by Marvin Kaye
“Dad, you’re a real lifesaver,” Kelly said as she jumped into the seat and slammed the door ahead of a few raindrops. “And, don’t worry, I am starting to fasten my seatbelt.”
Pulling away from the curb, her slightly overweight father swallowed hard and said, “Honey, this’ll only take a few minutes, but I just got a call on a 614 over on 8th and—”
“Don’t tell me you’re the nearest officer to a robbery.” Kelly glanced out the window. “I can grab a cab—”
“Kelly, it’s already raining cups on the way to buckets out there. I promise I’ll get you home in time for your dinner. That Paul’s a good one. If things work out, we’ll have Metro box seats for life.”
“Gee, for a second there, I thought you cared about my happiness.” She laughed and sat back for the ride. Murphy had thrown her another curve.
Stepping under the Diamond-in-the-Rough canopy, Kelly’s father opened the jewelry store door marked HENRI LAPORTE, PROP. for his daughter. A uniformed officer with a name-tag reading WHITE barred their entry and said loudly over the alarm, “Hold it, folks. This is police business.”
Shaking his head, Matt Locke pulled his gold shield and I.D. from his blazer.
“Oh,” White said, his face matching his name, “I didn’t recognize you, Cap’n Locke.”
“Dispatch was hazy,” the Chief of Detectives said as White stepped out of their path. “What’s going down?”
“I think it has gone down,” said the uniform, his voice a bit shaky. “At first we thought it was a routine B&E, that someone had broken into our discount glasshouse here.”
“Why?” said Kelly.
“My partner and me—he’s the one over there with the clerk—just happened to be turning onto this block when the alarm went off. We couldn’t have been more than a hundred feet away when we hit the siren.”
“And then?” said Kelly.
“S.O.P. I covered the front. Rick, the side. We go by here enough to know there are only two ways out.”
“How long exactly was your response time?” asked Kelly.
The officer looked at the anchorwoman as if a girl had just invaded his gang’s secret clubhouse. “Listen, lady, you’re not talking to a rookie.” White clenched his nightstick. “We covered the exits in less than thirty seconds.”
“What did you find?” she pressed.
“Nothing,” snorted the uniform.
It was obvious to Kelly that White was uncomfortable answering questions from a woman, especially one who hadn’t flashed gold.
“Nothing?” repeated her father.
Officer White gestured to the left of the jewelry store. “The side door opens into that alley, and the only way out of it is in the front. Nobody came out of the alley or the front door from the moment the alarm went off. I’ll stake my badge on that.”
“Any windows?” continued Kelly.
“Just the display in front, and as even you can see, it can’t be opened.” Officer White turned to Kelly’s father. “Cap’n Locke, no disrespect, but who is this girl and why are you letting her grill me like some rookie fresh out of the academy?”
“This woman,” said Matt Locke sternly, “is my daughter, and if Sherlock Holmes himself were here, he couldn’t do any better figuring out what happened. But if you’re going to get your shorts in a bind, I’ll ask the questions. Now, is there a second story?”
“No, sir,” snapped the chastised policeman.
“You searched the place?”
“We checked around a bit.”
“And found nothing?”
“Just the clerk, who claims he was in the back room when the alarm went off. Said it must be faulty. You know, I got this smoke detector at home that goes off every time the little lady uses the stove to bake.”
Kelly cringed as her father said, “Let’s take a look around.”
As they wound their way through the well-lighted maze of display cabinets, Kelly felt like Audrey Hepburn. Audrey had had Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but it looked like Kelly was going to have to settle for a fast-food supper with her boyfriend.
They found the other uniform, Officer Rick Givan, standing by the bottled water cooler with a clerk whose sense of clothes coordination disqualified him for GQ. A striped tie hung over a plaid flannel shirt. Now inside, Kelly noticed the alarm’s decibels seemed to have risen. “Can you turn off the alarm, Mr. LaPorte?”
“Eh, what,” the clerk answered, straightening his tie, “but I’m not LaPorte, just an employee, and I’m new here.”
From behind Kelly, White groused, “I told you he was a clerk.”
Kelly ignored his attitude, but sensed her father getting a little short of patience.
“Officer White,” addressed Captain Locke, “unless you’d like to pull an assignment checking dumpsters for discarded contraband, you’d better lighten up. Now why don’t you and this employee go turn off the alarm.”
“Sure thing, Cap’n. The darn thing’s gone off before, and I know how to disengage it.”
Kelly watched as the contrite officer and the clerk disappeared into the back room. She and Officer Givan crossed to the side door. “Your partner said you covered this exit,” she said.
“Yes ma’am,” answered the young officer in a voice made too loud by the abrupt end of the alarm.
Slipping on a glove from her purse so as not to disturb potential evidence, Kelly opened the door, where the storm had given way to occasional drops. Givan used his Maglite to paint the entire alleyway. Concertina wire surrounded the store’s roof. The other alley walls were so high and without holds that even Spiderman would have gotten vertigo trying to climb them. “Wonder how they fix a leak in the roof,” she mused aloud.
Givan said, “Workers can get up there through a skylight in the back room.”
Kelly was impressed with the patrolman.
“We checked that too,” said White. He was standing in the doorway carrying a flashlight and new respect. “It’s bolted shut and covered with so many cobwebs nobody’s been through it this decade.”
Givan and Kelly re-entered the jewelry store. “Was this door locked when you got here?” she inquired.
“Tighter than a timpani,” answered Givan.
“Just like the front, Miss Locke,” chimed in the suddenly eager-to-please White.
The clerk, who was returning from the back room, bit off a piece of a Hershey bar and said, “Can we wrap this up? It’s past 8:00, I don’t get paid overtime, and I’m starved.”
White shifted his bulky body to one side and patted his stomach like it had been a long time since his last meal. “What’d I tell you, Cap’n Locke? A clear case of false alarm. You ready to wrap up this present?”
Kelly turned to the clerk, who was wiping chocolate from the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief. “Mr. . . .”
“Hicks, Jack Hicks. My friends call me Bingo.”
“Mr. Hicks, is there anything missing here?”
“Like I told the officers, I was in the back room and the front door was locked. I had to let these officers in, but I can check for you.”
“Make it quick,” said White. “My shift’s over and the little lady likes to get out of the kitchen.”
Not me, thought Kelly. She just wanted to get home to the kitchen. Paul would be arriving in less than an hour. She followed the clerk up and down the aisles till they came to a display case near the side door. Inside the case, the starkness of black velvet caught her eye. “What about this one?” Using her glove again, she pressed upward against the top of the case. It opened.
“Mr. LaPorte took the stones in there with him,” said the clerk. “He has a buyer.”
“Well, Cap’n,” said White, turning abruptly toward the front door.
“File your report be
fore you check out,” said Matt Locke.
Suddenly Kelly got an idea. She grabbed one of the store’s notepads with Diamond-in-the-Rough across the top of it. “I’m looking for a gift for my boyfriend,” she said abruptly to Hicks. “Could you write down the price of your cheapest loose diamond so I can show him at least I was thinking of him?”
White shook his head. The clerk scribbled something and walked away. Kelly scrutinized what he had written: 1/4K—$450.
She jerked around. The clerk was passing in front of the water cooler, and the uniforms were starting out the front door. “Dad, grab Hicks.”
Fifteen minutes later Matt Locke’s face looked the way he had come up, empty. Kelly could see the lead story on The Eleven O’Clock News. “Chief of Detectives Facing False Arrest Suit!” Hicks hadn’t had the diamonds on him.
* * * *
Paul forked a piece of microwaved turkey breast. “I thought I had an exciting day hauling down that potential game-winning home run back onto the field, but it pales in comparison with—what did your dad call it?—collar.” He separated the green beans from the meat. “Why did you suspect the clerk?”
Kelly pulled the price quotation out of her purse and let it float down into the good hands of the Metro’s centerfielder. “Little things at first.” As he studied the paper, she said, “What really happened earlier this evening was that Officers White and Givan interrupted a burglary in progress. To bypass the alarms, the thief had come into the busy store earlier in the day and hidden himself in the backroom. After the owner locked up, he came out. What he didn’t know was that the display cases themselves are wired. When he opened one to grab some loose diamonds, the alarm was triggered.”
“And before he could find the alarm to shut it off, the cops showed.”
“Right. Our thief was a quick thinker when he heard the alarm. He slipped on a tie that the owner had left there—I noticed it clashed with his shirt—and pretended to be a clerk closing up. And then there was the alarm. If our supposed clerk knew it was false, why didn’t he immediately shut it off when the officers arrived? Answer. He didn’t know where the pad was and he didn’t know the code.”
“But you said he didn’t have the diamonds on him and that the officers who searched the premises found nothing. Kel,” added Paul with a smile, “if I came up that empty at the plate, I’d be a bench-warmer.”
“That had me baffled for a while. There can’t be a burglary unless something is stolen. A quick call to the store’s owner, who hadn’t gone to the coast, and LaPorte confirmed he had left on display some $200,000 in fine-cut white diamonds. As was his habit—something Hicks probably knew from observing him—he always closed up shop around seven, took a two-hour dinner at a downtown restaurant, and came back to put away some of the day’s display in the store’s safe. He liked to leave the stones on display for the passing dinner crowd.” Hungry as she was, she gulped down more turkey, glad it wasn’t crow. “Finally, LaPorte confirmed he had no clerk working for him that night or any other.”
“Well done, Sherlock,” said Paul across the candle-lit table, “but where were the diamonds?” He thumped the turkey breast with his fork. “There was no Christmas goose around to hide them in like in . . . what was that Doyle story you had me read last winter?”
“‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.’ These diamonds were hidden in plain sight, but nobody saw them. Maybe I caught on because the thief was near the water cooler both when I arrived and left. Officer White got a little wet when I had him lift the bottle from the stand and turn it over.” Kelly smiled. “But when he did, the stones drifted through the water.”
The baseball star looked like he had taken a called third strike. “The thief had stuck them in the water cooler?”
“It was easy. He just tipped the unit upside down, opened the spigot, dropped the stones in, and set the water cooler back in place. The whole operation took only a few seconds. He planned to con the officers into believing his faulty alarm story, show them to the door, then leave with the stones.”
“But what if the cops spotted the diamonds?”
“Hicks panicked, but his spur-of-the-moment plan would have worked since flawless diamonds are invisible in water. I took a chance they were in the cooler even though I couldn’t actually see them.”
“Good guess, Kel, but how did this note make you suspect that the thief wasn’t a clerk in the first place and cause you to place that cell phone call to LaPorte?”
“He turned out to be a minor-league second-story man, not some Cary Grant international cat burglar. He knew the basic value of the stones because he had to fence them, but look at that note again.”
“1/4K—$450. So?”
“K is used to measure the worth of gold, something he also probably fences. K is short for karat. Diamonds, on the other hand, are measured with a C for carat. Even a first-day clerk in a jewelry store knows that.”
“Well done, Kel.”
She fidgeted with her fork. “Paul, I’m sorry I didn’t have time to get you anything for a birthday gift.”
Paul fixed his eyes on the blushing news anchor. “Gee, I thought nuked turkey breast was my gift. Seriously, just sharing tonight with you is enough gift for me. Besides, I learned something tonight.”
She brushed her auburn hair out of her eyes. “What’s that?”
“People who live in glass houses shouldn’t stow stones.”
Kelly never regretted throwing a bean toward the centerfielder’s open mouth.
CARTOON, by Peter Arno & John Betancourt
ANOTHER NIGHT TO REMEMBER, by William E. Chambers
My car was parked half a block away from the pub I own in Greenpoint Brooklyn, a ‘Mixed-Use’ Neighborhood of old apartment buildings, private homes, small shops and some heavy industry. All the surrounding businesses, except mine, closed early because it was Christmas Eve, and the shadowy street seemed deserted. But just as I stuck my key in the Oldsmobile’s door, a voice from behind said, “Don’t move. I’m holding a gun.”
“I’m not moving,” I assured the voice in as nonchalant a tone as I could muster. “What do you want?”
“Your money.”
“I’ve got about three hundred bucks—” I felt something hard touch the back of my leather jacket, “in my pocket.”
The voice patted me down from behind, found I was clean, and said, “Unlock the car. Front and back doors.”
I opened the front door, reached over the seat and pulled up the button that locked the rear door of my aging Delta ’88. The voice said, “Get in.”
My unwanted companion climbed into the back seat while I slid behind the wheel. When both doors were locked, he explained, “We’re gonna drive to a place with no phones. Then you’re gonna get out and walk while I ride away in this heap with your money.”
The face in the rear view mirror was pale, early thirties, and somewhat familiar-looking. The fact that he didn’t mind my seeing his features bothered me. He asked if I knew the West Street piers and when I told him I did, he named a certain one and ordered me to take him to it. My mind spun like tires on ice as I began driving. I prayed a police car would pass by so I could plow this hunk of steel into it. None did. I thought of doing the same thing to any car at all but felt it was too risky. While he might hesitate to shoot me if cops were involved, I wasn’t sure civilians would be a deterrent.
He might even kill them.
West Street was poorly lit and empty of cars and people. When I turned down the block leading to the pier, he said, “So far, so good, Callahan. You can stop at the edge of the dock.”
The beauty of Manhattan’s luminous skyline on the other side of the East River did nothing for my frayed nerves. Wood planking creaked beneath my tires and abandoned warehouses formed dark shapes along the Brooklyn shoreline to my right and left. Wind buffeted m
y car. Aside from the two of us, the area was devoid of life. A condition I expected myself to be in if I didn’t do something quick. So I stomped the gas pedal and dived down, wedging my body between the seat and the dashboard.
A roar rocked the car. I saw sparks above my head and an acrid smell filled the air. The windshield webbed while my front tires bounced over the lip of the pier. Another shot rang out and the windshield disintegrated as the car flipped over. The man behind me hit the roof with his head and shoulders, dropping his weapon as the Olds slapped water. Then he thrashed about, screaming wildly in fear of the river that rushed in through the shot-out windshield below me. Knowing there was no bucking this icy torrent, I held my breath and waited. I was pounded repeatedly by a world that was cold and black and wet. When the force suddenly stopped, I heard the plunk of an escaping bubble and felt the car float downward.
Clawing blindly, I found the steering wheel and pulled myself toward the missing windshield. I tasted salt water and crude oil as I shoved my torso through the gap and kicked my feet against the fender of the descending car to begin my desperate upward swim. The blazing red and green Christmas lighting that adorned the Empire State Building’s peak welcomed me to the surface from all the way across the river. I sucked in freezing air and paddled to a slimy piling. Somehow I managed to shinny up that greasy pole and scramble onto the dock.
I knew civilization wasn’t far off but it seemed beyond my reach as I trudged forward on quivering legs. It was only three blocks, but the walk seemed to take forever because I had to stop several times to ease my burning lungs. Finally, I saw the kielbasa laden window of a Polish delicatessen whose dim lights indicated the store was about to close. I staggered through the front door and said, “I need your phone . . .”