How, indeed? Everybody stood staring at the tiny thing, and then at young Joel, and he was gazing at the flagstones, struck white and dumb. And all in a moment Connie Dymond had pulled her arm free of his and recoiled from him until her back was against the wall, and was edging away from him like somebody trying to get out of range of flood or fire, and her face a sight to be seen, blind and stiff with horror.

"You!" she said in a whisper. "It was you! Oh, my G.o.d, you did it-you killed her! And me keeping company-how could I? How could you!"

She let out a screech and burst into sobs, and before anybody could stop her she turned and took to her heels, running for home like a mad thing.

I let her go. She"d keep. And I got young Joel and that single ear-ring away from the Sunday congregation and into Trinity Cottage before half the people there knew what was happening, and shut the world out, all but old Joel who came panting and shaking after us a few minutes later.

The boy was a long time getting his voice back, and when he did he had nothing to say but, hopelessly, over and over: "I didn"t! I never touched her, I wouldn"t. I don"t know how that thing got into my pocket. I didn"t do it. I never ..."

Human beings are not all that inventive. Given a similar set of circ.u.mstances they tend to come out with the same formula. And in any case, "deny everything and say nothing else" is a very good rule when cornered.

They thought I"d gone round the bend when I said: "Where"s the cat? See if you can get him in."

Old Joel was past wondering. He went out and rattled a saucer on the steps, and pretty soon the Trinity cat strolled in. Not at all excited, not wanting anything, fed and lazy, just curious enough to come and see why he was wanted. I turned him loose on young Joel"s overcoat, and he couldn"t have cared less. The pocket that had held the ear-ring held very little interest for him. He didn"t care about any of the clothes in the wardrobe, or on the pegs in the little hall. As far as he was concerned, this new find was a nonevent.

I sent for a constable and a car, and took young Joel in with me to the station, and all the village, you may be sure, either saw us pa.s.s or heard about it very shortly after. But I didn"t stop to take any statement from him, just left him there, and took the car up to Mary Melton"s place, where she breeds Siamese, and borrowed a cat-basket from her, the sort she uses to carry her queens to the vet. She asked what on earth I wanted it for, and I said to take the Trinity cat for a ride. She laughed her head off.

"Well, he"s no queen," she said, "and no king, either. Not even a jack! And you"ll never get that wild thing into a basket."

"Oh, yes, I will," I said. "And if he isn"t any of the other picture cards, he"s probably going to turn out to be the joker."

A very neat basket it was, not too obviously meant for a cat. And it was no trick getting the Trinity cat into it, all I did was drop in Miss Thomson"s handbag, and he was in after it in a moment. He growled when he found himself shut in, but it was too late to complain then.

At the house by the ca.n.a.l Connie Dymond"s mother let me in, but was none too happy about letting me see Connie, until I explained that I needed a statement from her before I could fit together young Joel"s movements all through those Christmas days. Naturally I understood that the girl was terribly upset, but she"d had a lucky escape, and the sooner everything was cleared up, the better for her. And it wouldn"t take long.

It didn"t take long. Connie came down the stairs readily enough when her mother called her. She was all stained and pale and tearful, but had perked up somewhat with a sort of shivering pride in her own prominence. I"ve seen them like that before, getting the juice out of being the centre of attention even while they wish they were elsewhere. You could even say she hurried down, and she left the door of her bedroom open behind her, by the light coming through at the head of the stairs.

"Oh, Sergeant Moon!" she quavered at me from three steps up. "Isn"t it awful? I still can"t believe it! Can there be some mistake? Is there any chance it wasn"t ...?"

I said soothingly, yes, there was always a chance. And I slipped the latch of the cat-basket with one hand, so that the flap fell open, and the Trinity cat was out of there and up those stairs like a black flash, startling her so much she nearly fell down the last step, and steadied herself against the wall with a small shriek. And I blurted apologies for accidentally loosing him, and went up the stairs three at a time ahead of her, before she could recover her balance.

He was up on his hind legs in her dolly little room, full of pop posters and frills and garish colours, pawing at the second drawer of her dressing-table, and singing a loud, joyous, impatient song. When I came plunging in, he even looked over his shoulder at me and stood down, as though he knew I"d open the drawer for him. And I did, and he was up among her fancy undies like a shot, and digging with his front paws.

He found what he wanted just as she came in at the door. He yanked it out from among her bras and slips, and tossed it into the air, and in seconds he was on the floor with it, rolling and wrestling it, juggling it on his four paws like a circus turn, and purring fit to kill, a cat in ecstasy. A comic little thing it was, a muslin mouse with a plaited green nylon string for a tail, yellow beads for eyes, and nylon threads for whiskers, that rustled and sent out wafts of strong scent as he batted it around and sang to it. A catmint mouse, old Miss Thomson"s last-minute purchase from the pet shop for her dumb friend. If you could ever call the Trinity cat dumb! The only thing she bought that day small enough to be slipped into her handbag instead of the shopping bag.

Connie let out a screech, and was across that room so fast I only just beat her to the open drawer. They were all there, the little pendant watch, the locket, the brooches, the true-lover"s-knot, the purse, even the other ear-ring. A mistake, she should have ditched both while she was about it, but she was too greedy. They were for pierced ears, anyhow, no good to Connie.

I held them out in the palm of my hand-such a large haul they made-and let her see what she"d robbed and killed for.

If she"d kept her head she might have made a fight of it even then, claimed he"d made her hide them for him, and she"d been afraid to tell on him directly, and could only think of staging that public act at church, to get him safely in custody before she came clean. But she went wild. She did the one deadly thing, turned and kicked out in a screaming fury at the Trinity cat. He was spinning like a humming-top, and all she touched was the kink in his tail. He whipped round and clawed a red streak down her leg through the nylon. And then she screamed again, and began to babble through hysterical sobs that she never meant to hurt the poor old sod, that it wasn"t her fault! Ever since she"d been going with young Joel she"d been seeing that little old bag going in and out, draped with her bits of gold. What in h.e.l.l did an old witch like her want with jewellery? She had no right! At her age!

"But I never meant to hurt her! She came in too soon," lamented Connie, still and for ever the aggrieved. "What was I supposed to do? I had to get away, didn"t I? She was between me and the door!"

She was half her size, too, and nearly four times her age! Ah well! What the courts would do with Connie, thank G.o.d, was none of my business. I just took her in and charged her, and got her statement. Once we had her dabs it was all over, because she"d left a bunch of them sweaty and clear on that bra.s.s candlestick. But if it hadn"t been for the Trinity cat and his single-minded pursuit, scaring her into that ill-judged attempt to hand us young Joel as a scapegoat, she might, she just might, have got clean away with it. At least the boy could go home now, and count his blessings.

Not that she was very bright, of course. Who but a stupid harpy, soaked in cheap perfume and gimcrack dreams, would have hung on even to the catmint mouse, mistaking it for an herbal sachet to put among her smalls?

I saw the Trinity cat only this morning, sitting grooming in the church porch. He"s getting very self-important, as if he knows he"s a celebrity, though throughout he was only looking after the interests of Number One, like all cats. He"s lost interest in his mouse already, now most of the scent"s gone.

THE BURGLAR AND THE WHATSIT.

Donald E. Westlake.

I MEAN NO OFFENSE TO ANYONE, but there can be little dispute that the funniest mystery writer who ever lived was Donald E. Westlake. He showed his versatility by also writing a very hard-boiled series about the tough professional thief Parker, using the pen name Richard Stark, and the poignant series about Mitch Tobin, under the pseudonym Tucker Coe. It is for his complex and hilarious caper novels, mainly about the unlucky criminal genius John Dortmunder, for whom every perfectly planned burglary goes woefully wrong, that Westlake has been most honored, notably by the Mystery Writers of America, which named him a Grand Master for lifetime achievement in 1993. "The Burglar and the Whatsit" was first published in Playboy in 1996; it was first collected in A Good Story and Other Stories (Unity, ME, Five Star, 1999).

The Burglar and The Whatsit.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE.

"HEY, SANITY CLAUSE," SHOUTED the drunk from up the hall. "Wait up. C"mere."

The man in the red Santa Claus suit, with the big white beard on his face and the big heavy red sack on his shoulder, did not wait up, and did not come here, but instead continued to plod on down the hall in this high floor of a Manhattan apartment building in the middle of a cold evening in the middle of December.

"Hey, Sanity! Wait up, will ya?"

The man in the Santa Claus suit did not at all want to wait up, but on the other hand he also did not at all want a lot of shouting in this hall here, because in fact he was not your normal Santa Claus but was something else entirely, which was a burglar, named Jack. This Jack was a burglar who had learned some time ago that if he were to enter apartment buildings costumed like the sort of person who in the normal course of events would carry on himself some sort of large bag or box or reticule or sack, he could probably fill that sack or whatever with any number of valuable items without much risk of his being challenged, questioned, or-in the worst case-arrested.

Often, therefore, this Jack would roam the corridors of the cliff dwellers garbed as, for instance, a mailman or other parcel delivery person, or as a supermarket clerk pushing a cart full of grocery bags (paper, because you can see through plastic, and plastic bags don"t stand up). Just once he"d been a doctor, with a stethoscope and a doctor"s black bag, but that time he"d been snagged at once, for everybody knows doctors don"t make house calls. A master of disguise, Jack even occasionally appeared as a Chinese restaurant delivery guy. The bicycle clip around his right ankle, to protect his pants leg from the putative bicycle"s supposed chain, was the masterstroke of that particular impersonation.

But the best was Santa Claus. First of all, the disguise was so complete, with the false stomach and the beard and the hat and the gloves. Also, the Santa sack was more capacious than almost anything else he could carry. And finally, people liked Santa Claus, and it made the situation more humane, somehow, gentler and nicer, to be smiled upon by the people he"d just robbed.

The downside of Santa was that his season was so short. There was only about a three-week period in December when the appearance of a Santa Claus in an apartment building"s public areas would not raise more questions than it would answer. But those three weeks were the peak of the year for Jack, when he could move in warmth and safety and utter anonymity, his sack full of gifts-not for the nearby residents but from them. And all in peace and quiet, because people leave Santa Claus alone, when they see him they know he"s on his way somewhere, to a party or a chimney or something.

So they leave Santa alone. Except for this drunk here, shouting in the hallway. Jack the burglar didn"t need a lot of shouting in the hallway, and he didn"t want a lot of shouting in the hallway, so with some reluctance he turned around at last and waited up, gazing at the approaching drunk from eyes that were the one false in the costume: They definitely did not twinkle.

The drunk reeled closer and stared at the burglar out of his own awful eyes, like blue eggs sunny-side up. "You"re just the guy I need," he announced, inaccurately, for clearly what he most urgently needed was both a 12-step program and a whole lot of large, humorless people to enforce it.

The burglar waited, and the drunk leaned against the wall to keep the building from falling over. "If anybody can get the G.o.dd.a.m.n thing to work," he said, "it"s Sanity Clause. But don"t talk to me about batteries. Batteries not included is not the problem here."

"Good," the burglar said, and then expanded on that: "Goodbye."

"Wait!" the drunk shouted as the burglar turned away.

The burglar turned back. "Don"t shout," he said.

"Well, don"t keep going away," the drunk told him. "I got a real problem here."

The burglar sighed through his thick white beard. One of the reasons he"d taken up this line of work in the first place was that you could do it alone. "All right," he said, hoping this would be short, at least. "What"s the problem?"

"Come on, I"ll show you." Risking all, the drunk pushed off from the wall and tottered away down the hall. The burglar followed him, and the drunk touched his palm to an apartment door, which clicked and swung open-that was cute-and they went inside. The door swung shut, and the burglar stopped dead and stared.

Jack the burglar had seen a lot of living rooms in his business, but this one was definitely the strangest. Nothing in it looked right. All the furniture, if that"s what it was, consisted of hard and soft shapes from geometry cla.s.s, in a variety of pastel colors. Tall narrow things that looked like metal plants might have been lamps. Short wide things that crouched could have been chairs. Some of the stuff didn"t seem to be anything in particular at all.

The drunk tottered through this abstract landscape to an inner doorway, then said, "Be right back," and disappeared.

The burglar made a circuit of the room, and to his surprise found items of interest. A small pale pyramid turned out to be a clock; into his sack it went. Also, this avocado with ears seemed to be a CD player; pop, in it went.

In a far corner, in amazing contrast to everything else, stood a Christmas tree, fat and richly green and hung with a million ornaments, the only normal object in sight. Or, wait a minute. The burglar stared and frowned, and the Christmas tree shimmered over there as though it were about to be beamed up to the starship Enterprise. What was wrong with that tree?

The drunk returned, aglow with happy pride. Waving at the wavering Christmas tree, he said, "Whaddya think?"

"What is it, that"s what I think."

"A hologram," the drunk said. "You can walk all around it, see all the sides, and you never have to water it, and it never drops a needle and you can use it next year. Pretty good, huh?"

"It isn"t traditional," the burglar said. He had his own sense of the fitness of things.

"Tra-dish-unal!" The drunk almost knocked himself over, he rocketed that word out so hard. "I don"t need tradition, I"m an inventor!" Pointing at a whatsit that was just now following him into the room, he said, "See?"

The burglar saw. This whatsit was a metal box, pebbly gray, about four feet tall and a foot square, scattered all over with dials and switches and antennas, plus a smooth dome on the top and little wheels on the bottom that hummed as the thing came straight across the bare gray floor to stop in front of the burglar and go, "Chick-chick, chillick, chillick."

The burglar didn"t like this artifact at all. He said. "Well what"s this supposed to be?"

"That"s just it," the drunk said and collapsed backward onto a trapezoid that just possibly could have been a sofa. "I don"t know what the heck it is."

"I don"t like it," the burglar said. The thing buzzed and chicked as though it were a supermarket scanner and Jack the burglar were equipped with a bar code. "It"s making me nervous."

"It makes me nervous," the drunk said. "I invented the darn thing, and I don"t know what it"s for. Whyn"t you sit down?"

The burglar looked around. "On what?"

"Oh, anything. You want an eggnog?"

Revolted, the burglar said, "Eggnog? No!" And he sat on a nearby rhomboid, which fortunately was more comfortable than it looked.

"I just thought, you know, the uniform," the drunk said, and sat up straighter on his trapezoid and began to applaud.

What"s he got to applaud about? But here came another whatsit, this one with skinny metal arms and a head shaped like a tray. The drunk told it, "I"ll have the usual." To the burglar he said, "And what for you?"

"Nothing," said the burglar. "Not, uh, on duty."

"OK. Give him a seltzer with a slice of lime," he told the tray-headed whatsit, and the thing wheeled about and left as the drunk explained, "I don"t like to see anybody without a gla.s.s."

"So you got a lot of these, uh, things, huh? Invented them all?"

"Used to have a lot more," the drunk said, getting mad, "but a bunch got stolen. G.o.dd.a.m.n it, G.o.dd.a.m.n it!"

"Oh, yeah?"

"If I could get my hands on those burglars!" The drunk tried to demonstrate a pretend choke in midair, but his fingers got all tangled together, and in trying to untangle them he fell over on his side. Lying there on the trapezoid, one eye visible, he glared at the domed whatsit hovering near the burglar and snarled, "I wish they"d steal that thing."

The burglar said, "How can you invent it and not know what it is?"

"Easy." The drunk, with a lot of arm and leg movements, pushed himself back to a seated position as the bartender whatsit came rolling back into the room with two drinks on its head/tray. It zipped past the drunk, who grabbed his gla.s.s from it on the fly, then paused in front of the burglar on the rhomboid, who accepted the gla.s.s of seltzer and suppressed the urge to say "Thanks."

Tray-head wheeled around the enigmatic whatsit and left. The drunk frowned at the whatsit and said, "Half the things I invent I don"t remember. I just do them. I do the drawing and fax it to my construction people, and then I go think about other things. And after a while, dingdong, United Parcel, and there it is, according to specifikah-speci-plan."

"Then how do you find out what anything"s for?

"I leave myself a note in the computer when I invent it. When the package shows up, I check back and the screen says, "We now have a perfect vacuum cleaner." Or, "We now have a perfect pocket calculator." "

"How come you didn"t do that this time?"

"I did!" A growl escaped the drunk"s throat and his face reddened with remembered rage. "Somebody stole the computer!"

"Ah," said the burglar.

"So, here I am," the drunk went on, pointing with his free hand at himself and the whatsit and his drink and the Christmas tree and various other things, "here I am, I got this thing-for all I know it"s some sorta boon to mankind, a perfect Christmas present to humanity-and I don"t know what it is!"

"But what do you want from me?" the burglar asked, shifting on his rhomboid. "I don"t know about inventions."

"You know about things," the drunk told him. "You know about stuff. n.o.body in the world knows stuff like Sanity Clause. Electric pencil sharpeners. Jigsaw puzzles. Stuff."

"Yeah? And? So?"

"So tell me stuff," the drunk said. "Any kinda stuff that you can think of, and I"ll tell you if I did one yet, and when it"s something I never did we"ll try out some commands on Junior here and see what happens."

"I don"t know," the burglar said, as the whatsit at last wheeled away from him and out into the middle of the room. It stopped, as though poised there. "You mean, just say products to you?"

"S"only thing I can think off," the drunk explained, "that might help." Then he sat up even more and gaped at the whatsit. "Looka that!"

The whatsit was extruding more aerials. Little lights ran around its square body. A buzzing sound came from within. The burglar said, "It isn"t gonna explode, is it?"

"I don"t think so," the drunk said. "It looks like it"s broadcasting. Suppose I invented something to look for intelligence on other planets?"

"Would you want something like that?"

The drunk considered, then shook his head. "No. You"re right, it isn"t that." Perking up, he said, "But you got the idea, right? Try me, come on, tell me stuff. We gotta get moving here. I gotta figure out what this thing"s supposed to do before it starts doing it all on its own. Come on, come on."

The burglar thought. He wasn"t actually Santa Claus, of course, but he was certainly familiar with stuff. "A fax machine," he said, there being three of them at the moment in his sack on the floor beside the rhomboid.

"Did one," the drunk said. "Recycles newspapers, prints on it."

"Coffee maker."

"Part of my breakfast maker."

"Rock polisher."

"Don"t want one."

"Air purifier."