The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (96 page)

I suppose I had no business saying anything about how our neighbor might have his property mortgaged. We’d gone into debt heavily to buy our own home. But the business was going well, and promised to continue to do so, and there was no reason we shouldn’t be happy now and pay as we went along.

And in a way owing on the house could be a good thing. Once we were in it I knew we’d never give it up unless we absolutely had to, and it might serve as a spur to help make me work even harder.

But all the house motivated me to do that day was leave the office early so I could get home to enjoy living there with Adelaide. As I drove up the winding driveway I wondered when I’d get over the feeling that this was someone else’s charming home I was approaching and not my own.

Adelaide knew I was coming home early and had dinner in the oven. She fixed us each a drink while we were waiting and we sat in the disarranged living room.

“I don’t know when we’ll ever get things the way we want them,” Adelaide said, glancing around at the mess.

I grinned at her and took a sip of my Scotch and water, admiring her fresh good looks in the plain housedress she did so much for. “There’s plenty of time.”

“I suppose so.” She sighed with contentment and settled back in her chair. “I saw our neighbor today,” she said.

“Did he drop by to introduce himself?”

“No, but you can see the house from our bedroom window upstairs. When I looked out this afternoon I noticed a man swimming in the pool. He had a guest, a girl in a purple bikini who stayed there most of the day, then drove away in a little sports car.”

I had to laugh. If Adelaide had any faults at all, one of them would be that she was a trifle nosy. “Are you going to start a dossier on them?” I asked jokingly.

“Not yet,” she said with a smile. “And it’s not ‘them’, it’s ‘him’. The man seems to live there alone.”

“Big house for a single man,” I remarked, “though it sounds like he has his fun there.”

A timer bell sounded in the kitchen and Adelaide put down her drink and stood. I walked behind her as she hurried into the kitchen to check on the dinner.

“You keep an eye on him and keep me posted,” I said, rubbing the back of my hand playfully up the nape of her neck. She didn’t answer and I kept quiet. Experience had taught me to joke only so far about Adelaide’s feminine curiosity.

Though without any prompting she had another tidbit of information for me the next evening when I returned home.

“Our neighbor seems to be something of a swinger,” she said. “There was a girl in a red bikini there today.”

“Same girl, different bikini,” I speculated.

Adelaide shook her head. “The first one was a tall brunette. Today it was a short blonde.”

I smiled and shrugged. “His sister?”

“I doubt it,” Adelaide said, and drew a miniature bronze rooster from the carton.

“I’m sure we’ll find out more about him,” I said. “He’ll probably turn up at our door one of these days soon to introduce himself. Could be he doesn’t even realize there’s anybody living here yet.” Silently I wondered if he’d plant a shade tree between us and his pool when he did find out. Then for the next few hours I was busy helping Adelaide finish the job of unpacking and thought about little else.

But that night my own curiosity about our neighbor was aroused when I walked across the bedroom to close the drapes.

As my hand reached for the pull cord my eye caught the flash of a revolving red light in the distance. I leaned forward and squinted into the darkness, and I saw that a police car was parked in our neighbor’s driveway beside his long blue convertible.

As I watched, another car pulled up behind that one. In the reflection of its headlights I could see that it was a plain gray sedan. Two men got out of it and went into the house without knocking.

A hand touched my shoulder and Adelaide was standing beside me.

“Now who’s nosy?” she asked.

I didn’t answer, and we stood there for a while and watched shadows cross the distant draped windows. Then the two men and a uniformed policeman came out of the house. They got into their respective cars, the red light on the patrol car was turned off, and both cars left together. A few minutes later the windows of the house went black and Adelaide and I were staring at nothing.

“What do you think?” Adelaide asked as we turned away from the window.

“It could have been a lot of things,” I said. “Maybe the police were called because somebody was sick. Maybe the two men in the plain car were doctors. Maybe our neighbor thought he saw a prowler. I guess if we really wanted to find out the thing to do would be to ask him.”

The next evening I got in the car and drove down the road to do just that.

“It’s because I’m a burglar,” our neighbor answered me amiably.

I stood there and blinked, twice. I’d introduced myself when he’d answered the door, and he’d introduced himself as Jack Hogan and invited me inside and offered me a drink. After a few minutes’ exploratory conversation with the tanned and handsome man, I’d gotten around to asking him about the commotion at his house we’d witnessed last night, offering our help if anything was wrong.

“The police were here to harass me,” Jack Hogan went on. “Lieutenant Faber and his friends. I humor the lieutenant because I understand he acts out of frustration.”

“But if you’re innocent—” I said in a rather dumbfounded way.

“But I’m not innocent,” Hogan said freely, his gray eyes as sincere as his voice. “Though if you tell anyone I said so I’ll deny it. Lieutenant Faber knows I’m guilty, but he can’t do anything about it because I’m too smart for him. That’s the fun of it.”

I didn’t know if Hogan was joking or not. When I took a sip of my drink some of it spilled on my hand.

“A burglary was committed a few nights ago,” Hogan said, offering me his neatly folded handkerchief to dry my fingers. “They know I did it but they don’t know how, or what I did with the loot. Oh, they come and search here every now and then, but we both know they won’t find anything. And if a young lady is prepared to testify that I spent the time of the robbery in her presence, where does it all leave poor Lieutenant Faber?”

“Where I am, I suppose,” I said. “Confused.”

“Well, no need to be confused. I say what’s the sense of getting away with something if nobody knows about it? Surely you can understand that. Then, too, there’s the profit. Burglary is a thriving business. How else could I afford all this, living alone in a ten-room house with a pool, nights on the town, flashy women, flashy cars? A wonderful life. I admit to you, I need all that.”

“Then, in a way, it’s all a game,” I said slowly.

“Of course it’s a game. Everybody plays his own game. I just admit mine because I’m good enough to get by with it even though it is illegal.”

“But it’s wrong,” I said, trying to bat down his clearly stated logic.

“Sure, it’s wrong,” Hogan said, “but so’s cheating on your income tax, overcharging the public if you’re a big corporation, leaving a penny for a paper when you don’t have a dime. To tell you the truth, I don’t worry about right or wrong.”

“I guess you don’t.”

“You see,” Hogan explained earnestly, “it’s the challenge. I like nice things; I indulge myself. When I see something of value I take it. I guess I have to take it.”

“Kleptomania on a grand scale, huh?”

“Hey, you might say that!” He raised his glass and grinned.

I finished my drink and got up to leave. Hogan walked with me to the door. On the porch I noticed that the long blue convertible was gone, replaced by an even longer and more expensive tan convertible. Hogan saw me looking at the car.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not stolen and it doesn’t belong to a girl I have hidden in the house. You didn’t interrupt anything and I can afford to trade cars any time I feel like it. Say,” he said, pointing at the long car, “how do you like it?”

“Beautiful,” I said.

“Sure, and it cost a hunk of cash. Well, drop by again, why don’t you? Bring the wife and we’ll take a dip in the pool.”

I walked down the driveway to where my car was parked. I didn’t know what to think of our new neighbor. I was sure he wasn’t joking, and I must admit I reacted as a lot of people would react. There was a sense of resentment in me that the things I worked so hard for, this man simply went out and took. And yet I found that I couldn’t really dislike Jack Hogan. I waved to him as I started the engine and drove away.

When I told Adelaide about the visit she didn’t believe me. I didn’t blame her.

“You’d have to talk to him to understand how he thinks,” I told her. “You might describe him as an honest crook.”

“An honest crook?”

“Well, honest about being crooked, anyway.”

That confused Adelaide almost as much as I was confused, so I had a snack, went over some work I’d brought home, then went to bed.

Neither Adelaide or myself mentioned our neighbor for a while as we busied ourselves about our new home. Though I noticed that Adelaide kept a pair of binoculars in the bedroom now, and she often left the house to drive past the Hogan residence and look more closely at it, I suppose to check for bikini-clad guests and sports cars. Still, I don’t think she really completely believed what I’d told her about Jack Hogan until Lieutenant Faber called on us one Saturday afternoon.

Adelaide and I were working in the garden she’d planted when the lieutenant drove up in his gray sedan. I stood leaning on my hoe and watched him approach. He was a harried-looking man who appeared to be in his mid-forties. His straight graying hair was combed to the side over his forehead and the breeze mussed it as his lined face broke into its emotionless, professional smile. Even before he introduced himself I knew who he was.

“I hope we haven’t done anything wrong,” Adelaide said, returning the bland smile with one that shone.

“Wrong? No,” Lieutenant Faber said. “Actually I’m a city detective and have no authority out here in the county anyway.”

“And yet you drove out here to talk to us,” I said thoughtfully.

“I don’t speak officially, Mr Smathers,” Faber said in his tired, hoarse voice. “Anything I say to you folks is off the record.” He got out a cigar and lit it expertly against the breeze. “How you getting along with your neighbor down the road?”

“You mean the burglar?” I’d decided it was time to stop circling.

“You said it, not me,” Lieutenant Faber said.

“Actually Mr Hogan said it. He didn’t seem to mind admitting that fact to me at all.”

“Oh, he admits it, all right,” the lieutenant said in a voice suddenly filled with frustration, “but not to anybody who can do anything about it or prove he even said it. I could tell you some things about your neighbor that would really surprise you.”

“You mean he really
is
a burglar?” Adelaide asked suddenly.

“Ask him,” Lieutenant Faber said. “He’ll tell you. Not that we can get anything on him. We know but we can’t prove.”

“He told me he was clever,” I said.

Lieutenant Faber nodded bitterly. “He’s been clever enough so far. We know exactly how he operates – in fact, he always seems to go to some trouble to let us know he’s the one who pulled his jobs, but pinning him down’s another thing. He gets rid of the loot so fast and secretly we can’t get him there, and usually he knows where to find big sums of cash that can’t be traced. As far as alibis are concerned, there’s always some girl who’s willing to testify that he was with her at his house or her apartment or some motel. We can’t watch him twenty-four hours a day.” The lieutenant added with an undeniable touch of envy, “He seems to have an endless supply of girls.”

“He is rather handsome,” Adelaide said, and when we looked at her she blushed slightly. “I mean, he would be to a certain type of woman.”

“The type he’s handsome to will lie for him,” Faber said, “that’s for sure. He must have something working for him.”

“Money,” I said. “If used properly money will buy almost anything, and Hogan strikes me as the kind who knows how to use his wealth.”

“That’d be okay,” Lieutenant Faber said, “only it’s other people’s wealth. Just last week we know – off the record, of course – that he burglarized over three thousand in cash and five thousand in loot from the home of J. Grestom, president of Grestom Chemical.”

“Isn’t that the plant about four miles from here?” Adelaide asked. “The one that dumps all that sludge into the Red Fox River?”

“The same,” Lieutenant Faber said, “one of the biggest operations of its kind in the state.”

“Sounds like Robin Hood,” I remarked.

“Yeah,” the lieutenant said without amusement, “Hogan steals from the rich, only he doesn’t give to anybody.”

“From talking to him,” I said, “my impression is that it’s all a big game to him.”

“A game where other people get hurt, and a game I’m tired of playing. Hogan’s a crook like all crooks. He’s one of the world’s takers. He’s a kid and the world’s one big candy shop with a dumb proprietor.”

I thought good manners dictated me not pointing out who that dumb proprieter must be in Hogan’s mind.

“Do you think you ever will catch him?” Adelaide asked.

Lieutenant Faber nodded. “We always do in the end. He’ll make a mistake, and we’ll be there to notice when he does.”

“He seemed awfully confident,” I said.

“Confident?” Faber snorted with disgust. “Confident’s not the word. Brass is more like it! About six months ago he burglarized the payroll office of a company downtown when their safe was full—”

“You mean he’s a safe-cracker too?” I interrupted.

“No, he stole the whole blasted safe. It was one of those little boxes that should have been bolted to the floor from the inside but wasn’t. The worst thing is that two nights later the safe turned up empty in the middle of a place that manufactures burglar alarms – bolted to the floor!”

“It really is a game with him, isn’t it?” I said.

Adelaide was laughing quietly. “You must admit he’s good at his game.”

“And we’re good at ours!” The lieutenant’s face was flushed.

“I’m sure you didn’t drive up here just to inform us that we’re living next to a police character,” I said. By that time I was certain I’d figured out the reason for Lieutenant Faber’s visit. I was right.