Besides, a silent alarm is a pain in the neck for the householder. Because it’s silent, there’s nothing to remind you that you’re supposed to key in your code. A certain amount of the time you forget, and the rent-a-cops turn up while you’re sitting there switching back and forth between Leno and Letterman. After that happens a few times you stop setting the alarm in the first place.
Groceries in hand, I crossed the threshold and moved into the entering phase of breaking and entering. I nudged the door closed with my hip, cutting off the light from the hallway. It was pitch dark where I was standing, and silent as a tomb.
Lord, what a feeling! A quickening of the pulse, a tingling in the fingertips, a lightness in the chest—but that doesn’t begin to describe what I felt, and always feel in such circumstances. I’d told Carolyn about the excitement, the thrill of it all, but there was more. I felt an abiding sense of satisfaction, as if I was doing what I’d been placed on earth to do. I was a born burglar, and I was aburgling, and whatever had led me to think I could possibly give it all up?
I set down my grocery bags and put on my disposable gloves. I got hold of my tiny flashlight, dropped it, and fumbled around on the floor for it, cursing the darkness. I found it, finally, and switched it on, then got to my feet and followed the straight and narrow beam all around the apartment. Once I’d established that every window was heavily curtained, I turned on a few lights and took another deliberate tour of the premises.
Walking from room to room, I felt like a gentleman farmer riding his fences, master of all he surveyed. But there was method in it. Long ago, in a nice apartment on East Sixty-seventh Street, I had amused myself looting a living room while the apartment’s bona fide occupant was lying dead on the other side of the bedroom door. He had died, it must be said, of natural causes; someone had murdered him. The police, who conveniently turned up while I was still busy with my looting, jumped to the completely unwarranted conclusion that I ought to be listed as the proximate cause of death, and I had a hell of a time getting it all straightened out.
It’s not the sort of thing anybody would want to go through twice, believe me. So I’ve learned to spend my first moments in a burglary checking around for dead bodies, and of course I never find any. They’re like cops and cabs, never there when you’re looking for them.
What I found instead was what realtors call a Classic Six, by no means a scarce item in prewar apartment buildings on the Upper West Side. An entrance foyer, where I’d groped for my flashlight. A living room, a formal dining room, a windowed kitchen. Two good-sized bedrooms, one with twin beds, the other a guest room which evidently doubled as an artist’s studio for Joan Nugent. There was an easel with a half-finished painting of a man in harlequin drag playing the pipes of Pan. Pablo Picasso, eat your heart out.
That’s six rooms right there if you count the foyer, but I don’t think you do, because there was another room off the kitchen. I don’t know what it was supposed to be originally. A pantry, I suppose, or else a maid’s room. Now it was Harlan Nugent’s den. There was a desk with a computer and a fax modem on it, and a bookcase that ran heavily to technothrillers, along with nonfiction along the lines of How You Can Profit from the Coming Ice Age. Above the desk hung a rural landscape which I was able to recognize as the work of Mrs. Nugent.
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?)