most likely a fat one who hadn’t wanted to climb up two flights in the first place.
So I started up the fire escape, up past the fourth floor and on to the roof. Someone had built a redwood sundeck up there, and there were trees and shrubs in large redwood planters. It was all very lovely, but there was one trouble with it—I couldn’t get off it. The adjoining buildings were both a hundred or more feet taller than the one I was standing on, and the heavy fire door leading back into the building couldn’t be opened without a key. This wouldn’t have been a problem if I’d had my tools along, but who figured I’d need them?
Back down the fire escape. I paused at the fourth-floor landing, trying to decide if I wanted to take my chances with whoever was posted at ground level. I could always break into the basement and just hide there in the boiler room until the heat died down, but did I really want to do that? For that matter, did I want to scurry past the bedroom window of the Porlock apartment when the police were most likely already in there?
I took a moment to check the two fourth-floor apartments. The one on the right—4-D, I suppose, directly above the Porlock place—had its shade drawn. I pressed my ear to the windowpane and caught Brady Bunch reruns on the television set. The shade was drawn a few yards to the left at 4-C, but I couldn’t hear anything inside, nor could I see any light around the edges of the window shade.
Of course the window was locked.
If I’d had a glass cutter I could have drawn a neat freehand circle on the appropriate pane of glass, reached in and turned the window lock. If I’d had some tape I could have broken any pane I wanted with no more noise than you’d make snapping a dry twig. If I’d had…
If wishes were horses, burglars would ride. I kicked in a pane of glass and closed my eyes until the tinkling stopped. I put my ear to the opening I’d created and listened for a moment or two, then unlocked the window, raised it, and stepped through it.
A few minutes later I left that apartment in a more conventional manner than I’d entered it, departing through the door and walking briskly down a flight of stairs. I encountered a couple of uniformed patrolmen on the third floor. The door to 3-D was open now, with other cops making themselves busy inside the apartment, while these two stood in the hall with nothing to do.
I asked one what the trouble was. He jutted out his chin at me and told me it was just routine. I nodded, reassured, and went down the other two flights and out.
I wanted to go home. It may or may not be where the heart is but it’s where the burglar’s tools are, and a burglar, like a workman, is only as good as his tools, and I felt naked without mine. I wasn’t sure if the cops had a make on me yet. They’d get one before long, I was fairly sure of that, but I didn’t doubt my ability to get in and out of my apartment before they set about looking for me. I had my tools there, I had cash there, and I would have liked to make a quick pit stop and equip myself for whatever lay ahead.
Because what lay ahead didn’t look too good from where I sat. Madeleine Porlock had been left with more than the traditional number of holes in her head, and my fingerprints were undoubtedly plastered all over that apartment—on the cup I’d been drinking from, on the glass-topped table, and God knows where else. The same criminal genius that had wrapped my inert fingers around the murder gun would have seen to that.
The police would have a lot of questions for me, and they wouldn’t even pay attention to my answers. I, on the other hand, had some hard questions of my own.
Who was Madeleine Porlock? How did she fit into the whole business? Why had she drugged me, and where had her killer come from, and why had he murdered her?
Whatever had become of Rudyard Whelkin?
And, finally, how did the Sikh fit into all of this?
The last question was no more easily answered than the others, but it made me realize I couldn’t go home. By now