldrake. The painting looked early nineteenth century and the woman looked French, but she might simply have cultivated the art of looking French. There was something fetching about her expression. I decided she’d been disappointed so many times in life, largely by men, that she’d reached a point where she expected disappointment and decided that she could live with it, but it still rather rankled. I was between women myself at the time and told her with my eyes that I could make her life a joy and a fulfillment, but her chalky blues met mine and she let me know that she was sure I’d be just as big a letdown as everybody else. I figured she was probably right.

Then I heard the key in the lock.

It was a good thing there were two locks, and it was another good thing I’d relocked them upon entering. (I could have bolted them as well, so that they couldn’t be opened from outside, but I’d given up doing that a while ago, figuring that it just let citizens know there was a burglar inside and moved them to come back with a cop or two in tow.) I froze, and my heart ascended to within an inch or two of my tonsils, and my body got damp in all those spots the antiperspirant ads warn you about. The key turned in the lock, and the bolt drew back, and someone said something inaudible, to another person or to the empty air, and another key found its way into another lock, and I stopped being frozen and started moving.

There was a window in the bedroom, conventionally enough, but there was an air conditioner in it so there was no quick way to open it. There was another smaller window, large enough so that I could have gotten through it, but some spoilsport had installed bars on it to prevent some rotten burglar from climbing in through it. This also prevented rotten burglars from climbing out, although the installer had probably not had that specifically in mind.

I registered this, then looked at the bed with its lacy spread and thought about throwing myself under it. But there wasn’t really a hell of a lot of room between the box spring and the carpet. I could have fit but I could not have been happy about it. And there’s something so undignified about hiding under a bed. It’s such a dreary cliché.

The bedroom closet was every bit as trite but rather more comfortable. Even as the key was turning in the second Rabson lock, I was darting into the closet. I’d opened it before to paw through garments and check hatboxes in the hope that they held more than hats. It had then been quaintly locked, the key stuck right there in the lock waiting for me to turn it. I don’t know why people do this but they do it all the time. I guess if they keep the key somewhere else it’s too much trouble hunting for it every time they want to change their shoes, and I guess locking a door provides some sort of emotional security even when you leave the key in the lock. I’d taken nothing from her closet earlier; if she had furs they were in storage, and I hate stealing furs anyway, and I certainly wasn’t going to make off with her Capezios.

At any rate, I hadn’t bothered relocking the closet and that saved unlocking it all over again. I popped