The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams

CHAPTER Five

You’re not here, I told the dead guy. You’re a figment of an overactive imagination, stressed beyond endurance by a rough day and a snootful of scotch and a nothing little deadbolt that took forever to open. You don’t exist, and I’m going to close my eyes, and when I open them you’ll be gone.

It didn’t work.

All right, I decided. In that case, I wasn’t there. More precisely, I would erase all traces of my visit, and once I’d vanished into the night—what there was left of it—it would be as if I had never been there in the first place.

First, fingerprints. I’d taken off my gloves to get serious with the lock, and I hadn’t yet troubled to put them back on. I did so now, and snatched up a washcloth and wiped everything I might have touched during my interlude of glovelessness. The lamp, the door, the knob on either side. The toilet seat, which I’d raised (and hadn’t lowered afterward, what can I tell you, guys are like that). The flusher, which I’d flushed. The shower curtain, which I’d made the mistake of drawing open, and which I now returned to its original position. The light switch over the sink, which worked, and the light switch on the wall outside, which I tried again, and which still didn’t seem to do anything. And other things like the towel bar and the hamper, which I probably hadn’t touched, but why take chances?

I backed out of the bathroom and closed the door. I put Joan Nugent’s gooseneck lamp back where I’d found it, took another look around her studio, and left it for the master bedroom, where I put all her jewelry back in her jewelry box. There was no way to make sure everything wound up in its original compartment, but I did the best I could. I’d been wearing gloves when I lifted the stuff and I was wearing them as I put everything back, so I didn’t have to worry about prints.

I put Mr. Nugent’s watch where I’d found it on his night table, and replaced his diamond-and-onyx cufflinks in the little stud box in his sock drawer. That left me with two empty shopping bags from the deli. I carried them into the kitchen and filled them up with the cereal boxes and paper towels they’d held when I entered the apartment. I wasn’t entirely sure of the wisdom of this. Wasn’t it risky to carry anything out of the building? And did I really have to worry about the cops canvassing all the neighborhood delis and bodegas, trying to trace two rolls of Bounty and a box of Count Chocula? I decided to be guided by a modified version of the National Parks Service motto, updated for hapless burglars. Don’t even leave footprints, I told myself. Don’t even take snapshots.

With my bags packed, I stood once again in the darkened foyer, filled this time with a different sort of anticipation. In another few minutes I’d be out of here, and I’d be leaving everything exactly as I’d found it—

Oh yeah? a little voice demanded. What about the bathroom door?

I just stood there. I gave it some thought, and then I gave it some more thought.

Then I took out my picks and went back to the guest room.

It was past five by the time I got out of there. I said good morning to Eddie as I sailed past him, face averted. “Hey, how ya doin’,” he said, for a change. I walked briskly southward for three blocks, nodded to my own doorman, got nodded at in return, and went upstairs. I stopped at the compactor chute and disposed of my disposable gloves. I almost added the two sacks of groceries, but what the hell, they were mine, bought and paid for. I let myself into my apartment and put my groceries away.

I put away my burglar’s tools, too, and my stethoscope. I hung up my tie and jacket, kicked off my sneakers, and threw everything else into the hamper. I had a shower which nobody could have called premature, then jumped into bed and fell asleep.

The phone woke me. It was Patience, my poetry therapist, calling to see if I was feeling better.

Oh, right, the food poisoning. “I’m still a little rocky,” I said.

“You were sleeping, weren’t you? I’m sorry I woke you. I tried you at the store, and when there wasn’t any answer I was concerned. Have you seen a doctor?”

Had I? I couldn’t remember what Carolyn had told her.

“Actually,” I said, “I’m feeling a lot better.”

“But you said you were still a little rocky.”

“I’d say the crisis has passed,” I said. “And as far as waking me is concerned, I’m glad you did. I should have been up hours ago.” That seemed safe to say, if it was late enough for her to have tried me at the store. What time was it, anyway? God, eleven-fifteen. I should have been up hours ago.

“As a matter of fact,” I went on, “I really have to get moving. But it’s good you called, because I wanted to apologize for last night. I hated to cancel at the last minute like that.”

“I’m just relieved you’re all right.”

“Could we reschedule, Patience? Are you free for dinner this evening?”

“This evening? Are you sure you’re well enough, Bernie?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “It’s one of those twenty-four-hour food-poisoning things. I still feel the slightest bit rocky because it’s only been about twenty-three hours, but an hour from now I’ll be ready to wrestle alligators.”

“Is the timing really that precise?”

“You can generally set your watch by it,” I said. “I had the same thing two or three years ago, I got it from a brown rice knish from the health food store. Thought I was going to die, and then twenty-four hours later I was whistling show tunes. How about dinner tonight?”

“I have a client coming at seven,” she said, “so I should be through by eight, but the session might run over. He’s in the middle of a very tricky sonnet sequence and I hate to rush him. It’s not like Freudian analysis, where you hurry them out the door after fifty minutes. I’d hate to risk stifling somebody’s creativity.”

“I know what you mean.”

“So do you want to come here? Come at eight, and if we’re not through you can sit in the waiting room and read a magazine. I’ll definitely be ready by eight-thirty, and that’s not too late, is it?”

“No, it’s fine.”

“We’ll eat someplace in the neighborhood,” she said. “No burritos, though.”

“Please,” I said. “Don’t even say the B word.”

It wasn’t going to be my day to find out how I liked Count Chocula. I was in too much of a hurry. I shaved, dressed, and got out of there, not even pausing to trade nods with my doorman. I legged it over to Broadway and caught the subway. I would have taken a cab but at that hour the subway figured to be quicker, even with a change of trains at Times Square and a three-block walk from Fourteenth Street.

Why the hurry?

I usually open at ten, but it’s not as though I generally have a mob of impatient bibliophiles banging on the steel gates. I have a standing lunch date with Carolyn, but I could have called to tell her I’d be late, or to go ahead and eat without me. I’d been up all night, and a hell of a night it had been. Why didn’t I just spend the rest of the day in bed?

Good question.

I unfastened the big padlock, opened the steel security gates. I unlocked the several locks on my door, went in, flicked on the lights. Before I’d managed to take two steps inside the shop, the ravenous little bastard was rubbing himself against my pants leg.

“All right,” I said. “Cut the crap, will you? I’m here.”

He said what he always says. “Miaow,” he said.