The Burglar in the Closet - By Lawrence Block Page 0,42

dime in my hand. I started to put it in my pocket. Then, without any real thought involved, I began making a phone call instead. I dialed Jillian’s apartment, and when a male voice answered I said, “Sorry, wrong number,” and hung up. I frowned, checked the number on the card in my wallet, frowned again, fished out another dime—I still had an ample supply—and dialed once more.

“Hello?”

The same voice. A voice I’d heard often over the years, saying not Hello but Open wider, please.

Craig Sheldrake’s voice.

“Hello? Anybody there?”

Nobody here but us burglars, I thought. And what are you doing there?

CHAPTER

Twelve

King Street lies just below the southern edge of Greenwich Village, running west from Macdougal Street toward the Hudson. SoHo’s a commercial district that’s been turned into artists’ housing, but the stretch of King where Grabow lived had always been primarily residential. Most of the block was given over to spruced-up brownstones four and five stories tall. Here and there an old commercial building newly converted to artists’ lofts reminded me I was south of Houston Street.

Grabow’s building was one of these. It stood a few doors off Sixth Avenue, a square structure of dull-red brick. It was four stories tall but the height of its ceilings put its roofline even with the five-story brownstones on either side. On all four floors the building sported floor-to-ceiling industrial windows extending the full width of the building, an unarguable boon to artists and exhibitionists.

A boon, too, to the veritable jungle of plants on the second floor, a tropical wall of greenery that was positively dazzling. They were soaking up the afternoon sun. The building was on the uptown side of the street so the windows faced south, which was probably terrific for the plants but less desirable for artists, who prefer a north light. On the first and third and top floors, drapes prevented the south light from screwing up masterpieces. Or perhaps the tenants were sleeping, or out for the day, or watching home movies—

I opened the door and stood in a small areaway facing another door, and this one was locked. The lock looked fairly decent. Through a window in the door—glass with steel mesh in it, they weren’t kidding around here—I could see a flight of stairs, a large self-service freight elevator, and a door that presumably led into the ground-floor apartment. This last was probably a safety requirement, as the ground-floor place had its own entrance in front from the days when it had been some sort of store. The downstairs tenant got his mail through a slot in his front door, because there were only three mailboxes in the hall where I stood, each with a buzzer beneath it, and the middle box was marked Grabow. Nothing fancy, just a scrap of masking tape with the name printed in soft pencil, but it did get the message across.

So his loft figured to be the middle one of the three, which would put it two flights up. I reached for the buzzer and hesitated, wishing I had a phone number for him. After all, I had a whole pocket full of dimes. If I could call him I’d know whether or not to open his door. Hell, if I called him anything could happen. His wife could answer the phone. Craig Sheldrake could answer the phone. He was answering all sorts of phones these days—

But I didn’t want to think about that. I’d cabbed downtown trying not to think at all about Craig and his surprising presence in Jillian’s apartment. If I started thinking about that I’d start wondering why he was there instead of in a cell, and just when they had started letting persons charged with homicide go dancing out on bail. I might even wonder what had led the cops to drop charges against Craig, and who they were looking for to take his place.

God, why would anyone want to think about that?

I pushed Grabow’s button. Nothing happened. I pushed it again. Nothing happened again. I gazed thoughtfully at the lock and touched the ring of cunning implements in my trouser pocket. The lock didn’t scare me, but how did I know there was nobody home upstairs? Grabow was an artist. They keep odd hours in the first place, and this guy didn’t have a listed phone, he might not have any phone at all, and maybe he was a temperamental bastard, and if he was sleeping or working he might just let the bell