“She didn’t tell me to.”

  Clara said, “For all you know, she’s sick in bed and can’t answer the door.”

  “She’d have to be pretty sick not to use the phone when it’s right near the bed.”

  “Maybe she had a heart attack. Listen, maybe she’s dead and that’s why she doesn’t shut off the drip.”

  “She’s a young woman. She wouldn’t have a heart attack.”

  “You can’t be sure. With the life she lives—maybe a boyfriend killed her. We’ve got to go in.”

  “That’s breaking and entering,” said Hester.

  “With a key? If she’s away, you can’t leave the plants to die. You water them and I’ll shut off the drip. What harm?—And if she’s dead, do you want her to lie there till who knows when?”

  “She’s not dead,” said Hester, but she went downstairs to the fourth floor for Mrs. Maclaren’s keys.

  “No one in the hall,” whispered Clara. “Anyone could break in anywhere, anytime.”

  “Sh,” whispered Hester. “What if she’s inside and says, ‘Who’s there?’”

  “So say you came to water the plants and I’ll ask her to shut off the drip.”

  The key to one lock and then the key to the other turned smoothly and with only the tiniest click at the end. Hester took a deep breath and opened the door a crack. She knocked.

  “There’s no answer,” whispered Clara impatiently. She pushed the door wide open. “The air conditioner isn’t even on. It’s legitimate. You want to water the plants.”

  The door closed behind them. Clara said, “It smells stuffy, in here. Feels like a damp oven.”

  They walked softly down the corridor. Empty utility room on the right, empty bathroom—

  Clara looked in. “No drip. It’s in the master bedroom.” At the end of the corridor there was the living room on the left with some plants.

  “They need water,” said Clara. “I’ll go into the master bath—”

  She opened the bedroom door and stopped. No motion. No sound. Her mouth opened wide.

  Hester was at her side. The smell was stifling. “What—”

  “Oh, my God,” said Clara, but without breath to scream.

  The bed coverings were in total disarray. Mrs. Maclaren’s head lolled off the bed, her long brown hair brushing the floor, her neck bruised, one arm dangling on the floor, hand open, palm up.

  “The police,” said Clara. “We’ve got to call the police.”

  Hester, gasping, moved forward.

  “You musn’t touch anything,” said Clara.

  The glint of brass in the open hand—

  Hester had found her son’s missing button.

  28

  Halloween

  This was written on order. I do a regular column for American Way (the in-flight magazine of American Airlines) on what the future might be like in one way or another. I have done 160 of these articles so far, but every once in a long while the magazine asks for a piece of fiction from me.

  This is the mystery story I wrote for them. This was written before I had begun my Union Club mysteries, but, in my opinion, this could have become one of them with very little in the way of change.

  Sanderson looked troubled and grew sulky. “That was a mistake on our part. We took him so for granted that we didn’t see him. Human error.” He shook his head.

  “And what was the motive?”

  “Ideology,” Sanderson said. “He got the job just to do this. We know because he left a note behind, couldn’t resist crowing over us. He was one of those who feel that nuclear fission is deadly; that it will lead to the big-time theft of plutonium, to the making of homemade bombs, to nuclear terrorism and blackmail.”

  “I take it he was out to show it could be done?”

  “Yes. He was going to publicize it and rouse public opinion.”

  “How dangerous is the plutonium he stole?” Haley asked.

  “Not at all dangerous. It’s a small amount. You could hold the case in your hand. It wasn’t even meant for the fissioning core. We were doing other things with it. There’s certainly not enough to build a bomb with, I assure you.”

  “Could there be possible danger to the individual holding it?”

  “None if it’s left in its case. If you took it out, there would be damage eventually to anyone coming in contact with it.”

  “I could see where public alarm would be justified,” Haley said.

  Sanderson frowned. “But it proves nothing. It was a mistake that will never happen again and, in any case, the alarm system worked. We were after him at once. If he hadn’t managed to get to this hotel; if we didn’t fear alarming the people here…”

  “Why didn’t you inform the Bureau at once?”

  “If we could have gotten him ourselves…” Sanderson mumbled.

  “Then the whole thing could have been hidden, even from the Bureau. Mistakes and all.”

  “Well…”

  “But you did inform us in the end. After he died. I take it, therefore, you don’t have the plutonium?”

  Sanderson’s eyes drifted furtively away from Haley’s steady glance. “No, we don’t.” Then defensively, “We couldn’t operate too openly. There were thousands of people here and if the notion arose that there was trouble—if it were pinned to the station…”

  “Then you would have lost and he would have won, even if you caught him and retrieved the plutonium. I understand that. How long was he here then?” Haley looked at his watch. “It’s 3:57 A.M. now.”

  “All day. It was only when it got late enough to allow us to work more openly that we trapped him on the stairs. We tried to rush him and he tried to run. He slipped—hit his head against the railing, after tumbling a flight, and fractured his skull.”

  “And he didn’t have the plutonium on him. How do you know he had it with him when he entered the hotel?”

  “It was seen. One of our men almost had him at one point.”

  “So during the hours he managed to evade you in this hotel, he could have hidden this thing, a small box, anywhere on the twenty-nine floors, in the ninety rooms on each floor—or in the corridors, offices, utility sections, basement, roof—and we have to have it back, don’t we? We can’t allow plutonium to float about the city, however small the amount. Is that right?”

  “Yes,” Sanderson said unhappily.

  “One alternative is to take a hundred men and search the hotel—floor by floor, room by room, square inch by square inch—until we find it.”

  “We can’t do that,” Sanderson said. “How would we explain it?”

  “And what is the alternative?” Haley asked. “Do we have a hint? The thief said something. Halloween?”

  Sanderson nodded. “He was conscious a few moments before he died. We asked him where the plutonium was and he said, ‘Halloween.’”

  Haley took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Is that all he said?”

  “That’s all. Three of us heard him.”

  “And it was definitely ‘Halloween’ you heard? He didn’t say ‘hollow ring,’ for instance?”

  “No. ‘Halloween.’ We all agree.”

  “Has the word any significance to you? Is there a Project Halloween at the station? Is the word used to mean something in an ‘in’ way?”

  “No no. Nothing like that.”

  “Do you think he was trying to tell you where the plutonium was?”

  “We don’t know,” said Sanderson agonizingly. “His eyes were unfocused. It was a dying whisper. We don’t even know if he heard our question.”

  Haley was silent for a moment. “Yes. It could have been a last fugitive thought of anything at all. A childhood memory. Anything—except that yesterday was Halloween. The day on which he hid in this hotel and tried to evade you for long enough to get the story to the newspapers was Halloween. It could have had some significance to him.”

  Sanderson shrugged.

  Haley was thinking out loud. “Halloween is the day on which the forces of evil are abroad and he must surely have been considering himself to be fighting those forces.”

  “We are not evil,” Sanderson said.

  “What counts is what he thought—and he didn’t want himself caught, and the plutonium, too. So he hid it. Every room is vacuumed, every room has its sheets and towels changed at some time during the day, and when that is happening the door is open. He would pass an open door and step in—one step and a quick placing of the box where it wouldn’t be readily seen. Then he could come back later to retrieve it; or if he was caught, the box would eventually be noticed by some guest or some employee, taken to the management, and recognized with or without having done damage.”

  “But what room?” Sanderson agonized.

  “We can try one room,” Haley said, “and if that doesn’t work, we will have to search the hotel.” He left.

  Haley was back in half an hour. The body had been removed, but Sanderson was still there, deep in dejection.

  “There were two people in the room,” Haley said. “We had to wake them. I found something on top of the shelf above the coatrack. Is this it?”

  It was a small cube, gray in color, heavy in the hand, the top held down by wing nuts.

  “That’s it,” Sanderson said with barely controlled excitement. He loosened the wing nuts, lifted the top a crack, and put a small probe near the opening. The sound of crackling could be heard at once. “That’s it. But how did you know where it was?”

  “Just a chance,” said Haley, with a shrug. “The thief had Halloween on his mind, judging from his last word. When he saw a particular hotel room open and being cleaned, perhaps it seemed like an omen to him.”

  “What hotel room?”

  “Room 1031,” Haley said. “October the thirty-first. Halloween.”

  29

  The Thirteenth Day of Christmas

  I also write a series of mystery stories for young people, stories in which my detective is a junior high school student named Larry. I don’t do them often and have only eleven of them so far.

  Usually, they run in Boys Life magazine. This one, however, was rejected by them for some reason, but it was snapped up by EQMM, even though it was patently a juvenile.

  It was my favorite Larry story and I had even been so vain as to read it aloud to my daughter (ordinarily, I never let anyone see my stories before acceptance), which meant I was all the more taken aback at its rejection.

  However, it is still my favorite and here it is.

  This was one year we were glad when Christmas Day was over.

  It had been a grim Christmas Eve and I had stayed awake as long as I could, half listening for bombs. And Mom and I stayed up until midnight on Christmas Day, too. Then Dad called and said, “Okay, it’s over. Nothing’s happened. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

  Mom and I danced around as if Santa Claus had just come and then, after about an hour, Dad came home and I went to bed and slept fine.

  You see, it’s special in our house. Dad’s a detective on the force and these days, with terrorists and bombings, it can get pretty hairy. So, when on December twentieth, warnings reached headquarters that there would be a Christmas Day bombing at the Soviet offices in the United Nations, it had to be taken seriously.

  The entire force was put on the alert and the FBI came in, too. The Soviets had their own security, I guess, but none of it satisfied Dad.

  The day before Christmas was the worst. “If someone is crazy enough to want to plant a bomb and if he’s not too worried about getting caught afterward, he’s likely to be able to do it no matter what precautions we take.” Dad’s voice had a grimness we rarely heard.

  “I suppose there’s no way of knowing who it is,” Mom said.

  Dad shook his head. “Letters from newspapers pasted on paper; no fingerprints, only smudges. Common stuff we can’t trace and a threat that it would be the only warning we’d get. What can we do?”

  “Well, it must be someone who doesn’t like the Russians, I guess,” Mom said.

  Dad said, “That doesn’t narrow it much. Of course, the Soviets say it’s a Zionist threat, and we’ve got to keep an eye on the Jewish Defense League.”

  “Gee, Dad,” I said. “That doesn’t make much sense. The Jewish people wouldn’t pick Christmas to do it, would they? It doesn’t mean anything to them; and it doesn’t mean anything to the Soviet Union, either. They’re officially atheistic.”

  “You can’t reason that out to the Russians,” Dad said. “Now, why don’t you turn in, because tomorrow may be a bad day all round, Christmas Day or not.”

  Then he left. He was out all Christmas Day, and it was pretty rotten. We didn’t even open any presents; just sat listening to the radio, which was tuned to the news station.

  Then at midnight when Dad called and nothing had happened, we could breathe again, but I still forgot to open my presents.

  That didn’t come till the morning of the twenty-sixth. We made that day Christmas. Dad had a day off and Mom roasted the turkey a day late. It wasn’t till after dinner that we talked about it at all.

  Mom said, “I suppose the person, whoever it was, couldn’t find any way of planting the bomb once the Department drew the security strings tight.”

  Dad smiled, as if he appreciated Mom’s loyalty. “I don’t think you can make security that tight,” he said, “but what’s the difference? There was no bomb. Maybe it was a bluff. After all, it did disrupt the city a bit and it gave the Soviet people at the United Nations some sleepless nights, I’ll bet. That might have been almost as good for the bomber as letting the bomb go off.”

  “If he couldn’t do it on Christmas,” I said, “maybe he’ll do it another time. Maybe he just said Christmas to get everyone keyed up and then, after they relax, he’ll…”

  Dad gave me one of his little pushes on the side of my head. “You’re a cheerful one, Larry. No, I don’t think so. Real bombers value the sense of power. When they say something is going up at a certain time, it’s got to be that time or it’s no fun for them.”

  I was still suspicious, but the days passed and there was no bombing and the Department gradually went back to normal. The FBI left and even the Soviet people seemed to forget about it, according to Dad.

  On January second, the Christmas-New Year vacation was over and I went back to school. We started rehearsing our Christmas pageant. We made an elaborate show out of the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” which doesn’t have any religion to it—just presents.

  There were twelve of us kids, each one singing a particular line every time it came up and then coming in all together on the “partridge in a pear tree.” I was number five, singing “five gold rings” because I was still a boy soprano and I could hit that high note pretty nicely, if I do say so myself.

  Some kids didn’t know why Christmas had twelve days, but I explained that if we count Christmas Day as one, the twelfth day after it is January sixth, when the Three Wise Men arrived with gifts for the Christ child. Naturally, it was on January sixth that we put on the show in the auditorium, with as many parents there as wanted to come.

  Dad got a few hours off and was sitting in the audience with Mom. I could see him getting set to hear his son’s high note for the last time because next year my voice changes or I’ll know the reason why.

  Did you ever get an idea in the middle of a stage show and have to continue, no matter what?

  We were only on the second day with its “two turtledoves” when I thought, “Oh my, it’s the thirteenth day of Christmas.” The whole world was shaking around me and I couldn’t do a thing but stay on the stage and sing about “five gold rings.”

  I didn’t think they’d ever get to those stupid “twelve drummers drumming.” It was like having itching powder on instead of underwear. I couldn’t stand still. Then, when the last note was out, while they were still applauding, I broke away, went jumping down the steps from the platform and up the aisle, calling, “Dad!”

  He looked startled, but I grabbed him, and I think I was babbling so fast he could hardly understand.

  I said, “Dad, Christmas isn’t the same day everywhere. It could be one of the Soviet’s own people. They’re officially atheist, but maybe one of them is religious and he wants to place the bomb for that reason. Only he would be a member of the Russian Orthodox Church. They don’t go by our calendar.”

  “What?” said Dad, looking as if he didn’t understand a word I was saying.

  “It’s so, Dad. I read about it. The Russian Orthodox Church is still on the Julian Calendar, which the West gave up for the Gregorian Calendar centuries ago. The Julian Calendar is thirteen days behind ours. The Orthodox Christmas is on their December twenty-fifth, which is our January seventh. It’s tomorrow.”

  He didn’t believe me, just like that. He looked it up in the almanac; then he called up someone in the Department who was Russian Orthodox.

  He was able to get the Department moving again. They talked to the Soviets, and once the Soviets stopped talking about Zionists and looked at themselves, they got the man. I don’t know what they did with him, but there was no bombing on the thirteenth day of Christmas, either.

  The Department wanted to give me a new bicycle for Christmas after that, but I turned it down. I was just doing my duty.

  30

  The Key Word

  This is another Larry story.

  Some reviewers seem to think that Larry is an insufferable kid and wonder how his father can stand him. As a matter of fact, anyone that smart is bound to be insufferable, and I make it quite plain that his father, in between being proud of him, tends to get exasperated with him.

  It doesn’t bother me. I was that bright when I was a kid, and quite insufferable, and I managed to survive—and my father even liked me part of the time, I think.

  Ordinarily, Dad keeps his temper pretty well around the house and he never loses it with me—almost never. I like to think it’s because I’m a good kid, but he says it’s because I’m smart enough to stay out of his way when he’s mad.