Who's sorry now?

down Walker said to the other two men, ”It’s his first day on the job and I left him to guard the can overnight.” Both men laughed.
    Chief Coiling asked, ”How did you get rid of the dumb lump of a deputy you used to have?”
    ”I didn’t. He got a girl from Albany pregnant and had to marry her and live with her family.”
    ”Happy Families,” the fire marshal said with a wink. ”Now let’s look at this trash bin.” He put on a pair of fresh white cotton gloves and held the sides toward the bottom and turned it upright. ”Probably no fingerprints in this area,” he added as he leaned carefully into the bin and took a deep breath, then stood up. ”No fire starter accelerator. No gasoline or kerosene smell. But plenty of dry wood. It looks like slats from cartons of some sort. Most people would keep it for kindling. Unless they already had too much kindling.”
    Deputy Parker staggered in the door of the greengrocer’s shop.
    ”What’s wrong with you, boy?” Mr. Bradley asked. ”You look like a wrung-out rag.”
    ”I was babysitting a trash can overnight,” Parker said. ”That’s probably mine,” Bradley said. ”I went out early this morning and it was gone.”
    ”Do you mind calling Chief Walker and telling him that? He’d like to know.”
    But when Bradley called, Walker already knew. He said, ”We found an invoice for a crate full of apples in the can. I’m sorry I can’t return it yet. I have to hold it for a day or two to have it fingerprinted. It’s a bit charred.”
    ”Charred?”
    ”Someone set fire to the packing slats in the trash bin and then leaned the bin against the front door of the new tailor’s shop.”
    ”That’s awful!”
    ”More than awful.It’s arson and attempted murder,” Howard said.
     

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
     
    ROBERT WAS GOING AROUND TOWN with his much-revised petition to build a mail sorting center at the train station. So far he had twenty signatures. He was approaching Chief Walker next and found him in his office in town, with his feet crossed on the desk and his chair tilted back.
    ”You’re going to kill yourself someday sitting that way. The back feet will slip and you’ll crack your head on the windowsill.”
    ”Maybe so,” Howard agreed. ”But this is my deep-thinking position, and I have some serious thinking to do right now.”
    ”About the fire last night at the tailor’s shop?”
    ”I’ve been thinking that it was a man who did both the swastika and the fire. He’s an avid hater of Germany. But my new deputy suggested that it might be a nasty old woman. That had never crossed my mind.”
    ”Could an old woman have carried that trash can from the back of Mr. Bradley’s grocery shop?” Robert asked.
    ”The crate slats weren’t that heavy, and they were all dry because we’ve had so little rain. And the can wasn’t completely full. A strong woman of any age could have carried it by the handles.”
    ”No word yet on fingerprints?”
    ”Some. I called the expert who got the painted fingerprint and asked if it was necessarily a man’s. He said he couldn’t tell. It wasn’t a small woman’s but some men also have smallish hands. He hasn’t had time yet to check the trash bin though. But if that same fingerprint is on it, we still don’t know the sex of the person.”
    ”Nor do we know if it’s somebody local, I’d guess,” Robert said.
    ”I’ve been thinking about that, too. It’s likely, I’m sorry to say, it’s someone who lives here and knows their way around. But there are also frequently people who turn up in Voorburg thinking they might find jobs. Those who don’t have a car or train fare, and probably camp out in the woods in good weather like this.”
    ”What about that old enemy of McBride’s that you interviewed in Yonkers?”
    ”Nope. His fingerprints didn’t match. And it’s a whole different crime. But I can’t imagine what a German hater would have against a man named McBride,” Walker went on.
    ”Are you absolutely certain of this?”
    ”I’m not absolutely certain about anything at this stage,” Walker said, suddenly angry. ”I’ve never been so completely ignorant of any crime before. I usually have a few obvious suspects. Even when none of them are actually guilty. But questioning people almost always leads to other suspects, one of whom is usually guilty. This time there’s almost nobody to question. Not even one witness has seen the person threatening Mr. Kurtz. No one saw anyone