Bernie Rhodenbarr - 04 - The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780060872762
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2006-07-06T14:12:20+00:00

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 personnel, which I emphatically was not, but they hadn’t taken the trouble to seal the apartment in any meaningful fashion, perhaps because the building’s security was so forbidding. The locksmith who’d knocked off Abel’s police lock (by drilling the cylinder rather than picking it, I noted with some professional disapproval) had left only the door’s original lock as a deterrent to entry. It was a Segal, with both an automatic spring lock that engaged when you closed the door and a deadbolt that you had to turn with a key. The cops had probably had keys—they could have obtained one from the doorman or the super—but the last man out hadn’t bothered to use one, because only the spring lock secured the door, and it was no harder to open than those childproof bottles of aspirin. It would have been faster if I’d had the key, but just barely.

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 funny. I turned away from them and turned back again, and then I skirted the chalk marks and walked to the window and looked out over the park, out across the river.

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,

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