The Burglar in the Closet - By Lawrence Block Page 0,51

still ached from that jump and I blamed him for it.

A cab came along the minute I got to the street. Sometimes things just work out that way.

They have these lockers all over New York, in subway stations, at railroad terminals. I used one at Port Authority Bus Terminal on Eighth Avenue; I opened the door, popped the attaché case inside, dropped a pair of quarters in the slot, closed the door, turned the key, took the key out and carried it off with me. It had felt very odd, carrying all that currency around with me, and it felt even odder abandoning it like that in a public place.

But it would have been stranger still running down to SoHo with it.

God knows I didn’t want to go there. It hadn’t been that long since I’d faked a heart attack to get away from Walter Ignatius Grabow, and here I was climbing right back onto the horse and sticking my head in the lion’s mouth again.

But I told myself it wasn’t all that dangerous. If he was home he’d buzz back when I rang his bell, and I’d just make an abrupt U-turn and take off. And he wouldn’t be home anyway, because it was Saturday night and he was an artist and they all go out and drink on Saturday night. He’d be partying it up at somebody else’s loft or knocking back boilermakers at the Broome Street Bar or sharing a jug of California Zinfandel with someone of the feminine persuasion.

Except that his girlfriend Crystal was dead, and maybe he’d be doing some solitary drinking to her memory, sitting in the dark in his loft, downing shots of cheap rye and not answering the bell when I rang, just moping in a corner until I popped his lock and sashayed flylike into his parlor—

Unpleasant thought.

The thought stayed with me after I rang his bell and got no answer. The lock on the downstairs door was a damned good one and the metal stripping where the door met the jamb kept me from prying the bolt back, but no lock is ever quite so good as the manufacturer would have you believe. I did a little of this and a little of that and the pins dropped and the tumblers tumbled.

I walked up two flights. The second-floor tenant, the one with all the plants, had soft rock playing on the stereo and enough guests to underlay the music with a steady murmur of conversation. As I passed his door I smelled the penetrating aroma of marijuana, its smoke an accompaniment to the music and the talk. I went up another flight and listened carefully at Grabow’s door, but all I could hear was the music from the apartment below. I got down on hands and knees and saw that no light was visible beneath his door. Maybe he was downstairs, I thought, getting happily stoned and tapping his foot to the Eagles and telling everybody about the lunatic he’d cornered that afternoon in the lobby.

Meanwhile, the lunatic braced himself and opened the door. Grabow had a good thick slab of a door, and holding it in place was a Fox police lock, the kind that features a massive steel bar angled against the door and mounted in a plate bolted to the floor. You can’t kick a door in when it has that kind of a lock, nor can you take a crowbar and pry it open. It’s about the strongest protection there is.

Alas, no lock is stronger than its cylinder. Grabow’s had a relatively common five-pin Rabson, mounted with a flange to discourage burglars from digging it out. Why should I dig it out? I probed it with picks and talked to it with my fingers, and while it played the maiden I played Don Juan, and who do you think won that round?

Grabow lived and worked in one enormous room, with oceans of absolutely empty space serving to divide the various areas of bedroom and kitchen and living room and work space from one another. The living-room area consisted of a dozen modular sofa units covered in a rich brown plush and a couple of low parson’s tables in white Formica. The sleeping area held a king-size platform bed with a sheepskin throw on it. Individual sheepskin rugs covered the floor around the bed. The wall behind the bed was exposed brick painted a creamy buff a little richer than the paper wrapper on the twenty-dollar bills,