Nameless 08 Scattershot

by Bill Pronzini

  Hickox paid me a call as the reception party got under way, no doubt at Mollenhauer’s instructions. He said, “Is everything in order?” in his usual stiff tones.

  “No problem.”

  He frowned at the pulp in my hands. “What’s that?”

  “An old pulp magazine.”

  “Gaudy thing. It looks like a comic book.”

  “Well, it’s not. Detective short stories.”

  “Well,” he said disapprovingly, “I don’t think Mr. Mollenhauer would like the idea of you reading,”

  “Why not? I’ve got to do something with my time.”

  “You should be staying alert.”

  “I can stay a lot more alert reading than I can just sitting here,” I said. “You wouldn’t want me to go to sleep, would you?”

  “I should hope not.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t fall down on the job. How was the wedding?”

  “A very nice ceremony,” he said, and went away and left me alone again with my gaudy reading matter.

  Out on the terrace the party was in full swing. But judging from the noise level, which was low, it was not exactly a boisterous affair. Even the orchestra played nothing but soft background music. I was glad I was in here and they were out there; not only would I have been out of place among them, I’d have been bored to tears.

  At five-fifteen a maid surprised me with supper on a tray; nobody had said anything about feeding me, and I hadn’t expected the consideration. It was stuff from the party buffet: canapes, half a dozen little sandwiches with the bread crust trimmed off, two kinds of salad, and coffee. I ate all of it. Not as’ good as deli food and beer, to my taste, but then maybe I was just a lowbrow.

  I had finished reading Double Detective and had opened up a second pulp—a 1941 issue of Dime Detective. The lead novelette was another by Norbert Davis, this one about a hard-boiled but wacky private eye named Max Latin. I liked Davis’s work a good deal; unlike most other pulp writers, he had a wild and irreverent sense of humor.

  I was more or less engrossed in the story, almost to the end of it, when the glass shattered inside the gift room.

  It was an explosive sound and it brought me to my feet in a convulsive jump. No, I thought, ah no! Confusion kept me standing in place for a second or two,- the noise from the crash faded, but after-echoes seemed to linger in the hallway. Then, jerkily, I dropped the magazine, dragged the Police Special out of its holster, and lunged across to the gift-room door. I caught hold of the knob, threw my shoulder against the panel. The lock creaked but held fast.

  Inside the room something clattered, and there was a series of clumping sounds.

  I stepped back, raised my right foot, and for the second time in three days I slammed the sole of my shoe against a door latch and kicked it in. The lock screeched loose; the door wobbled open. I went in after it in a crouch, the gun extended in front of me.

  The room and its adjoining bath were empty.

  That made me blink. And what I saw scattered across the floor brought a dry metallic taste to my mouth, made the multiple admonition Stay out of trouble echo mockingly in my mind. Two of the , white-bowed and three of the pink-bowed little packages from the table were on the floor; the lid was off the one that had contained Carla Mollenhauer’s diamond ring, the tissue paper from inside spilled out. In the middle of the paper lay the blue-velvet ring case, popped open and resting at an angle that let me have a clear look inside.

  As empty as the room. The ring was gone.

  Straightening, I ran to the window in the rear wall. A gaping hole had been broken out of it; the frame was serrated with jagged shards of glass. I shoved my head through the opening. But there was nobody in the shrubbery outside, nobody on the shadow-dappled grounds between the wing and the carriage house or the estate’s boundary walls.

  What the hell— ?

  I pulled my head back in, spun around, and charged back into the hallway. The bolt-lock on the window there released easily, but the catch-lock was stuck; I wrenched at it, cursing, and managed to get it loose. Outside, a short man and a tall bejeweled woman had appeared from somewhere and were making a tentative approach across the lawn. When they saw me heave the sash upward, throw one leg out over the sill, both of them recoiled and began to back up, wearing frightened expressions. But it was not so much me they were reacting to, I realized, as the gun I still carried in my right hand.

  I yelled, “It’s all right, I’m a private guard,” to keep them from panicking and shoved the .38 back into its holster; if I had been thinking clearly, I would not have come out here with it drawn. “Get Mr. Mollenhauer. Quick!”

  I climbed the rest of the way out of the window, dropped down onto the lawn. There was a sudden tearing noise as I did that, and the whole damned crotch of the too-tight tuxedo pants split open. It froze me for a second; I pawed at my rear end, felt my underwear and one fat cheek hanging out through the rip. I started to swear again, feeling foolish and violently angry on top of everything else.

  A cool breeze had come up; it iced the sweat on my forehead, blew cold against my exposed backside as I lumbered over to where I could look along the front of the wing and out toward the entrance drive. I had a clear view of the forty or fifty fancy cars which crowded the parking circle. No movement anywhere among them. And no movement anywhere else in the vicinity, either.

  When I turned back the woman was gone and the short man was standing alone, gawking alternately at me and at the broken window. I snapped as I neared him, “Did you see anybody running away from here before I came out?”

  “No. For God’s sake, what—”

  Before he could finish the sentence, Mollenhauer came rushing around the corner from the terrace; half a dozen other people trailed after him. He took one incredulous look at the window, another at me and my ripped pants, and demanded peremptorily, “What’s happened here?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “You’re not sure?”

  “No, sir. It all went down pretty fast—”

  “The presents? Carla’s ring?”

  I made a frustrated gesture with one hand; the other one was behind me, holding the torn trouser cloth together. “I’m afraid the ring is gone.”

  “Gone? What do you mean, gone?”

  “Stolen,” I said. “Whoever smashed the window got away with it.”

  He glared at me with his eyes sparking and his own hands bunched up at his sides. “Damn you,” he said and then said it again with even more feeling. “Damn you!”

  I looked away from him, over at the window. He started yelling something about calling the police, but I was no longer paying attention to him; I was staring toward the window by then, at what lay spread across the lawn beneath it, and there was a bristling coldness on my body that had nothing to do with the night breeze.

  Shards of glass—that was what lay on the lawn.

  Scattered outward away from the wall for two or three feet, glinting in the fading sunlight. In the confusion of the past several minutes I had not registered them, but now that I had I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

  They should not have been there. They should have been on the floor inside the gift room, because if you break a window from outside, the broken glass will always fall inward. That the shards were on the lawn could mean only one thing, and that thing was impossible.

  The window had been broken from the inside.

  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 no
t 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 har
der 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.”