Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 44, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1999

Missing Persons by Jas. R. Petrin

Returning from lunch with his meal repeating under his ribs, Chief Robideau was in no mood to display charm at finding Mrs. Robideau and a woman who looked like a small, anxious poodle waiting for him in his office. He mumbled a greeting, sat down, and rummaged in a desk drawer for an antacid pill. Mrs. Robideau jumped to her feet and fastened a scathing look on him.

“Where have you been?” Then, preferring her own response, she added, “I know where. Out wasting time while criminals go skulking around. Sometimes I wonder why we pay our taxes!”

“One reason we pay our taxes,” the chief gently reminded her, “is so that I can continue to draw my salary.” He swallowed one of the tablets dry, peering blearily around for something to wash it down with.

“This,” declared Mrs. Robideau, indicating the small woman as if introducing a royal personage, “is Betty-Anne Bretton, and she has a crime to report. Hear that? A crime! Go on, Bets, tell him. If he tries to bully you, I’m right here.”

The little woman continued to stare fixedly at the chief as if concerned that he might jump up at any moment and make a rush at her. She had a tiny voice.

“It’s... it’s something that I heard in the disposal chute.”

“In the what?” The chief’s rumble pressed the little woman back an inch.

“In the garbage chute,” interjected Mrs. Robideau, “aren’t you listening? Are you going to interrupt, or are you going to let her have her say?”

The chief rumbled again but said nothing. The woman explained, “I live in the Highcliff Apartments. I wasn’t actually in the disposal chute, of course, I was standing in front of it, holding the flap open, ready to drop my kitchen Tidy Bag in. That’s when I heard it.”

“Heard what?”

“Heard the murderer. I’ll remember his words for the rest of my life. They made my blood run cold! He said, ‘If you play games with me, I’ll fix you good.’ That’s what I heard. Those very words.”

The chief closed his eyes. “And you think that was a murder threat?”

“Well, the voice said—”

“ ‘I’ll fix you.’ That could mean a number of things.”

Betty-Anne closed her mouth with an audible click and turned in desperation to Mrs. Robideau, who placed a supportive hand on her shoulder. “Dear,” she advised, “be patient. The official mind is slow on the take sometimes, and things aren’t helped by the fact that my husband has obviously eaten something disagreeable for lunch instead of the nice sandwich I made him. It’s in his desk drawer. I looked. He’ll throw it away later. He thinks food grows on trees.”

“It does,” the chief reminded her. “And I’d have eaten that sandwich except that I was at the Sunrise Diner earlier, quoting our new bylaws to Rani Probal, the owner, and he practically shoved his chili burger special down my throat.”

Mrs. Robideau observed him as if from a distance.

“Yes, I can see how that might happen. He tied you to a chair with aprons and force-fed you with a pair of tongs. Now he’ll vanish from your inspection list.” She raised an eyebrow. “It’s strange how that happens. Like some kind of an X-File.”

The chief wisely abandoned the argument. “What about those details? If somebody’s making threats, I’ll look into it.”

“Looking is one thing,” said Mrs. Robideau airily. “Doing something is quite another. But there’s detail if you want it. We believe the threat was carried out, don’t we, dear?”

Betty-Anne nodded. “Well, I... I mean — yes!”

“Then let’s have it,” Robideau said. He wasn’t convinced. End of Main was small, the budget was small. Even when he had staff to assist him (a condition that came and went with each balance sheet), the chief dealt with every report personally, and in his experience most complaints derived from misunderstandings that could be put right with a phone call. But he tried to sound less grumpy. “Take your time.”

“Go ahead, dear,” said Mrs. Robideau encouragingly.

“Well, this all started a few weeks ago, on a Wednesday. I know it was Wednesday because we’d just had our card party — not a party party, but a get-together in the hospitality room for a few hands of whatever interests us — rummy, euchre, frustration...”

“Yes, yes, go on.” The woman dragged on like a magistrate.

“It was my job to tidy up afterwards. It’s a room we share, you see, and—”

“Right, yes.”

“—so it’s important to keep it tidy. Anyway, I finished up, locked the door, and went down to the end of the hall to drop the trash down the garbage chute.”

Hmm, garbage chute. The chief pulled his new list of potential bylaw infractions out of his top drawer and, yes, there it was, amendment 23: sec. B, para. 4: Trash disposal chutes prohibited... No new construction; existing installations to be sealed up in favor of recycling bins and the town’s normal refuse collection. As the chair of the Green Committee had argued, one couldn’t have people anonymously popping unsorted rubbish down a chute into an incinerator, plastics and God-only-knew-what-else spewing toxic fumes into the air. The chief saw the problem, but he did have other concerns — like the graffiti that seemed to be spreading like a blight throughout the town.

“The chute door is set in the wall. Heavy iron, a flap that lifts up. As soon as I raised it, I heard that voice.” Mrs. Bretton shuddered. “It was so cruel and cutting. I could easily imagine that threat being carried out.”

I’m sure you could, the chief thought. “Did you recognize the voice?”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t hear clearly.”

“Do you know where it came from?”

“It’s a chute. It serves every floor. I don’t know what else it connects to. You could ask the janitor.”

“And who’s that?”

“Leonard Boski.”

The chief winced. He knew Leonard. He was doubtful that Leonard could tell him anything besides the exact operating hours of every pub in a ten mile radius.

“Okay, so you heard this threat, but you also claim that the actual crime was committed.”

“Oh yes.” She was gaining confidence. She sat on the edge of her chair, erect, as if to convince him by her physical bearing.

“You see, Miss Lemay has disappeared.”

“Who?” The chief scowled. “Angela Lemay. A dancer who lived in our block. No one knew her well. She took the top corner suite only a week after old Mr. Jarvis left. But we tried to make her feel welcome — we all did. And now—”

“You say she was a dancer?”

“That’s right. Oh, not one of those kind. A real dancer. Ballet. A very cultured girl from the city who was going to open a dance school right here in town. Mr. Overberg — our landlord — says she was lucky to come along just when an empty suite was available.”

The chief cleared his throat. “So you want me to find this woman?”

Mrs. Bretton looked baffled.

“Well, certainly. We’re very afraid for her.”

“But you don’t know that the threat you overheard was directed at her—”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” interjected Mrs. Robideau, “she’s missing, isn’t she?”

“We can assume she’s missing, but there are less fanciful explanations. She could have gone on a holiday, be visiting friends, or—”

“Or she could be the victim of a horrendous outrage,” pronounced Mrs. Robideau, leaving no doubt that she had put up with all the procrastination she was going to. “For crying in the sink, aren’t you paying attention? A woman is threatened, then — poof! — disappears! If that doesn’t concern you, then no woman’s safe. Not even me. Especially not me!”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that with a husband as dense as you looking out for me, I might as well give myself up to the nearest murderer right this minute. Hang out a sign. ‘Easy pickings. Husband dumb as a post.’ ” She steered Betty-Anne to the door by the arm. “Don’t strain yourself over those new bylaws!”

“You did what?”

Mrs. Remillard stopped dealing the cards and stared openmouthed at Betty-Anne Bretton, who had a new confidence, bearding Robideau the way she had. “I went to see Chief Robideau, and told him about Miss Lemay.” She added quickly, defensively, “Just like I said I would!”

“We know what you said, dear, but—”

“Let’s not argue,” broke in Mrs. Pashniak worriedly, “I’m anxious to hear what the chief is going to do about the matter.”

“He’s looking into it.”

“Looking into it?” This was Mrs. Hundt, the remaining member of the foursome. “Then he’d better wear his bifocals. When it comes to crime, Chief Robideau couldn’t see a cow on a dining room table unless it was well-done with mashed potatoes on the side.” She let out something between a snigger and a snort. “And just when does this amazing event come about? Probably not until the men in white coats arrive to—”

A beep from the intercom silenced her. They sat there wide-eyed a moment, then Betty-Anne got up and pressed the button.

“Who... who is it?”

The voice was official-sounding. “It’s Chief Robideau, Mrs. Bretton. I’d like to talk with you, if I may.”

Close up, he seemed very large. One didn’t notice that so much in the queue at the grocery store, or in the Legion on a Saturday night. But he seemed pleased at finding them all together and wasted no time asking whether they were all of one opinion about the new tenant, top floor, corner suite.

“She’s missing, all right,” confirmed Mrs. Hundt. “I took her some cheese pirogies — I give everybody cheese pirogies — but I didn’t get no answer even after I knocked at her door for fifteen minutes.”

“Fifteen minutes?” The chief raised his eyebrows.

“Well, it seemed like fifteen minutes, though maybe it wasn’t quite that long. Anyways, no answer, so I went back and put the pirogies in the fridge. Someone’ll eat them. They’re the best ones going.”

“Mine are dam good,” asserted Mrs. Remillard with a snippy lift of her chin.

“Your cabbage rolls are, dear, but—”

“Yes, yes,” Chief Robideau said. “What else can you tell me? Who saw the young lady last?”

“That was me,” admitted Mrs. Remillard. “I’d just got home from the bakery, set my bags down to fish out my key, and I hear this sniffling. I look, and there’s Miss Lemay sitting in the stairwell, head down, crying her eyes out. She scurried off without one word. I never did know what she was weeping about.”

“You’d weep,” Mrs. Hundt reminded her, “if you were about to be killed!”

“Only if I seen it coming.”

A chill silence descended as the ramifications of that thought gripped them.

“This happened...” Robideau urged Mrs. Remillard.

“Two and a half, three weeks ago. On a Monday — that’s when I shop. Must of been — let’s see — the twenty-eighth of last month.”

“And you live...”

“Top floor, same as she does — did.”

The chief frowned. “I’m trying to picture it. There must be a fire door on your stairwell — there’s a bylaw about that — so how could you see her? And with the steps leading down, her face would be turned away...”

“Nope, there’s one more flight. There’s a storage room up there where they keep old furniture, things like that. And the fire door don’t close properly.”

Another infraction. The chief made a mental note. “Anything else?” Robideau turned to the uncommunicative Mrs. Pashniak. “What about you? You’re awful quiet.”

Mrs. Pashniak flushed red. “I... I don’t know anything. Except that she’s a nice, quiet girl.”

“Well behaved, was she?”

“Quiet as a clam,” confirmed Mrs. Remillard. “All the racket in this place comes from the super and his friends. Inner-moanious bunch.”

“Excuse me?”

“She means inharmonious,” said Mrs. Hundt, who did crosswords; she added, “Or something.” Then with concern: “Are you going to get to the bottom of this, Chief Robideau?”

The chief’s reply was a noncommittal flown.

“Look,” Leonard Boski argued, fingers spread in the air as if to fend off blame, “I don’t know nothing about bylaws. If you say the chute’s illegal, I’ll believe it. I just work here. Don’t shoot the piano player.”

The chief stood by patiently as Boski went on clinking with deliberation through a gigantic ring of keys. “Funny, this is a different lock from the others. But I got something that’ll open it, something I keep for emergencies.”

The chief noted the new lock on the door of the apartment, brass-colored and shiny, unlike the dull gray locks on the other doors along the hall. “It’s not standard practice here then, I take it, to change locks when the suite changes hands?”

Leonard shrugged. “Couldn’t say. I ain’t been here a month. I only took the job ’cause my pogie ran out.” To the chief’s dismay he lost his place in the ring and started over again. “I doubt it, though. Normally you just re-key ’em.” Finally he displayed a small instrument that looked like a short, bent pick. “Here’s the puppy.” He fitted it, jiggled it, and amazingly the door opened. He seemed suddenly troubled. “You don’t suppose she’s lying in here dead of a heart attack, do you?”

Robideau nudged him aside.

The suite was disordered. Rumpled clothes, scattered magazines, soiled dishes. A lot of plants. Despite the untidiness, the furniture appeared new and expensive, a colossal TV ogling blankly at them from one corner, faced by a sofa and armchair in white leather. The air smelled faintly skunky.

Boski wrinkled his nose. “Pooh. I hope that ain’t her!”

Robideau moved slowly about the room, glancing left and right, and stopped at the kitchen, a small ell off the main room. Cold pots on a stove. Congealed fat in a pan. A smell of bacon. He moved on to the bedroom and found the same innocuous disorder: an open closet, more scattered clothes, an unmade bed — the biggest he’d ever seen in his life. Boski brightened, realizing there was no decomposing body to deal with. “The bed’s been slept in. That’s a good thing, right?”

“Not especially. We don’t know when it was slept in.”

Robideau noted with misgiving that the clock on the bedside table was exactly one hour slow.

The small bathroom yielded no insights, except that it was spotlessly clean and tidy compared with the rest of the suite.

Nowhere was there a picture of the girl herself, which was disappointing; it was always nice to know what somebody looked like when you were searching for them.

“All right,” said the chief. “That’ll do.” He hadn’t learned much, certainly nothing from which to draw inferences as to the tenant’s whereabouts, but he was here investigating a suspicious circumstance, a woman’s disappearance, and after ascertaining that she was not in the suite, possibly sick or in trouble, he could not intrude further. He paused by a dieffenbachia plant, poked into its depths, and gently extracted a small plastic gnome pinioned to the soil on a long peg. He examined it, then replaced it.

“What next?” asked Leonard.

“The mailbox.”

Entering the lobby, where mail slots lined the wall in three flat, brass-faced tiers, Leonard Boski suddenly advanced a complaint of his own. “Chief,” he groused, “when are you goin’ to stop the little beggars in this town from scribbling gerfeedy over hell’s half-acre? They done a number on the back of this place, and the owner’s all over me about it. ‘Clean it off,’ he says, but he don’t say how.” In a narrow room behind the mailboxes, he opened a steel panel that exposed the backs of one whole tier. The slot labeled 623 was empty except for a standard record dub offer. “Those came this morning,” he commented. “I got one, too.”

Robideau glanced at the envelope with little interest. “About that lock,” he said, disarmingly returning to the earlier discussion, “if you didn’t install it, who did? The previous caretaker?”

“I doubt it. Not Dal Reeves. Only thing Dal could install was his butt into a chair. And anyways, he’d been gone three, four months already before I arrived, and she got here after that. She must of done it herself.”

“Why would she if the management would re-key it?”

“Maybe she didn’t know any better. Or maybe the management wouldn’t help her. Ask the owner when you spring it on him about the illegal garbage chute.” He chuckled. “He’s gonna love that. Anyways, the girl’s bed was slept in, and you can see she’s been clearing her mail, so she must be coming around here sometimes, right?”

Robideau handed back the envelope without comment. As he moved to the door, Leonard called after him, “So what are you goin’ to do about them gerfeedy criminals, huh?”

The chief sat in his car thinking. He agreed with the cantankerous Boski that, at least superficially, things appeared normal. The apartment was messy but not alarmingly so. Nothing overturned or broken, no sign of foul play. But certain things were troubling. The clock showing winter time when it ought to have been rolled forward to daylight-saving ten days ago. The girl was last seen on the twenty-ninth — almost a week before the clocks changed. And then there were the plants. Mrs. Robideau kept plants and wouldn’t dream of neglecting them. If she went away, she left explicit instructions as to their care — water twice a week and a careful dusting of the leaves — and woe to the chief if he forgot.

Miss Lemay liked plants, too. Dressing them up with little ornaments like that gnome. If she had been missing since before the clocks changed, her plants ought to be pretty dry. But the soil that little gnome was sitting on was as moist as a West Coast rain forest.

Somebody was watering those plants.

Roald Overberg, owner of the Highcliff Apartments, was a tall, observant septuagenarian erect as an obelisk behind the calf-lined blotter of his teakwood desk. He gazed back at Robideau with eyes like two bright blue crystals. His skin was tanned, the legacy of a winter vacation. He wore a gray silk tie, a cashmere sweater, and showed half an inch of starched white shirtcuff at both wrists.

“The letters went out two months ago,” Robideau told him. “You must have got one. Besides, the new bylaws are the talk of the town.”

Overberg shrugged, displaying a patronizing smile. “I generally disregard the ‘talk of the town,’ chief. To a man of my years it hardly seems relevant. And as to the letter, well, no doubt it’s misfiled. I’m not as organized as I once was.”

The chief replied with a doubtful glance. The room was tidy to the point of fastidiousness, even the objects on the desk appearing to have been positioned with a special template. He said:

“There’s one other matter...”

“Oh?” Overberg’s trim gray eyebrows moved.

“It seems as though one of your tenants is missing.”

“Really? How strange. I’ve never misplaced one before.”

Robideau gave him a caustic look. “Don’t you want to know who I’m referring to?”

“Oh yes. Of course.”

“I mean Miss Angela Lemay. She’s not been seen for weeks. You weren’t aware of it?”

Overberg’s teeth were startlingly white in that tan face.

“Chief Robideau. Really. People lead their own lives. It’s not my province to meditate on their whereabouts. But since you drive me to it, my guess would be that she’s on a vacation.”

“That’s my guess, too, but I need to nail down some dates. Can you show me her last rental payment? She doesn’t use postdated checks, I hope.”

“As a matter of fact, she pays cash.”

“Then you’ll have a receipt stub.”

Overberg studied him. Still smiling, he made a circular motion with his hand. “Again, it will be here somewhere. I need time to locate it, that’s all.”

“Fine. I’ll call back. One last thing. The lock’s been changed on her apartment. When was that done?”

“I have no idea.”

“Not changed by you at her request?”

Did his smile twitch slightly? “No, sir, it wasn’t.”

“Doesn’t it bother you, people changing locks like that? I’d imagine you’d want access in some situations.”

“Good Lord, chief, I don’t have access personally. I leave that to my superintendent. I have enough keys to lug around.” He flourished a key fob, which Robideau’s sharp eyes noticed held only four keys and a small metal charm.

“It seems odd,” Robideau said, “that she’d replace a lock at her own expense when she could have had you re-key the old one.”

“When you find her you’ll have to ask her about that, won’t you?”

Robideau held the steely blue gaze a moment, then got up.

“I hope,” he said from the door, “you’ll act promptly on those bylaw infractions. The fire door. And that garbage chute...”

Missing person reports were not common in End of Main, and so Chief Robideau was surprised to receive a second one the very next day. Even more interesting was the name and address of the complainant, Mrs. Tozer. She lived one street over from the Highcliff — in fact, just across the alley from it. She could not locate her son, a man of about forty who was no stranger to Chief Robideau’s files. Edward Tozer (Ted, his mom called him) had been accused of unsavory acts in the past, several times being a suspect in the mutilation of neighborhood pets.

Mrs. Tozer was as he remembered her, a heavy woman with an aura of doom about her. She had no idea where poor Teddy could be.

Robideau asked, “Was there an argument between the two of you? Was he threatening to go off on his own?”

“His clothes are still in his closet, aren’t they? And his money — all what he had — is still in the tin box under his bed. He wouldn’t leave that. Not on purpose.”

“All right, Mrs. Tozer, let’s visit his room.”

She led him up a malodorous staircase, wheezing asthmatically like someone unaccustomed to the climb. Probably, Robideau thought, she hadn’t been up these stairs in years.

There was scarcely space for the two of them in the half-story room. It had walls of half-height that angled up to a low, narrow ceiling. The bed was a tangle of sheets. The walls were covered with posters, and realizing the violent nature of some of them, Robideau’s jaw tightened. Not typical movie horror scenes, this was neo-Nazi stuff, hateful and vicious. Sensing his disapproval, Mrs. Tozer was defensive. “I know what you’re thinking, but it’s just something he’s going through.”

Good Lord. And the man was forty.

A sheet of drawing paper lay on a rickety sideboard, covered with writing that was heavily stylistic. Fat, pillowy, indecipherable characters. The markings repeated as if whoever made them had been practicing penmanship.

“Has Ted taken up calligraphy?”

“I dunno. What’s that?”

“Fancy writing.”

“Oh, he can write okay. He’s not stupid, you know.”

Back they went down the creaking stairs. At the door, the woman told Robideau emotionlessly, “I hope you find him soon. It’s important.”

Robideau paused. “How so?”

“He’s got a job. He was looking for ages, since you told him that’s what he should do, but no luck. Then a man offered him work. A man he met someplace.” She swung her head morosely. “He’s already done a few things for him.”

“What sort of work is it?”

“Ted never told me.”

“Did you meet his employer?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you know anything about him? Anything at all?”

She screwed up her heavy face in concentration. “Well, sir, one thing. Ted said he wore an overcoat that could of paid off our mortgage.”

This time the tanned face appeared strained. In a slow, practiced movement, Overberg cupped the back of his head with linked fingers and leaned back, as though to communicate a relaxed sincerity.

“I know of Ted Tozer. Who doesn’t in this town? But he doesn’t work for me, and even if he did, I trust that wouldn’t be a crime under some new bylaw.” He went on gratuitously. “We may have been seen together. We talked at the mall one day. A chance encounter.”

“Oh? Did he mention during that conversation that he was thinking about moving out of his mother’s house?”

“Why, I believe he did. Called her an old bag. Said he was fed up with her. I chastised him, of course. ‘She’s your mother,’ I told him.”

“That cheered him up, I’m sure.”

“Ah... not exactly. But I did give him food for thought.”

“Do you know where he might have gone?”

“He mentioned something about Texas, I think.”

Robideau contemplated the aging but still handsome face. He considered Tozer’s sudden departure, abandoned belongings, and forgotten cash. “Mr. Overberg, let me tell you my problem. I don’t often have missing persons to find, but here I have two of them. And you’re connected to both.”

Overberg chafed his thin, clean hands. “Hardly connected. I have many tenants, after all. And surely I’m not the only person to have spoken to Mr. Tozer in the last while.”

“Still, it’s strange.”

“It isn’t really. A small coincidence. One of life’s little pranks.”

He laughed dryly.

You’d better hope, the chief thought, that the joke’s not on you.

“What it is,” Leonard Boski indignantly informed his visitors, Wilmer Gates and Chuck Lang, with insistence, “kids nowadays got no respect. It’s like they figure they got clearance from God almighty to go slap gerfeedy all over the place. And I’m supposed to get it off? How? You answer me that!” His pals sat on crates in the furnace room with their beers in their hands, staring thoughtfully into space as if they expected the solution to leap into their minds, filling a blank spot. And Lord knew they had blank spots. Big enough to roll a combine-harvester through. But for some reason Leonard put up with them; maybe because they put up with him.

“We didn’t do gerfeedy when I was a kid,” Leonard announced, defying anyone to refute it.

“What did you do?” Chuck asked. He burped hugely and fisted his chest.

“When I was a kid,” Leonard said wistfully, “we’d sit around someplace and make rockets and stuff.”

Rockets? Both Wilmer and Chuck came to attention.

“You made rockets?” Incredulity flickered across Chuck’s simple face. “I never figured you for no rocket scientist.”

“What’s that s’posed to mean?”

“Well, you never been the sharpest tack on the chair, after all. And you made rockets?”

“We didn’t invent ’em, you mutt, we just made ’em. A cardboard tube. Saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal shook in a jelly can with some marbles till our arms practically fell off, making fuel fine as baby powder. We launched her from a hunk of rain trough stuck in a picket fence. That sucker’d climb two hunnerd feet in four seconds.”

“You could of blown something off,” said Chuck. He winked at Wilmer. “Maybe he did.”

“Dangerous materials are no problem when you know what’s what.”

“Hoo,” said Chuck. “Hoo, haw! I feel safer already, don’t you, Wilmer?”

“Hoo, haw!” Wilmer said.

There was a far-off hollow clang, a growing, bumbling sound, then a sudden slam followed by a whump! as something shot into the heart of the furnace.

“That’ll be Mrs. Remillard tossin’ her cat poopies out,” Leonard muttered. He stood up and wandered over to a cluttered workbench overhung by shelving that groaned under containers of miscellaneous paints and chemicals. “Now, let’s see what we got to clean that gerfeedy off with...”

“I thought Robideau told you to seal up that chute,” Chuck said.

“He did. See the owner, I told him. What do I look like, I said. Some real estate baron?”

“You look,” opined Wilmer Gates, “like a gas fitter.”

“Thanks.” Leonard held out a can at arm’s length to read the fine print, then gave it up. “Anyways, the chief’s busy looking for one of the tenants that’s disappeared.” He recounted the chief’s visit. “I think those old ladies got too much time on their hands. Maybe they should clean off the gerfeedy.”

Someone coughed gently, and their heads swiveled toward the door, where an impassive, no-nonsense face was glowering in.

“Leonard, can I see you a moment?” the chief said.

Boski straightened. “Okay. But I ain’t received no instructions yet, what to do about the garbage chute.”

Out in the hallway the chief told Boski, “If I said that someone claims they heard voices in that chute, what would you say?”

“Depends who heard ’em, chief.” Smirking. “You?”

“Just answer the question.”

The janitor clawed at his grizzled chin. “Well, you could hear voices coming from any floor where there’s an access door standing open. But people usually drop their rubbish in, then beat it. The doors are heavy. They close on their own.”

“I know,” the chief replied, “I tried one.”

Leonard continued, “But there is another type of door on the chute, the kind that stays open on a latch. One here in the furnace room, another one upstairs.”

“Upstairs?”

“Way upstairs. On the roof, practically. In a storage room there.”

The chief nodded. “What do they keep there?”

“Not much, really. Lot of old stoves and fridges that crapped out. Some raggedy old carpet. A bunch of plumbing stuff.”

“I’d like to see in that room.”

“You would?” Boski got a clever look. “Okay, I’ll give you the grand tour. But on one condition. That you come out back with me after and see a real crime scene. The criminal gerfeedy vandalism plastered on the back of this building.”

The chief agreed.

But the storage room was a disappointment. It was a wide, bright area, windows on three sides, one large room. Nothing much in it but disused appliances and other odds and sods, as Boski had said. But there was indeed a chute access door that could be latched in an open position. The conversation that had so upset Betty-Anne Bretton could have taken place here.

“Is this room kept locked?”

“Pretty much.”

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“You can take it as a yes.”

“Thank you. We can look at that graffiti now, if you insist.”

The back of the building was a mess, all right. Someone had done a real number on it. Spray-painted markings galloped across an area some twenty feet wide.

“So?” growled Leonard, “don’t this break a bylaw?” He flung out a hand at the swirls and loops. “My boss is somethin’ hot about it. Never seen him so riled. Either the gerfeedy goes, he says, or I do.”

The chief backed away, studying the markings. They were highly stylized, almost Cyrillic, composed of fat puffy characters. Only with intense scrutiny could he flesh out any actual characters. One grouping looked as if it might be the word “secretary.”

“What’s it mean?” he asked.

“You tell me, chief.”

Then something clicked. The chief realized he’d seen markings like this before but on a smaller scale. It was much like the writing he’d seen in Ted Tozer’s room.

“How long has this been here?”

“About two weeks.”

Robideau let out an uneasy breath. The timing could be coincidental, but that required a faith in coincidence far beyond anything Robideau could summon.

“Listen,” he said, “I don’t want you to clean this off.”

“Huh? The boss said—”

“Never mind what he said. Play around with it, find a solvent that works on it, but don’t actually erase the words till I say you can. Got that?”

Seeking a few peaceful moments in which to compose his thoughts, Robideau stopped at a sleepy coffeeshop, the paper from Ted’s room, compliments of Mrs. Tozer, tucked into his pocket. It was too dark now to inspect the graffiti; he would do so first thing in the morning. For now he would content himself with mulling things over.

Poking around the girl’s suite, inspecting her meager mail, interviewing her neighbors, the chief had learned nothing conclusive. The ladies had been helpful to a point, and forthcoming — with the possible exception of Mrs. Pashniak. She almost seemed frightened, as if she knew more than she was telling.

On the other hand, she might simply be afraid for the missing girl.

As for the disappearance of a man who may have defaced the rear of the Highcliff apartments, was it coincidence? Not likely. With a connection running from Tozer to Overberg, and from Overberg to Angela Lemay, one couldn’t dismiss the matter so easily. Besides, Tozer was a middle-aged man. Why on earth would he be scrawling graffiti?

He drank some coffee.

But if Ted were the graffiti bandit, was he caught by Angela Lemay scribbling on the rear of the building? Had she admonished him, and had all that bottled up hate and spite come boiling out, driving him to attack her, and — perhaps unintentionally — knock her head too hard against the wall? Panicking, had he hidden the body in the dumpster and run off?

But why wait so long? He’d hung about another two weeks or more, and in that time would surely have calmed down long enough to pack a suitcase.

And then there was Overberg, who, like Mrs. Pashniak, seemed to know more than he was admitting to.

But none of this explained the voices in the chute, or Miss Lemay’s distress on the staircase as dutifully reported by Mrs. Remillard.

Start over.

Suppose Tozer had attacked Lemay and was seen by someone. This “someone” later emerged with a blackmail threat, prompting Tozer to flee...

But you don’t blackmail a penniless loser.

Robideau ordered a sour-milk doughnut. He lacked information. He didn’t know precisely when Lemay had come to harm, or even if she had come to harm. The plants were being seen to, the mail was being collected, but the clock showed the wrong time. Of course, resetting the clock would be a priority only to somebody actually living there. And Overberg had yet to produce that canceled check...

Overberg.

These were murky waters, but every time Robideau stirred them, the old businessman bobbed up like a cork.

So turn it around. Say Overberg was the instrument of Miss Lemay’s disappearance and Tozer the witness. It hung together better. Tozer’s bedroom overlooked the rear of the Highcliff, so conceivably he might have witnessed something. And if that incident were compromising to Overberg?

Tozer attempts blackmail. A reasonable assumption — the man being a cheat and a crook. Overberg doesn’t respond. Tozer applies pressure with some fake graffiti, emulating the stuff appearing all over town. (If only Robideau knew what that damned scrawling meant!) But despite Tozer’s efforts, Overberg identifies his tormentor, perhaps by determining which house and window have a view of the crime scene. Exposed, Tozer takes off running.

The argument was rickety, in need of a crutch, but it could stand. There were missing elements, such as the nature of the relationship between Overberg and Lemay. The chief didn’t know yet that there had been a relationship.

But Robideau smiled inwardly. He was starting to get somewhere.

The following day, Tozer’s hieroglyphs in hand, Robideau drove to the Highcliff. He walked up the alley to the back of the building, where some boys were amusing themselves by bouncing a hockey puck off the side of the garbage dumpster.

He quickly settled one thing. The two sets of markings were a match, with identical if indecipherable words appearing both on the wall and on the sheet of paper. They were the product of the same hand. Apparently, as he had surmised, Boski’s “gerfeedy kid” was none other than Ted Tozer, a middle-aged man. Robideau struggled with it. Secretary. An unlikely word. Might this actually be “secret,” with a flowery embellishment tagged on?

On impulse he called to the boys. One of them ambled over, cautious but inquisitive. “We’re not hurting anything,” he said defensively.

“I can see that. But I’ve got a question — if you can answer it.”

“My mom told me not to talk to strangers,” the boy said deadpan, eliciting a burst of hilarity from his pals.

“That’s good advice. I doubt if you can explain it anyway.”

“Explain what?” The boy shuffled closer.

“Well, I’m wondering why this graffiti is so hard to decipher. I mean, if someone wants to say something, why not make sure people can read it?”

“People can read it,” said the boy. “Some people.”

“People like you?”

“Sure. It’s like you don’t want just anybody reading your mail, right?”

“You can’t read this, though.”

“Sure I can.” The boy looked at the wall. “It says, ‘Secrets don’t keep. Pay me.’ ”

Robideau reappraised the fat, pillowy characters, and immediately the phrase jumped out at him. The boy was right! Secrets Don’t Keep. Pay Me!

“I don’t suppose you know who wrote this,” he said hopefully.

“Nope, I don’t. But they weren’t really serious.”

“How do you know?”

“ ’Cause they didn’t sign it. See, a guy’s serious, he initials his work.”

Robideau looked at markings on the dumpster. Sure enough, every effort was initialed, like a work of art.

“Thanks,” said Robideau.

“No problem.” The boy slouched away, slapping the ground with his stick.

Now, said Robideau, pleased with himself, onward and upward! He would take on Mrs. Pashniak. Get something out of her if he had to give her the third degree.

Mrs. Pashniak received him sheepishly, as if she had been waiting for him to call and confront her. But she had enough spunk to put him on the defensive. “Have you found her, Chief Robideau?”

“No, not yet, but...”

“Did you figure out where the voice was coming from?”

Robideau informed her it might have come from the furnace room or from the upstairs storage room, but he was forced to admit he had not gone further along that line of investigation.

“Then you should, chief. You should. After all, it’s where all this started.”

“I don’t disagree. But there’s some unfinished business between you and me, isn’t there?”

The sheepish look returned.

“This changes things,” she said as if to herself.

“Changes what, Mrs. Pashniak?”

“I lay awake all night fretting about it. I made a promise, and I don’t take my promises lightly. But as I said, things have changed.”

“Do you know where Miss Lemay is?”

She shook her head. “No. I wish I could tell you that, but I can’t.”

“Then...”

She silenced him with a raised hand, opened a drawer in the coffee table, extracted two keys and a small plastic bag, and thrust them at him. “Miss Lemay meant to go away, you see, and asked me to keep an eye on things. Take in her mail, water her plants until she sent for them — she loved plants. But she made me agree not to tell anyone. She never said as much but I got the feeling she’d be in awful trouble with somebody if they knew she was sneaking away secretly like that.”

“But if you knew she was leaving, why did you worry?”

“I didn’t. It was the other girls who worried. I thought I knew what was going on, but then...” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “Then I started thinking, what if something happened to her before she got away? What then? So I decided to tell you.”

Robideau nodded. “This at least explains why the plants weren’t dried out.” He took the mail and leafed through it. It didn’t amount to much, but then the girl hadn’t been here long enough to establish a presence. There were a few fliers, a cable television bill, and a manila envelope from a national seed company...

His interest quickened.

The manila envelope had been redirected, a previous address scribbled out with a pen.

A previous address.

An address in the city.

“I won’t be arrested over this, will I?” fretted Mrs. Pashniak.

“Not today,” Robideau assured her.

The girl who received him was thin and plain, though with remarkable eyes and a faultless complexion. Her name was Sidney Brixton, and certainly she knew Angela. They had been friends since enrolling in Fine Arts, where Sidney had majored in photography, and Angela in modem dance. Angela had done well. Won some awards for choreography. But she’d had trouble landing employment after graduation.

Sidney Brixton was consternated to hear that her friend had gone missing. The chief said, “You haven’t heard from her, then, since she left?”

“No, sir.”

“You’re not just saying that because she asked you to?”

“Oh, no!”

“You were close, then? Friends and roommates?”

“Yes. Then she went off to that little town. I told her it was silly, that the city was a better place for her, but she was determined. She had a benefactor, she said. A patron. Someone who would help her get established.” Sidney ruefully blinked her large, sad eyes. “She hoped to open a dance school. It was her fallback plan, you see — to teach. But it would take money to set it up, and she didn’t have any.”

“Who was this benefactor?”

“A man. I never actually met him. If he came to get her, they’d meet down at the door. We spoke on the phone a few times, and I didn’t like him because he seemed arrogant. Smug and superior. I never said as much to Angela, though.”

“Why not?”

“She would have had ten fits. She’d have asked me how I could say such a thing about someone I knew nothing about.”

Sidney shrugged. “We parted on good terms, though, and I expected to hear from her.” Her face clouded. “And now I think you’re telling me that I may not hear from her ever again.” Her large eyes glistened.

“I need to find this man,” Robideau said. “Can you tell me his name?”

“Only a pet name. Angela called him Obie.”

Obie, thought Robideau. Overberg?

“He approached her after a school performance. I didn’t go that night. The subject matter didn’t appeal to me.” She frowned disparagingly. “All about forced prostitution during wartime — the brothel camps armies set up. It was a short musical sketch that Angela had choreographed. But I don’t like that stuff. Angela told me later about this older fellow who approached her afterward.”

“This Obie.”

“Yes.”

“So he liked her work... You had your doubts, though, about that?”

“Darn right I did. I thought he was using her.”

I think so, too, the chief thought.

“Do you have a picture of your friend?”

“Of course. I’m a photographer.”

Thank God, Robideau thought.

It was a posed photo in black and white. Sidney explained that there was a whole new movement afoot in black and white photography; she seemed excited by it. What a difference, Robideau thought, between her and the so-called artists who aimed spray cans at fences and walls.

The girl in the picture was dark and pretty. Strong features, hair curling in at her chin. She sat elbows up, fingers interlaced, her face against the back of one hand.

“That’s a curious bracelet she’s wearing,” Robideau said.

“Yes, isn’t it. It’s only pewter, but rather interesting. All those little figures, like charms, sort of, engaged in different forms of dance. She found it in a pawnshop and had to have it. She wore it always.”

Overberg, thought Chief Robideau darkly, heading north out of the city with the wheel clenched in his two big fists. It was Overberg who had befriended Angela. Older, smug, condescending Obie. The smiling man with no answers. Well, he was going to have to come clean before this day was out!

With a sense of forboding he thought about Angela Lemay. He was ready to accept — like Sidney, like the girl’s neighbors, like Mrs. Robideau — that something terrible might well have happened to her. Mr. Overberg had a lot to answer for.

But unfortunately Mr. Overberg was not at home. More accurately, he did not acknowledge his doorbell, nor did he answer his phone. Robideau swallowed his irritation and drove to the Highcliff.

If he couldn’t deal with Overberg directly, he would take Mrs. Pashniak’s advice and go back to the beginning, that voice in the garbage chute. He could probably rule out the furnace room, Leonard Boski’s domain, and go directly back to the storage room at the top of the stairs.

He buzzed Leonard from the door, but it was Chuck Lang who let him in. “Leonard’s a tad busy at the moment, chief. He thought up a surefire concoction to get the paint off them bricks.” Chuck winked. “The man’s a rocket scientist, you know.” The chief wasn’t interested. He relieved Chuck of Boski’s key ring, then took a ride to the top floor.

Again he was struck by the room’s clinical tidiness. He entered reluctantly, concerned lest he disturb some crucial if microscopic evidence.

The room’s contents were in three rough groupings: furniture on the left, unused building materials and fixtures in a small corner on the right, and appliances at the back standing three deep along the wall. There were some large washers and dryers, no doubt originally from the building’s laundry facility; also some old electric ranges, fridges, and freezers.

And the chute access door.

It was quiet up here. Except...

Yes. Very odd. The machines should be disconnected and dead, but one of them was humming, quietly functioning. Why? Moving to investigate, he found that the sound was coming from one of the freezers.

An unpleasant queasiness stirred inside him. Steeling himself, he heaved up on the lid.

It was locked.

Well, if Boski could jimmy apartment doors, Robideau could certainly open a recalcitrant freezer. He found the pick on Boski’s large key ring and applied it to the key slot. The pick wouldn’t fit. But the chief was bound and determined to open this freezer and picked up a length of flat iron from the plumbing corner. He wedged it under the lid, heaved again. With a screech, the catch tore out of the sheet metal.

He threw back the lid.

He had been prepared to discover a human body. What he saw was a long, bent, bundled object, lying hunched in the bottom of the box. It was wrapped in an old window curtain taken from a stack by the door, drapery cords binding it tight. He leaned into the frosty cavity, fumbled with the bindings, pulled them open...

A human hand slipped out, each tiny hair on the back of it sparkling with tiny ice crystals.

“Found what you’re looking for, chief?”

Horrified and startled, Chief Robideau straightened. He turned and found Overberg standing behind him, eyes fixed in an intense, icy hatred.

“It appears,” the older man continued, glancing at the freezer, “that you’ve been prying into things — pardon the pun. I trust you have the appropriate permissions. A warrant would be nice.” He had lost his youthful radiance, the haughty humor missing from his eyes.

“I think we’re past those niceties now,” the chief told him, regaining his composure. “I’m going to guess that it’s Ted Tozer lying in this freezer, and that you can tell me how he got here.”

Overberg hunched his shoulders like some creature in the wild sizing up its predicament. Fight or flight. With the back of one foot, he slowly closed the door.

“You spoke to Ted’s mother. I watched you from this room. Frowzy old mop. Would you believe she’s a decade younger than me?” Behind dusty glass the treetops moved in the cool spring sunshine. “And her son was a piece of work. I peered into him and found a rather twisted soul under that nasty exterior.”

“A twisted soul that you took advantage of.”

“He needed money. I had a job for him.”

“You had a job for him, all right,” the chief remarked, “but not the type of job he could speak openly to his mother about.”

“We came to an agreement—”

“About disposing of Angela Le-may,” the chief put in mercilessly.

Overberg bristled. “No. That shouldn’t have happened! The man was a fool! I wanted him to scare her, make her realize that she needed a protector. But he got carried away. I was devastated.” Overberg sniffed. “Naturally I told him he would have to get rid of the evidence, that it was his problem. Only later did I discover what the maniac had done.”

Overberg’s cold blue eyes turned to the chute.

“My God!” Robideau breathed. He understood now the clinical tidiness of the bathroom in the suite one floor below, and the unnatural cleanliness here in this room. Someone had scoured them. Scrubbed them clean. Tozer must have done his grisly work in her apartment, then slipped up here to use the disposal chute. How many trips had he made? What had he been thinking about?

Overberg was talking again.

“Afterwards he wanted more money, much more. I think his mind had begun to come apart. He had some mad idea that I was fabulously wealthy, that because I owned this modest apartment block I could dash off checks for spectacular stuns. I couldn’t pay anything close to what he was demanding.”

The chief was finding it difficult to take his eyes off the chute. “So you paid him nothing. And to hit back at you, and perhaps change your mind about it, he scrawled that warning on the back of your building.”

“Yes. And I was worried, at first, I’ll admit it. But he wanted those scrawls to look like real graffiti, wanted me to believe some third person knew of our secret — and he outdid himself. When I saw how incomprehensible the markings were, I relaxed a little. Anyway, I knew it was him. It was sneaky. The sort of thing he would do.” Overberg pushed his hands deep in his pockets. “He was an odious man who deserved what he got.”

“So what happened then? I suppose you got him up here to renegotiate, then knocked him on the head with a hunk of that old plumbing. Maybe even this bar.” He looked at the bar in his hand with new appreciation.

The grin returned for a moment, a brief flicker. “He attacked me. It was self-defense.”

“No. He wouldn’t do that. He wanted money from you.” The chief nudged the freezer. “I’d say getting him into this thing was the hard part, but I’m sure you’re fit enough to manage it.” Robideau shook his head. “Why were you so bitter towards Angela?”

For a moment the man seemed uncertain, his confidence gone. He said, as if explaining it to himself, “I suppose I was flattered. A woman her age taking an interest in a man of my years. Oh, I’m well preserved, as they say, but still I was aware of the gulf between us. A regular chasm. And when she seemed ready to overlook it — yes, I was flattered.”

“But you misled her. You had no intention of funding her school.”

“Well, I don’t know. Perhaps if she had shown me a positive business case...”

“You wanted to possess her. Control her. So you got her out of the city, put her up in an apartment, made all sorts of promises to her. But the bottom line was that she was to become your property. You expected thanks of the most physical kind, and when it wasn’t forthcoming, you lost your temper with her. That’s why she wouldn’t let you in the apartment, why you had to meet with her in this room. That’s why she changed the lock on her door.”

Something angry and evil flickered in the old man’s eyes. “She was using me. Leading me on!”

“And so her fate was sealed.”

“All of our fates are sealed, Chief Robideau — yours included.”

Overberg brought his hand out of his pocket then, and there was a pistol in his grip. A very tiny pistol — tiny and deadly. He twitched the thin barrel.

“Get into that freezer.”

Robideau didn’t move. His grip tightened on the bar.

Six floors below, Leonard Boski was in a foul mood. He had tried every solvent available to him, finally being reduced to employing raw gasoline. But his exertions only served to smudge the stubborn ink even more deeply into the porous brick. He returned angrily to the furnace room and banged the gasoline can down on the bench.

“You mean you’re not a chemical whiz after all?” Chuck Lang asked with a sly contempt. “You, a rocket scientist?”

Leonard was fuming. “Shut up!”

“Oh, I’ll shut up. Whatever you say, professor.”

It was too much for Leonard. He had scorned rough red brick till his arms ached, his hands were bleached from all the chemical indignities they’d undergone, and now he was expected to endure this verbal abuse on top of it all? It was too much. He flung the furnace door open and began firing cans and bottles into the flames. “Hey, buddy, hold it!” Chuck Lang bellowed. But it was too late. He saw the gasoline container go into the box, then Leonard kicked the door shut with his big black boot.

There was a sound in the belly of the firebox like a huge piece of ordnance going off. The furnace pipes jumped, the walls shook, and dust rained down in a noxious snowfall on their baseball caps.

“Jeez!” said Chuck, an I-told-you-so look on his face mixed with raw terror, “you ain’t no explosives expert neither!”

Robideau heard a sharp bang and the door of the chute burst open, striking Overberg under the shoulder blades, driving him forward on a blast of expanding gasses and black soot straight into the chief’s arms. The chief dropped the bar, snatched the gun away, spun Overberg around, and hustled him out of the room.

“So you never did find that poor girl — I knew you wouldn’t.”

Robideau glanced up from his paperwork, miffed.

“I found out what happened to her. Doesn’t that count?”

Mrs. Robideau gave a grudging sigh.

“Oh, I imagine it does. In a way. But what I had in mind, you’d bring the girl back, all smiling.”

“She won’t be smiling, ever again. Teddy Tozer saw to that. But then Teddy won’t be smiling either, compliments of Roald Overberg, so there’s some justice to it, I suppose.”

“And you figure Overberg will get ten years? If that’s justice, you can keep it!”

“Well, he didn’t kill the girl — not directly. And a jury may buy his self-defense argument after they hear about Tozer’s history and view what we pulled out of the furnace grate.”

“That pewter bracelet.”

The chief nodded. He added, uncomfortably, “And... a few other things.”

“He should get life!”

“He will. He’s in his seventies.”

Mrs. Robideau was not mollified. “They could stick a few more years on him if they tried. What about those bylaws he broke? They should be good for an extra six months. I mean, what’s the good of having bylaws if you’re only going to use them against ordinary citizens?”

“I don’t make the laws, I only enforce them.” Robideau set down his pen. “At the risk of quoting Leonard Boski, I just work here.”

“Is that what you call it?”

He looked at her. “You do tease me unmercifully, don’t you?”

“Never. Now, come on home and get some sleep. No telling what tomorrow will bring.”

They put out the lights and went out of the building together. As they disappeared around the corner, arm in arm, Mrs. Robideau’s voice came floating back, saying, “When we get home, I’ll make you a nice lunch for tomorrow. You might want something to throw out later in the day...”