The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams

CHAPTER Sixteen

I was somewhere, God knows where, picking a lock. Had I been an Iraqi, I might have called it the mother of all locks, because every time I seemed to have opened it I found another more intricate mechanism within. At last the final set of tumblers tumbled, giving me access not to a house or apartment but to the inner recesses of the lock itself. I had done it, I had broken into the lock, and I could wander around in its labyrinthine chambers where no mere human had ever gone before, and—

The burglar alarm went off. Loud, piercing, shrill. Where was the keypad? What was the combination? How could I get out of here?

I rolled over, sat up, blinked, and glared at the alarm clock. There was no keypad to cope with, no combination to be entered. There was a button to push, and I pushed it, and the awful ringing stopped.

But not without having done its job. I was awake, with no hope of finding my way back into the seductive machinery of the dream. You could wait all your life for a dream like that, and then it finally comes along, and there you are, abruptly delivered from it as if by an obstetrician with a golf date in an hour. Maybe if I settled my head on the pillow, maybe if I just thought about locks for a moment—

No.

It was six in the morning, and time for my Sunday to start. I put on a singlet and a pair of nylon running shorts. I pulled my socks on, reached for my Sauconys, then set them aside and got an old pair of New Balance 450s from the closet. I never wore them anymore because they were falling apart, but you couldn’t touch them for comfort.

I put a few things in a fanny pack and hooked it around my waist. I found a terry-cloth sweatband and put it on, picked up a blue-and-white checkered hand towel and tucked that into the waistband of my fanny pack. I let myself out of my apartment, locked up after myself, and put my keys in the fanny pack and zipped it shut.

Outside, the sky was just lightening up, which was more than I could say for myself. I started off walking briskly, and that seemed to me as much as ought to be required of anyone. If a man needs to move any faster than that, let him take a cab.

At Seventy-second Street, I forced myself to turn left, toward Riverside Park and the Hudson River. I walked for another twenty or thirty yards, then made myself ease into a slow trot.

You’re doing it, I told myself. You’re running. You fool, you’re running!

Not for very long, however. I trotted for half a block or so, then switched back to my brisk walking pace. By the time I got on the asphalt park path I was trotting again, and fifty yards down the line I was walking.

It’s remarkable the extent to which a healthy and reasonably active young man can allow himself to get out of shape. It’s even more remarkable the way he can hold two irreconcilable ideas in his mind at the same time. As I huffed and puffed my way around the park, I marveled at the fact that I’d once been masochistic enough to put myself through this pointless and hideous ritual every single day. And, even as I was thinking this, a part of my mind was toying with the prospect of getting back into the horrible swing of it. Just an easy two or three miles a day, I was actually telling myself. Three times a week, say. Just enough to work up a sweat, keep the blood moving, tone the old cardiovascular whatsit. What was so bad about that?

Sweat beaded on my brow, gathered under my arms, dampened the front of my singlet. Well, that was the object, wasn’t it? I’d signed on for this farce with the sole intent of working up a visible lather of perspiration, not pushing myself to the brink of coronary catastrophe. I could take it down a notch now, gear down to my old brisk walk, and then in the final stretch—

“Hey, Bernie! What a surprise, huh?”

“Wally,” I said.

“Today’s my weekly long run,” he said. “I figure from here to the Cloisters and back is pretty darn close to a half marathon. And coming back it’s mostly downhill.”

“Piece of cake.”

“You said it. What I’d really like to do, I’d like to do it twice, go for a full twenty-six miles. But then I’d run the risk of peaking too soon.”

“You don’t want to do that.”

“Not with the marathon coming up the first Sunday in November. You think you’ll run it next year, Bernie? You could, you know. Just increase your distance a little bit every week and before you know it twenty-six miles is just a walk in the park. Bernie, you’re walking. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Why’d you suddenly stop running?”

“I’m practicing for the marathon,” I said. “You said it’ll be a walk in the park, and that’s what I’m doing, walking in the park.”

“Pick it up a little,” he urged. “We’ll take a nice easy run up to Eighty-first Street. Then you can walk back home. How does that sound?”

It sounded terrible. “It sounds wonderful,” I assured him, “but I don’t want to peak too soon.”

I guess he saw the wisdom in that. He took off, heading gamely uptown, and I found my way out of the park and retraced my steps to Seventy-second and West End. I was walking now, and not too briskly, either, but the part of the system that controls perspiration was a little late getting the message. The sweat was still pouring out of me, and my shorts and singlet were soaked.

Good.

Maybe, I thought, I could have avoided running altogether. Maybe I could have simply soaked my clothes in the sink before putting them on. Then all I’d have had to do was pour a cup of water over my head and I’d be a perfect study in verisimilitude.

Oh, well.

At West End I turned north, not south, and started jogging again. There’s something about the sight of the finish line that gets the old adrenaline flowing, and I guess I put on a burst of speed at the end without having intended to. When I reached the entrance of 304, my heart was pounding and I was gasping for breath, even as I mopped my face with the blue towel.

I chugged right past the doorman and into the elevator.

Luke Santangelo’s door didn’t present much of a problem. There was just one lock, and I picked my way through it with ease. He’d double-locked it, though, so I wouldn’t have been any more able than Doll to get past it with a credit card.

Inside, I gave the place a quick check to make sure I wasn’t sharing the premises with any other persons, living or dead. This was a simpler process than it had been Thursday night in 9-G. Unlike the Nugents’ Classic Six, 7-B was a less-than-classic one-bedroom apartment. There was only a single bathroom and no one had been so inconsiderate as to lock its door, let alone die in it. When I had established as much I returned to the living room and put on the pair of gloves I’d stowed in my fanny pack.

Then I got down to business.

When I left Luke’s apartment I was wearing a suit. It was the only one in his closet, a three-button charcoal pinstripe with a label indicating it had been bought (or, considering what I knew about Luke, stolen) from Brooks Brothers. We were about the same size, Luke and I, but the pants were a little tight in the seat and waist and the jacket was a little large in the shoulders.

Maybe if I got back to running three times a week, I thought, and did an upper-body workout with free weights on the days I didn’t run—

I found a shirt that fit me, freshly ironed. He’d forgotten to tell them “no starch.” He had half a dozen ties hanging on a nail, and I don’t know where he’d stolen those, or why he’d bothered. I picked the one with red and black stripes.

His shoes were small on my feet, but I hate the way running shoes look with a suit, although it’s a costume with which Wally Hemphill seems perfectly happy. I tried on all three pairs of leather shoes in his closet and settled on the black penny loafers as the most nearly comfortable of the lot, hoping I wouldn’t have to wear them for very long.

His attaché case was under the bed, along with some other luggage. The attaché was the only one that was locked, and the only one that seemed to contain anything. I picked it open and found, to my gratification if not greatly to my surprise, that it was full of baseball cards. I’d thought I might add my sneakers and running gear, but there wasn’t any room.

Before I closed the attaché case, I chose a single baseball card and found a temporary home for it in a pocket of the maroon backpack. I took a quick turn around the apartment, but I did not linger long. I had my picks in a pocket of the suit jacket, where I could get at them easily, and I took off the pliofilm gloves just before I quit the apartment and slipped them into another pocket. I had the attaché case in one hand, and I had a canvas tote bag over one arm. It contained my sneakers and running clothes and fanny pack, and it bore the logo of the Mercurial Wombat, a gift shop in Tucumcari, New Mexico.

There was a tenant in the hallway, a woman waiting for the elevator, but if she looked in my direction all she could have seen was a man locking his door. It wasn’t my door, and I wasn’t using a key, but there was no way for her to know that. Before I’d finished, the elevator came and whisked her away. Then I took a silk hanky from the breast pocket of my suit, wiped my prints from the doorknob, and walked to the end of the corridor, where a door led to a staircase.

I climbed the two flights to the ninth floor, made sure the hall was empty, and walked the length of it to the Nugents’ door. I hadn’t rung Luke’s bell, but I leaned long and hard on their buzzer, giving anyone inside plenty of time to put on a robe and come to the door. When no one did, I let myself in. I didn’t bother letting my eyes accustom themselves to the darkness this time around. I put my picks away, donned my gloves, and turned on a light.

The apartment hadn’t changed much in the fifty hours or so since my last visit. I took a quick look around, then went straight to the guest room. The harlequin on the easel looked as depressed as ever, and who could blame him?

The bathroom door was still locked. I knocked on it, and on the adjoining wall. I tapped the switch plate and fiddled with the switch, the one that didn’t seem to turn on a light in either the guest room or the bathroom.

I drew my tool ring from my pocket, selected the appropriate instrument, and unscrewed the two screws that held the switch plate in place. I lifted it off and set it aside. It was a dummy, with no switch box in the wall behind it. The switch itself was attached to the plate and came away with it, leaving a rectangular opening about four inches high and three inches wide. I put my hand in and tapped the rear of the little compartment, running my fingers over the surface. I had my gloves on, so it took me longer than it might have to identify what I was touching as the unglazed side of a square of ceramic tile.

What had we here? A hiding place? Not likely, because the interior of the opening wasn’t framed. Anything you stashed here would drop down to the bottom of the wall and you wouldn’t be able to get it out.

I put a little pressure on the tile. It was hinged on top and it swung back, and I caught the scent of the dead man in the bathtub. The bathroom door fit snugly enough to have held the smell within, but I’d broken the seal when I pushed the tile, and two days of aging had ripened him wonderfully. I steeled myself, reached all the way in, and unlocked the door.

I made myself go in there. I drew the shower curtain and took a look at the fellow, just to refresh my memory. He was quite as I remembered him, if a good deal more pungent. I still couldn’t tell if there was a gun in the tub with him, and I still didn’t care enough to move him to find out. I left the bathroom door open and went to the master bedroom, where I spent a moment or two. I went back to the bathroom and took hold of the door, swinging it to and fro, not so much to air the place out as to let the aroma fill the rest of the apartment. It wasn’t the sort of task you want to devote a great deal of time to, and I didn’t. Before long I left the bathroom, closed the door, and reached in through the secret passageway to turn the lock.

I withdrew my arm and the hinged tile swung right back into place. I replaced the dummy switch plate and screwed in the screws. I went into the master bedroom again and scooped up the watches and jewelry I’d been so careful to put back two nights ago. This time it all went straight into the attaché case. Then, in Harlan Nugent’s closet, I picked out a well-polished pair of shoes, black cap toes by Allen-Edmonds. They were much easier on my feet than Luke’s penny loafers, which I’d actually kicked off shortly after entering the Nugent apartment. (They went better with the suit, too.) I put the loafers in the closet, in the space on the shoe rack previously occupied by the cap toes.

I turned off all the lights, let myself out, locked up, and went home.

After I’d showered and shaved and rinsed out my running clothes, I got dressed again, this time in some clothes of my own. I put on my blue blazer and a pair of gray slacks, and I packed up all of Luke’s clothes along with Harlan Nugent’s shoes in a pair of plastic shopping bags. I could have hung everything in my closet, but why take chances? The shirt had a laundry mark, and there might well be something identifiable about the suit. They have this DNA testing nowadays, so God knows what they can or can’t find out. Besides, it’s not as if I would ever have worn any of the stuff again. The suit didn’t fit right, the shirt had an unbecoming collar style, and the tie was a real loser. The shoes were a temptation, the first $300 shoes I’d ever had on my feet, and I sort of felt like keeping them around. But they were a half-size too large, and that made it a little easier to give them up.

I hid the attaché case behind the panel in my closet, along with the Tucumcari tote bag. I tucked my picks in one pocket, my gloves in another, and I put on a much nicer tie than I’d taken from Luke’s place, and I locked up and left.

I walked east on Seventy-first, and at the corner of Broadway I found a pay phone and dialed 911. “Hi,” I said. “Say, I just had a delivery at West End and Seventy-fourth and there was a real nasty smell coming from one of the apartments. I was in the military, and it’s a smell you don’t forget once you smelled it. Somebody’s dead in there, I’d put money on it.” The operator asked my name. “Naw, I don’t want to get involved,” I said. “You got to put something down on your form, put Joe Blow. The apartment’s 9-G, that’s G as in George, and the building’s number 304 West End Avenue. I tried reporting it to the doorman but I don’t think he got it. Could be his English isn’t too good. 9-G, 304 West End. Something dead in there, I’d be willing to bet on it. Bye.”

The first uptown train to come along was an express, and I rode it one stop to Ninety-sixth Street. I went out through the turnstile and started walking down Broadway. The first panhandler I met was a woman, the second a large man. I gave each of them a dollar. The third was a man about my size, and I gave him my two shopping bags. “What’s this?” he demanded. “Hey, what’s this?”

“Wear it in good health,” I told him, and turned around and went back to the subway.

By ten o’clock I was in the store, helping Raffles develop his mousing skills. A few hours later I was back in Luke’s apartment, trying to look as though I was there for the first time. I’d been careful to leave his $240 in the jelly jar earlier. This time I took it, but you’ll recall that I split it down the middle with Doll.

That’s called ethics.

By the time I got home my half of the $240 was largely depleted. I’d spent twenty bucks for a baseball card encyclopedia and fifty for a blanket, and as the night wore on I kept shelling out for cabs and coffee. And now it was two in the morning, and I’d been awake for twenty hours, and was I bedded down with my head on my pillow? I was not. Instead, I was sitting on my couch examining baseball cards and looking them up in the encyclopedia.

Some kids never grow up.