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

“No,” I said. “Don’t ask me. I’m not on the public payroll — I earn my living solving these things, and that’s what I intend to do tonight. I’ll tell you this much, though: I’ve got at least a portion of the shoplifting puzzle worked out, and I’m going home now to try to work out the rest with my wife. She has all the brains in the family.”

We both stood in anticipation of my departure. Sammons hesitated again, then he said, “You’re married, eh? Law enforcement is hard on marriage, from what I’ve seen.”

“It depends.”

“I’ve avoided it — marriage.” He looked all at once very young for his age. “What I said about knowing Judy in high school — actually, we dated for a while. We stopped because I was Lutheran, she was Catholic. One more reason why marriage doesn’t work out. But it was a shock seeing her after nine years, shot up like that.” His face was putting on a brilliant blush.

I said, “Well, I’m Presbyterian, myself, but my wife was raised half-Catholic and half-Lutheran. Her folks made it work.”

As I left I could see him staring with his clean-cut, handsome face at my birthmarked, ugly one. It’s a look I’ve always gotten a lot of and don’t care for much, but what occurred to me on this particular occasion was that Sammons wasn’t really seeing me — he was seeing a long, slim blonde in a hospital bed — so I let it pass.

Part IV

At quarter after nine that night I was showing that same dubious mug to the closed circuit security camera outside the main loading dock of Speedway Mall.

“Say the secret password,” said a voice in a box.

“Pulp.”

“What?”

“Let me in, or tomorrow I’ll beat you to a pulp.”

“Yes, sir. Just joking.”

“Right.”

I was feeling good. Ginny and I had come up with a very tight theory about the shoplifting ring, and although we still couldn’t quite see how the goods were being disposed of, that wouldn’t matter if we found enough confirming evidence on the people involved. I was meeting Frank Malin at nine thirty to make a directed search for the evidence, if it existed.

The backside of the shopping mall was and still is a depressing sight, not to mention an ungodly smell. The first thing that hit me as I came in the door was the odor of live garbage, collected in its own huge dumpster from the twelve Food Court outlets and four independent restaurants scattered elsewhere in the mall. For no particular reason, mainly to get away from the stink, probably, I ambled down one of the service corridors which ran behind the stores. No matter how flashy the storefronts, no matter how elaborate the decor of the public areas, in every mall of this design these corridors look the same — poorly lighted, lined with cheap wallboard, covered with cheaper paint, and over the paint the inevitable graffiti.

When I made the first turn in the corridor, about a hundred feet from the loading dock, I saw coming toward me a one-man motorized truck pulling two narrow flatbed carts in tandem. On the carts were what appeared to be barrel-shaped waste receptacles and boxes of trash, and as the distance closed between us, I came to recognize the driver of the truck as Mike Cooksey, Frank Malin’s dark-haired boy.

“Hey! Haul your damn ass out of the way!” he yelled from about twenty feet off. I could see his point: the right angle turn was tricky pulling that load, so I moved back a few yards and leaned up against the wall as he slowed to make the swing around the corner. Since I was wondering more about Cooksey than about what he was doing, the tail end of the cart was almost out of sight before the fact registered with me that what I had been watching was the day’s take by the shoplifting ring being methodically and prosaically carted away from the stores. All the barrels on the two carts had been stenciled Return To, followed by a particular retailer’s name, and each Return To I had seen was one of the six problem stores.

I started to hurry after Cooksey but then stopped, thinking it might be better to watch what he did with the barrels first, so I held off for thirty seconds to give him a good lead, then ambled back along the corridor to the shipping area. As I came out into the brighter lighting I spotted the carts, minus the driver and truck, parked unobtrusively alongside the first loading bay next to another cart which was half full of what looked to be shipping cartons. Except for a forklift operator thirty yards across the expanse of concrete, no one else was visible in the large, enclosed space. The forklift roared suddenly and disappeared into the interior of a trailer backed up to the dock. I quickstepped along the wall to the carts full of barrels.