The Alley (26 page)

"I was lying in bed, Connie," Billy said, "trying to get over my cold when suddenly, Connie, I heard the tune; you know,
the tune,
the tune of the bullet-head man..."

"'On the Street Where You Live,'" Connie said.

"Yes," said Billy. "So I grabbed my camera, put it around my neck ... it has a long strap, you know ... and I climbed out my window and onto the little roof over the back stoop. I jumped into Mrs. Orr's yard, not ours, and landed on her honeysuckle bush. Thank goodness, I missed the roses, and I crawled across her yard ... not to be seen by the whistler ... and I got over her fence and into the twins' yard, and then across it ... the same way ... and up and over their fence, sticking close to the houses all the while ... and, thank goodness, no one saw me..."

"Of course not ... everyone was at my house. Now they're all coming up the Alley to the gate here to watch for the police ... see what was taken ... the whole thing. So whisper—unless you want them to know we are up here."

"Well, let me finish. I didn't mean I hoped no
Alley people would see me
...I meant
burglar
people see me.... I finally made my way up here, into the tree. And, Connie, it was not easy to get up here without busting my camera. But I did, luckily ... you'll see..."

"Oh!" gasped Connie. "Billy, you are brilliant!" She could see what was coming next.

"So," said Billy. "Sure enough. Soon, along comes our friend ("Friend, hah!" interrupted Connie, enjoying the sarcasm), the bullet-head man. Walking briskly, he was, and whistling his tune. And he trots right up Bully Vardeer's steps as if Bully were expecting him ("Bully probably would like to paint him, likes to paint everybody," Connie put in), stood a moment, looking toward Larrabee ... where his cronies were ... and I snapped a picture of him! He was smoking a Mura; I could smell it. Then he whistled faster, and one of his cronies ... I don't know how many he had, but this other guy ... Sawtooth Pete, I suppose ("Just like Mr. Fabadessa said," Connie put in)...swiftly joined him, and I snapped a picture of him ... this sawtooth guy, too. Bullet-head gave the door a big push—that was all it needed apparently. Bully Vardeer ... ts, ts ... in spite of all our warnings, when he took Princey out for a walk, did not close the outer green door. So there they were inside the little vestibule. I heard a cracking noise. Door being busted in, I thought..."

"Just like ours," said Connie.

"Then in they stepped, I suppose. But they were not in there long, just a few minutes, when some guy out on Larrabee began whistling, 'Get Me to the Church on Time.' You know, it must be their signal to beat it ... they must have seen Bully coming home ... and the two inside guys came out. I snapped another picture ... of the two of them together. They had..."

"The Olivetti typewriter," said Connie.

"A typewriter," said Billy. "Naturally I did not know the make."

"Olivetti," said Connie. "Brand-new. Bully saw it was gone from the desk in the hall where it had just been delivered ... that's all he knows about..."

"Well, and so they strode swiftly away. I heard a car start off in a rush. I snapped a picture of it when it came in view beside the tennis court, but it will probably be a blur. Of course, the license plates wouldn't show up ... but, anyway, the more pictures the better," said Billy.

"True," said Connie. "But where are the police? They sure got to our broke-in house faster than this."

"Slow-pokes," said Billy.

At this moment they heard the police siren. "Here they come," whispered Billy. The police car sounded as though it had come into Waldo Place on two wheels, and it stopped suddenly, with a screech. Two policemen hopped out of the car, drew their pistols, just as they had in front of Connie's house, rushed to the front door, and said, "Come out or we'll shoot. We have you covered." And into the house they went!

"Dum-de-dum-dum," said Connie. She was so scared that she thought she would fall out of the tree. "Did you see those two policemen?" she asked Billy.

"Yes," said Billy. "Yes, so?"

"Well," said Connie, trying to hold her voice steady, "they are the two policemen, the two first policemen that Mama said she could see her diamond ring on my father's pencil case through the pockets of! And that were in the presink car the day of the bomb scare with the pencil marked J. I."

"Oh," said Billy. "My gosh! Ratty and Ippy?"

"Ratty and Ippy," said Connie, dazed. "It's as though it has all happened before."

"It has," said Billy.

Now, since Bully Vardeer had strode through his back door and was inside his house when the two policemen entered, there was little chance of their getting diamond rings on pencil clasps or anything else. Brave Bully followed them every step of the way upstairs—(Had the burglars touched his great paintings? No.)—downstairs (Had they bothered the organ? No.). Sometimes burglars just break things for the sake of breaking things, but there had not been time for this. Soon everybody came out and congregated in front of Bully's house. What a day! First a recital and then a burglary! It was not as great a burglary as Connie's. Just the typewriter gone—the Olivetti. Not a burglary inside a burglary. No hunches needed here, since Bully accompanied the policemen through the house. But—this was the important thing—one of the policemen, the tall one named Officer Ippolito, took out his notebook, and he took out his pencil to write up the burglary. He put his notebook on the top of the red brick wall just two feet under where Connie and Billy were lying, clinging to the thick branch of the catalpa tree. Connie nudged Billy. He took in immediately what she wanted him to ... that Officer Ippolito was making notes with a shiny, silvery-looking pencil, not the sort of ordinary pencil that you would expect a policeman to use, not a plain yellow wooden one.

Then Connie, seeing all her friends and the Alley people below her, felt brave, and she did a very brave thing. It is true she did not have Nanny's tall green glass Tiffany vase to drop on this ... suspected ... burglar-policeman's head. Even if she had had the vase, it was unlikely that she would have dropped it on his or anyone else's head. Connie was just not the bopping-on-the-head sort of girl. Quiet, she was, quiet and gentle. But she said out loud, in her reasonable, calm little voice, "You know, Billy, my father once had a pencil exactly like that."

The policeman, Ippy, hearing a voice from out of the tree above him, was very startled, naturally, and he looked up.

"He did?" said Billy. "Hm-m-m."

"Yes," said Connie. "The pencil my father had—that was like the one this nice policeman has—is where he used to keep my mother's diamond ring, on its clasp, that's where. But that's gone now—the pencil—and the ring's gone with it."

"Gone?" said Billy.

"Yes, gone," said Connie. "Some burglars took it ... well, we
think
burg..." Connie paused meaningfully.

Officer Ippolito cast a searching glance up at Connie through the leaves. Did he or didn't he recognize this girl as an inhabitant of the house around the corner that he and Sergeant Rattray had investigated a few weeks ago? His hand was shaking a little as he wrote down the facts. He said he and Sergeant Rattray would report to headquarters. And since there was nothing more to do, they'd go. ("How disappointing this burglary must be to these two compared to ours," thought Connie.) However, as he was about to leave. Sergeant Rattray accidentally nudged Officer Ippolito's arm, and the shiny pencil fell. It fell over Mr. Bernadette's wall and down into the hidy-hole in Mr. Bernadette's yard, all covered over with ivy and heavy creeping squash vines.

"Oh!" said Officer Ippolito. "I must get that pencil." And he started to climb over the red-brick wall.

"Isn't that a lot of trouble to go to ... just for a pencil?" asked Bully Vardeer in his soft, deliberate voice. "I'll get you another one."

"I want that one," said the policeman. "My wife gave it to me on my birthday." ("What a liar!" thought Connie.) He was puffing ... in quite a heat—as he tried to swing himself up and over Mr. Bernadette's wall.

"Oh, well..." said Bully in his quiet voice. "It's a special pencil then. I'll get it for you." And he scaled Mr. Bernadette's wall—he was quite athletic, and all the sunning that he did added to his strength. He strode across Mr. Bernadette's garden—he was now barefoot, having kicked off his moccasins. ("Good for the feet," he often said, "to go barefoot.") Then he climbed down into the hidy-hole. He looked like half a man to Connie ... like a statue in a museum, cut off at the waist.

Bully then felt around in the hidy-hole for the pencil with his hands.

Connie saw Mama standing in the Alley, outside Mr. Bernadette's wall, and she swung herself down out of the tree. "Mama," she whispered. "Those are the same two policemen who came to our house ... that you saw through the pockets of..."

"Sh-sh-sh," said Mama. "I see they are, darling."

"And the pencil they are looking for in the hidy-hole is Papa's pencil with the J. I. letters on it."

"You saw it?" asked Mama.

"Yes," said Connie.

There were a lot of people swarming around now, even little fellows from the recital, and they had hopped down into the hidy-hole with Bully Vardeer, hoping to be the one to find the important pencil of the policeman. By this time, even Officer Ippolito had climbed over the fence and was in there feeling around with his long arm. He looked like a man in swimming, trying to find a lost something or a shell on the bottom of the sea.

Mama came into the yard—by now somebody had opened the Bernadettes' gate, and she said, "I've always been good at finding things. I always have a sort of hunch as to where things are, in pockets—or hidy-holes. You all get out and let me try to find the pencil. I have a sort of hunch. I know this pencil well."

When Officer Ippolito saw Mama, of course, he must have remembered her from the day of her famous burglary. His already red face turned even redder. He stood up, looked at Connie's mother and at Connie, and their burglary probably all came back to him. Connie said to her mother in a voice that all could hear, "No wonder, Mama, he wants his pencil back. It is such a pretty one, just like Papa's new one that the ladies of his department gave him for Christmas with J.I. on it and your ring on it."

Silence fell over everybody as they tried to recall the details ... something about a pencil, they remembered ... about Mr. Ives's pencil and ring and robbery ... something ... everything. Officer Ippolito picked himself up, brushed himself off, gave a disagreeable sort of a snort, and said, "Oh, well, what's a little pencil more or less in the world? Come on, Ratty. We might as well go. No sense spending any more time on this case with important robberies going on all over the city probably. Let me know if you find anything besides the typewriter missing," he said to Bully, who was still standing in the hidy-hole, as though rooted there in the ivy and vines. The two policemen then got into their police car, and they turned around practically on two wheels and tore out to Larrabee Street and up it and around Gregory Avenue with brakes screeching.

"Phew! They were in a hurry," said Bully Vardeer.

The two little fellows, Danny and Nicky, still in their recital clothes ... their best ... got lifted out of the hidy-hole by Bully Vardeer. "We couldn't find the pencil," they said.

"No," said Bully, "because I am stepping on it, that's why. The minute I stepped down here, my bare feet felt something slippery and cold, and I knew it was the pencil; and I knew that there must be something special and peculiar about that pencil, so I didn't let on."

Bully stooped down and picked up the pencil and climbed out himself. "Now," he said. "What
is
there so peculiar about this pencil?"

Connie's mother said, "May I see it, please? Yes," she said. "Connie is right. I think this is John's pencil. See? There are his initials. J. I. Connie, you're a great detective."

"It's Billy," said Connie, "not me, who's the brains. He..."

Billy climbed down out of the tree. "Sh-sh-sh," he said. "You were the brave one who said, 'My father had a pencil exactly like that..."'

"But you took pictures of the other, the real, burglars, with your camera, and..."

"What's this? What's this?" Everybody clambered around Billy and Connie, trying to take everything in at once, old burglaries, new burglaries, pictures having been snapped, a ring—where was it? The pencil. How could anyone prove that the policeman had the ring even if he had the pencil, and, now that he was gone, how could anyone prove that he had had this pencil in the first place? Too many fingerprints on it now. Well, all these questions had to be answered. In a lull, the excited voices of Nanny, "O-ooh, child," and of Papa, "Hey! Hey!" could be heard as they came up the Alley. "Ah, now! If anyone would know how to tackle the police, Presink number 9999, it would be Papa," thought Connie proudly.

Billy said he was going into his house to develop his pictures.

"What bright children there are here in the Alley," said Nanny.

"Billy probably has an I. Q. of 180," said Connie proudly.

"Not quite," said Billy. He ran to get away from the praise and to see the negatives. Whether it could ever be proved or not, everyone felt that one-half of the original burglary of Mrs. Ives's house had been solved, the half about who had got the ring ... the burglars or the policemen. The policemen, of course, since they had the pencil. And that showed how good Connie Ives's mother was at seeing through things. Everyone agreed to this and wished the same could be said about them. Even Connie's father agreed to this. "It surely does," he said, and he gave Mama a hug and kiss right in front of everybody. Connie didn't know whether to be happy or embarrassed.

While Billy was in his house developing his pictures, downstairs in his father's darkroom, and quite nervous he was, too, about whether they would turn out or not ... if they didn't, he would be left with the same old clues—a Mura butt; the question, "Does this dog bite?"; the screwdriver named "Stanley"; and the bloodstained bit of curtain ... all the other people were still standing around in the Alley. It was a lovely day to be out, anyway, and let the dishes wait, thought and said all the mothers, talking about this burglary and the Ives's old burglary ... or any old burglary they had ever read about or had had.