Write me a Letter

relationship with an exceptionally sexy and intellectually stimulating male. His often exotic behavior and cosmopolitan view of life only helps to support his desire to change and grow.” Me—to the very tee!! ”He is adult both emotionally and financially and he is particularly attracted to brilliant, positive women who are in touch with their own physicality.” Right on again!! ”Age?” (Oh-oh) ”Old enough to know better, young enough to walk barefoot in the rain.” Damn—tripped at the final hurdle.
    I was glancing at an ad for sensual boudoir portraiture (a thrilling memento he will long remember) when Katy returned with a bulky green cardboard folder, which she plunked down on the table beside the tray.
    ”That’s all there is, there ain’t no more,” she said. I took out my notebook and a pen, opened the file, and began detecting. Katy watched me with undisguised fascination.
    Number of thefts—eight, not umpteen million. From eight separate mobile homes, no repeats. I noted the names of the home owners. I inquired of Katy what protective devices, if any, the homes had when they were burgled— they all had something more than a lock on the front door; in a few cases, a lot more. I made a list of what had been stolen—there were a handful of small items but mainly money, quite a lot of it, considering. Of course the biggest hauls came from the homes that were the best protected; it stands to reason that if you spend a lot of money to protect, you must be protecting something valuable, any crook could work that out. All this money had, also of course, been cleverly stashed away in unfindable places, so much so that it might have taken the thief as much as say five minutes to unearth it.
    When I’d gotten that far, I asked Katy to take me on a tour of the estate, please, and to make sure the tour included all the homes that had been broken into. So off we went, down Election Lane , into Convention Lane , around Representative Circle , and so on—well, it was the Senate Estate and Sacramento was the state capitol—get it? I noticed that everything was clean, the grass was well tended, likewise the flowers, that the swimming pool had no customers, nor did the rec room, and that all of the homes that had been burgled all had back windows that faced the high, wooden, slatted fence that enclosed the estate, not back windows that faced someone else’s windows. I left Katy talking with an elderly resident we met on our meanderings, the subject being animal droppings, and made two complete tours of the exterior fencing, one outside and one inside.
    Some half an hour later I rejoined her in her home. When we were sitting around the cocktail table again, I said, ”The story so far. We are dealing with a professional, not kids. He’s done eight successful break-ins, and according to the police report they sent you, they don’t have a clue. He’s also a professional because he’s not frightened off at all by alarm systems or weight sensors or whatever, au contraire, he loves them. And it looks like an inside job to me. There’s been some small attempt to make it look like someone climbed over the fence but I’m not convinced; the couple of places where the grass near the fence was disturbed on the inside, on the other side is cement, which doesn’t show traces.”
    ”So?” said Katy.
    ”So, I as a resident here could find plenty of reasons for wandering around inside making all the traces I wanted, walking the dog, picking wildflowers, but who’s going to walk around no man’s land outside, looking for what, weeds, used tires? And it goes without saying that he’s also a pro because wherever you cleverly hide your emergency fund, he’s on to it pronto. But you know what is outside that fence?”
    ”No,” said Katy. ”What?”
    ”A service road that leads back up to the highway. So the reason only small stuff was taken wasn’t because of the difficulties of moving it, you could hoist a grand piano over that fence as long as someone’s waiting to catch it and shove it in the van. Or VCRs, TVs, rugs, you name it. But if it is someone living here, what’s he going to do with a grand piano, stick it in his living room? Or ten TVs, stick them in the den? There’s no way he could truck them out of here without some kindly neighbor watching. Something else, Watson—in every case the homes that got burgled were empty at the time of the crime. How did he know? Most of them had lights left