Thefts of Nick Velvet

by Edward D. Hoch

  Fitzpatrick had resumed his seat, but Asher remained standing. “I know,” she said. “Tell them, Nick.”

  “I don’t think you have to tell me anything,” Fitzpatrick said. “I finally recognized Mr. Velvet in his fireman’s suit-but not in time to keep him from taking my water. And I suppose you set the fire yourself?”

  Nick nodded. “I was paid $20,000 by this young lady to steal the water from your pool.”

  “Twenty …! Asher, have you gone completely mad?”

  “The money came from my family. I think they would have wanted it spent this way!”

  “But why?”

  “I’ve taken samples from that water—a hundred samples already, with more to come. They’re all being analyzed, Sam.”

  “Analyzed?”

  “There’s chlorine in your pool water. Apparently you’re not familiar with the effects of chlorine on calcified cement. There’ll be traces of calcium in that water, Sam, especially after ten years.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do, Sam. I’ll be back on Tuesday with the results of the analyses.”

  Nick hesitated a moment, then followed her out, leaving Fitzpatrick and his wife staring after them.

  Back in the car, heading away from the house, Nick Velvet leaned back in the seat. “I had a question to ask you last night. I’ll ask it now. Was Fitzpatrick installing his pool the night your aunt disappeared?”

  She drove for a long time without answering, bathing in a morning sun already high in the sky. “How did you know?” she asked finally.

  “He built the pool in honor of his first hit play, and you told me your aunt vanished a month or so after it opened. It seems logical that the two events came at about the same time.”

  She nodded. “The divorce papers were never served on Aunt Mary. That’s what first made me suspicious. Last winter I hired a private detective to check on this lawyer who’s been sending me the money in my aunt’s name. He reported that the money was actually coming from Sam. That’s when I really became suspicious that something had happened to her ten years ago.”

  “And you remembered the pool.”

  “I remembered. I was only fourteen at the time, but I remembered that last day with my aunt. We’d watched them pouring the concrete for the bottom of the pool. Aunt Mary said it wouldn’t be hard till morning.” She was staring straight ahead at the road.

  Nick Velvet lit a cigarette. “There’s no such thing as a chlorine effect on calcified cement. You made that up, and you wasted your twenty thousand.”

  “I didn’t waste the twenty thousand. It had to be a big lie if he was to believe it at all. He’d have laughed in my face if I took a single test-tube sample from the pool. But he’s written this sort of thing, remember—wild, way-out stuff, real campy. I know him—this is just bizarre enough for him to believe. The calcium from her bones, being drawn out of the cement bottom …”

  “What do you do now?”

  “Wait.”

  They didn’t have long to wait. She came to Nick’s hotel room the following morning with his check.

  “You’re up early,” he said. It was the Fourth of July, and outside someone was setting off illegal fireworks.

  “Lydia phoned me. He killed himself during the night. Out by the pool.”

  Nick Velvet turned away. “I’d hate to be your enemy.”

  “It had to be done.”

  “Just one thing,” he said. “Why did it have to be over the long weekend?”

  “He was a writer, remember?” She was staring out the window at something far away. “I didn’t want him calling the library or some science editor in New York to check on my chlorine-on-cement effect. This way he couldn’t find out till Tuesday, and I knew he wouldn’t last that long.”

  Nick thought about Gloria, back home on the porch, and remembered that he’d promised to be there for the Fourth. It was time to be going.

  The Theft of the Toy Mouse

  “I’M GOING TO PARIS,” Nick Velvet told Gloria one evening, as they sat on the porch drinking beer and listening to the vague rumblings of distant summer thunder.

  “Oh, Nicky! When?”

  “The end of the week. I’ve been commissioned by a big film processor to find a good plant location for them in northern France. Chances are I’ll be over there about a week.”

  “Nicky, do you think I could go with you? I’ve never been to Paris. I’ve never been anywhere!”

  He could almost see her features in the nervous glow of her cigarette—her eyes wide, and anxious as a child’s. “You know I couldn’t take you along, Gloria. But I’ll be back. I always come back, don’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I’ll bring you something. A bottle of French perfume.”

  “Will you, Nicky?”

  “Sure,” he promised. The thunder was nearer, but it didn’t bother him. He was already thinking about the job in Paris.

  This time the assignment had come to him through the mail, along with a certified check for $20,000. The letter was from a man who called himself J. Orchid, and that was the name signed on the check. “Please consider the enclosed certified check as total payment for the theft of one toy mouse, as described herein, which is at present being used as a prop in the filming of an American motion picture, Any Losers?, on a sound stage in Paris, France. Once the theft has been accomplished, not later than Monday, August 1st, you should remain in your room at the Empire Hotel in Paris until contacted about disposition of the mouse.”

  That was all of it, except for a picture of the thing clipped from a toy catalogue. It showed a little wind-up metal mouse, about four inches long, that apparently ran around in circles. It was made in Japan, and sold for 98 cents in this country. Nick looked at the $20,000 check again. Twenty thousand dollars for a 98-cent toy mouse! The check seemed genuine enough. He wasn’t in the habit of doing business through the mail, but it seemed he could make an exception in this case.

  It seemed he would have to, for there was no return address for Mr. J. Orchid. The letter had come to the box number Nick used for his business activities, and he could only suppose that the address had been passed on by one of his satisfied customers. The money could not be returned, and Nick would never keep it without fulfilling the assignment. Besides, he’d stolen stranger things than a toy mouse in his time—things like a live tiger from a city zoo in broad daylight, and all the water from a swimming pool. He was a specialist in the theft of the unusual. For $20,000 he would steal anything unusual—even a 98-cent mechanical mouse.

  Nick Velvet flew to Paris on Friday morning, trading a New York heat wave for the splendid breezes of Paris in July. The city already was surrendering itself to the traditional month-long siesta that was August. The streets were relatively uncrowded, and signs were already appearing in shop windows and office doorways announcing the annual holiday period. Frenchmen would head south, for the most part, leaving the city in the grip of tourists and the coming heat.

  But for Nick it was good to be back, good to watch the barges along the Seine and wander through the Left Bank bars where summer never came. By Saturday morning he knew all about the American film company that was in Paris shooting Any Losers? The picture was a Fleming-Archer Production, directed by a young Canadian named Lee Fitzwright, and starring Carol Young—a new starlet in the midst of a typical Hollywood press buildup. But the name that most interested Nick Velvet among the film’s credits was that of Mary Karls, who was in charge of props.

  On Saturday evening Nick arranged to meet Mary Karls at a restaurant in Montmartre where she was dining with some of the cast. She was a woman in her late thirties, only a few years younger than Nick himself, but there was still about her a lingering aura of past glamor.

  “Are you in the film they’re shooting?” he asked, when he caught her alone at the bar.

  She turned on him with a questioning smile. “No. What makes you ask that?”

  He smiled
and lit her cigarette. “I recognized Carol Young in your party.”

  “Oh, yes. She’s very beautiful, isn’t she?” Mary Karls settled down beside him, and he wasn’t surprised. She’d had just enough to drink to be interested, and interesting. “She’s worth a million dollars to Fleming-Archer Productions, and some day she may be one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.”

  “You work with her?”

  The woman nodded. “Prop girl, I guess you’d call me. A thankless task, but I get screen credit, at least. I was a script girl at Paramount once.”

  “You must have been on the screen.”

  She smiled at him through the cigarette smoke. “Once, when I was twenty-two. It was one of the last big Hollywood musicals—a picture called Bright Waves Tomorrow. I thought it was the beginning of a glorious career. My part on screen lasted exactly thirty-five seconds.”

  He ordered her a drink and introduced himself belatedly. “Nick Velvet’s my name. I do industrial development work. Picking plant sites, mostly.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Nick.” She glanced down at the drink. “But I’m a very frank girl. I don’t want you to think you’re buying any more than the drink.”

  He smiled. “And some conversation. I’m just a lonely American in Paris, but my intentions are honorable.”

  “Good. Then we understand each other.” The rest of her party was leaving, and she went over to say a few words to them. Carol Young, looking like a beautiful blonde child, glanced in Nick’s direction, then quickly away when she saw that he was watching her. She seemed to be with an older man whom Nick guessed was the film’s director, Lee Fitzwright.

  After they had departed, Mary Karls returned to the bar stool next to him. “They’re off to another bar. I might as well stay here. I want to get home early anyway.”

  “Home?”

  “The hotel. You know. I have to start work at six-thirty.”

  “How’s the picture coming?”

  “Good. It’s beginning to take shape.”

  “I don’t even know what it’s about,” Nick said.

  “Remember Lili? About fifteen years ago? It’s the same sort of thing. Lonely little girl growing up in Paris, with no friends and no playthings except a toy mouse that runs in circles when it’s wound up. Our director thinks it’s a symbol of modern life.”

  “Carol Young is the lonely little girl?”

  “She’s sixteen at the start, but she blossoms. You know Hollywood. She gets involved with some of the jet-set gambling crowd.”

  “And she plays with a toy mouse?”

  Mary Karls nodded.

  “Where are you shooting?” He tried to sound casual.

  “A big sound stage just outside of town. We rented it from Cintfilm. Of course we’re doing the usual Eiffel Tower exteriors, and some other spots around Paris. In three weeks we go back to Hollywood to finish the interiors.”

  “Do you have a room where you keep the props?”

  “On the sound stage? Sure. I have to lock everything up at night, although they have a watchman and a burglar alarm. Nothing worth stealing anyway. It’s a great place to shoot, though. Skylights all across the ceiling. Lots of natural light. Though sometimes we have to cover them over when the weather isn’t right for the scene we’re doing. All the dressing rooms and supply rooms are just little cubicles with walls and no ceiling. We had to put a canvas over Carol’s room because she was afraid some reporters would get up on the roof and take a picture of her through the skylight.”

  “I’d like to come out and see it sometime.”

  “Our producer, Mr. Archer, is dead against visitors to the set. Otherwise I’d invite you. He’s behind schedule already, and he’s afraid of any sort of delay.”

  Nick sipped his drink. “How about another? These taste pretty good.”

  “Sorry. My hotel is calling to me. It’s been fun, though, just talking to someone besides that crowd all the time.” She eyed him suspiciously. “I just had a thought. You’re not a reporter, are you?”

  “Heavens, no! Do I look like one?”

  “Well, no,” she admitted.

  “Do you know a fellow named J. Orchid? Connected with the movie business.”

  “Jason! You know Jason Orchid?”

  “I’ve just heard the name.”

  “My God, he threatened to kill Mr. Fleming and Mr. Archer, our producers. He claims he wrote the original screenplay for Any Losers? and they stole it from him. He’s a real nut.”

  “Is he in Paris?”

  “I hope not!” She gathered up her cigarettes and purse. “But I really have to be going now, Mr. Velvet. Thank you for the drink, and the conversation.”

  “Thank you, Miss Karls.” He walked her to the door and saw that she got a taxi back to her hotel. Then he strolled for a time along the river, thinking about the toy mouse that ran around in circles.

  The Cintfilm sound stage which had been leased by Fleming-Archer Productions was a great gray hulk of a building, and Nick Velvet quickly confirmed that it had both burglar alarm and resident watchman. He could not reach the watchman without tripping the alarm, and he could not tamper with the alarm system without first disposing of the watchman. It was a simple but foolproof setup.

  Nick made it to the roof with little effort and looked down through the wired-glass skylight at a mass of darkened interior. He had no idea which was the room he sought, or where the mechanical mouse might be inside that room. He had pressed Mary Karls as far as he could without exciting her suspicions. Now he turned his attention to the skylight. In addition to a wire mesh inside the glass, each pane was equipped with a silvered border connected to the alarm system. And none of the sections of the skylight opened. There’d be no entry this way. But at least he might learn where he was headed.

  Working quickly with a diamond-tipped glass cutter, he lifted a one-inch circle from the glass, careful not to disturb the wire mesh or the alarm tape. Then he took a small ball bearing from his pocket and let it drop through the hole, holding his breath until it hit, bounced, and clattered along the floor. Carefully he slid back to the edge of the skylight and waited. Almost instantly the place was flooded with light and the watchman came to investigate the noise of the bearing.

  It had rolled off somewhere out of sight, and the tiny hole did not show in the mesh window. The watchman walked back and forth, puzzled, while Nick quickly mapped the floor area in his mind. The sound stage, about forty feet below, camera booms reaching almost to the skylight, microphones, banks of powerful lights, a retractable canvas to cover the skylight, and the row of little walled cubicles that served as dressing rooms. He spotted the covered one that would be Carol Young’s room, then let his eyes wander over the rest. Costumes, hairdresser, makeup—a layout quite primitive by the usual Hollywood standards.

  Then he saw it, a room cluttered with odd pieces of furniture, lamps, pictures. Set decorations, in the trade term—or simply props. Surely the toy mouse would be there. Somewhere near, because they would probably be using it on Monday.

  But he couldn’t see it, even with the aid of the miniature monocular that was part of his equipment.

  Nowhere.

  And the watchman was already walking back toward the light switch, ready to plunge the place into its slumbering darkness.

  Nick watched the scene go suddenly black beneath him with a feeling of utter frustration. The mouse must be in a box, under something else, impossible to spot from above.

  And yet there was no way for him to gain entrance to the building. A frontal assault, and damn the alarms, would have brought the police before he’d have time to locate his objective.

  He slid off the roof and hit the ground feet first, with knees bent. All right, now what?

  His frown turned slowly to a smile as he saw the warm glow of a public telephone booth halfway down the block.

  In a moment he’d found Cintfilm and dialed the number. The voice of the watchman, gruff and sleepy, answered in English. “This is Lee Fitzw
right,” Nick said, muffling his words. “I want you to check something for me. Unlock the prop room and make certain the toy mouse is there.”

  “What?” the man mumbled. “I don’t know no mouse. I guard the place.”

  “In the prop room. It’s the end room on the right. The mouse is a little metal thing about four inches long. Take it out of its box and leave it on the table. I want to be certain it’s there. Come back and tell me.”

  “I can’t do that. I’m not supposed to touch things.”

  “It’s very important to me. I’ll make it worth your while tomorrow.”

  A hesitation. “I don’t know.”

  “Did anything strange happen there tonight? Any noise?”

  “Yes, there was something.”

  “Go and check, then! I must know!”

  A sigh. “All right. Hold on.”

  But Nick was already sprinting from the phone booth back to where his rope still dangled from the roof. Above him he saw the glow from the lights as it hit the sky. Then he was in position again, in time to see the watchman unlocking the prop-room door. The watchman puttered around a bit, looking here and there, until finally he opened a small box and revealed the mouse. After studying it for a moment he put it back in its box, but left the lid off. All right, Nick breathed; good enough.

  The watchman went back to the dead telephone, leaving the lights on. Finally he came back, shaking his head, and locked the prop-room door. He turned out the lights, and the place was in darkness again.

  Now Nick worked swiftly. He edged out over the skylight until he was above the prop room. It was difficult to be certain in the dark, and he had to risk a quick flash of his flashlight to make sure. Yes, the mouse was directly under him, about forty feet below.

  Another tiny circle of glass came carefully out, then a small but powerful magnet dropped through at the end of a vinyl fishing line. The line was safe—unbreakable and almost invisible, even if the watchman returned. He only prayed the mouse was made of a ferrous metal.