Scattershot

EIGHTEEN

It took the local police just about fifteen minutes to respond to Mollenhauer’s summons. But those fifteen minutes were chaotic. Word of the theft spread among the assembled guests and broke up the party posthaste. A few of the people left, presumably to avoid the inconvenience of being detained by a lengthy police investigation; nobody made any effort to stop them, and I had neither the authority nor the inclination to try it myself. The rest milled around on the terrace or inside the house in nervous little groups.

I wanted to wait in or near the gift room, but Mollenhauer was not having any of that. He subjected me to a two-minute diatribe, all of it vicious. “You’re an incompetent idiot,” he said. And, “For all I know, those newspaper stories about you are true and you’re nothing but a damned thief.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with what happened, Mr. Mollenhauer,” I said.

“No? Then, where is my daughter’s ring?”

“I just don’t know.”

“How could you let it be stolen like this?”

“The gift-room door was locked,” I told him. “If it had been left unlocked, I might have been able to get in there in time to prevent the theft.”

“I doubt that,” he said bitterly. “You’re a miserable excuse for a detective, no matter what the circumstances.”

Hickox was there and Mollenhauer started in on him. “I shouldn’t have listened to you, George; I should have listened to my better instincts. This man should never have been allowed inside my house.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Mollenhauer-”

“Sorry?” Mollenhauer said. “Go tell Carla how sorry you are, see what she says. I won’t forget your part in this, George. You can count on that.”

There was more, but I quit listening to it; it was pointless to try to reason with a man like Mollenhauer when he was this upset. I went and did my waiting where he insisted I should, in his study.

A nice easy job. An omen that my luck was starting to change for the better. Jesus Christ!

I sat there alone in my ripped pants, still a little stunned, and wondered what I had done to offend the powers that be in the universe. It must have been something pretty terrible to warrant all that had been dumped on me in this crazy week. Three simple cases, and all three take bizarre twists and land me square in the middle of a pair of homicides and a jewel robbery. My relationship with Kerry starts to fall apart. A lunatic woman slanders me in the press and threatens a criminal-negligence suit. I make an error in judgment and let a murderess escape with $118,000 in stolen money. And it looks, now more than ever, as though my investigator’s license is going to be suspended. It was like getting sprayed with shotgun pellets-a scattershot of incidents that kept peppering me no matter which way I turned.

What next? I thought. What else can go wrong?

While I was sitting there feeling sorry for myself, the door chimes sounded and the cops trooped in. Five minutes later, they got around to me. The guy who came in was a broad, chunky type with olive-green eyes and a mop of pewter-colored hair, dressed in plain clothes. He was also a slow-moving, slow-talking type; the impression you got was. that he deliberated each movement and each word before going ahead with them. His name was Banducci, and his official title was lieutenant.

Apparently Mollenhauer had not bothered to give him my name; when I showed him the photostat of my license he said, “You a paisan?” “Yes, Swiss-Italian.”

“Uh-huh. My people were Romano.” He shrugged, dismissing the subject of ancestries. And then a frown worked its way onto his face, and he peered at the photostat again. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I thought your name looked familiar. You’re the private detective who’s been in all the San Francisco papers lately.”

“Yeah, that’s me.”

“Well, well. And now here you are in Ross, mixed up in another criminal case. “You do get around, don’t you.”

Like Typhoid Mary, I thought. The harbinger of trouble and adversity, that’s me. I said, “It’s been a hell of a week,” which was pretty feeble.

“You’re in a lot of hot water, seems like.”

“Through no fault of my own. I’ve never done anything illegal or unethical-not in San Francisco or anywhere else, including this house.”

“For your sake, I hope that’s the truth.” He paused. “Mr. Mollenhauer tells me you’re armed.”

I nodded. “I’ve got a carry permit for a handgun, if you want to see it.”

“Maybe later. You mind checking your weapon with me for the time being?”

It was a procedure request and it did not have to mean anything. Or then again, maybe it meant I was more suspect in his eyes than he was letting on. I said, “Not at all,” and pushed the tux coat back and took the.38 out of its holster-carefully, with my thumb and forefinger. I handed it to him butt first.

“Thanks,” he said. He put the weapon into his coat pocket. “What happened to your pants?”

“I tore them climbing out through the window.”

“After the robbery?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” he said, “let’s have your version of what took place here tonight.”

I gave it to him.

“So you didn’t see anybody after you broke into the gift room,” he said when I was done. “Not inside and not outside on the grounds.”

“-No. Except for the man and woman I told you about.”

“How long was it from the time you heard the glass break to the time you got the door kicked in?”

“Thirty seconds, maybe. Forty-five at the most.”

One of his eyebrows went up. “That’s not much time for somebody to come in through the window, grab the ring, go back out, and disappear.”

“I know,” I said. The time factor had been bothering me, too, along with the broken window and the location of the glass shards. “But that’s how it was.”

“Mm,” Banducci said. His voice was noncommittal. “Suppose you wait here while we go over the gift room. I’ll want to talk to you again after that.”

“Fine.”

He went out, and I sat down on an antique sofa and wished that I could smoke a cigarette. I almost never had a craving for one anymore, but when I was a heavy smoker it was times like this, times of stress, that the need for tobacco had been the strongest. Funny how the mind works sometimes, how it regresses and dredges up old desires.

I sat in the empty room and fought the nicotine urge and tried not to think about what Eberhardt and the Chief of Police and the media would make out of this latest mess. Instead I tried to find some sense in the theft of Carla Mollenhauer’s diamond ring. The facts as I knew them were muddy and damned improbable. How could the window have been broken from inside the gift room? How could the thief have got away with the ring in less than a minute? Questions without answers, at least for the moment. And questions which seemed to contradict my explanation of the facts.

Another twenty-five minutes crawled away, heavy with tension, before I had company again. This time it was another plain clothesman whose name I never did get. He stood just inside the doorway and crooked a hand at me. “Lieutenant Banducci wants to see you.” he said.

I stood and went out with him, through the house and back into the rear wing. On the way we encountered Walker and a pretty dark-haired girl of about twenty-Mollenhauer’s daughter, obviously, because she was still wearing her bridal gown. The girl paid no attention to me; her eyes were red-rimmed and her expression was tragic and remote. But Walker pinned me with a passing glare, a down-the-nose look full of loathing. If he had any decent qualities, that boy, they were well bidden. I wondered briefly if Carla Mollenhauer was anything like him, or if she had made a serious mistake she would one day regret.

Banducci was alone in the gift room, standing by the window and watching a couple of uniformed cops working the grounds outside. The sun had gone down on the opposite side of the house and there were lengthening shadows across the lawn; dusk was not far off. The cops out there both carried flashlights.

As we came in, Banducci turned and then came over in front of me. His movements were still ponderous, but there was a hard edge now in his eyes and in the set of his mouth.

“Okay, paisan,” he said, and he put a different inflection on the Italian word this time, almost accusing, as if he had come to consider me a disgrace to our mutual heritage. “Let’s go over your story again.”

I nodded and repeated it to him, carefully, omitting none of the details. Nothing changed in his expression, but his eyes seemed to darken, to take on an even harder edge. The tension in me sharpened to anxiety. I didn’t like the way things were shaping up.

Banducci was silent for a time. Then he said deliberately, “Must be at least two hundred packages in here, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes.”

“And all of them still gift-wrapped.”

“I know what you’re getting at,” I said. “How did the thief know which package contained the ring? And he had to know, all right; the ring box was the only one opened.”

“So how do you explain that?”

“An inside job,” I said. “Has to be.”

“Sure. An inside job. How many people saw the ring and its gift box after it was delivered this afternoon?”

“Mollenhauer, his secretary, his son-in-law, and the guy from the jewelry store.”

“And you,” Banducci said.

“Yes. And me.”

“Which makes one of you five the probable guilty party.”

“It adds up that way.”

“But it wasn’t you, right?”

“No. I told you what happened, all of it.”

“The whole truth?”

“Yes.”

“One of the other four, according to your story, broke in the window, came inside, opened the gift box and the ring case, took the ring, went back through the window, and got clear away.”

I didn’t say anything.

“And he did all of that in less than a minute. According to your story.”

“Look, I know it sounds impossible-”

“It doesn’t sound impossible; it is impossible.” He motioned me over to the window. “Take a look at this hole,” he said. “Jagged pieces all around the frame-top, bottom, and sides. You see any blood on those pieces? Bits of cloth or anything like that?”

“No.”

“But a man is supposed to have gone through there not once but twice, over and through all those sharp edges of glass, without once cutting himself or tearing his clothing. You think that’s possible?”

“No.”

“No,” he agreed. “Look at the floor under the window. What do you see?”

Here it comes, I thought. “Nothing,” I said. “The broken glass is all outside on the lawn.”

“Oh, you realized that, did you?”

“Yeah. Just after it happened.”

“Then you also realize what it means: this window couldn’t have been smashed from the outside, as you claim it was.”

“I didn’t claim it was smashed from outside,” I said. “All I know is that I heard the glass shatter, and that’s all I reported to you.”

“The fact is, it was broken from inside this room-a locked empty room by your own testimony. Now how do you account for that?”

“I can’t account for it.”

“I can,” he said. “How does this sound? You saw that diamond ring today and figured what it was worth, and while you were sitting out in the hallway you worked up a little plan to steal it. You kicked in the door, grabbed the ring, and then broke the window yourself. From in here, forgetting until afterward where the broken glass would fall.”

“I didn’t do any of that.”

“The evidence says you did.”

“I don’t care what the evidence says. Listen, go ahead and search me. Search my car.”

“We’ll do just that. But I doubt if we’ll find the ring that way. You’d be too smart to have it on you or in your car.”

“Then what the hell am I supposed to have done with it?”

“Stashed it somewhere on the grounds nearby. You had enough time. And it wouldn’t have been too difficult for you to come back one of these nights, late, to pick it up.”

I had to struggle to control a surge of anger. Letting it out would only make matters worse for me, by giving the confrontation between us a personal angle. Banducci was just a cop doing his job, interpreting the facts as he saw them-the same way I might have interpreted them myself if our roles were reversed. I couldn’t blame him for the position I was in.

In level tones I said, “Call Lieutenant Eberhardt on the San Francisco force. He’s known me for thirty years; he’ll vouch for my honesty.”

Banducci sighed. “References aren’t going to help you much, paisan. Not with evidence like we’ve got here.”

“I’m telling you, I did not steal that ring.” “Sure,” he said. “That’s about what they all say-right up to the time the gates close behind them at San Quentin.”