Because I’d played this scene before. Once before I’d ducked into a closet when somebody came home unexpectedly. That was on Gramercy Park, and the apartment was Crystal Sheldrake’s, and when I got out of her closet I found her on the floor with a dental scalpel stuck in her heart. I have stumbled over altogether too many dead bodies in the course of my young life, and maybe you get used to it, but I haven’t yet, and don’t much want to.

And it had happened again, I just knew it. That was what had bumped into the closet door before-a body, dead as Spam, making the awkward transition from vertical to horizontal. Now it would be in the way when I tried to open the door, and I’d wind up tampering unwittingly with evidence and trying to squeeze through an opening that would have been a snug fit for Raffles.

Or maybe the body wasn’t dead. Maybe the person on the other side of the closet door had been merely knocked senseless, and would recover consciousness even as I was emerging from my refuge. A consummation devoutly to be wished, certainly-if one had to have bodies lying about, it was preferable that they be alive-but I didn’t really feel up for much in the way of human contact just now. I offered up a quick prayer to St. Dismas, the patron saint of burglars. Let the body be alive but unconscious, I implored him. Better yet, I thought, let it be in Schenectady -but maybe that was too much to ask.

A thought came to me, unbidden, irresistible: Bogart would get the hell out of the closet.

I opened the door, and of course there was no body there. I went all through the place, making sure; while a dead body is not something you want to run into, neither is it the sort of thing you’d care to overlook. No body, anywhere in the apartment. Two people had entered and two people had left, and one of them had stumbled against the closet door on the way out.

The bed, neatly made up before, was a rumpled mess now. I looked at the tangled sheets and felt embarrassed for my own voyeuristic role. It had been involuntary, God knows, and I hadn’t seen anything, or made sense of what I’d heard, but I still found it disquieting to look upon the whole thing.