Dr. Bixby good-naturedly drew her hand down, held it pressed to her lap. “I broke you of that habit when you were seven; you’re not going to make me do it all over again, are you?” He looked ahead through his none-too-spotless windshield. “Here she comes now. See those two lights way off down there? Yep, that must be her, all right.”
Something soft brushing against his legs down by the floor roused him. He brought the point of his chin up off the second button of his shirt, looked down blurredly.
Cookie was scampering around down there on all fours like a little animal, head almost lower than his feet. “Still trying to find someplace to hide?” Moran asked fondly.
His young son looked up, sharply corrected his failure to keep abreast of current events. “We not playing now any more. Miss Baker loss her ring, I’m he’ping her to fine it.”
Her voice sounded somewhere outside at that moment. “See it yet, dear?”
Moran roused himself, got up and went out. He remembered seeing it on her when she first came in.
The stair closet door was wide open, as though she’d already been in there. She was exploring the baseboard across the way, on the opposite side of the hall, slightly bent forward, hands cupped to knees.
“I don’t know how it happened to slip off without my feeling it,” she said. “Oh, it’s probably around somewhere. The only reason I’d feel bad about losing it is my mother gave it to me on my graduation—”
“How about in here?” he said. “Have you looked in here? You stepped in here once, remember, and thumped the sides—”
She glanced casually over her shoulder while she continued her search. “I looked in there already, but I didn’t have any matches, so it was hard to make sure—”
“Wait a minute, I’ve got some right here. I’ll look again for you—” He stepped across the sill, struck a tarnished gold glow, crouched down with his back to the entrance.
The sound the door made was like a pistol shot echoing up and down the enclosed hallway.
III
Post-Mortem on Moran
Superior to Wanger:
“Well, what’dja find out over there? You seem to be becoming our expert in murders-that-don’t-look-like-murders-but-are.”
“Sure it was! Certainly it was! How can there be any doubt about it?”
“All right, don’t blow all these papers off my desk. Well Kling tells me the men he put on it don’t seem to feel as sure about that as you do yourself. That’s why I got his O.K. on your homing in. He was very nice about it—”
“What?” Wanger became almost inarticulate. “What’re they trying to do, build it up that he locked himself in acci—”
His superior sliced his hand at him calmingly. “Now, wait a minute, don’t get so touchy. Here’s what he means by that, and I can see his point, too. It’s true that Mrs. Moran got, or claims she got, an anonymous telegram with her sister’s name signed to it. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been any trace of it found around the house; it’s disappeared, so there’s no way of tracing where it was filed from. It may have been filed right here in the city, and in her perturbation she didn’t notice the dateline. It’s true that the kid keeps prattling about a ‘lady’ playing games with him. The only two facts that point definitely to an adult agency’s being involved are the cut telephone wire and the note on the kid’s quilt—”
Wanger forced up his underlip scornfully. “And what about the putty?”
“Meaning the kid couldn’t have reached the top of the door with it, that it? No, Kling tells me they tried him out on that. Didn’t interfere, just handed him the putty set, said, ‘Let’s see you cover up the door like the other night,’ stood back and watched. When he’d gotten as high up as he could go, he dragged over the three-legged telephone stool, climbed up on that, and his hands spanned the top crack beautifully. Now if he did that, of his own accord and without being coached, the second time, why, they wanna know, couldn’t he have done it the first?”
“Hoch!” Wanger cleared his throat disgustedly.
“They put him to another test. They said to him, ‘Sonny, if your daddy went in there, what would you do — let him out or make him stay in?’ He said, ‘Make him stay in there and play a game with me.’ ”
“Are those guys crazy — where’re their heads? I suppose the kid cut the phone wire, too. I suppose he wrote out that note in printed capitals—”
“Let me finish, will you? They’re not trying to say that the kid did all those things himself. But they are inclined to think along the lines of it being an accident, with a clumsy frightened attempt on someone’s part, afterward, to escape being involved.
“Now here’s the theory of Kling’s men — and remember, it hasn’t jelled, they’re just playing around with it until something better shows up: Moran had some lady friend on the side. A fake telegram was sent to the wife to clear the coast. Before the woman got there, Moran, alone in the house with his kid, started playing games with him. He accidentally locked himself in the closet and the damn-fool kid puttied up the door. The woman shows up and Moran is smothered to death in there. She loses her head, deathly afraid of being dragged into it because of her reputation. She puts the kid to bed and leaves an unsigned note pinned to the quilt for the wife. Maybe the phone starts ringing while she’s there, and, afraid to answer it, she loses her head even further and cuts the wire. They think she even went so completely haywire that after having already opened the closet door once and seen that Moran was dead, she made a panicky attempt to leave things looking just like she found them by closing the door on him a second time and leaving him in there, even replugging the putty so it would look like the kid’s work and nobody else’s. In other words, an accident followed by a clumsy attempt at concealment on the part of somebody with a guilty conscience.”
“Pew!” said Wanger succinctly, pinching the end of his nose. “Well, here’s the theory of your man Wanger: bull fertilizer. Do I stay on or do I come off?”
“Stay on, stay on,” consented his overlord distraitly. “I’ll get in touch with Kling about it. After all, you can only be wrong once.”
They seemed to be playing craps there in the room, the way they were all down on their haunches hovering over something in the middle of the floor. You couldn’t see what it was; their broad backs blotted it out completely. It was awfully small, whatever it was. Occasionally one of their hands went up and scratched at the back of its owner’s rubber-tired neck in perplexity. The illusion was perfect. All that was missing was the click of bone, the lingo of the dice game.
A matron stood watchfully looking on, over by the doorway, without taking part in the proceedings herself. Something about her clashed with one’s sense of fitness. Almost anyone’s sense of esthetic fitness. She kidded the beholder, from the top of her head all the way down to her ankles, that she was going to end bifurcated, in a pair of trousers. Then at the ankles she ended in a skirt anyway; and the sense of harmony was revolted.
Wanger, over in the opposite doorway, where he’d just come in unnoticed, stood taking in what was going on as long as he could stand it. Finally he strode forward, the apelike conclave disintegrated, to reveal a pygmy in the middle of the giants. Cookie looked even smaller than he was against their anthropoidal bulk.
“Not that way, not that way,” Wanger protested. “Whaddaya trying to do, anyway — sweat a kid that age?”
“Who’s sweating him?” Wanger knew they hadn’t been. One of them put away a gleaming pocket watch he’d evidently been dangling enticingly at the end of its chain with complete lack of result.