The beard came off and he applied a heavy base of eccentric-lady rouge. He painted on excessive eyebrow liner. Several dozen strokes with a thin sienna pencil gave him septuagenarian wrinkles. A change of shoes.

As for the misdirection, he'd found a shopping bag and filled the bottom with newspaper—along with the pipe and the other weapon he'd used for his routine—and added a large fresh pineapple from Calvert's kitchen. If he met anyone as he left the building they might glance at him but they'd focus on the sizable pineapple, which is just what happened as he politely held the door open for the arriving officers.

Now, a quarter mile from the building, still dressed as the woman, he stopped and leaned against the wall of a building as if he were catching his breath.

Then he eased into a dim alley. With one tug the dress, held together by tiny Velcro dots, came off. This garment and the wig went under a foot-wide elastic band he wore around his stomach, which compressed the items and made them invisible under his shirt.

He tugged his pants cuffs down, took makeup-removal pads from a Baggie in his pocket and wiped his face until the rouge, wrinkles and eyebrow pencil were gone, checking to make sure with a small pocket mirror. The pads he dropped into the shopping bag with the pineapple, which he in turn placed in a green garbage bag. He found a car illegally parked, picked the lock to the trunk and tossed the bag inside. The police would never think to search the trunks of parked cars and, anyway, the odds were that the car would be towed before the owner returned.

Back on the street, heading for one of the West Side subways.

And what did you think of our second act, Revered Audience? He himself thought it had gone well, considering that because he'd slipped on the damn cobblestones the performer had gotten away and managed to close and lock two doors.

But by the time Malerick had gotten to the back door of Calvert's building he had his picking tools in hand.

Malerick had studied the fine art of lock-picking for years. It was one of the first skills his mentor had taught him. A picker uses two tools: a tension wrench, which is inserted into the lock and twisted to keep pressure on the locking pins inside, and the pick itself, which pushes each pin out of the way so the lock can be turned to the open position.

It can be time-consuming to push aside the pins one at a time, though, so Malerick had mastered a very difficult technique called "scrubbing," in which you move the pick back and forth quickly, brushing the pins out of the way.

Scrubbing only works when the lock-picker senses exactly the right combination of torque on the cylinder and pressure on the pins. Using tools that were only a few inches long, it had taken Malerick less than thirty seconds to scrub open the locks in both the back door and the apartment door of Calvert's place.