possible hiding places; in fact, Haggard's men became so paranoid midway through the search of Markwood and Jame that they all had the feeling that the thieves were slipping around behind them, crawling from one counter to the next and moving always at the periphery of vision. However, they found no one in the store. It was a simple matter, by comparison, to check the changing rooms in Archer's Tailor Shoppe and declare that place clean. Likewise, Gallery Gallery-the mall's rather expensive art gallery-was easily looked into and found empty. Tie and Kerchief offered few places for concealment, and all these were unused. Freskin's Interior Decoration was wildly partitioned into sample rooms, but all of these were quiet and unlived-in.
'I feel like a kid playing hide-and-seek,' one of Haggard's men said, disgusted with the whole affair.
'There's a difference,' Haggard said. 'When you were a kid playing hide-and-seek, there wasn't any chance at all that you could get your brains blown out.'
Rookies Hawbaker and Muni were working under Officer Shrout over in the west corridor toward the front of the mall. They did not have to prowl through the Plaza's business office, because that was crawling with homicide detectives and technicians from the police laboratory downtown. But they had to check out everything else. They stayed close together and kept their revolvers drawn; Shrout was only seven months away from retirement and did not intend to get killed and be cheated out of his pension, while Patrolmen Hawbaker and Muni were too young to be anything but scared witless. Cautiously they moved through the flower shop and then through Craftwell Gifts, went down to the fancy shoe store and then across to The New Place, a hip clothing store where the prices were decidedly unhip. In the House of Books, where some of the rows of shelves were eight feet high, they had a bad moment when Hawbaker and Muni collided coming out of different aisles and almost shot each other in terror. Henry's Gaslight Restaurant, with its individually partitioned booths and its large kitchen lined with.food-storage closets, was the most harrowing part of the stalk, but it, too, proved to be deserted.
In the south wing additional lab technicians were at work in the jewelry store and in Countryside Savings and Loan. If anyone were hiding in those two places, one of the policemen would have tripped over him by this time. Therefore, Officer Brandywine and his two men concentrated their search on Sasbury's, the mall's other large clothing-department store. Like Haggard's group in Markwood and Jame, these men became so jumpy that they were looking over their shoulders more than they were watching where they were going. But they did not find anyone. Tramping on the broken glass that littered most of the corridor, a bit unnerved by the sound of it crunching under their shoes, they went next to Harold Leonardo Furriers and poked around in the cold-storage vaults full of animal pelts. All that was hiding in Harold's was a herd of dead mink.
When Officer Peterson, the last search party leader to bring in a negative report, told Lieutenant Kluger that his men had not found a trace of the thieves, the lieutenant thrust out his jaw and began to shout at them. He slammed his fist on the top of the card table that he was using for a desk, and his voice rose until it seemed to drown out the steady susurration of the fountain behind him. 'They have to be here! There is no way they could have gotten out! No way!'
Peterson, Haggard, Shrout, Brandywine, and the other men just stared at him, unable to say anything that would please him.
'They have to be hiding in here,' Kluger said through gritted teeth. 'Somewhere in this mall, you've overlooked a hiding space big enough to contain three men.' He glared at them, waiting for one of them to dare to disagree. When they remained mute, he said, 'Change off. Take different corridors this time. Peterson, you search the north hall. Haggard, go over the ground Shrout covered on the west end; see if you can spot something he missed. Shrout, take the south corridor. Brandywine, you take the east stores and the warehouse.'
Haggard started to say something to Peterson.
'Officer Haggard!' Kluger snapped. 'I'd prefer that you did not tell Peterson where you've already searched. Let him start fresh, without preconceptions.'
Haggard frowned, nodded grudgingly.
'Now move,' Kluger said.
As they were leaving, Evelyn Ledderson arrived. Though it was past three o'clock in the morning, and though she had been through quite an ordeal in the course of the night, she appeared to have showered and applied makeup and started her day only a couple of hours ago. Her short green skirt and ruffled white blouse were wrinkled and smudged, but she was crisp and alert and extremely attractive. 'They said you wanted to question me.'
Kluger smiled. 'That's right.' He pointed to the folding chair that was set up on the other side of the card table. 'Just sit down there and help me tie up a few loose ends. I'm sure we can let you go home shortly.'
She sat down. 'Why do I have to be questioned twice?'
Kluger settled into the other chair and folded his hands on the table. 'Those other detectives are with homicide. I'm a burglary-and-theft man. So there are sort of two investigations going on at the same time.' He felt slightly tongue-tied in her presence.
'Go ahead then,' she said.
'You worked for Mr. Rudolph Keski?'
'Yes.'
'He was the owner of this mall?'
'He owned most of it.'
'What were you-his secretary?'
She smiled coldly. 'Yes.'
'Did you often work evenings?'
'Only on Wednesday nights,' she said, recrossing her slim legs. 'Every Wednesday Mr. Keski and his business associates ate an early dinner at Henry's Gaslight.' She pointed to the restaurant that faced out on the lounge. 'Then they came over to the office and discussed the week's finances until closing time. Mr. Keski and I always stayed another hour or so, attending to the details that had come up during the meeting.'
'Was that one of his associates in there with him when he was killed?' Kluger asked.
'No. That was his bodyguard.'
'I see.' He thought about that for a while, staring unabashedly at her face, slender shoulders, and full breasts. Then he said, 'Tell me what happened. How was Keski killed?'
She told him, quickly, succinctly.
'That was smart work, using that alarm pedal.'
'It wasn't so smart,' she said. 'I was terrified.'
He smiled at her, wondering how he could go about asking for a date. 'Then they tied you up in the warehouse?'
'Yes.' Unconsciously she rubbed her wrists where the wire had encircled them.
'I've already talked to the night watchmen,' Kluger explained. 'I won't waste a lot of time going over old ground.'
'I am awfully tired,' she said.
'I appreciate that, Miss Ledderson,' he said, smiling and nodding to show her how sympathetic he was. 'Or? May I call you Evelyn?'
She leaned forward seductively, then winked at him and said, 'Why don't you just keep on calling me Miss Ledderson?' Her dark eyes bored straight through him and saw much more than he wanted her to know.
He colored, looked at his hands, glanced at the spritzing fountain, and felt like a schoolboy caught doing something filthy. 'I understand? This must have been difficult for you. I was only trying to be friendly.'
'I know what you were trying to be,' she said.
At that moment, when he realized that she was not the sort of woman who could be easily fooled, Kluger lost all interest in her. Women who could hold their own, women who were sharp and perceptive and not afraid to speak their minds never had appealed to him. They offended his sense of tradition, of male-female lightness. He liked the soft and helpless type, the ones who needed support and guidance from sun up to sunset. He didn't want to have to compete with a woman in the bedroom. It never occurred to him, at least not on a conscious level, that he was afraid of losing that competition.
His voice had a nasty twist to it now. 'You must have known that Rudolph Keski hasn't always been a legitimate businessman.'
'Oh?' She seemed amused.
'He used to be in the rackets.'
She smiled. 'He was in jail, then?'
