The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams - By Lawrence Block Page 0,18

I didn’t even want to know.

What I did want to do—needed to do, in fact—was use the bathroom, and I figured I’d earned the right. Its utilitarian aspects aside, the john was the massive anticlimax I’d figured it to be. The usual porcelain fixtures, a medicine cabinet with nothing in it more exciting than aspirin, a tub with a drawn shower curtain—

After all this buildup, you can see it coming, can’t you?

Well, why not? It’s obvious, isn’t it? If a bathroom’s that hard to unlock from outside, how could anybody have locked it in the first place? Why, duhhhh, whoever it was must have locked it from inside. And, unless that person had subsequently jumped out the window, leaving a terrible mess on the pavement below, where could he be but in the bathroom? Where indeed but in the tub, say, behind the floral shower curtain?

That’s where he was and that’s where I found him. Naked as the truth and dead as a pet rock, with a little round hole right in the middle of his forehead.

CHAPTER

Five

You’re not here, I told the dead guy. You’re a figment of an overactive imagination, stressed beyond endurance by a rough day and a snootful of scotch and a nothing little deadbolt that took forever to open. You don’t exist, and I’m going to close my eyes, and when I open them you’ll be gone.

It didn’t work.

All right, I decided. In that case, I wasn’t there. More precisely, I would erase all traces of my visit, and once I’d vanished into the night—what there was left of it—it would be as if I had never been there in the first place.

First, fingerprints. I’d taken off my gloves to get serious with the lock, and I hadn’t yet troubled to put them back on. I did so now, and snatched up a washcloth and wiped everything I might have touched during my interlude of glovelessness. The lamp, the door, the knob on either side. The toilet seat, which I’d raised (and hadn’t lowered afterward, what can I tell you, guys are like that). The flusher, which I’d flushed. The shower curtain, which I’d made the mistake of drawing open, and which I now returned to its original position. The light switch over the sink, which worked, and the light switch on the wall outside, which I tried again, and which still didn’t seem to do anything. And other things like the towel bar and the hamper, which I probably hadn’t touched, but why take chances?

I backed out of the bathroom and closed the door. I put Joan Nugent’s gooseneck lamp back where I’d found it, took another look around her studio, and left it for the master bedroom, where I put all her jewelry back in her jewelry box. There was no way to make sure everything wound up in its original compartment, but I did the best I could. I’d been wearing gloves when I lifted the stuff and I was wearing them as I put everything back, so I didn’t have to worry about prints.

I put Mr. Nugent’s watch where I’d found it on his night table, and replaced his diamond-and-onyx cufflinks in the little stud box in his sock drawer. That left me with two empty shopping bags from the deli. I carried them into the kitchen and filled them up with the cereal boxes and paper towels they’d held when I entered the apartment. I wasn’t entirely sure of the wisdom of this. Wasn’t it risky to carry anything out of the building? And did I really have to worry about the cops canvassing all the neighborhood delis and bodegas, trying to trace two rolls of Bounty and a box of Count Chocula? I decided to be guided by a modified version of the National Parks Service motto, updated for hapless burglars. Don’t even leave footprints, I told myself. Don’t even take snapshots.

With my bags packed, I stood once again in the darkened foyer, filled this time with a different sort of anticipation. In another few minutes I’d be out of here, and I’d be leaving everything exactly as I’d found it—

Oh yeah? a little voice demanded. What about the bathroom door?

I just stood there. I gave it some thought, and then I gave it some more thought.

Then I took out my picks and went back to the guest room.

It was past five by the time I got out of there. I said good morning to Eddie as I sailed past