A stenographer taking dictation at the next desk glanced up, and he dropped to a whisper. The Bureau would disapprove of the use of such a word before the stenos.
He asked, “Are you in a bar somewhere, Miss Randall?”
He heard her shout to someone. “Mike, for heaven’s sake, turn that radio off.” She returned to him. “No, I’m not in a bar. I’m at home and his name is Darn Cat and I can’t help it and you insisted on knowing and “
“Is someone with you, Miss Randall?”
“Yes, my brother, Mike. He’s twelve and my sister, In-grid, she’s sixteen. Our parents are in Europe . My father, George Randall, works for Lockheed
.”
He scribbled the names as fast as she spoke them, listing them on a yellow, legal-size scratch pad. “Miss Randall, would you please open the watch and see if there’s anything scratched inside the back cover?”
As he waited, he drummed his fingers quietly on the desk. He needed another cup of coffee badly. He thought he was becoming an addict. He had been up since five, and at the office since six, drafting a lengthy report on a case involving unlawful flight to avoid prosecution for murder. Recently, the work load had been heavy. Seventy-two hours last week.
What was taking her so long?
She came back on the line. “I can’t get the back off.”
“Try a paring knife.”
“I’m afraid I’ll ruin the watch.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
After another minute, she said, “Looks like a Y followed by some numbers. They’re so small I can’t make them out.”
He came alive. There was no question this was the victim’s watch. They had learned at the outset of the investigation from Helen Jenkins’ father that she had had her watch repaired in June 1960, at the House of Neuwirth, 6081 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood , and at that time the repairman had scratched in the identifying Y mark.
As of last night, then, Miss Jenkins had been alive. For seven days they had searched with growing desperation for trace of her and her two captors. Zeke himself had concluded she was dead. The pattern in most of these cases was the same: the hold-up men either freed or killed the hostage within a few hours. Seldom did they want to be burdened with one in flight.
He asked quickly, “Where had he been? I mean, where does your cat usually go or do you know?”
She laughed softly. “I can see you don’t know much about cats, Mr. Kelso. He goes everyplace. He likes people. Thinks he’s one of us. And he likes to visit. He waits until dark when the mockingbirds can’t see him, because they give him a bad time, and then goes scratching around on doors. If the people are nice to him, he goes back. I think he’s got a regular route worked out.”
Zeke toyed with a pencil. From the way she talked, not only does the cat think he is “one of us,” but she thinks so, too. The long-hoped-for break binged not only on a dame who sounded zany but a cat equally zany. He detested cats; they were barbarians the entire breed devouring birds, fighting to the death with all vocal stops pulled out, howling like a bunch of banshees as they made love, purring one minute around you, clawing and spitting the next, and then delivering that final insult, the turn of the rear on you with the tail held high.
He caught his thoughts in mid-air. He must be careful not to betray how he felt. The Bureau would tolerate no prejudice. The Bureau believed firmly in the brotherhood of man. The Bureau wanted the objective approach.
He continued with his questions. “Do you know when your cat came in, Miss Randall?”
“Twelve-thirty exactly. I’d had a phone call.”
“Might I ask who called you?”
“Well, I didn’t get to the phone in time. It was under the bed I mean, it’d quit ringing, but the party came over to the house shortly afterwards. One of the neighbors from across the street.”
“What’s her name?”
“It wasn’t a her.” She paused and, in doing so, knew she had aroused suspicion. “It was a young attorney. Greg Balter. B-a-1-t-e-r.”
“Why did he come over?”
She hesitated again, then came out with. it. “D.C. had broken into his house and stolen a duck.”
“He’d stolen what?”
“A duck. A mallard duck.”
“Oh.” He thought about that for a moment “You say he’d broken in are we still talking about your cat, Miss Randall?”
“Yes, Mr. Kelso, he’s very clever. He’ll take a paw and if the door is barely ajar he’ll open it. Sometimes on a screen door he can jiggle the latch loose.”
“What attitude did Mr. Balter take about this? Was he that is, upset?”
“That puts it mildly. Mr. Balter can get awfully mad awfully fast.”
“I’ll need a description of the cat. We always get one on “
He had started to say “informants.” A description of a cat? That struck him as asinine. But he did have a card to file in an index, a report to write eventually, and the Bureau insisted on details.
He wrote on a separate sheet: Informant. Name: Darn Cat Randall. He frowned, crossed out the Randall, then reinstated it. Address: 1820 Greenbriar, Sherman Oaks, California . Description:
“How old is he?”
“Let me see. We got him when Mike was seven. That makes him five.”
“Weight?’
“Twenty-five pounds.”
Zeke put down his pencil. “Miss Randall, I have been laboring under the impression this is a house cat.’
“He is. Plain all-American cat.”
“And he weighs twenty-five pounds?”
“He does have a weight problem. We have to watch his diet.”
Zeke swallowed and turned back to the form. “Height?”
“Really, Mr. Kelso
.”
“Sorry you’ll have to forgive me. We don’t get many cats I should say we don’t get any.” He read from a list. “Education, hobbies, relatives I guess they don’t apply.”
He reached a conclusion. “Could I see you soon as possible? I’d like to get the watch.” He added cautiously and without conviction, “You could be most helpful to us you and D.C.”
They agreed to meet at Bullock’s in Westwood, at 10 a.m., outside the store, on the second-level parking lot. She said, “If we meet inside, one of the girls will ask who you are, and I don’t want to try to make up a story, because I always get caught.”
As he headed for the supervisor’s office, he hummed softly. Passing the steno pool, he was conscious of a dozen eyes following him. He was fair game, one of the few single men in the office.
The supervisor on the criminal desk, Robert Z. Newton, looked even more harried than usual. His desk was stacked with reports from the agents, which he would read, initial, and forward to Washington if the leads and facts had been properly developed and set forth, or return to the respective agents with cryptic notes if they had been careless.
On spotting Zeke, Newton brightened. “I see you beat me in this morning. You after my job?” He got up to stretch. He was getting a little heavy about the girth, but determinedly kept his belt at the same notch.
Zeke said, “We’ve got a break finally in the Jenkins case.”
Newton stopped quite still. For seven days agents had worked the case without developing a good lead. They still knew little more than the bare facts: that at 10:05 a.m. two men, somewhere between twenty and thirty years of age, wearing Halloween masks, had escaped with $202,400 in cash from the Van Nuys Federal bank, forcing Helen Jenkins, forty-one, to accompany them at gun point. As happened frequently, the eye witness accounts varied widely regarding the height of the men, their build, their clothes, and the weapons they carried. Only on the escape car was there general agreement, and, as usual, it had been stolen and was found deserted three hours later in a Studio City parking lot. The victim’s father, Thomas Z. Jenkins, sixty-six, who was bedridden, provided the lead about the watch.
Zeke said, “But it’s the darndest note 3 setup you ever heard. I don’t know