The Alley (11 page)

"Connie," said Billy. "Do you think, since your mother is going to throw this curtain away anyhow, that we could cut out this bit that has blood on it and keep it with our clues?"

"Oh, sure," said Connie. She got her scissors, and Billy snipped out the little bloodstained piece of curtain. Now, Billy had in his pocket the screwdriver named 'Stanley,' the burnt cigarette butt—it happened to be a Mura—and a piece of bloodstained curtain. The children then all went back downstairs, streamed past Mama and Papa, who had fallen into an angry reverie, and went outside, where they gathered around the swing to piece the facts together.

"You know," said Connie, "that Mama says the two policemen, or the one of them, might not even have known that they, or he, had a diamond ring? They might just have seen the brand-new little pencil in its case and thought, 'Hm, here is a nice little present to bring home to Molly,'—or whatever their little girl's name is..."

"Or boy," said Billy Maloon.

"Writes good," continued Connie. "I bet that's what they thought."

Billy said, "We have three important clues. And we know that these three clues belong to the first, the real burglars. The real burglars were the ones who broke into the house, smoked a cigarette while breaking in, and lifted the curtain to look out to see if the coast was clear. But, you know the most important clue ... most important but missing clue?"

"The pencil!" shouted Katy Starr, who always got A plus in everything.

"Right," said Billy.

"Yes," said Connie. "If we ever could find that, we would know whether Mama is right in hunches or not," said Connie. "You know what the pencil was named—it was a little silver pencil; it was named 'Eberhardt.'"

"Millions of pencils are named 'Eberhardt,'" said Billy.

"But this pencil has J for John and I for Ives in tiny little scrolls around the top of it. The J.I. doesn't look like plain J.I. at all; it looks like an ornament, a scrawling gold line."

"They probably will never see that the pencil has initials on it," said Billy. "Boy! If only that pencil would show up somewhere!"

"I know," said Connie. "But it won't. I know it won't. Things just don't happen that way in real life ... or do they?"

"No," said Billy.

"Wowie!" said Hugsy in the pause that followed. "What a story! Can I tell my robbery now?" He wanted to remind them of his five-dollar-bill robbery in case they had forgotten.

"No," said Connie patiently. "One robbery at a time."

"How much," said Hugsy, who was terribly interested in money—he was always having fairs to sell his old comics and toys and pink cold drinks—"how much would you say the burglars got away with? In money, I mean, if everything were sold?"

Billy said he guessed a hundred dollars, easily.

"A hundred dollars, hah!" said Connie. "A thousand, maybe ten!" she said.

"Ten thousand dollars!" said Hugsy, and he fell down in a pretended faint.

"Well," Connie said. "Look at my seven silver dollars alone. They mount up, you know. And I had only just polished them the other day."

"Polished them!" said Hugsy. "I never heard of polishing money."

"Never heard of polishing money!" exclaimed Billy. "Yikes!" Sometimes he found Hugsy irritating.

"Oh, of course—polishing!" said Hugsy, ashamed of his ignorance. "I guess I didn't hear straight."

Then Katy, who had been remarkably silent during the entire reenactment of the burglary, turned to Hugsy and said, "Hugsy, if you can't keep quiet, you'll just have to leave the yard. Won't he, Connie?"

"We-ell," said Connie hesitantly. Although she found it pleasant to be appealed to by Katy, a most important person in the Alley, still, Hugsy was one of her favorite people, and she did not want him to be put out of her yard. So, instead of answering Katy, she said, "Well, do you all want me to go on, or don't you?"

"Go on, go on!" It was unanimous.

"Where was I, were we?" she asked.

"Well," said Billy. "You were up to the clues ..."

"Oh, yes," said Connie. "You know that, although I think the 'Stanley' screwdriver is a very important clue ..."

"Yes!" agreed Hugsy. "Stanley! It might be the engraved name of the robber, a confirmation present.... I have 'Hugo' on my belt buckle."

"Don't interrupt," said Connie, but she added kindly, "Same idea."

Billy's eyes were dreamy, the pupils enlarged. "...fingerprints all over the place..." he murmured.

"Yes," said Connie. "Well, although 'Stanley' and all our clues are important, we should go back to the day long before the burglary, the day of de Gaulle saying, 'Get out, get out' to no one—the day of the bullet-headed-man dog lover."

"Oh, yes, Wags!" said June Arp accusingly. "Where was Wags during the burglary?"

"Wags! Yes!" said Hugsy. "Where was she?"

"Wait, can't you?" said Connie. "I'm coming to Wagsie. I'm getting to her right now."

Connie's head swam as she tried to recall the steps that might have led up to the robbery. So she said, although there was silence, "Quiet, can't you? I can't think."

Billy reminded her quietly—he knew how hard it was to tell such an important story in the right order—"You were on Wagsie. Why didn't she, well ... bark? And you also said something about a bullet-head..."

"Oh, yes," said Connie. "Well, she probably did bark! She probably barked her head off—at first. You know that wonderful, deep, beautiful bark she has...? She doesn't bark often, but what a wonderful bark when she does!"

"Then why didn't she bark that wonderful bark when burglars came?" asked Judy Fabadessa wonderingly. "She is an F.B.I. dog."

"Was," said Connie, "as a puppy. But listen, can't you?" she said, for there was some murmuring among the others, too—"Yes, why," said some, "didn't Wags bite or at least scare the burglars, arouse the neighbors?" and many other comments of that sort.... "When Mama and I finally had the chance to get into the kitchen after the police—the first two and the second two, and the detective—had all left, there, under the table we saw—a bone!"

"Bone!" exclaimed Billy. "What's strange about a bone?" But his eyes showed that he knew that what was coming was going to be good, and it was.

"Yes, bone!" said Connie. "Under the kitchen table was a bone ... not one of Wagsie's real, right, regular old soup bones she keeps under there, but a strange bone that somebody, the burglar probably, must have given her. It was no bone of ours."

"O-o-oh," said Hugsy. "I see it all now. They tempted her with a bone—to keep her quiet. That is why no one heard her."

"And this bone," Connie went on, "may have had a sleeping potion on it. There might have been poison on it. We don't know, she might die yet. Papa's going to watch her carefully and take her to the vet's if she acts funny. But it might be a poison that takes a year to work; we don't know, we don't know. So Mama picked up that bone with a paper towel and threw it in the trash can..."

"Threw the bone clue away!" shouted Billy. "Your mother is no better than the police, who didn't gather up the other clues. Do you think the bone is still in the garbage can?"

"Sure," said Connie.

"O-o-oh, ugh!" said Katy. She had been sitting on the garbage pail, and she leapt off as though the bone beneath might bite or poison her.

"Good," said Billy quietly. "I'll get it out later."

"Ugh," said Katy again. "Who would want to touch a dirty old burglar bone like that, poison on it and all?"

"I would," said Billy.

("Ts," thought Connie proudly. "Billy is not afraid of anything. Not one thing. He's like Papa.") "I'll get it later," said Billy, "and put it with the rest of the clues."

"What for?" asked June Arp.

"You'll see," said Billy with a slow and meaningful nod of his head.

"Now I get it; now I get it all!" said Hugsy. "Take the bone to the drugstore, see what sort of poison is on it, see who has bought that sort of poison."

"You're brilliant," said Billy to Hugsy. He was a little put out because Hugsy had spilled the reason before he had.

To clear the atmosphere, Connie said, "You know how greedy Wagsie is; she's always hungry ... always. She probably did bark her head off, but then the man ... oh, you see—it's all coming to me now—I bet the breaking-into-the-house burglar was the man that talked to Mama and me that day, the bullet-head man who said, 'Does this dog bite?' Remember? The day of de Gaulle and the lady with the loose stockings..."

"And the beautiful-mansions man..." put in Billy.

"Oh, they're all probably in cahoots," suggested Hugsy.

"Oh, don't be silly," said Katy. Hugsy drooped.

"Anyway," said Connie. "When that bullet-head man put his hand in the broken-in door and spoke gently to Wagsie—who I know, I just know, was barking her head off—and probably said, 'Nice feller. You remember me, don't you?' Well, he probably had the bone in his hand then—it is the sort of bone that Wagsie loves; and probably then Wagsie, not knowing what else to do, just stopped barking and took the bone to the kitchen, crawled way, way under the table, close to the wall, and gnawed. It probably was like a friend to her—this bone. No family around, but at least—a bone. She tried to let the bone take her mind off the people in the house who did not belong here and had made such an awful noise coming in. It's like bad people giving a lollipop to a little child when all the while they are going to kidnap it..."

"Do you think, oh, you don't think they were planning to kidnap Wagsie, do you?" asked Judy, her beautiful gray-blue eyes wide with horror. Judy loved Wagsie and all dogs and animals—all. She owned hamsters, two parakeets, and a found dog. "Would they have planned to kidnap Wags?" she repeated.

Now, this was something that had not occurred to Connie at all. Tears of terror sprang into her eyes. "Perhaps," she said. "Who knows? She is a wonderful dog. Has a long genealogy."

All eyes turned to Wags, who knew she was being talked about. She was embarrassed and ashamed, and she looked aimlessly here and there, at her paws, behind her, at nothing. She dug at her itchy ear. With an enormous sigh, she raised herself—she was rather stout—ambled over to the iris, and lowered herself with an even deeper sigh to the ground. She closed her eyes and pretended to sleep.

"She doesn't seem poisoned," said Hugsy.

"Can't tell," said Billy. "Not yet." Judy lay down beside Wags and crooned to her. "Poor Wagsie," she said.

All eyes turned back to Connie, who went on, "Afterwards," she said "when we finally had time to pay a little attention to Wagsie, who kept looking at us as though she had so much to tell—imagine how terrified she must have been when they broke down the door, with none of us home to save her ... well, we thought she was all right, only just scared."

"Still," June Arp spoke again, "I don't understand why she wouldn't bite them. Such a big dog!"

Judy defended Wags. "Because she is timid, that's why, very, very shy and timid."

"Yes," said Connie. "She is shy and timid, and she is a coward. She can't help it. She is even afraid of the minister's dog, though he is always on his leash. She hides behind the green door, in the vestibule, when the minister comes along ... is dragged along, I should say instead, by his big black Doberman pinches. Wagsie peeks out at them, and she does not bark or growl at all-—not to attract their attention—and she does not go back outside to sit on the top stoop and wait for Papa until the minister and his dog are way up the street. But what we wonder is—why no one, not one of the neighbors, heard Wagsie barking? She must have barked in the beginning, before the bone."

"Don't let me forget to get the bone, by the way," said Billy.

"I won't," said Connie. "But we wonder why nobody heard her barking. We know she would bark that deep, wonderful bark that means danger. June, didn't you hear Wags? Were you home? Living right next door, I'd think you would have heard Wagsie."

"Yes," said June. "Ray and I were home. My mother and father were out. But we were in the basement, we were all—Ray, Laura, Katy—all in the basement playing ping-pong. You know ... I remember now ... I
did
hear Wags. But I didn't think anything about it. 'Wags is barking,' that's all I thought. I don't remember anything else."

Billy reproached her. He said, "You should always think something when you hear Wags bark, because Wags is a thoughtful, quiet, silent dog, not like Atlas; and she barks only when something is really wrong."

"Well, I didn't know," said June, rather irritated. She looked as though she thought they were all accusing her of not having stopped the robbery. And she really could have stopped it, if only she had thought something was amiss when she heard Wags. She could have run upstairs, wondering what all the pounding—the breaking in of the door must have made quite a racket—was about. And the unusual barking of the Ives's usually quiet dog could have sent her to the front window, and she might have peeked out. Then, she would have seen those men across the street, the lookout men, and she might have thought something was strange about that, and she might have called—if not the police, at least Mrs. Stuart, next door to her on the other side. But she didn't.

"I just didn't think one thing about it," she said coldly to Billy Maloon, for he was looking at her with a certain amount of disgust. Here was June and also her brother Ray—they had had a chance to be heroes, and they had let the chance slip through their fingers. If
he
had been the one to hear Wags, he would have known right away something was wrong. "Some people have all the luck," Billy thought, "and they let it slide through their fingers."

"Well, anyway," said June's brother Ray. "It was lucky it wasn't
our
house the burglars burglared because
my
mother had six hundred dollars...
six hundred dollars in cash.
Cash is what they like, my mother says—they much prefer cash to anything else, suits, a crummy old typewriter; and here my mother had all this money, plain bills—greenbacks—lying loose on the top of her valise in her bedroom. The valise was wide open, too—they could have scooped the money up in a second and gone off with it. She had it for her trip to Spain next week.... Yeh, supposing it was
my
house they broke into! Supposing it was the six hundred dollars they got!"