“Did he drop by to introduce himself?”
“No, but you can see the house from our bedroom window upstairs. When I looked out this afternoon I noticed a man swimming in the pool. He had a guest, a girl in a purple bikini who stayed there most of the day, then drove away in a little sports car.”
I had to laugh. If Adelaide had any faults at all, one of them would be that she was a trifle nosy. “Are you going to start a dossier on them?” I asked jokingly.
“Not yet,” she said with a smile. “And it’s not ‘them’, it’s ‘him’. The man seems to live there alone.”
“Big house for a single man,” I remarked, “though it sounds like he has his fun there.”
A timer bell sounded in the kitchen and Adelaide put down her drink and stood. I walked behind her as she hurried into the kitchen to check on the dinner.
“You keep an eye on him and keep me posted,” I said, rubbing the back of my hand playfully up the nape of her neck. She didn’t answer and I kept quiet. Experience had taught me to joke only so far about Adelaide’s feminine curiosity.
Though without any prompting she had another tidbit of information for me the next evening when I returned home.
“Our neighbor seems to be something of a swinger,” she said. “There was a girl in a red bikini there today.”
“Same girl, different bikini,” I speculated.
Adelaide shook her head. “The first one was a tall brunette. Today it was a short blonde.”
I smiled and shrugged. “His sister?”
“I doubt it,” Adelaide said, and drew a miniature bronze rooster from the carton.
“I’m sure we’ll find out more about him,” I said. “He’ll probably turn up at our door one of these days soon to introduce himself. Could be he doesn’t even realize there’s anybody living here yet.” Silently I wondered if he’d plant a shade tree between us and his pool when he did find out. Then for the next few hours I was busy helping Adelaide finish the job of unpacking and thought about little else.
But that night my own curiosity about our neighbor was aroused when I walked across the bedroom to close the drapes.
As my hand reached for the pull cord my eye caught the flash of a revolving red light in the distance. I leaned forward and squinted into the darkness, and I saw that a police car was parked in our neighbor’s driveway beside his long blue convertible.
As I watched, another car pulled up behind that one. In the reflection of its headlights I could see that it was a plain gray sedan. Two men got out of it and went into the house without knocking.
A hand touched my shoulder and Adelaide was standing beside me.
“Now who’s nosy?” she asked.
I didn’t answer, and we stood there for a while and watched shadows cross the distant draped windows. Then the two men and a uniformed policeman came out of the house. They got into their respective cars, the red light on the patrol car was turned off, and both cars left together. A few minutes later the windows of the house went black and Adelaide and I were staring at nothing.
“What do you think?” Adelaide asked as we turned away from the window.
“It could have been a lot of things,” I said. “Maybe the police were called because somebody was sick. Maybe the two men in the plain car were doctors. Maybe our neighbor thought he saw a prowler. I guess if we really wanted to find out the thing to do would be to ask him.”
The next evening I got in the car and drove down the road to do just that.
“It’s because I’m a burglar,” our neighbor answered me amiably.
I stood there and blinked, twice. I’d introduced myself when he’d answered the door, and he’d introduced himself as Jack Hogan and invited me inside and offered me a drink. After a few minutes’ exploratory conversation with the tanned and handsome man, I’d gotten around to asking him about the commotion at his house we’d witnessed last night, offering our help if anything was wrong.
“The police were here to harass me,” Jack Hogan went on. “Lieutenant Faber and his friends. I humor the lieutenant because I understand he acts out of frustration.”
“But if you’re innocent—” I said in a rather dumbfounded way.
“But I’m not innocent,” Hogan said freely, his gray eyes as sincere as his voice. “Though if you tell anyone I said so I’ll deny it. Lieutenant Faber knows I’m guilty, but he can’t do anything about it because I’m too smart for him. That’s the fun of it.”
I didn’t know if Hogan was joking or not. When I took a sip of my drink some of it spilled on my hand.
“A burglary was committed a few nights ago,” Hogan said, offering me his neatly folded handkerchief to dry my fingers. “They know I did it but they don’t know how, or what I did with the loot. Oh, they come and search here every now and then, but we both know they won’t find anything. And if a young lady is prepared to testify that I spent the time of the robbery in her presence, where does it all leave poor Lieutenant Faber?”
“Where I am, I suppose,” I said. “Confused.”
“Well, no need to be confused. I say what’s the sense of getting away with something if nobody knows about it? Surely you can understand that. Then, too, there’s the profit. Burglary is a thriving business. How else could I afford all this, living alone in a ten-room house with a pool, nights on the town, flashy women, flashy cars? A wonderful life. I admit to you, I need all that.”
“Then, in a way, it’s all a game,” I said slowly.
“Of course it’s a game. Everybody plays his own game. I just admit mine because I’m good enough to get by with it even though it is illegal.”
“But it’s wrong,” I said, trying to bat down his clearly stated logic.
“Sure, it’s wrong,” Hogan said, “but so’s cheating on your income tax, overcharging the public if you’re a big corporation, leaving a penny for a paper when you don’t have a dime. To tell you the truth, I don’t worry about right or wrong.”
“I guess you don’t.”
“You see,” Hogan explained earnestly, “it’s the challenge. I like nice things; I indulge myself. When I see something of value I take it. I guess I have to take it.”
“Kleptomania on a grand scale, huh?”
“Hey, you might say that!” He raised his glass and grinned.
I finished my drink and got up to leave. Hogan walked with me to the door. On the porch I noticed that the long blue convertible was gone, replaced by an even longer and more expensive tan convertible. Hogan saw me looking at the car.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not stolen and it doesn’t belong to a girl I have hidden in the house. You didn’t interrupt anything and I can afford to trade cars any time I feel like it. Say,” he said, pointing at the long car, “how do you like it?”
“Beautiful,” I said.
“Sure, and it cost a hunk of cash. Well, drop by again, why don’t you? Bring the wife and we’ll take a dip in the pool.”
I walked down the driveway to where my car was parked. I didn’t know what to think of our new neighbor. I was sure he wasn’t joking, and I must admit I reacted as a lot of people would react. There was a sense of resentment in me that the things I worked so hard for, this man simply went out and took. And yet I found that I couldn’t really dislike Jack Hogan. I waved to him as I started the engine and drove away.
When I told Adelaide about the visit she didn’t believe me. I didn’t blame her.
“You’d have to talk to him to understand how he thinks,” I told her. “You might describe him as an honest crook.”
“An honest crook?”
“Well, honest about being crooked, anyway.”
That confused Adelaide almost as much as I was confused, so I had a snack, went over some work I’d brought home, then went to bed.