Lawrence Block - The Burglar In The Closet

Neat.

I turned out the light, let myself out, closed the door behind me. The elevator took me down to the lobby and the doorman wished me good evening. I gave him a curt nod; the soles of my feet still ached from that jump and I blamed him for it.

A cab came along the minute I got to the street. Sometimes things just work out that way.

They have these lockers all over New York, in subway stations, at railroad terminals. I used one at Port Authority Bus Terminal on Eighth Avenue; I opened the door, popped the attaché case inside, dropped a pair of quarters in the slot, closed the door, turned the key, took the key out and carried it off with me. It had felt very odd, carrying all that currency around with me, and it felt even odder abandoning it like that in a public place.

But it would have been stranger still running down to SoHo with it.

God knows I didn’t want to go there. It hadn’t been that long since I’d faked a heart attack to get away from Walter Ignatius Grabow, and here I was climbing right back onto the horse and sticking my head in the lion’s mouth again.

But I told myself it wasn’t all that dangerous. If he was home he’d buzz back when I rang his bell, and I’d just make an abrupt U-turn and take off. And he wouldn’t be home anyway, because it was Saturday night and he was an artist and they all go out and drink on Saturday night. He’d be partying it up at somebody else’s loft or knocking back boilermakers at the Broome Street Bar or sharing a jug of California Zinfandel with someone of the feminine persuasion.

Except that his girlfriend Crystal was dead, and maybe he’d be doing some solitary drinking to her memory, sitting in the dark in his loft, downing shots of cheap rye and not answering the bell when I rang, just moping in a corner until I popped his lock and sashayed flylike into his parlor-

Unpleasant thought.

The thought stayed with me after I rang his bell and got no answer. The lock on the downstairs door was a damned good one and the metal stripping where the door met the jamb kept me from prying the bolt back, but no lock is ever quite so good as the manufacturer would have you believe. I did a little of this and a little of that and the pins dropped and the tumblers tumbled.

I walked up two flights. The second-floor tenant, the one with all the plants, had soft rock playing on the stereo and enough guests to underlay the music with a steady murmur of conversation. As I passed his door I smelled the penetrating aroma of marijuana, its smoke an accompaniment to the music and the talk. I went up another flight and listened carefully at Grabow’s door, but all I could hear was the music from the apartment below. I got down on hands and knees and saw that no light was visible beneath his door. Maybe he was downstairs, I thought, getting happily stoned and tapping his foot to the Eagles and telling everybody about the lunatic he’d cornered that afternoon in the lobby.

Meanwhile, the lunatic braced himself and opened the door. Grabow had a good thick slab of a door, and holding it in place was a Fox police lock, the kind that features a massive steel bar angled against the door and mounted in a plate bolted to the floor. You can’t kick a door in when it has that kind of a lock, nor can you take a crowbar and pry it open. It’s about the strongest protection there is.

Alas, no lock is stronger than its cylinder. Grabow’s had a relatively common five-pin Rabson, mounted with a flange to discourage burglars from digging it out. Why should I dig it out? I probed it with picks and talked to it with my fingers, and while it played the maiden I played Don Juan, and who do you think won that round?

Grabow lived and worked in one enormous room, with oceans of absolutely empty space serving to divide the various areas of bedroom and kitchen and living room and work space from one another. The living-room area consisted of a dozen modular sofa units covered in a rich brown plush and a couple of low parson’s tables in white Formica. The sleeping area held a king-size platform bed with a sheepskin throw on it. Individual sheepskin rugs covered the floor around the bed. The wall behind the bed was exposed brick painted a creamy buff a little richer than the paper wrapper on the twenty-dollar bills, and hanging on that wall were a shield, a pair of crossed spears, and several primitive masks. The pieces looked to be Oceanic, New Guinea or New Ireland, and I wouldn’t have minded having them on my own wall. Nor would I have minded having what they’d be likely to bring at a Parke-Bernet auction.

The kitchen was a beauty-large stove, a fridge with an automatic ice-maker in the door, a separate freezer, a double stainless-steel sink, a dishwasher, a washer-drier. Copper and stainless-steel cookware hung from wrought-iron racks overhead.

The work area was just as good. Two long narrow tables, one chest height, the other standard. A couple of chairs and stools. Printmaking equipment. A ceramicist’s kiln. Floor-to-ceiling steel shelving filled with neatly arranged rows of paints and chemicals and tools and gadgets. A hand-cranked printing press. A few boxes of 100-percent rag-content bond paper.

It must have been around 10:15 when I opened his door, and I suppose I spent twenty minutes giving the apartment a general search.

Here are some of the things I did not find: A human being, living or dead. An attaché case, Ultrasuede or Naugahyde or otherwise. Any jewelry beyond some mismatched cufflinks and a couple of tie clips. Any money beyond a handful of change which I found-and left-on a bedside table. Any paintings by Grabow or anyone else. Any artwork except for the Oceanic pieces over the bed.

Here’s what I did find: Two pieces of meticulously engraved copper plate, roughly two and a half by six inches, mounted on blocks of three-quarter-inch pine. A key of the type likely to fit a safe-deposit box. A desk-top pencil holder, covered in richly embossed red leather, containing not pencils but various implements of the finest surgical steel, each fitted with a hexagonal handle.

When I left Walter Grabow’s loft I took nothing with me that had not been on my person when I came. I did move one or two of his possessions from their accustomed places to other parts of the loft, and I did place several crisp new twenty-dollar bills here and there.

But I didn’t steal anything. There was a moment, I’ll admit, when I had the urge to fit one of those masks over my face, snatch the shield and a spear from the wall, and race through the streets of SoHo emitting wild Oceanic war whoops. The impulse was easily mastered, and I left masks and spears and shield where they hung. They were nice, and undeniably valuable, but when you’ve just stolen somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter of a mill in cash, lesser larceny does seem anticlimactic.

Just as my cab pulled up in front of Jillian’s building I spotted the blue-and-white cruiser next to the hydrant. “Keep going,” I said. “I’ll take the corner.”

“I already threw the flag,” my driver complained. “I’m risking a ticket.”

“What’s life without taking chances?”

“Yeah, you can say that, friend. You’re not the one who’s taking ’em.”

Indeed. His tip was not all it might have been and I watched him drive off grumbling. I walked back to Jillian’s, staying close to the buildings and keeping an eye open for other police vehicles, marked or unmarked. I didn’t see any, nor did I notice any coplike creatures lurking in the shadows. I lurked in the shadows myself, and after a ten-minute lurk a pair of familiar shapes emerged from Jillian’s doorway. They were Todras and Nyswander, not too surprisingly, and it was nice to see them still on the job after so many hours. I was happy to note that their schedule was as arduous as my own.