Chapter Eight: That Fateful Burglary
Duke's townhouse dwelling, in the den, days thereafter, Duke is confronting Brenda, who stands with her shoulders hunched up, rubbing and wringing her hands, extremely tense. Duke is offering her a small shot glass of Scotch whiskey. The newspaper with its headline reading, POLICE CHIEF ESCAPES FLYING BOMB, is unfolded over a coffee table in the background.
Duke speaks in a smooth reassuring tone.
"Brenda, this is going to be only temporary.---I simply need to be away for, say, one month. If you can understand..."
"Oh, I understand perfectly. Look at me, how I got taken for a fool about the Caboot family."
Brenda turns her back toward Duke, clenching her hands tightly together and swallowing hard.
"So wait, I'll make you proud of me yet. I'll do my part in your operations."
She does not take the Scotch from Duke, who keeps holding the glass of it extended and offered to her.
"Some of these things I get involved in are very important,---for us today, for our children in the future."---He pauses.---"I won't go out of my way looking for danger. Question is, do you have what it takes to stand by me?"
Brenda, her back still toward Duke, answers him.
"I have it!"---Hushed but intense she speaks.---"I'll show you!"
"Okay. Relax. I hate seeing you worked up. I've never seen you like this.---Are you sure you're all right?"
Duke and Brenda both keep their awkward positions, Brenda with her back turned to Duke, and he still holding out the glass of the Scotch.
For a time they stand like that, unchanged and saying nothing. Brenda takes one deep breath, which seems to help her relax.
<<<>>>
After several silent seconds, the background sound of a flying propeller-driven airplane starts approaching. Soon the sound is as loud as it would be inside the aircraft itself.
The sky over river delta terrain, a twin engine propeller-driven commuter airplane is in flight.
Inside this airplane, flying, are four businessperson passengers,---Duke, occupying a seat by a window, wearing dark sunglasses and reading a newspaper. Seated beside him is Dornell, plain clothes, shooting wary glances around the passenger compartment:---no signs of anything sinister.
In the sky over a coastal bay area, the airplane continues on its flight. Below, the great ocean is spread out.
Downtown in the inland city, some landmarks are seen.---Including the police station with the damaged interior and window of Chief Ghoon's office.
And at the Caboot mansion, inside a chamber, meanwhile, Studs, Sharker, Zellie and Hart are seated around a large table.
Vivien yells.
"Idiotic!"
She storms in, gesticulating and angrily waving a copy of the newspaper with the headline reading:---POLICE CHIEF ESCAPES FLYING BOMB.
"Who pulled off this idiotic thing?"---then, after a furious pause---"Without any okay from me?!"
Hart fidgets in his seat. He fans the pages of the thick book of his formulæ with his thumb a couple of times, clutching this book like the most precious object in the world.
"How should we know?" he says. "Nobody knows."
And Zellie remarks, "Somebody got mad."
"Look what that raid cost us, Vivien." Hart speaks, rapping his knuckles on his book.
"There's a market for ten billion dollars income out there, and see what we've got,---we're set back to square one."
Vivien bursts out, "I had no choice! I was told, if the cops seized what was in that lab they'd have the evidence to nail us!"
Zellie then grumbles, "Your tutor, Vivie, fingered us. I reckoned he was a cop or working for the cops. I had a fight with Rich over bringing that guy in, but then Rich was getting into his second old age childhood."
Vivien screams, shaking the newspaper at her aunt.
"Just you shut your mouth, 'cause I don't want no word like that about my grandfather!"
"Oh, I bet you don't want words like that, because..."---Zellie catches herself and clams up.
Vivien then challenges her.
"Because what?"
A lengthy tense pause settles in.---Vivien takes a rather menacing pose against her aunt, awaiting a reply. But everyone is very quiet.
And Vivien insists, "So what were you going to say...next?"
She pauses; then she speaks, furiously.
"I'm waiting..."
The whole house and the room are abruptly jolted. Everything sways and shakes in a rolling earthquake tremor. Vivien is almost knocked off her feet and catches herself on the back of a chair. The ceiling light goes off for several seconds, then flickers back on. Something falls with a crash in another room. Sharker draws a pistol from a shoulder holster under his jacket and holds it aimed, glancing around, ready for action. Hart looks around nervously, up at the ceiling, at the swaying ceiling light, and half-rises from his chair, before settling back down when the shaking abates.
Zellie springs to her feet.
"Is this the cops again?"
Vivien steadies herself and regains her composure, placing her hand with the newspaper against the back of a chair. Zellie is standing and looking around, very alarmed. Studs is tense. Sharker is very much on edge, holding his weapon ready for action. Hart keeps looking up at the ceiling apprehensively.
"It's an earthquake," he finally states.
Vivien waves her newspaper flippantly at Sharker and begins smirking.
"Sharker, put your gun away," she says. "Are you going to put out a contract on that earthquake?"
Sharker retorts, "Yeah!"---He pauses.---"I'd like to do that."
But somewhat sheepishly he reholsters his firearm. Even Zellie calms down and resumes her seat. Vivien again places her hand holding the newspaper against the back of a seat. The newspaper is folded out awkwardly, and Vivien looks at it. There is a smaller photograph and title near the bottom of the front page. Vivien frowns in a puzzled way.
The photograph in the newspaper shows the face of the young man Jeff who spoke to Vivien in the symphony hall. The boldface title above reads:---MUTILATION MURDER BAFFLES THE COPS.
The face is smiling blandly like for a high school snapshot.
<<<>>>
Everyone is still there, in the same chamber. Hart begins slamming his fist on the table.
"We've got to protect our market! Blow up city hall, blow up the jail, if that's what it takes! Spread rage, spread terror, we're at war! I feel this...this...this fury surging through me! It's the killing times,---headhunting times! The assassin, pulling the plug on anyone, is the ultimate master. Everyone else survives only at his pleasure, in effect as his slave!"
Vivien whirls at Hart menacingly.
"Hey! Big master, you're through," she says to him. And then, coldly disdainful, she says.
"Don't just sit there blinking your eyes at me, Professor."---She pauses, for a moment.
"Studs, Sharker, take this psycho off my property."
Sharker and Studs rise and advance toward Hart, who sits in a frozen mortification. Zellie is also very shocked, but Vivien is extremely firm.
"Studs and Sharker, that's my order. Get him out, but leave his book here."
Hart almost gags, and his jaws start quivering uncontrollably. He clutches his book and tries to shake his head negatively. Sharker and Studs come up to him on either side, towering over him. Sharker slams a heavy fist across Hart's forearm, almost breaking it. With a scream of pain the professor lets go of his computer printout formula book.
Vivien almost growls, "Hurry up, or the psycho's liable to puke over my table and my carpet. Just drop-kick him out the gate."
Studs and Sharker seize Hart and roughly hustle him out of the chamber, overturning his chair in the process. The book with the drug formulæ stays on the table. Without so much as a further glance in Hart's direction, Vivien saunters up to this book and casually starts leafing through it, standing over it. Zellie sits, watching, clasping her hands very tightly and tensely in front of her on the table.
Then Zellie clears her throat slightly.
"Vivie... Are you sure this was a wise thing to do?"
Vivien answers, gazing down at the book.
"Wise? I never liked him. Now this whole book, I'm putting it on ice. Okay?"
Zellie and Vivien are the only persons remaining in the chamber. Vivien continues standing by
the table and leafing casually through Hart's book. She still holds the newspaper in her other hand. She lays it out over the table, and something again diverts her attention. She traces a line with her finger across the front page, to Jeff's snapshot.
"Say, you know what, Aunt Zellie? I never forget a face. I remember this face. I know this guy from somewhere. Who murdered him?"
"Vivien, what's gotten into you?---Quite right, if a young stud falls in love he probably deserves to get murdered. Falling in love is decadent, disgusting and obscene."
Vivien scrutinizes the snapshot, convinced that the face is familiar, and straining to remember.
<<<>>>
On the grounds of the Caboot family mansion, at night by now, the security of the Caboot premises has been shattered since the raid by the police.
The guard dog kennels are empty. The dogs, which had been killed by the police, have not yet been replaced.
The gate, crashed open by firefighters responding to the warehouse blaze, is still tilted off its hinges, closed in a makeshift way by a heavy chain wrapped around the handles and padlocked.
The floodlights and the electronic surveillance mechanisms on the outer walls are either broken or dead. Only the floodlights on the mansion house itself are still working.
The burnt warehouse is nothing but a heap of charred and twisted ruins, reflecting moonlight eerily.
This moonlight is what exposes a shadowy form of someone throwing a rope with anchor weight over the wall, snagging the rope and climbing it, slipping once awkwardly but recovering,---then going over the top, jumping into some garden bushes. The figure wears a somewhat baggy jumpsuit outfit, and the head looks like it is covered with a stocking mask. The intruder crouches among the garden bushes, a barely discernible shadow-silhouette.
The figure looks, as at some distance a man wearing the uniform of a private security guard passes along a footpath, never distracted or noticing a thing.
Shadowy are the intruder's hands, as they try to pry open a basement window of the Caboot mansion. The intruder wears gloves. The clinking and scraping of a tool, a chisel, is audible but not too loud. The mysterious intruder stays undetected.
And then already inside the mansion, in the night, throughout, it is just the shadow of the intruder. The moonlight through basement windows helps define the shadow: first as the intruder noiselessly creeps through what seems to be a wine cellar. It is a very cold cellar. The intruder utters a shivering hiss. And the steam of exhaled breath are heard and seen.
Luck runs out:---the intruder stumbles, and there is a crash of a bottle breaking. The shadow freezes for a longer time of silence. The accident seems undetected. No response to it follows.
The shadow starts moving again, heading carefully toward a door.
The intruder opens the door and creeps out into a vestibule.---The intruder looks around, crouches, creeps on.
The security inside the mansion is better.---Inconspicuous detection cameras mounted high near the ceiling aim toward the intruder. They even move slightly, tracking.
The intruder is unsure which way to go, climbing part way up a flight of stairs, then retreating, then approaching the portal of what looks like an office, empty, just moonlight from a window falling on a desk and executive chair.
Inside this office , the intruder has crouched behind the desk, and tinkers with the desk drawers. The office is dark, except for the moonlight shining through the window.
A short time passes. Suddenly all the lights in the office go on. Footsteps of several persons are heard entering including the click of a woman's high heels.
And Vivien comes to be looking down.
A triumphant smirk is on her face.
Studs remarks, quietly.
"So... A cat burglar?" he asks.
Vivien murmurs.
"Meeowww..."
It is the head and shoulders of Brenda.
Her ski mask is being pulled off her head by Vivien. Brenda is caught, still crouching helplessly behind the desk. She stares up at her captors, blinking, quivering and swallowing hard.
Thus Vivien and Studs confront Brenda.
Studs says, "Boss, do you know who this is?"
"No."
"That's Duke's girl. I know, because you asked me to do a rundown on her. Pictures."
Studs pauses, to take a breath.
"Huh! The professional crooks out there have more sense than hit on your family's house."
Brenda keeps crouching behind the desk. Studs stands holding a drawn pistol. He exchanges glances with Vivien, who lifts up her head, almost closes her eyes, and renders the smuggest possible smile.
"So this is quite a kitty we've caught."
Studs moves forward and reaches to seize Brenda's arm and pull her up from behind the desk.
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