“Because I happen to be one,” Duff answered. And suddenly, without planning it, he told his story, beginning with the day, which now seemed long ago, when an old hobby had led him to pick the fairly new lock of a closet door.
Excepting for an occasional quiet expletive, Scotty listened to the account without interruption. At its end, his expletives were many and vehement. But they wound up mildly.
“Ye gods,” he murmured. “I’ll say you carry a mountain around. But you’ve got to do something.”
Duff shrugged miserably. “What can I do?”
Scotty drummed on the table, his drink forgotten. “Not much, here. Ellings — and whoever else is involved — that super-jerk you saw, no doubt — will certainly be careful not to act suspiciously for a while. But I bet they are using that truck company to ship the parts!
What I’d do, if I were you, is take that list of customers and go north for the Christmas holidays! I’d look into as many places those trucks serve regularly as I could. Because if you found even one that was a drop—”
“What,” Duff asked disconsolately, “would you use for money?”
Scotty smiled sympathetically and thought a moment. “I was going to fly up home for the holidays,” he said. “Come back after, with the family, as far as Palm Beach. But I could drive. We could. We could stop off at the various cities.”
The Yates family was surprised and disappointed by Duff’s sudden announcement that he was going home for the holidays. It was a very hard thing to do, and he almost hated himself for his decision. Eleanor took the news especially badly. She accused him of deserting. She reminded him that he wouldn’t see her as Orange Bowl Queen. And she burst into tears. But he stuck to his story that he was going to Indiana to visit his family.
Even Indigo Stacey, at whose home he spent an evening playing bridge — the one game in which he was expert — expressed disappointment. She told him that she had developed a “large passion” for him and that the approaching holidays would be the “longest and dullest in years” without him.