Bill Pronzini - Scattershot

“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 harder 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.”

“Oh, you realized that, did you?”

“Yeah. Just after it happened.”

“Then you also realize what it means: this window couldn’t have been smashed from the outside, as you claim it was.”

“I didn’t claim it was smashed from outside,” I said. “All I know is that I heard the glass shatter, and that’s all I reported to you.”

“The fact is, it was broken from inside this room-a locked empty room by your own testimony. Now how do you account for that?”

“I can’t account for it.”

“I can,” he said. “How does this sound? You saw that diamond ring today and figured what it was worth, and while you were sitting out in the hallway you worked up a little plan to steal it. You kicked in the door, grabbed the ring, and then broke the window yourself. From in here, forgetting until afterward where the broken glass would fall.”

“I didn’t do any of that.”

“The evidence says you did.”

“I don’t care what the evidence says. Listen, go ahead and search me. Search my car.”

“We’ll do just that. But I doubt if we’ll find the ring that way. You’d be too smart to have it on you or in your car.”

“Then what the hell am I supposed to have done with it?”

“Stashed it somewhere on the grounds nearby. You had enough time. And it wouldn’t have been too difficult for you to come back one of these nights, late, to pick it up.”

I had to struggle to control a surge of anger. Letting it out would only make matters worse for me, by giving the confrontation between us a personal angle. Banducci was just a cop doing his job, interpreting the facts as he saw them-the same way I might have interpreted them myself if our roles were reversed. I couldn’t blame him for the position I was in.

In level tones I said, “Call Lieutenant Eberhardt on the San Francisco force. He’s known me for thirty years; he’ll vouch for my honesty.”

Banducci sighed. “References aren’t going to help you much, paisan. Not with evidence like we’ve got here.”

“I’m telling you, I did not steal that ring.” “Sure,” he said. “That’s about what they all say-right up to the time the gates close behind them at San Quentin.”

They did not take me straight to jail. I supposed Banducci, in his methodical way, wanted his men to finish combing the grounds first before he booked me; if they found the ring, to his way of thinking, it would solidify his case. But he did read me my rights from a Miranda card-I told him I would waive right of counsel for the time being, but that if he officially charged me with theft, I would not answer any more questions without my lawyer being present-and then had me searched and put under guard in another of the spare bedrooms. No handcuffs, but two patrolmen in there with me instead of just one.

Now I knew what else could go wrong in this crazy scattershot week. I could end up in jail facing a prison term for first-degree robbery. That was the last pellet in the week-long peppering, and the deadliest of all: it had lodged in a vital spot, and it threatened to wipe out my future completely.

I sat on the bed, fidgeting, and tried again to piece things together. If ever I needed to have a deductive inspiration, it was now. The way it looked, nobody could get me out of this particular bind except me.

But none of it seemed to make any more sense now than it had earlier. The window could not have been broken from the inside-not unless someone had been hiding in the room all afternoon, and that was a literal impossibility; I had checked it over thoroughly, and the five of us had left together. No one should have been able to come through those sharp edges of glass without leaving some sort of trace of his passage. No one should have been able to accomplish the theft and then escape in a span of thirty to forty-five seconds. And yet someone had to have been in the room; I had heard him in there, knocking packages to the floor, stealing the ring.

Impossible, all of it.

Except that it had happened, somehow and some way. There had to be a logical explanation.

One of the other four, I thought-Mollenhauer, Hickox, Walker, or Patton. But which one? None of them seemed a likely candidate, considering who and what they were; any of them could be clever enough to have planned out a caper of this complexity. It had not just been designed to net him the ring under mysterious circumstances- that much I felt sure of, now. It had been designed so that all the evidence would point straight at me.

A neat, tight little frame.

Mollenhauer, Hickox, Walker, or Patton …

Something began to nibble at the back of my mind. I shut my eyes and concentrated, visualizing the gift room as I had seen it after breaking in. Everything exactly as it had been when I was in there with the four of them at one-forty, except for the broken window and all the stuff scattered on the floor. Or was it? There seemed to be-

And all at once it came popping through-the difference, the one fact that opened a crack in the frame. I sat motionless, working with it, backtracking. Once I had part of it figured out I remembered something else, too, and worked with that until it all began to pull together.