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

He looked at his watch. “Sure. But if I don’t go for lunch now, I’ll never get one, so...”

“All right,” I said. “I could eat.”

“Fine. Oh — you’ll need to know about this. I just heard about it myself. On Saturday night the manager of Speedway Cinema turned in a small handgun to us. One of her cleaning people found it. Monday we got a call from someone claiming he lost it.” Malin shook his head. “Anyway, the guy said he’d come by and pick it up — show his permit — sometime this week.”

“And it’s gone,” I said.

“Yeah. It’s gone. Evidently it was put in the holding drawer under the reception counter out front for this guy to claim, the last time anyone saw it. He came by this morning and threw a fit when we didn’t have it for him.”

“And in the meantime there’s been a shooting here with a small caliber weapon.”

“Yeah. Course, it might be a coincidence.” But I could tell from the look on his face that he didn’t think so either.

“Judy doesn’t like me,” Malin was saying as we angled toward an isolated table in the newly opened Mall Food Court: twelve different varieties of indigestion at one convenient location. I had Greek; he had Chinese. “I may be the only white male around here who hasn’t laid his hand on her thigh, but still she doesn’t like me.”

We sat and started eating. “She likes you, though,” he said, pointing a plastic forkful of chow mein at me. “Every problem, she wants to call you.”

“This is the first time she ever did.”

“That I don’t know about. I know I’ve been acting head of security since September twentieth, and I know management doesn’t want to bring you in for consultation over dope smoking in the washrooms.”

“So what did she say specifically? This time?”

He chewed a little, possibly thinking, possibly not. “This theft problem just exploded from nowhere — you’ve got to understand that first. November was very quiet till the last week. Then, boom!”

“And?”

“The Merchants Association gets hysterical, and of course they go to Judy because she’s their liaison with mall management. I’m responsible to management — so is Judy, you know? — and management says to keep it quiet, keep the police out, solve it internally.”

“And?”

“Okay. Judy doesn’t like me. She thinks I can’t handle this job. You don’t either — I heard it through the grapevine. Judy says I’m a policeman, not a security expert. But management tells me to keep trying. I keep trying.”

“And that’s it?”

“Yeah. That’s it.”

I watched his face for a moment, then said, “You’re not telling me everything, Frank.”

For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to respond, but he finally said, “Nothing you need to know, that’s all. It’s private — between her and me. If I’m wrong about that, then you’re right and this job is too big for me.” He lit a cigarette. “I want this job, Ray. Hank Arnow is not coming back. The doctors say the stress would be too much, so come January, either I’m permanent head of security or I’m out on my ass. So nobody wants this stuff cleared up worse than I do, but I still have to do what I’m told.”

There wasn’t a lot to say in response, so I didn’t say it. As we were leaving the food court, Malin remarked casually, in a low voice, “See that guy coming in?”

It was the man I’d observed earlier talking to Barb Becker. “Yeah,” I said. We kept on walking.

“He works here — fairly new guy on the nighttime custodial crew. Name’s Mike Cooksey. Don’t recognize him, do you?”

“Nope,” I said to keep things simple.

“That’s too bad. Either I’ve seen him before, or he reminds me of someone I’ve seen before.”

“Oh. Someone with a police record.”

“Uh-huh. Only he hasn’t got one — at least not as Mike Cooksey — and I don’t have time to look through mug books.”

I spent the early afternoon gathering bits and pieces and feeling the sense of urgency I’d had all along grow more and more pressing. First I’d doubled back to the food court and retrieved a greasy food wrapper from a trash receptacle as soon as Mike Cooksey was out of sight, on the principle that fingerprints beat mug books every time. I’d lived my life in a family of policemen, so I know that the faint association of a face with past criminal activity in the mind of a former cop, even a mediocre cop, was probably worth checking out.

Then I’d talked to some of the security guards and the managers of Catterson Furs and The Wedge (“Your Source for High Tech Electronics”) and ambled around in all six of the problem stores. At three o’clock I’d driven over to the new district headquarters on Grand Avenue for an appointment I’d made with Jim Sammons, only he turned out to be running late, so I hunted up an evidence technician to start a trace on Mike Cooksey’s fingerprints.