“Now remember, Willy,” the Colonel whispered; “you will have a limited time to execute your maneuver.” We were in the Colonel’s room, standing at the door, me in my stocking feet. He was holding a book of poetry.
“You are to follow me down the stairway, and then wait,” he said, “remaining undetected at the bottom of the stairs, until I give you the signal okay.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Don’t say ‘okay.’ Always answer with ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Leave no room for ambiguity.”
“But you said ‘okay’ was the signal.”
“Oh, I see; you were confirming the signal. Perhaps we should designate another code word in order to avoid confusion.”
“I know what to do! Isn’t it almost time to start the operation?”
“Oh,” he said, surprised. He’d forgotten the time. He looked at his watch and showed me, tapping it with his finger. “In fifteen seconds,” he said.
He counted down the seconds, nodded when he got to zero, and then I followed him down the stairs and waited at the bottom of the stairway.
I was supposed to stay out of sight in the stairway, but I stuck my head out and watched him walk down the hall. He went into the lobby, and I couldn’t see him then, but I heard him fall and groan. He used to fall down a lot anyway. Elsie ran out from her parlor and into the lobby.
“Are you all right, Arthur?” she said. She was the only one who ever called him “Arthur.”
“I think so,” he said. “I think I am—all right.”
When he said “all right,” I didn’t know if that meant “okay” and I was supposed to go, and I didn’t know what to do. I finally figured that he didn’t say “okay” because he wasn’t ready yet. Maybe Elsie was facing the wrong way or something.
“Let me help you up,” Elsie said.
I couldn’t see what was going on but it took a while and he had to fall a couple more times before he finally got her settled the way he wanted. Then they got to talking and either I didn’t hear him say “okay,” or he forgot. I wasn’t going to wait all day so finally I tiptoed down the hall and I could see them sitting in the lobby. They were talking about setting up Nancy’s funeral, and Elsie said she should have sold the hotel and moved to Florida, and that Nancy took her for a fool.
Elsie wasn’t looking, so I slipped into her parlor and grabbed her key ring from the hook on the wall and headed back without her seeing me. There was one tread on the stairs that always squeaked, so on my way up the stairs I skipped that one.
The Colonel’s orders were for me to unlock Nancy’s door, open it just enough to be sure that it was unlocked, close the door, put the key ring back on its hook in Elsie’s parlor, and then reconnoiter in the lobby. I unlocked Nancy’s door just like the Colonel told me to, and went in. The statue was missing, just like I’d thought. On the top of her bureau, where the statue should have been, there was a spot with no dust. Her suitcase was open on the floor. I pawed through the clothes in it but the statue wasn’t there either. I took her bird feeder from the closet. That was the main thing I wanted. I started for the door and then I thought, What the hell, I might as well get some cat food for Mr. Winkley, so I went to Nancy’s cupboard and took a couple of cans of cat food and put them in my pockets. I put the bird feeder and the cat food in my room and went downstairs just like the Colonel told me to.
I walked down the hall and peeked around the corner into the lobby. The Colonel was supposed to have been reading poetry to Elsie, but they were talking about me.
“He doesn’t care about anybody,” she said.
That wasn’t true. I put the key ring back on its hook and went into the lobby. The Colonel got up from the sofa when he saw me. It looked for a second like he didn’t know why I was there, and then he remembered.
Before he could say anything Elsie gave me a dirty look and said, “My diamond brooch is missing. It’s a pin with diamonds. It was on my table near where you sat the other day.”
“I didn’t take it,” I said. “Maybe Stanley took it when he was eating lunch with you. He was sitting in the same chair where I always used to sit.”
“They’re not real diamonds,” she said. “Nobody will give you any money for it.”
I was going to tell her off but the Colonel put his hand on my shoulder and so I didn’t say anything.
He and I went up to Nancy’s room. I turned the door knob while he watched in case someone stepped out into the hallway.
“What took you so long?” he whispered.
The Colonel had whispered, so I did too. “There were a lot of keys on that ring,” I said.
I opened the door a couple of inches, reached in and held the chain lock that was dangling from its chain so that it wouldn’t bang against the door, and opened the door the rest of the way. We went in the room and closed the door behind us.
“Don’t touch anything, Willy; fingerprints.”
I pointed at the bureau. “The statue’s gone,” I said. Of course I already knew that but I didn’t want the Colonel to think I had contravened his orders and gone into the room and taken the bird feeder and cat food.
He got down on one knee and was looking at the inside of Nancy’s door. Then he signaled to me and I thought it was something about the door but it was just that he needed help getting up. I helped him to his feet and then I found two pairs of rubber gloves under the sink and gave one pair to him. We put on the gloves and I unlatched and opened the window because it was hot in there. I stuck my head out the window, and Mr. Winkley was poking around in the dumpster below.
I turned around and the Colonel was looking in Nancy’s pocketbook. I told him the statue was missing and he came over and looked.
“Perhaps she was murdered,” he said. We searched everywhere in the room for the statue but didn’t find it.
While he went through Nancy’s suitcase I emptied her pocketbook onto the table, thinking maybe the Colonel might have missed something. There were no clues in her pocketbook, not one single thing that told me anything about her death, but I had the feeling I was missing something.
Mr. Winkley came up the fire escape and in through the open window and walked around. He might have been looking for Nancy, but I don’t know. Then he stuck his paw underneath Nancy’s bureau. There was something under there, and he was trying to get at it. The Colonel and I stopped and watched. Mr. Winkley looked up at us and meowed. We moved the bureau and there was a small flashlight covered with gray rubber. Mr. Winkley crouched down and stared at it. Then he pounced on it and he was rolling around on his back fighting with the flashlight that was on his belly.
The Colonel tried to take the flashlight but Mr. Winkley wouldn’t let him, so I took it. It felt dead in my hand.
“It’s not Nancy’s,” I said. It just didn’t feel like Nancy’s.
“How do you know it’s not hers?” he said, sucking the back of his hand where Mr. Winkley had scratched him.
“It’s gray,” I said. “It’s not pretty.”
We moved the bureau back and put the flashlight back under it. I was putting Nancy’s things back in her pocketbook when the Colonel found her bank book on a chair. He brought it over and we went through it. I had thought she had a thousand dollars, but it was more. She had sixteen hundred dollars in the bank. I mean, she had had it, but the book said that she’d cleaned out her account on the afternoon just before she died. I knew she’d been working a lot of overtime and saving, but I never knew anybody could save that much money. Then I realized something.
“There’s no money in her pocketbook!” I said.
“No money at all?”
“Not even any change. When I looked in her pocketbook I thought I was missing something. I didn’t know what it was, though, because it wasn’t there. Her money’s missing.”
“And yet,” he said, “she transacted a substantial withdrawal. If the money is not somewhere in this room, we have clear evidence of murder.”
We looked all around, in the drawers, in and under the bed, in the cabinets, the closet, everywhere, for the money. I even pried the back off her radio with my jack-knife and looked inside. If there had been any money in that room, we would have found it.
“Now empty your pockets,” he said.
“What?”
“Procedure; it’s nothing personal.”
If it had been anybody but the Colonel I would have smacked him.
I emptied my pockets onto the table: my jack-knife, a matchbook, a dime and three pennies, a blue jay feather, my key to The Morpheum, a room key, my key to the supply closet, and my rabbit’s foot.
“Now your wallet,” he said.
“I don’t have a wallet,” I said. I turned around and raised my arms and he patted me down.
I still had my hands up and my back to him and I nodded over my shoulder, in the direction of the stuff from my pockets that was on the table. “That room key is Nancy’s,” I said. “I found it in her pocketbook and I was going to give it to you so we could get back in if we had to.” I lowered my arms and turned back to him.
“Where’s your room key?” he said.
“I lost it a long time ago,” I said. “I don’t lock my door.”
I put my things back in my pockets, except for Nancy’s key, which he kept so that we could lock her door on the way out and get back in if we had to.
I was still mad at him for searching me and I thought of a way to get back at him.
“Now you,” I said. “Empty your pockets.”
He wasn’t expecting that, and it set him back some.
“I should have briefed you more thoroughly on investigative procedures,” he said. “The chain of command …”
“Your pockets, Colonel. You searched me; now I have to search you.”
“Oh all right; if you insist.”
We’d been playing chess earlier in the day and I knew he’d taken one of my pawns off the board and slipped it into his pocket when he thought I wasn’t looking. He emptied his pockets onto the table and I picked up the pawn and held it in front of his face.
“I would not have expected this from you, Colonel,” I said.
He just turned around and raised his arms. I patted him down and went through his wallet, just so that I wouldn’t have to be mad at him anymore.
We decided to look around in the dumpster. He said that if he and I went at the same time it might look suspicious, so he told me to go first and to wait for him. I put Mr. Winkley in my room and went down. Mr. Winkley was in the dumpster when I got there. I’d forgotten that I’d left the balcony door open.
In a few minutes the Colonel came, carrying a trash basket. If anybody saw him, they’d just think he was taking out his trash.
Mr. Winkley was inside the dumpster rustling the papers. That startled the Colonel and he put his finger to his lips for me to be quiet, and listened.
“It’s just Mr. Winkley looking for stuff in the dumpster,” I said.
“Don’t you ever feed that cat?”
“Course I do, but he likes it in there; he used to live there.”
I climbed into the dumpster and looked for clues while the Colonel kept watch. I was supposed to call out every item I found, but there was so much stuff in there that I couldn’t tell everything. If you’re ever in a dumpster and you find a full bottle of beer with the cap still on it, sniff it before you drink it. It was the Colonel’s brand.
“Geez, Colonel,” I said. “I just almost drank some of your piss from a beer bottle I found in here.”
He didn’t answer right away because he had to think about it first.
“Your instructions were to report each item as you found it,” he said. “Instead you withheld evidence in direct contravention of orders.”
“It wasn’t evidence,” I said.
“Also,” he said, “you forgot to repair my sink drain as you had promised.”
“Well, Elsie ordered us not to piss in the sinks, so you’re the one that’s contravening, not me. Anyway, I don’t see how you can—”
“Shhh! Somebody’s coming,” he said. He started humming ‘April Love’, and emptied his trash basket into the dumpster, and all the stuff—coffee grounds, egg shells, banana peels—landed on top of my head.
After the person had passed he asked me what else I had found.
“There’s a lot of empty Clorox bottles,” I said.
“How many?”
“A lot. You think maybe Lucille bleached her hair again?”
“Yes, that must be it. What else is in there?”
“A lot of papers, orange peels, ice cube bags …”
“Ice cube bags?”
“Yeah. Mr. Winkley just found a fish head.”
“Ice cube bags?”
“That’s what I said. There’s a snowman, and he’s pointing to three ice cubes that have letters on them: I … C … E.”
He didn’t say anything. I could tell he was thinking, and that it might take a while. While I waited, I sat down in the dumpster and ate a half a Twinkie. It wasn’t evidence.
“It’s hot in here, Colonel, and it stinks,” I said. “Can I come out now?”
He was still thinking. I couldn’t see him from inside the dumpster, but he was a very deep thinker and when he was thinking like that you could almost feel it.
“Bleach and ice,” he said to himself, “when combined with acetone … Look around for paint thinner, Willy.”
I looked around. “I don’t see any paint thinner,” I said. “No can of paint thinner in here.”
“All right. Bring out one of the bleach bottles and an ice cube bag. We’ll regroup at HQ—headquarters—in ten minutes to discuss our findings.”