Bill Pronzini - Scattershot

Bingo.

I might have become a Typhoid Mary and I might have developed a penchant for screwing up in various ways and I might yet lose my investigator’s license, but my God I was good at my job. I could figure things out with the best of them. All, that was, except how to keep my life and my career from falling apart in one week.

I stood up and looked at the two patrolmen. “I want to see Lieutenant Banducci.”

“What for?” one of them said.

“I know how the theft was done and I know who stole the ring. Tell him that. Get him in here.”

It took them a few second to make up their minds; they were thinking that maybe it was a trick. Then the one who had spoken drew his weapon, held it on me, and told the other guy to go ahead.

Banducci was there inside of three minutes. “So you know who and how, do you?” he said. The skepticism was plain in his voice.

I said, “Yes. I can’t prove it, but I think you can.”

“All right, let’s hear it.”

“Take me to the gift room first.”

He took me there, the two patrolmen trailing behind. The items that had been on the floor had been picked up and put back on the table; the open gift box and the ring case carried the residue of fingerprint powder. Otherwise, nothing was changed.

“This better be good,” Banducci said. “You’re on your way to jail if it isn’t.”

“It’s good.” I went to the table. “How many of these little packages were on the floor when you first examined the room?”

He frowned. “Four or five,” he said. “Including the one the ring was in.”

“Doesn’t that strike you as odd? The thief knew which one contained the ring. Then why were the others knocked off the table?”

“He-or you-was in a hurry. They were knocked off accidentally.”

I shook my head. “The table hasn’t been moved from its original position, which means it wasn’t bumped into. And even a man in a hurry wouldn’t be likely to sweep off four other packages by accident, not when he already knew where the ring was. No, those packages were knocked to the floor as part of a deliberate plan.”

“I don’t see what you’re leading up to-”

“You will.” I pointed to the gifts on the table. “There are nine packages here-four with pink bows, counting the gift box for the ring, three with blue bows, and two with white bows.”

“So?”

“There were eight packages, again counting the ring box, when the five of us were in this room at one-forty. And only one with a white bow.”

Banducci’s frown deepened into a scowl. “You sure about that?”

“Positive,” I said. I picked up the two white-bowed presents. Only one of them had a card attached; I put that one down and shook the other. It was heavy and did not rattle. “If you open this one, I’m pretty sure it’ll contain something cheap and not very suitable as a wedding gift.”

He took it out of my hand, untied its ribbon, and removed the lid. A wad of tissue paper. And the kind of hard plastic paperweight you can buy in a dime store.

“Okay, poison,” he said. “So far you’ve got my attention. If this package wasn’t here before the robbery, then how did it get into the room?”

“It was thrown in through the broken window from outside.”

“For what reason?”

“To knock the ring box and as many other packages as possible off the table. The ring box was the primary target. The thief wanted it to hit the floor so the lid would pop off and the velvet case would fall out. He couldn’t have planned that the case would come open, too, but it worked in his favor when it did.

“The bogus gift was a pretty clever touch. You need to throw something into a roomful of presents, so you make up a weighted one of your own. Chances are it’ll be overlooked, and when it’s finally opened, it gets passed over as somebody’s idea of a practical joke.”

Banducci said, “But what’s the sense in it? Why knock off the ring box and the other packages?”

“To make me think the thief had come into this room to steal the ring, when in fact he hadn’t, and to make you think I was the one who was guilty. If nobody else could have done it, according to the manufactured evidence, it had to be me.”

“Are you saying he somehow stole the ring from outside?”

“No,” I said. “He stole the ring when all of us were in here at one-forty.”

“Yeah? How did he do that?”

“Simple. He was the last person to touch the case, the one who put it back inside the gift box. When he did that, as he was covering the case with the tissue paper, he slipped it open and palmed the ring. None of us suspected anything like that and none of us watched him closely; it was easy for him.”

“Easy for who? Who are we talking about here?”

“George Hickox. Mollenhauer’s secretary.”

Banducci did some ruminating.

I said. “That’s why he went to bat for me when Mollenhauer read about my troubles in the newspaper and wanted to bring in another detective in my place. I thought that was out of character at the time, but I put it down to a streak of humanity. He must have figured that because I was already under suspicion as a shady operator, I’d make the perfect fall guy for his little scenario. He didn’t want to have to find somebody else, with more stable credentials, at the last minute.”

“Let’s say I buy it so far,” Banducci said. “There’s still one fact you haven’t accounted for.”

“The broken window.”

He nodded. “The window that was broken from the inside.”

“It wasn’t broken from the inside,” I said. “It was broken from the outside.”

“So that all the shards fell out on the lawn? You know that’s impossible.”

“No, it isn’t. No more impossible than any of the rest of it. There’s a way to do it.”

“What way?”

“Do you know what a suction clamp is?”

“One of those bar gadgets with rubber cups on each end?”

“Right. They’re used by house painters along with certain types of scaffolding, among other things, and they’re pretty strong. Remember the movie Topkapi? It had guys lifting up a heavy glass case with just that kind of clamp.” “And you think Hickox broke the window with one.”

“That’s what I think. He moistened the rubber cups, shoved them against the windowpane, locked them in place, and then took hold of the bar and gave a hard rocking jerk or two; the glass is relatively thin and the window is wide and Hickox is a brawny man. So the window broke outward, the shards fell to the lawn, and the clamp pulled free. Then he threw the bogus gift at the table in here and ducked around the front corner. He was long gone by the time I got outside.”

Banducci ruminated again.

I said, “My guess is that he got the clamp from the painters’ scaffolding on the carriage house; maybe you noticed when you came in that that building’s being painted. And he probably returned it there afterward. If you can find it, it might have some glass residue that your lab people can match to the window. It might even have Hickox’s fingerprints.”

“All right,” he said, “it all sounds reasonable enough. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.” He turned to the two patrolmen, both of whom were standing just inside the door. “One of you go find George Hickox and bring him in here. Let’s see what he has to say.”

Hickox did not have much to say-not right then, anyway. He put on an indignant act, denied everything, and tried his damndest to lay the suspicion back on me. But he had grown more and more nervous as I explained again how the robbery was done, and he kept wiping beads of sweat off his face. Banducci could read the guilt on him as well as I could; he began to take the same hard line he had taken with me earlier.