Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 59, No. 1. Whole No. 338, January 1972

Once a Cop by John Pierce{© 1971 by John Pierce.}

If you read a story in which a shoemaker is the murderer, you know of course that not every shoemaker is a murderer. Or if you read about a corrupt politician, you don’t have to be reminded that most politicians are not corrupt. Or if you read about a fraudulent Old Master, you know that not every Old Master is bogus, that not every art dealer is dishonest…

“I’ve been locked up for less than that,” commented Fingers Hinschelman, who had also been locked up for more.

“They do seem incautiously loud,” agreed Seal, Chief Inspector (retired).

Reference was to a set of sounds gusting from a front window of the Peter Pan Nursery and Pleading School. An unmatched set of sounds — raucous, overloud, unnerving. A recorded band thundered Anchors Aweigh in accompaniment to the brisk military commands of Miss Springer as amplified through a granular loudspeaker. It threatened the tree leaves as it laced its way halfway across the park to the stone bench that the two men occupied.

“…HERE WE GO NOW, ROUND THE WORLD, ROUND AND MARCHING, THREE AND FOUR; FASTER, WILLIAM, THREE AND FOUR; NO, NO, SUSAN, YOU MISSED FRANCE; TURN RIGHT, REUBEN, GREECE IS NEXT AND HUP AND TWO AND THREE AND FOUR…”

“Should I ask what that is?” puzzled Hinschelman.

“Moppet geography,” Seal conjectured. “I’d suspect they have a world map chalked out on the floor across which the class marches Napoleonically.” (“… THREE AND FOUR…”)

“And that’s your lady friend drilling them?”

Seal failed to answer. Was it? Not since that candlelit evening a month ago had he seen or talked to Miss Springer, a bounteously endowed divorcee in her thirties. He did not have her address; she was not in the phone book. Twenty years on the force and he could not relocate a simple winsome woman — until yesterday when, quite inadvertently, he met her leaving this nursery school where, it turned out, she taught.

He had walked with her to the branch post office where she mailed off a package of school business to something called the Ubiquity Mailing Service in San Francisco. She seemed flustered at seeing him, resistant to his overtures. Still he persisted until she accepted his dinner invitation for tonight. Now, hearing her amplified voice, reservations fought him like mosquitoes. This was Miss Springer, with the drill-sergeant voice? Had police work diluted his judgment?

The question was pigeonholed. A blue sedan parked between the school and the corner candy store and its driver, an elegant, graying gentleman in stylish garb, worked free. Armed with a brief case and a small box camera, he crossed the street to the school, nodded to the heavy-set handyman at the bright red door, and vanished inside.

“Why, that’s Antoine Grivas,” remarked Seal.

“Don’t know him,” said Hinschelman, “but I’ve seen that guy at the door.”

“Big name in education, Grivas. World traveler, twelve languages, crack photographer, and heads up a large philanthropic outfit — Foster Children International.”

“Know him, Inspector?”

Seal shook his head. “I’ve seen him wandering around the slums with his camera. Then, happened onto a showing of his photographs at a local art gallery a month ago. Same day and place I first met Miss Springer, though I scarcely thought them connected in any way.”

“What kind of photographs?”

“Poverty. Torn posters on old board fences, rundown tenement buildings, close-ups of underprivileged children, the faces of the poor.”

“And you paid to see that?”

“No, just happened by the gallery. No admission fee. It was the afternoon of my last day on the force and I was en route, with your old nemesis Captain Stout, for a glass or two of Auld Lang Syne. We took a look in. Regrettably, sirens in the street called Stout back to duty and, left alone, I met Miss Springer. My evening continued with her.”

“Did you tell her you were a cop?”

“No, didn’t mention it. Why?”

“The fact that you didn’t is why. Dame like that, hanging around art galleries, might look down her nose at a cop.”

“I hardly think she’s that sort.”

“But she did disappear.”

“Like a lead bar at eighty fathoms.”

“What’s a hotshot photographer like him doing with a cheap Brownie camera?”

“Could be primitivism’s back in vogue.”

“So now you find out she and Grivas are teaching in the same kiddie school. Jealous, Inspector?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” dissembled Seal. Nosy fellow, Hinschelman. His mind is like his fingers on a safe knob or lifting a wallet. Annoyingly acute. Was it in fact jealousy, this pollution of his happy mood? Was Grivas the gray force behind her tantalizing secretiveness, her refusal to tell him where she lived?

He thanked heaven he was well back in the park — behind the green foliage, beyond the equestrian bronze of the dyspeptic General Grant. To be spotted by her and thought spying would be unthinkable. Spying he was, in point of fact, but she could hardly have known it was five-year-old William Wagner — one of her blue-chip marching pupils — he rode tail on. Nor, under any circumstances, could he tell her.

“… WHO’S ON CHINA? COME BACK, WILLIAM; N-O-W YOU’VE GOT IT, THREE AND FOUR…”

“Little William’s your quarry, right?” came from Hinschelman.

“William, alias Billy. Yes.”

“Like to have a look at him.”

“You will. They’ll soon break for afternoon recess and adjourn to that candy store.”

“What’s his problem? What’s his mother worried about?”

“The source of the lad’s daily income. Each morning he is delivered to the Peter Pan School, pockets bare of funds. In the afternoon he returns home clinking small change, devoid of appetite, his mouth a rainbow of bilious colors from the candy shop. She — his mother — is the daughter of an old friend. She cornered me at a recent soiree and I was trapped into volunteering my services. I now tail a five-year-old when I should be out playing golf. And now to find that Miss Springer works here—”

Hinschelman shook his head, dissatisfied. “His mother couldn’t just ask the kid where he gets it?”

“Oh, no. Modern psychology forbids it. To ask where he gets the money would be not only a sign of distrust but an encroachment on his privacy.”

“Oh, my — oh, for — and you believe that?”

“Not exactly,” chuckled Seal.

“Me, I’d have it out of him in fifteen seconds,” spat Hinschelman in disgust. “She couldn’t call up the school and ask them?”

“She prefers not to. It could be the initial manifestation of, say, kleptomania, in which case she wants nothing known of it for the boy’s sake, and in which case she’d seek more discreet professional help.”

“And how do you plan to go about it?”

“I’m not sure yet. Miss Springer has now reared her shampooed head.”

Hinschelman cracked his knuckles. “Well, Inspector, maybe it’s your lucky day — me running into you here in the park.”

“How is that?” queried Seal.

“You have a thing going for this Miss Springer, right? You’re having her over for dinner tonight. You don’t hardly want her to see you crawling around in that candy store. Six-feet-two and distinguished mustache and two-hundred-dollar sports jacket, you might not blend in.”

“I’ve been pondering that.”

“Sweat no more, Inspector. I’d kind of like to do something legal. Anyway, I wouldn’t even be here, out of Bagwell State Pen, if it hadn’t of been for you getting me a job and going to bat for me.”

“Or been in it,” appended Seal, who had twice abridged his friend’s freedom.

“Oh, I’d of been there all right. I was in and out while you were still playing polo. But it was you got me going straight. I’ll do the candy store.”

Seal was touched. “Thoughtful of you, Aaron. If you could get a line on his purchases, note the denomination with which he makes payment—”

“No problem. I’d of wandered over anyway. That fat guy at the door, I’ve seen him somewhere and it’s bugging me.” He rose. “You say Billy’s wearing a red suit and cap, blond hair?”

“Beanie cap, celluloid propeller. I believe they’re coming out for recess right now.”

Hinschelman left, and from the red door issued half a hundred shrieking children. On the school’s narrow concrete forecourt the handyman coerced them into a hand-holding column of twos. Would Miss Springer present herself to escort them? She did not. From the column’s head the man appraised them sourly, barked a muffled command; and off they trooped behind him, gaggling like geese — out the gate and down the sidewalk to the candy store. Were they all filching money at that tender age?

At City Hall the clock struck two. My God, thought Seal, and vaulted to his feet as though kicked upright. At two — at this minute — he had an appointment for an eye examination, a booking he’d sought for ten days. He turned and walked quickly uphill, striding rhythmically, he soon found, for a new class in geography had begun and Anchors Aweigh drummed him forward. He could not seem to disentangle his long legs from the march’s beat or the brisk Prussian commands of Miss Springer.

“…THREE AND FOUR; NO, NO, SUSAN, YOU MISSED FRANCE; TURN RIGHT DUM AND DAH AND DEE…” I am marching, Seal discovered, horrified.

He skipped militarily out of step; he quickened his own cadence. Bloody little William anyway; what was this, skulking about after someone two feet tall with a celluloid propeller atop his skull? When would they begin to respect his retirement? He did not barge around asking the free services of his casual friends.

On he hurried, grumbling discontent, miffed at the collision of his romantic interest and the mysterious peculations of a five-year-old…

“…And so, well, the marriage ‘didn’t work out,’ as they say, and I took back my own name and went off for study in Europe and came home decided on teaching, and here I am,” concluded Miss Springer,

Seal, his eyes bleary, nodded understanding. The venue was his brownstone on Crown Street, above the park. He was not yet comfortably used to its grandeur. A wealthy aunt had died, willing him the two-story house, eighteen potted plants, and the money that made possible his early retirement. Side by side, in twin easy chairs, they dwelt on the lights of the city. Behind them a marble staircase coiled upward. Around them was the good aroma of gourmet cooking from the skilled hands of a borrowed maid.

“The brass plate on your door reads Creighton T. Seal, C.I.E. What is that?”

“Chief Inspector Emeritus,” he answered. “An honor they gave me when I retired.”

She changed the subject. “You mentioned your late wife. Should I ask how—?”

Seal, the pupils of his eyes still dilated and useless from the drops (dammit, he must be allergic to them), struggled to pour a second Scotch into their glasses. “She died in India,” he said. Scotch flowed down his hand and up a shirt sleeve. “She fell off an elephant.”

Her gasp did not seem genuine. Nothing was right, he thought. She’d been two hours late getting here (it was nearly nine) and had offered no apology. He could not see anything. Observing her from close range made his head ache. Eyes squinting, he groped for her hand with a highball glass and said, “How did you settle on the Peter Pan School?”

“So revolutionarily progressive,” she answered. “Dr. Grivas’ own method. Where else will you find kindergarten-age children reading and writing after two months?”

“And what is the method?”

“But I’ve said twice I don’t want to talk about it. I work hard all day and when I leave the school I leave it.”

“My apologies.” Not that he felt apologetic. Disgruntlement was more his mood. She was not the Miss Springer of a month ago. On that occasion, over drinks and red wine at the Italian restaurant, she had warmth and sparkle and had amused him with a cascade of fey chatter. It contrasted ill with her lacquered rigidity of tonight, her reluctance to accept his invitation, her blitheness as she floated in two hours late. Grudgingly he deferred to Hinschelman: she was some kind of fire-breathing liberal and he was a cop.

True, he hadn’t, on that first evening, told her; each had paid decorous heed to the other’s privacy, as if questions would sanction counterquestions. It was while walking with him to his car that a patrolman tipped his cap and said, “Good evening, Inspector.” Abruptly she’d recalled a forgotten engagement; she’d insisted on taking a cab.

Or had he now antagonized her, by probing and asking questions, hoping he might turn her in the direction of William Wagner? Once a cop— He pleaded guilty. Here was his choice: pursuit of such romantic endeavor as his Chief Inspectorship had for many years precluded, or the solution of a kiddie crime. Repeatedly he chose the latter. Always a cop… “I could never do that,” he said.

“Do what?”

“Compartmentalize my life. Leave the office and let a curtain drop. My work went with me night and day.”

“Yes, you’ve made that quite obvious,” she said.

“Obvious?”

“Grilling me, asking me questions.”

“My dear, you know perfectly well I’m retired.”

“Oh, come off it, C.I.E. You contradict yourself. A month, five weeks ago, your work followed you ‘night and day.’ Has retirement, in this short time, erased all your keyhole instincts and tendencies?”

Part of him bristled. He had mooned about over this razor blade? “I saw the children leaving school as I met you yesterday. I thought them charming. I’m interested in many things. I showed interest in your work. If that’s prying—”

“It is when you’re this insistent. Dr. Grivas has spent his adult life perfecting a radically new educational method. It’s now getting its first full test. He is not about to have his record ruined by a bunch of half-informed, ignorant-rich parents jerking their children out of Peter Pan in mid-term out of some stone-age seizure of horror at ‘something new.’ He does not want his method bandied about or misrepresented at this time. He’d fire me in five minutes, he’d strangle me, can’t you understand?”

“Severe payment,” murmured Seal, again squinting to try to improve his blurred vision. The phone rang. He fumbled for it on the table beside his chair. He said, “Yes,” and then, “Oh, my God,” and then, “Yes, right away.” He replaced the phone and stared blankly at his feet.

“Bad news?” asked Miss Springer.

“Quite bad,” he said, standing. “A friend — gravely hurt in an — an accident.”

“Not dead?”

Seal, mind deadened, scarcely heard her. “What?”

“Nothing,” she said quickly. “Yes, you must go to him right away.”

“I can’t see to drive. I’ll get a taxi and drop you home.”

Miss Springer would not hear of it. Suddenly she’d remembered an engagement. She would take her own cab.

On the sidewalk he apologized profusely. Their goodbyes were polite.

The woman named Louise Potchernik led him through an ugly fourth-floor room to the doorway of the bedroom where Hinschelman lay. His face was pale, his eyes were closed. He was heavily bandaged around the left shoulder and upper trunk.

“He’s had a hypo,” she said. “He’ll be out for four or five hours. I ran straight for Dr. Mendez. He just lives down the block.”

Yes, Mendez. Unfrocked and delicensed on an illegal abortion count, but a competent doctor with a brisk underworld trade.

She said, “Nobody else I dared go to with Hinsch on parole. One reason Hinsch kept mumbling your name, I guess. Thought you might help if the cops came.”

“But they haven’t.”

She shook her head. “Listen, I got a mop and bucket of water and washed blood off the stairway and clear down to Blake Street between those old empty condemned warehouses where it happened.”

“What did happen?”

“Shot twice, shoulder and chest. Mendez said another two inches and—”

“No, I mean from the start.”

“First he came home. Eight-twenty or so. Started to phone you but remembered you had an engagement. Had some things to tell you. Said something about a candy store and then, talking more like to himself than to me, said, ‘every one of those kids had a brand-new quarter.’ Couldn’t seem to get over that, whatever it meant. Said to tell you that ‘in case something happens,’ the stuff came from the school-house.”

“He went into that school?” asked Seal incredulously.

“Some school somewhere. He talks to himself a lot more than to me. I think it’s a habit from prison.”

“And then?”

“I fixed supper, we ate, and he went downstairs and down Blake Street towards this deli’ to get a six-pack and cigarettes. The next I knew was hearing him moaning from half a flight down. He doesn’t weigh but a hundred and fifteen. I got him up here and ran for Mendez.”

“Could he tell you anything?”

“Mendez?”

“Hinsch.”

“Pretty delirious. Came to, passed out, and so on. Said your name, ‘Seal,’ and then ‘dark’ over and over again. That really scared me, that ‘dark.’ Said ‘room,’ and then ‘dark’ again. And said another thing — I had to bend down to make it out. Said ‘Bullfrog.’ ”

“Bullfrog?”

“That’s all,” she said. “Here’s these things for you.” From beneath a soiled sofa cushion she withdrew certain sheets of paper, seemingly a mimeographed list. She handed him two mounted film slides. “Here’s something else. The bullet Mendez dug out of him. Says it’s from a .32 pistol.”

The feel of it was .32, but Seal could not adjust his eyes to it or to the print on the mimeographed pages. He rose and walked back to the man’s bedside and leaned to hear his labored breathing. “He was helping me,” he said, “but I never wanted him going into that school.”

“Yeah, but you know Hinsch. Show him a door with a fool-proof lock on it and give him enough reason — and always talking about owing you so much.”

“Not that much,” Seal said, and pocketed what she had given him. “I’ll look into it. I’ll straighten it out.”

“We might have to move him. Someone around that school must have seen him. I can’t have the police here.”

“Call me. Don’t say anything. Just say he was on his way for cigarettes and got shot.”

He picked at a filet off the warmer and, eyes functionless, went to bed. Visions of Hinschelman followed him. He’d gone scrambling off at the critical moment, leaving Fingers to do his dirty work. How long might the man have waited for him, or how many times had he telephoned? And he was unreachable, of course — seeing the optometrist, shopping about for exotic viands for the strange Miss Springer. While he awaited her, cocktail apparatus ready, Hinschelman, in his misguided fervor, got into and out of the Peter Pan School, bringing booty of questionable importance. While Seal and Miss Springer sipped drinks and crossed conversational hatpins, someone found Hinsch with two rounds of a .32.

And Miss Springer? Where did the shoots of her belligerence lead? Or her almost paranoiac defensiveness? Love of Grivas, fear of Grivas, loathing of Seal as an ex-cop?

And what about Grivas carrying an antique box camera around?

Working the night shift at headquarters was one Lieutenant Gibbet, a close-mouthed young officer whom Seal had trained. From his bedside telephone he called him, asking any information on anyone in the files known as “Bullfrog.” Gibbet did not recognize the name, he’d ring him back.

The caption, in urgent boldface, was under the touching photo of a potbellied, hollow-eyed African child. Following was the quarter-page advertisement on a page of Family Way, one of a half ton of female magazines left in a storeroom by Aunt Grace. There ensued (translated from the Swahili) this letter:

“Before you, dear Mrs. Bernice Borkey of Trestle Glen, Idaho, USA, I could not went to school. Here is picture. Wind blow hut away and flood take mealie plot and I every day find grubworms and lizard for sick sister eat and boil posho — our only sheep die heart water. Find berries and wart-hog curds. Wear leaves and no doctor for sister dying, baya sana! (Very bad). Then you have adopt us now new hut and littles barley meal for eat and scabs better since you send money.”

A plea from Foster Children International followed. Would you turn your back on the tens of thousands of Bebo Ogologos dying of malnutrition and hopelessness in every land? Twenty-five dollars monthly (less than you now spent for cigarettes or a ‘night on the town’) offered you the rewarding knowledge that you kept a Bebo alive. Your orphan would write personal letters and send snapshots, as did Bebo… WILL YOU HELP?”

Seal tossed the magazine aside, tested his improved vision on the city skyline, and picked up the ringing phone. Respectfully a man asked if he would hold the line for Captain Stout of Detectives. “Certainly,” Seal answered and, once on the “hold” button, hung up. A worn gag of Stout’s, prefatory to a jocular harpoon. The phone rang again. He let it ring while he thought. He knew now who “Bullfrog” was but he couldn’t tell them. Pull in Bullfrog and they’d nail Hinschelman with a housebreaking — five years in any courtroom with his past. On the twelfth or sixteenth ring he answered.

“Ah, Inspector,” Stout said, buoyant as an airline ticket girl.

“Stout.”

“Thought you might have a comment on your boy Hinschelman, who’s just made the charts again.”

“Bad connection. Can hardly hear you.”

“Aaron. Fingers. Little excitement around here; we had a pool running on how long he’d keep out of trouble effective the date you soft-hearted him out of the pen.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“We voted to ask you. You were seen coming in and then going out, by taxi number, last night.”

“Wonder who saw that?”

“Didn’t give name. Called us around midnight. Spoke of you and said Hinschelman got himself shot.”

“So what’s this, your quarter-hourly coffee break?”

“Boys took a second vote, decided you might know where he is. We got there, nobody home. Pretty sloppy job of swabbing blood off that stairway and clearing out the medic smells. Ex-Doctor Mendez came to mind. Fancy Mendez being missing, too.”

“Unbelievable,” Seal said. “So someone shot Fingers, you say. That’s your charge, his getting shot? Or is it ‘not being home at night?’ ”

“Charge is being good old Hinschelman with a record as long as New Year’s morning. Boys wanted me to call you. They’re having trouble picturing someone just walking up and shooting Hinschelman without provocation.”

“Then you need some new boys. Everybody down there knows he dropped me information.” Seal laughed. “Provocation? Without Hinsch you’d have a dozen unsolved jewelry heists on your hands.”

“They asked me when he last dropped you information.”

“Tell them I don’t know. I had drops in my eyes yesterday and they clouded my memory. Tell the boys this: ever since Bagwell State he’s been working as timekeeper on the midnight shift at Plynx Automotive. Call his super if you don’t think he’s straight.”

“Straight as the pool cue of a hustler’s mark. We’ll know when we pick up the guy that shot him.”

“Yes, don’t forget him in your hilarity. While you’re laughing he might be gunning down someone else. Funny thing about that nameless phone call when you come to think about it. I got word around nine and went out for the straight story, which is that Hinsch was on the way to a store for some cigarettes. Someone, your party, went to all the trouble of writing down my cab number. Odd hobby, wouldn’t you think? Or maybe he just likes to collect cab numbers. Makes phone calls, too. Along about midnight he got around to phoning you.”

Stout answered less jovially. “More than you did.”

“Yes, but three long hours later. Think it might be they held off until they learned the assassination had aborted and Hinsch was out of range? Pretend — you and the boys — that they knew of his parolee status and were settling for his reconsignment to the pen.”

“We’d still want to know ‘Why?’ We’ll find out. We’re all tired of Hinschelman. Nobody favored releasing him but you.”

“Me, the warden, and the parole board.”

“Yeah, invite them all over, drink some warm beer. You’ll keep us posted, naturally.”

“I always do,” smiled Seal.

He returned to the arcana that Fingers had lifted from the school. Straddling a heap of minor mysteries was the reasoning behind the theft of these things. On the film slides were microscopic rows of scriptography, indecipherable without a projector. Mimeographed were alphabetical rosters (‘N’ into ‘O’) tom at random from a loose-leaf notebook listing donors and foreign foster children of the charity fund. He read the five pages. Here, in the orphan column, might be something worth driving over to his Uncle Malcolm’s about.

He was folding the pages when a penciled notation on the back of one caught his eye. It was in Hinschelman’s handwriting. It said: “Ubiquity Mailing Service, San Francisco.” Miss Springer had mailed a package to that address. He opened his address book and dialed a San Francisco friend.

“… ALL IN STEP NOW, THIS IS RUSSIA, ONE AND TWO AND LENINGRAD; CAREFUL, KEVIN, WATCH THE NORTH SEA, NO WET FEET AND HUP TWO THREE…”

“What in God’s name?” asked Stout.

“Nursery school over there,” the Inspector said. This park bench was well back, farther back than yesterday’s, behind the oleander bushes near the bandstand.

“Well, they’re busting a city ordinance, all that noise.”

“They may be busting more than that.”

“What does that mean? What are you up to anyway, getting me out here in the woods?”

“You wanted information on Hinschelman.”

“You found him?” Stout asked.

“No, and wouldn’t tell you — yet — if I had. Got something better. He was shot out of that warehouse door by a hood named James T. Keech, alias Bullfrog. You don’t know him — he filtered down here after four years at Bagwell State, where he seems to have been a contemporary of Hinschelman’s. Nice book on Bullfrog. Armed robbery, assault with deadly weapon—”

“Friend of Hinschelman’s—”

“Wrong. Hinsch didn’t know him but had seen him somewhere and remembered the face. Ergo, Keech didn’t know Fingers until yesterday, which recognition he celebrated by ambushing him with a .32.” He handed the spent round to Stout.

“We call that withholding evidence.”

“How withholding? I just gave it to you.”

“You know, sometimes you just make me squirm,” Stout said. “And you wouldn’t possibly be able to describe this guy or help us out on where he is.”

“Can do both with the greatest precision, once we get a thing or two straightened out.”

“I knew there was a catch. Get on with it. I can’t sit out here all day for some cheap grifter.”

“I may offer you something bigger.”

Stout mouthed his cigar. “Wonder what it is about that word ‘offer,’ when you say it, that comes on like a hyena eating glue? What’s the deal?”

“Immunity for Hinschelman.”

“Doesn’t need it. You said he’s straight.”

“Anything he did I asked him to do.”

“Go to hell, Seal. You’re retired, you’ve got no authority to do anything or have anyone else do it for you.”

“Subject is a five-year-old boy, Captain. You want it?” Stout massaged his round face. Cigar ashes dropped to his tie.

“The two things are interlinked,” Seal went on. “What Hinsch did for me and the shooting. I tell you that Keech acted under orders, and I ask who of any stature would risk killing a small-time pickpocket unless something of considerable importance was involved.”

“Keep talking.”

“I sent Hinschelman into a building for some information. Someone apparently saw him there, but nothing was done about it on the site. Your desk says they never called you. An hour or so later Keech shot him. The place Hinschelman entered employs, for the most dubious reasons, Keech.”

Stout spoke as the wind changed. “…MEXICO AND YUCATAN AND ONE AND TWO AND…”

“I said what’s this touchy institution?” Stout bellowed.

“You’re hearing it from that window right ahead of you. The Peter Pan Nursery and Reading School.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” groaned Stout and stood up. “I’m going home.”

Seal pulled him back by an arm. “Sit down. You want a coast-to-coast AP story or don’t you? We’ve already got an unregenerate hood running loose in a houseful of kinder-gartners from the best homes in town, and that doesn’t pique your cement head? There’s a lot more going on in there than a nursery school.”

Seal rose to peer over the oleander bush. Keech was guarding the door, but Grivas’ car hadn’t arrived.

“And what is that?” Stout said wearily.

“Thing called Foster Children International.”

Stout stared at him. “Antoine Grivas? You’re out of your mind. Mess with him and you’ll have every Women’s Club in the country after your scalp.”

“Better now than a million dollars later.”

“I’ve got five more minutes. Go on.”

He began with Billy Wagner and progressed to Miss Springer and then to Hinschelman. He dwelt on the strange behavior of the woman. “I’m waiting for one particular portion of the geography drill she’s giving, then I’ll be sure.” He told of the phone call last night. “She said, ‘Not dead?’ and then ‘Yes, you must go to him.’ Unusual things to say, just as if she’d been sitting there expecting it. I’d said ‘a friend,’ not ‘her’ or ‘him.’ ”

Seal paused, signaling silence. Stout eyed his wrist watch. “Go ahead.”

“I’m listening,” Seal said, “we’re getting to it. Here it is.”

“… HERE WE GO NOW, ROUND THE WORLD, ROUND AND MARCHING, THREE AND FOUR; FASTER, WILLIAM, THREE AND FOUR; NO, NO, SUSAN, YOU MISSED FRANCE; TURN RIGHT, REUBEN, GREECE IS NEXT AND HUP AND TWO AND THREE AND FOUR…”

Like a cat by a fireplace, Seal stretched, smiling. “Susan missed France yesterday. Missed it twice, once while she was clear out of the room on the way to the candy store. I missed it because I was racing to the eye doctor.”

“Brain doctor’s where you should have gone. I don’t get a thing.”

“It’s a tape,” Seal said. “It’s not the innocent geography class that passersby are supposed to think it is. I now submit this bizarre document from those premises — a list of the donors to Foster Children International and opposite each the name and location of his-or-her respective adoptee. Notice these foreign villages: you’ve never heard of a single one of them!

“I paid a call on my rich Uncle Malcolm who spent twenty-five years junketing for National Geographic and has notes and maps that money can’t buy. They exist, all right, these villages, but they’ve all got one thing in common: they’re unreachable unless you have a helicopter or a dogsled. If not in ten-thousand-foot mountains they’re deep in some primeval swamp or buried among Amazon headhunters or in forests you couldn’t get a bulldozer through. Their one and only contact with the outside world is the mail burro or outrigger or native runner, whose arrival sets off two weeks of bonfires and tribal dancing.”

“And what do you plan to do, relocate them?”

“Wake up, Jonathan. Say you ‘adopt’ one of these infants and, as time passes, get sentimental enough to go voyaging off for an in-person interview in his mudhole. Impossible. Conveniently so. That gets us to another murky area. Every school day a parcel goes out of that nursery addressed to Ubiquity Mailing Service in San Francisco. I found out what Ubiquity is. Ubiquity will, for a healthy fee, see that mail is remailed to an addressee bearing the postmark of any town, village, igloo, or cliff dwelling on earth. They do a brisk trade for practical jokers, college kids, ‘missing’ husbands, and such as play games with the F.B.I.”

Stout chewed his thumbnail. “I am catching a gamey odor.”

“Smell these film slides. No use trying to read them without a projector. Uncle Malcolm has one and knows some languages. This is his translation from Pakistani.” He handed a typewritten page to the Captain. Stout read it and rubbed his beefy neck.

“If you’re wrong I’ll be selling shoelaces.”

Seal peered over the oleander bush. “You’ve been saying that for twenty years.”

“Support me and my family on your aunt’s will if you’re wrong?”

“When was I ever wrong, Jonathan? Better that we work fast. There’ll be a ton of evidence in that building and Grivas hasn’t showed up yet. Phone them to bring you a warrant, and we’ll need four or five men.”

Two men neutralized Keech in a quick pincers movement, taking his .32 away, silencing him before he could shout an alarm. In the unoccupied business office Seal went for the carton sealed and destined for Ubiquity Mailing, broke it open, and extracted the top envelope. The paper was of the poorest quality; it was sealed but unstamped, and addressed to a matron in Alabama with return address: Carla Pupin of Plensknik, Yugoslavia. The writing on the envelope and enclosed letter was in a child’s wandering scrawl. A fuzzy snapshot of a small girl was inside. On a bookcase Seal found a jar of mint-new quarters.

They left Officer Wode there and bypassed the empty geography room, leaving the tape recorder playing. Beneath an unlit red light ahead was the door to the “dark… room” referred to by a delirious Hinschelman. Inside Seal turned a light on and sidled down the line of prints paper-clipped to a horizontal wire.

“Pictures of slum kids, every one of them,” Stout said. “I’ve seen some of these kids in the Fifteenth Ward. Terrible prints, aren’t they? And this guy’s a professional photographer?”

“Done poorly on purpose,” said Seal. “Uses a six-dollar camera, prints them amateurishly. What other kind of photography would there be in North Rucksack, Paraguay?”

Stout shook his head, still doubtful. “Suppose they mail him the undeveloped negatives from all those places?”

“You sure die hard,” said Seal. “Come along.”

He took Stout down the wide hall festooned with crayoned cutouts and toward a door at the end of a corridor. Behind them the recorder receded and a new voice was heard — that of the real Miss Springer.

The door was at the left rear of a large classroom. A foot-square tinted window gave them vantage.

“It beats anything,” Stout murmured, looking in. “Anything I ever saw.”

Her back was to them. All about her at their tiny desks toiled fifty children, heads bent, tongues writhing, feet tangling with chairlegs, and knuckles white on their pencils as they copied from the three projection screens ahead. Three projectors at the rear wall threw three images of handwritten letters in three foreign languages. The calligraphy was round and flowing, easily copiable. Two aisles separated the class into three sections, each assigned its respective screen as copy fodder.

Now Miss Springer bent over Billy Wagner and smiled approval, walked on, then bent to assist a small girl.

“Know Italian or Burmese?” Seal asked.

“Know Spanish,” answered Stout. “It says, ‘Estimada Senora.’ Then it’s blank.

“They fill that in to order,” Seal said.

“Says: ‘My name is Mateo. Here is picture. I am live in little pueblo of Saenz in Chile with my brother. I go to school now with you send money. I have dog name Lobo. When you send so kind have coat for winter and…”

His voice faded. “They copy it in the foreign language without knowing the meaning of a single word.”

Seal nodded. “Keeps them from babbling about it at home. Grivas runs ad, receives contributions, has the children copy letters and address envelopes, adds snapshots, and off they go to Ubiquity Mailing Service to be postmarked in towns halfway around the world.”

“And pays each kid a quarter a day.”

“Rewards them, let’s say. Cuts down overhead. Figure two letters per afternoon by fifty children — that comes to five hundred letters a week. Times twenty-five dollars a month per contributor gives them a $50,000-a-month sucker list.”

“Minimum,” Stout said grimly.

The door suddenly flew open and closed behind a livid Miss Springer.

She said, “Look, you keyhole creep, can’t you understand I’m not interested? What do you want now?”

Seal smiled at her. “You.” They were walking her to the front door when Antoine Grivas entered. A white carnation graced the left lapel of his imported suit; his shoes were English saddle leather; he carried a bulging brief case and a Brownie camera.

“Two bits a day,” mused Hinschelman, “and those shysters taking home five figures a month.”

They had found him and returned him to his own billet via ambulance. “I still don’t understand all that noise we heard.”

“The recorder? Oh, they had their regular morning curriculum,” Seal answered. “Or enough to satisfy enough parents. It was afternoons that were given over to the illegalities, and the recorder backed up Keech’s reasons for keeping people out of there — classes in session. His function was to guard that door.”

Hinschelman wagged his head in admiration. “You’re something all right, making sense out of all that junk I brought you. Didn’t know what I was taking. Was looking through the front office and heard footsteps and just grabbed the first things I could. How did I know Keech slept in the place? I beat him out the front door but he must have followed me home.”

“And phoned Grivas for instructions while you ate supper. She lived with him, and hadn’t yet left for my place, so she knew what had happened.”

“How’d she connect us?”

“Saw us on that park bench together. So did Keech.”

“I played dead. It wasn’t hard. I lay there and he came out of that doorway and searched my pockets, not that he knew I’d taken anything. I looked up when he was walking off and recognized him under a street lamp.” His eyes closed. “Some racket. Now Billy doesn’t get his quarter anymore.”

“Billy will now live within his allowance, which is a nickel a week.”

“And you’re without a girl friend.”

“Never had one, as you wisely suggested.”

“Maybe I can find you someone nice,” said Louise.

“Please don’t,” urged Inspector Seal.