“By then I’d got my heart down out of my throat and could speak, so I asked him what he was doing there. He took a slip of paper out of a breast pocket—he had on a white coverall—and said, ‘Mr. Romstead called us to check out the simalizer and put a new frammistat in his KLH.’ That wasn’t what he actually said, of course, but some technical jargon that didn’t mean a thing to me, and he had the console of the KLH pulled out from the wall as if he were going to work on it. He said the manager let him in, which I knew was a damn lie—the office wouldn’t let anybody in an apartment when the tenant’s not there—but I didn’t know what to do. If I started to run, he might grab me and drag me inside to keep me from calling the police.
“And, believe me, I didn’t want to go on into the kitchen with those groceries, either, because then he’d be between me and the door, but there didn’t seem to be anything else I could do without making him suspicious. He’d know I’d opened the door for something. Anyway, he was so cool and professional that by then I’d about decided he really was an honest, card-carrying burglar and not a creep of some kind, so I told him I was just a friend that had stopped by with this stuff for you. So I went into the kitchen and shoved the things in the refrigerator—I mean, all of it, and fast, in case you ever wonder why there’s a package of paper napkins and two bars of toilet soap in your freezer. I came back out. He was humming under his breath and fiddling with the back of the KLH. I said something about being sure the door was locked when he left and eased out. I didn’t think my knees would ever hold up till I made it to the elevator.
“When I got to the office, of course, I had to explain what the hell I was doing in your apartment. We got that straightened out, and they called the police. A squad car pulled up in two or three minutes, and the manager went up with the two officers. He was gone by then, of course, but they found enough evidence he’d been there so they didn’t write me off as some kind of nut. It seemed to be your desk he was interested in—or that’s as far as he’d got—because everything in it had been pretty well shuffled. Of course, they don’t know if anything’s missing, but they said the chances were he got the hell out of there the minute I was out of the corridor.”
Alarm circuits were tripping all over the place, but he was merely soothing—and admiring. “Honey, you handled it beautifully; you really used your head. Anyway, there was nothing in the desk but correspondence, old tax returns, bank statements, and so on. Could you describe the guy?”
“He wasn’t real big, a little less than six feet, anyway, around a hundred and sixty pounds. About thirty years old. Very slender and dark, Indian-looking, with black hair and brown eyes. And cool, real cool.”
“Well, you’re pretty cool yourself, Hotshot,” Romstead said. While he didn’t like any of it, he still didn’t want to scare her over what so far was just a feeling. “But don’t let it go to your head. If there are prowlers working those apartments, keep the chain on your door the way I told you, and don’t let anybody in until you’ve finished the first two volumes of his biography. I’ll call you tomorrow, and I’ll be back early tomorrow night.”
They talked a few minutes more, and as soon as he’d hung up, he put in a call to Murdock. His answering service said Mr. Murdock wasn’t at his office or at home yet, but that he should report in shortly. Romstead gave her the number of the motel. “Ask him to call me as soon as he comes in.”
All he could do then was wait. And wonder about it. Too many things were wrong with the picture, Naturally, any prowler could get names off the mailboxes down below, but this guy wasn’t some punk who’d wandered in off the street with a strip of plastic or a credit card. He couldn’t have got in. Those were dead-bolt locks, and he’d turned the key when he left. Then there were the other touches, the coverall, the prop toolbag—both disposable down the nearest garbage chute—the calm assurance, the plausible patter, all of which bespoke a real professional—except that no professional in his right mind would waste his time prowling a single man’s apartment, even if you left him a key under the doormat. No furs, no jewelry—all the expensive baubles belonged to women. He’d get three or four suits that some fence might give him two dollars apiece for and the cleaning woman’s eight dollars if he could find it.
He could call Paulette Carmody, but he didn’t want to have the phone tied up if Murdock called.
He waited. He unpacked his bag and studied the maps some more. It was about twenty minutes before the phone rang. He grabbed it up. It was Murdock.
“I just got your call,” he said. “Anything new?”
“Yeah, some guy shook down my apartment this afternoon,” Romstead replied. “I can’t figure what he was after, but let’s take up your end of it first. You get any line on the girl?”
“Yes, we’ve had pretty good luck so far. I’ve just talked to Snyder again—he’s the man I put on her. He picked up her trail at Packer Electronics right off the bat. It’s a big outfit on upper Mission, handles everything in the electronics line: hi-fi components, radio and TV parts and tubes, transistors, ham equipment, and so on. She worked in the office there for about a year and a half, until last March. They let her go for tapping the till; apparently her habit was pretty expensive even then. Snyder got her last known address and checked that out. She’d been sharing an apartment with another girl named Sylvia Wolden out near the Marina, but she’d moved out of there in April. The Wolden girl didn’t know she was on junk but suspected she was shoplifting, from the things she’d bring home.
“She left no forwarding address, but Sylvia was able to give Snyder the name of an old boyfriend, Leo Cullen, who tends bar at a place on Van Ness. Cullen told Snyder he’d broken up with her along about Christmas, when she first got hooked on the stuff, and hadn’t seen her since but had heard she was shacked up with a guy named Marshall Tallant, who ran a one-man TV repair place in North Beach. Snyder went out there and found the place; but it was closed, and nobody in the neighborhood had seen Tallant in over a month. The girl had been living with him, though, and they’d both disappeared from the neighborhood about the same time.”
“Any idea how she was supporting her habit?” Romstead asked. “Tallant couldn’t have made much out of that shop.”
“No,” Murdock replied. “We haven’t got any line on that yet. If she was hustling, it apparently wasn’t in that neighborhood, though she might have been shoplifting downtown. And you’re right about the shop—Tallant couldn’t have paid for any forty- or fifty-dollar habit unless he had other sources of income. I gather he was plenty good, could fix anything electronic, but snotty and temperamental. He’d turn down jobs if they didn’t interest him, and some days he didn’t even open the place.
“There’s one possibility, though, and that brings me to my end of it. She could have had some kind of hustle going with your father. What, I don’t know, but she definitely had been in his apartment a good many times. Three people I talked to had seen her going in or coming out of the building over the past four months, but never with him. She might have been working as a high-priced call girl, with him as one of her list; I just don’t know. But I do think she had a key. One of the tenants I talked to saw her in the corridor on that floor on the Fourth of July, and you remember your father was in Coleville then. And I think it’s definite your father was never in the apartment any time between July sixth and fourteenth. Nobody saw him at all, not even the apartment house manager, and he and your father were good friends. He’s a retired merchant marine man himself, mate on a Standard Oil tanker, and when your father came to town, they always had a couple of drinks together.