Wait a minute.
Where was the attaché case?
It certainly wasn’t in the closet with me. Had I left it alongside the desk, or somewhere else in the apartment? I couldn’t remember. Had I even brought it to the apartment? Had I set it down while I picked the locks, or tucked it between my knees?
I was pretty sure I hadn’t. Well, had I had it with me when I entered the Boccaccio at Captain Hoberman’s side? I tried to visualize the whole process-up in the elevator, saying a few words to Mr. Weeks in 12-J, then hotfooting it down four flights of stairs. It didn’t seem to me that I’d been carrying anything, except for five pounds I could have done without, but it was hard to be sure.
Had I left it home? I remembered picking it up, but I could have put it down again. The question was, had I had it when I left my apartment?
The answer, I decided, was yes. Because I could recall having it in my hand when I hailed Max Fiddler’s cab for the second time that night, and balanced on my knees when he asked if I was on my way to a business appointment.
Had I left it in his cab? I had his card, or his Chinese herbalist’s card, anyway, with Max’s phone number on it. There was nothing I needed in the attaché case. There was, in fact, nothing in it at all. It was a good case and I’d owned it long enough to get attached (or even attachéd) to it, but I certainly could live a rich and rewarding life without it if I had to.
But suppose he brought it back of his own accord. He knew where I lived, having dropped me off and picked me up at the same location. I didn’t think I’d mentioned my name, or Bill Thompson’s name either, but he could describe me to the doorman, or-
What the hell was I working myself up about? I was going stir-crazy in the damned closet. It was an empty attaché case with no identification on it and nothing incriminating about it, and if I got it back that was great, and if I didn’t that was fine, and who cared?
Anyway, I’d had it with me when I got out of the cab. Because I could remember switching it from one hand to the other in order to ring Hugo Candlemas’s doorbell. Which meant I’d probably left it there when Hoberman and I set out on our fool’s errand, unless I’d left it at the Wexford Castle, and I didn’t think I had. I had almost certainly left it up in Candlemas’s apartment, in which case I could get it back when I went there to drop off the portfolio and collect my money.
Assuming I ever got out of the closet.
Outside, the fires of love were but glowing embers, to judge from the sound track. Maybe, I thought, I could just leave. Maybe they wouldn’t notice.
Right.
I wondered what Bogart would do.
In the past fifteen days I had watched thirty movies, all of them either starring or featuring Humphrey Bogart. Some of them were films that everybody knows, like The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca and The African Queen, and others were movies that nobody’s ever heard of, like Invisible Stripes and Men Are Such Fools. My companion at these outings, sitting beside me and sharing my popcorn, seemed to believe that the Bogart on-screen persona would tell you all you needed to know to cope with life. And who was I to say her nay?
But I couldn’t think of anything better for Bogart to do than the course I’d chosen for myself, which was an essentially passive one. I was waiting for something to happen. Maybe Bogart would have taken the bit in his teeth and the bull by the horns and made something happen, but it seemed to me that he was most apt to do that when he had a gun in his fist. I didn’t even have my fucking attaché case. All I could lay my hands on was a coat hanger.
Outside my door, activity seemed to have resumed, but of a different sort. They were walking about now, and carrying on an audible if incomprehensible conversation.
And then there was a loud sound, and something or someone bumped into the closet door, and then there was silence. Seconds later a door opened-not, thank God, the closet door, but what sounded like the front door. Then it closed. Then more silence.
And then, finally, I heard the sound that had started the whole thing, a key in a lock. Whoever it was must have walked halfway to the elevator before deciding to come back and lock up. Maybe the afterthought was prompted by natural tidiness, or maybe the door-locker figured this way it would take them longer to discover the body.
Because I’d played this scene before. Once before I’d ducked into a closet when somebody came home unexpectedly. That was on Gramercy Park, and the apartment was Crystal Sheldrake’s, and when I got out of her closet I found her on the floor with a dental scalpel stuck in her heart. I have stumbled over altogether too many dead bodies in the course of my young life, and maybe you get used to it, but I haven’t yet, and don’t much want to.
And it had happened again, I just knew it. That was what had bumped into the closet door before-a body, dead as Spam, making the awkward transition from vertical to horizontal. Now it would be in the way when I tried to open the door, and I’d wind up tampering unwittingly with evidence and trying to squeeze through an opening that would have been a snug fit for Raffles.
Or maybe the body wasn’t dead. Maybe the person on the other side of the closet door had been merely knocked senseless, and would recover consciousness even as I was emerging from my refuge. A consummation devoutly to be wished, certainly-if one had to have bodies lying about, it was preferable that they be alive-but I didn’t really feel up for much in the way of human contact just now. I offered up a quick prayer to St. Dismas, the patron saint of burglars. Let the body be alive but unconscious, I implored him. Better yet, I thought, let it be in Schenectady -but maybe that was too much to ask.
A thought came to me, unbidden, irresistible: Bogart would get the hell out of the closet.
I opened the door, and of course there was no body there. I went all through the place, making sure; while a dead body is not something you want to run into, neither is it the sort of thing you’d care to overlook. No body, anywhere in the apartment. Two people had entered and two people had left, and one of them had stumbled against the closet door on the way out.
The bed, neatly made up before, was a rumpled mess now. I looked at the tangled sheets and felt embarrassed for my own voyeuristic role. It had been involuntary, God knows, and I hadn’t seen anything, or made sense of what I’d heard, but I still found it disquieting to look upon the whole thing.
Aside from the bed, you’d never know anyone had been in the place. The guy in the uniform, the Jazz Age Teddy Roosevelt, still grinned dopily from the silver frame. The same clothes still hung in the closet, the same paper clips still huddled together in the leather box.
But the portfolio was gone.
CHAPTER Three
And so, minutes later, was I. If there was any reason to hang around, I couldn’t think of it. I gave the place yet another once-over, just in case one of them had taken the portfolio not to keep but merely to give the other a playful swat. I made sure it wasn’t lurking on the floor behind the dresser, or in a pile of books alongside the fireplace, or, indeed, anywhere.
Then I got out of there. I’d had my gloves on all the time I’d been inside the apartment, so I hadn’t left any fingerprints, and if the other visitors had done so, that was their problem. I left everything the way they’d left it, unlocked the doors, and was compulsive enough to do with my picks what they’d done with keys-i.e., I locked up after myself.