Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 26, No. 4. Whole No. 143, October 1955

The Little Doctor drained his glass, crossed the street, and went into the store by a side entrance. With Lucas beside him he made his way to the jewelry department on the second floor. Alice looked up anxiously from her customers, but the Little Doctor made a gesture of reassurance.

“There’s one man we can’t count on to move fast, and that’s your redhead,” he observed to the Inspector. “Because he has one shoe off, just like Justin Galmet... Now, tell me this: If you planned to rob a bank or office employee, what day of the month would you choose to do it?”

His questions were almost unbearably irritating, but perhaps this was only his way of containing his impatience.

“What day? What do you mean?”

“Just what I say. What day of the month would you pick out if you wanted to hold up a bank employee? January 4th, for instance?”

“I don’t see...”

“Never mind. January 4th would be a very bad choice, because you’d find little on him. He’d just have paid his rent and the Christmas holidays would be only a few days behind. No, the time to rob a white-collar man is directly after pay-day... Don’t you notice anything around you?...”

Lucas was too annoyed to reply, and the Little Doctor continued to soliloquize:

“The crowd is twice as large as yesterday. It’s a crowd of real buyers, and the cash registers are filling up with money.”

The Inspector pricked up his ears.

“Do you by any chance mean...?”

But his question was interrupted by the bell, which clanged through the whole store, while the piped music struck up a march in order to speed the customers out.

“You’ll see,” said the Little Doctor. “If something happens it will be very quick. Don’t lean over too far, or you’ll make yourself conspicuous.”

He himself knew exactly what to watch for. The cashier at “No. 89” sealed a big envelope and came out of her cage. The crowd was flowing like a stream of lava among the counters and she had to fight her way through it in order to reach the elevator. Suddenly she cried out, and at the very same moment the Little Doctor detected a pearl-gray hat beside her. What happened next had the appearance of chaos. A woman screamed, and another one, whose child had been knocked over, screamed even louder. Some people, mindful perhaps of the recent murder, stampeded for the doors, while the redhead detective rushed forward, minus his left shoe.

“We needn’t bother to hurry down,” said the Little Doctor, unable to contain his joy. “We’d only get there too late. If your men do their duty...”

The gray hat had disappeared, and the crowd pouring out of the store mingled with the crowd on the sidewalk.

The man with the gray hat was in Inspector Lucas’ office, with his face scratched and his collar torn, looking somewhat the worse for wear. He had been nabbed, after a struggle, just as he was slipping into a car parked right in front of the police car itself. But the envelope wasn’t on him, and it was not found anywhere along the path he had taken. Who knows how many accomplices had passed it through their hands along the way? He had planned a masterly job and even now he did not lose countenance, although he could not help returning the Little Doctor’s penetrating stare.

“Unless I’m mistaken, Inspector, this is the leader of the ring of which you told me.”

“Go ahead and see if you can pin anything on me!” said the prisoner. “The cashier can’t possibly say that I took the envelope from her. In a crowd like that, it might have been anyone.” And there was some reason for his boasting.

“Do you know what particularly impressed me, Inspector?” said the Little Doctor. “The fact that the place where Justin Galmet was sitting when he met his death was a strategic position. First, cashier’s cage ‘No. 89’ is the only one anywhere near a door; second, this door is the one most frequently used, because it is the nearest to the subway entrance. Now it was on a Saturday that Galmet came hastily down from the jewelry department. What could he have seen below? This man in the gray hat! And he knew that the presence of this man meant something was cooking!”

The Little Doctor was thirsty but he had to soothe his taut nerves with no more than a cigarette.

“When he was on the Force, I’m sure Galmet dealt with thefts of this kind. That’s probably what lay behind his resignation. He figured that if every thief gave him a 10 or 20 per cent rake-off... Do you see now? He knew their faces, and he could live off their work instead of turning them in! Not a very pretty idea, but a clever one. He lived quietly, keeping an eye on his chickens and waiting for them to hatch. While he was making small purchases in the stores, his practiced eye spotted the petty operators. That’s how he managed to lead a typical middle-class existence and put 10,000 francs in the bank every week. Until one day he fell on bigger game...”