I passed up the silver, and some nice lace and linen, and went into the master bedroom, where Mrs. Nugent kept her jewelry in a miniature brassbound chest on top of her Queen Anne dresser. The chest had a lock, but she hadn’t locked it, which showed good sense on her part. I’d have opened it in a wink, and a cruder sort of yegg would have simply tucked the whole thing under his arm and hauled it off to open at leisure.
Some people have the same gift with gemstones that I have with locks. They barely have to look at a stone to know whether it came from the De Beers consortium in South Africa or the Home Shopping Network’s once-in-a-lifetime Cubic Zirconium Jamboree. They can tell lapis from sodalite and ruby from spinel more readily than I can distinguish amber from plastic or hematite beads from ball bearings. (It doesn’t really matter, neither one’s worth stealing, but a person ought to be able to tell the difference.)
I don’t have that gift, but when you’ve been stealing the stuff long enough you develop a certain sense of what to take and what to leave. When in doubt, you take. I passed up the pieces that were obvious costume. There was one necklace, for example, with a stone so large it would have had to be the Kloppman Diamond if it was real. There were earrings made of African trading beads. I got some nice things, and I could describe them in detail and even provide a ballpark estimate of their value, but why?
As you’ll see, it turned out to be academic.
After half an hour in the Nugent apartment, I was ready to go home. I hadn’t slept in any of the beds or broken any chairs, and there was no porridge anywhere to be found. I’d used my two plastic bags for the jewelry, plus a watch and some cufflinks of Harlan’s, and then I’d tucked each bag into a pocket. Jewelry in each front trouser pocket, cash in the blazer’s inside breast pocket, the stethoscope in an outside blazer pocket, my picks and flashlight tucked here and there—I may have cut an ungainly silhouette, but I had my hands free.
I took a last turn around my apartment, not in the hope of more booty but to make sure I hadn’t left any traces of my visit. As usual, I’d been compulsively neat. I was ready to call it a night, and a long one at that, when my eyes settled on a door I hadn’t noticed before. Another closet? The place was crawling with closets, and not a thing worth stealing in any of them.
The door wouldn’t budge. And there was no keyhole, and thus no lock to pick.
What had we here? Was this a permanently sealed door leading to another apartment, a vestigial aperture from a time when this and the adjoining apartment had been a single unit? It seemed unlikely. The door was on a side wall of the guest room, Mrs. Nugent’s studio. There was another door on that same wall leading to a large walk-in closet, into and out of which I had ambled a while earlier. Did the closet extend the whole length of the room, and had one of its two doors been closed off for some obscure reason?
I checked. The closet was deep and wide, but it only ran half the length of the wall. Was the sealed door one that led into the rear of a closet in the next apartment? It seemed like a strange way to do things, but old buildings get partitioned in curious ways over the years, so maybe it was possible.
What difference did it make?
Well, it was curious, that was all. And I was curious, and never mind what it did to the cat.
I got out my ring of picks and selected a flat steel strip four and a half inches long. I went up to the mystery door and slid my strip of steel between it and the jamb. I raised my hand to the top of the door, then lowered it again. I didn’t encounter any resistance until I’d brought it down a few inches below my waist, right about where you’d expect to find a lock. I eased the steel strip out, drawing it downward to trace the outline of what seemed to be a bolt. Below the bolt, the strip had smooth sailing again all the way to the floor.
Curiouser and curiouser. If you were dividing one apartment into two, you didn’t just close a door and bolt it. That was okay with adjoining hotel rooms, when you wanted to preserve the option of access, but it wouldn’t do in this case, where you wanted privacy and security. At the very least, you’d seal the door all around with some sort of plaster compound.
Besides, the lock wasn’t one of those add-on bolts you pick up at the hardware store. It was set right in the middle of a door two inches thick, which meant it was for a room designed to be locked and unlocked only from the inside. Closets don’t have locks like that.
Bathrooms do.
Well, sure. There was a bathroom off the master bedroom, and a half bath off the foyer. (“Halfbath, half-human. They call him…Tubman!”) So it made sense that there’d be one in the second bedroom as well. So that’s all it was, another bathroom, and if I’d wanted to steal towels I’d have gone to the Waldorf, so the hell with it. I could just—
Wait a minute.
A bathroom in an empty apartment that happened to be locked from the inside?
I went back to the door and ran my hands over it, as if to assess its psychic energy. On the wall alongside it there was a switch plate set at shoulder height if your shoulders were set a tad lower than mine. I worked the single switch. No lights went on or off in the bedroom, and I couldn’t tell if anything happened in the bathroom. No light showed beneath the door.
I flicked the switch back again, to undo whatever I might have done. I found a chair and sat down. I looked at the poor old harlequin in joan Nugent’s work-in-progress. On earlier inspection he’d looked sad. Now he looked confused.
Was someone in there? Had I alerted him by buzzing the buzzer, and had he responded by…by locking himself in the bathroom?
Why would anybody do that?
Well, say I wasn’t the first burglar to come a-calling. I’d once been tossing a place when someone else broke in, and I’d found the whole thing something of a sticky wicket. I hadn’t locked myself in the bathroom, but I might have, if it had occurred to me.
But did the apartment I entered look like one into which another housebreaker had recently broken? No way.
Still…
Logic, I thought. When all else fails, try logic.
All right. There were two possibilities. There was someone in the bathroom or there wasn’t. If so, who could it be? A Nugent?
If you were a Nugent, or anyone else legitimately present in the Nugents’ apartment, you might or might not choose to answer a doorbell at an ungodly hour. But if you didn’t go open the door, or at least peep through the peephole, would you instead lock yourself in the bathroom?
You would not.
Therefore if someone was there it was someone who didn’t belong and who would sit on the john in the dark for half an hour to avoid detection. All I had to do was slip out and go home now and let the mystery visitor remain anonymous. Anybody in there had to be aware of my presence, and eventually he (or she; maybe it was Doll Cooper, for God’s sake, trying out a third career) could emerge in his (or her) own good time. There was still silver for the taking, and thirty-odd dollars in the windmill canister, and, for all I knew, the legendary Kloppman Diamond.
I went around the apartment turning off lights. In no time at all the whole place was dark except for the overhead light in the foyer. I turned that off, too, and opened the front door and stuck my head out into the hallway.
And drew it back inside, and pulled the door shut, and padded noiselessly through the dark apartment, not even using my pen light. Moving slowly and silently, I slipped back into the guest room, where I hovered, barely breathing, and waited for the bathroom door to open.