The Burglar in the Closet Read online

  And then the door buzzer buzzed.

  I swear I wanted to spit. The damned buzzer made a sound loud enough to make hens stop laying. I froze where I was, praying fervently that Crystal wouldn’t hear it under the shower, but evidently my prayer wasn’t quite fervent enough. Because the thing sounded again, a long horrible piercing blurt, and while it was so doing Crystal shut off the water.

  I stayed where I was and I went on tugging at the scrap of paper. The last thing I wanted was for her to spot the key on the floor on her way to the door. The key cleared the door and came into view, and while this was happening the bathroom door opened and I heard her footsteps.

  I stayed where I was, crouched on the floor as if in prayer. If she noticed that the key was missing, well, at least she wouldn’t be able to open it because I had the key. That, I told myself, was something.

  But she didn’t even slow down as she passed the closet. She swept right on by, presumably in her lime-green terry-cloth robe. I suppose she poked the answering buzzer to unlatch the downstairs door. I waited, and I suppose she waited, and then the doorbell sounded its two-tone chime. Then she opened the door.

  By this time I had gotten to my feet again and was standing behind the rack of dresses. I was also paying close attention to what was happening, but it was hard for me to get a clear picture of what was going on. The door opened. I heard Crystal saying something. Part of what she said was inaudible, but I could make out “What is it? What do you want?” and similar expressions. It seems to me that there was panic in her voice, or at the least a whole lot of apprehension, but I may have just filled that in after the fact.

  Then she said “No, no!” very loud, and there was no missing the terror. And then she screamed, but it was a very brief scream, chopped off abruptly as if it were a recording and someone lifted the tone arm from the record.

  Then a thudding sound.

  Then nothing at all.

  And there I was, standing snugly in my closet like the world’s most cautious homosexual. After a moment or two I thought about using the key in my hand to unlock the door, but then once again I heard movement outside. Footsteps, but they sounded different from Crystal’s. I couldn’t say that they were lighter or heavier. Just a different step. I’d grown used to Crystal’s footsteps, having spent so much time lately listening to them.

  The footsteps approached, reached the bedroom. The source of the footsteps began moving around the bedroom, opening drawers, moving furniture around. At one point the doorknob turned but of course the door was still locked. Whoever had turned the knob was evidently not proficient at picking locks. The closet was abandoned and I was safe inside it.

  More movement. Then, after what couldn’t really have been an eternity, the footsteps passed me again and returned to the living room. The apartment’s outer door opened and closed—I’d learned to recognize that sound.

  I looked at my watch. It was eleven minutes to eleven, and thinking of it that way made it more memorable than 10:49. I looked at the key I was holding and I slipped it into the lock and turned it, and then I hesitated before opening the door. Because I had all too good an idea what I’d find there and it wasn’t anything I was in a rush to look at.

  On the other hand, I was really sick of that closet.

  I let myself out. And found, in the living room, pretty much what I’d expected. Crystal Sheldrake, sprawled out on her back, one leg bent at the knee, the foot cramped beneath the opposite thigh. Blond hair in shower cap. Green robe open so that most of her rather spectacular body was exposed.

  An ugly purple welt high on her right cheekbone. A thin red line, sort of a scratch, reaching from just below her left eye to the left side of her chin.

  More to the point, a gleaming steel instrument plunged between her noteworthy breasts and into her heart.

  I tried to take her pulse. I don’t know why I made the attempt because God knows she looked deader than the Charleston, but people are always taking pulses on television and it seemed like the thing to do. I spent a long time taking hers because I wasn’t sure I was doing it right, but finally I gave up and said the hell with it.

  I didn’t get sick or anything. My knees felt weak for a moment, but then the sensation lifted and I was all right. I felt rotten because death is a rotten thing and murder is particularly horrible, and I felt vaguely that there should have been something I could have done to prevent this particular murder, but I was damned if I could see what it was.

  First things first. She was dead and I couldn’t help her, and I was a burglar who certainly did not want to be found at the scene of a far more serious crime than burglary. I had to wipe off whatever surfaces might hold my fingerprints and I had to retrieve my attaché case and then I had to get the hell out of there.

  I didn’t have to wipe Crystal’s wrist. Skin doesn’t take fingerprints, any number of inane television programs notwithstanding. What I did have to wipe were the surfaces I’d been near since I took off my rubber gloves (which I now put back on, incidentally). So I got a washcloth from the bathroom and I wiped the inside of the closet door and the floor of the closet, and I couldn’t think what else I might have touched but I wiped around the outside closet knob just to make sure.

  Of course the murderer had touched that knob. So maybe I was wiping away his prints. On the other hand, maybe he’d been wearing gloves.

  Not my concern.

  I finished wiping, and I went back to the bathroom and put the washcloth back on its hook, and then I returned to the bedroom for a quick look at the disappointed pastel lady, and I gave her a quick wink and dropped my eyes to look for my attaché case.

  To no avail.

  Whoever killed Crystal Sheldrake had taken her jewelry home with him.

  CHAPTER

  Three

  It never fails. I open my mouth and I wind up in hot water. But in this case the circumstances were special. After all, I was only following orders.

  “Open, Bern. A little wider, huh? That’s right. That’s fine. Perfect. Just beautiful.”

  Beautiful? Well, they tell me it’s in the eye of the beholder and I guess they’re right. If Craig Sheldrake wanted to believe there was beauty in a gaping mouthful of teeth, that was his privilege and more power to him. They weren’t the worst teeth in the world, I don’t suppose. Twenty-some years ago a grinning orthodontist had wired them with braces, enabling me to shoot those little rubber bands at my classmates, so at least they were straight. And since I’d given up smoking and switched to one of those whiter-than-white toothpastes, I looked somewhat less like a supporting player in The Curse of the Yellow Fangs. But all of the molars and bicuspids sported fillings, and one of the wisdom teeth was but a memory, and I’d had a wee bit of root-canal work on the upper left canine. They were respectable teeth for one as long in the tooth as I, perhaps, and they’d given me relatively little trouble over the years, but it would be an exaggeration to call them either a thing of beauty or a joy forever.

  A stainless-steel probe touched a nerve. I twitched a little and made the sort of sound of which one is capable when one’s mouth is full of fingers. The probe, relentless, touched the nerve again.

  “You feel that?”

  “Urg.”

  “Little cavity, Bern. Nothing serious but we’ll tend to it right now. That’s the importance of coming in for a cleaning three or four times a year. You come in, we shoot a quick set of X-rays just as a routine measure, we have a look around, poke the old molars a bit, and we catch those little cavities before they can grow up into big cavities. Am I right or am I right, keed?”

  “Urg.”

  “All this panic about X-rays. Well, if you’re pregnant I suppose it’s a different story, but you’re not pregnant, are you, Bernie?” He laughed at this. I’ve no idea why. When you’re a dentist you have to laugh at your own jokes, which might be a hardship but I suspect it’s more than balanced by the fact that you remain blissfully unaware of it when your precious wit goes over like a brass
blimp. Since the patient can’t laugh anyway, his silence needn’t be interpreted as a reprimand.

  “Well, we’ll just take care of it right away before I turn you over to Jillian for a cleaning. First molar, lower right jaw, that’s a cinch, we can block the pain with Novocaine without numbing half your head in the process. Of course some practitioners of the gentle art would wind up depriving you of sensation in half your tongue for six or eight hours, but you’re in luck, Bern. You’re in the hands of the World’s Greatest Dentist and you have nothing to worry about.” Chuckle. “Except paying the bill, that is.” Full-fledged laugh.

  “Urg.”

  “Open a little wider? Perfect. Beautiful.” His fingers, tasting as though they’d been boiled, deftly packed my mouth with cylinders of cotton. Then he took a curved piece of plastic tubing attached to a long rubber tube and propped it at the root of my tongue, where it commenced to make slurping noises.

  “This is Mr. Thirsty,” he explained. “That’s what I tell the kids. Mr. Thirsty, come to suck up all your spit so it doesn’t gum up the works. Of course I don’t put it quite so crudely for the little tykes.”

  “Urg.”

  “Anyway, I tell the kids this here is Mr. Thirsty, and when I whack ’em out with nitrous oxide I tell ’em they’re going for a ride in Dr. Sheldrake’s Rocket Ship. That’s ’cause it gets ’em so spacy.”

  “Urg.”

  “Now we’ll just dry off that gum there,” he said, peeling back my lower lip and blotting the gum with a wad of cotton. “And now we’ll give you a dab of benzocaine, that’s a local that’ll keep you from feeling the needle when we jab a quart of Novocaine into your unsuspecting tissue.” Chortle. “Just kiddin’, Bernie. No, you don’t have to give a patient a liter of the stuff if you have the skill to slip the old needle into the right spot. Oh, thank your lucky stars you’ve got the World’s Greatest Dentist on your team.”

  The World’s Greatest Dentist shot me painlessly with Novocaine, readied his high-speed drill, and began doing his part in the endless fight against tooth decay. None of this hurt. What was painful, albeit not physically, was the patter of conversation he directed my way.

  Not at first, though. At first everything was fine.

  “I’ll tell you something, Bernie. You’re a lucky man to have me for a dentist. But that’s nothing compared to how lucky I am. You know why? I’m lucky to be a dentist.”

  “Urg.”

  “Not just because I make a decent living. Hell, I don’t have any guilt on that score. I work hard for my money and my charges are fair. I give value for value received. The thing about dentistry is it’s very rewarding in other ways. You know, most of the dentists I know started off wanting to be doctors. I don’t know that they had any big longing for medicine. I think half the time the attraction was that their parents thought it was a great life. Money, prestige, and the idea that you’re helping humanity. Anybody’d be happy to help humanity with all that money and prestige there as an added incentive, right?”

  “Urg.”

  “Speak up, Bern, I can’t hear you.” Chuckle. “Just joking, of course. How we doing? You in any pain?”

  “Urg.”

  “Of course you’re not. The WGD strikes again. Well, all these guys went to dental school instead. Maybe they couldn’t get accepted at medical school. A lot of bright guys can’t. Or maybe they looked at all that education and training stretching out in front of them, four years of med school and two years internship and then a residency, and when you’re a kid a few years looks like a lifetime. Your perspective on time changes when you get to be our age, but by then it’s too late, right?”

  I guess we were about the same age, getting a little closer to forty than thirty but not quite close enough to panic about it. He was a big guy, taller than me, maybe six-two or six-three. His hair was a medium brown with red highlights, and he wore it fairly short in a deliberately tousled fashion. He had an open honest face, long and narrow, marked by warm brown eyes and a long down-curving nose and sprinkled with freckles. A year or two back he’d grown a mustache of the macho variety sported by male models in men’s cologne ads. It was redder than his hair and didn’t look quite bad enough for me to counsel him to shave it off, but I sort of wished he would. Beneath the mustache was a full mouth overflowing with the nicest teeth you could possibly imagine.

  “Anyway, here you’ve got a load of dentists who secretly wish they were doctors. Some of them don’t even keep it a secret. And you’ve got others who went into dentistry because, hell, a man has to go into something unless he wants to go on welfare, and it looked like a decent deal, set your own hours, a steady buck, no boss over you, some prestige, and all the rest of it. I was one of this group, Bern, but in my case something wonderful happened. Know what it was?”

  “Urg?”

  “I fell in love with my work. Yep, that’s what happened. One thing I recognized right off the bat is dentistry’s about solving problems. Now they’re not problems of life and death, and I’ll tell you, that’s fine with me. I sure as hell don’t want patients dying on me. The doctors are welcome to all that drama. I’d rather deal with smaller life questions, like Can This Tooth Be Saved? But a man comes in here, or a woman, and I look around and take X-rays, and there’s a problem and we deal with it then and there.”

  No urg this time. He was rattling along too well to need encouragement from me.

  “I’m just so damn lucky I wound up in this line of work, Bern. I remember my best friend and I were trying to decide what we wanted to do with our lives. I picked dental school and he went into pharmacy school. His educational route looked easier and his potential income was certainly much higher. You own your own store, you branch out and open other stores, hell, you’re a businessman, you can make a ton. For a little while there I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have taken the road he took. But just for a little while. Jesus, can you picture me standing behind a counter selling Kotex and laxatives? I couldn’t be a businessman, Bern. I’d be rotten at it. Hey, open a little wider, huh? Perfect, beautiful. I’d be rotten at it and I’d go out of my bird with boredom. I read somewhere that pharmacists get more action than any other occupational group. Some study out of California. I wonder if it’s true or not? What woman would want to ball a druggist, anyway?”

  He went on with this line of thought and my mind drifted off a ways. I was a captive audience if there ever was one, and I had to sit there and take it but I didn’t, by God, have to pay attention.

  And then he was saying, “So I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be a pharmacist, and I swear I wouldn’t want to be anything but what I am. Satisfied Sam, huh? True, though.”

  “Urg.”

  “But I’m normal, Bernie. I have fantasies just like everybody else in this world. I try to think what I’d be if dentistry just didn’t happen to be an option for me. Just asking myself the hypothetical question, like. And because it’s hypothetical and I know it’s hypothetical, why, I can feel free to indulge myself. I can pick something that would call for someone a lot more adventurous than I actually know myself to be.”

  “Urg.”

  “I try to have fantasies of being a professional athlete, for instance. I play a lot of squash and a fair amount of tennis, and I’m not absolutely lousy, in fact I’m getting so I shape up pretty decent on the squash court, but there’s such an obvious gulf between my game and the pro game that I can’t even fantasize about playing that role. That’s the trouble with reality. It gets in the way of the best fantasies.”

  “Urg.”

  “So I’ve settled on something I’d like to be, and I can enjoy it on a fantasy level because I know virtually nothing about it.”

  “Urg?”

  “It’s exciting, it’s adventurous, it’s dangerous, and I can’t say I don’t have the skills or temperament for it because I don’t know exactly what they are. I gather it pays a whole lot and the hours are short and flexible. And you work alone.”

  “Urg?” He ha
d me interested by now. It sounded like the sort of thing I might be interested in.

  “I was thinking about crime,” he went on. “But nothing where you have to point guns at people or where you wind up with them pointed at you. In fact I’d want a criminal career with no human contact involved in it at all. Something where you work alone and don’t have to be a part of a gang.” Chuckle. “I’ve pretty much narrowed it down, Bernie. If I had it to do all over again, and if dentistry was just out of the picture, I’d be a burglar.”

  Silence.

  “Like you, Bernie.”

  More silence. Lots of it.

  Well, of course it rocked me. I’d been set up with considerable skill. Here was ol’ Craig Sheldrake, Mr. Laid Back and World’s Greatest Dentist, just running pleasantly off at the mouth about how much he loved his work, and the next thing I knew he’d dropped this brick into my open mouth and all the Novocaine in the world couldn’t have numbed the shock.

  You see, I’ve always kept my personal and professional lives as separate as possible. Except during my blessedly infrequent stays as a guest of the state, at which times one’s freedom of association is severely proscribed, I don’t hang out with known criminals. My friends may swipe stationery from the office or buy a hot color TV. They almost certainly fiddle a bit on their income tax returns. But they don’t make their livings lifting baubles from other people’s apartments, or knocking over liquor stores and filling stations, or writing checks drawn on the Left Bank of the Wabash. Their moral caliber may be no greater than mine but their respectability quotient is infinitely higher.

  And as far as any of them know, I’m as respectable as the next fellow. I don’t talk much about my work, and in the sort of casual friendships toward which I gravitate there’s nothing remarkable about that. It’s generally understood that I’m in investments, or living on a small but apparently adequate private income, or doing something dull but earnest in import-export, or whatever. Sometimes I’ll assume a more colorful role to impress a youngish person of the interesting sex, but for the most part I’m just Good Old Bernie, who always has a buck in his pocket but never throws it around recklessly, and you can always count on him for a fifth at poker or a fourth at bridge, and he probably does something like sell insurance but hasn’t thank God tried to sell it to me.