What difference did it make?

Well, it was curious, that was all. And I was curious, and never mind what it did to the cat.

I got out my ring of picks and selected a flat steel strip four and a half inches long. I went up to the mystery door and slid my strip of steel between it and the jamb. I raised my hand to the top of the door, then lowered it again. I didn’t encounter any resistance until I’d brought it down a few inches below my waist, right about where you’d expect to find a lock. I eased the steel strip out, drawing it downward to trace the outline of what seemed to be a bolt. Below the bolt, the strip had smooth sailing again all the way to the floor.

Curiouser and curiouser. If you were dividing one apartment into two, you didn’t just close a door and bolt it. That was okay with adjoining hotel rooms, when you wanted to preserve the option of access, but it wouldn’t do in this case, where you wanted privacy and security. At the very least, you’d seal the door all around with some sort of plaster compound.

Besides, the lock wasn’t one of those add-on bolts you pick up at the hardware store. It was set right in the middle of a door two inches thick, which meant it was for a room designed to be locked and unlocked only from the inside. Closets don’t have locks like that.

Bathrooms do.

Well, sure. There was a bathroom off the master bedroom, and a half bath off the foyer. (“Halfbath, half-human. They call him…Tubman!”) So it made sense that there’d be one in the second bedroom as well. So that’s all it was, another bathroom, and if I’d wanted to steal towels I’d have gone to the Waldorf, so the hell with it. I could just—

Wait a minute.

A bathroom in an empty apartment that happened to be locked from the inside?

I went back to the door and ran my hands over it, as if to assess its psychic energy. On the wall alongside it there was a switch plate set at shoulder height if your shoulders were set a tad lower than mine. I worked the single switch. No lights went on or off in the bedroom, and I couldn’t tell if anything happened in the bathroom. No light showed beneath the door.

I flicked the switch back again, to undo whatever I might have done. I found a chair and sat down. I looked at the poor old harlequin in joan Nugent’s work-in-progress. On earlier inspection he’d looked sad. Now he looked confused.

Was someone in there? Had I alerted him by buzzing the buzzer, and had he responded by…by locking himself in the bathroom?

Why would anybody do that?

Well, say I wasn’t the first burglar to come a-calling. I’d once been tossing a place when someone else broke in, and I’d found the whole thing something of a sticky wicket. I hadn’t locked myself in the bathroom, but I might have, if it had occurred to me.

But did the apartment I entered look like one into which another housebreaker had recently broken? No way.

Still…

Logic, I thought. When all else fails, try logic.

All right. There were two possibilities. There was someone in the bathroom or there wasn’t. If so, who could it be? A Nugent?

If you were a Nugent, or anyone else legitimately present in the Nugents’ apartment, you might or might not choose to answer a doorbell at an ungodly hour. But if you didn’t go open the door, or at least peep through the peephole, would you instead lock yourself in the bathroom?

You would not.

Therefore if someone was there it was someone who didn’t belong and who would sit on the john in the dark for half an hour to avoid detection. All I had to do was slip out and go home now and let the mystery visitor remain anonymous. Anybody in there had to be aware of my presence, and eventually he (or she; maybe it was Doll Cooper, for God’s sake, trying out a third career) could emerge in his (or her) own good time. There was still silver for the taking, and thirty-odd dollars in the windmill canister, and, for all I knew, the legendary Kloppman Diamond.

I went around the apartment turning off lights. In no time at all the whole place was dark except for the overhead light in the foyer. I turned that off, too, and opened the front door and stuck my head out into the hallway.

And drew it back inside, and pulled the door shut, and padded noiselessly through the dark apartment, not even using my pen light. Moving slowly and silently, I slipped back into the guest room, where I hovered, barely breathing, and waited for the bathroom door to open.

Ten minutes passed, arguably the longest ten minutes of my life. By the time they’d crept by, it was glaringly obvious that the bathroom was unoccupied.

So why was it locked?

And what was inside?

The usual things, I told myself. A sink, a tub, maybe a stall shower. A commode. A medicine chest. Go home, I urged myself, and whatever’s in there can stay in there, and who cares?

I did, evidently.

Because what I did—after I had turned on the light again, so that I could at least see what I was doing even if I couldn’t satisfactorily explain it—what I did was get down on my hands and knees and try to pick the goddam lock. It was a nothing lock, it was a simple bolt of the sort you turn when you’re in the john and you don’t want someone to walk in on you. There were no tumblers, no pins, nothing, really, but a bolt that went back and forth when you turned the little gizmo on the back of the door.

I couldn’t pick the sonofabitch to save my soul.

I could have popped it with one good kick, but I didn’t want to do that. I was a man who’d once been called “the Heifetz of the picklock,” and I certainly ought to be able to open a locked bathroom door. It wasn’t Fort Knox, for God’s sake. It was a bathroom, a guest bathroom, on West End Avenue.

Couldn’t do it.

I flicked the switch again, the one at the side of the bathroom door, the one that had previously caused nothing to happen. Predictably, nothing happened.

Suppose I got married, suppose we had kids. Suppose one of them locked himself in the bathroom, the way the little bastards do, and then couldn’t unlock the door and panicked. Suppose Daddy rushed to the rescue, picks in hand, and then suppose Daddy had to tell Mommy to call a locksmith, because he couldn’t open the bloody door?

Ridiculous.

If it was my door, and my kid inside, I’d have taken it off its hinges. But that’s a lot of work, and a real messy job. You always get chips of paint off the hinge and onto the carpet, a mute testament to one’s continuing inability to draw back the bolt.

See, there was no way to work my kind of magic on the thing. All I could do was try to get a purchase on it with my tools and snick it back into the door. The gap between door and jamb was pretty snug, so I didn’t have much room to work with. I could make a little progress, but sooner or later I’d be unable to maintain constant tension on the bolt, and my pick would slip and I’d be right back where I started, and not at all happy about it.

One of the steel strips on my tool ring is a cut-down hacksaw blade, and it would have gone through the bolt like a knife through butter. Not a hot knife, and not warm butter either, but it would have done the job. I ruled it out, though, for the same reason I wouldn’t take the door off its hinges or kick it into the next county. I felt challenged, dammit.

I took off my pliofilm gloves. I dragged over a gooseneck lamp and positioned it to best advantage. I gritted my teeth and went to work.

And, by God, I opened the fucker.

With the bolt drawn and one hand on the doorknob, I paused to note the time. Astonishingly, it was getting on for four in the morning. How long had I taken to open the bathroom door? I didn’t even want to know.

What I did want to do—needed to do, in fact—was use the bathroom, and I figured I’d earned the right. Its utilitarian aspects aside, the john was the massive anticlimax I’d figured it to be. The usual porcelain fixtures, a medicine cabinet with nothing in it more exciting than aspirin, a tub with a drawn shower curtain—