on the pair of gloves I’d stowed in my fanny pack.
Then I got down to business.
When I left Luke’s apartment I was wearing a suit. It was the only one in his closet, a three-button charcoal pinstripe with a label indicating it had been bought (or, considering what I knew about Luke, stolen) from Brooks Brothers. We were about the same size, Luke and I, but the pants were a little tight in the seat and waist and the jacket was a little large in the shoulders.
Maybe if I got back to running three times a week, I thought, and did an upper-body workout with free weights on the days I didn’t run—
I found a shirt that fit me, freshly ironed. He’d forgotten to tell them “no starch.” He had half a dozen ties hanging on a nail, and I don’t know where he’d stolen those, or why he’d bothered. I picked the one with red and black stripes.
His shoes were small on my feet, but I hate the way running shoes look with a suit, although it’s a costume with which Wally Hemphill seems perfectly happy. I tried on all three pairs of leather shoes in his closet and settled on the black penny loafers as the most nearly comfortable of the lot, hoping I wouldn’t have to wear them for very long.
His attaché case was under the bed, along with some other luggage. The attaché was the only one that was locked, and the only one that seemed to contain anything. I picked it open and found, to my gratification if not greatly to my surprise, that it was full of baseball cards. I’d thought I might add my sneakers and running gear, but there wasn’t any room.
Before I closed the attaché case, I chose a single baseball card and found a temporary home for it in a pocket of the maroon backpack. I took a quick turn around the apartment, but I did not linger long. I had my picks in a pocket of the suit jacket, where I could get at them easily, and I took off the pliofilm gloves just before I quit the apartment and slipped them into another pocket. I had the attaché case in one hand, and I had a canvas tote bag over one arm. It contained my sneakers and running clothes and fanny pack, and it bore the logo of the Mercurial Wombat, a gift shop in Tucumcari, New Mexico.
There was a tenant in the hallway, a woman waiting for the elevator, but if she looked in my direction all she could have seen was a man locking his door. It wasn’t my door, and I wasn’t using a key, but there was no way for her to know that. Before I’d finished, the elevator came and whisked her away. Then I took a silk hanky from the breast pocket of my suit, wiped my prints from the doorknob, and walked to the end of the corridor, where a door led to a staircase.
I climbed the two flights to the ninth floor, made sure the hall was empty, and walked the length of it to the Nugents’ door. I hadn’t rung Luke’s bell, but I leaned long and hard on their buzzer, giving anyone inside plenty of time to put on a robe and come to the door. When no one did, I let myself in. I didn’t bother letting my eyes accustom themselves to the darkness this time around. I put my picks away, donned my gloves, and turned on a light.
The apartment hadn’t changed much in the fifty hours or so since my last visit. I took a quick look around, then went straight to the guest room. The harlequin on the easel looked as depressed as ever, and who could blame him?
The bathroom door was still locked. I knocked on it, and on the adjoining wall. I tapped the switch plate and fiddled with the switch, the one that didn’t seem to turn on a light in either the guest room or the bathroom.
I drew my tool ring from my pocket, selected the appropriate instrument, and unscrewed the two screws that held the switch plate in place. I lifted it off and set it aside. It was a dummy, with no switch box in the wall behind it. The switch itself was attached to the plate and came away with it, leaving a rectangular opening about four inches high and three inches wide. I put my hand