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 hail 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.”
“The police? But you can’t—”
I took the key out of the inside lock, shut the door on him, and locked it from the outside.
Immediately I went downstairs to my study. The Matisse print was in place and the safe door behind it was closed and locked; I worked the combination, swung the door open. And let out the breath I had been holding: the records and ledgers were there, exactly as I had left them. If those items had fallen into the wrong hands, I would be seriously embarrassed at the least and open to blackmail or possible criminal charges at the worst. Not that I was engaged in anything precisely illegal; it was just that some of the people for whom I set up accounting procedures were involved in certain extra-legal activities.
I looked through the other things in the safe — $2,000 in cash, some jewelry and private papers — and they were all there, untouched. Nothing, it developed, was missing from my desk either. Or from anywhere else in the study.
Frowning, I searched the rest of the house. In the kitchen I found what might have been jimmy marks on the side door. I also found — surprisingly — electrician’s tape on the burglar-alarm wires outside, tape which had not been there before I left on my trip and that might have been used to repair a cross-circuiting of the system.
What I did not find was anything missing. Absolutely nothing. Every item of value, every item of no value, was in its proper place.
I began to have doubts. Maybe I was wrong after all; maybe this was just a large misunderstanding. And yet, damn it, the fat little man had been in here and had lied about it, he had no identification, he was nervous and furtive, and the burglar alarm and the side door seemed to have been tampered with.
A series of improbable explanations occurred to me. He hadn’t actually stolen anything because he hadn’t had time; he had broken in here, cased the place, and had been on his way out with the intention of returning later in a car or van. But burglars don’t operate that way; they don’t make two trips to a house when they can just as easily make one, and they don’t walk out the front door in broad daylight without taking something with them. Nor for that matter, do they take the time to repair alarm systems they’ve cross-circuited.
He wasn’t a thief but a tramp whose sole reason for breaking in here was to spend a few days at my expense. Only tramps don’t wear neat gray suits and they don’t have expertise with burglar alarms. And they don’t leave your larder full or clean up after themselves.
He wasn’t a thief but a private detective, or an edge-of-the-law hireling, or maybe even an assassin; he hadn’t come here to steal anything, he had come here to leave something — evidence of my extra-legal activities, a bomb or some other sort of death trap. But if there was nothing missing, there was also nothing here that shouldn’t be here; I would have found it one way or another if there was, as carefully as I had searched. Besides which, there was already incriminating evidence in my safe, I was very good at my job and got along well with my clients, and I had no personal enemies who could possibly want me dead.
Nothing made sense. The one explanation I kept clinging to didn’t make sense. Why would a burglar repair an alarm system before he leaves? How could a thief have stolen something if there wasn’t anything missing?
Frustrated and angry, I went back to the guest bathroom and unlocked the door. The fat little man was standing by the sink, drying perspiration from his face with one of my towels. He looked less nervous and apprehensive now; there was a kind of resolve in his expression.
“All right,” I said, “come out of there.”
He came out, watching me warily with his shrewd eyes. “Are you finally satisfied that I’m not a thief, Mr. Loomis?”
No, I was not satisfied. I considered ordering him to take off his clothes, but that seemed pointless; I had already searched him and there just wasn’t anything to look for.
“What were you doing in here?” I said.
“I was not in here before you arrived.” The indignation was back in his voice. “Now I suggest you let me go on my way. You have no right or reason to hold me here against my will.”
I made another fist and rocked it in front of his nose. “Do I have to cuff you around to get the truth?”
He flinched, but only briefly; he had had plenty of time to shore up his courage. “That wouldn’t be wise, Mr. Loomis,” he said. “I already have grounds for a counter-complaint against you.”
“Counter-complaint?”
“For harassment and very probably for kidnapping. Physical violence would only compound a felony charge. I intend to make that counter-complaint if you call the police or if you lay a hand on me.”
The anger drained out of me; I felt deflated. Advantage to the fat little man. He had grounds for a counter-complaint, okay — better grounds than I had against him. After all, I had forcibly brought him in here and locked him in the bathroom. And a felony charge against me would mean unfavorable publicity, not to mention police attention. In my business I definitely could not afford either of those things.
He had me then, and he knew it. He said stiffly, “May I leave or not, Mr. Loomis?”
There was nothing I could do. I let him go.
He went at a quick pace through the house, moving the way somebody does in familiar surroundings. I followed him out onto the porch and watched him hurry off down the driveway without once looking back. He was almost running by the time he disappeared behind the screen of cypress trees.
I went back inside and poured myself a double bourbon. I had never felt more frustrated in my life. The fat little man had got away with something of mine; irrationally or not, I felt it with even more conviction than before.
But what could he possibly have taken of any value?
And how could he have taken it?
I found out the next morning.
The doorbell rang at 10:45, while I was working on one of my accounts in the study. When I went out there and answered it I discovered a well-dressed elderly couple, both of whom were beaming and neither of whom I had ever seen before.
“Well,” the man said cheerfully, “you must be Mr. Loomis. We’re the Parmenters.”
“Yes?”
“We just dropped by for another look around,” he said. “When we saw your car out front we were hoping it belonged to you. We’ve been wanting to meet you in person.”
I looked at him blankly.
“This is such a delightful place,” his wife said. “We can’t tell you how happy we are with it.”
“Yes, sir,” Parmenter agreed, “we knew it was the place for us as soon as your agent showed it to us. And such a reasonable price. Why, we could hardly believe it was only $100,000.”
There was a good deal of confusion after that, followed on my part by disbelief, anger, and despair. When I finally got it all sorted out it amounted to this: the Parmenters were supposed to meet here with my “agent” yesterday afternoon, to present him with a $100,000 cashier’s check, but couldn’t make it at that time; so they had given him the check last night at their current residence, and he in turn had handed them copies of a notarized sales agreement carrying my signatures. The signatures were expert forgeries, of course — but would I be able to prove that in a court of law? Would I be able to prove I had not conspired with this bogus real estate agent to defraud the Parmenters of a six-figure sum of money?