I looked back, and at first I couldn’t see the Packard, but then I caught an evil glint of chrome in the darkness back there. That car was the mechanical Sydney Greenstreet.
The driveway entrance to Mr. Gross’s house was at the far end of the frontage. I crunched along, seeing his house lights vaguely through the hedge on my left, and after the road’s darkness his driveway, when I stood in front of it, seemed as bright as Times Square. It was wide, and four or five cars were parked along it, all new and expensive.
Would he have dogs? It seemed to me a place like this required dogs, huge loping animals who’d galumph over and bit your leg off without the least malice in the world. I stood a minute peering into the property in search of them, but all I could see were driveway and lights.
What I was worrying all the time about dogs for anyway I’ll never know, since it was mostly human beings who’d been trying to do me in the last twenty hours.
Finally, reluctantly, I stepped onto Mr. Gross’s property. I skirted the driveway and all its lights, and came around at the house from the other side. Light spilled from the windows to guide my way across turf as soft as a Persian rug. These windows were too high for me to look in them and see anything but ceilings, which was just as well; it made it less likely anyone on the inside would glance out and see me.
I moved around to the rear of the house, where I tiptoed across a slate patio alive with metal furniture. There were no rooms alight at the rear of the house, so I moved in utter darkness here, and my progression across the patio, ricocheting from metal chair to metal table to metal chair like a complex billiard shot, was a series of tiny magnificently distinct noises. When I came at last to a door, a possible entry, I simply leaned against it for a minute to listen to the blessed silence.
But the job was to get in. After I’d caught my breath and my wits, I tried the knob and the door proved to be unlocked. I could hardly believe my luck.
Well, it wasn’t luck. I pushed open the door, stepped through in unbroken silence, shut the door as silently behind me, and forty lights went on.
I was in a smallish dining room, with secretarys and highboys against the walls and a sturdy English-looking table in the center. Leaded windows overlooked the patio and, I suppose, a garden. Quiet elegance bespoke itself softly in this room, just as in my Uncle Al’s apartment, and similarly, too, the human element provided the only discordant note.
In this case it was the Three Stooges, one of whom had turned on the lights, principally a crystal chandelier suspended above the table. I say the Three Stooges, but of course I mean only an imitation of the Three Stooges. But for all that, a pretty good imitation.
Moe, in a black chauffeur’s suit, held an automatic, pointed more or less at me. Larry, in a butler’s tux, had armed himself with a basketball bat. And Curly, in white apron and tall white chef’s cap and blackface, hefted a meat cleaver. All three glared at me with the belligerence of fear.
This was the last thing I’d expected to find in the house of Mr. Gross — amateurs like myself. They were, in their own way, more frightening than professionals. Like dogs, there was no reason to suppose they could be talked to.
I raised my hands over my head. “Don’t shoot,” I said. “Don’t hit. Don’t cut.”
They advanced.
Chapter 14
From the window I could see the driveway and lawn and hedge, and down to the right, beyond the hedge, I could make out the streetlight at the intersection. Just beyond there, I knew, Chloe sat waiting in the Packard. I stared off that way, but of course I couldn’t see the car.
The Three Stooges had grabbed me up like blockers on the kickoff forming around the man with the football. They’d run me up a narrow flight of stairs — back stairs, service stairs, whatever they call them — up here to the second floor, and locked me away in this bedroom facing the front of the house. Larry, the butler with the bat, had frisked me and relieved me of Tim’s little pistol — which he handled with complete terror — and then they’d backed out of the room, bumping into one another and watching me with round eyes. I heard them talking through the door, deciding Larry and Curly, the cook, should stand guard at the door while Moe, the chauffeur, went downstairs to tell Mr. Gross what they’d caught.
Well. I was in the Gross house, under the Gross roof. There was even a chance I was going to get to see Mr. Gross himself in a minute or two. And wasn’t that what I wanted?
Of course it was.
Then why did I keep looking around for some place to hide, some way to escape? I didn’t want to escape, did I?
As a matter of fact, I did. Hopelessly, miserably, but certainly.
The room I was in seemed to be a spare bedroom, reserved for guests. The bed was a high wide ornate old thing with a canopy, dominating the room. Flowers and vines and so on were carved into the wooden head-board, and the same motif was followed through on the dresser, the vanity table, the writing desk, and the night tables. Paintings of fox hunts graced the walls. Heavy drapes framed the windows.
Yes, a guest room. The dresser drawers I opened were all empty. I don’t know why I expected to find a Gideon Bible in one of them, but its absence surprised me.
A key turning in the lock made me start and slide shut a dresser drawer with embarrassed haste. As though that counted! Poking into empty dresser drawers was hardly something to agitate Mr. Gross; aside from having already broken into his house, there was whatever else he thought I’d done that had made him put me on the spot in the first place.
I turned and the Three Stooges popped through the opening doorway all at once and spread out, and after them came Mr. Gross.
Up till then I’d assumed that “Gross” was the man’s name, but it was his description. He looked like something that had finally come up out of its cave because it had eaten the last of the phosphorescent little fish in the cold pool at the bottom of the cavern. He looked like something that better keep moving because if it stood still someone would drag it out back and bury it. He looked like a big white sponge with various diseases at work on the inside. He looked like something that couldn’t get you if you held a crucifix up in front of you. He looked like the big fat soft white something you might find under a tomato plant leaf on a rainy day with a chill in the air.
He was beautifully dressed, but in his case it was a mistake. Had he worn overalls, a dirty flannel shirt, it would have been better. But the tailored black suit, the crisp white shirt, the narrow dark tie, the gleaming black shoes, the golden cuff links and the broad plain wedding band and the large flat wristwatch with its gold expansion bracelet, all they did was emphasize the grossness and pallor and sickliness of the white parts that bulged out at collar and cuff.
Stuck on that face like raisins on a cake were two expressionless eyes. They looked at me, the fat lips twitched, and out of them came a cracked soprano, a voice so high and foolish I inadvertently looked at the Three Stooges to see which was the ventriloquist. But it was Mr. Gross speaking, in his own voice:
“What did you want in here? Are you a burglar?”
“No, sir, Mr. Gross,” I said. I tried to keep looking him straight in the eye, to show him I was honest, but it was just impossible. He was so vile-looking it was embarrassing, I had to keep looking away.
Falsetto, cracking, there-are-sharks-in-these-waters voice: “One thing I cannot stand is incompetence. Incompetence. How could you expect to break in with the house full of people?”