Lawrence Block - The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams

On my way out the door I took a minute to look up a listing in the White Pages. I didn’t call it, though. Not from my own phone.

At 1:24, dressed for success, I left my building. I walked up to Seventy-second Street, and then I walked a block out of my way to the corner where I’d met Doll Cooper. I dropped a quarter in a phone slot and dialed the number I’d looked up.

Four rings. Then a computer-generated voice, inviting me to leave a message for Joan or Harlan Nugent. I hung up instead and headed up Broadway to the Korean deli at Seventy-fifth Street, where I picked out enough groceries to fill a couple of bags. I went for low weight and high volume, choosing three boxes of cereal, a loaf of bread, and a couple of rolls of paper towels. No point in weighing oneself down.

I got out of there and took a left, walked a block to West End Avenue, turned left again, and walked to her building at the corner of Seventy-fourth. The same old stalwart was still manning his post. “Hi, Eddie,” I said.

This time he looked up. He saw a well-dressed chap, tired from a long day removing spleens, performing one final domestic chore before settling in for some brief but well-deserved rest. Did he happen to note the stethoscope peeping out of the side pocket? Would he have known what it was if he did? Your guess is as good as mine.

“Hey, how ya doin’,” he said.

I breezed past him and went up to call on the Nugents.

The elevator huffed and puffed getting me to the ninth floor, as if the operation that had years ago converted it to self-service had somehow sapped its strength in the process. I emerged at last into a conveniently empty hallway, turned to the right, walked past doors marked 9-D and 9-C, and saw the error of my ways. I did an about-face, walked on past the elevator, and found 9-G (as in Goldilocks) all the way at the end. I walked there, set down my bags of groceries on either side of the jute doormat, and tried to divine the presence of anyone within.

Because you never know. Maybe the Nugents had come home early. Maybe Harlan had got word of an emergency at the widget factory, maybe Joan couldn’t bear to spend one more hour away from her beloved split-leaf philodendron. Or maybe Doll Cooper had got the apartment number wrong, and they lived one floor below in 8-G, just downstairs from the kung fu master who only left his apartment to walk his rottweiler.

I took out my stethoscope, fitted the earpieces in my ears, pressed the business end against the very heart of the door, and listened hard.

You didn’t think the stethoscope was just camouflage, did you? If all I’d intended was to look like a doctor, I’d have carried a beat-up old Gladstone bag and pretended I was making a house call. No, I was using the stethoscope for the same reason a doctor does: to get a clue what was going on inside.

If 9-G had been a human being, I’d have closed its eyelids and put a tag on its toe. I couldn’t hear a thing.

But what did that mean? The Nugents could be sleeping. The kung fu master could be sleeping. Even the rottweiler could be sleeping.

Let them lie, I told myself. You don’t have to be here, risking life and liberty in the pursuit of happiness. You can pick up your groceries and go home. You’ll eat the bread and the cereal sooner or later. Who knows, maybe you’ll actually like Count Chocula. And paper towels last forever, they’ve got almost as long a shelf life as Twinkies. So—

I rang the bell.

It was a buzzer, actually, and with the stethoscope’s assistance I heard it clear as…well, clear as a buzzer. I let up on it, listened to the silence, then buzzed again, a little longer this time. And listened to more silence.

That little Jiminy Cricket voice was silent now, too. I was on automatic pilot, doing what I do best. Putting the stethoscope back in my pocket, taking out the little ring of picks and probes, and getting down to business.

It’s a gift. Some guys can hit a curveball. Others can crunch numbers.

I can open locks.

Anybody can learn. I taught Carolyn once, and in a pinch she can open her apartment door without her keys. But for most people, even those who work at it, even the sort who make a precarious living at it, picking a lock is a very laborious process. You pick and pick and pick, almost as if you were trying to nag the lock into submission, and your fingers get clumsy and you get cramps in your hands, and sometimes you say the hell with it and jimmy the thing, or rear back and kick the door in.

Unless you happen to have the touch.

There were two locks on the Nugents’ door. One was a Poulard, and you may have seen their ads, guaranteeing their product as pick-proof. The other was a Rabson; no guarantee, but a solid reliable lock.

I had them both open in under two minutes.

What can I tell you? It’s a gift.

Strictly speaking, I don’t think they should call it breaking and entering. If you’re really good at it, you never actually break anything.

Unless there’s a burglar alarm. Then, the instant you open a door or window that’s wired into the circuit, you break the electrical connection. When this happens there’s generally a high-pitched sort of whine, and you have a certain amount of time—generally forty-five seconds or thereabouts—to find the keypad and punch in the code that tells the system you’ve got every right to be there. After that you get the full treatment with bells and whistles and, sooner or later, a couple of private cops making an armed response.

By then, of course, any burglar in his right mind has gone home.

I took a deep breath, turned the knob, and opened the door.

No alarm.

Well, I couldn’t know that for sure. There’s also such a thing as a silent alarm. Open the door and there’s no warning whine, no sound at all beyond the music of the spheres. There’s a keypad concealed somewhere, but you’ve got no reason to go looking for it, and after forty-five seconds it’s too late, because by that time an alarm has registered in the office of the security firm, and they turn up with guns in their hands while you’re filling a pillowcase with the good sterling.

The thing is, hardly anybody installs a silent alarm these days, except as a supplementary system. What you want a burglar alarm to do is keep burglars out, not give you a shot at catching them once they’re already inside. Most burglars, it pains me to say, are just looking for the easy dollar. They’ve got no calling for the profession. The great majority, once they breach the system and hear the telltale whine, are out of there like a shot. A certain number, including the junkies and crackheads who get in by breaking a window or kicking in a door, will take a few minutes to grab a radio or go through a top dresser drawer. Then they’re gone.

If the only alarm’s a silent one, the burglar doesn’t know it’s there—which, after all, is the point of the thing. So the burglar goes about his business, and if he’s a junkie or even if he’s not, he’ll very likely finish up and go home before the armed-response guys turn up. Even when traffic’s light, it takes a while to answer a call. In rush hour, forget it.

Besides, a silent alarm is a pain in the neck for the householder. Because it’s silent, there’s nothing to remind you that you’re supposed to key in your code. A certain amount of the time you forget, and the rent-a-cops turn up while you’re sitting there switching back and forth between Leno and Letterman. After that happens a few times you stop setting the alarm in the first place.

Groceries in hand, I crossed the threshold and moved into the entering phase of breaking and entering. I nudged the door closed with my hip, cutting off the light from the hallway. It was pitch dark where I was standing, and silent as a tomb.