“No. Should I?”
“I think that’s best,” I said, not wanting to run down all the red herrings that I was sure Violet could leave if she didn’t want Reggie trailing after her.
“I’d be glad to pay you,” he said.
“Let’s not get into that yet. She might turn up any time. Tell you what,” I said with a sudden inspiration for getting rid of him. “I’m headed for the police station now. While I’m there, I’ll check on anything that might have come in just to be sure nothing has happened to her. You might call around to her girlfriends and relatives and see if they know where she is.”
That made him happier. He unwound his long legs, glanced at his watch, and hurried off. I had no intention of doing anything about her and, at that point, didn’t think anyone needed to.
“The problem is,” Ed Lucero said as I sat in his office in the police station, “that there is no consistent M.O. I’ve got a gut feeling that these burglaries are all connected, but I can’t find the thread that might give us a clue.”
“How do you know there is one?” I asked.
“There’s got to be,” Ed said doggedly as he shuffled the batch of files in front of him. Ed had been on the force a long time. He was a careful, thorough detective. Nothing flashy about him, he stuck with a case until he saw through every angle of it. He was also smart enough to call in other investigators — like myself — to give him new slants when he was stumped. And, except for a few lukewarm suspects, he was badly stumped on this one.
“We’ve got a sudden rash of jewel thefts. The witnesses we’ve got described the burglars differently in each incident. The approach is slightly different each time, but they steal good jewelry in broad daylight and it disappears fast — it never turns up at the pawnbrokers or fences. I’m sure there is a connection between these burglaries because the whole underworld doesn’t suddenly turn to jewel theft just like that.”
“What can I do to help?” I asked.
“I’d like you to question a couple of suspects. See if you can get anything out of them. Word on the street has it that they may be involved. But I haven’t been able to dig anything helpful out of any of them. See what you can pick up.”
As Ed led me through the main lobby to the interview room, I got a surprise. There, nervously perched on a bench in the main lobby, was Reggie’s Violet. We had met a few times at my office, and I wasn’t sure if she saw me but her head seemed to snap away from my direction as Ed and I approached.
“Do you know her?” I asked Ed softly as we went into the interrogating room.
He shook his head. “Never seen her before.”
“What’s she doing here?” I asked him.
“No idea. Is it important?”
“Probably not,” I said as I shrugged and let it go.
Striking a disarming pose in the small stark room, I welcomed a young man named Cliff Dorgan who worked in a jewelry store that had been robbed. He had quit to take another job just two days before the store got hit. But his life seemed to be as open and clean as his countenance. I couldn’t see any way to connect him with the burglary.
After that I tried to talk with one Bobby Colvin, an excitable youth whose eyes darted all over the room while the rest of his body twitched and hitched. The only thing I could be sure of about him was that he was in dire need of a controlled substance.
Next was a smooth-faced man in his early thirties named Gilbert Carver who said he had only been in town a few weeks. He was here to visit his mother, who was in a nursing home, and would be heading back to Detroit soon. He was a little tight-lipped, but otherwise courteous and cooperative. But there wasn’t a thing I got out of him that connected him to the stolen jewelry.
I decided to check out Gilbert’s story about his aged mother because I couldn’t think of anything else to do and because his Detroit record indicated he didn’t always behave as his mother should have taught him to.
She was there at the nursing home all right. I introduced myself to the smiling gray-haired lady in a wheelchair that a nurse pushed in.
“Mrs. Carver, I’m here to see that you’re getting good treatment,” I began. She went on smiling. “Are you feeling well?” I inquired.
“Oh, yes!” she answered, and I noticed then that the smile included everyone in the room, as well as the walls, ceiling, and floor.
“Do your children come to see you often?” When she nodded affirmatively, I asked, “How many children do you have?”
“Seven,” she answered with a broad smile.
“And can you tell me their names?”
“Yes. There’s George, Warren, Gladys, Esther, Judith, Marion, Terrence...” she paused.
“Do you have a son named Gilbert?”
“Oh yes, Gilbert. Such a nice boy.”
“But that’s eight children,” I pointed out.
“Yes, eight,” she nodded pleasantly.
“Can you tell me their names again?” I asked.
“Sure. Gilbert, Nancy, Everett, George, Solomon, Rita, John, Henry, and... and...”
I knew then I had struck out. They told me at the desk that a son answering Gilbert’s description had visited her frequently in recent weeks. They said she also had several other children who came, as well as some adult grandchildren; they weren’t sure how many. So much for Mrs. Carver. Time had evidently dimmed her memory as to who was which, but she apparently did have a large and devoted family. No wonder she smiled so much.
It wasn’t until I got back late that afternoon and passed his closed office door that I thought again about Reggie and his rambling rose.
Oops! I said to myself as I slunk by quickly. Hope he’s made contact with Vanishing Violet by now. But just in case he hadn’t, I quietly dashed in and out of my own office and slipped down the back stairway. I couldn’t see that it would calm his nerves any if I told him I’d spotted her at the police station.
At two A.M. my phone wrenched me out of a good night’s sleep. Reggie’s scrappy voice came on as soon as I answered. “Jane! The police are searching my apartment,” he screamed in terror.
“What for?” I asked.
“I don’t know. They won’t tell me. Could you come over right away? You work with police. Maybe you can handle them. I don’t know what to do.”
What could I say? He lived close by. I got there in minutes. But it was already too late. I recognized the burly figure of Ed Lucero coming down the steps of the building.
“Hi, Jane. We found it,” Ed said to me cheerily, just as though I should know what he was talking about.
“You did?” I asked, just as though I knew what we were both talking about.
“Not all, but I saw enough from recent jewelry store burglaries to cinch the case. Come on back to the station and I’ll tell you about it,” Ed said in his big, friendly way.
My mouth was already opening with a question, but I gaped even wider when I saw them leading poor Reggie out in handcuffs. Hideous green and yellow checked pajamas stuck out below his coat, and leather mules flapped on his reluctant feet. He stopped protesting when he spotted me.
“Help me!” he shrieked in a wail that pierced the night as they loaded him into a police car.
“I think you may have the wrong man,” I said to Ed.
“But he’s got the goods,” Ed said.
“That’s one thing I don’t understand,” I answered. “The other thing is: what made you look in his apartment?”
Ed explained that Reggie’s cleaning lady, who had read about all the jewelry store robberies, called in and announced that she’d found too many little packages of sparkly stuff hidden in odd places in his apartment.
On the way downtown I told Ed what I knew of the panicky shrink they had taken into custody. He agreed that Reggie’s biography didn’t seem to fit with robbing jewelry stores.