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

After we hung up I sensed Ortíz standing near me again, along with another man. I asked Ortíz to watch for Ginny and then followed behind his companion to a washroom where I cleaned the blood off my face and out of my scalp. The wound was a long split in the skin close to the hairline with some bad swelling underneath that would get worse, I suspected, before it got better. But for the moment I was functioning, and I had work to do.

I’d just made it back to the loading dock desk when I was attacked again, this time in the form of a blindside embrace from Ginny, who had set a speed record getting to the mall. She was crying, which wasn’t like her, so I hugged her, calmed her down, and told her what had happened. She dried her eyes with my handkerchief, then finally placed the glasses she’d brought onto my nose.

“I brought you something else,” she said.

“All right,” I responded. “But it wouldn’t have helped, and I won’t need it.”

She stepped close to me again and transferred a.22 caliber target pistol from her purse to my coat pocket. The gun belonged to her — one of a pair left over from the days when she’d done target shooting. I’ve never been big on firearms myself, to be truthful, and never carried any back in those more innocent years unless I had to. The look on Ginny’s face told me I had to.

“I’m staying until you’re ready to go,” she said next. “The children are asleep, and Dorothy, I’m sure, is asleep by now, too, in your chair.”

“Fine,” I said, “but the whole problem is pretty much worked out. I just need to check a few files over in the main office.”

“Hmph,” she grumbled, with a new expression on her face, half dubious and half worried. “Then I’m coming along. I honestly wonder sometimes if you ought to be trusted out by yourself.” Meaning, or so I deduced, that she was thinking about a case from a few months before that had put me in the hospital with a concussion. All at once she embraced me again, so I held her awhile longer — never hard work — and when I looked up I saw a young black security guard eyeing us tentatively.

I said, “It’s okay, pal — we’re married. Has Frank Malin ever shown up?” Ginny moved behind me and did things to her face.

“Don’t know, sir. I came to write up a report on the assault.”

“You can do something better. See those two carts of trash barrels? Get a maintenance man to haul them over to Security and put them in the storeroom. They’ll just about fit.”

“Yes, sir. Could I ask why?”

“They’re evidence. A shoplifting ring was putting stolen merchandise in the trash, and Cooksey was collecting it.”

“Ah!”

I led Ginny away to the security office, and just before we got there she said, “R. J., I just remembered something: an extremely young man to be a police sergeant stopped by the house immediately after you left to come over here, and he gave me a report for you on Mike Cooksey’s fingerprints.”

“Sammons,” I said. “Right. Did he ask you about being married to a detective, by chance?”

“I... in a manner of speaking, yes. He also asked about my religious affiliation. What did you tell that man about me?”

“Well — the subject came up about Lutherans and Catholics and I just said—”

“Oh. No wonder he looked embarrassed. I told him I was Presbyterian.”

“Good — that ought to confuse him even more. You didn’t by chance bring along that report, did you? About Cooksey?”

The report on Cooksey’s fingerprints was brief but meaty. The fingers that made them attached to the hands of Michael Corcoran, frequent user of aliases, most recently a resident of the Pontiac Correctional Facility — specialty, car theft — and nephew of Thomas Alton, a man well known in certain local circles as a suspected receiver of stolen goods. This information was what might be called highly suggestive.

Ten minutes after talking over the report, we were in the reception area of the mall office, going through the file cabinets that flanked Barb Becker’s desk, searching for anything we could find about Christmas Temps. Frank Malin had never shown up for our meeting, even though his wife assured me over the phone that he’d left home at nine fifteen. So there was another worry.

Ginny found the Christmas Temps files in a tray on Barb Becker’s desk, and one look through them gave the rest of the show away. Fifty-six Christmas Temps were working as clerks in stores. The last six, entered on the master list all on the same day in the same handwriting, were those assigned to the six problem stores. One, Florence Siwinski, was now dead, which accounted for the absence in the evening’s haul of the trash barrel from The Wedge where she had worked.