Small Felonies - Fifty Mystery Short Stories (30 page)

"Tiger?" Kerry asked.

"That's what George and I call practiced, compulsive shoplifters," Tinker said. "They blend in with their background so you hardly notice them watching and waiting. Then they pounce.

Kerry had never thought of herself as a tiger. But she understood the analogy. For a few moments she had felt as if she were stalking each of her preys.

"What are you going to do with me?" she asked anxiously. "Are you going to have me arrested?"

Tinker said, "I'm afraid so, Mrs. Maitland."

"But you can't. What would my family say? Oh, please, can't you just let me go? I promise I'll never come here again . . ."

Tinker sighed. "You seem to be a decent person; maybe you couldn't help what you did. But store policy is to turn all shoplifters over to the police. No exceptions."

"Please," Kerry said again. "Isn't there some way. . . ?"

"You know, Mr. Tinker," Cassidy said, "I kind of feel sorry for the lady. Maybe she's not a genuine tiger at that. Couldn't we give her a break?"

Another frown wrinkled Tinker's puffy face. "I tend to agree with you, George. But we'd be taking a big risk. If our superiors found out, we could lose our jobs."

"I'd never tell anyone," Kerry said fervently. "Never."

"Well . . ." Tinker leaned forward and lowered his voice to a near-whisper. "Maybe we could make an arrangement, at that."

"Arrangement?"

"Yes. Where you could leave here free and clear, with no report made to the police. And where Mr. Cassidy and myself would be, ah, rewarded for the risk we'd be taking."

"You mean . . . money?"

"Yes, dear lady. Money."

Cassidy said, "We'd even let you keep the items you stole. It'd be kind of like a trade."

"Oh," Kerry said. "Oh, I see. And since I did keep the stolen merchandise, I could never reveal the truth to anyone. Yes, I'd be willing to make that sort of arrangement." She cleared her throat. "How much would you want?"

"How about two thousand dollars apiece?" Cassidy suggested. "That's one month's salary for each of us, more or less; and it could take us a month to find new jobs if we got fired."

"Does that sound fair to you, Mrs. Maitland?"

"Yes, all right. But I couldn't get that much money until Monday morning . . ."

"Tell you what," Tinker said. "You trust us, we'll trust you. We won't even think about contacting the police until Monday noon; all you have to do is come in before then with the cash."

Kerry nodded. "Before noon on Monday," she said. "Two thousand dollars for each of you, in cash."

"Very good."

"May I leave now? I . . . I'm not feeling very well."

"Of course," Tinker said. "I'll just keep your driver's license, though, if you don't mind. As a sort of insurance." He took it out of its card pocket and then handed wallet, purse, and stolen items back to Kerry. "Until Monday, then, Mrs. Maitland."

"Yes. Until Monday." Hastily she put the merchandise into her purse.

Cassidy opened the door for her; she went into the hallway and around to the elevators. The first one that came was empty. She stepped inside, pushed the button for the main floor, and waited for the doors to close.

Then she relaxed, smiled, reached into her purse, took out her compact—which wasn't a compact at all—and opened it.

And switched off the miniature tape recorder concealed inside.

The tape had been recording ever since she entered the store, because she hadn't known at which point in her shoplifting spree Cassidy would appear. But it was a long-playing tape; the entire conversation in Tinker's office would be on it.

She couldn't wait to play that tape for her husband Jim. She couldn't wait to see the look on his face when she told him how she'd been shopping here six Saturdays ago and seen Cassidy apprehend and take away one of two well-dressed women; how that same woman had reappeared a half-hour later and Kerry had overheard her tell the friend that she'd "bought her way out of trouble"; how Kerry's suspicions of an extortion scheme had brought her back on several occasions to watch Cassidy surreptitiously—and watch the same thing happen again last week, with another shoplifter; and how she'd set out today to put an end to larceny by using a little larceny of her own.

Oh yes, she would enjoy telling Jim. It might just convince Police Captain James Maitland that he'd been wrong about his new young wife; that she shouldn't simply sit home like a lump in posh Forest Hills, living off her inheritance while he pursued a career. Maybe she could even become a policewoman . . .

She smiled again as the elevator reached the main floor. No one accosted her on her way out of the store.

In the privacy of her richly furnished living room, Kerry laid the stolen ring, cufflinks, and perfume on the marble-topped coffee table and examined them. She would give them to Jim when he got home from the afternoon shift.

As she stared at the gleaming merchandise, she recalled the rather delicious thrill of stealing it. And a thought struck her. She didn't have to give Jim the—for some reason she relished the word—loot. She could simply pay Tinker and Cassidy their money, retrieve her driver's license and destroy the tape. If she could never reveal their extortion scheme, neither could Tinker or Cassidy reveal her crime.

The gold mantel clock ticked loudly, in rhythm with Kerry's pulse and her rapid, shallow breathing. She had always craved beautiful things—for what they were, not for their cash value. And to take them from time to time, simply take them in carefully and cunningly planned raids. . . . The idea was exhilarating. Sort of like Salome contemplating the head of John the Baptist—chilling, thrilling, and revolting, all at the same time.

She couldn't do it, of course. Not really.

Or could she?

Kerry remembered Cassidy's allusion to a tiger, a thief who blended in with his background so you hardly noticed him watching and waiting until he pounced. Then she remembered a story she had read as a girl, a story about a young man forced to choose between opening one of two identical doors; behind one was salvation in the form of a benign woman, while behind the other was danger in the form of a deadly tiger. The title of the story was "The Lady or the Tiger?"

"Which am I?" Kerry wondered aloud, staring into the blood-red depths of the ruby.

M
y Uncle Walter studied me across the massive oak desk in his library, looking at once irascible, anxious, and a little fearful. "I have some questions to ask you, Harold," he said at length, "and I want truthful answers, do you understand?"

"I am not in the habit of lying," I lied stiffly.

"No? To my mind your behavior has always left much to be desired, and has been downright suspect at times. But that is not the issue at hand, except indirectly. The issue at hand is this: where were you at eleven-forty last evening?"

"At eleven-forty? I was in bed, of course."

"You were not," my uncle said sharply. "Elsie saw you going downstairs at five minutes of eleven, fully dressed."

Elsie was the family maid, and much too nosy for her own good. She was also the only person who lived on this small estate except for me, Uncle Walter, and Aunt Pearl. I frowned and said, "I remember now. I went for a walk."

"At eleven P.M.?"

"I couldn't sleep and I thought the fresh air might help."

"Where did you go on this walk?"

"Oh, here and there. Just walking, you know."

"Did you leave the grounds?"

"Not that I recall."

"Did you go out by the old carriage house?"

"No," I lied.

My uncle was making an obvious effort to conceal his impatience. "You were out by the old carriage house, weren't you?"

"I've already said I wasn't."

"I saw you there, Harold. At least, I'm fairly certain I did. You were lurking in the oleander bushes."

"I do not lurk in bushes," I lied.

"Somebody was lurking in the bushes, and it couldn't have been anyone but you. Elsie and Aunt Pearl were both here in the house."

"May I ask a question?"

"What is it?"

"What were you doing out by the old carriage house at eleven-forty last night?"

Uncle Walter's face had begun to take on the unpleasant color of raw calf's liver. "What I was doing there is of no consequence. I want to know why you were there, and what you might have seen and heard."

"Was there something to see and hear, Uncle?"

"No, of course not. I just want to know—look here, Harold, what did you see and hear from those bushes?"

"I wasn't in them in the first place, so I couldn't have seen or heard anything, could I?"

Uncle Walter stood and began to pace the room, his hands folded behind his back. He looked like a pompous old lawyer, which is precisely what he was. Finally he came over to stand in front of my chair, glaring down at me. "You were not out by the carriage house at eleven-forty last night? You did not see anything and you did not hear anything at any time during your alleged walk?"

"No," I lied.

"I have no recourse but to accept your word, then. Actually it doesn't matter whether you were there or not, in one sense, because you refuse to admit it. I trust you will continue to refuse to admit it, to me and to anyone else."

"I don't believe I follow that, Uncle."

"You don't have to follow it. Very well, Harold, that's all."

I stood and left the library and went out to the sun porch at the rear of the house. When I was certain neither Elsie nor Aunt Pearl was about, I slipped out and hurried through the landscaped grounds to the old carriage house. The oleander bushes, where I had been lurking at eleven-forty the previous night, after following Uncle Walter from the house—I had gone for a short walk, and had noticed him sneaking out—were located along the southern wall of the building. I passed along parallel to them and around to the back, to the approximate spot where my uncle had stood talking to the man whom he had met there. They had spoken in low tones, of course, but in the summer stillness I had been able to hear every word. I had also been able to hear the muffled report that had abruptly terminated their conversation.

Now, what, I wondered, glancing around, did Uncle Walter do with the body?

The gunshot had startled me somewhat, and I had involuntarily rustled the bushes and therefore been forced to run when my uncle came to investigate. I had then hidden behind one of the privet hedges until I was certain he did not intend to search for me. Minutes later I slipped around by the carriage house again; but I had not been able to locate my uncle. So I returned to the privet hedge and waited, and twenty-five minutes later Uncle Walter had appeared and gone back to the house.

A half-hour or so is really not very much time in which to hide a dead man, so I found the body quite easily. It was concealed among several tall eucalyptus trees some sixty yards from the carriage house, covered with leaves and strips of bark. A rather unimaginative hiding place, to be sure, although it was no doubt intended to be temporary. Uncle Walter had given no prior consideration to body disposal, and so had hidden the corpse here until he could think of something more permanent to do with it.

I uncovered the dead man and studied him for a moment. He was small and slender, with sharp features and close-set eyes. In the same way my uncle looked exactly like what he was, so did this person look like what he was, or had been—a criminal, naturally. In his case, a blackmailer. And not at all a clever or cautious one, to have allowed Uncle Walter to talk him into the time and place of last night's rendezvous. What excuse had my uncle given him for the unconventionality of it all? Well, no matter. The man really had been quite stupid to have accepted such terms under any circumstances, and was now quite dead as a result.

Yet Uncle Walter was equally as stupid: first, to have put himself in a position where he could be blackmailed; and second, to have perpetrated a carelessly planned homicide on his own property. My uncle, however, was impulsive. He also had a predilection for beautiful blonde show girls, about which my Aunt Pearl knew nothing, and about which I also had known nothing until overhearing last evening's conversation. This was the reason he had been blackmailed. He had committed murder because the extortionist wanted more money than he had been getting for his continued silence—Uncle Walter was a notoriously tightfisted man.

It took me the better part of two hours to move the body. I am not particularly strong, and even though the dead man was small and light, it was a physical struggle to which I am not accustomed. At last, however, I had secreted the blackmailer's remains in what I considered to be quite a clever hiding place—one that was not even on my uncle's property.

Across the dry creek which formed the rear boundary line was a grove of trees, well into which I found a large decaying log, all that was left of a long-dead tree felled by insects or disease. At first glance it seemed to be solid, but upon inspection I discovered that it was hollow. I dragged the body to the log and managed to stuff it inside; then I covered all traces of the entombment.