Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 44, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1999

I thanked him and we said goodbye. But that evening on the vaguest kind of hunch I spent an hour and a half in our local library digging around at the real and rumored biography of a man who had been dead for one hundred fifty years named Niccolò Paganini.

At around ten thirty the following Saturday morning a man who looked suspiciously like myself was strolling along the edge of a county highway in south central Wisconsin near a sign inviting persons of easy means and limitless credulity to consider a future at Mansion Lakes. This man wore a hunter’s cap, a well-worn tan windbreaker, and a pair of field binoculars on a strap around his neck. On occasion he would peer earnestly through the binoculars into the woods on the opposite side of the road in the apparent hope of spotting a creature perched on a twig with a brain at least the size of his own. Or such seemed to be the man’s innermost desire.

At ten thirty-eight a metallic gray Ford station wagon slowed as it passed him on the pavement and came to a halt on the shoulder a hundred feet ahead. He trotted up to the car and climbed in on the passenger’s side before glancing across at the driver, a black-haired woman dressed in tweeds whose mature beauty was capable of stopping traffic on that particular or any other stretch of highway in the universe. Except for the tweeds she looked remarkably like the man’s wife, Ginny.

“You were right — as usual,” she said in a low, clear tone.

“I was afraid of that,” I replied. I looked out at the mild, cloudless sky. “Well. If we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it.”

“Yes. Breaking and entering in broad daylight — how to bring new excitement into your humdrum married life. Do Wisconsin jails allow conjugal visits?”

She drove the Ford ahead, reversed our course in the next lane, and braked to a halt five minutes later in front of the Byron Davis house. “I knocked seven times even though I felt silly doing it,” she said, “Perhaps you should, too.”

“Nope,” I said. “I feel silly enough as is. Just blow that whistle if you see them coming.”

We kissed for no special reason except that we always do; then I got out and looked around before climbing the steps. Golfers blocked from view by the hillock; no construction crews in sight; no farmers in the distant fields — only the occasional hum of a passing vehicle on the road beyond the artificial berm at the opposite end of the lake. And no one in the house. I hoped.

From the top of the hillock I could peer down and see Ginny standing beside the Ford with a scarf around her head and a police whistle hidden in her palm. She looked up and noticed me and made shooing motions, so I had to put on my gloves and go to work.

In the detective and security business, the business I happen to be in, you learn a lot about things like locks and alarms, and you notice such improvements as home protection systems as a matter of course. Davis’s new house had a lot of peripheral protection, but the front door stood vulnerable to anyone with the right key — or that was my assessment on my previous visit — and so I’d brought two bunches of Grunwalds along, eighty-three in all. Just into the second bunch, one of them turned freely and put me inside the entry.

The double doors to the library were unlocked, which saved a minute, and I was pulling out the drawers of a collector’s safe in no time, thanks to another bunch of keys. Of course Davis’s “small” collection amounted to hundreds of items, and it took me a couple of minutes even to figure out the organization, not that Ginny and I expected to find what we wanted correctly classified anyway.

After five minutes of random search with no luck, I took a break from the safe and walked around the room to try for some kind of new inspiration by looking at books and artifacts. Davis’s violin had a place of honor in a locked glass case, and even though it seemed like the absolute least promising possibility, I gave it a thorough examination by flashlight, especially inside the soundholes. Just as I finished I heard the honk of a car horn, which meant I had five minutes left out of the twenty I’d allowed, not the happiest development. I glanced around the room again, still feeling stymied.

What it boiled down to, I decided, was a single question that I didn’t have an answer for: exactly how clever did Davis think he was? Ginny probably would have spotted it right away, but I only caught on when I looked down at the violin another time and took real notice that in the same glass case, beside the glowing wood of the instrument, rested the polished leather of a very fine old Bible, printed in what I made out to be Italian and open to the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew.