The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart - By Lawrence Block Page 0,59
then at the Poodle Factory. No answer. I walked on across to West End and Seventy-first, and I got the same prickly feeling on the nape of my neck that I’d had the night before. Then it had kept me from getting out of Max Fiddler’s taxi. Now it led me to stand under an awning on the far corner, doing what I could to observe without being observed.
After ten minutes I was fairly certain my place was staked out, although I couldn’t absolutely swear to it. There was a car parked some fifty feet from the front entrance with two men in it, and inside the lobby, where I couldn’t see too clearly, there was what might be a man sitting in a chair reading a newspaper. But it could also have been a shadow, and if it was a man that didn’t mean he was waiting for me.
Still, why take chances? I circled the block and wound up at the service entrance, which was locked and unattended. Mine is not a high-security building. The doorman, handy for receiving packages and discouraging low-level muggers and prowlers, is hardly the Maginot Line. There’s no closed-circuit TV, no electronic security system, and the locks, while decent enough, are a far cry from state-of-the-art. I had opened this one on several occasions, most recently during a stretch when I wasn’t getting along with one of the doormen and refused to use the front entrance when he was on duty. That lasted for a couple of weeks, by which time enough other tenants had complained about him that he’d been let go, and good riddance. But the point is that I was pretty good at zipping through that particular lock, and my sang could hardly have been froider at the prospect of opening it, and why not? A cop who caught me in the act might have given me an awkward moment, but not much more than that; after all, it’s not illegal entry when you live there.
I took the elevator to the floor above mine out of an excess of paranoia, walked down a flight, and had a look at my own door. It’s not the Maginot Line, either, but I’ve replaced the original locks and added some refinements over the years, so it’s reasonably secure.
But it looked as though someone had had a go at it. There were scratches that looked fresh, and someone had mucked about with the jamb, trying to get a purchase with a pry bar. Nothing will keep a person out who is sufficiently determined to get in—a resourceful housebreaker, confronted with an unbreachable door, will simply go through the wall—but whoever had paid me a visit had been unwilling or unable to carry things that far. I let myself in with my keys, reasonably certain no one had entered in my absence, and locked the locks behind me. I checked everything, including my hidey-hole, just to be sure, and everything was fine.
I drew a tub, soaked in it, got out and dried off and lay down on the bed for a minute. I didn’t even realize I was tired, but I must have been gone the minute my head touched the pillow. I don’t know how long I slept, because I don’t know what time I lay down, but when I opened my eyes it was ten after six, and I was sufficiently disoriented that I had to check my calendar watch to be entirely certain it was still that afternoon, not six the following morning.
I called Carolyn and couldn’t reach her at home or at work. I put on clean clothes, tossed some other clothes and sundries into a flight bag from a defunct airline, and rode the elevator to the basement. If it had stopped at the lobby floor I might have been able to get a peek at the man with the newspaper, if he was still there, but he might have been able to get a peek at me at the same time, so I guess it was just as well the trip was nonstop. I let myself out through the service entrance, circled the block to avoid the little reception committee in front of the building, and tried to figure out where to go next.
Was I hungry? I’d had a hot dog and a knish a couple of hours back. I didn’t really feel like sitting down to a meal, but I felt like eating something. But what?