The Burglar In The Closet

Chapter Fifteen

Knobby Corcoran’s building was a twelve-story prewar job with an Art Deco lobby and a doorman who thought he was St. Peter. I lurked across the street watching him make sure every supplicant was both expected and desired by a bona fide tenant. I thought of passing myself off as a tenant unknown to him, but his manner suggested this wouldn’t be a breeze and I wasn’t sure I had self-confidence equal to the chore.

The building on the right was a five-story brownstone. The building on the left, however, was a fourteen-story building, which, given the curiosities of superstition in the New York real-estate trade, meant it was only one story taller than Knobby’s building. It too had a doorman but he hadn’t been through the same assertiveness-training course as Knobby’s and I could have walked past him wearing convict’s stripes without creating an incident.

First, though, I had to learn the number of Knobby’s apartment, and I did that by presenting myself as his visitor and watching which buzzer the doorman rang for the intercom. When no one answered I knew two things for certain-Knobby lived in 8-H and nobody was home. I walked to the far corner, came partway back, and breezed past the doorman of the building next door with a nod and a smile and a “Nice night, eh?” He agreed that it was without even looking up from his paper.

I took the elevator to the top floor and climbed a flight of stairs to the roof. Some Manhattan rooftops feature amateur astronomers and some sport courting couples and still others are given over to roof gardens. This roof, praise be to God, was empty. I walked to its edge and gazed down through the darkness for about twelve feet, which is a much greater distance to fall down than to walk across. It could have been worse-there might have been a gap between the buildings. But then I wouldn’t have been there in the first place.

I must have wasted a few minutes getting my courage up. But this was nothing I hadn’t done before, and if you can’t contend with acrophobia when there’s no way around it, well, burglary’s not the right trade for you, my boy. I went over there and I jumped, and while I landed with a little pain I did so with my ankles unturned. I did a few shallow kneebends to make sure that my legs still worked, let out the breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding, and made my way over to the door leading back into the building.

It was locked from the inside, but of course that was the least of my problems.

Knobby’s lock was no problem, either. I got to his door just as a middle-aged man emerged from a door down the hall and began walking in my direction. I could have sworn I recognized him from one of those Haley’s M-O commercials, asking his pharmacist for some commonsense advice about, uh, irregularity. I knocked on Knobby’s door, frowned, said, “Yeah, it’s me, man. You gonna open the door or what?”

Silence from within, of course.

“Yeah, right,” I said. “But hurry it up, huh?” I looked at the approaching gentleman, caught his eye, rolled my own eyes in exasperation. “Taking a shower,” I confided. “So I gotta stand here while he dries off and gets dressed and everything.”

He nodded sympathetically and hurried on by, hoping no doubt that I’d keep the rest of my sorrows to myself. When he turned the corner I hauled out my ring of tools and popped Knobby’s lock in less time than it takes to announce the fact. He had one of those spring locks that engages automatically when you close the door, and he hadn’t bothered to use the key to engage the deadbolt, so all I had to do was snick the thing back with a strip of spring steel and give the door a push.

I slipped inside, closed the door, locked it more thoroughly than Knobby had done, and groped around for a light switch. I didn’t have rubber gloves with me and this time I didn’t care, because I didn’t expect to steal anything. All I really wanted was to find some evidence, and once I found it I could leave it there and quick go bring it to the attention of the police. There would probably be some subtle way to do this.

If I got really lucky, of course, I might just find the caseful of jewels. In which event I would liberate my attaché case with the greater portion of its contents intact, minus a few choice and eminently traceable items which I could hide here and there on the premises where Todras and Nyswander could uncover them at their leisure. But it seemed all too probable that, if Knobby was the killer and thief, the jewels were tucked away someplace where I wouldn’t find them, not left in this apartment behind an imperfectly locked door.

While I thought all of these things I was already getting busy tossing the place. This was a relatively simple job because of its size. Knobby had a studio apartment not very much bigger than Jillian’s place and a good deal more sparsely furnished. There was a captain’s bed in unpainted birch, a mahogany set of drawers with mismatched drawer pulls, clearly acquired secondhand, a comfortable chair and a pair of straightbacked side chairs. A stove and refrigerator and sink stood at the rear, ineffectively screened from the rest of the room by a beaded curtain.

The place was sloppy. Bartenders have to be very neat at their work and I’d spent enough hours watching them polish glasses and put things away in their proper places to assume they were just naturally precise individuals. Knobby’s apartment disabused me of this notion. He had scattered dirty clothes here and there around the room, his bed was unmade, and one got the general impression that his cleaning woman had died months ago and had not yet been replaced.

I kept at it. I checked the kitchen area first. There was no cold cash in the fridge, no hot jewelry in the oven. There was, as a matter of fact, mold and dead food in the former and stale grease and crud in the latter, and I moved on to other areas as quickly as possible.

The drawers in the captain’s bed contained a jumble of clothing, the wardrobe running mostly to jeans in various stages of disrepute and T-shirts, some of them red Spyder’s Parlor numbers, others imprinted to promote other establishments, causes, or life styles. One drawer held a variety of contraceptive devices plus the sort of sex aids available at adult bookstores-vibrators, stimulators, and diverse rubber and leather objects the specific functions of which I could only guess at.

No jewels. No dental instruments from Celniker Dental and Optical Supply. No objects of enormous value. It had occurred to me earlier that even if Knobby had no connection with the killing, I could at least make expenses out of the visit. After all, the way things were going it looked as though I’d need money for a lawyer, or for a plane to Tierra del Fuego, or something, and when I open a door without a key I expect to get something tangible for my troubles. I’m no amateur, for God’s sake. I don’t do it for love.

Hopeless. He had a portable TV, a radio on the dresser top, an Instamatic camera, all items that might have gladdened the heart of a junkie who’d kicked the door in looking for the price of a bag of smack, but nothing I’d lower myself to take. There was a little cash in the top right-hand dresser drawer, accumulated tips I suppose, and I reimbursed myself for what I’d spent at the bar-and his tip was part of it, as far as that goes. Actually I did a little better than get even. There was somewhere between one and two hundred dollars in ones and fives and tens, and I scooped it all up and shook the bills down into a neat stack and found them a home on my hip. No big deal, certainly, but when I find cash around I make it mine. There was change, too, lots of it, but I left it right there and closed the drawer. You’ve got to have standards or where the hell are you?

Enough. I could inventory every piece of debris in the lad’s apartment, but why bother? I opened his closet, I burrowed among his jackets and coats, and on the overhead shelf I saw something that made my heart turn over, or skip a beat, or stand still, or-you get the idea.

An attaché case.

Not mine. Not Ultrasuede but Naugahyde, black, shiny Naugahyde. The Nauga and the Ultra are two altogether different animals. My disappointment at this second discovery was greater than you can possibly imagine. For one moment I’d had the jewels at hand and the murder of Crystal Sheldrake all solved, and now that moment was over and I was back where I’d started.

Naturally I took the case down and opened it anyway.

Naturally I was somewhat surprised to find it absolutely jam-packed with money.