Ed McBain’s Mystery Book, No. 3,1961

Cops and Robbers Vincent H. Gaddis

INSTALLMENT PLAN

In Atlanta, Georgia, D. A. Stoddard, Jr., told police that when he returned to his parked car, he discovered that someone had stolen the battery and drained the gasoline tank.

He left the car and went to a service station to purchase a battery and a can of gasoline. When he got back, both front wheels on his car were missing. Stoddard then went to a nearby garage to see if he could get two wheels. Again he returned — and this time the entire car was missing.

Later, he learned, police in a scout car had noticed the stripped car, thought it might have been stolen, and had it hauled away.

FEMININE TOUCH

A young woman, convicted of burglary in Baltimore, Maryland, carried her tools in her purse. Police said Miss Josephine Ditmore, twenty-three, broke into a restaurant and a tailor shop with eyebrow tweezers, a nail file and a lady’s-size razor.

RESTAURANT RIDDLE

A classic case of ingenuity in larceny was disclosed after a large branch of a national restaurant chain showed an inexplicable decline in receipts. Undercover inspectors sent to the scene were puzzled. “Everything seems to be in order,” they reported. “A close watch was kept on all three cash registers and all sales were rung up accurately.”

The report revealed the gimmick. Management remembered that only two cash registers had been installed. A clever cashier had installed a third register of his own.

MISLABELED

Mrs. Carrie Crump was fined fifty dollars in Knoxville, Tennessee, city court for selling window-cleaning fluid for fifty cents a portion. Police explained that Carrie’s customers didn’t use the stuff to clean windows. They drank it.

MASCOT

A bird-watching society has been formed by a group of inmates at Dartmoor Prison, Princetown, England. Officials report that the prisoners chose the jackdaw, known as the bird world’s No. I thief, as their object of study.

BOLD AND BRAZEN

With some embarrassment, Alfonso Garcia, of Nogales, Arizona, informed police that someone had stolen the collar off his watchdog’s neck.

EXCEPTIONAL

As a rule, a burglar with plenty of time to work reportedly takes “everything but the kitchen sink.” But the intruder that entered the home of Mrs. Betty Stillman at Jacksonville, Florida, left everything but — the kitchen sink.

ETHER ENIGMA

At Montello, Wisconsin, a freak atmospheric condition occasionally causes the radio frequency of the Marquette County sheriff’s department to become crossed up with one on which an unidentified police department in the far South is operating. Officer Don Neilson ona night was attempting to contact a squad car when he was interrupted by the drawl of Southern officers on the same wave length. Suddenly Neilson heard one of the annoyed Southern officers say, “Doggone it, Rufe, I can’t bear a word you’re saying. Some mushmouth damn Yankee keeps breaking in.”

BLOODS THICKER

A young man at Mansfield, Louisiana, asked Sheriff Harmon Burgess to let his uncle sober up on a jail cot. Burgess agreed, and the youth helped his intoxicated companion to bed in a cell, promising to come for him later.

Awakening, the older man disclosed that he had no nephew — and a quick check revealed that he had no car, either. The sheriff sent out an alarm for a youth about twenty-one, driving a car filled with luggage, small appliances and a television set.

TWX THEFTS

Three teen-age boys in Ardmore, Oklahoma, were apprehended and turned over to juvenile authorities. They were accused of giving the telephone company tape-recorded sounds of coins being deposited into a pay telephone instead of money.

And in Hammond, Indiana, Patrolman Robert Dowling was unable to make his hourly report to headquarters from his beat. Someone had stolen his call box.

BUDDIES

When Donald Bolland, twenty-two, applied for a job with the Tucson, Arizona, police force, he listed his friend, Pat Daily, as a character reference. A few days later, an FBI fugitive report revealed that both Bolland and Daily were wanted for violation of the Dyer Act.