The Burglar in the Rye by Lawrence Block Page A

through the door.

CHAPTER
Five
    I didn’t bide my time on the fire escape. I passed nothing but lighted windows on the fourth and fifth floors. A lighted room is not necessarily an occupied room, but I didn’t want to waste time on a closer look. I kept going until I found a dark room on the third floor. The window was closed but not locked, and I opened it and clambered over the sill and pulled it shut behind me.
    I drew the curtain, turned on the light, and took a moment to catch my breath. The room had been rented—to either a woman or a male transvestite, judging from the array of cosmetics on the dresser top—and whoever it was had gone out for a night on the town. Unless a sudden fit of homesickness sent her straight to the airport, she’d be back sooner or later. So I couldn’t stay indefinitely, but for the time being I was perfectly safe.
    Perfectly safe, and in somebody else’s abode. Under such circumstances it’s second nature for me to lookaround for something to steal. I had entered the premises illegally. I was where I clearly did not belong. While I was there, why not take something?
    The necklace and earrings, for example.
    If I wasn’t supposed to take them, what the hell were they doing out in plain sight? I mean, there they were, in a palm-sized jewelry case tucked underneath the bras and panties in the second drawer of the dresser. Well, maybe that’s not exactly in plain sight, but still…
    Each earring sported a ruby of about a carat, ringed with diamond chips. The necklace’s ruby was larger—three or four carats, at a guess. There are, alas, a lot of fake rubies around, and I didn’t have a jeweler’s loupe with me, or time for a good look, but my guess was that these were the real thing. Good color, no obvious inclusions. And the settings were gold, at least eighteen-karat and probably twenty-two.
    If they were fakes, they’d be larger. And who’d set fake rubies in solid twenty-two-karat gold? They looked real to me, and if so they were worth enough to put the evening in the plus column.
    After all, I had an investment to protect. I was out better than six hundred dollars for my room. Gully Fairborn’s letters were gone. Someone else had beat me to them, and killed a woman to get them. I’d had a bad night, and it wasn’t over yet, and why not grab at an opportunity to turn a small profit?
    Still, I was going to be walking through a lobby crawling with cops. I was a registered guest, and there was nothing inherently suspicious in my dropping the key at the desk and walking out of the lobby. My belongings could stay in Room 415 until the chambermaid collected them and cleaned up after me. I’d probably left a few fingerprints there, along with my socks and underwear, butso what? No one was going to bother dusting an empty room for prints. Given the Paddington’s casual approach to housekeeping, they’d probably find a whole collection, all the way back to Stephen Crane.
    So what was I supposed to do? Just put the rubies back where I’d found them? Just abandon them?
    I took a last look at them, sighed, and closed the case with a snap. It was the sort of case that would slip right into your pocket, and wasn’t that a sign?
    I thought so.
     
    I went out the door to a blissfully empty hallway, then passed up the elevator in favor of the stairs. At the bottom of the last flight I walked through an unlocked door into a lobby full of people, a good number of them wearing blue uniforms. Others were citizens, trying to loiter long enough to determine what all the fuss was about, while some of the uniforms urged them to get on about their business. And that’s what I was planning to do, and the business I planned to get on about was escape.
    I didn’t slink and I didn’t scamper. I did my best to saunter, room key in hand, passing the desk on my way out, and—
    “That’s him!”
    The last time I’d heard that voice, low-pitched and husky, it had been at once irritating and