Bill Pronzini: Scattershot

“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.

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.