The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams - By Lawrence Block Page 0,16

of which I had ambled a while earlier. Did the closet extend the whole length of the room, and had one of its two doors been closed off for some obscure reason?

I checked. The closet was deep and wide, but it only ran half the length of the wall. Was the sealed door one that led into the rear of a closet in the next apartment? It seemed like a strange way to do things, but old buildings get partitioned in curious ways over the years, so maybe it was possible.

What difference did it make?

Well, it was curious, that was all. And I was curious, and never mind what it did to the cat.

I got out my ring of picks and selected a flat steel strip four and a half inches long. I went up to the mystery door and slid my strip of steel between it and the jamb. I raised my hand to the top of the door, then lowered it again. I didn’t encounter any resistance until I’d brought it down a few inches below my waist, right about where you’d expect to find a lock. I eased the steel strip out, drawing it downward to trace the outline of what seemed to be a bolt. Below the bolt, the strip had smooth sailing again all the way to the floor.

Curiouser and curiouser. If you were dividing one apartment into two, you didn’t just close a door and bolt it. That was okay with adjoining hotel rooms, when you wanted to preserve the option of access, but it wouldn’t do in this case, where you wanted privacy and security. At the very least, you’d seal the door all around with some sort of plaster compound.

Besides, the lock wasn’t one of those add-on bolts you pick up at the hardware store. It was set right in the middle of a door two inches thick, which meant it was for a room designed to be locked and unlocked only from the inside. Closets don’t have locks like that.

Bathrooms do.

Well, sure. There was a bathroom off the master bedroom, and a half bath off the foyer. (“Halfbath, half-human. They call him…Tubman!”) So it made sense that there’d be one in the second bedroom as well. So that’s all it was, another bathroom, and if I’d wanted to steal towels I’d have gone to the Waldorf, so the hell with it. I could just—

Wait a minute.

A bathroom in an empty apartment that happened to be locked from the inside?

I went back to the door and ran my hands over it, as if to assess its psychic energy. On the wall alongside it there was a switch plate set at shoulder height if your shoulders were set a tad lower than mine. I worked the single switch. No lights went on or off in the bedroom, and I couldn’t tell if anything happened in the bathroom. No light showed beneath the door.

I flicked the switch back again, to undo whatever I might have done. I found a chair and sat down. I looked at the poor old harlequin in joan Nugent’s work-in-progress. On earlier inspection he’d looked sad. Now he looked confused.

Was someone in there? Had I alerted him by buzzing the buzzer, and had he responded by…by locking himself in the bathroom?

Why would anybody do that?

Well, say I wasn’t the first burglar to come a-calling. I’d once been tossing a place when someone else broke in, and I’d found the whole thing something of a sticky wicket. I hadn’t locked myself in the bathroom, but I might have, if it had occurred to me.

But did the apartment I entered look like one into which another housebreaker had recently broken? No way.

Still…

Logic, I thought. When all else fails, try logic.

All right. There were two possibilities. There was someone in the bathroom or there wasn’t. If so, who could it be? A Nugent?

If you were a Nugent, or anyone else legitimately present in the Nugents’ apartment, you might or might not choose to answer a doorbell at an ungodly hour. But if you didn’t go open the door, or at least peep through the peephole, would you instead lock yourself in the bathroom?

You would not.

Therefore if someone was there it was someone who didn’t belong and who would sit on the john in the dark for half an hour to avoid detection. All I had to do was slip out and go home now and let the mystery visitor remain anonymous. Anybody in