Lawrence Block: The Burglar In The Closet

I did not breathe while this was happening. Not specifically to escape detection but because breathing is impossible when your heart is lodged in your windpipe.

There was Crystal, ash-blond hair stuffed into a coral shower cap. I saw her but she didn’t see me, and that was just fine, and in the wink of an eye (if anyone’s eye winked) she was closing the door again.

And locking it.

Wonderful. She had a thing about closets. Some people can’t leave a room for five minutes without turning off the lights. Crystal couldn’t walk away from an unlocked closet. I listened as her footsteps carried her back to the bathroom, listened as the bathroom door closed, listened as she settled herself under her pulsating massagic shower head (no speculation; I’d looked in the bathroom and she had one of those jobbies).

Then I stopped listening and poked between the dresses and turned the doorknob and pushed, and when the door predictably refused to budge I could have wept.

What an incredible comedy of errors. What a massive farce.

I stroked the lock with my fingertips. It was laughable, of course. A good kick would have sent the door flying open, but that would involve more noise than I cared to create. So I’d have to find a gentler way out, and the first step was to get the damned key out of the lock.

Which is easy enough. I supplied myself with a scrap of paper by tearing one of the protective garment bags that was protecting one of Crystal ’s garments. I scrunched down on hands and knees and slipped the paper under the door so that it was positioned beneath the keyhole. Then I used one of my little pieces of steel to poke around in the silly-ass lock until the key jiggled loose and fell to the floor.

Back on my hands and knees again, tugging at the paper. Tugging gently, because a swift tug would have the effect of a swift yank on a tablecloth, removing the cloth but leaving the dishes behind. I didn’t just want the paper. I wanted the key that was on it as well. Why pick a lock if the key’s just inches from your grasp? Easy does it, take your time, easy, that’s right-

And then the door buzzer buzzed.

I swear I wanted to spit. The damned buzzer made a sound loud enough to make hens stop laying. I froze where I was, praying fervently that Crystal wouldn’t hear it under the shower, but evidently my prayer wasn’t quite fervent enough. Because the thing sounded again, a long horrible piercing blurt, and while it was so doing Crystal shut off the water.

I stayed where I was and I went on tugging at the scrap of paper. The last thing I wanted was for her to spot the key on the floor on her way to the door. The key cleared the door and came into view, and while this was happening the bathroom door opened and I heard her footsteps.

I stayed where I was, crouched on the floor as if in prayer. If she noticed that the key was missing, well, at least she wouldn’t be able to open it because I had the key. That, I told myself, was something.

But she didn’t even slow down as she passed the closet. She swept right on by, presumably in her lime-green terry-cloth robe. I suppose she poked the answering buzzer to unlatch the downstairs door. I waited, and I suppose she waited, and then the doorbell sounded its two-tone chime. Then she opened the door.

By this time I had gotten to my feet again and was standing behind the rack of dresses. I was also paying close attention to what was happening, but it was hard for me to get a clear picture of what was going on. The door opened. I heard Crystal saying something. Part of what she said was inaudible, but I could make out “What is it? What do you want?” and similar expressions. It seems to me that there was panic in her voice, or at the least a whole lot of apprehension, but I may have just filled that in after the fact.

Then she said “ No, no! ” very loud, and there was no missing the terror. And then she screamed, but it was a very brief scream, chopped off abruptly as if it were a recording and someone lifted the tone arm from the record.

Then a thudding sound.

Then nothing at all.

And there I was, standing snugly in my closet like the world’s most cautious homosexual. After a moment or two I thought about using the key in my hand to unlock the door, but then once again I heard movement outside. Footsteps, but they sounded different from Crystal ’s. I couldn’t say that they were lighter or heavier. Just a different step. I’d grown used to Crystal ’s footsteps, having spent so much time lately listening to them.

The footsteps approached, reached the bedroom. The source of the footsteps began moving around the bedroom, opening drawers, moving furniture around. At one point the doorknob turned but of course the door was still locked. Whoever had turned the knob was evidently not proficient at picking locks. The closet was abandoned and I was safe inside it.

More movement. Then, after what couldn’t really have been an eternity, the footsteps passed me again and returned to the living room. The apartment’s outer door opened and closed-I’d learned to recognize that sound.

I looked at my watch. It was eleven minutes to eleven, and thinking of it that way made it more memorable than 10:49. I looked at the key I was holding and I slipped it into the lock and turned it, and then I hesitated before opening the door. Because I had all too good an idea what I’d find there and it wasn’t anything I was in a rush to look at.

On the other hand, I was really sick of that closet.

I let myself out. And found, in the living room, pretty much what I’d expected. Crystal Sheldrake, sprawled out on her back, one leg bent at the knee, the foot cramped beneath the opposite thigh. Blond hair in shower cap. Green robe open so that most of her rather spectacular body was exposed.

An ugly purple welt high on her right cheekbone. A thin red line, sort of a scratch, reaching from just below her left eye to the left side of her chin.

More to the point, a gleaming steel instrument plunged between her noteworthy breasts and into her heart.

I tried to take her pulse. I don’t know why I made the attempt because God knows she looked deader than the Charleston, but people are always taking pulses on television and it seemed like the thing to do. I spent a long time taking hers because I wasn’t sure I was doing it right, but finally I gave up and said the hell with it.

I didn’t get sick or anything. My knees felt weak for a moment, but then the sensation lifted and I was all right. I felt rotten because death is a rotten thing and murder is particularly horrible, and I felt vaguely that there should have been something I could have done to prevent this particular murder, but I was damned if I could see what it was.

First things first. She was dead and I couldn’t help her, and I was a burglar who certainly did not want to be found at the scene of a far more serious crime than burglary. I had to wipe off whatever surfaces might hold my fingerprints and I had to retrieve my attaché case and then I had to get the hell out of there.

I didn’t have to wipe Crystal ’s wrist. Skin doesn’t take fingerprints, any number of inane television programs notwithstanding. What I did have to wipe were the surfaces I’d been near since I took off my rubber gloves (which I now put back on, incidentally). So I got a washcloth from the bathroom and I wiped the inside of the closet door and the floor of the closet, and I couldn’t think what else I might have touched but I wiped around the outside closet knob just to make sure.

Of course the murderer had touched that knob. So maybe I was wiping away his prints. On the other hand, maybe he’d been wearing gloves.

Not my concern.

I finished wiping, and I went back to the bathroom and put the washcloth back on its hook, and then I returned to the bedroom for a quick look at the disappointed pastel lady, and I gave her a quick wink and dropped my eyes to look for my attaché case.