“I saw it,” said Jupe. “You fell in the pool. And Elmquist came out of his apartment.”
“But that’s impossible!” declared Pete. “He wasn’t in his apartment when I fell in the pool. There was no way he could be in his apartment. He was over by Murphy’s, and then he wasn’t anywhere!”
12
Crack-up!
FOR THE REST OF THE NIGHT, Bob and Jupe took turns watching from the balcony. There was no further movement in the courtyard until four, when Mrs Bortz came out of her apartment. She was wearing a heavy tweed coat. Jupe saw her and dodged into Prentice’s apartment.
“Mrs Bortz is going out,” Jupe reported to Prentice. The old gentleman had not gone to bed at all. He had spent the night sitting up, propped against a corner of the sofa, dozing now and then.
“Of course,” said Prentice when he heard this.
“At four a.m.?” questioned Jupiter.
Prentice yawned. “The market is open twenty-four hours a day,” Prentice reminded Jupe. “Mrs Bortz always does her marketing on Thursdays and she always leaves at four.”
Jupe could only stare at Prentice.
“She claims the market isn’t crowded at this hour,” said Prentice. “It is my opinion, however, that at this hour she can be reasonably sure nothing will be happening here, so she won’t miss anything if she’s away. Mr Murphy will not leave for his office until five o’clock. The other tenants are always in bed at this time.”
Bob and Pete came in from the den, where they had been napping. “You mean she’s so nosy she can’t stand to be away from here unless everybody’s asleep?” said Pete.
“It is strange, compulsive behaviour,” said Prentice. “She’s like a spider who cannot leave her web. Her only interest is in the people who live here; she watches them constantly. That is her existence.”
Bob went to the front window and pulled aside the curtains. He heard a car start and saw the red glow of tail lights on the cement below. Then a grey sedan began to back out from under the building.
“I’m surprised her battery doesn’t go dead, if she only uses the car once a week,” said Bob.
“She has to summon the men from the garage fairly often,” said Prentice.
The sedan backed into the street, turned, and started forward slowly.
Then, in the pre-dawn stillness, the boys and Prentice heard an explosion and a scream.
Prentice jumped up from the sofa.
Jupiter leaped to the window.
A little way down the street, the sedan swerved first to the left and then to the right. Smoke billowed out from under the hood.
Mrs Bortz screamed again. The car, now completely out of control, smashed into the kerb, blowing both front tyres. With a horrible crunch, it struck a hydrant head on.
Mrs Bortz screamed again and again. The hydrant had snapped off level with the ground, and water spurted up around the car.
“Call the fire brigade!” shouted Pete to Prentice.
Bob ran towards the doors. “We’d better get her out of there before she drowns,” he said.
The boys reached the courtyard just as Murphy, clad in a bathrobe, and Elmquist, who had thrown a coat on over his pyjamas, were going out through the front gate.
“Mrs Bortz!” shouted Murphy. The big man ran towards the wrecked car.
The boys passed Elmquist and overtook Murphy. They waded through ice-cold water and then groped through the bone-chilling cascade from the broken hydrant to reach the door of the sedan.
Mrs Bortz sat rigidly behind the wheel, staring straight ahead and screaming–screaming as if she would never stop.
“Mrs Bortz!” Jupe pulled at the door handle. The car door was locked.
Murphy beat at the window next to Mrs Bortz.
The woman turned, stunned, and stared at him.
“Open the door!” yelled Murphy.
She fumbled with the button on the door. A second later Murphy had yanked the door open. He and Bob dragged the hysterical woman out of the car.
There were sirens on the street then, and an emergency truck from the fire brigade pulled up. Men in black raincoats swarmed down. One took a look at the situation and turned to say a few words to the driver of the truck. The man put his vehicle in gear and sped off towards the corner.
A moment later, the fire hydrant stopped spouting. Murphy, Elmquist, Bob, and Jupe stood with Mrs Bortz, who was speechless from shock.
“How’d you do that?” said Murphy to a fireman.
“There’s a master valve at the corner,” said the fireman. He looked at Mrs Bortz. “Were you driving?” he asked.
She didn’t answer.
“We’d better get her inside,” said Murphy. “She’ll catch pneumonia standing out here.”
Bob and Jupe almost had to drag Mrs Bortz up the steps into the building. Murphy got her keys from the car to open her door. The fireman had come to the door and stood there. A policeman appeared behind him.
“Who hit the hydrant?” the policeman said.
Mrs Bortz stood in her living room. “Someone shot at me,” she said. She seemed to speak without moving her lips.
“You’d better get out of your wet things, ma’am,” said the policeman quietly. “Then, if you’re feeling okay, maybe you’d like to tell us about it.”
She nodded and disappeared into a hallway.
Jupe realized that his own teeth were chattering. “I’m going to change, too,” he told the officer.
“You see anything?” asked the policeman.
“I saw the car start up the street,” said Jupe.
“Okay, go and change your clothes, then come back here.” He turned to Bob and Pete. “You, too.”
A few minutes later the boys returned in dry clothes and gave their report to the police.
A breakdown truck had arrived on the street. Several men in police uniforms and one man in plain clothes were clustered around the wrecked car.
“If anybody shot at her, he missed,” said the plain-clothes man.
“There was a shot,” said Jupe. “I heard it. Just as she started to drive down the street, there was a shot or . . . or an explosion.”
The sedan, listing to one side atop the broken hydrant, was brilliantly lit by the headlamps of the breakdown truck.
“No bullet holes,” said the plain-clothes man.
Jupe spotted something on the ground–some bit of reddish paper, sodden now with water. He bent and picked it up, peering closely at it.
“A cloud of black smoke,” he said.
“What?” asked the plain-clothes man.
“Just after the shot, or the explosion, a cloud of smoke came out from under the hood of the car.”
The plain-clothes man went to the front of the car and opened the bonnet.
A uniformed officer shone a torch on the motor.
There were bits of paper and what appeared to be singed cotton wadding strewn over the engine block. The radiator hoses were scorched and the fan belt had snapped.
“Not a shot,” decided the plain-clothes man. “An explosive device. There was some kind of a bomb under the bonnet!”
He banged the bonnet down. “Take it away!” he shouted to the driver of the breakdown truck. “Take it to the police garage!”
He turned to the boys. Murphy had joined them again, and Sonny Elmquist was hunched near the stairway to the building. Alex Hassell had come out, looking as if his slacks had been put on over his pyjamas.
“Somebody was out to get her!” said Hassell.
“She have any enemies?” asked the policeman.
“A whole building full of them,” said Murphy sourly, “though I can’t imagine anybody planting a bomb in her car.”
The stockbroker yawned. “My name’s Murphy,” he told the plain-clothes man. “Just for the record. John Murphy. I live in 1E and I didn’t see anything. I only heard the explosion and the car smashing up. I ran out with these kids and helped get the old bat out of her car. Now, since we haven’t had much sleep, I’m going to declare a day off and go back to bed. If you want to ask me any questions, feel free, but don’t do it before noon. I plan to sleep till then.”
The stockbroker plodded away up the stairs.
The policeman looked after him. “Things have been really weird on this block the last couple of days,” he remarked.
“You said it!” agreed Pete. He squinted towards the east, where a pink glow was beginning to light the sky. “If there’s anything to the law of averages, we ought to have a quiet morning. What else can happen?”
13
Fire!
AFTER THE NIGHT’S EXCITEMENT, Mr Prentice and the exhausted Investigators fell sound asleep. Late in the morning Prentice served an excellent breakfast to the boys. Jupe turned on the TV monitor but only glanced at it occasionally. The apartment building was very quiet.
“I have to go to the bank,” announced Prentice. “By tomorrow I must have ten thousand in cash in small bills. I would be most pleased if one of you young men would accompany me.”