Pleasure Thieves

They left the motor running, swinging both doors as they climbed out. The radio blared through the open door. It was a bleak windy night, and they pulled their coats tight against the cold. They stood before the great entrance door together. Somebody was coming to the ghost party. Harry reached into his coat as Phillip looked behind and around the grounds. With a sharp twisting movement, half obscured by Phillip's body, Harry opened the door. The blaring music accompanied them as they entered the silent house.

Inside, the mansion was frighteningly bright. Every light in the house seemed to be burning. They moved in unison, swiftly up the stairs taking them by two's.

At the landing, they turned abruptly and sprang to a door at the end of the hall. Harry quickly opened it, revealing a master bedroom. He strode across the room and yanked open the door of a huge dressing closet. Phillip started moving about the bedroom as Harry entered the large adjoining dressing room and brutally cleared a chair and a small table from one corner.

In a second, he cased the walls and floors for hidden drops, and then, finding none, turned to the bureau. With one yank, the top drawer was out and clanging against the corner wall. One glance, while going for the next, showed him the scattered contents. In ten seconds the bureau was a gaping hole.

He breathed heavily, sweating profusely. This was his work. There was a wildness and intensity about him, revealing the radical change in his usual, graceful, disinterested motions.

He moved clockwise around the room, overlooking nothing and never touching the same thing twice. Armfuls of clothes, hatboxes and shoe-filled racks were torn from the closet and thrown to the corner.

Systematically, he wrecked the place, panting. "Where are they?

"Where are they?" despising Mrs. Albright's purposeful sadism in hiding her jewels.

Phillip worked like a doctor in a contagious ward. He disturbed nothing, touched as little as possible. He moved through the bedroom opening drawers and fastidiously feeling their contents with outstretched lacquered fingers, going over the walls and floor, looking for the safe. On the dressing table he found the jewel box. Not what they were looking for. Not the real goods. But he dumped the contents on the table top and swept them into his briefcase.

Harry was finished with the closet. He moved like lightening and with an impersonal fury. His motions were monstrous and crude, but thorough. He turned to the last wall and picked up a small bureau.

Holding it face down he dumped all the drawers at once into the near corner. "Good thing, or bad thing," he thought, "that the maid had Thursday off." He wanted to kill, to ravish someone in his frustration.

"Where are they, where are they?" Mrs. Albright was giving them a good game.

He rifled through the contents on the floor. His forearm leaned against the radiator. He automatically withdrew his arm, then, after an instant's pause, touched the radiator in several places. It was cold. He reached behind it and in a second groping, his hand brought out a black steel safety-box.

Lock down, he smashed it open against the radiator in three powerful blows. Phillip entered and stood over him. Harry removed a decorative box of finely inlaid wood. He handed the box to Phillip and buttoned his coat as Phillip looked inside the box and nodded. "The game is over, Mrs. Gypsy."

They left the bedroom, glancing at the havoc behind them, and walked swiftly down the hall. They turned at the landing and passed a long table with an oddly shaped, cloth-draped form at the far end.

Phillip paused and raised the cloth. Beneath it, a small hexagonal wire cage held two sleeping love birds. They moved briskly down the staircase, not running. Harry paused before opening the door, and in the silence, Phillip heard his breathing. He pulled open the front door and they were assaulted by the screaming music of the car radio. In a second they were inside the vehicle and swerving away from the lighted house. They sent up a spray of gravel as they drove jet-like down the drive.

They turned onto the tree-lined road. Nothing like living in the country. Their faces were grim. They turned the bend where the Albright limousine had disappeared six minutes before. Phillip reached into the glove compartment for a towel. He passed the towel over his forehead and handed it to Harry. Harry wiped his steaming face. They saw head-lights ahead, and a car swung around the bend. It swished by them and in a brief glimpse, they saw the wheel. Phillip moved his head to watch it in the rear mirror. It relaxed them to see the Albright car heading home. Perfect form, a plump round circle.

"The end of a perfect evening," Harry commented.

"What are you talking about, my boy?" Phillip checked his watch.

"It's only a little past eight o'clock. The night is young."

CHAPTER VI