“What could we do, for Christ’s sake? They put us on that goddam roadblock, we couldn’t get — “
“Yd of got off! You think Yd of stood around that roadblock for seven hours? That’s what’s wrong with the goddam cops, not a one of you’s got the brains of a pissant! You couldn’t figure out — “
“Now, wait a minute, Lozini, you can’t — “
“Don’t you tell me what I can do and what I can’t do, you son of a bitch, you’re nothing but one of my two- dollar Boy Scouts, and if you were found with your head busted open in some vacant lot tomorrow morning nobody’d even look twice. So you just watch what the hell you say to me, boy.”
The cop stood swaying, and Parker watched him, wondering which way he’d go. Cops tend to have pride where their brains ought to be, and right now it was going to be a battle between this cop’s pride and his brains, with the pride telling him he was a cop in a uniform and he shouldn’t let any hood like Lozini chew him out in front of a bunch of other hoods no matter what the situation or the relationship between them, and with the brains telling him Lozini was just as mad as he looked about the death of his protege Gal and wouldn’t think twice about taking it out on a cop, particularly one that he half-blamed for Gal’s death in the first place.
This time, brains won out. When the cop finally spoke; it was much quieter, so quiet Parker could barely make out the words. “All right,” he said. “You’re upset, I know that. I’m just as sorry about Cal as you are, I respected him as a man, I liked to think he was maybe a friend of mine. Maybe a smarter man than me would have got himself off duty last night, I don’t know. I doubt it, I don’t think anybody got himself off duty last night, but maybe it could have been done. But it wasn’t my decision that we come in here anyway, after the seven hours, it was Cal’s. And yours. I’m sorry about what happened to Cal, but I’m not taking any of the blame for it.”
“Oh, you’re not. You son of a bitch, you’ll tell me what you will take and what you won’t take.”
“Any man here will,” the cop said, “if you push him hard enough. Dunstan and me, we’ve got to spend some time on patrol, because if we stay in here all day, sooner or later the captain’s gonna miss us and start people looking for us, and maybe they’ll even look here, and I don’t think you’d like that. So that’s why we have to leave for a while. We’ll be back within an hour.”
Lozini didn’t answer anything for a minute. When the cop had turned reasonable it had pulled some of the sting of Lozini’s bad temper, too. He was trying to stay hot and angry, but it wasn’t working too well. Finally, down there, he shrugged and said, “I don’t give a damn. Do what you want. But before you go, I got a cop-type problem here for you.”
The cop looked around, obviously puzzled. “Sure,” he said. “What is it?”
“We got us what they call in the mystery books a locked room,” Lozini said. “What my wife reads every night in bed, mysteries about locked rooms. A nice detective problem.” He made a broad gesture, including the whole theater in its sweep.
“Here’s a theater building,” he said. “We got all the exits watched, every exit has been watched since before the last time we knew for sure the guy was in the building. We’ve searched the place from top to bottom, we’ve looked in every room, I even sent a guy up on the roof. We can’t find him. He isn’t here. So how did he get out? And if he didn’t get out, if he’s still in here, where is he?”
The cop looked at his partner, and back at Lozini. “How do I know? I don’t know anything about locked-room mysteries. Maybe there’s someplace you didn’t look.”
“We looked everywhere.”
“Then he got out in the confusion.”
“My boys say they weren’t confused, they say they never stopped watchin the doors.”
“Then he wasn’t in here at all, maybe.”
“He was in here because he dropped all these pipes and things on our heads. And besides that, we know he was in here because George out there in that Island in the Sky thing saw him come in.”
The other cop took a hesitant half-step forward and said, “Maybe he’s one of us.”
They all looked at him. Lozini said, “Hah?”
“That’s one of the ways they solve it in the mystery stories,” the cop said. His voice sounded nervous, as though he was sorry now he’d started talking. “The way it works,” he went on, “the guy everybody’s looking for doesn’t really exist, he’s actually one of the searchers. Like the guy would be somebody that works for you, and he got in on this robbery, and he spent last night in the park here, and today he made a lot of confusion in the theater here and then just joined everybody else and went around helping to look for himself.”
There was silence. Everybody looked at the cop — Dunstan, the other cop had called him — and Parker saw the cop squirm under all the attention. He acted as though he was going to say something more, but he never did.
Finally Lozini spoke. “That’s either a stroke of genius,” he said quietly, “or the goddamnedest piece of shit I ever heard in my life.” He took a step closer to the apron of the stage. “I know every man I called this morning,” he said, “and I don’t see anybody here I didn’t call. You guys that were on the doors before. Did anybody at all go out? One of us, or anybody.”
There was a ragged response, all no.
“And the guys I sent to take your places,” Lozini said, “I sent, and I know who they are. You guys go ask them did anybody at all go out since they took over.”
There was a rustle and shuffle of motion, dying out, and then Lozini looked over at the young cop and said, “That’s the kind of thing my wife would like, she’d go for that. I think you’re wrong, but I think you got brains, that’s a very interesting solution. You got a lotta brains for a cop.”
The cop sort of bobbed his head and shuffled, but didn’t say anything.
They waited a couple of minutes until all the messengers had come back, all with the same answer. Nobody had gone out.
Lozini nodded. “Right,” he said. “That’s what I figured.” He looked at the young cop again. “Any more ideas?”
“No, sir. No.” The answer was more croaked than spoken.
