Authors: Edward D. Hoch
“One thing,” he said. “Of course, Fitzpatrick’s going to know the water’s being taken. There’s no way of stealing 19,000 gallons of water without his knowing about it.”
“I want him to know,” she told Nick. “As long as it’s before the holiday weekend.” She steered the sports car like an expert, maneuvering it through the beginnings of the rush-hour traffic. “I still can’t imagine how you’re going to do it, though. If he knows you’re taking it, how are you going to have the time to empty, the entire pool?”
“Leave that to me,” Nick said with a smile. “That’s what you’re paying me for.”
Friday afternoon was calm and clear, with a musty heaviness about the air that hinted at a change in weather before the long weekend really got under way. Sam Fitzpatrick and his wife were at the pool—she was sunning herself while he was typing a reply to a letter in the morning’s mail.
It was mid-afternoon when he first smelled the smoke, and glanced over the fence at the nearby field. “Lydia! There’s a grass fire here! Come look!”
“Hadn’t we better call the Fire Department, Sam?” The fire already had a good start, spreading in a sort of ring that reached from the distant woods almost to Fitzpatrick’s line.
“Damn! I suppose I’d better.” But then they heard the rising wail of the schoolhouse siren, and the answering call from the firehouse. The volunteers were on their way.
Within ten minutes the flaming field had been converged on by two pumpers and a pair of auxiliary water trucks. There were no hydrants out this far, and the volunteers had to bring their own water supply. Fitzpatrick knew most of the volunteer firemen by name, but this day a stranger in rubber coat and leather helmet came running up to the fence.
“Mr. Fitzpatrick?”
“Yes. That’s quite a blaze you’ve got there.”
“Sure is.” The stranger turned up his collar and glanced over Fitzpatrick’s shoulder. “We need more water than our trucks can supply. Could we throw a hose into your swimming pool and pump out the water?”
“What? Say, don’t I know you from somewhere?”
“Better hurry,” the fireman warned him. “A shift in the wind could endanger your house.”
“Well … all right, I suppose so.”
In a moment the heavy canvas hose was over the fence, splashing into the deep end of the pool. The fireman gave a signal to the nearest pumper and they started to drain Sam Fitzpatrick’s water. Off in the distance two firemen played a smaller hose on the leading edge of the fire.
The familiar-looking fireman was everywhere, directing activities, shouting orders. After a half hour, when the pool was already half empty, one of the auxiliary water trucks pulled out through the high grass to get a refill at the town tank.
Finally, when another truck-load of water and the remainder of the pool’s supply had been used up, the fire began to retreat and die. Sam Fitzpatrick watched it with relief, and he called out to the familiar-looking fireman, “You fellows want a drink?”
“No time now, sir. Thanks anyway.”
“What about my pool?”
“The trucks will be out tomorrow to refill it. Thanks for your help.”
Fitzpatrick watched them pull away and then walked over to stare into the empty swimming pool. At the deepest end a few inches of water remained, but otherwise there was only the damp concrete below.
He started to light a cigarette, then stopped suddenly with the lighted match in mid-air. He’d just remembered where he had seen the fireman before.
Asher Dumont was waiting in her sports car a few miles down the road. Nick hopped off one of the pumpers and tossed his helmet and rubber coat onto the seat. Then he ran over to the car. “Where do you want it? 19,000 gallons of Sam Fitzpatrick’s swimming-pool water, as ordered.”
“You’re mad,” she said with a laugh. “I never thought you’d be able to do it.”
“I’ve had harder assignments than this.”
“But I still don’t understand. The firemen—”
“While we were pumping out his pool with a big hose and filling up one of the auxiliary water trucks, we were fighting the fire with a small hose from the other truck. With the high grass he couldn’t see which hoses went where. And when the first truck was full, we took it out and brought in another empty one. Each of the pumpers has a 1,000-gallon tank of its own, so we had plenty of water without using the water from the pool.”
“But these are the real firemen and their trucks!”
Nick nodded. “I gave them $100 each and told them we wanted to shoot a film for television. They know Fitzpatrick’s in the business, so they believed it.”
“Where were your cameras, Mr. Television Producer?” she asked with an impish grin.
“I told them this was the dress rehearsal. People will believe a lot for $100.” He opened the door and slid in beside her. “How about my money now?”
“Just one more thing,” she said, suddenly serious.
“What’s that?”
“I want you to come back to Sam’s house with me and tell him exactly what you did.”
“Now we’re getting to the root of it, aren’t we?”
“Maybe.” She gunned the motor into life.
“We’re going there now?”
“Tomorrow, when the weekend’s started. Then you’ll get your money. It’s worth every cent of it.”
“What about the water?”
“There’s a dry creek behind my place. We can dam it up and keep it there.”
He shook his head. “You’re a wonderful girl.”
“Wait till tomorrow, buddy.”
He could wait. There was a question forming itself in his mind, and he would have to ask her when the time came. But for now he could wait.
The following morning Lydia Fitzpatrick led them out to the pool. Asher wore a pale summer dress with a full skirt, and seemed somehow overdressed to Nick after her brief costumes of the past days. There was something else different about her too—the spark was gone from her eyes, replaced by something cold and hard.
“Asher! How are you?” Sam Fitzpatrick asked, rising from his deck chair to meet them.
“I’m fine, Sam.” Quietly, tightlipped.
“And you’ve brought Mr. Velvet again!” The words-rang not quite true to Nick’s ears.
A garden hose was hanging over the side of the swimming pool, feeding a trickle of water into the puddle at the bottom. “We can’t get any pressure out of this thing,” Lydia explained. “It’ll take us a week to fill it again. The firemen needed the water yesterday—”
Fitzpatrick had resumed his seat, but Asher remained standing. “I know,” she said. “Tell them, Nick.”
“I don’t think you have to tell me anything,” Fitzpatrick said. “I finally recognized Mr. Velvet in his fireman’s suit—but not in time to keep him from taking my water. And I suppose you set the fire yourself?”
Nick nodded. “I was paid $20,000 by this young lady to steal the water from your pool.”
“Twenty …! Asher, have you gone completely mad?”
“The money came from my family. I think they would have wanted it spent this way.”
“But why?”
“I’ve taken samples from that water—a hundred samples already, with more to come. They’re all being analyzed, Sam.”
“Analyzed?”
“There’s chlorine in your pool water. Apparently you’re not familiar with the effects of chlorine on calcified cement. There’ll be traces of calcium in that water, Sam, especially after ten years.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you do, Sam. I’ll be back on Tuesday with the results of the analyses.”
Nick hesitated a moment, then followed her out, leaving Fitzpatrick and his wife staring after them.
Back in the car, heading away from the house, Nick Velvet leaned back in the seat. “I had a question to ask you last night. I’ll ask it now. Was Fitzpatrick installing his pool the night your aunt disappeared?”
She drove for a long time without answering, bathing in a morning sun already high in the sky. “How did you know?” she asked finally.
“He built the pool in honor of his first hit play, and you told me your aunt vanished a month or so after it opened. It seems logical that the two events came at about the same time.”
She nodded. “The divorce papers were never served on Aunt Mary. That’s what first made me suspicious. Last winter I hired a private detective to check on this lawyer who’s been sending me the money in my aunt’s name. He reported that the money was actually coming from Sam. That’s when I really became suspicious that something had happened to her ten years ago.”
“And you remembered the pool.”
“I remembered. I was only fourteen at the time, but I remembered that last day with my aunt. We’d watched them pouring the concrete for the bottom of the pool. Aunt Mary said it wouldn’t be hard till morning.” She was staring straight ahead at the road.
Nick Velvet lit a cigarette. “There’s no such thing as a chlorine effect on calcified cement. You made that up, and you wasted your twenty thousand.”
“I didn’t waste the twenty thousand. It had to be a big lie if he was to believe it at all. He’d have laughed in my face if I took a single test-tube sample from the pool. But he’s written this sort of thing, remember—wild, way-out stuff, real campy. I know him—this is just bizarre enough for him to believe. The calcium from her bones, being drawn out of the cement bottom …”
“What do you do now?”
“Wait.”
They didn’t have long to wait. She came to Nick’s hotel room the following morning with his check.
“You’re up early,” he said. It was the Fourth of July, and outside someone was setting off illegal fireworks.
“Lydia phoned me. He killed himself during the night. Out by the pool.”
Nick Velvet turned away. “I’d hate to be your enemy.”
“It had to be done.”
“Just one thing,” he said. “Why did it have to be over the long weekend.”
“He was a writer, remember?” She was staring out the window at something far away. “I didn’t want him calling the library or some science editor in New York to check on my chlorine-on-cement effect. This way he couldn’t find out till Tuesday, and I knew he wouldn’t last that long.”
Nick thought about Gloria, back home on the porch, and remembered that he’d promised to be there for the Fourth. It was time to be going.
T
HE BIG MAN WAS
smiling like a hungry shark as he came up to the table and clamped a meaty hand on Nick Velvet’s shoulder. “Nick, boy! Haven’t seen you around since the old days in New York!”
Nick looked up from his steak and potatoes. He remembered Charlie Weston, of course, but he’d forgotten until this moment that the big detective had left the 17th Precinct for the slower pace of a middle-sized New England police force.
“Good to see you again,” Nick said, not really meaning it. Weston was a smart cop and an honest one. He was trouble. “This your city now?”
Charlie Weston pulled out a chair and joined him without being asked. “It’s nice country up here, Nick. Lots better than summers in New York. You vacationing?”
Nick wiped his mouth with the napkin. “You might say that. How about you? Made police chief yet?”
Weston merely smiled. “I’m a lieutenant of detectives. Robbery division.”
“Oh?”
“You’re the most famous thief we’ve ever had in Eastbridge, Nick. I had to come out and greet you personally.”
Nick Velvet went on eating. The steak was very good. “I didn’t really think you just happened to drop in. Your communications are good—I only got off the plane an hour ago.”
Weston leaned back in his chair. His face and eyes were small, not really a match for the big body beneath them. “We keep an eye out, I’ll be frank with you, Nick. We’ve got a peaceful community here, and we don’t want any trouble. This is the summer tourist season, just like on Cape Cod, and nothing’s going to spoil it. Keep moving, that’s all.”
“I’m just a tourist like everyone else,” Nick told him.
“Keep it that way. None of your tricks.”
Nick smiled as he paid the check and got to his feet. He’d had to skip his dessert, but a little bit of Charlie Weston went a long way. He tipped the checkroom girl a quarter for his summer straw hat and tried not to notice the official-looking man standing near the door. Charlie Weston’s partner.
Casually Nick left the restaurant and strolled back to his hotel. He wasn’t at all surprised to feel the firm outline of a microtransmitter under his hatband. Electronic bugging was illegal in the courts, but still useful to a cop like Weston. It would make Nick’s job a bit more difficult. Just a bit.
He waited till after dark, then strolled down a shaded side street until he found a little neighborhood bar with a buzzing neon sign that proclaimed it to be The Pilgrim’s Rock. He glanced in the window, spotted the phone booth right next to the sign, and went in. The microtransmitter was still in place under the brim of his hat, but Nick knew that the interference from the neon sign would effectively jam the device. Weston or his partner would be getting an earful of static just about now.
He dialed the number he’d been given in the letter. “Mr. Joseph Millings?”
“Yes,” the voice said. It was firm and deep.
“This is Nick Velvet. You wrote to me about a job.”
“Where are you?”
“In Eastbridge, but the police are watching me. We’ll have to do this over the phone.”
“The police?” Something like panic crept into the voice. “Then how can you do the job?”
Nick Velvet sighed. “Let me worry about that, Mr. Millings. My price is twenty thousand dollars. Now what do you want stolen?”
“It’s nothing of value.”
“I don’t steal objects of value,” Nick told him.
“Well, down by the Easton River there’s a building—it belongs to the Satomex Corporation, an electronics firm. On the side overlooking the river they have the company name spelled out in large brass letters attached to the building’s wall. I want you to steal those letters.”
Nick didn’t even blink. “All of them?” he asked.
“No. As a matter of fact, just three.”
On the following morning Nick Velvet made a number of stops. He went first to the Eastbridge Public Library, where he looked up Joseph Millings in the city directory and discovered he was a partner in the law firm of Millings & Mota. Next he took a stroll down by the river. It was wide here, and deep—only a mile or so from the outlet to Buzzards Bay and the ocean. Pleasure boats were much in evidence, cruising gently in the summer sun. He watched them for a time, then turned his attention to the fourteen-story headquarters of the Satomex Corporation.