Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 48, No. 1, January 2003

Two hours later I was finally sitting down at Judy’s desk to try to figure out why she’d called me in the first place. In the intervening time I’d conferred with Jim Sammons, the detective sergeant in charge of the case, and we’d agreed that, if Judy pulled through, she was going to need guarding until we found out what was happening at Speedway and who her assailant was. Then I’d called a vice president of the Speedway Corporation to verify my authority to investigate the whole business. It was in my contract, but sometimes people have to be reminded. I’d also called home and talked to Ginny. She was back from Niles and had just tucked the kids in.

“R. J.,” she’d said, “please promise me you’ll be careful when you leave there. I think — that is, it makes sense to think — that Judy Pilske might have been shot because she got in touch with you. You have to consider that.”

“Yeah,” I’d replied, “I have. So the sooner we get an answer, the sooner the danger’s going to be past.”

“Maybe I can help.”

“Right. Tomorrow morning, first thing.”

“Then please be careful tonight.”

Judy’s copy of the Mall Security Log, when I found it, was uninspiring — the usual catalog of petty crime, frailty, stupidity, and craziness it always was. In December to that point it tallied two muggings, a stolen vehicle, four vehicle break-ins, a handful of stolen purses, some suspected pickpocket activity, a variety of disturbances by the obnoxious or irate, two episodes of vandalism, a hit-and-run in the parking lot, vagrancy, panhandling, et cetera, et cetera, and a two-part list six pages long of suspected or confirmed shoplifting and stolen or missing merchandise.

When I asked the on-duty security supervisor if he knew of any particular problems requiring my being called in, he’d only grunted. Frank Malin, his superior, was incommunicado at his bowling league that night.

I prowled around Judy’s office for a few minutes, looking into this file drawer or that cabinet, before I suddenly remembered an occasion in which I’d seen her slip a half-finished report under the blotter pad on her desk. On this particular night, I discovered, the blotter pad concealed two things, a bill for repairing the office copy machine and an incomplete insurance form relating to the victim of the hit-and-run accident in the mall parking lot. There was nothing unusual in this pair of documents, except for the fact that Florence Siwinski, the victim of the hit-and-run, apparently had died after three days at Northwest Hospital without regaining consciousness.

This fact, though, was enough to make me decide to take the form and the security log home with me, and while I was driving along — carefully, per Ginny’s instructions — I had the not-so-funny thought that Judy Pilske was at that moment lying unconscious at Northwest Hospital after a hit-and-run shooting at Speedway. This parallel circumstance inspired me to call Jim Sammons before I went to bed and ask him if he could dig out the police file on Florence Siwinski for me. Then I crawled in beside Ginny, but I didn’t sleep well.

The next morning, after our children — ages four and eight that year — were off to pre- and grade school respectively, I gave Ginny a pretty thorough summary of the problem, then I handed her the security log and the accident report and said, “You tell me if there’s something here. I’m going to make some calls from the bedroom.”

First I called another mall out in the southwest suburbs and canceled a security review appointment for that morning. Then I called Northwest Hospital to find out about Judy. She was in critical condition in the intensive care unit, so I was informed. After an additional five-minute hold, the floor nurse came on the line and gave me the answer to my real question: Judy hadn’t regained consciousness and probably wouldn’t for some time, maybe days, a response that sounded fairly hopeful to me, actually, so I didn’t ask for further details that I wouldn’t have been given anyway.

My next call was to Speedway and Frank Malin. Malin was a fifty-year-old former police sergeant from Chicago who had left the force early. He’d been the kind of cop who makes it hard for other cops — gruff and domineering, not corrupt, but a taker of small gifts and unfair advantages. When the Speedway Corporation hired him as a shift supervisor I’d advised against it, and when he’d been made acting security chief while his boss, Hank Arnow, convalesced from a triple bypass operation, I’d protested strongly. The Speedway Corporation paid for my advice — not enough, from my standpoint — but they didn’t always take it.

“Malin here,” he said in a smoker’s baritone.

“Yeah, Frank, this is R. J. Carr. I’ll be over there at eleven to see you about Judy. But I want to know now why she called to get my advice on security. I know she went to you first — she said as much in the message she left on my machine. Only I’m still in the dark because she’d been shot by the time I got there last night.”