I looked around for a cop, but there wasn’t one in sight. Then I trotted out to the street as the fake mailman emptied the bronze box into his canvas carrying sack. I saw nothing but pedestrians. (Where are the cops when you need them?) I nearly ran back through the Bancroft lobby out to the alley where the U.S. Mail truck was parked and there was no cop there either, but the door of the mail truck was unlocked — further indication that the guy was a fake — and I boarded it quickly and stepped back into the body, out of sight. The guy he’d swiped the uniform from wasn’t in the truck, so he must be someplace else, maybe dead. I got out my old Walther .38, glad now I’d brought it along. Sweat began to build around my eyes as I waited.
He looked as innocent as Bambi the Fawn as he got back in the truck, but I knew better. The Walther traced a wiggly zero between his eyes and he slumped weakly backwards onto the cab floor.
“No!” he said.
“Yes!” I said. “Get up and drive this thing to the Central Police Station.”
“No,” he said, even more feebly. “Don’t shoot — please. It’s a felony to — rob the United States—”
“You don’t say,” I said. Another band was marching over the horizon of my mind, dimly heard, but coming fast. “Where’s the other guy?”
“What other guy?”
Oh boy, I thought. “You’re an honest-to-goodness mailman, aren’t you?”
“What the hell did you think I was?” He was getting some strength back.
I lifted the canvas carrying sack from his lap and dumped the contents on the floor of the truck at my feet. Taylor’s big manila envelope stuck out in the pile of ordinary business letters and I picked it up, half gloating but completely puzzled.
“That’s a felony,” the mailman said.
“Yeah, I know, and a bullet between the eyes is fatal — facts of life.” I began to step over his legs to the door. He grabbed the envelope and we got into a ludicrous tug-of-war over the thing, one corner of it ripping off in his hand before I finally got over him and out to the alley, mad now. I put the Walther in his left nostril and said softly, “You forget it, I forget it — right? You shouldn’t have left your door unlocked.”
He closed his eyes and seemed to go to sleep. I put the Walther back in its holster and Taylor’s money in my side coat pocket and walked toward the street where the sun danced off the passing cars like laser beams.
I was back in my apartment at quarter after two, feeling some word not yet coined, a blend of miffed and puzzled — mizzled, maybe. Thoroughly mizzled. I didn’t want to call Taylor, who was no doubt back in his office making money, because I didn’t know what I wanted to say to him. But, I called his home and after some jockeying around with a foreign-accented maid I got the housekeeper, currently Mrs. Malvern. In the nine months I’ve been acquainted with the Taylor menage, there have been three housekeepers. Some people I know don’t change shirts that often.
“Mrs. Taylor, please,” I said with a certain hauteur I’m capable of when speaking to housekeepers. “I know she’s not there, but would you kindly tell me where she can be reached?”
“The playhouse, I would think,” Mrs. Malvern said. “She’s in rehearsal.”
I groped. “Ah yes, the — er—”
“Marin Mummers Society,” Mrs. Malvern said. “In Sausalito.”
“Of course,” I said, thanked her, and hung up.
Isabella Taylor, I remembered, had been an actress of sorts before Henry married her some twenty years ago. Maybe she thought she still was.
I’d put the coffee on to warm when I came in and was pouring myself a cup when someone knocked on my door, an almost unheard-of occurrence. People don’t knock on my door unless they’ve phoned beforehand, and since Murphy was stalking the streets today I got out the Walther before I opened the door with a snap and stepped slightly aside, ready to blast.
A tall, thin, cruel-faced man was standing there, his right hand in his jacket pocket holding a gun pointing at my heart. For an instant it was a Mexican stand-off, but then the cruelty on his face melted like wax and his blue-jeaned knees began to shake. I’d never seen him before. I slowly eased the pressure off the Walther’s trigger. My shot would have tom his chin off.
“Don’t!” he whispered and pulled his hand from the jacket pocket, empty. “Look — no g-g-gun.” I grabbed him by the hand and drew him through the door and, just for the hell of it, twirled and dropped him to the floor on his face, my knee at the base of his spine in the follow-through.
“Speak,” I said. “Where is she?”
“Oh, God,” he blubbered into the rug. “Oh, God. Please—”
“Where is she?”
“In a motel. She’s waiting. Please, that hurts.”
I stood up and watched him roll over slowly. Then he sat up, rubbing his arm, and I stuck the Walther in my belt.
“What motel?”
“Just outside town — Sausalito. The Bayside, or Bayview, something like that. I’ve got the phone number.”
“Have you called her yet?”
“No.”
“You were going to filch the ransom money first.”
He looked up. “It seemed insane to — just to let it go. Twenty thousand dollars! We could use it, believe me. I mean — just to let it go?”
“Who’s we?”
“The Marin Mummers. I’m the director.” His chin lifted a little with a touch of pride. He had an actor’s protean face. It looked as honest now as a scoutmaster’s.
“What’s your name?” I said.
“Paul Travers. What’s yours?” He tried a winsome smile.
“Sam Train. Where were you in the Bancroft Building — on the thirty-eighth floor?”
“Yes.”
“You phoned Mr. Taylor from there at one-thirty — to the booth in the lobby?”
“Yes.”
“And when he showed up on the thirty-eighth floor you went down to the lobby. Did you know the mail would get picked up at exactly one-forty?”
“Yes. I’d checked the mailman a half dozen times. He was never more than a minute off. Like clockwork. I figured he’d be gone before Taylor got back down to the lobby.”
“And then what?” I said. “You weren’t planning to hijack the mail, were you?”
“No.” Travers shivered. He was still frightened, still rubbing his arm. “I couldn’t do that,” he said. “Violence makes me ill. I was going to point out to him that there was no addressee on the envelope and tell him that I’d dropped it down the chute by mistake. I was going to ask him to give it back.”
“And then what, Travers? You saw me in his truck in the alley and figured I was doing what? Sticking him up?”
“Yes!” His eyes flashed with new spirit. “I thought it was just one of those awful things — that for the first time in the history of the universe that particular postal truck was getting held up — and I got mad.”
“And followed me here.”
“Yes, getting madder by the minute. I simply couldn’t let you take my money, so I hyped myself into acting like the world’s deadliest gunsel and taking it back, but—” He shrugged.
“At the critical moment, the act failed. You fell apart.”
“Yes. When I saw that horrible gun. I told you I can’t stand violence.”
“Who thought this up?” I said. “You?”
“Mostly, yes. The details were mine. The idea of faking a kidnapping was strictly Bella’s, but when she insisted the ransom couldn’t be more than twenty thousand, I thought of the mail-chute thing. I used to work in the Bancroft Building. You can get twenty thousand into one of those envelopes if you try.”