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Whereupon I went home and changed my Weejuns for my Pumas, all in the interest of verisimilitude, and then I called Carolyn and begged out of our standing lunch date, pleading a doctor's appointment. She wanted to know what kind of doctor, and I said an ophthalmologist instead of a podiatrist because I'd have been stuck for an answer if she asked what was the matter with my feet. I didn't yet know I had Morton's foot with chondromalacia just a hop, skip and a jump away. When she asked what was the matter with my eyes, I muttered something about getting headaches when I did a lot of reading, and that seemed to satisfy her.
I didn't mention the middle-of-the-night phone call.
At one-fifteen I showed for my appointment with Feinsinger. The doorman called upstairs to make sure I was expected and the elevator operator lingered to check that I entered the right door. Now I was out thirty bucks and my feet felt too narrow while my shoes felt impossibly wide. Maybe I should have gone to the pediatrician instead. I could have lied about my age.
I put my ear to Abel's door, listened carefully, heard nothing. There was a button recessed in the doorjamb and I gave it a poke, and a muted bong sounded within the apartment. I heard no other sound in response to the bong, nor did a brisk knock provoke any reaction, so I took a deep breath, drew the tools of my trade from my pocket, and opened the door.
It was at least as easy as it sounds. The police had slapped a sticker on the door forbidding entry to anyone other than authorized police perso
I stepped inside, drew the door shut, turned the little knob to engage the deadbolt. I hesitated in the foyer, trying to figure out what was wrong. Something was bothering me and I couldn't pin it down.
The hell with it. I moved from the dimness of the foyer into the living room, where light streamed in through the windows. Near the window on the left I saw an outline in chalk, half on the burnished parquet floor and half on the oriental rug. The rug was a Sarouk and it was a nice one and the chalk marks didn't do anything for it.
Looking at the outline, I could picture his body lying there, one arm outstretched, one leg pointing directly at the chair where I'd been sitting Tuesday night. I didn't want to look at the chalk marks and I didn't seem able to keep my eyes away from them. I felt fu
And then I realized what had been bothering me in the foyer. It was an absence that I had been faintly aware of, as Sherlock Holmes had remarked on the dog's not barking in the night.
The thrill was gone. That little boost I always get when I cross a threshold without an invitation, that little up feeling that comes on like coffee in a vein, simply wasn't there. I had come as a burglar, had managed entry by means of my cleverness and my skills, yet I felt neither triumph nor anticipation.
Because it was my old friend's place and he had lately died in it, and that took the joy out of the occupation.
I gazed at New Jersey in the distance-which is where it belongs. The sky had darkened in the few minutes since I'd entered the apartment. It looked like rain, which would mean either that the haze around last night's moon had been an accurate forecaster or that it had not, depending on what it's supposed to herald.
I felt a little better once I knew what was bothering me. Now I could forget about it and get on with the business of robbing the dead.
Of course that's not what I was doing. I was merely bent on recovering what was rightfully mine-or wrongfully mine, if you want to be technical about it. By no stretch of the imagination could the coin be considered Abel's property; he'd had it strictly on consignment, having neither bought nor stolen it from me.
So all I had to do was find it.
I suppose I could have aped the method of the clods who'd preceded us to the Colca
Abel too had been neat. There was a place for everything and everything was already in it, and I took care to put it all back where I'd found it.
This made the process difficult beyond description. The proverbial needle in the proverbial haystack would have been a piece of cake in comparison. I started off looking in the obvious places because that's where people hide things, even the people you'd think would know better. But I found nothing but water and Ty-DBol in his toilet tank and nothing but flour in the flour canister and nothing but air in the hollow towel bars I unbolted from the bathroom wall. I pulled out drawers to see what was taped to their backs or bottoms. I went through the closets and checked suit pockets, thrust my hands inside shoes and boots, looked under rugs.
I could go step by step and fill a dozen pages with an explanation of the search I gave those rooms, but what's the point? Three things I didn't find were the philosopher's stone, the Holy Grail, and the golden fleece. A fourth was the Colca
I did find any number of other interesting articles. I found books in several languages ranging in value to over a thousand dollars. It was no great accomplishment finding them; they constituted Abel Crowe's personal library and were out in the open on his shelves.
I looked behind each book, and I flipped the pages of each book, and I found nineteenth-century postage stamps from Malta and Cyprus in the pages of Hobbes's Leviathan and five hundred pounds in British currency tucked into a copy of Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle. On a high shelf I found what were probably Sassanian coins tucked behind three leatherbound volumes of the poetry of Byron and Shelley and Keats.
There were two telephones in the bedroom, one on the bedside table, the other across the room on a dresser. That seemed excessive. I checked, and both of them were hooked up to wall plugs, but the one on the dresser didn't seem to be in working order. So I un-screwed the base plate and discovered that the thing had been gutted, its working parts replaced with a wad of fifties and hundreds. I counted up to $20,000, which brought me close enough to the end of the stock to estimate that it totaled perhaps $23,000 in all. I put the phone back together again, with the money back inside where I'd found it.
That's enough to give you the idea. I found no end of valuable booty, which is just what you'd expect to find in the home of a civilized and prosperous fence. I found more cash, more stamps, more coins, and a fair amount of jewelry, including the watch and earrings from the Colca