The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams - By Lawrence Block Page 0,15

the stack. $8,350 in perfectly anonymous used bills. A little off-the-books income old Harlan didn’t want to report? Or was there a perfectly legitimate explanation? It is, after all, still legal for Americans to possess actual money.

Well, if it was unreported income, Nugent would bear its burden no longer. I pocketed the bills and returned the empty envelope to the drawer.

Then, just to show off, I took out my picks and locked the drawer after myself.

I moved a lot of pictures without uncovering a wall safe. I didn’t find any loose bricks in the fireplace, either. Actually I didn’t really expect to encounter a safe or a hidey-hole; if the apartment had had one, that’s where he’d have stashed the $8,350, not in a desk drawer you could have opened with eyebrow tweezers.

There was some nice silver on top of the sideboard in the dining room, English by the look of it, Georgian if I had to guess. There was more of the same in the drawers. Over the years I’ve known three good customers for fine silver. One’s dead, one’s in jail, and the third retired to Florida two years ago. (He may still buy the odd soup tureen now and again, but you wouldn’t want to shlep a load of stolen silver onto a plane. How would you get it through the metal detector?)

I passed up the silver, and some nice lace and linen, and went into the master bedroom, where Mrs. Nugent kept her jewelry in a miniature brassbound chest on top of her Queen Anne dresser. The chest had a lock, but she hadn’t locked it, which showed good sense on her part. I’d have opened it in a wink, and a cruder sort of yegg would have simply tucked the whole thing under his arm and hauled it off to open at leisure.

Some people have the same gift with gemstones that I have with locks. They barely have to look at a stone to know whether it came from the De Beers consortium in South Africa or the Home Shopping Network’s once-in-a-lifetime Cubic Zirconium Jamboree. They can tell lapis from sodalite and ruby from spinel more readily than I can distinguish amber from plastic or hematite beads from ball bearings. (It doesn’t really matter, neither one’s worth stealing, but a person ought to be able to tell the difference.)

I don’t have that gift, but when you’ve been stealing the stuff long enough you develop a certain sense of what to take and what to leave. When in doubt, you take. I passed up the pieces that were obvious costume. There was one necklace, for example, with a stone so large it would have had to be the Kloppman Diamond if it was real. There were earrings made of African trading beads. I got some nice things, and I could describe them in detail and even provide a ballpark estimate of their value, but why?

As you’ll see, it turned out to be academic.

After half an hour in the Nugent apartment, I was ready to go home. I hadn’t slept in any of the beds or broken any chairs, and there was no porridge anywhere to be found. I’d used my two plastic bags for the jewelry, plus a watch and some cufflinks of Harlan’s, and then I’d tucked each bag into a pocket. Jewelry in each front trouser pocket, cash in the blazer’s inside breast pocket, the stethoscope in an outside blazer pocket, my picks and flashlight tucked here and there—I may have cut an ungainly silhouette, but I had my hands free.

I took a last turn around my apartment, not in the hope of more booty but to make sure I hadn’t left any traces of my visit. As usual, I’d been compulsively neat. I was ready to call it a night, and a long one at that, when my eyes settled on a door I hadn’t noticed before. Another closet? The place was crawling with closets, and not a thing worth stealing in any of them.

The door wouldn’t budge. And there was no keyhole, and thus no lock to pick.

What had we here? Was this a permanently sealed door leading to another apartment, a vestigial aperture from a time when this and the adjoining apartment had been a single unit? It seemed unlikely. The door was on a side wall of the guest room, Mrs. Nugent’s studio. There was another door on that same wall leading to a large walk-in closet, into and out