Bill Pronzini - Scattershot

I wanted to wait in or near the gift room, but Mollenhauer was not 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.