“This is a good set you have,” he said presently. “Have much trouble with it?”
“Hardly any,” I said.
“Then why has Larry Forrest been here so often to fix ft?”
There was an uproar of laughter from the set at something the comedian had said. I turned it off. Margaret was sitting deep in the wing chair with her hands folded on her lap.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said to Breen. “The only trouble we had with it was a couple months ago, when a tube had to be replaced.”
“So I was led to believe.” Breen took from his pocket a number of yellow cards. “These are from the Riverside Service files. They are made out by the repairman after each call so the company will have a record of what work was done on each set and how much time was spent on the job.” He shuffled the cards as if about to deal them. “There are nine here in the name of McKay at this address. Nine in seven weeks. There were only three under Hamilton.”
I said, “There must be a mistake.”
But looking at Margaret, I knew there wasn’t. She had put her head against the back of the chair and closed her eyes.
“Like almost all cars that come to this street, Forrest’s truck came from the right,” Breen was saying. “That’s why he always parked across the street, on the right side of the street, in front of the Hamilton house, because it’s directly opposite this house. He made his calls here. Anyway, most of them. The last one here was eight days ago. Then two at the Hamilton house.”
He had been speaking to me, and only to me, from the first. As Margaret remained silent, I had to say something. I said, “But if it was anything but a service call, would he have made out a service card?”
“The only time the coast was clear was when you were at your office,” Breen said. “Those were also his working hours. He had to report each call he made to explain to his office the time spent. These are the cards. Probably be paid for the charges written on each of these out of his own pocket”
Margaret started to laugh. That was the most awful sound I had ever heard.
“I paid for each call,” the said. “I paid the charge each time.” She laughed some more and said, “For services rendered.”
“Margaret!” I cried.
She looked at me, and for some reason, I was the one who cringed.
“Twenty years of dullness,” she said. “Twenty years of living with you. And it was unbearable this last year with Betty away and the house always so empty. Then there was Larry Forrest and it was like being reborn. Like being young again.” Her hands writhed on her lap. “Then he saw Norma. He made a call there, and he was no different than the others. Because she was younger and prettier and threw herself at him, he... he...”
There was a silence. She had become a stranger to me. It was odd that a man could live with a woman for so long and not know her.
The detective stood shuffling those cards, and after a long moment, he said, “So this morning you killed her.”
“I didn’t go there to kill her,” Margaret said. “I went, to plead with her. I told her she bad other men. I had only Larry. I begged her to let him come back to me. Norma sneered at me. She said I was too old for him. We were in the bedroom. I snatched up the vase.”
Her voice faded. She slumped in the chair.
“And then you had to bring Forrest into it,” Breen said. “You called Riverside Service and told the girl in the office that you were Mrs. Hamilton. You said your set was out of order and please send a man at once because there was a program on soon you were anxious to see. You knew that Forrest phoned his office every hour or so to find out if there were calls for emergency service in his area. From your porch, you watched him arrive and go into that house across the street. Once again he was serving you, this time in a different way. He was set up by you to take the rap for you.”
“No. That wasn’t it. I didn’t care so much about myself.” Margaret’s head lifted, and her face was stem. “He had to be punished, too,” she said.
Cops and Robbers
Vincent H. Gaddis
INSTALLMENT PLAN
In Atlanta, Georgia, D. A. Stoddard, Jr., told police that when he returned to his parked car, he discovered that someone had stolen the battery and drained the gasoline tank.
He left the car and went to a service station to purchase a battery and a can of gasoline. When he got back, both front wheels on his car were missing. Stoddard then went to a nearby garage to see if he could get two wheels. Again he returned — and this time the entire car was missing.
Later, he learned, police in a scout car had noticed the stripped car, thought it might have been stolen, and had it hauled away.
FEMININE TOUCH
A young woman, convicted of burglary in Baltimore, Maryland, carried her tools in her purse. Police said Miss Josephine Ditmore, twenty-three, broke into a restaurant and a tailor shop with eyebrow tweezers, a nail file and a lady’s-size razor.
RESTAURANT RIDDLE
A classic case of ingenuity in larceny was disclosed after a large branch of a national restaurant chain showed an inexplicable decline in receipts. Undercover inspectors sent to the scene were puzzled. “Everything seems to be in order,” they reported. “A close watch was kept on all three cash registers and all sales were rung up accurately.”
The report revealed the gimmick. Management remembered that only two cash registers had been installed. A clever cashier had installed a third register of his own.
MISLABELED
Mrs. Carrie Crump was fined fifty dollars in Knoxville, Tennessee, city court for selling window-cleaning fluid for fifty cents a portion. Police explained that Carrie’s customers didn’t use the stuff to clean windows. They drank it.
MASCOT
A bird-watching society has been formed by a group of inmates at Dartmoor Prison, Princetown, England. Officials report that the prisoners chose the jackdaw, known as the bird world’s No. I thief, as their object of study.
BOLD AND BRAZEN
With some embarrassment, Alfonso Garcia, of Nogales, Arizona, informed police that someone had stolen the collar off his watchdog’s neck.
EXCEPTIONAL
As a rule, a burglar with plenty of time to work reportedly takes “everything but the kitchen sink.” But the intruder that entered the home of Mrs. Betty Stillman at Jacksonville, Florida, left everything but — the kitchen sink.
ETHER ENIGMA
At Montello, Wisconsin, a freak atmospheric condition occasionally causes the radio frequency of the Marquette County sheriff’s department to become crossed up with one on which an unidentified police department in the far South is operating. Officer Don Neilson ona night was attempting to contact a squad car when he was interrupted by the drawl of Southern officers on the same wave length. Suddenly Neilson heard one of the annoyed Southern officers say, “Doggone it, Rufe, I can’t bear a word you’re saying. Some mushmouth damn Yankee keeps breaking in.”
BLOODS THICKER
A young man at Mansfield, Louisiana, asked Sheriff Harmon Burgess to let his uncle sober up on a jail cot. Burgess agreed, and the youth helped his intoxicated companion to bed in a cell, promising to come for him later.
Awakening, the older man disclosed that he had no nephew — and a quick check revealed that he had no car, either. The sheriff sent out an alarm for a youth about twenty-one, driving a car filled with luggage, small appliances and a television set.