The Burglar in the Closet - By Lawrence Block Page 0,9

I hesitated before opening the door. Because I had all too good an idea what I’d find there and it wasn’t anything I was in a rush to look at.

On the other hand, I was really sick of that closet.

I let myself out. And found, in the living room, pretty much what I’d expected. Crystal Sheldrake, sprawled out on her back, one leg bent at the knee, the foot cramped beneath the opposite thigh. Blond hair in shower cap. Green robe open so that most of her rather spectacular body was exposed.

An ugly purple welt high on her right cheekbone. A thin red line, sort of a scratch, reaching from just below her left eye to the left side of her chin.

More to the point, a gleaming steel instrument plunged between her noteworthy breasts and into her heart.

I tried to take her pulse. I don’t know why I made the attempt because God knows she looked deader than the Charleston, but people are always taking pulses on television and it seemed like the thing to do. I spent a long time taking hers because I wasn’t sure I was doing it right, but finally I gave up and said the hell with it.

I didn’t get sick or anything. My knees felt weak for a moment, but then the sensation lifted and I was all right. I felt rotten because death is a rotten thing and murder is particularly horrible, and I felt vaguely that there should have been something I could have done to prevent this particular murder, but I was damned if I could see what it was.

First things first. She was dead and I couldn’t help her, and I was a burglar who certainly did not want to be found at the scene of a far more serious crime than burglary. I had to wipe off whatever surfaces might hold my fingerprints and I had to retrieve my attaché case and then I had to get the hell out of there.

I didn’t have to wipe Crystal’s wrist. Skin doesn’t take fingerprints, any number of inane television programs notwithstanding. What I did have to wipe were the surfaces I’d been near since I took off my rubber gloves (which I now put back on, incidentally). So I got a washcloth from the bathroom and I wiped the inside of the closet door and the floor of the closet, and I couldn’t think what else I might have touched but I wiped around the outside closet knob just to make sure.

Of course the murderer had touched that knob. So maybe I was wiping away his prints. On the other hand, maybe he’d been wearing gloves.

Not my concern.

I finished wiping, and I went back to the bathroom and put the washcloth back on its hook, and then I returned to the bedroom for a quick look at the disappointed pastel lady, and I gave her a quick wink and dropped my eyes to look for my attaché case.

To no avail.

Whoever killed Crystal Sheldrake had taken her jewelry home with him.

CHAPTER

Three

It never fails. I open my mouth and I wind up in hot water. But in this case the circumstances were special. After all, I was only following orders.

“Open, Bern. A little wider, huh? That’s right. That’s fine. Perfect. Just beautiful.”

Beautiful? Well, they tell me it’s in the eye of the beholder and I guess they’re right. If Craig Sheldrake wanted to believe there was beauty in a gaping mouthful of teeth, that was his privilege and more power to him. They weren’t the worst teeth in the world, I don’t suppose. Twenty-some years ago a grinning orthodontist had wired them with braces, enabling me to shoot those little rubber bands at my classmates, so at least they were straight. And since I’d given up smoking and switched to one of those whiter-than-white toothpastes, I looked somewhat less like a supporting player in The Curse of the Yellow Fangs. But all of the molars and bicuspids sported fillings, and one of the wisdom teeth was but a memory, and I’d had a wee bit of root-canal work on the upper left canine. They were respectable teeth for one as long in the tooth as I, perhaps, and they’d given me relatively little trouble over the years, but it would be an exaggeration to call them either a thing of beauty or a joy forever.

A stainless-steel probe touched a nerve. I twitched a little and made the sort of sound of which one