A detective.
His feeling was that of being in the same small, cramped room with a shoulder-wide cobra, reared six feet or better on its tail and busily jotting a report in a notebook.
He had to choke back a yell of unadulterated horror when, in the course of his writing, the tip of the detective’s tongue suddenly flicked out at the far corner of his mouth, then withdrew again.
“And the windows were all down, just as they are now?” he said to Marjorie.
“Yes, I can be positive of that, because I remember latching them all, the last thing, just before I left. There were some dark clouds over in the west, and I was afraid it might rain before I could get back. I’d just put up fresh curtains this morning.”
“Then he, or they, got in by the front door. Either by using a skeleton key, or passing a strip of celluloid in through the doorseam.”
“I never heard of that,” she exclaimed wonderingly.
“It’s something new they’ve got onto lately,” the detective let her know grimly.
He readied his notebook once more, to take inventory. An inventory that proved barren.
“How about jewelry?”
She dropped her eyes momentarily. “I don’t have any, except what I was wearing: my wedding ring and this little watch.”
“Silver?”
“We only used this bone-handled set.” She opened the lid of the chest to show him. “It’s all in place. Nobody would want it anyway.”
“How about money, then? Is that all accounted for?”
“I had my pocketbook with me under my arm. And Pres — Mr. Marshall doesn’t get paid until Friday afternoon. Oh, wait—” she remembered suddenly, “I did have a dollar and a half in a baking-powder can in the kitchen. I let it accumulate in there to pay the milkman, at the end of the month. A dollar bill and a half-dollar piece!” She ran to look.
Marshall desperately wanted that money to be found missing. In order to prove this the bona fide burglary, that he was afraid in his heart it wasn’t.
“They found it!” she called out alarmedly. “The lid’s off the little can, and it’s empty inside!”
They both hastened in there after her. Marshall’s step was light; there was actually a smile of relief on his face, which he remembered to quench just in time.
“It was standing right here like thi— Wait a minute!” she cried sharply, and dipped down to the floor. “Here’s the dollar bill, lying right under it, by my feet. The linoleum pattern blurred it.”
“And here’s your half-dollar piece,” the sharp-eyed detective added, scooping up something that lay out before the stove.
“Why, they must have just turned it upside down and shaken it out to see what was in it, and then when the money fell out, didn’t even bother picking it up!” She looked at the detective in amazement. “What were they after, anyway?”
Marshall’s heart had gone down to his feet. He could have told them what they were after; he knew. But he didn’t dare. Evidence against himself; documentary; papers of one sort or another. There was the proof of it right there; the disregarded money from inside that can. You didn’t have to be a detective...
The real one acted fairly crestfallen, even resentful of the waste of time (and perhaps even of the opportunity to distinguish himself) that this expedition had turned out to be. “Well, I have to get back,” he said somewhat brusquely. “If you can’t report anything of value missing, Mrs. Marshall, then I’m afraid it becomes only a case of suspected illegal entry, and I doubt we can do anything much about that, since you didn’t even actually see anyone in the place.”
Marshall was glad to see the young plain-clothesman go. He even walked with him to the door to see him out (and chiefly to make sure the door was closed fast behind him once he was out).
Her disquietude ended with the realization that nothing was missing, nothing had been taken.
His only began there.
Nighttime was the usual time for burglaries. Why broad daylight? The answer was obvious. Because he himself wouldn’t have been there in the daytime, would have been at night. He was the hindrance, not anyone else. His belongings were the objective.
And, now that he recalled, Wise hadn’t been to the office that day. Had phoned in that he was ill.
What more was needed? It all hung together too beautifully.
With skin drawn tight over his cheekbones, and a feeling of rigidity to the walls of his diaphragm, he watched from the bedroom doorway while she moved about restoring it to its norm of orderliness.
She picked up a receipted gas company bill from the floor. Then a letter addressed to her from her father, of some time back, which she had been keeping.
“Wait a minute!” he said sharply, and strode forward. “You always had that in the original envelope it came in. I’ve seen it there several times. Now it’s without an envelope.”
“Here’s the envelope, right here,” she said soothingly, picking something additional up. “They flew apart, I suppose, when it was tossed to the floor.”
“It couldn’t have come out of the envelope by itself,” he insisted, almost palpitating with tension. “You don’t open envelopes like other people, rip out the flap along the top. I’ve seen you too often. Look at this. You tear off a thin little sliver down the side, the short way.” He tried to reintroduce the letter into the slotted envelope; it balked, warped. He had to shake the envelope, and pat the letter down into it with his fingers. “That was taken out deliberately, to be read over, find out what it said.”
She gave a little laugh of complete incredulity. “What kind of burglars were those?” she demanded. “Taking time to read other people’s mail!”
He knew what kind of burglar that — or they — had been. Not a burglar after money, after trinkets. A burglar after evidence.
A police-agent burglar.
Wise.
How ironical, he thought, to have had that young plain-clothesman here in the flat just now to investigate.
One detective trying to cancel out another’s work, all unknowing.
12
Wise brought a camera to the office with him one day, at about this time. Marshall, ordinarily so alert to every nuance of potential danger, for once didn’t think anything of it. It meant nothing to him. It was just a camera, and a camera was harmless. Knowledge of police methods, techniques and apparatuses used in the identification and apprehension of criminals was not very widespread among the public at large. And certainly a camera, to the average layman — and Marshall was still very much the average layman, in everything save conscience perhaps — bore in itself no intrinsic connotation of police processes. It was an idle-hour thing, a holiday thing, to be used at the beach, or on a picnic in the new Pierce-Arrow, or on the front porch steps on a Sunday afternoon en famille.
So he saw it, and remained unalarmed.
It stood there on Wise’s desk all morning. It wasn’t a Brownie box camera, it was one of the folding kind, an Eastman Kodak, one of the newer models.
The middle-of-the-day break came, and they all went to their lunches. Marshall left the office before Wise did. He didn’t think a second time of him or of his camera. He went to his usual little tablecloth-restaurant lunching place, sat alone at his usual little table, ate his usual forty-five-cent “businessman’s lunch,” plus five cents for the waiter. Went back toward the office again. With time to spare, as was usual on other days as well.
It was a piercingly clear sun-gorged day. The sidewalk in front of the office building was flour white with hot-baked sunshine. People’s shadows were India ink in intensity. He did now what he’d done many times before. Backed himself against the building wall and prepared to stand there and bask for the remainder of his leisure period, hands locked behind him, face tilted slightly upward to catch full effect of the benign solar rays. Some of the others did that too. To get the benefit of the sun in their faces they all had to stand facing the one way, outward to the street, and they did this. It was like an impromptu little line-up of three or four, strung along out there on the open sidewalk. Exchanging an occasional desultory remark (particularly at the passing of some comely young woman) but otherwise not conversing overmuch. They had enough of one another all day upstairs in the office.