“Oh, you’re not. You son of a bitch, you’ll tell me what you will take and what you won’t take.”
“Any man here will,” the cop said, “if you push him hard enough. Dunstan and me, we’ve got to spend some time on patrol, because if we stay in here all day, sooner or later the captain’s gonna miss us and start people looking for us, and maybe they’ll even look here, and I don’t think you’d like that. So that’s why we have to leave for a while. We’ll be back within an hour.”
Lozini didn’t answer anything for a minute. When the cop had turned reasonable it had pulled some of the sting of Lozini’s bad temper, too. He was trying to stay hot and angry, but it wasn’t working too well. Finally, down there, he shrugged and said, “I don’t give a damn. Do what you want. But before you go, I got a cop-type problem here for you.”
The cop looked around, obviously puzzled. “Sure,” he said. “What is it?”
“We got us what they call in the mystery books a locked room,” Lozini said. “What my wife reads every night in bed, mysteries about locked rooms. A nice detective problem.” He made a broad gesture, including the whole theater in its sweep.
“Here’s a theater building,” he said. “We got all the exits watched, every exit has been watched since before the last time we knew for sure the guy was in the building. We’ve searched the place from top to bottom, we’ve looked in every room, I even sent a guy up on the roof. We can’t find him. He isn’t here. So how did he get out? And if he didn’t get out, if he’s still in here, where is he?”
The cop looked at his partner, and back at Lozini. “How do I know? I don’t know anything about locked-room mysteries. Maybe there’s someplace you didn’t look.”
“We looked everywhere.”
“Then he got out in the confusion.”
“My boys say they weren’t confused, they say they never stopped watchin the doors.”
“Then he wasn’t in here at all, maybe.”
“He was in here because he dropped all these pipes and things on our heads. And besides that, we know he was in here because George out there in that Island in the Sky thing saw him come in.”
The other cop took a hesitant half-step forward and said, “Maybe he’s one of us.”
They all looked at him. Lozini said, “Hah?”
“That’s one of the ways they solve it in the mystery stories,” the cop said. His voice sounded nervous, as though he was sorry now he’d started talking. “The way it works,” he went on, “the guy everybody’s looking for doesn’t really exist, he’s actually one of the searchers. Like the guy would be somebody that works for you, and he got in on this robbery, and he spent last night in the park here, and today he made a lot of confusion in the theater here and then just joined everybody else and went around helping to look for himself.”
There was silence. Everybody looked at the cop — Dunstan, the other cop had called him — and Parker saw the cop squirm under all the attention. He acted as though he was going to say something more, but he never did.
Finally Lozini spoke. “That’s either a stroke of genius,” he said quietly, “or the goddamnedest piece of shit I ever heard in my life.” He took a step closer to the apron of the stage. “I know every man I called this morning,” he said, “and I don’t see anybody here I didn’t call. You guys that were on the doors before. Did anybody at all go out? One of us, or anybody.”
There was a ragged response, all no.
“And the guys I sent to take your places,” Lozini said, “I sent, and I know who they are. You guys go ask them did anybody at all go out since they took over.”
There was a rustle and shuffle of motion, dying out, and then Lozini looked over at the young cop and said, “That’s the kind of thing my wife would like, she’d go for that. I think you’re wrong, but I think you got brains, that’s a very interesting solution. You got a lotta brains for a cop.”
The cop sort of bobbed his head and shuffled, but didn’t say anything.
They waited a couple of minutes until all the messengers had come back, all with the same answer. Nobody had gone out.
Lozini nodded. “Right,” he said. “That’s what I figured.” He looked at the young cop again. “Any more ideas?”
“No, sir. No.” The answer was more croaked than spoken.
“Don’t be afraid, kid,” Lozini said. “That was a very smart idea, very nice. It could of been right. You sure you don’t have any more?”
The cop shook his head.
“Too bad,” Lozini said. He looked at the other one. “What about you? Any ideas?”
“Just leave men on guard at all the doors here,” the older cop said, “and start looking around the rest of the park again. That way, if he’s still in he can’t get out, but if he’s out maybe you’ll find him again.”
“That kind of thing I can figure out for myself,” Lozini told him. “It’s this other stuff I wanted you guys for, like what your partner come up with.” He turned away from the cop, back to the front of the stage again. “All right,” he said. “We’ll go back to what we were doin before. We’re gonna turn on every light in the park, and then we’re gonna start at one end and sweep right down to the other end, and somewhere in this pile of shit we’re gonna find that son of a bitch, and before we put him out of his misery we’ll ask him how he worked this stunt, gettin out of here.” He turned back to the cops. “You two get back as soon as you can.”
The older cop said, “We will. Within the hour.”
Two
PARKER MOVED. The stiffness had set in again, his joints creaked at every motion of his arms or his legs.
The inside of the theater was empty now, had been empty for about five minutes. But it was still brightly lighted down there, and he knew the exits were all being watched from the outside.
He made himself move. The first thing to do was get himself down out of here, and in order to get anywhere at all he was going to have to crawl along the pipes on hands and knees, a little bit at a time, making the creaky muscles work, with the ceiling inches above his back.
He was heading for where he’d seen the sunlight angle through when the trap door had been opened, and after a little searching around he found it. He pushed up, and it wasn’t locked, and he lifted the trap door a little and raised his head until he could see out onto the roof, see the snow there, the new footprints in it, the blue sky beyond. The air smelled cold and clean.
At first everything looked safe, but then Parker looked to the left, and hanging in the air was the lookout in the Island in the Sky pot, the one who’d first hollered to everybody that Parker was going into the theater. He was maybe five feet higher than the theater roof and about ten feet away from the edge. He could look right over here and see everything, it would be as easy as looking into a living room from a dining room.
He was being conscientious about his job, too, moving around in an endless circle inside the waist-high pot, a metal basket-like thing similar to the baskets people ride in when they travel by balloon. His concentration was on the ground, looking all around at the paths and building entrances down there, but he’d be able to see somebody walking around on the theater roof. He’d hardly be able to miss it.
Parker kept the trap door just barely open, just enough to be able to watch the lookout. There was a knee-high wall around the edge of the roof, and it was maybe seven or eight feet from the trap door. Parker waited, moving his shoulders and his legs, trying to get more limber while he watched the lookout’s movements, and when he felt he was ready, and the lookout was facing the other way on his circuit, Parker came quickly up out of the opening and ran awkwardly the three steps to the edge of the roof and dropped flat again behind the wall. Now he was out of the lookout’s sight, and he could study the roof and find the other entrance to it that the first guy had used.