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shown that he had the resourceful imagination of a con artist and the guts of a second-story man. Who’s to say how he might have turned out if circumstances early on had given him a nudge in the wrong direction?
    Oh, I don’t suppose he’d have had my natural talent with locks. That’s a gift. But anyone with a little training can learn all you absolutely need to know about locks and how to get around them.
    If Hi could manipulate a pair of stamp tongs, he could handle lockpicking tools. And Shelly was a surgeon, certainly capable of applying those same skills to the creations of Rabson and Segal and Fichet and Poulard. If they’d taken a hard left turn a while back, any of my relatives could have turned out wrong. And, if they’d taken up burglary, I bet they’d have been damn good at it.
    Instead, they were all leading exemplary lives, and I was getting ready to break into an old lady’s hotel room.
    Go figure.
     
    Anthea Landau was listed in the Yellow Pages, under Literary Agents. I got an outside line and had her number half-dialed when I caught myself and broke the connection. If I dialed her private line there’d be a record of the call, and did I want that?
    I dialed 7, then 602. I let the phone ring half a dozen times before hanging up.
    Could it be that easy? Could I be that lucky? Was she really out somewhere, having dinner or seeing a play or visiting an old friend?
    It seemed possible. The envelope I’d left for her had disappeared from her mailbox, suggesting that she might have come down and retrieved it. (It was equally possible that Carl or another hotel employee brought her mail to her door, a not unlikely service for a reclusive tenant.)
    Even if she’d gone for the mail herself, that didn’t mean she hadn’t turned around and returned directly to her room. But she hadn’t answered her phone now, and that meant something, didn’t it?
    Maybe it meant she was sound asleep. It was not quite nine o’clock, too early to be bedtime for most of the people I know, but how did I know what hours Anthea Landau kept? Maybe she took naps. Maybe she slept in the early evening and stayed up all night. Older people are typically light sleepers, and might be roused by a ringing telephone, but who could say with assurance that Ms. Landau wasn’t an exception? Maybe she welcomed Morpheus with a cocktail of Smirnoff’s and Seconal, and slept so soundly an earthquake wouldn’t wake her.
    Maybe she was in the bathroom when the phone rang and couldn’t get to it in time. Maybe she was watching TV and never picked up the phone during Seinfeld.
    Maybe I should try her again. I reached for the phone, caught myself in time, put my hand back in my lap before it could get me in trouble. I had called her number once and nobody answered. What was I doing,stalling to get my three nights’ worth out of the hotel? I couldn’t wait for some sort of guarantee that she wasn’t home and that I could get in and out undetected. If I wanted guarantees, I was in the wrong business.
    It was time to get to work.

CHAPTER
Four
    T he Paddington had a single stairwell, and the fire door giving access to it had a sign on it explaining that it was the reverse of a Roach Motel. Guests could get out, but they couldn’t get back in again, not without walking clear down to the lobby.
    Yeah, right.
    I let myself out and walked up two flights of stairs. At the fifth-floor landing there was a wall-mounted firehose with a massive dull brass nozzle, and I figured they’d picked the right spot for it, because the stairwell reeked of cigarette smoke. Evidently one or more of the hotel employees was in the habit of ducking onto the stairs for a quick smoke, and if there’d been anything flammable on hand, it probably would have long since caught fire. But there was nothing but the metal stairs and the plaster walls, unless you counted the firehose itself, and you never hear of them burning, do you?
    At the sixth floor I put my ear to the