The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams - By Lawrence Block Page 0,91
and she got another shot at him.”
“But that wasn’t going to happen,” Carolyn said helpfully, “because Luke was dead in the bathroom.”
“Not anymore,” I said. “Oh, he was still dead, but by the time we got into his apartment the cops had hauled him out of here in a body bag. That made the news Sunday night, and after that I never heard another word from Doll. She concluded, reasonably enough I suppose, that any chance she had of making a couple of bucks had just gone down the bathtub drain, so she’d move on to whatever life offered her next.”
“What happened to the cards?” It was Lolly Stoppelgard who wanted to know, reinforcing my view of her as an eminently practical woman.
“Gone,” I said. “Did Luke sell them? If so, what happened to the money? My guess is he put them, briefcase and all, in a coin locker somewhere while he figured out what to do with them. But there must be half a dozen other things that could have happened to them, and I have a feeling we’ll never know where they wound up.”
“And what about Luke?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The young man,” Edna Gilmartin said. It was, as far as I could recall, the first time she’d spoken up all night. “The young man who died mysteriously in a locked bathroom. Who killed him?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” I said. “Harlan Nugent killed him.”
CHAPTER
Twenty-two
I had a tense moment there, I have to admit it. Because all Harlan Nugent had to do was tell us to go home and pick up the phone to call his lawyer.
But what he said was, “That’s ridiculous. I never even knew the man. Why on earth would I kill him?”
“That’s a good question,” I said.
“And we were in London,” Joan Nugent put in. “Neither of us could have had anything to do with it. We were out of the country.”
“You left Wednesday evening,” I said. “Doll dropped the cards at Luke’s apartment on Monday. Sometime between then and when you left, Luke was up here and Harlan Nugent killed him. If I had to guess, I’d go with Tuesday afternoon.” I looked over at Ray. “How does that square with the estimated time of death?”
“No problem, Bernie.”
“I think you must be out of your mind,” Nugent said. “That man was never in this apartment on any of those days.” A shadow passed over his wife’s face, and for an instant it looked as though she was about to say something, but her husband’s hand settled on hers and the moment passed. He set his jaw. “I’ll repeat what I said before. You admitted it was a good question. Why on earth would I kill him?”
“It’s still a good question,” I said, “but I’ve got a couple of good questions myself. Why would a man take off all his clothes and lock himself in somebody else’s bathroom?”
“To take a shower,” Lolly Stoppelgard suggested.
“That would make sense if it was his own bathroom,” Carolyn volunteered, “but it wasn’t. Maybe he got all sweaty posing and he needed to wash up.”
“He was not here,” Harlan Nugent said.
“Or maybe he just needed to use the john, Bern. That wouldn’t get him in the tub, though, would it? Ray, has anybody checked if the shower worked in his apartment on the seventh floor? See, if he couldn’t take a shower at his own place—”
“Forget the shower,” I said. “The water wasn’t on and the body wasn’t wet.”
“Some men tend to lock themselves in the bathroom,” Lolly Stoppelgard said, with a glance at her husband. “Did they find any funny magazines in there with him?”
Time to grab the wheel again. “He would lock himself in the bathroom,” I said, “as a way of hiding. Once, years ago, back in the days when I still engaged in occasional acts of burglary—”
“Aw, Jesus,” Ray muttered.
“—I was an uninvited guest in an empty apartment when its occupant returned. I hid in the closet, though a bathroom would have done as well had one been close at hand. I couldn’t lock the closet, of course.” Someone else had locked the closet, with me in it, and when I managed to get out I found a corpse on the floor. I winced at the memory.
“Nor was I naked,” I continued. “Last week Ray Kirschmann asked me what kind of burglar takes off his clothes in the course of a burglary. No burglar I ever heard of, I told him, so—”