“How’d they get in,” I said, “through the front door?”
“I don’t think they ever got in,” Demeter said, and puffed some cigar smoke at the ceiling and cocked an eye at me to see how I liked his last statement.
“Why not?”
“The doors,” Fastnaught said. “They’re electrically sealed at six o’clock.”
“Except one,” Demeter said.
“That’s right,” Fastnaught said. “Except one.”
“It’s an emergency door that leads from the basement up a ramp to the loading area in the rear. It’s electrically sealed only one way. What I mean is that the door can be opened from the inside without touching off the alarm system, but it can’t be opened from the outside without all hell breaking loose. You follow me?”
I said that I did.
“The guards use the door to change shifts and it’s also got something to do with fire-department regulations. I figure that since Sackett had twelve-minute check-in intervals he could use one of them to carry the shield down to the ramp that led to the emergency door. A couple of punch-in intervals later he could carry it up the ramp, open the door, hand it to the thieves, and then make it back upstairs in time to punch in again. He’d give his buddies a half hour or so to get clear and then report the shield as stolen.”
“Did he report it?” I said.
“He reported it.”
“And there was no full-time guard on that emergency door?”
“No.”
“Did you talk to him? Sackett, I mean.”
“Me and Fastnaught were off. I was home in bed when it happened; God knows whose bed Fastnaught was in.”
Fastnaught chewed his gum a little more rapidly, making it pop on every third or fourth chew. “She’d just turned eighteen,” he said. “In fact, it was her birthday. I gave her a real nice present.”
“You don’t have to lie to us,” Demeter said mildly.
“When were you assigned to the thing?” I said.
“Friday,” Demeter said. “When we came on our shift. We went looking for Sackett, but by then he’d disappeared. You know something, St. Ives?”
“What?”
“About all we’ve got on this is the Sackett woman.”
“Shit, she doesn’t know anything,” Fastnaught said.
“Well, I might go along with that, but maybe she does and maybe she doesn’t. But I didn’t say she was the only thing we’ve got. I said she was about the only thing.”
“What else is there?” Fastnaught said.
“Why, we’ve got ourselves a fancy New York-type go-between, Sergeant Fastnaught, that’s what we’ve got.”
Fastnaught took his feet from the desk and put them back on the floor. He leaned forward, his jaws moving rapidly on his stick of gum, and stared at me with his blue eyes. I noticed that they seemed a little bloodshot. “That’s right,” he said, “we have Mr. St. Ives.”
“Who’s going to be most cooperative,” Demeter said, and smiled at me in a happy, friendly way as if I’d just told him that the promotion had gone through after all and he would be Captain Demeter come next Wednesday morning.
I decided it was time to go. I got up and moved toward the door. “Thanks very much for the information, gentlemen. If you break the case before eight-thirty this evening, I’ll be at the Madison. After that, I’ll be in New York.”
“Did you hear that, Sergeant Fastnaught? Mr. St. Ives will be at the Madison until eight-thirty.”
“I figured the Madison,” Fastnaught said. “The Hilton’s getting too commercial.”
“If you hear of anything from the people — probably just some irresponsible kids who thought it’d be a good joke — anyway if you hear anything from the people who stole the shield of Komporeen, you’ll let us know, won’t you?” Demeter said, waving his cigar again. “Through no fault of your own, you’re sort of mixed up in a murder now, Mr. St. Ives, and we’d more or less like you to stay in touch, if it’s not too much trouble.”
“No trouble at all,” I said. “I always like to support my local police.”
“Well, that’s good to hear because I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of each other,” Demeter said. “Just one more thing.”
“What?” I said.
“You be careful,” he said, and then grinned at me around his cigar as if he had just told a very funny and extremely dirty joke.
“And cautious, too,” Fastnaught called as I closed the door behind me and went down the green and black marble hall, into the bronze-doored elevator, and out into the yellow sunlight. I walked around until I spotted the window with the lowered Venetian blind, and when I found it I was pleased to note that the only view it had was that of a parking lot.
Chapter five
I was surprised that it was a woman’s voice. She called a little before six, just after I had finished a second bottle of beer and an editorial in The Washington Star that took an extremely dim view of a Russian reply to a State Department note protesting the treatment of a couple of American tourists in Moscow. Not only didn’t The Star much care for the tone of the Russian note, but it also seemed to feel that the two tourists would have done far better to have spent their vacations at Grand Canyon or Rehoboth Beach.
“Would you please listen carefully to what I say, Mr. St. Ives?” the woman said, and it sounded as if she were reading the words and wasn’t at all used to it.
“I’m listening,” I said.
“You will fly back to New York tomorrow morning and stay in your room at the Adelphi Hotel until six o’clock in the evening. If you have not received a phone call by then, you can leave. If you are not called on Tuesday, then on Wednesday, at 11 o’clock in the morning, you will go to the first phone booth on the left in the lobby of the Eubanks Hotel on East 33rd. At exactly 11 o’clock you will be called. Do you want me to repeat it?”
“No,” I said. “I understand.”
There were no good-bys and when she hung up I went back to my chair and newspaper and beer, but I could no longer get interested in the danger of air pollution and the beer seemed flat. I tried to remember how many calls there had been during the last four years from nervous men in phone booths who had something that they wanted me to buy back for the persons from whom they had stolen it. Sometimes they whispered, sometimes they talked through their handkerchiefs, and a few had even attempted foreign accents. Each of them had his own complicated set of instructions, sometimes so complicated that they probably bordered on paranoia. Each of the schemes had begun as somebody’s daydream and each was wrapped in a curious childlike quality of “let’s pretend.” But if they seemed the product of a child’s fantasy, they invariably were enveloped in the unemotional and unpredictable cruelty that children often have.
My trade had one compensation, however, and I took it out of my wallet and admired it briefly. Then, tired of playing at Silas Marner, I put the check back, walked over to the phone, and dialed a number. When it stopped ringing I asked for Lieutenant Demeter. He came on briskly, barking “Robbery Squad, Lieutenant Demeter,” loudly enough for the phone to crackle.
“This is St. Ives. They just called. It was a woman.”
“Go on,” he said.
“They want me to go back to New York and wait for them to call. If they don’t call me at my place tomorrow, they’ll call me at a booth in a hotel on Wednesday.”
“How did she sound?”
“Like she was reading it.”
“She say anything about money?”
“No.”
Demeter sighed. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll get you some company tomorrow.”
“Who?”