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There was a moment, I have to admit, when I was overtaken by a feeling of infinite sadness. This was an unutterably serene apartment, with its heavy draperies and its thick carpet topped here and there by oriental area rugs, its graceful French furniture and torchère lamps, its old-fashioned wall molding and ceiling medallions, and even the art on its walls, the hand-tinted steel engravings of faraway places that shared wall space with Mrs. Nugent’s oddly comforting thrift-shop acrylics. Why couldn’t I relish for an hour or so the joy of illegal entry; then, having done so to my heart’s content, why couldn’t I leave everything exactly as I found it?
I suppose because photographic safaris are great for you and me, but they feel kind of lame to a born hunter. I could try telling myself to treat the Nugent apartment like a National Park, taking only snapshots, leaving only footprints, but it wasn’t going to work. I was a burglar, and no burglar worthy of the name counts the night a success when he comes home empty-handed.
So I went to work. I started in the kitchen, where I unpacked the groceries I’d bought, wiped them free of fingerprints, and stowed them in the cupboards. (Maybe the Nugents would like Count Chocula.) Then I checked the refrigerator. It was empty of perishables, which suggested Joan and Harlan had gone off for a week or more. It was, alas, also empty of cash, as was the freezer compartment. A lot of people stash money in the fridge, and I guess it’s as good a place as any, or at least it was until everybody started doing it. No cold cash in the Nugent icebox, however, so I moved on.
Nothing worth taking in the kitchen. There was an eight-piece canister set on the cupboard, white china with blue trim in a Dutch motif—windmills, tulips, a boy on ice skates, a girl with fat cheeks and one of those soup-bowl haircuts. One container held around thirty dollars in change and small bills, handy for tipping delivery boys, I suppose. I left it as I found it.
There was a locked drawer in the desk in the den, so it was the one I opened first. Locks like that are never terribly serious, and this one was child’s play. Inside there was a diary, which I supposed was locked away so that Mrs. Nugent wouldn’t get her hands on it. I read a few pages, hoping for a little prurient interest, and it may have been there for the finding, but not on the pages I happened to hit. There all I ran into was Harlan Nugent’s personal ruminations on life and death, and as soon as I realized that’s what I was getting I put the little book down like a hot brick. Pillaging the man’s apartment was enough of an invasion of privacy for me. I couldn’t bring myself to ransack his soul.
Besides the diary, the once-locked drawer held three manila envelopes a little larger than lettersize. The first one contained an insurance policy, the second a will. I did no more than look at each before returning it to its envelope, and I almost didn’t bother with the third envelope, which would have been a mistake. It was full of money.
Hundred-dollar bills, and a thick sheaf of them. I took off my gloves to give the money a fast count, figuring it didn’t matter if I left fingerprints on the bills. They’d be coming home with me.
Eighty-three of them, plus a stray fifty in the middle of the stack. $8,350 in perfectly anonymous used bills. A little off-the-books income old Harlan didn’t want to report? Or was there a perfectly legitimate explanation? It is, after all, still legal for Americans to possess actual money.
Well, if it was unreported income, Nugent would bear its burden no longer. I pocketed the bills and returned the empty envelope to the drawer.
Then, just to show off, I took out my picks and locked the drawer after myself.
I moved a lot of pictures without uncovering a wall safe. I didn’t find any loose bricks in the fireplace, either. Actually I didn’t really expect to encounter a safe or a hidey-hole; if the apartment had had one, that’s where he’d have stashed the $8,350, not in a desk drawer you could have opened with eyebrow tweezers.
There was some nice silver on top of the sideboard in the dining room, English by the look of it, Georgian if I had to guess. There was more of the same in the drawers. Over the years I’ve known three good customers for fine silver. One’s dead, one’s in jail, and the third retired to Florida two years ago. (He may still buy the odd soup tureen now and again, but you wouldn’t want to shlep a load of stolen silver onto a plane. How would you get it through the metal detector?)
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 A
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.