The night was warm and gentle with a deep navy blue sky and stars like fluorescent polka-dots. Two miles away the blazing lights of Vegas raised a bell-shaped orange glow, but among the palms and orange trees the shadows were thick and black and comfortably concealing.
The Clives’ was only the latest of a great many houses I had broken into. My short cuts to truth were scandalous by all public and private standards, and Keeble rarely asked how I got my information: and as I would have had the press, the police, and public opinion all balefully against me if I’d ever been caught, A gag on eggs would have been clumsy in comparison. Law-abiding citizens never knew I’d been their guest. For the Clives’, however, I had alternative plans.
Wearing surgeons’ rubber gloves, and with my shoes stuck through my belt to the left of the Luger, I worked on the lock on the back door, and after not too bad a time, considering its complexity, the two sets of tumblers fell sweetly over, and the house was mine.
Inside, the air was stale and still, and dust sheets draped the furniture, looking like pale boulders in the dim light of my torch. The rear door opened into a spacious hall which led straight through to the front. I walked across, unbolted and unfastened the front door, brought in the bags of flour, and left the door ajar, like the one I’d come in by: the value of always being prepared for instant flight had been drummed into me by an ex-burglar who had once neglected it.
I went into the bedrooms. Large separate single bedded rooms again for Yola and Matt, and a guest bedroom, with a bathroom to each. I pulled all the covers off the furniture and flung on to the floor everything they had left in the chests and closets. Over the resulting mess in each room I shook six pounds of self-raising flour.
In the kitchen I emptied on to the floor a packet of soap flakes, a packet of rice, some cereal and four pounds of brown sugar, which were all lying handy in the pantry. I unlocked the pantry window and unfastened its outer screen, leaving both open: and as an afterthought tumbled some canned fruit off the shelf beneath it, to show that the intruder had come in that way.
In the spacious living room I again removed all the covers, put every ornament and small loose object in a heap on the floor, and flung flour over them and around the whole place. A smaller cosier room, facing the road, contained a desk full of papers, two large bookshelves, and a well-filled sewing box. Together the jumbled contents made a splendid ankle-deep mess on the floor. Pounds of flour fell over everything like snow.
It was while I was tearing open the last bag, ready for a final scatter round the hall, that I heard the distant police siren. Frozen, I doubted for a second that it was for me: then considered that either a too watchful neighbour had seen my torch in chinks through the blinds, or else that the Clives’ complicated locks weren’t their only protection, and that they had a direct burglar alarm line to the police.
Without wasting much time I shut the front door and heard the lock engage. Emptied the last bag of flour over a plastic flower arrangement on a table in the hall. Flitted through the rear door and clicked it shut behind me. Thrust the torch into my pocket.
The siren wailed and stopped at the front of the house. Doors slammed, men shouted, boots ran. Someone with a megaphone urged me to come out with my hands on my head. The edges of the house were outlined by a spotlight shining on its front.
With bare seconds to spare before the first uniform appeared in silhouette around the corner I reached the nearest of the bushes flanking the trefoil pool and dived behind it. Being quiet enough was no problem, as the law were making an intimidating clatter all around the house, but staying invisible was more difficult. They brought another spotlight round to the rear and shone it full on the house. The shuttered windows stared blindly and unhelpfully back, reflecting the glare almost as far as my cover.
Lights appeared in neighbouring houses, and heads stuck like black knobs out of the windows. I eased gently away past a few more bushes and thought I was still a great deal too close to a spell in the zoo.
A shout from the side of the house indicated that they had found the open pantry window. Four troopers altogether, I judged. All armed to the teeth. I grimaced in the darkness and moved another few yards with less caution. I wasn’t going to give them any forefinger exercise if I could help it, but the time was running out.
They were brave enough. One or more climbed in through the window and switched on the light. I more rapidly crossed the last stretch of garden, stepped over the white-painted stones, and headed straight out into the desert.
Five steps convinced me I needed to put my shoes on. Ten steps had me certain that the only vegetation was prickly pear, and close-ranked, at that. I should imagine I impaled myself on every one in the neighbourhood.
Back at the Clives’ they had temporarily stopped oohing and ahing over the mess, and were searching the grounds. Lights moved round the next door houses as well. If they went five along and found the car, things would get very awkward indeed.
I had meant to be safely back in my motel long before I called the police early in the morning to say that I was a civic minded neighbour who had just seen a prowler coming out of the Clives’...
When they showed signs of shining the light out towards where I was stumbling along I lay down flat on the ground and listened to the thud of my heart. The spotlight beam flickered palely over the low scrubby bushes and outlined the flat spiky plates of the prickly pears, but in the shifting uneven shadows that they threw, I reckoned I must be just another clump. There was a good deal of shouted discussion about whether it was necessary to take a look-see in the desert, but to my relief no one came farther out than the boundary stones. Gradually, frustrated, the dazzle and commotion retreated and died away.
The lights inside the Clives’ house went out. The police car drove off. The neighbours went back to bed. I got to my feet and brushed off the surplus of dry sandy earth. What with that and flour dust even the blindest cop would have little difficulty in buttoning me on to the crime.
With more care than on the outward trip I headed back towards the houses, but at an angle I hoped would bring me near the car. The sooner I beat it from that little neck of the woods, the better...
I stopped dead.
How might one catch a prowler? Just pretend to go away, and wait somewhere down the road, and when he thought everything was safe, he’d come carelessly along and fall into your waiting hands like a ripe plum.
I decided not to drive back towards Las Vegas from that quiet cul-de-sac. Just in case.
At the fifth house along, everything was quiet. I cat-footed through the grounds, around the house, and took a distant look at the car. Still there. No trooper beside it. I stood in the shadows for longer than was probably necessary, then took a deep breath and risked it. I completed the steps to the car and peered in through the window. Empty. Made a quick cautious tour of the row of spiky low-growing palms hiding it from the road.
Nothing. No irate shouts. All quiet. Car undiscovered. Sighing with relief, the vision of the malicious Clives dancing at my trial fading a little, I pulled wide the already open door and folded like an understuffed rag doll into the driving seat. For five minutes I did nothing more energetic than to breathe freely, and enjoy it.
There remained however the problem of telephoning to Walt: and I chewed it over thoughtfully while absent-mindedly pulling prickly pear needles out of my legs.
I was a fair hand at wire tapping, when I had the kit: but it was in Putney. No doubt there would be a telephone in the empty house alongside. But I wasn’t sure that I wanted to risk this house too being directly connected to the police, if that was what had happened at the Clives’. On the other hand, I had been in the Clives’ house twenty minutes before the police showed up. Yet they might be quicker, on a second call.