Scattershot

NINETEEN

They did not take me straight to jail. I supposed Banducci, in his methodical way, wanted his men to finish combing the grounds first before he booked me; if they found the ring, to his way of thinking, it would solidify his case. But he did read me my rights from a Miranda card-I told him I would waive right of counsel for the time being, but that if he officially charged me with theft, I would not answer any more questions without my lawyer being present-and then had me searched and put under guard in another of the spare bedrooms. No handcuffs, but two patrolmen in there with me instead of just one.

Now I knew what else could go wrong in this crazy scattershot week. I could end up in jail facing a prison term for first-degree robbery. That was the last pellet in the week-long peppering, and the deadliest of all: it had lodged in a vital spot, and it threatened to wipe out my future completely.

I sat on the bed, fidgeting, and tried again to piece things together. If ever I needed to have a deductive inspiration, it was now. The way it looked, nobody could get me out of this particular bind except me.

But none of it seemed to make any more sense now than it had earlier. The window could not have been broken from the inside-not unless someone had been hiding in the room all afternoon, and that was a literal impossibility; I had checked it over thoroughly, and the five of us had left together. No one should have been able to come through those sharp edges of glass without leaving some sort of trace of his passage. No one should have been able to accomplish the theft and then escape in a span of thirty to forty-five seconds. And yet someone had to have been in the room; I had heard him in there, knocking packages to the floor, stealing the ring.

Impossible, all of it.

Except that it had happened, somehow and some way. There had to be a logical explanation.

One of the other four, I thought-Mollenhauer, Hickox, Walker, or Patton. But which one? None of them seemed a likely candidate, considering who and what they were; any of them could be clever enough to have planned out a caper of this complexity. It had not just been designed to net him the ring under mysterious circumstances- that much I felt sure of, now. It had been designed so that all the evidence would point straight at me.

A neat, tight little frame.

Mollenhauer, Hickox, Walker, or Patton …

Something began to nibble at the back of my mind. I shut my eyes and concentrated, visualizing the gift room as I had seen it after breaking in. Everything exactly as it had been when I was in there with the four of them at one-forty, except for the broken window and all the stuff scattered on the floor. Or was it? There seemed to be-

And all at once it came popping through-the difference, the one fact that opened a crack in the frame. I sat motionless, working with it, backtracking. Once I had part of it figured out I remembered something else, too, and worked with that until it all began to pull together.

Bingo.

I might have become a Typhoid Mary and I might have developed a penchant for screwing up in various ways and I might yet lose my investigator’s license, but my God I was good at my job. I could figure things out with the best of them. All, that was, except how to keep my life and my career from falling apart in one week.

I stood up and looked at the two patrolmen. “I want to see Lieutenant Banducci.”

“What for?” one of them said.

“I know how the theft was done and I know who stole the ring. Tell him that. Get him in here.”

It took them a few second to make up their minds; they were thinking that maybe it was a trick. Then the one who had spoken drew his weapon, held it on me, and told the other guy to go ahead.

Banducci was there inside of three minutes. “So you know who and how, do you?” he said. The skepticism was plain in his voice.

I said, “Yes. I can’t prove it, but I think you can.”

“All right, let’s hear it.”

“Take me to the gift room first.”

He took me there, the two patrolmen trailing behind. The items that had been on the floor had been picked up and put back on the table; the open gift box and the ring case carried the residue of fingerprint powder. Otherwise, nothing was changed.

“This better be good,” Banducci said. “You’re on your way to jail if it isn’t.”

“It’s good.” I went to the table. “How many of these little packages were on the floor when you first examined the room?”

He frowned. “Four or five,” he said. “Including the one the ring was in.”

“Doesn’t that strike you as odd? The thief knew which one contained the ring. Then why were the others knocked off the table?”

“He-or you-was in a hurry. They were knocked off accidentally.”

I shook my head. “The table hasn’t been moved from its original position, which means it wasn’t bumped into. And even a man in a hurry wouldn’t be likely to sweep off four other packages by accident, not when he already knew where the ring was. No, those packages were knocked to the floor as part of a deliberate plan.”

“I don’t see what you’re leading up to-”

“You will.” I pointed to the gifts on the table. “There are nine packages here-four with pink bows, counting the gift box for the ring, three with blue bows, and two with white bows.”

“So?”

“There were eight packages, again counting the ring box, when the five of us were in this room at one-forty. And only one with a white bow.”

Banducci’s frown deepened into a scowl. “You sure about that?”

“Positive,” I said. I picked up the two white-bowed presents. Only one of them had a card attached; I put that one down and shook the other. It was heavy and did not rattle. “If you open this one, I’m pretty sure it’ll contain something cheap and not very suitable as a wedding gift.”

He took it out of my hand, untied its ribbon, and removed the lid. A wad of tissue paper. And the kind of hard plastic paperweight you can buy in a dime store.

“Okay, poison,” he said. “So far you’ve got my attention. If this package wasn’t here before the robbery, then how did it get into the room?”

“It was thrown in through the broken window from outside.”

“For what reason?”

“To knock the ring box and as many other packages as possible off the table. The ring box was the primary target. The thief wanted it to hit the floor so the lid would pop off and the velvet case would fall out. He couldn’t have planned that the case would come open, too, but it worked in his favor when it did.

“The bogus gift was a pretty clever touch. You need to throw something into a roomful of presents, so you make up a weighted one of your own. Chances are it’ll be overlooked, and when it’s finally opened, it gets passed over as somebody’s idea of a practical joke.”

Banducci said, “But what’s the sense in it? Why knock off the ring box and the other packages?”

“To make me think the thief had come into this room to steal the ring, when in fact he hadn’t, and to make you think I was the one who was guilty. If nobody else could have done it, according to the manufactured evidence, it had to be me.”

“Are you saying he somehow stole the ring from outside?”

“No,” I said. “He stole the ring when all of us were in here at one-forty.”

“Yeah? How did he do that?”

“Simple. He was the last person to touch the case, the one who put it back inside the gift box. When he did that, as he was covering the case with the tissue paper, he slipped it open and palmed the ring. None of us suspected anything like that and none of us watched him closely; it was easy for him.”

“Easy for who? Who are we talking about here?”

“George Hickox. Mollenhauer’s secretary.”

Banducci did some ruminating.

I said. “That’s why he went to bat for me when Mollenhauer read about my troubles in the newspaper and wanted to bring in another detective in my place. I thought that was out of character at the time, but I put it down to a streak of humanity. He must have figured that because I was already under suspicion as a shady operator, I’d make the perfect fall guy for his little scenario. He didn’t want to have to find somebody else, with more stable credentials, at the last minute.”

“Let’s say I buy it so far,” Banducci said. “There’s still one fact you haven’t accounted for.”

“The broken window.”

He nodded. “The window that was broken from the inside.”

“It wasn’t broken from the inside,” I said. “It was broken from the outside.”

“So that all the shards fell out on the lawn? You know that’s impossible.”

“No, it isn’t. No more impossible than any of the rest of it. There’s a way to do it.”

“What way?”

“Do you know what a suction clamp is?”

“One of those bar gadgets with rubber cups on each end?”

“Right. They’re used by house painters along with certain types of scaffolding, among other things, and they’re pretty strong. Remember the movie Topkapi? It had guys lifting up a heavy glass case with just that kind of clamp.” “And you think Hickox broke the window with one.”

“That’s what I think. He moistened the rubber cups, shoved them against the windowpane, locked them in place, and then took hold of the bar and gave a hard rocking jerk or two; the glass is relatively thin and the window is wide and Hickox is a brawny man. So the window broke outward, the shards fell to the lawn, and the clamp pulled free. Then he threw the bogus gift at the table in here and ducked around the front corner. He was long gone by the time I got outside.”

Banducci ruminated again.

I said, “My guess is that he got the clamp from the painters’ scaffolding on the carriage house; maybe you noticed when you came in that that building’s being painted. And he probably returned it there afterward. If you can find it, it might have some glass residue that your lab people can match to the window. It might even have Hickox’s fingerprints.”

“All right,” he said, “it all sounds reasonable enough. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.” He turned to the two patrolmen, both of whom were standing just inside the door. “One of you go find George Hickox and bring him in here. Let’s see what he has to say.”

Hickox did not have much to say-not right then, anyway. He put on an indignant act, denied everything, and tried his damndest to lay the suspicion back on me. But he had grown more and more nervous as I explained again how the robbery was done, and he kept wiping beads of sweat off his face. Banducci could read the guilt on him as well as I could; he began to take the same hard line he had taken with me earlier.

The interrogation was still going on when one of the uniformed cops Banducci had dispatched to the carriage house came running in, bright-eyed with excitement. He had found a detached suction clamp, but that wasn’t all he’d found and brought back with him. He had thought to stir around in the cans of paint and turpentine left by the painters, he told us, and in one of the turpentine tins-

The missing diamond ring.

You could almost see Hickox come apart then, the way Joe Craig had in Xanadu. And when Banducci instructed the patrolman to have both the clamp and the turpentine tin dusted for fingerprints, Hickox broke down completely and admitted it. He had planned the robbery for days, even before making me his random selection as the fall guy-he had suggested to Mollenhauer a detective be hired in the first place-but he’d been having second thoughts about going through with it until Edna Hornback made her public charges against me; that had cemented his resolve. His statement as to why he’d decided to commit robbery amounted to two sentences: “I didn’t want to keep on being a rich man’s secretary. I wanted just a little of what Mollenhauer has for myself.”

They put him in handcuffs and took him away. I got to go away, too, with an apology and even an expression of thanks from Banducci. I wanted to leave quietly, without any more contact with Mollenhauer and his family; there was nothing I cared to say to any of them. But on the way out to my car, I ran into the lord of the manor himself.

No apology or expression of thanks from him, not that I had expected any. Just a frozen-faced look and a curt nod. I would have gone right on by him without speaking, but it occurred to me that while I was in his presence I might as well tell him that I wanted just a little of what he had, too-my fee for the job I had been hired to do. I said as much to him, politely, adding that I would send him a bill sometime next week.

He said, “Go ahead, but I have no intention of paying it.”

“What?”

“I owe you nothing. If you’d been on your toes, none of this would have happened. As it is, my daughter’s wedding has been ruined and the family subjected to an ugly public scandal.”

“You can’t blame me for that-”

“I can and I do,” Mollenhauer said. “Now get off my property before I have you forcibly removed.”

I got off his goddamn property. Telling myself as I did so: You’d better stay clear of the heavy-sugar crowd from now on. You can’t cope with them; they’ll find a way to stick it to you every time. You common, screwed-up, ethnic private eye, you.