Karl Wagner - Why Not You and I?

The sun was behind the old drugstore whose second floor housed a number of small businesses, and the dirty windows of Stryker’s office lay in shadow. Behind their uncurtained panes, a light was burning.

Mandarin frowned uncertainly. Curtiss never left his lights on. He had an obsession about wasting electricity.

Leaning heavily on the weathered railing, Russ climbed the outside stairway that gave access to the second floor. Above, a dusty hallway led down the center of the building. Several doorways opened off either side. A tailor, a leathershop, several student-owned businesses — which might or might not reopen with the fall term. Only Frank the Tailor was open for the summer, and he took Mondays off.

Dust and silence and the stale smell of disused rooms. Stryker’s office was one of the two which fronted the street. It was silent as the rest of the hallway of locked doors, but light leaked through the not-quite-closed doorway.

Mandarin started to knock, then noticed the scars on the door jamb where the lock had been forced. His descending fist shoved the door open.

Curtiss’s chair was empty. No one sat behind the scarred desk with its battered typewriter.

Russ glanced around the barren room with its cracked plaster and book-laden, mismatched furniture. Anger drove a curse to his lips.

Stryker’s office had always been in total disorder; now it looked like it had been stirred with a stick. Whoever had ransacked the office had done a thorough job.

Through the Yardarm jukebox Johnny Cash was singing “Ring of Fire” for maybe the tenth time that evening. Some of those patrons who had hung around since nightfall were beginning to notice.

Ed Saunders hauled his hairy arms out of the sleeves of his ill-fitting suitcoat, slung the damp garment over the vacant chair beside him. He leaned over the beer-smeared table, truculently intent, like a linebacker in a defensive huddle.

“It still looks completely routine to me, Russ,” he concluded. Mandarin poked a finger through the pile of cold, greasy pizza crusts, singing an almost inaudible chorus of “down, down, down, in a burnin’ ring of far…” A belch broke off his monotone, and he mechanically fumbled through the litter of green Rolling Rock bottles for one that had a swallow left. Blackie the bartender was off tonight, and his stand-in had no conception of how to heat a frozen pizza. Mandarin’s throat still tasted sour, and he felt certain a bad case of heartburn was building up.

The bottles all seemed empty. He waved for two more, still not replying to Saunder’s assertion. A wavy-haired girl, braless in a tanktop, carried the beers over to them — glanced suspiciously at Saunders while she made change. Mandarin slid the coins across the rough boards and eyed the jukebox speculatively.

The city detective sighed. “Look, Russ — why don’t you let Johnny Cash catch his breath, what do you say?”

Russ grinned crookedly and turned to his beer. “But it wasn’t routine,” he pronounced, tipping back the bottle. His eyes were suddenly clear.

Saunders made an exasperated gesture. “You know, Russ, we got God knows how many break-ins a week in this neighborhood. I talked to the investigating officer before I came down. He handled it OK.”

“Handled it like a routine break-in — which it wasn’t,” Mandarin doggedly pointed out.

The lieutenant pursed his lips and reached for the other beer — his second against Mandarin’s tenth. Maybe, he mused, it was pointless to trot down here in response to Mandarin’s insistent phone call. But he liked the psychiatrist, understood the hell of his mood. Both of them had known Curtiss Stryker as a friend.

He began again. “By our records, two of the other shops on that floor have been broken into since spring. It goes on all the time around here — I don’t have to tell you about this neighborhood. You got a black slum just a few blocks away, winos and bums squatting in all these empty houses here that ought to be torn down. Then there’s all these other old dumps, rented out full of hippies and junkies and God knows what. Hell, Russ — you know how bad it is. That clinic of yours — we have to just about keep a patrol car parked in front all night to keep the junkies from busting in — and then the men have to watch sharp or they’ll lose their hubcaps just sitting there.”

Mandarin reflected that the cessation of break-ins was more likely due to the all-night talking point now run by university volunteers at the community clinic — and that the patrol car seemed more interested in observing callers for potential dope busts than in discouraging prowlers. Instead, he said: “That’s my point, Ed. Routine break-ins follow a routine pattern. Rip off a TV, stereo, small stuff that can easily be converted into cash. Maybe booze or drugs, if any’s around. Petty theft.

“Doesn’t hold for whoever hit Stryker’s office. Hell, he never kept anything around there to attract a burglar.”

“So the burglar made a mistake. After all, he couldn’t know what was there until he looked.”

Russ shook his head. “Then he would have taken the typewriter — beat up as it is — or finished the half bottle of Gallo sherry Curtiss had on the shelf. Doubt if he would have recognized any of his books as worth stealing, but at least he would have taken something for his trouble.”

“Probably knew the stuff wasn’t worth the risk of carrying off,” the detective pointed out. “Left it to try somewhere else. Looked like the door on the leathershop was jimmied, though we haven’t contacted the guy who leases it. It’s a standard pattern, Russ. Thief works down a hallway room by room until he gets enough or someone scares him off. Probably started at Stryker’s office, gave it up and was working on another door when he got scared off.”

“Ed, I know Curtiss’s office as well as I know my own. Every book in that place had been picked up and set down again. Someone must have spent an hour at it. Everything had been gone through.”

“Well, I’ve been up in his office before, too,” Saunders recalled, “and I’d be surprised if anyone could remember what kind of order he kept his stuff in — if there was any order I don’t know — maybe the thief was up on his rare books. Say he was scanning title pages for first editions or something.”

“Then he passed up a nice copy of Lovecraft’s The Outsider that would have brought him a couple hundred bucks.”

“Did he? I never heard of it. I meant stuff like Hemingway and all— things you’d likely know were valuable. Or maybe he was just checking for money. Lot of people keep maybe ten or twenty dollars lying around the office for emergencies — stuck back in a drawer, behind a picture, inside a book or something.”

Mandarin snorted and finished his beer. He signalled for two more despite the other’s protest.

“Look, Russ,” Saunders argued gently, “why are you making such a big thing out of this? So far as we can tell, nothing was taken. Just a simple case of break and enter — thief looks the place over a bit, then gives up and moves on. It’s routine.”

“No, it isn’t.” Mandarin’s thin face was stubborn. “And something was missing. The place was too neat, that’s the conclusion. Usually Curtiss had the place littered with notes, pieces of clippings, pages of manuscript, wadded-up rough drafts — you’ve seen how it is. Now his desk is clean, stuff’s been picked up off the floor and shelves. All of it gone — even his wastebaskets!”

“Do you want to report a stolen wastebasket, Russ?” Saunders asked tiredly.

“Goddamn it all, can’t you put it together? Somebody broke into Curtiss’s office, spent a good deal of time gathering up all of his notes and pages of manuscript — all of it, even the scrap paper — then piled it into the wastebasket and walked out. Who’d stop a man who was walking down the alley with a wastebasket full of paper?”