could only leave the stairs at the lobby. They couldn’t get off at another floor.
Well, that was nice enough in theory, but an inch-wide strip of flexible steel did its work in nothing flat, and then I was easing the door open, making sure that the coast (or at least the hallway) was clear.
I traversed the hallway to 11-B. No light showed under the door, and when I pressed my ear against it I couldn’t hear a thing, not even the roar of the surf. I didn’t expect to hear anything since I’d just let the phone in 11-B ring twelve or twenty times, but burglary is chancy enough even when you don’t take chances. There was a bell, a flat mother-of-pearl button set flush against the doorjamb, and I rang it and heard it sound within. There was a knocker, an art nouveau affair in the shape of a coiled cobra, but I didn’t want to make noise in the hallway. I didn’t, indeed, want to spend an unnecessary extra second in that hallway, and with that in mind I bent to my task.
First the burglar alarm. You wouldn’t think one was necessary at the Charlemagne, but then you probably don’t have a houseful of objets d’art and a stamp collection on a par with King Farouk’s, do you? If burglars don’t take unnecessary chances, why should their victims?
You could tell there was a burglar alarm because there was a keyhole for it, set in the door at about shoulder height, a nickel-plated cylinder perhaps five-eighths of an inch in diameter. What man can lock, man can unlock, and that’s just what I did. There is a handy little homemade key on my ring that fits most locks of that ilk, and with just the littlest bit of filing and fiddling it can make the tumblers tumble, and—oh, but you don’t want to know all this technical stuff, do you? I thought not.
I turned the key in the lock and hoped that was all you had to do. Alarm systems are cunning devices with no end of fail-safe features built in. Some go off, for example, if you cut the household current. Others get twitchy if you turn the key in other than the prescribed fashion. This one seemed docile, but what if it was one of those silent alarms, ringing nastily away downstairs or in the offices of some home-protection agency?
Ah, well. The other lock, the one that was keeping the door shut, was a Poulard. According to the manufacturer’s advertisements, no one has ever successfully picked the Poulard lock. I’d walk into his offices and dispute that claim, but where would it get me? The lock mechanism’s a good one, I’ll grant them that, and the key’s complicated and impossible to duplicate, but I have more trouble on average with your basic Rabson. Either I picked the Poulard or I made myself very long and narrow and slithered in through the keyhole, because within three minutes I was inside that apartment.
I closed the door and played my pencil-beam flashlight over it. If I’d made some grave error knocking off the burglar alarm, and if it was the sort that was ringing in some agency’s office, then I had plenty of time to get away before they came calling. So I examined the cylinder to see how it was wired in and if anything seemed to have gone awry, and after a moment or two of frowning and head-scratching I started to giggle.
Because there was no alarm system. All there was was a nickel-plated cylinder, attached to nothing at all, mounted in the door like a talisman. You’ve seen those decals on car windows warning of an alarm system? People buy the decals for a dollar, hoping they’ll keep car thieves at bay, and perhaps they do. You’ve seen those signs on houses, BEWARE OF THE DOG, and they haven’t got a dog? A sign’s cheaper than rabies shots and Alpo, and you don’t have to walk it twice a day.
Why install a burglar alarm at a cost of a thousand dollars or more when you could mount a cylinder for a couple of bucks and get the same protection? Why have a system you’d forget to set half the time, and forget to turn off the other half of the time, when the illusion of a system was every bit as effective?
My heart filled with admiration for John Charles Appling. It was going to be a pleasure