Man on a leash - By Charles Williams Page 0,31
just start from the beginning.”
“All right.” She took a deep breath. “On the way back from the airport I decided while I had the car out I might as well do some grocery shopping, and I bought some things for you too—a steak and a bottle of rosé and some tonic water, oh, a bagful of stuff. After I’d put mine away, I thought I’d take yours over and tidy up the apartment a little. So I went over and took the elevator up, and when I opened the door, I almost dropped the bag and my purse and everything. There was a man standing right there in the living room, with a kind of tool bag open on the rug. But it was funny—I mean, I was scared blue, but he didn’t seem to be startled at all. With my arms full like that I must have fumbled around for maybe fifteen seconds getting the door open—I had the wrong key at first—so he had some warning. He just smiled and said, ‘Good afternoon, are you Mrs. Romstead?’ and leaned down to get something out of the tool kit.
“By then I’d got my heart down out of my throat and could speak, so I asked him what he was doing there. He took a slip of paper out of a breast pocket—he had on a white coverall—and said, ‘Mr. Romstead called us to check out the simalizer and put a new frammistat in his KLH.’ That wasn’t what he actually said, of course, but some technical jargon that didn’t mean a thing to me, and he had the console of the KLH pulled out from the wall as if he were going to work on it. He said the manager let him in, which I knew was a damn lie—the office wouldn’t let anybody in an apartment when the tenant’s not there—but I didn’t know what to do. If I started to run, he might grab me and drag me inside to keep me from calling the police.
“And, believe me, I didn’t want to go on into the kitchen with those groceries, either, because then he’d be between me and the door, but there didn’t seem to be anything else I could do without making him suspicious. He’d know I’d opened the door for something. Anyway, he was so cool and professional that by then I’d about decided he really was an honest, card-carrying burglar and not a creep of some kind, so I told him I was just a friend that had stopped by with this stuff for you. So I went into the kitchen and shoved the things in the refrigerator—I mean, all of it, and fast, in case you ever wonder why there’s a package of paper napkins and two bars of toilet soap in your freezer. I came back out. He was humming under his breath and fiddling with the back of the KLH. I said something about being sure the door was locked when he left and eased out. I didn’t think my knees would ever hold up till I made it to the elevator.
“When I got to the office, of course, I had to explain what the hell I was doing in your apartment. We got that straightened out, and they called the police. A squad car pulled up in two or three minutes, and the manager went up with the two officers. He was gone by then, of course, but they found enough evidence he’d been there so they didn’t write me off as some kind of nut. It seemed to be your desk he was interested in—or that’s as far as he’d got—because everything in it had been pretty well shuffled. Of course, they don’t know if anything’s missing, but they said the chances were he got the hell out of there the minute I was out of the corridor.”
Alarm circuits were tripping all over the place, but he was merely soothing—and admiring. “Honey, you handled it beautifully; you really used your head. Anyway, there was nothing in the desk but correspondence, old tax returns, bank statements, and so on. Could you describe the guy?”
“He wasn’t real big, a little less than six feet, anyway, around a hundred and sixty pounds. About thirty years old. Very slender and dark, Indian-looking, with black hair and brown eyes. And cool, real cool.”
“Well, you’re pretty cool yourself, Hotshot,” Romstead said. While he didn’t like any of it, he still didn’t want to scare her