Patterson disappeared the Danish so fast Lindsey figured he must have missed his dinner last night as well as his breakfast this morning. Lindsey got him another, refilled his coffee cup, and said, “Well, how ’bout it, Terry? You ready to give everything back and drop it? Officer Plum there might be pretty annoyed with you for filing a false report, but I think we can still square it.”
Patterson shook his head.
“Sticking with your story?”
“It’s the truth, Mr. Lindsey.” He held up his hand like a witness in court. “So help me. I th-thought it was your job to be on my side, not against me.”
“That’s right. That’s why I don’t want to see you ruin yourself. Look, Terry, you’re just a kid. How old can you be—twenty-eight, thirty?” In person Patterson was substantially older than he sounded on the telephone—certainly no teenager.
“T-Twenty-six.”
“Don’t mess yourself up now. They’ll catch you. If the cops don’t, then we will—International Surety. You don’t think we’re going to pay out a quarter mil on this phony claim, do you? We’ll deny the claim, it’ll drag on for years. You’ll never see the money. But you will see the inside of a cell, I can promise you that!”
Maybe I overplayed that a little, Lindsey thought. Patterson put down his Danish and started to sweat again. Lindsey grabbed his wrist, but this time the kid didn’t faint.
Instead he started to cry.
A tall, skinny, twenty-six-year-old man slumping there in the middle of a crowded restaurant with every kind of Berkeley character imaginable sitting around him, reading newspapers and drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, and he was bawling.
“What can I do to convince you?” the kid sobbed. “I found the door jimmied when I came in this morning. Then I checked the stock and discovered the missing comics. How can I prove it? I’ll swear an oath. I’ll take a p-polygraph test. How’s that? Would you believe that if I pass it?”
“Let’s leave that for now.” Lindsey decided to let up on him a little. He’d been playing good-cop-bad-cop with the kid and taking both roles himself. You learned to do a lot of things in his job, and the plain honest unadorned truth was that Bart was darned good at it, and one of these days Harden at Regional was going to move up to National and Lindsey expected management to take him into account for Harden’s slot. The trouble was, his good work had been done in a little office, one man plus secretary. He’d been so loaded down all these years with routine that he’d never had time for anything else. He was like the character in the Disney Alice in Wonderland who had to run at top speed just to stay in one place.
This might be his big chance to shine, to be noticed by the big shots...if International Surety was still operating by the time the case was wrapped up. There had been rumors of a takeover bid from a bigger company. International Surety hadn’t been doing too well the past few years, and there was hardly an employee who wasn’t looking over his shoulder to see if something might be gaining on him.
Lindsey said, “Do you have a list of the missing items?”
“Off-Officer Plum took that.”
“You didn’t keep a copy?”
He shook his head. “B-But I can make another list,” he said.
“Thirty-five items? You memorized them?”
“Uh, I can see them,” he said. “I can just close my eyes and see the displays, the boxes, I can visualize everything that they took. Comics are my life, Mr. Lindsey. If I don’t get the money for the ones they took, I’ll lose my store, I’ll lose everything. I’ll never pay off the consignors.”
He felt around in his pockets for a stubby pencil, grabbed a napkin and started writing. Lindsey took the pencil and the napkin out of his hands and gave him an International Surety ballpoint and a lined pad.
He sat there making the list. He wrote down the first dozen or so without slowing down. Then he stopped and closed his eyes for a few seconds, opened them and wrote down a couple more, stopped again, wrote again. Finally he scanned the list, nodded, and handed it to Lindsey.
“It—It was the whole RTS order,” Patterson said. “I don’t know what I’ll do. What will George say? What about the consignors?”
Lindsey scanned the list, took his International Surety ballpoint back and slid it into his pocket. “Hold on,” he said. “What order did you say?”
“RTS.”
“Yeah. What’s that?”
“Uh, Ridge Technology Systems.”
Lindsey said, “You’ve lost me, Patterson. You run a comic book store, right? What’s Ridge Technology Systems and what do they have to do with a bunch of overpriced comic books?”
“Ridge was my customer. They were going to buy the comics.”
“Ridge Technology? That sounds like some kind of electronics outfit.”
“Y-Yeah,” Patterson said. “They build computers. We even have one of them in the store, for inventory and accounting. A Circuitron 60.”
Lindsey grinned. The computer at International Surety was a Circuitron 60. He remembered the classes on how to use the thing. He had gone first, then sent Ms. Wilbur. When she came back she helped him figure the thing out. He didn’t know or care who built it. To him, computers were generic, like jet liners or toothbrushes or VCRs. You just use them, and don’t pay any more attention to them than you have to.
“You often sell comic books to high-tech corporations?” Patterson shook his head. “No. Uh, could I have another Danish?”
Lindsey got him one. He had to stand in line again, and he glanced at Patterson to make sure he didn’t slip away. He didn’t.
“This is the first time,” Patterson said. “Usually we sell to private collectors. But this guy came in one day—”
“What guy?” Lindsey had his pocket organizer in his hand, ready to jot down the name.
“George. George, uh, Dunn. He came from RTS, he had this computer printout with a list of comic books. He said his company wanted to buy them as an investment. Something about tax shelters and needing to spend the money before the tax reform law took effect. He said they wanted exactly these comic books. He told me how much they were willing to pay for them and the prices looked about right to me so I said we’d try to assemble the collection they wanted.”
Lindsey studied the list Patterson had handed him. “They wanted these exact comic books? Titles, dates—exactly these and no others?”
“Well, uh, M-Mr. Dunn, George told me these were what they wanted. He said if they couldn’t get exactly these comics we could propose substitutes for them. Like another issue from the same era, of the same comic. Or another title in the same publisher’s line, with the same artists and features. Like, uh, the August ’44 Captain Marvel Adventures instead of the July ’44, or an EC book like Tales from the Crypt instead of The Vault of Horror.”
“Wait a minute. A what book like Tales from the Crypt?”
“EC. That was a publisher. They started out with things like Picture Stories from Science and Picture Stories from American History. EC stood for Educational Comics. Then they switched to horror and science fiction and changed the company to Entertaining Comics. So it was still EC, see?”
Lindsey nodded. “Okay. Now, what about Dunn, Terry?”
“Oh. Well, what I was saying—see, he really didn’t want to take any substitutes if he could help it. He said they might lower their offer or—or even go to another dealer if we didn’t