The Burglar in the Closet - By Lawrence Block Page 0,49
pain I did so with my ankles unturned. I did a few shallow kneebends to make sure that my legs still worked, let out the breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding, and made my way over to the door leading back into the building.
It was locked from the inside, but of course that was the least of my problems.
Knobby’s lock was no problem, either. I got to his door just as a middle-aged man emerged from a door down the hall and began walking in my direction. I could have sworn I recognized him from one of those Haley’s M-O commercials, asking his pharmacist for some commonsense advice about, uh, irregularity. I knocked on Knobby’s door, frowned, said, “Yeah, it’s me, man. You gonna open the door or what?”
Silence from within, of course.
“Yeah, right,” I said. “But hurry it up, huh?” I looked at the approaching gentleman, caught his eye, rolled my own eyes in exasperation. “Taking a shower,” I confided. “So I gotta stand here while he dries off and gets dressed and everything.”
He nodded sympathetically and hurried on by, hoping no doubt that I’d keep the rest of my sorrows to myself. When he turned the corner I hauled out my ring of tools and popped Knobby’s lock in less time than it takes to announce the fact. He had one of those spring locks that engages automatically when you close the door, and he hadn’t bothered to use the key to engage the deadbolt, so all I had to do was snick the thing back with a strip of spring steel and give the door a push.
I slipped inside, closed the door, locked it more thoroughly than Knobby had done, and groped around for a light switch. I didn’t have rubber gloves with me and this time I didn’t care, because I didn’t expect to steal anything. All I really wanted was to find some evidence, and once I found it I could leave it there and quick go bring it to the attention of the police. There would probably be some subtle way to do this.
If I got really lucky, of course, I might just find the caseful of jewels. In which event I would liberate my attaché case with the greater portion of its contents intact, minus a few choice and eminently traceable items which I could hide here and there on the premises where Todras and Nyswander could uncover them at their leisure. But it seemed all too probable that, if Knobby was the killer and thief, the jewels were tucked away someplace where I wouldn’t find them, not left in this apartment behind an imperfectly locked door.
While I thought all of these things I was already getting busy tossing the place. This was a relatively simple job because of its size. Knobby had a studio apartment not very much bigger than Jillian’s place and a good deal more sparsely furnished. There was a captain’s bed in unpainted birch, a mahogany set of drawers with mismatched drawer pulls, clearly acquired secondhand, a comfortable chair and a pair of straightbacked side chairs. A stove and refrigerator and sink stood at the rear, ineffectively screened from the rest of the room by a beaded curtain.
The place was sloppy. Bartenders have to be very neat at their work and I’d spent enough hours watching them polish glasses and put things away in their proper places to assume they were just naturally precise individuals. Knobby’s apartment disabused me of this notion. He had scattered dirty clothes here and there around the room, his bed was unmade, and one got the general impression that his cleaning woman had died months ago and had not yet been replaced.
I kept at it. I checked the kitchen area first. There was no cold cash in the fridge, no hot jewelry in the oven. There was, as a matter of fact, mold and dead food in the former and stale grease and crud in the latter, and I moved on to other areas as quickly as possible.
The drawers in the captain’s bed contained a jumble of clothing, the wardrobe running mostly to jeans in various stages of disrepute and T-shirts, some of them red Spyder’s Parlor numbers, others imprinted to promote other establishments, causes, or life styles. One drawer held a variety of contraceptive devices plus the sort of sex aids available at adult bookstores—vibrators, stimulators, and diverse rubber and leather objects the specific functions of which I could only guess at.
No