rang only seven before someone picked it up, at which point I came perilously close to vomiting.
“Seven-four-one-nine,” a soft female voice said, and my risen gorge sank and I calmed down. Because just as actors have listed phones so do they have services to answer them, and that was what this voice represented; the number which had been spoken to me was nothing other than the last four digits of Rodney’s phone number. I cleared my throat and asked when Rodney would be back in town, and the lady with the dulcet tones obligingly informed me that he would be on tour for another fifteen weeks, that he was in St. Louis at the moment, and that she could supply me with the number of his hotel there if I wished. I didn’t wish. I suppressed an infantile urge to leave a comic message and returned the phone to its cradle.
It took a little doing but I managed to find Bethune Street and walked west on it until I located Rod’s building. It was half a block west of Washington Street in a neighborhood that was half brownstones and the other half warehouses. The building I wanted was a poor but honest five-story brownstone indistinguishable from its neighbors on either side but for the rusty numerals alongside the front door. I stayed on the street a moment to make sure there was no one taking obvious notice of me, then slipped into the front vestibule. I scanned the row of buttons on the wall, looking for names of illustrious actors and actresses, but Helen Hayes wasn’t listed and neither were the Lunts. Rod was, however; one R. Hart was inked in as occupying Apartment 5-R. Since there were five floors and two apartments to a floor, that meant he was on the top floor at the rear of the building, and what could be less obtrusive than that?
Because old habits die hard, I gave his bell a good ringing and waited for anyone who might be in his apartment to buzz me back. Happily no one did. I then thought of ringing other bells at random. This is what I would do on a job. People buzz you on through the locked front door without a qualm, and if they happen to pop out into the hallway to see who you are you just smile apologetically and say that you forgot your key. Works like a charm. But Rod lived on the top floor, which meant I’d have to walk past all the other floors, and anyone who noticed me might notice again when the papers saw fit to print my picture, and I might be holed up here for a while, if not forever, and…
Didn’t seem worth the risk, small though the risk might be. Especially since it took me less than fifteen seconds to let myself through that front door. A strong wind could have opened that lock.
I scampered up four flights to the top floor and took deep breaths until my heartbeat returned to normal. Rod’s door had 5-R on it and I went and stood in front of it and listened. The door at the other end of the hallway, 5-F, had no light shining underneath it. I knocked on Rod’s door and waited, and knocked again, and then I took out my burglar’s tools.
Rod had three locks on his door. Sometime in the past an amateur had dug at the frame around one of them with a chisel or screwdriver, but it didn’t look as though he’d accomplished anything. Rod’s locks included a fancy Medeco cylinder, a Segal police lock with a steel bar wedged against the door from within, and a cheap piece of junk that was just there for nuisance value. I knocked off the third lock first to get it out of the way, then tackled the Segal. It’s good insurance against a junkie kicking the door in and it’s not easy to pick but I had the tools and the touch and it didn’t keep me waiting long. The tumblers fell into place and the steel bar slid aside in its channel and that left the Medeco.
The Medeco’s the one they advertise as pick-proof and of course that’s errant nonsense, there is no such thing, but it’s a pardonable exaggeration. What it meant was that I had to do two jobs at once. Suppose you’re a cryptographer and you’re given a message which was encoded from an original in Serbo-Croat, a