I was out that afternoon, too, on the eternal job hunting that took most of my daylight hours. I returned around four thirty, and as I came past Mrs. Garr’s living room I heard a drawer closing softly. I stopped to ask how Mrs. Garr had liked the movie.
Mrs. Garr wasn’t there. Only the mousey little gentleman from upstairs, Mr. Grant, was sitting on the davenport.
“I wonder if Mrs. Garr won’t be in soon; I’m waiting for her to pay my rent.” His speech was as dry and brisk as he was.
But his hand on his knee shook so it moved the knee.
“She went to a movie with Mrs. Halloran. She should be back any minute.”
“Oh, thank you. I won’t wait, then.”
He hurried out past me and upstairs.
I stared after him in unbelief.
So there was a rummager! So there was some foundation for Mrs. Garr’s imaginings! And that foundation was in Mr. Grant; little, blue-eyed Mr. Grant!
Thoughtfully I left my doors open and sat in the upholstered chair in my left bay window, where I could watch the hall while I read the paper I’d brought home.
I’d only just settled down when a man I’d never seen before crept silently out of the room under the stairs, came to a dead stop on seeing me, then shot down the hall and out the front door.
4
“WELL, WHAT THE . . . !” I said, jumping up.
What was going on in this house?
Should I call the police?
I went to the head of the basement stairs, but I could hear nothing down there except dark silence—the type of silence that’s so much more frightening than any understandable sound. My nerves weren’t what they had been before the discovery of Sam Zeitman.
Hurriedly I got away from there, hastening toward the upstairs; I wanted company. Who else was in the house?
I knew Mr. Grant was, but I couldn’t very well speak to him about the prowler, not when I’d almost caught him rummaging among Mrs. Garr’s possessions, too. If anything queer was going on, he probably was in on it. The watch, perhaps.
I knew, by this time, just about who lived where in the upstairs. Miss Sands wouldn’t be home yet. I walked back toward the Wallers’ door, but stopped with my hand lifted to knock. Mrs. Garr suspected the Wallers.
If she was right, they might be in on it, too.
I left there for the front of the house. The bath was empty. The room ahead of that was quiet, too. But in the rooms at the front, thank goodness, I heard a steady thump, thump.
I knocked.
“Come in,” yelled a man’s voice.
The thump, thump went on, slowly and steadily, but nothing else happened. So I turned the knob and went in.
I almost forgot what I’d come for, because I walked in on a man with nothing on but a pair of shorts, chinning himself on a bar which had been put in at the top of the doorway between that room and the next. It was the stocky man with the brown eyes, Mr. Kistler. With his clothes off, he looked like nothing so much as a buff gorilla; his arms were long for his height and obviously powerful; he pulled himself up until his head bumped the casing—that was the thump I’d heard—and counted.
“Twenty-six . . . twenty-seven . . . twenty-eight . . . Oh, hello!”
He dropped to the floor, and again I thought of a gorilla; he took the jar so easily on bent knees.
“Hello again!” He disappeared in the other room, came back shouldering into a bathrobe. He smiled ingratiatingly.
“I wasn’t expecting a lady, but one’s always welcome.”
I stuck right by the door.
“You took my breath away. I don’t usually walk in on exactly this scene.”
“You never can tell what opportunities will develop,” he said cheerfully.
“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t—I came up because a strange man that acted like a burglar or something came out of the cellar. Mrs. Garr’s out. He came up the cellar stairs tiptoeing; he must have because I didn’t hear him at all. Then when he saw me through my open door he dashed out the front as if he expected me to yell for the police.”
“What interesting adventures you have! Weren’t you the one that found the slain gangster, too? We’ll look into this.” He left for the other room again; when he came back he had added slippers to his costume.
He ran ahead down the stairs, but I went, too.
The basement, as far as we could see, was empty now. Mrs. Tewman’s rooms in the front were locked and seemed undisturbed. Mrs. Garr’s kitchen in the back was locked and seemed undisturbed, too; I was sure of that last because as we came near the door the dog barked and the cats cried. She always locked her pets in there when she went out on errands, leaving the key on a nail on the casing. The key hung there now. Those animals would have shot out of there if anyone had opened the door.
“Not much evidence of prowling here,” my fellow detective said.
I took another look around the furnace room. One thing you could say for Mrs. Garr was that she didn’t keep a mess in her cellar; she was too much enamored with the idea that every scrap of paper burned saved on the coal bill. The furnace room was bare except for a pile of newspapers on a box near the storage-room door. That pile of papers . . .
“Look! Some of the papers have been knocked down.”
“You mean you think we have a newspaper fiend in our midst? What depravity! What vice!”
“They might have been knocked off by someone hurrying into or out of the storeroom.”
The young man walked toward the storage-room door, tried the knob gently. It turned.
“Whoever’s in there come out,” he yelled, standing back.
No one came.
The
