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

“Well,” I continued, “she was also Mike Cooksey’s girl — his fiancée, in fact, although that was off while he was at Pontiac. I can’t tell you what charm Cooksey had to attract Barb in the first place, but he turned it back on when he got out, and suddenly he was there living with her, listening to her talk about her job, about Speedway Mall — how it worked from the inside — and about how he needed to find a job himself.

“I don’t honestly think Cooksey had a clear-cut idea of what he wanted to do after his prison stint, so when Barb wrangled him an interview for an opening on the Speedway custodial crew he went along with the idea, at least at first, but he also went to his uncle Tom Alton and got a false identity made up in the name of Cooksey, not Corcoran, that described a man recently discharged from the U. S. Navy. Because Mike had been in the Navy, just not recently or honorably.

“Barb, I’d guess, thought the false identity business was okay. She wanted Cooksey to get into some kind of honest work, and you don’t have to have a bleeding heart to understand that ex-cons have a hard time finding employment. The main point is, Speedway ended up hiring him — and then Tom Alton got ideas.”

“Who’s this Tom Alton?” asked Judy’s father.

Frank Malin broke in by saying, “He’s the biggest fence on the North Side, Mr. Pilske. Receiver of stolen goods. He’s so big he finances thieves to steal for him — everything from jewelry to cars to red-hot stoves.”

“Only this time it didn’t cost him anything except a little inspiration,” I said. “What with Barb being so enthusiastic about running the Christmas Temps program, and Mike hauling the garbage away from the backs of the stores two nights a week, and Christmas coming up pretty soon, his thought was to persuade Barb to put a handful of thieves into positions at the mall where they might shuffle a few fenceable goodies into the bottom of the trash twice a week. All in the spirit of Christmas greed, you might say.

“After Mike checked out the backs of the stores to learn their procedures, Alton selected six as the easiest to take the most profit from: Catterson’s, Mason’s, The Wedge, Orchid Records, Slade’s, and California Kitchens. Then the two of them told Barb about their little project and what her part in it was going to be. At the same time, Cooksey proposed that they get married on the profits and promised to go straight forever, and Barb, I’m afraid, caved in to the pressure. There were also some not-so-veiled threats by Cooksey, by the way, concerning Barb’s future health and personal appearance that probably helped sway her decision.

“At any rate, Alton lined up a crew of likely and likable thieves — including his own daughter — and Barb sent them out as Christmas Temps to the six targeted stores. This was actually a much riskier project than Alton realized, though, and my feeling, Judy, is that Frank and Speedway Security would have broken the ring by now through the process of elimination, even if Ginny and I hadn’t come into the business over the attack on you. All we really did was to intervene from a different angle, so we saw the problem in a different light. And, of course, Mike Cooksey’s stupidity and general incompetence would probably have blown the program to smithereens by this time anyway.

“And there was another problem as well.

“The deal Alton cut with the Christmas Temps gave them half the value of what they stole when it was resold, with Cooksey and Alton splitting the balance. Not a bad arrangement on the surface, but what it meant in real terms was that the young woman at Catterson Furs — Tom Alton’s daughter, strangely enough — stood to gain ten or twenty times what Florence Siwinski would make stealing from The Wedge.

“The Widow Siwinski, I think, was new to the game. Her husband had been a friend of Tom Alton’s, and Alton probably was trying, in his twisty old mind, to do her a good turn. But she didn’t see it that way. She looked upon herself as an employee with a grievance, taking as much risk for a few hundred dollars as Debbie Alton was doing for several thousand, so she finally went to Mike Cooksey and threatened to disclose the scheme to Speedway Management unless there was a more equitable distribution of the profits.

“Now, I’m told that Tom Alton has a long history of nonviolence, so my assumption is that Cooksey never consulted his uncle at all; he just asked Mrs. Siwinski to wait for him in the parking lot after work that night. Then he decided to be extra clever by running her down with a stolen car, which he would then drive to a chop shop for disassembly, and when he saw a new Mercedes by the cinema building, he must have thought his ship had come in. At car theft he had some talent, but as it turned out, he wasn’t so good at running down widows, with the result that he had to sneak into her hospital room here a couple of days later to finish the job. And that, Judy, is where you come in.”