In the front hall, I found their buzzer, marked GEARHARDT. I tried them first, hoping that they knew at least to get out of town on a holiday weekend. But no, not long after I poked their buzzer a male voice came over the intercom, asking me who I was.

“My name is Roger,” I said cheerfully, “and my friend’s name is Mary Beth, and we’d like to talk to you about the state of your immortal soul.”

“Whyntcha shove it up your ass?” he suggested.

“Oh!” I said, trying to sound shocked, but I think it was a waste of time, because he’d already broken the connection. I moved on to the buzzer immediately below it, deciding on a different approach for the fellow from Singapore. I couldn’t take the chance that he might welcome a visit from a couple of urban missionaries, or be too polite to let on otherwise. I could just pretend I was looking for the Lehrmans.

But I didn’t have to, because he didn’t answer the bell. I reentered the building-no lockpicking this time, I’d kept my foot in the door-and went up a flight, to confront a door equipped with two excellent locks, one your basic Segal, the other a police lock fitted with one of the new pickproof Poulard cylinders.

Pickproof indeed.

The Lehrmans had a nice place, furnished with a little too much of everything-too many rugs on the floor, too many paintings on the walls, too much furniture crowded together in the rooms. Too many knickknacks on the marble mantel over the fireplace, too many on the whatnot shelf in the corner by the window. A minimalist decorator would have shuddered, and I don’t know what a Chinese businessman from Singapore would have made of it, but from a professional standpoint I have to say I was thrilled.

It was a decorative scheme to gladden the heart of a burglar. You’ll never catch a burglar proclaiming that less is more. A burglar knows that less is less, and more is more. People who cram their apartment full of stuff, assuming they’re not the Collier brothers and the stuff is not old newspapers, are people who like things. They’re a lot more likely to have something worth taking than a guy who beds down on a futon in a room with nothing else in it but the track lighting on the ceiling.

It would have been fun to have a look around, but who had the time? I walked straight through the apartment to the large bedroom at the rear, moved a bookcase and a large jade plant in a pot that looked like Rockwood, unlocked and raised the bedroom window, and crawled out onto the fire escape. I climbed two flights, past the sullen Mr. Gearhardt and his imperiled soul, and wasted close to ten minutes trying to find a benign way to open the late Mr. Candlemas’s bedroom window. He had casement windows, secured by a lever that you raised and lowered from within. But you couldn’t reach it from outside, naturally enough, not unless you could pry the window back from the frame and get the right sort of gizmo in that way. It’s not that hard if you’ve got the tools for it. Just watch an enterprising teenager open a locked automobile in the wink of an eye and you’ll get the idea.

This wasn’t the identical operation to grand theft auto, but it requires a similar instrument, and I didn’t have one on hand. I tried to get in without it and kept coming teasingly close, which in turn kept me trying. It finally dawned on me that I was spending far too much time in plain sight on a fire escape, whereupon I used the glass cutter on my tool ring and cut out one of the window’s little panes. I reached in, turned the latch, and let myself in.

I was in there for hours. It was stuffy at first, but I opened a window in the front room, and the pane I’d removed in the rear provided good cross-ventilation. It didn’t take me long to find the spot where Cappy Hoberman had lain bleeding. They hadn’t outlined the body in tape or chalk. They don’t do that anymore, preferring to have the crime scene photographer expose a few rolls of film before they move the body. But they hadn’t done anything about the blood, either, and a lot of it had soaked into the carpet.

I stood there and looked at it. He’d died on the Aubusson, and his blood hadn’t done a lot for the rug’s appearance. Even if you assumed that Candlemas had bought the rug from someone other than its rightful owner, he must have paid a good sum for it. It looked terrible now, but somebody someday would be able to get the stains out. They’ve got all sorts of chemicals and enzymes available, and nowadays they can get blood out of anything, even a turnip.

But they couldn’t pump it back into Hoberman.

I walked around the apartment, running alternate scenarios through my mind. Hoberman gives Charlie Weeks the bone carving of the mouse, cuts his visit short, and returns to this apartment. By cab, natch, since he didn’t have me along to urge him to walk. Something he says or does moves Candlemas to kill him. Candlemas grabs something sharp-this letter opener, say, or one of these Sabatier knives from the kitchen, or some other implement even better suited to dispatching a visitor. Candlemas strikes, Hoberman crumples and falls, and Candlemas slips out and legs it over to Second Avenue, looking to buy Hefty bags and a Skilsaw.

Then what?

Earlier, Weeks and I had spun out a theory in which Candlemas got home, found the cops on the scene, muttered, “Curses, foiled again!” and stole off into the night. But his own death put a different light on things. When he left Hoberman bleeding, he evidently encountered someone. Maybe he went to the wrong person for help, or maybe someone was lying doggo, waiting for him.

Maybe it was that person who made the 911 call that sent the cops to Seventy-sixth Street. In any case, the cops came. Hoberman, the way I figured it, was still breathing when Candlemas took a powder. His wounds were mortal, and he was alive but not lively, probably inert and unconscious. Somewhere along the way he rallied and wrote six unfathomable letters on my heretofore blameless attaché case, using his own life’s blood for ink. Then, perhaps even as the Keystone Kops were sending out for a locksmith, the valiant captain breathed his last.

It was probably around that time, too, that I was downstairs myself, wondering what had happened to Candlemas and considering a little illegal entry of my own. Even loopy with Ludomir, I’d been able to spot that for a bad idea. A good thing, too, considering what I would have walked in on. I could have saved the city the price of a locksmith’s house call, but I’d have had a lot of explaining to do, and my task wouldn’t have gotten all that much easier when the attaché case turned out to be mine.

The new scenario was pretty reasonable, I decided, and a substantial improvement over the one Charlie Weeks and I had hatched the previous morning. It made the mysterious telephone call to the police a little less inexplicable, and fit the dying message into a logical time frame.

But it didn’t do a whole lot to decode it.

C-A-P-H-O-B. What the hell could it mean?

I thought about it as I ambled to and fro, opening drawers and rummaging around in them, exploring closets, looking inside and beneath and behind this and that and the other thing. I was glad to have something to ponder, because this was the worst way to search a place.

The best way is when you know what you’re looking for and where it is. You go in, get it, and get out. Almost as good is when you know what you’re looking for; you go through the place systematically, checking those locations where it’s likely to be, and as soon as you find it you get to go home.

The next best thing-and probably the most enjoyable-is when you’re not looking for anything in particular. Missions of this sort are burglary at its best, and they run the gamut from the meticulously planned suburban break-in, where you time the neighborhood security patrol and run rings around the electronic alarm system, to a completely impulsive crime of opportunity, where you kick the door in and hope for the best. You don’t know what they’ve got or where they put it, but you get to be Goldilocks, sleeping in all the beds and eating all the porridge, and you never know what you’re going to find until you find it.