The Name of the Game Is Tape by Dan J. Marlowe

The best part of the caper was, nobody would ever know. Nobody, that is, but a very curious cop with an idea.

Broad-shouldered Carl Robey, detective sergeant of the Midland police force, shifted position uneasily on the roll of canvas in the storage room of the huge, semi-darkened supermarket.

“This is crazy!” he rasped to his detective partner, James Thompson. “Three nights you’ve had me in here for nothing now. This stakeout is a joke. Wherever you’re getting your information from, it’s all wet.”

Thompson, younger and slimmer, frowned in the darkness.

“Hold on a little longer, Carl,” he said softly. “I know I’m right about this. I have everything but the date. They’ll be along.”

Robey’s snort was distinctly audible. “You won’t get me in here another night, Jimmy,” he warned. “This is slower going than sitting in your apartment watching you add sound on sound to a pre-recorded tape. You know I don’t have the patience—” He broke off abruptly as a whirring noise made itself heard above the sound of his voice. He surged up to his knees, his big hand dropping on his partner’s shoulder and tightening.

“Diamond cutter on glass,” he breathed. “You were right, Jimmy. They’re coming through the side window. I’ll cover the front.” Moving with a speed surprising in a man of his bulk, he disappeared into the shadow of the store aisles, a bulldog flashlight in his left hand and a .38 police special held firmly in his right.

Thompson remained flat on the canvas, alert for the revealing tinkle of the removed square of glass. It was followed by the rasp of the catch being slipped off, and the squeak of the opening window. A series of grunts indicated the progress of the first man through it, and when he heard the third solid thump of heels hitting the floor, Thompson rose and moved cat-footedly to a more advantageous position.

“Let’s get to the safe,” a hoarse voice whispered.

The area of the room under the opened window was bathed suddenly in the glare of Carl Robey’s flashlight.

“Don’t move!” the big man snapped. Thompson flicked on his own light. Caught in the pinpoint crossfire of the flashlight beams, three white faces stared at the dark figures behind the dazzling brightness. “Turn around,” Robey ordered. The men complied slowly. “Hands over your heads and palms flat against the wall,” he continued. In the glare of the flashlights half a dozen hands crept up the wall. “Okay, Jimmy. Cuff them. I’ll call the desk.”

“Who talked?” the tallest of the men facing the wall cried out passionately. “I’ll kill the— Who talked?”

“You talked, Jeff,” Thompson told him, deftly slipping three pairs of wrists into the three sets of handcuffs he had brought along. “All right, Carl. Make your call.”

When the last of the paper work had been completed and the prisoners processed and the lieutenant’s congratulations duly savored, Carl Robey cornered his partner in the station-house locker room.

“All right,” the gray-haired man said grimly. “Give. Before I go out of my feeble mind trying to figure it out. How did you know they were planning to knock that particular safe over? And why three sets of handcuffs, instead of two or four?”

Thompson smiled as he lit a cigarette.

“It was easy, given the original hunch,” he said. “You remember that neither of us was happy about Jeff settling down in our precinct after the parole board turned him loose the last time, since we both had him figured for a real wrongo. I kept checking with his parole officer, and a month ago he told me he’d had unconfirmed rumors of Jeff’s cutting corners on his parole regulations, hanging out in taverns in wrong company, that sort of thing.

“I knew he was up to something, so I went by his rooming house one day and coaxed his landlord into giving me a look at his room. It was about what you’d expect, except that in one corner I saw an expensive-looking hi-fi unit with a quarter inch of dust on it, indicating that it wasn’t being used. I knew right then how I was going to find out what Jefferson was up to. I spent ten minutes hooking up the speaker in the hi-fi so it was operating as a microphone, and then I ran a wire—”

“Wait a minute!” Carl Robey protested. “Wait a minute! You changed a speaker into a microphone? What kind of talk is that?”

“All speakers are microphones, properly converted,” Thompson replied. “Usually you need an amplifier, because there’s a loss of power, but it’s no great trick. Just take the wire leading—”

“Spare me the lesson in electronics,” Carl Robey said gloomily. “You know I never made it out of the sixth grade.”

Thompson smiled. “All I did was run a wire from the converted speaker down to the basement, then brought in my voice-actuated portable tape recorder and connected it up in a closet to which the landlord gave me the key. Every morning I’d run in and put on a fresh reel of tape and take off the full one. I’ve got a stack of tapes at home in which Jeff outlined the entire job.

“I knew everything about it except the date, although I knew it was going to be this weekend. I think Jeff didn’t tell even his partners when he planned to move in to prevent exactly what happened.”

“So if you knew all this, why’d you have me losing sleep?” Robey demanded indignantly. “We could’ve scooped ’em in their room and wrapped ’em up.”

Thompson shook his head.

“Most courts won’t accept that kind of evidence,” he explained. “Now, anyway, although I believe they’ll come to it. They should, since they’re taking away so many of the lawman’s tools.” He smiled at Robey. “Simple, wasn’t it?”

“Not for me,” his partner said emphatically. “The Wizard of Oz has nothing on you, boy.” A slow grin spread over his broad features. “Crime prevention — that’s the name of the game!”

“This time the name of the game was tape,” Thompson said.

“Okay, okay,” Robey said. “You know what worries me? After this, what do we do for an encore the next time the lieutenant lines us up on a job?”

“When we need it, I’ll think of something,” Thompson said.

“I wouldn’t bet against it, partner,” Robey said.

Together they went out into what was left of the night.