“I wondered whether you were just along for the ride,” Mrs. Fredrick said to Powder. “Listening to all that... Outrageous. I pay your salaries.”
“Now just a—” Muntz began.
Powder put a hand on her shoulder. To Mrs. Fredrick he said, “Officer Muntz will be disciplined and I will see to it that she attends classes to help her learn how to be more polite in the future.”
“Well,” Mrs. Fredrick said, but her tone made it clear she liked this change of direction.
“Meanwhile, Officer Muntz and I will search through the public areas of the building. Before we leave, we’ll stop back and tell you what we’ve found, if anything.”
“Thank you,” Mrs. Fredrick said. “Officer...?”
“Lieutenant Leroy Powder, ma’am.” He gave her a card. “Don’t be shy about calling again if you see, or hear, anything suspicious. We’ll knock on your door in a few minutes.”
When she and Powder were out of earshot down the hall, Muntz said, “I can’t believe you bending over like that for a time-waster like that old woman.”
“That time-wasting old woman pays for your salary, Muntz. And your pension. And for your sick days. And for your personal days, once you’ve been working long enough to get some.”
“Yeah, but...” Muntz wasn’t happy. “What if somebody’s out there getting shot just because we’re in here chasing shadows?”
“You’ve made a fundamental mistake, Valerie.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
“You walked into this building and you came to this woman’s apartment. Right?”
“So?”
“And because you didn’t see anybody on the way, you act like you’ve searched the place.”
“I have.”
“Work it through. Nobody left the building after she heard what she heard. She watched from the window.”
“Right.”
“And when you came in, nobody was coming down as you were going up.”
“Exactly.”
“So tell me what happened if Mrs. Fredrick was right and she heard somebody in the hall. Where’d he go?”
“I don’t know.” Muntz felt her exasperation growing. She’d heard about the spots Powder put people in sometimes. She’d just never been on the receiving end before.
“Think about it,” Powder said insistently.
“Okay... then he went into one of the apartments. He lives here.”
“Reasonable. But Mrs. Fredrick says he doesn’t live here.”
“Then he vanished in a puff of smoke. I don’t know.”
“That’s true. You don’t.” He waited while Muntz stared at him. Finally he said, “What if the prowler went up instead of down?”
“There are only two floors, Lieutenant.”
“There’s a roof.”
“Why would a prowler go on the roof?”
“Why does a prowler prowl and mutter to himself? I don’t know. But I think we should go ask him, don’t you?”
And, as if to make the point as clearly as if it were a training exercise, Powder and Muntz did indeed find a man passed out at the top of a stairwell that led to the roof. From the smell of him he was almost certainly drunk. The empty bourbon bottle by his side was another clue.
How and why did he get into the building in the first place? Why did he go up as high as he could? There was no way to tell and they couldn’t ask him because his sleep was deep. But hey.
“You,” Powder said to Muntz, “will stay with this member of the public until the ambulance gets here.”
“Oh for—”
“When he is safely loaded aboard, you will go to Mrs. Fredrick. You’ll explain what happened, and apologize sincerely and profoundly to her. I will come back tomorrow to ask her how you presented yourself. What she says will have an effect on your future.”
By this point, Muntz had gone quiet.
“After your apology, you will follow the ambulance to the hospital and you will stay with Citizen Doe until he wakes up. You will ask him what he was doing in the building and how he got in. These are important security issues. You will not leave his side until you learn the answers to these questions. And you will make no stops on the way to the hospital. Do I make myself clear?”
Powder left home early the next afternoon and he did, indeed, stop to talk with Mrs. Fredrick.
“That girl policeman came by this morning,” Mrs. Fredrick said. “She looked terrible.”
“Remorse at having been rude to you, I expect,” Powder said.
“Well, I don’t know about that. But she did apologize. I offered her a cup of coffee, or a place to lie down for a nap, but she went on her way.”
“She’s on duty again tonight.”
“I hope she manages to sleep during the day. The poor thing looked exhausted.”
“Did she tell you about the prowler?”
“She said he thought he was somewhere else.”
“A different building?”
“Chicago. He has mental problems, it seems. There was a number in his pocket that the hospital called. He walked out of a facility in Illinois. They have no idea how he got here, and your young officer couldn’t find out how he got into the building. A bit worrying, but it doesn’t sound like it’s going to happen again soon.”
Powder nodded slowly as he absorbed this information. Muntz seemed to have followed instructions. It would be interesting to see how she behaved at roll call.
“Would you like a cup of coffee, Lieutenant?” Mrs. Fredrick asked. “And I have some fresh chocolate chip cookies...”
But Powder declined the offers apologetically. He had a second stop to make. This one was at the house of Barry Haller.
Although he was in his uniform he carried his baseball cap and his clipboard, just in case it was Mrs. Haller who opened the door. They would help remind her that he’d been there before. His sunglasses were missing, but only because he’d left them on his car seat and squashed them.
As things turned out, Mrs. Haller did answer the door, but this time she was the one wearing the sunglasses. Big ones. They completely covered her eyes and the area around them.
“Oh,” Powder said. The big shades caught him by surprise.
“You.” Her voice indicated surprise, too.
“You recognize me then?”
“I’m not a total dummy, no matter what...” She left that sentence hanging and spoke a different one. “I didn’t expect you to be coming back here, Lieutenant.”
“No? Why not?”
She frowned. Stuff was going on inside her head but all she said was, “I just didn’t.”
Today’s blue-and-white gingham pinafore was as fresh and bright as the red-and-white one was last time, but the woman herself seemed neither bright nor fresh. The disjointed way she stood in the half-opened doorway struck Powder as saying she didn’t care how she presented herself this time. Or was that too much to read into posture?
Either way, he wanted to take a look at her without the sunglasses. It was not a sunny day. “Would you take those sunglasses off for me, please, Mrs. Haller?” His best commanding tone of voice.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve got conjunctivitis.”
Did she? Or was something more anatomical swelling up in the darkness? Oh well, he’d tried, and if you don’t ask, you don’t get. “Who called you a dummy, ma’am?”
But this time Mrs. Haller wasn’t prepared to allow herself to be shifted away from her own agenda. “What do you want, Lieutenant? Got another letter to deliver? Because if you do and it has to be signed for, you can stick it where the sun don’t shine.”
Underneath the sunglasses? If he’d had an envelope he’d have given it a try. However, he said, “I’m sorry that I deceived you the last time I came to the door.”