What next? I thought. What else can go wrong?
While I was sitting there feeling sorry for myself, the door chimes sounded and the cops trooped in. Five minutes later, they got around to me. The guy who came in was a broad, chunky type with olive-green eyes and a mop of pewter-colored hair, dressed in plain clothes. He was also a slow-moving, slow-talking type; the impression you got was. that he deliberated each movement and each word before going ahead with them. His name was Banducci, and his official title was lieutenant.
Apparently Mollenhauer had not bothered to give him my name; when I showed him the photostat of my license he said, “You a paisan?” “Yes, Swiss-Italian.”
“Uh-huh. My people were Romano.” He shrugged, dismissing the subject of ancestries. And then a frown worked its way onto his face, and he peered at the photostat again. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I thought your name looked familiar. You’re the private detective who’s been in all the San Francisco papers lately.”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“Well, well. And now here you are in Ross, mixed up in another criminal case. “You do get around, don’t you.”
Like Typhoid Mary, I thought. The harbinger of trouble and adversity, that’s me. I said, “It’s been a hell of a week,” which was pretty feeble.
“You’re in a lot of hot water, seems like.”
“Through no fault of my own. I’ve never done anything illegal or unethical-not in San Francisco or anywhere else, including this house.”
“For your sake, I hope that’s the truth.” He paused. “Mr. Mollenhauer tells me you’re armed.”
I nodded. “I’ve got a carry permit for a handgun, if you want to see it.”
“Maybe later. You mind checking your weapon with me for the time being?”
It was a procedure request and it did not have to mean anything. Or then again, maybe it meant I was more suspect in his eyes than he was letting on. I said, “Not at all,” and pushed the tux coat back and took the.38 out of its holster-carefully, with my thumb and forefinger. I handed it to him butt first.
“Thanks,” he said. He put the weapon into his coat pocket. “What happened to your pants?”
“I tore them climbing out through the window.”
“After the robbery?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” he said, “let’s have your version of what took place here tonight.”
I gave it to him.
“So you didn’t see anybody after you broke into the gift room,” he said when I was done. “Not inside and not outside on the grounds.”
“-No. Except for the man and woman I told you about.”
“How long was it from the time you heard the glass break to the time you got the door kicked in?”
“Thirty seconds, maybe. Forty-five at the most.”
One of his eyebrows went up. “That’s not much time for somebody to come in through the window, grab the ring, go back out, and disappear.”
“I know,” I said. The time factor had been bothering me, too, along with the broken window and the location of the glass shards. “But that’s how it was.”
“Mm,” Banducci said. His voice was noncommittal. “Suppose you wait here while we go over the gift room. I’ll want to talk to you again after that.”
“Fine.”
He went out, and I sat down on an antique sofa and wished that I could smoke a cigarette. I almost never had a craving for one anymore, but when I was a heavy smoker it was times like this, times of stress, that the need for tobacco had been the strongest. Funny how the mind works sometimes, how it regresses and dredges up old desires.
I sat in the empty room and fought the nicotine urge and tried not to think about what Eberhardt and the Chief of Police and the media would make out of this latest mess. Instead I tried to find some sense in the theft of Carla Mollenhauer’s diamond ring. The facts as I knew them were muddy and damned improbable. How could the window have been broken from inside the gift room? How could the thief have got away with the ring in less than a minute? Questions without answers, at least for the moment. And questions which seemed to contradict my explanation of the facts.
Another twenty-five minutes crawled away, heavy with tension, before I had company again. This time it was another plain clothesman whose name I never did get. He stood just inside the doorway and crooked a hand at me. “Lieutenant Banducci wants to see you.” he said.
I stood and went out with him, through the house and back into the rear wing. On the way we encountered Walker and a pretty dark-haired girl of about twenty-Mollenhauer’s daughter, obviously, because she was still wearing her bridal gown. The girl paid no attention to me; her eyes were red-rimmed and her expression was tragic and remote. But Walker pinned me with a passing glare, a down-the-nose look full of loathing. If he had any decent qualities, that boy, they were well bidden. I wondered briefly if Carla Mollenhauer was anything like him, or if she had made a serious mistake she would one day regret.
Banducci was alone in the gift room, standing by the window and watching a couple of uniformed cops working the grounds outside. The sun had gone down on the opposite side of the house and there were lengthening shadows across the lawn; dusk was not far off. The cops out there both carried flashlights.
As we came in, Banducci turned and then came over in front of me. His movements were still ponderous, but there was a hard edge now in his eyes and in the set of his mouth.
“Okay, paisan,” he said, and he put a different inflection on the Italian word this time, almost accusing, as if he had come to consider me a disgrace to our mutual heritage. “Let’s go over your story again.”
I nodded and repeated it to him, carefully, omitting none of the details. Nothing changed in his expression, but his eyes seemed to darken, to take on an even harder edge. The tension in me sharpened to anxiety. I didn’t like the way things were shaping up.
Banducci was silent for a time. Then he said deliberately, “Must be at least two hundred packages in here, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes.”
“And all of them still gift-wrapped.”
“I know what you’re getting at,” I said. “How did the thief know which package contained the ring? And he had to know, all right; the ring box was the only one opened.”
“So how do you explain that?”
“An inside job,” I said. “Has to be.”
“Sure. An inside job. How many people saw the ring and its gift box after it was delivered this afternoon?”
“Mollenhauer, his secretary, his son-in-law, and the guy from the jewelry store.”
“And you,” Banducci said.
“Yes. And me.”
“Which makes one of you five the probable guilty party.”
“It adds up that way.”
“But it wasn’t you, right?”
“No. I told you what happened, all of it.”
“The whole truth?”
“Yes.”
“One of the other four, according to your story, broke in the window, came inside, opened the gift box and the ring case, took the ring, went back through the window, and got clear away.”
I didn’t say anything.
“And he did all of that in less than a minute. According to your story.”
“Look, I know it sounds impossible-”