Ten minutes passed, arguably the longest ten minutes of my life. By the time they’d crept by, it was glaringly obvious that the bathroom was unoccupied.
So why was it locked?
And what was inside?
The usual things, I told myself. A sink, a tub, maybe a stall shower. A commode. A medicine chest. Go home, I urged myself, and whatever’s in there can stay in there, and who cares?
I did, evidently.
Because what I did—after I had turned on the light again, so that I could at least see what I was doing even if I couldn’t satisfactorily explain it—what I did was get down on my hands and knees and try to pick the goddam lock. It was a nothing lock, it was a simple bolt of the sort you turn when you’re in the john and you don’t want someone to walk in on you. There were no tumblers, no pins, nothing, really, but a bolt that went back and forth when you turned the little gizmo on the back of the door.
I couldn’t pick the sonofabitch to save my soul.
I could have popped it with one good kick, but I didn’t want to do that. I was a man who’d once been called “the Heifetz of the picklock,” and I certainly ought to be able to open a locked bathroom door. It wasn’t Fort Knox, for God’s sake. It was a bathroom, a guest bathroom, on West End Avenue.
Couldn’t do it.
I flicked the switch again, the one at the side of the bathroom door, the one that had previously caused nothing to happen. Predictably, nothing happened.
Suppose I got married, suppose we had kids. Suppose one of them locked himself in the bathroom, the way the little bastards do, and then couldn’t unlock the door and panicked. Suppose Daddy rushed to the rescue, picks in hand, and then suppose Daddy had to tell Mommy to call a locksmith, because he couldn’t open the bloody door?
Ridiculous.
If it was my door, and my kid inside, I’d have taken it off its hinges. But that’s a lot of work, and a real messy job. You always get chips of paint off the hinge and onto the carpet, a mute testament to one’s continuing inability to draw back the bolt.
See, there was no way to work my kind of magic on the thing. All I could do was try to get a purchase on it with my tools and snick it back into the door. The gap between door and jamb was pretty snug, so I didn’t have much room to work with. I could make a little progress, but sooner or later I’d be unable to maintain constant tension on the bolt, and my pick would slip and I’d be right back where I started, and not at all happy about it.
One of the steel strips on my tool ring is a cut-down hacksaw blade, and it would have gone through the bolt like a knife through butter. Not a hot knife, and not warm butter either, but it would have done the job. I ruled it out, though, for the same reason I wouldn’t take the door off its hinges or kick it into the next county. I felt challenged, dammit.
I took off my pliofilm gloves. I dragged over a gooseneck lamp and positioned it to best advantage. I gritted my teeth and went to work.
And, by God, I opened the fucker.
With the bolt drawn and one hand on the doorknob, I paused to note the time. Astonishingly, it was getting on for four in the morning. How long had I taken to open the bathroom door? I didn’t even want to know.
What I did want to do—needed to do, in fact—was use the bathroom, and I figured I’d earned the right. Its utilitarian aspects aside, the john was the massive anticlimax I’d figured it to be. The usual porcelain fixtures, a medicine cabinet with nothing in it more exciting than aspirin, a tub with a drawn shower curtain—
After all this buildup, you can see it coming, can’t you?
Well, why not? It’s obvious, isn’t it? If a bathroom’s that hard to unlock from outside, how could anybody have locked it in the first place? Why, duhhhh, whoever it was must have locked it from inside. And, unless that person had subsequently jumped out the window, leaving a terrible mess on the pavement below, where could he be but in the bathroom? Where indeed but in the tub, say, behind the floral shower curtain?
That’s where he was and that’s where I found him. Naked as the truth and dead as a pet rock, with a little round hole right in the middle of his forehead.
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.