Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 24, No. 3, March 1979

The Hummelmeyer Operation by James Holding

Even the near-Stygian gloom of the Elite Cocktail Lounge was unable to hide from me the smile of approbation that bloomed on Dixie’s lovely face across the table from me.

In a conspiratorial whisper she said, “I bet you have another of your clever ideas, haven’t you? Is that why you asked me to meet you here, Professor?”

Dixie addresses me as “Professor” because I once attended Dartmouth College for a year and speak, in consequence, with what Dixie is pleased to characterize as the precision of a pedant.

I nodded. “Another idea, yes. And this time I believe we may achieve excellent results, Dixie, if you are willing to undertake a simple masquerade for a few days.”

“A masquerade! How exciting!” Dixie’s clear, brown, childishly candid gaze reflected the enthusiasm of the true con artist at the prospect of action. “What kind of a masquerade, Professor?”

“The impersonation of a mentally disturbed woman.”

“You want me to pretend to be crazy?” Dixie’s enthusiasm cooled perceptibly.

“No, no, child, not crazy,” I soothed her. “Merely afflicted with a very common malady known as kleptomania.”

“Oh, well, that’s different,” Dixie said, relieved. “Kleptomania’s just stealing, isn’t it? I can do that.” She settled back to listen.

I got the telephone call the next afternoon about three. I’d been waiting for it.

“Yes?” I said, adopting a humorless, no-nonsense tone.

“Mr. Miller?” a voice asked me. “Mr. C. B. Miller?” A bass voice, tinged, I thought, with the orotundity of authority.

“Right,” I replied.

“My name’s Damson, Mr. Miller. Chief of Security at Hummelmeyer’s Department Store.”

“What can I do for you, Mr. Damson?” Hummelmeyer’s is the biggest department store in the city.

“I have a woman here who claims to be your wife, Mr. Miller. One of my men has apprehended her in the act of shoplifting.”

“What!” I put pain and indignation into my voice. “Not again! Poor Estelle.” I paused and asked hopefully, “You’re sure she’s my wife?”

“She has no identification with her, but she gave me your number to call. She’s right here in my office. Five feet six, shoulder-length reddish blonde hair, woven straw shoulder bag, green pantsuit, nice figure, big sunglasses over baby blue eyes, and cries easy. Does that sound like your wife?”

It sounded like Dixie with her blonde wig, blue contact lenses, and platform shoes on. “That’s Estelle,” I sighed. “What did she steal, Mr. Damson?”

“An Italian silk head scarf. Sneaked it into her purse and left the store with it. My men braced her outside, retrieved the scarf, and brought her to me. The scarf’s a ten-fifty item, Mr. Miller. She’s offered to pay cash for it, of course, but it’s against Hummelmeyer’s policy to allow thieves to pay their way out of trouble. So now she’s into the remorseful tears bit, and begs you to come and rescue her. ‘Rescue’ is her word, not mine.” Damson’s voice was sardonic.

“Listen, Mr. Damson,” I said seriously, “I appreciate your calling me more than I can tell you. Our psychiatrist in Texas discharged Estelle several years ago as cured. But apparently he was wrong.”

Mr. Damson sighed wearily into the telephone. “Is your wife a kleptomaniac, Mr. Miller? Is that what you mean?”

“I’m afraid so. Quite innocent and honest usually. But occasionally she has stolen things. Small items mostly, like that scarf. She knows perfectly well that I can afford to pay for anything that catches her fancy — anything — yet that doesn’t help her when one of these spells hits her. She literally can’t keep herself from stealing. That’s why I don’t permit her to carry credit cards with her, only cash. Unless I’m with her, of course.”

“I don’t get it,” said Mr. Damson.

“What would Hummelmeyer’s do if you caught one of your charge customers stealing?”

“Cancel out her account op the spot.”

“You see? With Estelle in one of her light-fingered moods, we’d soon be up to our knees in canceled credit cards and charge accounts.”

“Do I understand that she has a charge account at Hummelmeyer’s?”

“I have, Mr. Damson. C. B. Miller, 102 °Cedarhurst Drive, charge card number 3616690-41-1. If you feed it into your computer, you’ll find my credit is excellent, Mr. Damson. Meanwhile, if you’ll be land enough to keep Mrs. Miller there in your office, I’ll be there in twenty minutes or so to take her off your hands.”

I whistled one of Scott Joplin’s tunes from The Sting as I drove my station wagon downtown toward Hummelmeyer’s Department Store to “rescue” Dixie from the clutches of Mr. Damson. I felt confident, optimistic. Now that the first hurdle had been successfully surmounted, what could possibly go wrong? Yet I realized that my euphoric mood was premature, to say the least. It was still too early in the operation to predict success with any certainty — and already too late for Dixie and me to escape unscathed if anything went wrong. Still, I couldn’t avoid the conviction that this time everything would fall into place smoothly and inevitably. Fortune couldn’t turn her back on me now.

Not after my incredible luck in finding C. B. Miller’s wallet in the YMCA locker room.

I’d come out of the shower and was toweling myself off after my game of handball, when I spotted the black-leather wallet lying under one of the dressing benches in the aisle next to mine. I could hear voices reverberating in the adjacent swimming pool. For the moment, however, I was alone in the locker room.

My first impulse was purely larcenous, of course. I counted the cash in the wallet’s money pocket and found it to come to the pleasant sum of one hundred and twenty-one dollars. A small bonanza. Then I rapidly investigated the rest of the wallet’s contents: credit cards for five major oil companies, Master Charge, Visa, Carte Blanche, Diner’s Club, American Express — all issued in the name of C. B. Miller of 102 °Cedarhurst Drive in one of our fashionable suburbs; registration certificates for a Lincoln Continental and a Cadillac Seville; a driver’s license, tucked in behind an Avis credit card; membership cards for the University Club and one of the district’s exclusive country clubs; plastic charge-account plates for a number of local stores; a dog-eared business card identifying C. B. Miller as the president of something called The Superior Drilling Supply Company of Texas; a wallet-size color snapshot of a fiftyish woman and two teenaged boys standing beside a private swimming pool, with a hand-written caption on the back, “Estelle and Dick and Jimmy, taken the day I retired, Dallas, 1975.”

Not the sort of stuff you’d expect to find in your ordinary YMCA member’s wallet.

Briefly I contemplated appropriating wallet, credit cards, cash, and all. Then I realized how useless that would be. The moment C. B. Miller found his wallet missing, every credit card he owned would be invalidated within twenty-four hours after he reported the loss to the Hot-Line Protection Service whose sticker adorned each card in his wallet. I wouldn’t be able to use any of them safely.

So in the end I replaced everything, including the cash, in Mr. Miller’s wallet except for two items; his driver’s license, which in our state does not carry the driver’s photograph, and the charge card for Hummelmeyer’s Department Store. These two items, I concluded after consideration, would probably not be missed for a few days after Mr. Miller recovered his wallet.

Which he would undoubtedly do. For although I did not know C. B. Miller, never having encountered him to my knowledge at the Y or anywhere else, he must, I reasoned, own one of the voices I heard echoing in the swimming pool. I therefore replaced his wallet exactly where I had found it under the bench, dressed hurriedly, and left, asking myself why Mr. Miller would be disporting himself in a humble YMCA swimming pool instead of in the pool of his exclusive country’ club. I needn’t have worried. I found out later that he was a member of the Y’s local board.

When I returned to my car in Hummelmeyer’s parking lot after being closeted for twenty minutes with Mr. Damson, Hummelmeyer’s security chief, and a Mr. Conrad, the store’s credit manager, I found Dixie demurely awaiting me in the front seat of my station wagon.

“Well, Professor,” she asked me at once, “did you sell them?”

I had sent her down to the car to wait for me, being reluctant, I explained to Damson and Conrad, to discuss her disorder with strangers in her presence, as she was very sensitive about it.

“Sensitive is right,” Damson had agreed, watching a piteously weeping Dixie, a.k.a. Estelle Miller, depart from his office under convoy of the young security officer who had detected Dixie in the act of shoplifting — a fellow who was introduced to me by Damson as Harry Something-or-other.

Harry looked like anything but a man whose aim in life was to reduce Hummelmeyer’s pilferage losses: six feet of spare muscular body, black hair cut long enough to cover his ears, a quiet, respectful demeanor, and very alert brown eyes. In faded jeans and sloppy T-shirt, he looked more like a college kid or a hippie on his way to a commune. Even I, with my vast experience, would never have suspected he was a store detective.

“Of course I sold them,” I told Dixie, not without pride, climbing behind the wheel of the station wagon and starting the motor.

“Goody,” she said, all smiles. “Tell me about it.”

“With pleasure,” I said. “Your superb performance as the troubled kleptomaniac was almost enough in itself to convince Hummelmeyer’s of our good faith. Miller’s driver’s license established our identity, of course. And our charge record at the store established us as free-spending charge customers, as I had hoped. Miller’s original application for a charge account at Hummelmeyer’s didn’t hurt either. By the time I got there they’d looked it up. Very impressive credentials. The Millers have accounts at the right banks, previous charge accounts at Neiman-Marcus, and so on. And of course I made out a splendid case history for you, Dixie. I told them that your psychiatrist in Texas had advised me privately that a series of public humiliations as a kleptomaniac would certainly exacerbate your condition — that the best therapy for you would be to pretend that you were doing no shoplifting at all, even when engaged in the act. I explained that you hadn’t had a spell of this disorder for two or three years now, ever since we moved north from Texas. After I dropped a few hints as to my club memberships and my recent contribution to the local library building fund, Damson and Conrad were totally in agreement with my proposal.”

“Which was what, exactly?” Dixie asked.

I drove carefully past a traffic policeman who wore spotless white gloves and a supercilious smile. “That you be allowed to work out your own salvation,” I said. “That I would personally be responsible for anything you stole from Hummelmeyer’s. That I am financially well able and willing to cover the cost of anything you might absentmindedly remove from their store without paying for it. And that they therefore should give you permission to lift anything you fancied — as an aid to your complete recovery — and merely put it on my tab. That is,” I amended, “on the tab of Mr. C. B. Miller. And I would gladly and thankfully pay it.”

“So,” Dixie said cheerfully, “I can steal anything I like from Hummelmeyer’s?”

“Anything. Up to and including the most expensive items, I should guess. That young man Harry who first picked you up today for shoplifting will be briefed to watch for you, follow you around while you’re in the store, and put the price of anything you steal on Mr. C. B. Miller’s bill. Isn’t that splendid?”

“Couldn’t be better,” said Dixie warmly. “I’ll have a ball.”

And have a ball she did. Knowing her predilection for the best and the costliest, I gave her no specific instructions, leaving it to her to select the items she purloined from Hummelmeyer’s in her role of Mrs. C. B. Miller, wealthy kleptomaniac.

My contribution to the operation at this point was the fencing, through channels long familiar to me, of the merchandise Dixie stole. Even at a third to a half of true market value, the cash sum thus accumulated in only a few days was quite impressive.

On the fifth day of our operation, a Friday, Dixie turned up at my apartment after dark with half a dozen Steuben old-fashioned glasses and an opera-length string of matched cultured pearls as her loot of the day. I congratulated her on her good taste, gave her an honest accounting of our profits thus far, and then warned her, “Hummelmeyer’s send out their monthly statements to charge customers on Monday, so I’m afraid we’ll have to finish up tomorrow. C. B. Miller’s sharp cries of anguish when he receives his bill this month will no doubt make the welkin ring merrily — as well as the ears of Mr. Conrad, Hummelmeyer’s credit manager. You and I must have disappeared by then, of course.”

Dixie nodded.

“I suggest that we would be wise to take a short leave of absence from the city until things quiet down a bit,” I said. “A vacation, you might call it. Not necessarily together, Dixie.” There is nothing physical between Dixie and me. “But a vacation out of the city.”

“O.K., Professor,” said Dixie. “Tomorrow’s the end of the operation if you say so. I’ll try to make it a red-letter day.”

She was as good as her word. I couldn’t believe my eyes when she strolled into my apartment the following evening about six o’clock. For although it was a very warm day in August, Dixie was carrying a heavy fur coat over her arm.

“What in the world is that?” I inquired, gesturing at it.

“What does it look like?” She dumped the coat on my sofa. “It’s a fur coat, Professor, as any fool can plainly see. I took it right off the display mannequin in Hummelmeyer’s fur salon, where it was being featured in the August for sale.”

“It doesn’t look like much,” I said. “It’s neither mink nor sable, with that long hair. Couldn’t you have selected something less bulky and more valuable?”

Dixie gave me her gamine grin.

“Look at the price tag,” she said.

I looked at it. “Well, well, I apologize, Dixie. Twenty-four thousand dollars! What is it?”

“Russian lynx. Very new, very smart, very fenceable,” said Dixie, dimpling. “Is there such a word, Professor? Fenceable? Anyway.” She groped in her shoulder bag. “That’s not all. Take a gander at this, if you want to see something pretty.”

She held out on the palm of one hand a circlet of platinum paved with diamonds and a pair of emerald-and-diamond earrings. Their price tags read, respectively, thirty-five hundred dollars and twenty-three hundred dollars.

“A red-letter day indeed, Dixie,” I complimented her. “I can t tell you—”

“Wait.” Dixie interrupted me. Her face turned sober and her dimples disappeared. “That’s the good news, Professor,” she said. “The rest is all bad.”

“Bad?” I asked, startled.

She nodded.

“What is it?”

“Just that we’re blown, Professor. Wide open. I’m sorry.”

For an instant I seemed to be struck dumb. At length I managed to whisper, “What do you mean, Dixie?”

“That store detective, Harry. Remember him? The one who caught me shoplifting the first day and has been following me around the store ever since?”

It was my turn to nod.

“Well, he knows I’m not Mrs. C. B. Miller.”

“What! How could he know that?”

“Because Mrs. C. B. Miller is his aunt,” Dixie said. “And he knows I ain’t her.”

I tried to absorb this calmly, but it was a telling blow. “Harry told you this?”

“Yes.”

“He may be lying.”

“I don’t think so. He knows more about the Millers than we do. A lot of stuff he couldn’t have made up—” she eyed me “—or found in a wallet. Like the prep schools his cousins go to. Like how much Hummelmeyer’s charged Miller for redecorating his new house on Cedarhurst Drive. Like that Mr. Miller’s brother Hubert has been running The Superior Drilling Supply Company since C.B.’s retirement. Oh, he’s telling the truth, all right. I know it.”

“Perhaps.” I tried to smile. “But it seems very quixotic of Harry, in that case, to permit our shoplifting spree to continue unchecked for a week without blowing the whistle on us.”

Dixie said, “I asked him about that. The truth is, Harry can’t stand his aunt. He says she’s a snob and a bitch and a bird-brain. And he dislikes her husband, C.B., even more. Harry’s from the poor side of the family, I gather. Anyway, he couldn’t care less how we sandbag Hummelmeyer’s and the Millers.”

I was still puzzled. “Then why reveal all this to you, Dixie?”

“He wants half our loot,” Dixie said. “That’s the bad news, Professor.”

Bad news indeed. Yet not total defeat. I said, “Even half our profits on this operation is still respectable. Half a loaf is better than none. Yet why shouldn’t we have the whole loaf? We need not take Harry’s blackmail demand lying down. We can be on a plane for Timbuktu or some other safe retreat in no time, Dixie. I can stop on our way to the airport to turn this fur coat and jewelry into cash.” I began planning rapidly. “I’ll shave off my moustache, wear a toupee, and put pads in my cheeks. You burn your wig and take out your blue contacts, get rid of those platform shoes and—”

Dixie shook her head. “No good, Professor. Harry’s waiting downstairs in the lobby for me right this minute. He’s given us fifteen minutes to make our decision before he goes to the fuzz.”

I looked at my watch. “We’ve still got time to leave through the back door of the furnace room and make the airport, Dixie—” I broke off. “How does he happen to be sitting downstairs in the lobby, for God’s sake?”

“He followed me here from Hummelmeyer’s and parked right behind me in your parking lot. That’s where we had our little talk. In your parking lot. I’m still dazed.” Dixie gave me an up-from-under look. “I haven’t told you about his other demand yet.”

“His other demand?” I sighed.

“He wants me to go out to dinner with him tonight,” Dixie said.

“To dinner? What on earth for?”

“He thinks I’m kind of cute.” Dixie blushed.

I was beyond surprise. I stared at her, this Dixie who wasn’t Dixie, with the wrong color hair, the wrong color eyes, the wrong height. I tried to see her as Harry must see her. I said sternly, “You’re not going to dinner with this... this — blackmailer, are you?”

Dixie fluffed her blonde wig. “Why not?” she said. “I think he’s kind of cute too.”