If the super or anyone else was prowling the backyard, he'd do his city-inspector routine and disappear. What he usually did, a building like this one, he went in through the fire escape and then took the elevator on his way out, if there was one.
Otherwise, he walked down the stairs and strolled out through the lobby. He never went in with anything but a small suitcase containing his tools and the box of chocolate chip cookies he'd baked that morning. He was holding that suitcase in his right hand now.
He kept waiting.
It was very hot here in the tunnel. He moved to the very end of it where he had a better view of the yard, white sheets hanging limply overhead on a breeze less afternoon.
Somewhere a radio was going. He loved the intimacy back here.
Well, he thought, let's boldly go, and stepped out into brilliant sunshine. The yard was empty. The radio was playing an opera, he didn't know which one. He moved swiftly toward the fire escape he had located on his last reconnaissance mission, jumped up for the hanging ladder, pulled it down, and began climbing in almost the same motion.
The windows on the first and second-floor landings were closed. He walked quickly past them, and climbed to the third floor. The tenor was reaching for a high note. It hung on the summer air, liquid and pure, and then fell with a dying grace.
He crouched outside the' window, listening intently.
The apartment was still.
He tried the window gently. Like a skilled craftsman, he knew better than to force anything. He always tried it delicately, seeing if it would ease open at a touch. Sometimes, he got lucky. The window slid open under his hands, but an unlocked window didn't mean an apartment was empty. He waited, listening. He had read someplace that professional burglars always went in through a door. Subverted the alarm, picked the lock, went in that way. Burglars who went in windows were supposed to be junkie burglars, your smash-and-grab types. He was not a junkie, but he was most certainly a burglar. In fact, he was a professional burglar going in through a window right this very minute, Beam me down, Scottie, he thought, and stepped through and dropped softly to the floor. He was in a dining room.
The apartment was dim, not a light burning, no sunlight streaming through the east-facing windows at this hour of the day. Still as a tomb. Just what one would expect at three-thirty in the afternoon, occupants off working or shopping, place all to himself. He kept listening. Every minute he was inside, he listened. Never knew when someone might be coming home unexpectedly. He heard an elevator moving up the shaft. Heard a telephone ringing in an apartment somewhere on the floor. Heard the muffled voice of an answering machine picking up.
Listened. At last, he took a chamois cloth from the small suitcase, and turned back to the window, and wiped the sill behind him, and the sash inside and out.
He never started in a dining room because he didn't know anything about expensive dinnerware, and silverware was heavy to carry and often difficult to fence. He never stole television sets, either, because that was a sure way of getting a hernia, struggling a heavy TV set out of the building. He waited a moment longer, and then, still carrying the suitcase, he moved toward a closed door at the end of the room. Again, he moved cautiously. Turned the knob slowly and gently, eased the door open, and stepped into a long corridor running left and right from the open door.
To the left were walls bearing framed photographs. At the end of the corridor, there was a closed door. To the right, there was an open door leading into a kitchen. People sometimes hid jewelry in ice cube trays, he wondered if he should give the fridge a shot first. Listened again. Someone turning a water faucet on either next door or above.
Off again. Silence again, except for what he long ago learned to identify as ambient room noise.
He decided to try what he guessed was a bedroom behind the closed door at the end of the corridor. The bedroom was where you usually hit the jackpot. This was where the man of the house kept his watches and his cuff links, the lady kept her bracelets and necklaces and rings. Cash, too, you'd find in dresser drawers or even old shoe boxes. Rich people took their valuables to banks and put them in safe-deposit boxes.
Bedrooms were the vaults of the lower middle class and the poor.
The photographs on the wall were family pictures, most of them black-and-white, more recent ones in color. A blonde woman and her obvious husband were the framed stars of weddings and graduations and Olrtlalay pffti and picnics, and other indoor and outdoor events Cookie Boy could not nor did not care to identify. Walking softly past and through the smiling faces on either side of him, he knew he was marching through a history not his own, and one he somehow resented. By the time he reached the door at the end of the hall, he was mildly annoyed, although he could not have clearly explained why to anyone, least of all himself.
He took the knob in his hand and gently twisted it. He eased the door open.
A woman was naked and flat on her back on the bed, legs and arms widespread. A man was between her legs, similarly naked, Cookie Boy's heart leaped into his throat.
He stood unseen in the open doorway, transfixed, scarcely daring to breathe.
He was backing away when the couple decided to change positions. The man rolled off of her, turning as he did. The woman sat up. They both saw Cookie Boy in the very same instant. The woman was the blonde who'd featured so prominently in most of the photographs lining the wall outside. In her late forties, Cookie Boy guessed, with a round face and wide surprised blue eyes. The man, however, was not the one in so many of the photos outside, the smiling, dark-eyed, mustached man so obviously her husband. In fact, the man naked in bed with her was hardly a man at all. He was instead a boy of sixteen or seventeen with flaming red hair and a freckled face and eyes as blue and as surprised as the woman's.
Cookie Boy had stumbled into a matinee with the delivery boy. He had walked smack into a burlesque skit, which might have been comical if he hadn't been here to burglarize the apartment.
"Oh my God!" the woman yelled, as well she might have since she'd never seen Cookie Boy in her life and here he was standing in her bedroom door holding a suitcase in his right hand, as if he were checking into a hotel, and here she was in bed with a sweaty kid named Jerry whose last name she didn't even know, while her husband was toiling downtown in the law offices of Hamlin, Gerstein and Konstantine, whose first names she sometimes couldn't remember, like now.
"Don't get nervous," Cookie Boy said. "I'm out of here.”
But the delivery boy had other ideas.
Cookie Boy could not later clearly remember the flow of events that followed. He supposed the initial impetus had something to do with the high level of testosterone in teenage boys especially when they got excited. What happened was the kid jumped off the bed like Spider Man himself, hurling himself on Cookie Boy's back just as he was turning to flee. "Jerry, let him go!” the blonde yelled.
"Call the cops, Mrs. Cooper!" the kid yelled. But Mrs. Cooper wasn't about to call any cops because here she was naked in bed with little Jerry here at three-thirty in the afternoon, why the hell would she want cops here? Why not sell tickets instead? "Call the cops!" he yelled again, hanging on tight to Cookie Boy, which forced him to ram his elbow backward into the kid's gut. The last thing he wanted here was physical combat of any nature, but Jerry grabbed his shoulder, and spun him around, and brought up his fists in the classic street fighter's pose, naked, however, freckled, and still wearing an erection you might have thought would have disappeared by now, but apparently the fight was keeping him excited.