“It doesn’t sound impossible; it is impossible.” He motioned me over to the window. “Take a look at this hole,” he said. “Jagged pieces all around the frame-top, bottom, and sides. You see any blood on those pieces? Bits of cloth or anything like that?”
“No.”
“But a man is supposed to have gone through there not once but twice, over and through all those sharp edges of glass, without once cutting himself or tearing his clothing. You think that’s possible?”
“No.”
“No,” he agreed. “Look at the floor under the window. What do you see?”
Here it comes, I thought. “Nothing,” I said. “The broken glass is all outside on the lawn.”
“Oh, you realized that, did you?”
“Yeah. Just after it happened.”
“Then you also realize what it means: this window couldn’t have been smashed from the outside, as you claim it was.”
“I didn’t claim it was smashed from outside,” I said. “All I know is that I heard the glass shatter, and that’s all I reported to you.”
“The fact is, it was broken from inside this room-a locked empty room by your own testimony. Now how do you account for that?”
“I can’t account for it.”
“I can,” he said. “How does this sound? You saw that diamond ring today and figured what it was worth, and while you were sitting out in the hallway you worked up a little plan to steal it. You kicked in the door, grabbed the ring, and then broke the window yourself. From in here, forgetting until afterward where the broken glass would fall.”
“I didn’t do any of that.”
“The evidence says you did.”
“I don’t care what the evidence says. Listen, go ahead and search me. Search my car.”
“We’ll do just that. But I doubt if we’ll find the ring that way. You’d be too smart to have it on you or in your car.”
“Then what the hell am I supposed to have done with it?”
“Stashed it somewhere on the grounds nearby. You had enough time. And it wouldn’t have been too difficult for you to come back one of these nights, late, to pick it up.”
I had to struggle to control a surge of anger. Letting it out would only make matters worse for me, by giving the confrontation between us a personal angle. Banducci was just a cop doing his job, interpreting the facts as he saw them-the same way I might have interpreted them myself if our roles were reversed. I couldn’t blame him for the position I was in.
In level tones I said, “Call Lieutenant Eberhardt on the San Francisco force. He’s known me for thirty years; he’ll vouch for my honesty.”
Banducci sighed. “References aren’t going to help you much, paisan. Not with evidence like we’ve got here.”
“I’m telling you, I did not steal that ring.” “Sure,” he said. “That’s about what they all say-right up to the time the gates close behind them at San Quentin.”
NINETEEN
They did not take me straight to jail. I supposed Banducci, in his methodical way, wanted his men to finish combing the grounds first before he booked me; if they found the ring, to his way of thinking, it would solidify his case. But he did read me my rights from a Miranda card-I told him I would waive right of counsel for the time being, but that if he officially charged me with theft, I would not answer any more questions without my lawyer being present-and then had me searched and put under guard in another of the spare bedrooms. No handcuffs, but two patrolmen in there with me instead of just one.
Now I knew what else could go wrong in this crazy scattershot week. I could end up in jail facing a prison term for first-degree robbery. That was the last pellet in the week-long peppering, and the deadliest of alclass="underline" it had lodged in a vital spot, and it threatened to wipe out my future completely.
I sat on the bed, fidgeting, and tried again to piece things together. If ever I needed to have a deductive inspiration, it was now. The way it looked, nobody could get me out of this particular bind except me.
But none of it seemed to make any more sense now than it had earlier. The window could not have been broken from the inside-not unless someone had been hiding in the room all afternoon, and that was a literal impossibility; I had checked it over thoroughly, and the five of us had left together. No one should have been able to come through those sharp edges of glass without leaving some sort of trace of his passage. No one should have been able to accomplish the theft and then escape in a span of thirty to forty-five seconds. And yet someone had to have been in the room; I had heard him in there, knocking packages to the floor, stealing the ring.
Impossible, all of it.
Except that it had happened, somehow and some way. There had to be a logical explanation.
One of the other four, I thought-Mollenhauer, Hickox, Walker, or Patton. But which one? None of them seemed a likely candidate, considering who and what they were; any of them could be clever enough to have planned out a caper of this complexity. It had not just been designed to net him the ring under mysterious circumstances- that much I felt sure of, now. It had been designed so that all the evidence would point straight at me.
A neat, tight little frame.
Mollenhauer, Hickox, Walker, or Patton …
Something began to nibble at the back of my mind. I shut my eyes and concentrated, visualizing the gift room as I had seen it after breaking in. Everything exactly as it had been when I was in there with the four of them at one-forty, except for the broken window and all the stuff scattered on the floor. Or was it? There seemed to be-
And all at once it came popping through-the difference, the one fact that opened a crack in the frame. I sat motionless, working with it, backtracking. Once I had part of it figured out I remembered something else, too, and worked with that until it all began to pull together.
Bingo.
I might have become a Typhoid Mary and I might have developed a penchant for screwing up in various ways and I might yet lose my investigator’s license, but my God I was good at my job. I could figure things out with the best of them. All, that was, except how to keep my life and my career from falling apart in one week.
I stood up and looked at the two patrolmen. “I want to see Lieutenant Banducci.”
“What for?” one of them said.
“I know how the theft was done and I know who stole the ring. Tell him that. Get him in here.”
It took them a few second to make up their minds; they were thinking that maybe it was a trick. Then the one who had spoken drew his weapon, held it on me, and told the other guy to go ahead.
Banducci was there inside of three minutes. “So you know who and how, do you?” he said. The skepticism was plain in his voice.
I said, “Yes. I can’t prove it, but I think you can.”
“All right, let’s hear it.”
“Take me to the gift room first.”
He took me there, the two patrolmen trailing behind. The items that had been on the floor had been picked up and put back on the table; the open gift box and the ring case carried the residue of fingerprint powder. Otherwise, nothing was changed.
“This better be good,” Banducci said. “You’re on your way to jail if it isn’t.”
“It’s good.” I went to the table. “How many of these little packages were on the floor when you first examined the room?”
He frowned. “Four or five,” he said. “Including the one the ring was in.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as odd? The thief knew which one contained the ring. Then why were the others knocked off the table?”
“He-or you-was in a hurry. They were knocked off accidentally.”
I shook my head. “The table hasn’t been moved from its original position, which means it wasn’t bumped into. And even a man in a hurry wouldn’t be likely to sweep off four other packages by accident, not when he already knew where the ring was. No, those packages were knocked to the floor as part of a deliberate plan.”