Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 60, No. 1. Whole No. 344, July 1972

“Nothing but a broken robin’s egg. I spotted three gray squirrels just before I came out of the woods and I could have sworn I heard the chirping of a—”

Paul Roberts thought he would go mad.

A car rolled slowly by them and pulled up into the driveway. “Mom’s home,” said Richie. “Would you like to meet her?”

“Some other time,” said Roberts in a tired voice. “And, Richie. When you tell her about what happened today, don’t make it too dramatic. A car went out of control and you came close to being hit — that’s all. But this other stuff — well, sometimes Mr. Strang lets his imagination run away with him.”

The teacher folded his arms and stared ahead in stony silence.

In the woods behind the Hatch house a large woman wearing a dark green coat which blended with the foliage ducked back behind the trunk of a huge willow tree and lowered a pair of high-power binoculars. Kneeling next to her was a stocky young man in blue jeans and a T-shirt under which his muscles bulged. The man looked up at his partner.

“What do you think, Doris? What did you see out there?”

“The kid’s with two men,” she answered, “just the way Larry told us on the phone. The little scrawny one with the gray hair wouldn’t be too hard to handle, but the big one’s got cop written all over him. We’d better lay low, at least until Larry gets back.”

“A cop,” muttered the man. “Hell’s bells, Doris, if that kid told the cops what he seen—”

“Take it easy. I don’t think he realizes yet that he saw anything important. Otherwise this whole area would be swarming with police. Probably he just told the cop about Larry’s almost running him down this morning.”

“Too damn bad he missed,” the man grumbled. “That kid might remember any time. Hey, look! The car’s leavin’. Now’s my chance to get over there an’—”

“Calm down,” said Doris. “The kid’s inside the house now with his old lady. What happens if you try to break in there and one of ’em manages to get to a telephone? The kid’s forgotten all about it, I tell you. And we’ll be out of here in another few hours.”

“When? What time?”

“We can’t even start unloading until after ten. About midnight, I guess.”

“What about the kid? Shouldn’t he still be wasted?”

“Maybe. Let’s see what Larry says when he gets back.”

When Paul Roberts dropped him off at his boardinghouse Mr. Strang was still furious. “Let my imagination run away with me, do I?” he grumbled to himself. “I’ll show him that—”

But the teacher wasn’t really prepared to show the detective anything. What could Richie have seen? A bee’s nest, a praying mantis, a hole, a robin’s egg, some squirrels; they seemed innocent enough.

“Platyhelminthes!” He spat out the word — Phylum VI in the classification of animals — in a tone that would have brought a blush to the face of a mule skinner. Then, feeling somewhat better, he sat down with the newspaper to await supper.

A short while later a mouth-watering smell from the kitchen brought the teacher to his feet. Pot roast. Quietly he tiptoed to the kitchen door. A large kettle was bubbling on the stove. He lifted the lid and a cloud of steam rose upward.

Tiny droplets of water settled onto Mr. Strang’s glasses and for a moment he was blind. Replacing the lid he removed the glasses to polish them on his tie. But then he stopped. Holding the glasses in front of him he glanced first at the lenses and then at the wall behind the stove. There was something else Bell had said this morning, something about—

And then he remembered.

Hoping against hope that he wasn’t already too late, the teacher scuttled back into the living room, picked up the telephone, and dialed Paul Roberts’ number.

It was after nine o’clock, and darkness had fallen when Roberts, accompanied by Mr. Strang, again reached Waverly Crescent. The detective pulled the car to the curb, turned off the ignition, and killed the lights. “We’ll walk from here,” he whispered to the teacher. “It’s a good thing there aren’t any street lights this far out.”

“There’s, a full moon though,” replied Mr. Strang. “We’ll still have to be careful.”

“I hope you’re right about all this,” said Roberts.

They passed two houses, keeping to the darkness on the opposite side of the street.

The Killian house was completely dark. “That figures,” breathed Roberts. “Richie said they were away.” The two men crept closer, keeping trees between themselves and the dark house.

Finally they reached the garage. “There’s a border of rocks along here,” Roberts told the teacher. “Be careful you don’t trip. I’m going to use my flashlight. I’ll try to keep it masked as much as possible, but — what’s that?”

There was a rustling sound from the far side of the garage, followed by an odd moaning. The teacher snapped to attention, then relaxed. “The dog,” he whispered. “He’s behind the house in the kennel.”

“Oh.” Roberts brushed a film of dirt from the garage window with the sleeve of his jacket. Then, from a pocket, he removed a small flashlight. Cupping one hand carefully around it he pressed the switch and held the light against the windowpane.

Mr. Strang peered through the glass. The car inside would have been close enough to touch had the window been open. “Gray four-door sedan,” breathed the teacher softly. “I’ll give you odds that’s the car that almost ran down Richie this morning.”

“Yeah, sure,” replied the detective impatiently. “Only — holy Moses on a bicycle! Look!”

As he moved the light, Mr. Strang could see the huge thing that reared up on the other side of the two-car garage. It was constructed of thick plates of steel, held together with numerous rivets, the heads of which spotted the brown surface like warts on the back of some prehistoric monster.

“There’s lettering on one plate,” said Roberts. “B-I–L-L–I — Billikin!” He breathed the word in an awed voice. “The Billikin Armored Car Service. One of their trucks was hijacked near Wolverton two days ago — with over a hundred and fifty grand in silver bars inside.”

The teacher nodded. “I remembered that your partner mentioned it this morning,” he said.

“You were right, Mr. Strang, when you said there was something important in this garage. Come on. I’ve got to get word back to headquarters. If we’re lucky, maybe the silver’s still inside there.”

“It is. But your luck’s about run out.”

At the sound of the voice behind them, Roberts and Strang whirled about. As the teacher’s eyes adjusted to the darkness he could just make out in the moonlight the figure of a woman — a mountainous figure in a dark coat. And as Roberts pointed the flashlight in her direction the teacher saw the glitter of a pistol in her hand.

“Point that light the other way,” rumbled the woman. “Right at your own face. I like to have my targets well lighted. You’re the two who were at the kid’s house earlier, aren’t you?”

There was the slamming of a door and a second figure, a man, walked over next to the woman. “What have you got here, Doris?” he asked. “A couple of snoopers?”

“Yeah, Larry. I guess the kid finally remembered.”

“Mr. Strang here was smart enough to figure it out,” said Roberts. Keep them talking, keep them talking. Get the woman’s mind off that gun. Maybe there’d be a chance to grab it. “You might as well tell ’em about it,” he said to the teacher gruffly. Come on, Mr. Strang, start talking. Stall for time.

Mr. Strang picked up the cue. “You saw Richie this morning, didn’t you?” he asked

“The kid? Sure,” said the woman. “He had his nose less than a foot from the garage window. I looked out from the kitchen and there he was.”