Walter shuddered, opened his eyes, lowered the handkerchief, and looked over to where the group of police and laboratory personnel were working around the body. Tom Olivet’s body. Tom Olivet, lying there dead.
We were like brothers, Walter thought. We were just like brothers.
“I can’t tell you anything about the mugger,” he said to the policeman. “I didn’t get a good look at him. I can’t tell you anything at all.”
Caught in the Act
When I drove around the bend in my driveway at four that Friday afternoon, past the screen of cypress trees, a fat little man in a gray suit was just closing the front door of my house. Surprise made me blink: he was a complete stranger.
He saw the car in that same moment, stiffened, and glanced around in a furtive way, as if looking for an avenue of escape. But there wasn’t anywhere for him to go; the house is a split-level, built on the edge of a bluff and flanked by limestone outcroppings and thick vegetation. So he just stood there as I braked to a stop in front of the porch, squared his shoulders, and put on a smile that looked artificial even from a distance of thirty feet.
I got out and ran around to where he was. His smile faded, no doubt because my surprise had given way to anger and because I’m a pretty big man, three inches over six feet, weight 230; I played football for four years in college and I move like the linebacker I was. As for him, he wasn’t such-a-much — just a fat little man, soft-looking, with round pink cheeks and shrewd eyes that had nervous apprehension in them now.
“Who are you?” I demanded. “What the hell were you doing in my house?”
“Your house? Ah, then you’re James Loomis.”
“How did you know that?”
“Your name is on your mailbox, Mr. Loomis.”
“What were you doing in my house?”
He looked bewildered. “But I wasn’t in your house”
“Don’t give me that. I saw you closing the door.”
“No, sir, you’re mistaken. I was just coming away from the door. I rang the bell and there was no answer—”
“Listen, you,” I said, “don’t tell me what I saw or didn’t see. My eyesight’s just fine. Now I want an explanation.”
“There’s really nothing to explain,” he said. “I represent the Easy-Way Vacuum Cleaner Company and I stopped by to ask if you—”
“Let’s see some identification.”
He rummaged around in a pocket of his suit coat, came out with a small white business card, and handed it to me. It said he was Morris Tweed, a salesman for the Easy-Way Vacuum Cleaner Company.
“I want to see your driver’s license,” I said.
“My, ah, driver’s license?”
“You heard me. Get it out.”
He grew even more nervous. “This is very embarrassing, Mr. Loomis,” he said. “You see I, ah, lost my wallet this morning. A very unfortunate—”
I caught onto the front of his coat and bunched the material in my fingers; he made a funny little squeaking sound. I marched him over to the door, reached out with my free hand, and tried the knob. Locked. But that didn’t mean anything one way or another; the door has a button you can turn on the inside so you don’t have to use a key on your way out.
I looked over at the burglar-alarm panel, and of course the red light was off. Tweed, or whatever his name was, wouldn’t have been able to walk out quietly through the front door if the system was operational. And except for my housekeeper, whom I’ve known for years and who is as trustworthy as they come, I was the only one who had an alarm key.
The fat little man struggled weakly to loosen my grip on his coat. “See here, Mr. Loomis,” he said in a half-frightened, half-indignant voice, “you have no right to be rough with me. I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“We’ll see about that.”
I walked him back to the car, got my keys out of the ignition, returned him to the door, and keyed the alarm to the On position. The red light came on, which meant that the system was still functional. I frowned. If it was functional, how had the fat little man got in? Well, there were probably ways for a clever burglar to bypass an alarm system without damaging it; maybe that was the answer.
I shut it off again, unlocked the door, and took him inside. The house had a faint musty smell, the way houses do after they’ve been shut up for a time; I had been gone eight days, on a planned ten-day business trip to New York, and my housekeeper only comes in once a week. I took him into the living room, sat him down in a chair, and then went over and opened the French doors that led out to the balcony.
On the way back I glanced around the room. Everything was where it should be: the console TV set, the stereo equipment, my small collection of Oriental objets d’art on their divider shelves. But my main concern was what was in my study — particularly the confidential records and ledgers locked inside the wall safe.
“All right, you,” I said, “take off your coat.”
He blinked at me. “My coat? Really, Mr. Loomis, I don’t—”
“Take off your coat.”
He looked at my face, at the fist I held up in front of his nose, and took off his coat. I went through all the pockets. Sixty-five dollars in a silver money clip, a handkerchief, and a handful of business cards. But that was all; there wasn’t anything of mine there, except possibly the money. I shuffled through the business cards. All of them bore the names of different companies and different people, and none of them was a duplicate of the one he had handed me outside.
“Morris Tweed, huh?” I said.
“Those cards were given to me by customers,” he said. “My cards are in my wallet, all except the one I gave you. And I’ve already told you that I lost my wallet this morning.”
“Sure you did. Empty out your pants pockets.”
He sighed, stood up, and transferred three quarters, a dime, a penny, and a keycase to the coffee table. Then he pulled all the pockets inside out. Nothing.
“Turn around,” I told him.
When he did that I patted him down the way you see cops do in the movies. Nothing.
“This is all a misunderstanding, Mr. Loomis,” he said. “I’m not a thief; I’m a vacuum-cleaner salesman. You’ve searched me quite thoroughly, you know I don’t have anything that belongs to you.”
Maybe not — but I had a feeling that said otherwise. There were just too many things about him that didn’t add up, and there was the plain fact that I had seen him coming out of the house. Call it intuition or whatever: I sensed this fat little man had stolen something from me. Not just come here to steal, because he had obviously been leaving when I arrived. He had something of mine, all right.
But what? And where was it?
I gave him back his coat and watched him put it on. There was a look of impending relief on his face as he scooped up his keys and change; he thought I was going to let him go. Instead I caught hold of his arm. Alarm replaced the relief and he made another of those squeaking noises as I hustled him across the room and down the hall to the smallest of the guest bathrooms, the one with a ventilator in place of a window.
When I pushed him inside he stumbled, caught his balance, and pivoted around to me. “Mr. Loomis, this is outrageous. What do you intend to do with me?”
“That depends. Turn you over to the police, maybe.”