Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 34, No. 13 & 14, Winter 1989

A Meaningful Relationship by C. J. Hursch

Reggie walked in just as I finished setting up an appointment with the police. His long face spelled trouble, but at that point, I didn’t know how much.

“Coffee time,” he squawked brightly. “Want me to get you some, Jane?”

“I’ve already had my shot of caffeine for the day,” I told him.

“Do you mind,” he asked with a woebegone look, “if I have mine here? I’ve just got to talk to somebody.”

How could I refuse? He looked like a sorry tomcat in his dull black suit, wilted white collar, and modestly striped gray tie. Reggie had an office just down the hall from my detective setup where he plied the psychologist’s trade for all it was worth. You’d know right away what his profession was because he always put out a lot of those hocus-pocus words some shrinks use to befuddle the rest of us about why we do what we do.

He often dropped in to my office to loosen his tie and try to be a human being. And because he amused me, I often let him. But right now I had other things on my mind, namely the spate of jewelry store robberies that the police had called me in on.

“What’s your problem?” I shot at him, not wanting to wait through a half hour of aimless chatter until he got to it.

He looked up, startled. “Does it show?” he asked. “I suppose you noticed my lowered affect.”

“No. I noticed that you looked like you’d just lost your last friend,” I told him.

“I may have,” he said, nodding solemnly. “I can’t find Violet.”

“Not Violet, your purple passion!” I exclaimed, hardly able to smother a giggle.

Violet was at the other end of the universe from Reggie. She was curvy and vivacious, wore long drippy earrings, dozens of silver and gold bangles on her arms, and a large silver star pasted to her forehead. She was into witchcraft, and she had a riotous laugh that could knock the pigeons off the roof.

“She’s probably deep in her coven issuing incantations,” I answered without much sympathy.

“No,” he assured me solemnly. “She only does that during the full moon, and that’s long past. It’s something else.”

There were countless possibilities as to why the flamboyant Violet was unavailable to dour Reggie, but most of them would have shocked him silly as he sat there stiffly balancing his coffee cup on his bony knee. So I just tried to soothe him. “She’ll probably call you soon,” I said.

“No, she won’t. She never calls me — she has a weak ego system,” he said gravely. “We were supposed to get together last night, but I went to her apartment and got no answer. I even called at six this morning, and she’s still not there. Look,” he said, focusing his red-rimmed eyes on me, “does your private investigating work include finding a missing person?”

“Have you reported her missing to the police?” I asked.

“No. Should I?”

“I think that’s best,” I said, not wanting to run down all the red herrings that I was sure Violet could leave if she didn’t want Reggie trailing after her.

“I’d be glad to pay you,” he said.

“Let’s not get into that yet. She might turn up any time. Tell you what,” I said with a sudden inspiration for getting rid of him. “I’m headed for the police station now. While I’m there, I’ll check on anything that might have come in just to be sure nothing has happened to her. You might call around to her girlfriends and relatives and see if they know where she is.”

That made him happier. He unwound his long legs, glanced at his watch, and hurried off. I had no intention of doing anything about her and, at that point, didn’t think anyone needed to.

“The problem is,” Ed Lucero said as I sat in his office in the police station, “that there is no consistent M.O. I’ve got a gut feeling that these burglaries are all connected, but I can’t find the thread that might give us a clue.”

“How do you know there is one?” I asked.

“There’s got to be,” Ed said doggedly as he shuffled the batch of files in front of him. Ed had been on the force a long time. He was a careful, thorough detective. Nothing flashy about him, he stuck with a case until he saw through every angle of it. He was also smart enough to call in other investigators — like myself — to give him new slants when he was stumped. And, except for a few lukewarm suspects, he was badly stumped on this one.

“We’ve got a sudden rash of jewel thefts. The witnesses we’ve got described the burglars differently in each incident. The approach is slightly different each time, but they steal good jewelry in broad daylight and it disappears fast — it never turns up at the pawnbrokers or fences. I’m sure there is a connection between these burglaries because the whole underworld doesn’t suddenly turn to jewel theft just like that.”

“What can I do to help?” I asked.

“I’d like you to question a couple of suspects. See if you can get anything out of them. Word on the street has it that they may be involved. But I haven’t been able to dig anything helpful out of any of them. See what you can pick up.”

As Ed led me through the main lobby to the interview room, I got a surprise. There, nervously perched on a bench in the main lobby, was Reggie’s Violet. We had met a few times at my office, and I wasn’t sure if she saw me but her head seemed to snap away from my direction as Ed and I approached.

“Do you know her?” I asked Ed softly as we went into the interrogating room.

He shook his head. “Never seen her before.”

“What’s she doing here?” I asked him.

“No idea. Is it important?”

“Probably not,” I said as I shrugged and let it go.

Striking a disarming pose in the small stark room, I welcomed a young man named Cliff Dorgan who worked in a jewelry store that had been robbed. He had quit to take another job just two days before the store got hit. But his life seemed to be as open and clean as his countenance. I couldn’t see any way to connect him with the burglary.

After that I tried to talk with one Bobby Colvin, an excitable youth whose eyes darted all over the room while the rest of his body twitched and hitched. The only thing I could be sure of about him was that he was in dire need of a controlled substance.

Next was a smooth-faced man in his early thirties named Gilbert Carver who said he had only been in town a few weeks. He was here to visit his mother, who was in a nursing home, and would be heading back to Detroit soon. He was a little tight-lipped, but otherwise courteous and cooperative. But there wasn’t a thing I got out of him that connected him to the stolen jewelry.

I decided to check out Gilbert’s story about his aged mother because I couldn’t think of anything else to do and because his Detroit record indicated he didn’t always behave as his mother should have taught him to.

She was there at the nursing home all right. I introduced myself to the smiling gray-haired lady in a wheelchair that a nurse pushed in.

“Mrs. Carver, I’m here to see that you’re getting good treatment,” I began. She went on smiling. “Are you feeling well?” I inquired.

“Oh, yes!” she answered, and I noticed then that the smile included everyone in the room, as well as the walls, ceiling, and floor.

“Do your children come to see you often?” When she nodded affirmatively, I asked, “How many children do you have?”

“Seven,” she answered with a broad smile.

“And can you tell me their names?”

“Yes. There’s George, Warren, Gladys, Esther, Judith, Marion, Terrence...” she paused.

“Do you have a son named Gilbert?”

“Oh yes, Gilbert. Such a nice boy.”

“But that’s eight children,” I pointed out.

“Yes, eight,” she nodded pleasantly.

“Can you tell me their names again?” I asked.

“Sure. Gilbert, Nancy, Everett, George, Solomon, Rita, John, Henry, and... and...”

I knew then I had struck out. They told me at the desk that a son answering Gilbert’s description had visited her frequently in recent weeks. They said she also had several other children who came, as well as some adult grandchildren; they weren’t sure how many. So much for Mrs. Carver. Time had evidently dimmed her memory as to who was which, but she apparently did have a large and devoted family. No wonder she smiled so much.

It wasn’t until I got back late that afternoon and passed his closed office door that I thought again about Reggie and his rambling rose.

Oops! I said to myself as I slunk by quickly. Hope he’s made contact with Vanishing Violet by now. But just in case he hadn’t, I quietly dashed in and out of my own office and slipped down the back stairway. I couldn’t see that it would calm his nerves any if I told him I’d spotted her at the police station.

At two A.M. my phone wrenched me out of a good night’s sleep. Reggie’s scrappy voice came on as soon as I answered. “Jane! The police are searching my apartment,” he screamed in terror.

“What for?” I asked.

“I don’t know. They won’t tell me. Could you come over right away? You work with police. Maybe you can handle them. I don’t know what to do.”

What could I say? He lived close by. I got there in minutes. But it was already too late. I recognized the burly figure of Ed Lucero coming down the steps of the building.

“Hi, Jane. We found it,” Ed said to me cheerily, just as though I should know what he was talking about.

“You did?” I asked, just as though I knew what we were both talking about.

“Not all, but I saw enough from recent jewelry store burglaries to cinch the case. Come on back to the station and I’ll tell you about it,” Ed said in his big, friendly way.

My mouth was already opening with a question, but I gaped even wider when I saw them leading poor Reggie out in handcuffs. Hideous green and yellow checked pajamas stuck out below his coat, and leather mules flapped on his reluctant feet. He stopped protesting when he spotted me.

“Help me!” he shrieked in a wail that pierced the night as they loaded him into a police car.

“I think you may have the wrong man,” I said to Ed.

“But he’s got the goods,” Ed said.

“That’s one thing I don’t understand,” I answered. “The other thing is: what made you look in his apartment?”

Ed explained that Reggie’s cleaning lady, who had read about all the jewelry store robberies, called in and announced that she’d found too many little packages of sparkly stuff hidden in odd places in his apartment.

On the way downtown I told Ed what I knew of the panicky shrink they had taken into custody. He agreed that Reggie’s biography didn’t seem to fit with robbing jewelry stores.

“Somebody must have set him up,” Ed concluded. “But who, and why?”

It was then that I remembered seeing Violet at the police station earlier that day. When I mentioned this to Ed he said, “Yeah. After you asked me about her I found out why she was there. She was waiting for that guy Gilbert Carver. I guess she’s his girlfriend because she walked out with him after you questioned him. They were having a big argument.”

“She’s the only possible link between Reggie and this case,” I pointed out. “Maybe you’d better pick her up.”

“Done,” Ed said, reaching for his phone.

I went on home after arranging for Reggie to be released as painlessly as possible. Ed said he’d call me when they brought Violet in.

Late the next morning, I was not surprised when Reggie, looking more haggard than usual, floated into my office. I could see he was still in shock.

“It was awful,” he breathed heavily as he sank into a chair. “They treated me like a criminal.”

“You were caught with the loot,” I reminded him.

“But it wasn’t mine,” he said. Then he calmed down and reverted to his usual style. “It is extremely deflating to one’s ego, you know, especially if one’s response system is unaccustomed to unwarranted stress.”

“How do you suppose the jewelry got hidden in your place?” I asked.

“I can’t imagine. I’m away a lot. Anyone could have sneaked in and put it there, but I don’t know why.”

“What about Violet?” I asked. “Any chance that...”

“Oh, no! How would she have access to stolen... loot?” he demanded. “Why would you suspect her?”

“She wears a lot of jewelry, for one thing. How well do you know her?” I asked. But I was unprepared for the rush of color that rose up from his starchy collar.

“Why, uh...” he said, with some indignation and so much embarrassment that it told me more than I had intended to find out.

“I mean,” I said with a quick wave of my hand to get him on another track, “what do you know about her background?”

“She doesn’t have much background,” he said innocently. “I know that her mother is in a nursing home here, but I think that’s all the family she has.”

He got my attention with that. “Wait a minute. What nursing home? What’s her mother’s name?” I demanded.

He thought for a minute. “I don’t know the answer to either question.”

“Does she have a lot of brothers and sisters?” I asked.

“She’s never mentioned any.”

Assorted facts ran loosely through my mind, but they didn’t fit together until much later.

That afternoon, I went down to the station to interview another unlikely suspect from whom I got nothing. Then I stopped by Ed’s desk.

“Several store owners have identified the pieces we found at your shrink friend’s place last night,” he said. “But that’s all the progress we’ve made.”

“What about Violet? Did she provide any useful information?” I asked.

“Haven’t been able to locate her yet.”

“Well, she was here yesterday afternoon, and you said she walked out with Gilbert afterwards, so why not pick up Gilbert again, and...”

“I thought of that, but we can’t find him either.”

I told Ed about my visit to the nursing home, and what Reggie had told me about Violet’s mother’s being in one.

At that point Ed’s phone rang. It was a short conversation, but before he put the receiver down, I knew the news was bad.

“They’ve found Violet,” he said in a flat voice. I waited expectantly until he added, “Her body was stuffed in a Dumpster. She’s been dead since last night.”

I winced. Poor Reggie was going to have another blow.

“And her mother is Mrs. Carver at the nursing home,” Ed continued. “I guess we’d better go and see her. She’s got to be notified of her daughter’s death. And maybe she can tell us more about all this.”

I doubted it, but at least, I thought, her mental condition might mercifully spare her from the full realization of what had happened to her daughter.

We went to Mrs. Carver’s private room but the door was locked. Knocking brought no results, so we found a nurse who helped hunt for her.

“She’s here somewhere,” the nurse assured us. “I saw her wheeling down the hallway not more than half an hour ago.”

When the sun room and patio revealed no Mrs. Carver, the nurse acquired a worried look, pulled out a batch of keys, and went at the door to Mrs. Carver’s room. As it swung open, she gasped, and so did Ed and I.

Signs of a hasty exit were everywhere: drawers hung open, the bathrobe Mrs. Carver had worn yesterday was flung on the floor, the mattress was half off the bed, and there were several empty brown paper bags strewn around the floor.

“She couldn’t have done this by herself — she’s practically helpless,” the nurse cried.

Then things began to click in my head. I ran toward the front of the building. We were on the second floor, and as I started down the stairway, I glanced out the window. There was Mrs. Carver, hurriedly stuffing two small suitcases into the back of a cab and scrambling in after them.

Ed and the nurse, who were right behind me, saw her too. “Is that her?” Ed asked.

I nodded as the astonished nurse said, “For two months I’ve been pushing her around in that wheelchair and she can walk as well as I can!”

“Where’s the nearest phone?” Ed barked.

The nurse quickly led him to a small, empty office where he called the taxi company for the destination of the cab that had made the pickup at the nursing home. When he found out it was headed for the airport, he called his office, briefly filled in an officer, then told him to tail the cab, and keep Mrs. Carver in sight after she got out.

His police officer’s eye had picked up an amazing amount of detail about her clothing and appearance. He gave all this again to the airport security office, asking them to detain anybody she met after she got there. He was particularly interested in the two small bags she was carrying.

Then he and I hopped into his car and headed for the airport, hoping we might at least be in time to catch the last act in this drama of the smiling old lady who had suddenly recovered her lost youth. Ed tuned in his radio, and we advised airport security of where the cab was entering the terminal so they could have a reception committee on hand if Mrs. Carver met anyone there.

We were in luck. She got out of the cab tailed by several of Ed’s men and rushed in to a ticket counter. Then she hurried down the concourse, the two bags clutched tightly in her hands, and met a group of five of her “children,” all grown men. Just as the boarding call sounded for her plane, another man and a woman joined the group and all headed for the gate.

At that point, airport security and Ed’s men moved in and surrounded the happy family. A few bolted, but were quickly caught. By then, Ed and I had arrived at the terminal and headed down the concourse to the gate where the family gathering had gone sour.

We immediately spotted familiar faces: Gilbert was there, as was the nervous, twitchy Bob Colvin, and Cliff Dorgan, the former jewelry store employee. Ed noted others whose acquaintance he had made in the course of his work. “Mother” Carver was holding forth in some of the gamiest language I had ever heard. Gone were her engaging smile and her vacant stare. In fluent street language she reviewed the stupidity of some of her “children,” the calumny of the police, and various breeding problems of the rest of humanity.

One of Ed’s men was holding both her bags, and this piqued her no end. She kept announcing her legal rights of privacy and other irrelevancies. We were sure that much of the remaining stolen jewelry was there.

“Do we book the whole group for burglary, captain?” one of Ed’s men asked as we approached.

Ed nodded. “That and murder,” he answered. “Somebody here decided to prune the family tree last night.”

At that several handcuffed individuals started to scream denials and point at Gilbert.

“Mother” Carver silenced them all with some choice verbs from her vast vocabulary of juicy expressions.

Later, by questioning each person separately, we found that they were all unrelated except by their interest in other people’s jewelry. We also learned that Violet had started to set up a spinoff business for herself by stashing some of the loot away instead of turning it in to Mrs. Carver at the nursing home. She intended to use it as a kind of dowry so that she and Reggie could run off to a tropical isle and live happily ever after — after she got Reggie to agree to this plan, which she hadn’t yet shared with him. Apparently her feeling for him was true love after all — in her fashion.

Mrs. Carver had become suspicious of the short returns Violet was bringing in and had instructed the others to put pressure on her to reveal her hiding place. Gilbert, the others agreed, had pressed too hard, forcing the group to make a run for fresh territory.

When it was all over, my worst problem was how to break all this to Reggie before it flashed on the front page of every newspaper. But I needn’t have worried.

After my gentle explanation to him of the basic facts, he sat in my office staring straight ahead and not blinking.

“My emotional responses are a bit flattened by all that has happened,” he said stiffly. “Please understand if I don’t openly exhibit the proper affect. In time I’ll adjust although the trauma will leave an indelible mark on my psyche.”

I concluded that he meant that it had hit him flat in the face and he needed a while to get over the jolt. That Violet was actually part of the gang and had never told him her real occupation seemed to preoccupy him most.

“It must have been due to her unhappy childhood,” he said.

“What happened to her as a child?” I inquired gently.

“I don’t know. She never mentioned it,” he admitted. “But she must have suffered an early-life trauma or she wouldn’t have tried to compensate for it with a life of crime,” he concluded, rounding out his circular logic.