A. Fair: Owls Don't Blink

“Oh.”

Rondler pulled a cigar from his pocket, puckered his lips as though he were going to whistle, but he didn’t whistle. He simply made little blowing noises as he carefully clipped oft the end of the cigar. Then, as he pulled a match from his pocket, he said, “Okay, here’s the dope. Around the latter part of 1936 we were troubled with a man who stuck up petting-parties. He’d take whatever the man had, and if the girl was good-looking, he’d take her, too. It made quite a stink. We put men out and staged mock petting-parties and did our damnedest to bait a trap he’d walk into. Nothing doing.”

“When it began to get cold and people didn’t sit out in automobiles and neck so much, our bandit suddenly quit. We thought we were rid of him; but in the spring of ’37 when things began to warm up, our petting-party bandit was right back again.”

“Several guys-put up a squawk when he started to take their women. This bird Craig was one of them. There were three altogether. Two of them were killed. One was shot, and recovered. Things got pretty serious. The chief told us to get this bird, or else.”

“We kept baiting traps. He wouldn’t walk into them. Then somebody got the bright idea. A guy who does that sort of stuff doesn’t do it and then lay off, and then do it again. It’s a steady racket with him. So why did he lay off during the cold months? Of course, the pickings were rather slim, but there were pickings just the same, and logically you’d have thought he’d have been easier to trap when he didn’t have so much to choose from.”

“So we got the idea perhaps he’d gone some place else for the winter months. San Diego was all clear. So we looked up Florida. Sure enough, back of Miami there’d been a lot of trouble with a petting-party bandit during the winter of ’36 and ’37. What’s more, they had a couple of clues, some fingerprints, and something we could work on.”

“That gave us an opportunity. We figured this man was driving an automobile that was registered in California. We thought that he was a lone wolf, particularly that he had no woman. It was a tedious job, but we started checking the license numbers of California vehicles that had been registered in Florida, of California vehicles that had crossed through the state quarantine inspection station at Yuma in the two weeks before the first petting-party holdup took place in Los Angeles.”

“That gave us our first clue. We found a car registered to a man named Rixmann had crossed at Yuma just four days before the first of our spring petting-party holdups in ’37. We looked Rixmann up. He was rather good-looking in a dark, sullen sort of way. He’d been out of work for some time. His landlady didn’t know just what he did. He seemed to be moody and morose, but paid his rent on time, had plenty of money, and slept a lot during the day. He drove a Chevrolet coupe and stored it in a garage back of the place where he roomed. Two or three nights a week he’d go to a picture show, but a couple of nights a week he’d take his car and go out. She’d hear him come back quite late. All this was in the late summer of ’37.”

“Of course, on these petting-party holdups where there’s an assault on the girl, it’s only about one out of four or five that makes a complaint to the police. Sometimes the man can’t afford to have his name put on the police records. Sometimes the woman can’t. Sometimes when there’s rape, the woman feels that it’s poor business to make a complaint and have the newspapers publish all the facts.”

“Was it Rixmann?” I asked.

“That was the bird we wanted,” Rondler said. “We started shadowing him, and about the third night he took his car down to one of the lovers’ lanes, parked it, got out and walked about three hundred yards, waited where it was good and dark under a tree. That gave us all we needed. We had a woman police investigator who was willing to go through with it. We caught Rixmann red-handed — and I mean we really caught him. Of course, the boys worked him over some’, and when he arrived here in this office, he was all softened up.”

“He sat right over there in that chair and spilled his guts. He knew it was curtains for him. Right at the time, he didn’t care. Afterward he got a lawyer and tried to plead insanity. He didn’t make it stick. He told us that he had a very fine pair of night binoculars. He picked places where he could wait in the dark, but where there was a little light that would shine on the spot where cars would naturally be parked. He’d look occupants over with his night binoculars, and study them carefully before he went out to make his holdup. Three or four times he’d seen a couple of policemen stage a mock petting-party, and he sat watching them through his binoculars and getting a great kick out of it. With those night glasses, you couldn’t fool him. He knew it was a trap, and simply stayed there in the dark and outwaited them.”

“He told the story. He couldn’t remember all the jobs he’d pulled, but he could remember enough of them. He remembered the shootings, of course. He always did swear he didn’t pull off that Craig job. Some of the other boys didn’t believe him. I did. I couldn’t see why he’d lie about that when he was talking his neck into a noose, anyway.”

“Did they hang him?”

“Gas,” Rondler said. “By the time they got him convicted, he had grown surly. He never would talk after that first night. He got hold of a lawyer, and the lawyer told him to clam up. They pleaded insanity, and they tried to keep that pose right up to the moment of execution, thinking perhaps he’d get a reprieve. I never have felt, though, that the Craig case was closed.”

“What’s your idea?” I asked him.

“I haven’t any. I don’t have enough facts to work on, but I’ll tell you what it could have been.”

“What?”

“That Fenn girl could have been crazy about him. She wanted him to marry her, and he wouldn’t. She tried all the old gags, and they didn’t work. He was in love with somebody else and was going to get married. She took him out for a last petting party, made an excuse to get out of the car, walked around on the driver’s side, pulled the trigger, ditched the gun, and ran down the road screaming. It was that simple.”

I said, “That could have been it all right.”

“Most of the murders that people get away with are just like that,” Sergeant Rondler went on. “They’re so damn simple that they’re foolproof. There’s nothing about them to go haywire. The more people plan, the more elaborately they try to work out something that will cheat the law, the more they leave a lot of loose threads they haven’t thought about and which can’t be tied up. The bird who commits the successful crime is the one who just has one main thread. He ties that in a good, tight square knot, then walks away and leaves it.”

I said, “How about that Craig murder? Any fingerprints or anything to go on?”

“Absolutely nothing except a description given by Roberta Fenn.”

“What was that?”

He opened the drawer of his desk, grinned, and said, “I just had it brought in after we got that wire from New Orleans. She describes the chap as being medium size, wearing a dark suit, an overcoat, a felt hat, and a mask. She says he was not wearing gloves, that when he first appeared on the scene, he limped noticeably, that when he ran away, he didn’t limp. Hell of a description.”

“Could you have done any better if you’d been there?”

He grinned. “Probably not. But if Rixmann didn’t pull that job, she did.”

“What makes you think so?”

“It’s a cinch. That’s the only petting-party job that isn’t accounted for. After Rixmann was arrested, they quit as though you’d sliced them off with a knife. If someone else had been muscling in on Rixmann’s racket, we’d have had more of the same.”