Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 48, No. 1, January 2003

Part I

I think of it less as a Christmas crime, to tell the truth, than as a crime of the 1980’s. And not because it had that much to do with Reaganomics or slash-and-grab greed — although the second of these was evident in a way — but because it took place at a shopping mall. The eighties, of course, were a boom time for malls. I personally shouldn’t complain, since the security-consulting half of my business at the time depended to a great degree on malls, but it was true as well that the criminals in this particular case couldn’t have succeeded the way they did at first without a mall to operate in.

Another truth is that I originally got into mall security by accident. One spring day in 1977, when my one-man operation, Carr Investigations and Security, was suffering an all-time record absence of new clients, the family bank balance got me desperate enough to head out with the idea of soliciting business. Through luck or fate or divine intervention, I hadn’t been driving for more than three or four minutes when I found myself cruising by a new shopping mall that was being built about eight blocks from my office. The place was called Speedway Mall because it was located on the site of a long-defunct half-mile race track, and when I saw a sign reading “Grand Opening September 1977. Mall Office Now Open,” I dropped my plans to cold call an industrial complex out in Niles, made a U-turn and followed the arrows through a curbed but unpaved lot to a temporary entrance, parked the car, and strolled inside.

I expected to find half-completed chaos and a cigar chomper using a construction crate for a desk, but instead I discovered that this particular portion of the mall was all but finished, and the mall offices, lining one side of a brick-and-glass walled corridor, were filled with modular furnishings and a staff of at least five, four of whom were using telephones as I walked in the public entrance. The fifth was a long, slim blonde wearing a youthful, intelligent expression and a cornflower blue dress. I handed her one of my business cards across the service counter and said, “Hi. I’d like to talk to someone about your security program, or if no one’s here who deals with that subject, I’d like to arrange an appointment.”

She looked at me slowly — without fear, you might say, since I’m oversized and not handsome — then she stood up and walked to the door of an interior office, commenting over her shoulder, “I’ll see what I can do.”

That’s how I met Judy Pilske, and even though she didn’t play any further role in my getting around a pair of skeptical supervisors and into directing the setup of security at the mall, I judged her to have assessed me positively when she took that first look, or I would never have made it past the counter. So to some degree I owed my entry into mall security work to her, and when she was promoted to office manager a few years later at the ripe age of twenty-two, I was pleased to see her sitting in with the security chief at Speedway when I came by every couple of months to review the mall’s records and procedures.

Judy was a graceful and reasonably attractive young woman, and like a lot of Northwest Side girls she was a live-at-home Catholic looking hard for a husband. Husband material in the late seventies and eighties was in as short supply as ever — even for long, slim blondes — so, before she finally did get engaged and then married, after all this happened, she spent half her time in the mall office fending off passes from the usual gang of suspects, some of them higher-ups in the Speedway Corporation. Being a Northwest Side girl, however, meant that she could handle it.

Over time we got to be fairly good acquaintances — I guess that’s the real point — enough at least so that we knew each other’s stories. I put up with her cigarettes at our review meetings, and she put up with whatever I did that was irksome. I enjoyed dealing with her because she was smart and hardworking, unlike a couple of the security chiefs Speedway had in those early years.

Exactly none of this was on my mind, of course, the evening in December, 1983, when I got back to the three-flat a good hour ahead of schedule from a one-day job up in Wisconsin. Ginny had taken the kids to her sister’s place in Niles, and so, being on my own for once, I decided to dial up my office answering machine for messages, something I hardly ever did back in those primitive, pre-voicemail days. The first couple of calls didn’t amount to much, but then this one came on:

After listening to the message a second time, I decided that I didn’t care for the “only talk to me” portion very much. It probably meant that Frank Malin, the acting security chief at Speedway, thought he could handle the problem alone, whereas he struck me from the beginning as the kind of guy who would rather perform an appendectomy on himself than see a doctor.

The time was only ten to eight, and our three-flat was a short drive from the mall, so on the spur of the moment I decided to run over in the car, see Judy, and possibly even do a little Christmas shopping afterwards. I made quick time to and through the mall to the same glass-and-brick corridor, but when I poked my head into Judy’s office she wasn’t in evidence, and the reception area twenty yards farther along the way appeared to be abandoned as well. While I stood there with the reception door open, wondering whether to call out or try another office, I heard a strange, high-pitched sound, almost like a whistle, coming from the far end of the corridor. I stepped out looking, the way you do, and there, running toward me, shrieking nonstop, was a young girl, maybe fifteen years old, dressed in early-eighties high-school chic — tight Levi’s, aviator’s jacket, and a pint each of eye makeup and hairspray. Behind her near the entrance to the women’s washroom was a second girl, similarly dressed, retching and screaming.

I stepped into the first girl’s path — I had to, in order to stop her — and grabbed her by both shoulders. “What’s wrong?” I said. “Tell me — I’m with mall security.”

She went limp and started hyperventilating. Between gasps she said, “Blood — in the restroom — a woman all bloody—”

By that time the screams had attracted a handful of curious people. One of them was a competent-looking middle-aged woman, and on an impulse I said, “Ma’am, could you please take these girls—” the other one had come up to us “—into that office? There’s a phone on the counter. Call the Speedway Security Office — it explains how right there — and tell whoever answers to get an ambulance over here because there’s been a severe injury in the washroom by the mall office. It’s an extreme emergency.”

I steered the first girl in her direction, then took off at a run toward the washroom, afraid of what I was going to find. As I dodged around the blockoff at the entrance I could smell a whiff of recent gunfire, and then I saw that I was right: on the floor at the far end, between a row of stalls and a row of sinks, Judy Pilske lay face downward in a pool of blood. I hurried to kneel by her and then adjusted her head to let her breathe easier, but I was afraid to do anything else. She’d been shot twice — in the lower back and the right shoulder — and the bruise on her forehead made me think that she’d fallen headfirst against the base of the wall. Her pulse at the neck seemed thin and fast to me, and her respiration light and slow.

I brushed the hair away from her face while I thought dark thoughts, then stood up and hit the wall with my fist.

After that I looked around belatedly to make sure that no one else was in the washroom before I went back outside to see if anything else was happening. I discovered a young and extremely green mall security guard standing by the entrance, but he told me he was embarrassed about entering the ladies’ restroom, so I suggested that he simply keep guard instead, then went to a pay phone farther down the corridor and dialed the local district headquarters to report the shooting and ask for support. At about the time a dispatcher told me that a squad car had already been sent, I could hear sirens sounding in the far distance, so I went back inside the washroom to stand over Judy. I took off my overcoat and covered her with it, I remember, hoping that I was doing the right thing and wishing that I remembered more first aid.

The good part, anyway, was that she was still alive and she had a chance. She’d been shot in nonvital spots by a smaller caliber weapon and I’d found her fast. Unfortunately, she’d also lost a lot of blood. So, if they got her on plasma quickly, I thought, and if the exit wounds were clean, and if the ambulance didn’t break down, and if the paramedics weren’t Stan and Ollie...

“Someone trailed her to the washroom,” I said half out loud to get my mind in focus. Trailed her, stepped inside, fired twice, and left quickly. That was how it must have happened, because otherwise Judy would already have died from a third wound fired from closer up. But why did the assailant leave? I hunted around for another clue, one of those essential details that shows up later full of meaning, but I didn’t find anything, and just as I started to go back outside, the ambulance crew and the police arrived together in a rush.

It had been a long seven minutes.

Part II

Two hours later I was finally sitting down at Judy’s desk to try to figure out why she’d called me in the first place. In the intervening time I’d conferred with Jim Sammons, the detective sergeant in charge of the case, and we’d agreed that, if Judy pulled through, she was going to need guarding until we found out what was happening at Speedway and who her assailant was. Then I’d called a vice president of the Speedway Corporation to verify my authority to investigate the whole business. It was in my contract, but sometimes people have to be reminded. I’d also called home and talked to Ginny. She was back from Niles and had just tucked the kids in.

“R. J.,” she’d said, “please promise me you’ll be careful when you leave there. I think — that is, it makes sense to think — that Judy Pilske might have been shot because she got in touch with you. You have to consider that.”

“Yeah,” I’d replied, “I have. So the sooner we get an answer, the sooner the danger’s going to be past.”

“Maybe I can help.”

“Right. Tomorrow morning, first thing.”

“Then please be careful tonight.”

Judy’s copy of the Mall Security Log, when I found it, was uninspiring — the usual catalog of petty crime, frailty, stupidity, and craziness it always was. In December to that point it tallied two muggings, a stolen vehicle, four vehicle break-ins, a handful of stolen purses, some suspected pickpocket activity, a variety of disturbances by the obnoxious or irate, two episodes of vandalism, a hit-and-run in the parking lot, vagrancy, panhandling, et cetera, et cetera, and a two-part list six pages long of suspected or confirmed shoplifting and stolen or missing merchandise.

When I asked the on-duty security supervisor if he knew of any particular problems requiring my being called in, he’d only grunted. Frank Malin, his superior, was incommunicado at his bowling league that night.

I prowled around Judy’s office for a few minutes, looking into this file drawer or that cabinet, before I suddenly remembered an occasion in which I’d seen her slip a half-finished report under the blotter pad on her desk. On this particular night, I discovered, the blotter pad concealed two things, a bill for repairing the office copy machine and an incomplete insurance form relating to the victim of the hit-and-run accident in the mall parking lot. There was nothing unusual in this pair of documents, except for the fact that Florence Siwinski, the victim of the hit-and-run, apparently had died after three days at Northwest Hospital without regaining consciousness.

This fact, though, was enough to make me decide to take the form and the security log home with me, and while I was driving along — carefully, per Ginny’s instructions — I had the not-so-funny thought that Judy Pilske was at that moment lying unconscious at Northwest Hospital after a hit-and-run shooting at Speedway. This parallel circumstance inspired me to call Jim Sammons before I went to bed and ask him if he could dig out the police file on Florence Siwinski for me. Then I crawled in beside Ginny, but I didn’t sleep well.

The next morning, after our children — ages four and eight that year — were off to pre- and grade school respectively, I gave Ginny a pretty thorough summary of the problem, then I handed her the security log and the accident report and said, “You tell me if there’s something here. I’m going to make some calls from the bedroom.”

First I called another mall out in the southwest suburbs and canceled a security review appointment for that morning. Then I called Northwest Hospital to find out about Judy. She was in critical condition in the intensive care unit, so I was informed. After an additional five-minute hold, the floor nurse came on the line and gave me the answer to my real question: Judy hadn’t regained consciousness and probably wouldn’t for some time, maybe days, a response that sounded fairly hopeful to me, actually, so I didn’t ask for further details that I wouldn’t have been given anyway.

My next call was to Speedway and Frank Malin. Malin was a fifty-year-old former police sergeant from Chicago who had left the force early. He’d been the kind of cop who makes it hard for other cops — gruff and domineering, not corrupt, but a taker of small gifts and unfair advantages. When the Speedway Corporation hired him as a shift supervisor I’d advised against it, and when he’d been made acting security chief while his boss, Hank Arnow, convalesced from a triple bypass operation, I’d protested strongly. The Speedway Corporation paid for my advice — not enough, from my standpoint — but they didn’t always take it.

“Malin here,” he said in a smoker’s baritone.

“Yeah, Frank, this is R. J. Carr. I’ll be over there at eleven to see you about Judy. But I want to know now why she called to get my advice on security. I know she went to you first — she said as much in the message she left on my machine. Only I’m still in the dark because she’d been shot by the time I got there last night.”

“Yeah. That was pretty terrible, all right,” he said. “And the papers are giving it space, which doesn’t sit well with the management either.”

“So?” I said.

“So I don’t know.”

“Look, Frank,” I said, deciding to take a hard line, “you can help me crack this case and be a hero, or you can try to hush it up and get nothing but trouble. You’re not on the force anymore, remember?”

I could almost hear the gears grinding in his brain, trying to figure if that made sense. Finally he said, “You seen the log?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well — it’s all those thefts. The Merchants Association complained, so we tried tighter controls and supervision, but stuff is still going.”

“And Judy thought you should call me?”

“I wanted to give it a couple more days.”

“Anything else?”

“Ah... no.”

“All right, then. I’ll see you about eleven.”

We hung up and I went back to the kitchen where I found Ginny emptying a teapot into a large mug. Ginny stood about a foot shorter than I did, and the similarity between us ended at that point. She was thirty-four and looked twenty-five, for one thing, whereas I was forty in both fact and appearance. She’d inherited classic French features from her mother and classic French curves either from her mother or somebody else — maybe her father, who was Latvian — so we didn’t look alike in that way either. Otherwise she had black hair, a fair complexion, an I.Q. of two hundred or so, and a calm and generally reserved manner with only one notable weakness, an irrational attraction to ugly, oversized detectives.

“Did you — how is Judy?” she asked. “Would they tell you?”

“In intensive care,” I said. “Critical but stable is my impression. Still unconscious.”

She stepped over to the table, sat on a kitchen chair, and pushed the waves of hair back from her face. “R. J.,” she said, “I don’t want to sound like an alarmist, but... you have to find this person quickly.”

“You mean Judy’s assailant.”

“Assailant, yes. Stop it at that, before the term becomes murderer. Of Judy — or you. You’re both at risk, I think.”

“And other people, too,” I pointed out. “But, all right — pedal to the metal at Speedway Mall. That’s what I told you last night, in fact. And in answer to the question you haven’t asked yet, the main problem at Speedway is a rash of thefts. Have you looked at those?” I gestured at the security log in front of her.

“I just came to that section, I’m afraid. Come and sit next to me. We’ll look together.”

So I sat and we looked. After a minute or so, Ginny said, “Bring me a piece of paper and a pen, would you, please.” I got them from a drawer.

“Do you see what I’m seeing?” she asked, as she began making notations.

I looked a little more. “Well,” I said, “there are about a hundred stores in Speedway, and I’d guess not over fifteen are on here, but—” I stopped and leafed quickly through the six-page list. “Wow! Orchid Records. Mason’s. Catterson Furs! Ginny — those stores have security sensors at the exits.”

“What?” she said, looking up from her notes.

“You can’t shoplift anything from those stores — or not without a heck of a lot of trouble. Their merchandise has a label or a sealed-on container or an embedded computer chip that sets off an alarm if it isn’t deactivated or removed by a salesclerk.”

“But, it’s those stores and—” she looked down at her notes “—and three others, Slade Jewelers, California Kitchens, and The Wedge, where... And look, look at the dates.”

I looked, we looked, and in five minutes we’d worked out what was happening in pretty clear terms. Someone was targeting those six stores for expensive and in some cases fairly large articles, targeting them over and over, in fact, on Wednesdays and Fridays, if the pattern of Thursday and Saturday reporting meant anything.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I — you’re the expert on this type of thing, but my opinion is that — have there been any arrests?”

“No,” I said. “The last column tells the status. Three or four apprehensions on theft in other stores. Kids, I’d guess — but this doesn’t look like kids.”

“No. To me it looks far more like, oh, a carnival of crime — or organized crime in a very special sense. Someone has analyzed security at Speedway Mall and found a weak spot.”

“Six weak spots. And you’re right about it being professional work, Ginny. The only items taken are fenceable goods. Look at this: fur stole, food processor, diamond bracelet, a box — an unopened box, Ginny — of the latest album by The Grateful Dead. Not that we’d be interested, but...”

“No.” She smiled a rare, sardonic smile before continuing, “Although doubtless it is a popular seasonal gift and already in short supply — unlike the new boxed set of Handel’s Messiah that I’m parenthetically hoping to find under our humble tree. Fortunately for me, though, that album is almost certainly not a fenceable item, and no one could ever accuse it of having anything to do with Christmas.”

She made another comical face, then said, “Musical tastes notwithstanding, however, something seems quite apparent in what’s happening at Speedway Mall, R. J., and it’s just this very element: the Christmas season. Nothing here says so, precisely, but what makes the shoplifting possible on this scale must have something to do with the Christmas shopping season.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. But my sense is that someone is taking deliberate advantage of it somehow, as cynical and horrible as that seems. It can’t be just a coincidence. Larger crowds, more harried clerks, longer store hours — there has to be some one thing, or a combination of things.” She gave me a look of sudden misgiving. “Or don’t you agree?”

“Maybe,” I said. “It’s a starting point, anyway. But the ‘thing’ you’re talking about has to be something so basic and simple that nobody notices it. What I mean, Ginny, is that it can’t be very complicated, or it would have been spotted by this time. The people running those businesses aren’t babes in the woods, you know, and according to what Malin just told me, everyone over there has been on the alert for the last few days, trying to figure it out.”

We talked a few more minutes without much result before I said, “Well — it’s probably not worth asking, but you didn’t see anything in the rest of the log that might throw some light on the thefts, did you?”

“No. It’s almost incomprehensible to me that people can be so sad and sick in so many ways, but I honestly didn’t notice anything beyond the shoplifting pattern. What I did notice — I wonder if anyone else has made the connection — is that the woman who was the hit-and-run victim, the one who died, was struck on the same evening that the only car theft was reported. In fact, before you came in here talking about shoplifting, I was certain that the attack on Judy had to be related to the car theft and hit-and-run. The presence of the insurance form misled me.”

I thought for a moment, then said, “You’re suggesting that the car thieves ran her down as they escaped?”

She hesitated. “Stated thus baldly it sounds unconvincing, I admit. But... I don’t think ‘coincidence’ describes the way the two fit together either.” She examined the form in her hand while I waited.

“Yes,” Ginny said, then looked up at me. “I thought I noticed that name. She was an employee of The Wedge, R. J. It might not mean anything, of course, but Judy did seem to hide away this form, as if she were holding it back to show you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”

I didn’t like what was happening. When Ginny’s arguments and my instincts pointed the same way, we had never been wrong on a case that I could remember.

Part III

I got over to the mall at quarter to eleven and wandered into the office complex through the reception area. After saying hello to a couple of familiar faces and ducking more than a couple of questions, I headed to the interior where the private offices were. As I approached Judy’s office door I heard a sound, probably a file drawer closing, and for some reason that made me step quietly and look before I entered. What I saw, from the rear, was a young woman of medium height, thin as a stick, and with long, straight brown hair. She was searching rapidly through the things on Judy’s desk and not finding what she wanted. She stopped, raised a hand to her chin as if thinking, and then, as I had the previous evening, she raised the blotter pad and looked beneath it.

After another five seconds I tapped on the door, just to get a reaction, but she only turned briefly and said, “Come on in, whoever you are. You can help me look.”

“What are we looking for?” I asked, as I slipped around to the front of the desk where I could see her better: frameless glasses and no makeup on a small-featured, somewhat pretty face. She was new to me, but she wore a mall identity pin that read Barbara Becker, Program Coordinator.

“You’re Mr. Carr, aren’t you?” she said, looking away quickly from my birthmarked face. “So you know about Judy. They say she’ll pull through, but the whole thing is just so terrible that I feel like going home and crying.” She shook her head sadly, but then continued in a perky tone, “Oh! I’m Barb Becker, by the way, and what I can’t find is an insurance claim form. It’s for one of my Christmas Temps. She was killed by a hit-and-run driver out in the parking lot last week. Another horrible thing.” She gestured vaguely and made a deeper frown. “You didn’t hear that. We’re not supposed to say negative things about Speedway Mall.” She picked up a cigarette from the desk and lit it with Judy’s lighter.

I said, “Well, I can find the form for you.”

I opened the security log in my hand and slipped out the form. Her eyes widened briefly before she exhaled smoke and said, “So that’s where the little stinker got to. Did Judy fill it in?” She took it from me and looked it over. “Nope. Well, Judy sure has an excuse, but I don’t know what I’m going to tell the woman’s son.”

I said, “What’s a — what did you call her? A Christmas something?”

“A Christmas Temp. This is our third year — my first running the program. The Speedway Corporation keeps a roster of mostly local neighborhood people — usually housewives and college students — who want part-time holiday work. So when the various stores in the mall need extra personnel for the Christmas rush they call us — me — and I send them over someone from my list who meets their requirements. It’s a really smart program: it saves the stores a lot of screening and paperwork, it gives us a boost with the local community, and practically all the wages paid get spent here for Christmas presents.” She drew on her cigarette.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sounds great.”

“It was Judy’s idea,” she replied and made a defeated, fatalistic shrug. “Well, I’ve got to get back to biz. Nice meeting you, Mr. Carr.” She drifted out the door.

I did the same a couple of minutes later, after I’d parked the security log and called to leave a message for Jim Sammons to find out more for me about the car stolen on the night of the hit-and-run. On my way across the mall to talk with Frank Malin in the security office I happened to see Barb Becker again as she walked along, engaged in a heated conversation with what seemed to me to be an unlikely companion, an aggressively stupid-looking man in a slicked-back ducktail haircut, denim jacket, and corduroy shirt. He was about thirty years old, but with a hard, weathered face, and the young woman seemed to have lost all her chipper good cheer in talking to him. She looked more than a little unhappy, in fact, and I couldn’t help speculating why, if only to divert my thoughts from the hurrying mass of shoppers and the loud, unrelenting blare of seasonal music that was long on Rudolph, Santa, and presents, but short on everything else.

In contrast to the retail area, the security office seemed almost like an island of calm when I stepped inside. Frank Malin greeted me in front of the three-person staff with an air of forced cordiality, asked after my brother Johnny, who at that time was a detective captain at Homicide Central, and led me back into a room that could have passed for a wartime interrogation chamber but was really his office.

“Pull up a chair,” he said, pointing to the only available candidate, a wobbly secretarial number tucked in a corner. “And be careful. It tips over backwards real easily. One of the many amenities afforded the head of security.” He waved roundly at the rest of the room — a metal desk, an inexpensive-grade executive chair, a file cabinet. It reminded me of my own office in a way, only my furnishings were older and my room had a window.

With his large, angular face and broad, powerful shoulders, Malin gave the impression of being hard and square. He lit a cigarette, then he said, “Well, you’ve seen the log. You’re the one comes in when we’re too stupid to catch on. So, who do I detain?”

“Today is Wednesday,” I said in reply. “What are you and the guards watching for?”

He thought for a few seconds. “I’d say... we’re watching for a gang of professionals. Slick and careful. They go for big stuff, they work together somehow — hand the stuff from one to another, maybe — and they’ve got some way, maybe a lead-lined bag, to get by the security sensors in some of the stores. Either that or they’re invisible.”

Suddenly, and for no reason I wanted to name, I felt better. “Lead-lined bags,” I said. “I hadn’t thought of that. You realize, then, that the stores with sensors are among the big losers.”

“Well, I know they’ve complained a lot. That rat’s ass at Orchid Records — I could turn him over any day of the week for possession and probably dealing — he’s been in here screaming.”

“Yeah, he’s a jerk,” I said. It was good to have some common ground. “But my point is that six stores are bearing the brunt of the thefts.” I reeled off their names. “In fact, I’m not at all certain that the rest of the mall is being affected by this gang. What’s left on the list seems to be pretty random. Have you talked to Penney’s and Wieboldt’s?” The two anchor department stores had their own in-house security.

“Yeah. What’s-his-name over at Penney’s said they got no big problem. Wieboldt’s never tells us anything, but if something goes bad, they scream.”

“And they’ve been quiet?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “Listen. This is how it seems to shape up: this gang has picked six stores that carry medium to big ticket merchandise and figured out a way — or possibly six ways — of moving the stuff out. I’m not absolutely sure, but the pattern in the log indicates that they do it on Wednesdays and Fridays.”

He made a skeptical growling sound, then opened his copy of the log and looked through it. After a couple of minutes of cross-checking, he said, “You know — I think you’re right. What if we put all our floaters on those six stores for the rest of the day?”

“Wouldn’t hurt,” I replied. “I really came over to talk about Judy, you know.”

He looked at his watch. “Sure. But if I don’t go for lunch now, I’ll never get one, so...”

“All right,” I said. “I could eat.”

“Fine. Oh — you’ll need to know about this. I just heard about it myself. On Saturday night the manager of Speedway Cinema turned in a small handgun to us. One of her cleaning people found it. Monday we got a call from someone claiming he lost it.” Malin shook his head. “Anyway, the guy said he’d come by and pick it up — show his permit — sometime this week.”

“And it’s gone,” I said.

“Yeah. It’s gone. Evidently it was put in the holding drawer under the reception counter out front for this guy to claim, the last time anyone saw it. He came by this morning and threw a fit when we didn’t have it for him.”

“And in the meantime there’s been a shooting here with a small caliber weapon.”

“Yeah. Course, it might be a coincidence.” But I could tell from the look on his face that he didn’t think so either.

“Judy doesn’t like me,” Malin was saying as we angled toward an isolated table in the newly opened Mall Food Court: twelve different varieties of indigestion at one convenient location. I had Greek; he had Chinese. “I may be the only white male around here who hasn’t laid his hand on her thigh, but still she doesn’t like me.”

We sat and started eating. “She likes you, though,” he said, pointing a plastic forkful of chow mein at me. “Every problem, she wants to call you.”

“This is the first time she ever did.”

“That I don’t know about. I know I’ve been acting head of security since September twentieth, and I know management doesn’t want to bring you in for consultation over dope smoking in the washrooms.”

“So what did she say specifically? This time?”

He chewed a little, possibly thinking, possibly not. “This theft problem just exploded from nowhere — you’ve got to understand that first. November was very quiet till the last week. Then, boom!”

“And?”

“The Merchants Association gets hysterical, and of course they go to Judy because she’s their liaison with mall management. I’m responsible to management — so is Judy, you know? — and management says to keep it quiet, keep the police out, solve it internally.”

“And?”

“Okay. Judy doesn’t like me. She thinks I can’t handle this job. You don’t either — I heard it through the grapevine. Judy says I’m a policeman, not a security expert. But management tells me to keep trying. I keep trying.”

“And that’s it?”

“Yeah. That’s it.”

I watched his face for a moment, then said, “You’re not telling me everything, Frank.”

For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to respond, but he finally said, “Nothing you need to know, that’s all. It’s private — between her and me. If I’m wrong about that, then you’re right and this job is too big for me.” He lit a cigarette. “I want this job, Ray. Hank Arnow is not coming back. The doctors say the stress would be too much, so come January, either I’m permanent head of security or I’m out on my ass. So nobody wants this stuff cleared up worse than I do, but I still have to do what I’m told.”

There wasn’t a lot to say in response, so I didn’t say it. As we were leaving the food court, Malin remarked casually, in a low voice, “See that guy coming in?”

It was the man I’d observed earlier talking to Barb Becker. “Yeah,” I said. We kept on walking.

“He works here — fairly new guy on the nighttime custodial crew. Name’s Mike Cooksey. Don’t recognize him, do you?”

“Nope,” I said to keep things simple.

“That’s too bad. Either I’ve seen him before, or he reminds me of someone I’ve seen before.”

“Oh. Someone with a police record.”

“Uh-huh. Only he hasn’t got one — at least not as Mike Cooksey — and I don’t have time to look through mug books.”

I spent the early afternoon gathering bits and pieces and feeling the sense of urgency I’d had all along grow more and more pressing. First I’d doubled back to the food court and retrieved a greasy food wrapper from a trash receptacle as soon as Mike Cooksey was out of sight, on the principle that fingerprints beat mug books every time. I’d lived my life in a family of policemen, so I know that the faint association of a face with past criminal activity in the mind of a former cop, even a mediocre cop, was probably worth checking out.

Then I’d talked to some of the security guards and the managers of Catterson Furs and The Wedge (“Your Source for High Tech Electronics”) and ambled around in all six of the problem stores. At three o’clock I’d driven over to the new district headquarters on Grand Avenue for an appointment I’d made with Jim Sammons, only he turned out to be running late, so I hunted up an evidence technician to start a trace on Mike Cooksey’s fingerprints.

Then I’d stood in the doorway of the new building and looked out across a couple of parking lots toward Northwest Stadium where, in another life, twenty-odd years before, I’d played a lot of high school football. The sky was iron gray, and flecks of snow drifted here and there. After a few minutes the image of Judy Pilske lying in her own blood cut across my view, and I’d sat down on a bench and brooded over the problem till Jim Sammons called me into his cubicle at five to four.

“Judy Pilske,” he said.

“Right.”

“Someone entered her room this afternoon about two thirty, then backed off when he saw the guard.”

“Male?”

“Correct.”

“And?”

“Our man was on the far side of the room. By the time he got around the bed and out into the hallway, the man had disappeared.” Sammons looked tired. He was about twenty-six, with a Scandinavian handsomeness — close-cut blond hair, pale blue eyes, a loose athletic build.

“How’s Judy doing?” I asked. “Or do you know?”

“She’ll probably make it,” he replied, looking down at his hands on the desk. “The concussion’s the difficult thing, the doctor says. She must have pitched forward against the wall at a bad angle. I let the guard off and sat there awhile so he could get his lunch. It made me feel like going hunting, though, watching her hooked up to all those tubes and monitors. It’s funny. I used to know Judy back in high school a little. Haven’t seen her since, but I guess that connection made it come home to me.”

I’d been wrong: Sammons wasn’t tired, he was angry.

“We’ll get him,” I said.

He took a deep breath, then responded, “Good. What do you know that I don’t?”

I told him about the missing pistol and the shoplifting epidemic, the connection Ginny had spotted between the car theft and the hit-and-run.

“Right,” he said. “I’ve got those files here. The hit-and-run victim was a fifty-seven-year-old widow named Florence Siwinski. She was a temporary employee of The Wedge store in the mall, and she was struck as she was walking to her car in the parking lot at around nine fifteen that night. The only witness was a hundred yards away and had no idea what kind of vehicle was involved. We have not traced the vehicle. No one has come forth with either a confession or a lead. Mrs. Siwinski died unexpectedly three days later without regaining full consciousness, but her condition had been improving. That was Sunday. An autopsy was requested, and we got the report yesterday. Mrs. Siwinski died of suffocation. Somebody smothered her in the hospital.”

I didn’t say anything. Sammons waited a couple of seconds, then went on. “As for the stolen vehicle, it is, or was, the property of a David Harnisch of River Forest, who discovered it missing at around eleven that same night when he came out of the Speedway Cinema after seeing a movie. I handled this one myself. The man was hysterical. He’s still hysterical — he calls here every day. His car was a brand-new Mercedes 450 sedan with a built-in alarm system. It was stolen by pros, and my feeling is that it will never be found. It could be the vehicle that ran down Florence Siwinski, but I doubt it.”

“You mean, I take it, that whoever ran her down wanted her dead.”

“That’s what I mean. It’s not my case, but I talked to Lieutenant Weber about it this afternoon. No one officially visited her room on Sunday according to the hospital people, and her son, who would otherwise be the obvious suspect, has an unshakable alibi — he works as a vendor at Soldier Field when the Bears play, and Sunday was their last home game. Also, he’s the one who demanded the autopsy.”

“It all fits, anyway,” I said. “This Mrs. Siwinski was a Christmas Temp at one of the stores that’s being hit hard by the shoplifters. She must have suspected something or else spotted someone and got spotted herself before she could report it. Or something like that.”

“What I don’t like,” said Sammons, “is the parallel with what’s happened to Judy Pilske. I wish we could put a second man over there.”

“What about her family?”

“It’s a thought. I saw her parents as I was leaving today. Nice people. Worried to death, of course. I don’t think they have much money.” He looked down at some notations before saying, “Oh. I think I’d better tell you that tomorrow we’ll be over at Speedway to look into your shoplifting ring. What you’re saying about how it ties into the hit-and-run and the attacks on Judy — I don’t think you can claim it’s a private security problem any more.”

I felt a twinge of unlikely sympathy for Frank Malin as Sammons made this remark. “Well,” I said, “in that case, I guess I’d better wrap it up tonight, if I want to keep consulting for Speedway Mall.”

“It’s that way, is it?” He suddenly looked hesitant.

“Speedway Management is the toughest client I’ve got,” I said. “But seriously, I’ll have it worked out by... oh, I’d say ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Keep guarding Judy.”

“What—?”

“No,” I said. “Don’t ask me. I’m not on the public payroll — I earn my living solving these things, and that’s what I intend to do tonight. I’ll tell you this much, though: I’ve got at least a portion of the shoplifting puzzle worked out, and I’m going home now to try to work out the rest with my wife. She has all the brains in the family.”

We both stood in anticipation of my departure. Sammons hesitated again, then he said, “You’re married, eh? Law enforcement is hard on marriage, from what I’ve seen.”

“It depends.”

“I’ve avoided it — marriage.” He looked all at once very young for his age. “What I said about knowing Judy in high school — actually, we dated for a while. We stopped because I was Lutheran, she was Catholic. One more reason why marriage doesn’t work out. But it was a shock seeing her after nine years, shot up like that.” His face was putting on a brilliant blush.

I said, “Well, I’m Presbyterian, myself, but my wife was raised half-Catholic and half-Lutheran. Her folks made it work.”

As I left I could see him staring with his clean-cut, handsome face at my birthmarked, ugly one. It’s a look I’ve always gotten a lot of and don’t care for much, but what occurred to me on this particular occasion was that Sammons wasn’t really seeing me — he was seeing a long, slim blonde in a hospital bed — so I let it pass.

Part IV

At quarter after nine that night I was showing that same dubious mug to the closed circuit security camera outside the main loading dock of Speedway Mall.

“Say the secret password,” said a voice in a box.

“Pulp.”

“What?”

“Let me in, or tomorrow I’ll beat you to a pulp.”

“Yes, sir. Just joking.”

“Right.”

I was feeling good. Ginny and I had come up with a very tight theory about the shoplifting ring, and although we still couldn’t quite see how the goods were being disposed of, that wouldn’t matter if we found enough confirming evidence on the people involved. I was meeting Frank Malin at nine thirty to make a directed search for the evidence, if it existed.

The backside of the shopping mall was and still is a depressing sight, not to mention an ungodly smell. The first thing that hit me as I came in the door was the odor of live garbage, collected in its own huge dumpster from the twelve Food Court outlets and four independent restaurants scattered elsewhere in the mall. For no particular reason, mainly to get away from the stink, probably, I ambled down one of the service corridors which ran behind the stores. No matter how flashy the storefronts, no matter how elaborate the decor of the public areas, in every mall of this design these corridors look the same — poorly lighted, lined with cheap wallboard, covered with cheaper paint, and over the paint the inevitable graffiti.

When I made the first turn in the corridor, about a hundred feet from the loading dock, I saw coming toward me a one-man motorized truck pulling two narrow flatbed carts in tandem. On the carts were what appeared to be barrel-shaped waste receptacles and boxes of trash, and as the distance closed between us, I came to recognize the driver of the truck as Mike Cooksey, Frank Malin’s dark-haired boy.

“Hey! Haul your damn ass out of the way!” he yelled from about twenty feet off. I could see his point: the right angle turn was tricky pulling that load, so I moved back a few yards and leaned up against the wall as he slowed to make the swing around the corner. Since I was wondering more about Cooksey than about what he was doing, the tail end of the cart was almost out of sight before the fact registered with me that what I had been watching was the day’s take by the shoplifting ring being methodically and prosaically carted away from the stores. All the barrels on the two carts had been stenciled Return To, followed by a particular retailer’s name, and each Return To I had seen was one of the six problem stores.

I started to hurry after Cooksey but then stopped, thinking it might be better to watch what he did with the barrels first, so I held off for thirty seconds to give him a good lead, then ambled back along the corridor to the shipping area. As I came out into the brighter lighting I spotted the carts, minus the driver and truck, parked unobtrusively alongside the first loading bay next to another cart which was half full of what looked to be shipping cartons. Except for a forklift operator thirty yards across the expanse of concrete, no one else was visible in the large, enclosed space. The forklift roared suddenly and disappeared into the interior of a trailer backed up to the dock. I quickstepped along the wall to the carts full of barrels.

A brief inspection told me that five of the six stores were represented by trash receptacles, The Wedge’s alone being absent. I looked around another time to make sure that I wasn’t under observation, then I carefully maneuvered the barrel marked Return To Catterson Fur down onto the floor. It was filled to the top with innocent looking trash, mainly paper, and after a moment of indecision I decided not to dump it. Instead I sifted down into its contents with my hands.

My arms are long, and I was penetrating close to the bottom, trying to detect anything at all promising with the touch of my fingertips, when at last I felt the surface of a plastic bag with a soft, fur-like substance beneath it. I eased my arms up and out and stepped back to consider whether I should dump the receptacle after all or simply take everything — carts, barrels, and contents — in charge as potential evidence.

The forklift was roaring again across the way, but all at once I became conscious of another sound coming from behind me, with the result that I turned just fast enough to duck slightly, so that the mop handle Mike Cooksey was swinging at the side of my head struck me at an upward angle straight across the forehead.

My glasses flew wide, I fell back against the barrel, my knees folded, and I toppled, not totally unconscious, onto my face. Then I must have blacked out.

“Mi-i-s-ter!” I heard a voice yell. “Senyor! Mi-i-s-ter!” Someone was shaking my shoulder. Then I felt a pain across my forehead and down into my neck, and I jolted into consciousness. I opened my eyes — not that I could see too much when I opened my eyes — and realized that I was on my back, which meant that someone had turned me over, the someone being a Hispanic-looking man whose mustachioed face was bent over me. I raised a hand to my forehead and felt blood there — but not much — and the memory of what happened came back to me.

“You okay?” said the man. “You need a... medico?”

“My glasses...” I said, pushing up on an elbow and feeling a new wave of pain across my forehead.

“Glasses...” he said. “Ah!” He pointed to his eyes. His face moved out of my sight range then returned. “Bad luck, mister. These glasses are busted.” He handed the frames to me half filled with shards and splinters.

My next thought was for Cooksey. “Where’s the man who hit me?” I asked, trying out of habit to look around.

“Cooksey? That man, he runs fast, I can tell you. I see him hit you — then I come fast, on forklift. Cooksey, he goes out the door like... a rabbit!”

“The exit door?”

“Si. Yes.”

“I need to get to a phone,” I said.

“And water.”

“Yeah, and water.” He helped me up. “What’s your name?” I asked.

“José. They call me Joe, but I am José Ortíz.”

“Well, José, you’re a darned good man. I’m R. J. Carr. Glad to meet you.”

I followed him to a dispatcher’s desk along the back wall. “Teléfonó,” he said. “I go to bring the water.”

I dropped into the chair by the desk and put my face down on my arm for a second. That was a mistake — the pain surged through my head. I jerked it back up, then pulled the telephone over near me where I could see the buttons and punched in the number of the security office around a corner fifty feet away. “Is Malin there yet?” I asked, peering at my watch. It read nine forty-two.

“No. Was he supposed to come in?”

“Yeah. This is R. J. Carr. I was assaulted on my way to meet him by Mike Cooksey, one of the maintenance men. You didn’t spot Cooksey shooting out of here by the loading dock door, did you? On the closed circuit camera?”

“I can check.”

“Don’t bother. Have someone sweep through the parking lot — you’ve got his car make and license number in the employee file. Also his address. I’ll want that in a few minutes. If Frank shows up, tell him I’m at the loading dock.” I hung up and noticed Ortíz standing beside me holding a large paper cup full of water. “Thanks,” I said. I gulped the water down, then I punched in my home phone number.

“Hello,” said a clear, feminine voice.

“Hi. It’s me.”

“Yes?”

“Can you get Mrs. Andersen to come up for a while and stay with the kids?” Dorothy Andersen was a widow who lived in our basement flat. “I’ve broken my glasses — smashed to smithereens — and you’re going to have to bring me another pair or I’ll never get this done.”

“What happened? Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m okay — just a little blind. There’s a pair in my top dresser drawer, or maybe the bedside table. Bring it to the loading dock on the west side of the mall. A man named José Ortíz will show you in. Treat him nice. He saved me from a beating.”

“R. J.!”

“I’ll tell you when you get here.”

After we hung up I sensed Ortíz standing near me again, along with another man. I asked Ortíz to watch for Ginny and then followed behind his companion to a washroom where I cleaned the blood off my face and out of my scalp. The wound was a long split in the skin close to the hairline with some bad swelling underneath that would get worse, I suspected, before it got better. But for the moment I was functioning, and I had work to do.

I’d just made it back to the loading dock desk when I was attacked again, this time in the form of a blindside embrace from Ginny, who had set a speed record getting to the mall. She was crying, which wasn’t like her, so I hugged her, calmed her down, and told her what had happened. She dried her eyes with my handkerchief, then finally placed the glasses she’d brought onto my nose.

“I brought you something else,” she said.

“All right,” I responded. “But it wouldn’t have helped, and I won’t need it.”

She stepped close to me again and transferred a.22 caliber target pistol from her purse to my coat pocket. The gun belonged to her — one of a pair left over from the days when she’d done target shooting. I’ve never been big on firearms myself, to be truthful, and never carried any back in those more innocent years unless I had to. The look on Ginny’s face told me I had to.

“I’m staying until you’re ready to go,” she said next. “The children are asleep, and Dorothy, I’m sure, is asleep by now, too, in your chair.”

“Fine,” I said, “but the whole problem is pretty much worked out. I just need to check a few files over in the main office.”

“Hmph,” she grumbled, with a new expression on her face, half dubious and half worried. “Then I’m coming along. I honestly wonder sometimes if you ought to be trusted out by yourself.” Meaning, or so I deduced, that she was thinking about a case from a few months before that had put me in the hospital with a concussion. All at once she embraced me again, so I held her awhile longer — never hard work — and when I looked up I saw a young black security guard eyeing us tentatively.

I said, “It’s okay, pal — we’re married. Has Frank Malin ever shown up?” Ginny moved behind me and did things to her face.

“Don’t know, sir. I came to write up a report on the assault.”

“You can do something better. See those two carts of trash barrels? Get a maintenance man to haul them over to Security and put them in the storeroom. They’ll just about fit.”

“Yes, sir. Could I ask why?”

“They’re evidence. A shoplifting ring was putting stolen merchandise in the trash, and Cooksey was collecting it.”

“Ah!”

I led Ginny away to the security office, and just before we got there she said, “R. J., I just remembered something: an extremely young man to be a police sergeant stopped by the house immediately after you left to come over here, and he gave me a report for you on Mike Cooksey’s fingerprints.”

“Sammons,” I said. “Right. Did he ask you about being married to a detective, by chance?”

“I... in a manner of speaking, yes. He also asked about my religious affiliation. What did you tell that man about me?”

“Well — the subject came up about Lutherans and Catholics and I just said—”

“Oh. No wonder he looked embarrassed. I told him I was Presbyterian.”

“Good — that ought to confuse him even more. You didn’t by chance bring along that report, did you? About Cooksey?”

The report on Cooksey’s fingerprints was brief but meaty. The fingers that made them attached to the hands of Michael Corcoran, frequent user of aliases, most recently a resident of the Pontiac Correctional Facility — specialty, car theft — and nephew of Thomas Alton, a man well known in certain local circles as a suspected receiver of stolen goods. This information was what might be called highly suggestive.

Ten minutes after talking over the report, we were in the reception area of the mall office, going through the file cabinets that flanked Barb Becker’s desk, searching for anything we could find about Christmas Temps. Frank Malin had never shown up for our meeting, even though his wife assured me over the phone that he’d left home at nine fifteen. So there was another worry.

Ginny found the Christmas Temps files in a tray on Barb Becker’s desk, and one look through them gave the rest of the show away. Fifty-six Christmas Temps were working as clerks in stores. The last six, entered on the master list all on the same day in the same handwriting, were those assigned to the six problem stores. One, Florence Siwinski, was now dead, which accounted for the absence in the evening’s haul of the trash barrel from The Wedge where she had worked.

My head was throbbing pretty badly by that hour, but otherwise, with this information in hand, I felt all right. It was only ten thirty-five by the clock on the wall, which meant that we — Ginny and I — were over eleven hours ahead on the time by which I’d told Sammons that the case would be wrapped up. The only difficulty remaining was that the aforementioned clock hung over a doorway, and in that doorway stood Barb Becker with a small automatic pistol in her hand.

“Get away from my desk!” she said in a harsh, unnatural voice. I felt Ginny give a start beside me. “Get up! Get away from my desk!”

We stood together and edged slowly between various pieces of furniture toward the opposite side of the room. I attempted to shield Ginny from the gun by turning away from Barb Becker while Ginny walked backwards, facing me. For a second or two we were close together, close enough for Ginny to reach into my coat pocket and pull out the target pistol. “Hold off,” I whispered, then turned around, keeping Ginny behind me. “You’re too late,” I said.

“Shut up,” the woman replied. She walked in a jerky motion to the desk and stared down at the open files spread across it. “What right have you — you think you’re so smart, don’t you? You and your ugly face! I can’t stand to look at you!” She threw down a set of keys and flopped like a stick puppet into the chair but managed to keep the pistol pointed toward us. With her free hand she pulled a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her coat pocket, extracted a cigarette, put it between her lips, and lit it.

“Who’s with you?” she said, after two deep inhalations. “Let me see her.” She waved the gun barrel from side to side.

I grabbed Ginny’s hand holding the target pistol and clenched it behind my thigh as she stepped to my side. “This is my wife Ginny,” I said. And then, just to try it out, I said, “And this, Ginny, is Barb Becker, wanted on suspicion of the attempted murder of Judy Pilske.”

“No, I’m not!” she shouted. Her face became even more distraught than it had been. “No, I’m not! That was my precious little lamebrain lover, Mike!”

“You’ve got the gun,” I said.

“I took it from him — can’t you see that? Then maybe you’re not so smart! He’s around here someplace tonight — pretty little Mikey — hauling garbage. I hope I never see him again!”

“He talked you into this?”

“Yes, yes, yes! Mike and his uncle, who else? He was going to make a killing, and no one would ever know. Then he’d go straight — straight to Hell — and we’d get married. God!”

When she stood up, I let go of Ginny’s hand and said, “Let me have the gun, Barb.”

“No! I’m going to shoot you down — you big smart-ass! And then that little dumb-ass, Mike.” She gestured wildly and then started to shake.

I said, “But the gun’s empty, Barb. You can’t shoot anyone with it.” That was the clue I’d been looking for in the restroom the previous night and hadn’t found. I stepped forward slowly with my hand held out, while she stared at me with an expression of intense loathing.

Then Ginny said, “Miss Becker, please give the pistol to my husband, or I’ll be forced to shoot it out of your hand.” As Ginny moved two paces over and assumed the stance of a marksman, Barb’s eyes turned reflexively in response. That was when I grabbed her hand quickly and yanked the pistol from it, then popped out the empty clip and held it up for Ginny to see.

“Oh, no! Oh, no!” Barb Becker cried.

Even with my head throbbing, I managed to block her sudden rush toward the door.

Part V

“Well, the truth is, sometimes these things look more complicated than they are.”

The date was December twenty-third of that same year, and I was seated in a small, private visitors’ lounge at Northwest Hospital, along with Ginny, Frank Malin, Jim Sammons, Mr. and Mrs. Stan Pilske, and their daughter Judy — still on one intravenous feed, still weak enough to be in a wheelchair, but mending fast and strong enough, according to her physician, to hear the whole story. Strong enough also, I hoped, to see me without a relapse: the stitches I wore across my forehead made me look even more than usual like a Halloween freak.

“The thing really began last July,” I said, “when a man named Mike Corcoran, only I’m going to call him Mike Cooksey, got out of prison. He’d done three years straight time — not the kind of guy the parole board goes for — but when he got out he headed right for Barb Becker’s door.”

“Barb?” Judy said. “Not my Barb Becker!”

Jim Sammons was sitting beside her, strangely enough, and he said, “Yes, Judy, I’m afraid it was.”

She started to cry. He took her hand and offered his handkerchief in what I took to be a very ecumenical spirit. “Go on,” she said. “I can stand it. That’s the worst you can tell me. She’s my best employee — my friend. How...?”

“Well,” I continued, “she was also Mike Cooksey’s girl — his fiancée, in fact, although that was off while he was at Pontiac. I can’t tell you what charm Cooksey had to attract Barb in the first place, but he turned it back on when he got out, and suddenly he was there living with her, listening to her talk about her job, about Speedway Mall — how it worked from the inside — and about how he needed to find a job himself.

“I don’t honestly think Cooksey had a clear-cut idea of what he wanted to do after his prison stint, so when Barb wrangled him an interview for an opening on the Speedway custodial crew he went along with the idea, at least at first, but he also went to his uncle Tom Alton and got a false identity made up in the name of Cooksey, not Corcoran, that described a man recently discharged from the U. S. Navy. Because Mike had been in the Navy, just not recently or honorably.

“Barb, I’d guess, thought the false identity business was okay. She wanted Cooksey to get into some kind of honest work, and you don’t have to have a bleeding heart to understand that ex-cons have a hard time finding employment. The main point is, Speedway ended up hiring him — and then Tom Alton got ideas.”

“Who’s this Tom Alton?” asked Judy’s father.

Frank Malin broke in by saying, “He’s the biggest fence on the North Side, Mr. Pilske. Receiver of stolen goods. He’s so big he finances thieves to steal for him — everything from jewelry to cars to red-hot stoves.”

“Only this time it didn’t cost him anything except a little inspiration,” I said. “What with Barb being so enthusiastic about running the Christmas Temps program, and Mike hauling the garbage away from the backs of the stores two nights a week, and Christmas coming up pretty soon, his thought was to persuade Barb to put a handful of thieves into positions at the mall where they might shuffle a few fenceable goodies into the bottom of the trash twice a week. All in the spirit of Christmas greed, you might say.

“After Mike checked out the backs of the stores to learn their procedures, Alton selected six as the easiest to take the most profit from: Catterson’s, Mason’s, The Wedge, Orchid Records, Slade’s, and California Kitchens. Then the two of them told Barb about their little project and what her part in it was going to be. At the same time, Cooksey proposed that they get married on the profits and promised to go straight forever, and Barb, I’m afraid, caved in to the pressure. There were also some not-so-veiled threats by Cooksey, by the way, concerning Barb’s future health and personal appearance that probably helped sway her decision.

“At any rate, Alton lined up a crew of likely and likable thieves — including his own daughter — and Barb sent them out as Christmas Temps to the six targeted stores. This was actually a much riskier project than Alton realized, though, and my feeling, Judy, is that Frank and Speedway Security would have broken the ring by now through the process of elimination, even if Ginny and I hadn’t come into the business over the attack on you. All we really did was to intervene from a different angle, so we saw the problem in a different light. And, of course, Mike Cooksey’s stupidity and general incompetence would probably have blown the program to smithereens by this time anyway.

“And there was another problem as well.

“The deal Alton cut with the Christmas Temps gave them half the value of what they stole when it was resold, with Cooksey and Alton splitting the balance. Not a bad arrangement on the surface, but what it meant in real terms was that the young woman at Catterson Furs — Tom Alton’s daughter, strangely enough — stood to gain ten or twenty times what Florence Siwinski would make stealing from The Wedge.

“The Widow Siwinski, I think, was new to the game. Her husband had been a friend of Tom Alton’s, and Alton probably was trying, in his twisty old mind, to do her a good turn. But she didn’t see it that way. She looked upon herself as an employee with a grievance, taking as much risk for a few hundred dollars as Debbie Alton was doing for several thousand, so she finally went to Mike Cooksey and threatened to disclose the scheme to Speedway Management unless there was a more equitable distribution of the profits.

“Now, I’m told that Tom Alton has a long history of nonviolence, so my assumption is that Cooksey never consulted his uncle at all; he just asked Mrs. Siwinski to wait for him in the parking lot after work that night. Then he decided to be extra clever by running her down with a stolen car, which he would then drive to a chop shop for disassembly, and when he saw a new Mercedes by the cinema building, he must have thought his ship had come in. At car theft he had some talent, but as it turned out, he wasn’t so good at running down widows, with the result that he had to sneak into her hospital room here a couple of days later to finish the job. And that, Judy, is where you come in.”

She’d been listening, I think, but she’d also been looking down at the handkerchief in her hand. She finally raised her head, saying, “You mean, I suppose, that I kept back the insurance claim. I didn’t, actually, although I was going to. Mrs. Siwinski had made an appointment for the previous Friday morning to see me regarding an unspecified complaint concerning mall security. That was the morning after the hit-and-run. I was so busy with the usual Christmas uproar that the fact that she didn’t come in didn’t register — I had two or three crises that ate up her appointment time and my lunch hour, too. The insurance form didn’t arrive in the mail until Monday, and that was when I realized that the temp who missed the appointment was the woman who had been run over in the parking lot.

“I felt very neglectful. The Christmas Temps were my program until this year, and I had a hunch that Barb, good as she was—” Judy paused to look at Sammons. “—good as she was, would not think to send flowers or a get-well card from Speedway Management. Somehow I’m the one who always does those things. Also, one look at the form told me I had to call the hospital for information, and when I did I was shocked to hear that she had died — and that the cause of death was being withheld until the medical examiner’s report was finished.

“This was all very grim to me, and it came right on top of a meeting with the Merchants Association about the shoplifting problem. The next day I called the hospital to see if they’d heard the cause of death yet, and I was told, rather indiscreetly, I suppose, that she’d been smothered and it was a police matter.”

Judy took a long drink of water before she went on. “Hearing that, I got — well, I know now that I went off the deep end. I marched over to Frank’s office — I hope you forgive me, Frank — and laid out this... this scenario, I suppose, where some security people were doing the shoplifting and Mrs. Siwinski discovered it and was killed before she could tell the mall management about it. Frank and I hadn’t seen eye to eye on the shoplifting all along, and I’m afraid I said some stupid things and we parted on bad terms.” She looked at Malin with an appeal in her eyes.

He shrugged and said, “Hey, forget it. I mean... if you’d been right, it would be different, you know, but there obviously was a gang involved, so I knew you were wrong. I felt a lot worse about you getting shot than about what you said, except — I’m glad you know the truth.”

“So anyway,” I said to Judy, “then you called me.”

“Yes. But I did something else that seemed, well, unimportant at the time, but probably wasn’t, from what you’ve been saying. After I called you I spent half an hour unloading my frustrations on Barb Becker, and I, well, I couldn’t bring myself to accuse security personnel to anyone but Frank, so I just said something about how I had a suspicion that the shoplifting might be the work of mall employees.”

“Which was exactly the wrong remark to make — right,” I said. “We know that part of the story from Barb. She went home at five while you stayed on, and she had a lengthy argument with Mike Cooksey about the whole affair in which your suspicions played a prominent role. And at that point Cooksey panicked completely. My guess is that Tom Alton had told Mike that murder wasn’t on the program and if he got caught he was on his own, so he went in for more murder to cover himself.

“I checked the custodial work schedule on a hunch and discovered that, the night before you were shot, Cooksey had been assigned to clean the security office. He’s just the kind of guy to nose around in the drawers at the counter for no good reason and come across the pistol being held there for pickup. We know for a fact that Tuesday at around six thirty he was in the security office making a complaint about minor vandalism to his car. On one of these occasions, but probably the second, he stole the gun.

“What we know for sure is that he was lurking around the management office an hour or so later in his custodian’s uniform, and when he saw you head to the ladies’ room, he followed you in, and...”

“I don’t remember it at all,” Judy said. “You could be talking about someone else.”

“You were very lucky,” Ginny remarked, speaking for the first time, “although it may not seem that way. Mike Cooksey had probably never fired a pistol before, so even at close range he hit you in nonvital spots, and since the pistol only contained two rounds, he couldn’t follow up from even closer. And R. J. found you very quickly, too.”

“Yes,” Judy said. “I feel lucky. I... well, I’ve had a chance to apologize to Frank, for one thing. And I know, R. J., that you and Ginny — I’m so glad to meet you, Ginny — have worried over me and worked overtime to figure out what was wrong at Speedway. I care about Speedway. And I met an old friend, too, that I hadn’t seen for years.” She paused, not looking at Sammons, then went on, “But how did you find out how the shoplifting was done? I haven’t even been told that.”

“Ginny figured it out,” I said.

“Not so — not at all. What I said was simply that the thefts were in some way connected to the Christmas shopping season, that some factor was different at Speedway Mall because of it. R. J. discovered what it was.”

“The Christmas Temps,” Judy said.

“Right. I ran into Barb Becker, you see, and in our discussion of Florence Siwinski the Christmas Temps program came up. I tried not to let my mouth fall open too wide when she told me about it, because even though it fit right into Ginny’s theory, that might have just been happenstance. But a little later I saw Barb having a public argument with a young man, and later still Frank pointed out the same young man as one, a new mall employee, and two, a person he suspected of a criminal past. At that point, with absolutely no evidence to support it, I formed the working hypothesis that Barb was being... used emotionally, let’s call it, to manipulate the Christmas Temps program for her boyfriend’s criminal gain.

“In order not to excite suspicion — and also because I had to play the organ at church that evening — I made arrangements with Frank for us to look through the employment records of the Temps at nine thirty, after the mall was closed. I arrived a few minutes early and spotted Cooksey at work hauling the trash barrels from the problem stores, which told me the method used to remove the stolen items. Cooksey spotted me as well, though, and socked me with a mop handle. Luckily, your night loading man saw him do it and chased him away with a forklift before he had a chance to beat my brains in. Frank never did show up, but Ginny came over to help me, and when we found the Temps files, they gave us everything else we needed. I called Jim right away with names and addresses, and he led a sweep to pick off the thieves at their homes. And that’s most of the story. Frank?”

“Must be my turn, eh?” he grumbled. “Okay — I’ll make it brief. That night, just as I’m about to get out of my car by the loading dock to meet Ray, I see Mike Cooksey come running scared out through the dock security door, and he keeps on running, looking back a couple times, till he’s across the outer circle to the employees’ parking area. Then he hops in his car and burns rubber halfway to the north exit. I’m facing north, and my gut instinct says to me, ‘Screw Carr — let him find his own records. I got to follow this punk.’ So I start up and I’m lucky — he comes to his senses once he’s out on the street and keeps his speed down near the limit.

“He drives around in circles for a while, then he gets over to Narragansett and heads north. And he keeps going north, which is okay with me. I expect him to turn off on the Kennedy, but he doesn’t, and when we get up to Devon, he turns east. I end up running a light to keep close, but what the hell, by this time I almost don’t care.

“Anyway, you know how you go about a mile through the forest preserve there on Devon? Well, I’m doing fifty-five to keep his taillights in sight, but then he slows down so quick I have to go by him or blow the tail. But I catch what he’s doing. Just east of the woods there are some commercial buildings before the light by the Northwestern tracks. He turns in and pulls to the back. I get turned around in time to see him coming at me on foot. I pass by, turn around again, and follow him across the tracks, then back through some side streets. Finally he goes in a door on the side of a building. I drive by, and it’s a big auto body shop.

“Then I do a dumb thing. I park, I get my .38 out of the glove compartment, and I walk up to the door and try it. It’s unlocked. I step inside and the place is lit up like Christmas, and it’s full of chopped up cars. The only guy I see, though, is Cooksey — by a phone thirty feet away. He sees me, too, and Jesus God, does he come at me. He’s a wild man. So I put a bullet in his kneecap.

“A couple of ugly guys turn up about then from the front of the building. Cooksey’s done screaming and passed out, so when these guys see the gun and Cooksey, they decide they aren’t quite tough enough, and well — that’s about it. We all got together later and exchanged notes, and what I did was smarter than I knew.”

“You couldn’t have done better, Frank,” said Jim Sammons. “You got Cooksey, with the chop shop as a bonus, and we got the rest.”

“Yes,” said Judy, peering at Sammons. “But did you really have to arrest Barb Becker? It’s not right.”

There was an uncomfortable silence while Sammons gave me a hard look. “I’m not aware that Barb Becker has been arrested, Judy,” he said finally. “Carr there didn’t name her on the list that he gave to me, and no one has sworn out a complaint against her that I know about. Actually, she’s our chief witness against Cooksey and the Alton gang. Speedway Mall has continued to employ her, I believe—” he gave me another hard look “—as a gesture of support or confidence or something.”

“The feeling,” said Ginny beside me, “is that Barb was coerced; she did not conspire. When we met her in the mall office that Wednesday night, R. J. and I, she was very unhappy and remorseful and — not herself. Did you know that she has no family? It was a terrible experience for her.”

“And that’s why, I believe,” said Sammons, “that she’s been living at the Carr residence ever since.”

There was a silence and a few more stares until I shrugged and said, “Well — you know how it is: cheap babysitting is hard to find. And anyway, we couldn’t very well let her go home alone that night — she was in pretty bad shape. So the plan now is to fatten her up a little, then boot her out after the holidays.”

“I feel better,” said Judy. “But you’ve got to make her come and see me.”

“She’s shy about it,” I said, “but it’s in the works. We’ve overstayed our time for today, though, so I think we’d better call a halt before the floor nurse has conniptions.”

“But, Mr. Carr,” said Judy’s mother, “you can’t stop until you at least tell us how the stolen things were gotten out of the mall. This Cooksey man collected the trash barrels — but then what happened?”

“Oh — yeah. That was Alton’s real touch of genius, as far as I’m concerned. He had his thieves put the stuff they stole into color-coded trash bags. On his meal break Cooksey would throw the bags into three or four pre-addressed shipping boxes and feed them into the next day’s UPS pickup. They were sent to some accommodation addresses run by Alton, and the sender was — guess who? — Speedway Management. In other words, Alton even had the mall paying the freight for him. But still, you know, practically all the merchandise has been recovered — so how’s that for a happy Christmas ending?”

Pretty happy, as it turned out. Frank Malin was hired as permanent head of mall security, Judy Pilske and Jim Sammons had a wildfire romance and got married the following June, Barb Becker made a good recovery, Santa left Ginny the Messiah recording on Christmas Eve, and my stitchmarks disappeared through the wonders of modern medicine.

Only Mike Cooksey ended up unhappy — with reason. Instead of a stocking full of coal, he got the ninety-and-nine plan at Stateville for Christmas, not to mention a limp to walk with for every one of those years.