RANSVESTIA

tore returning them to their proper place. He acquired a great facility for memorizing the location and position of articles. It was likely that the store's manager did not know the female apparel merchandise in the various departments as well as his weekend nightwatchman. In the year he had worked at Thayer's Harry had become intimate with every nook, cranny, and rack of clothing in the store.

He was horrified one Saturday night when an expensive nylon peig- noir gown Harriet was wearing snagged on a metal railing and ripped beyond repair. After considerable thought Harry decided that it was only fair to buy the gown. But, how was he to accomplish this without betraying his secret? He had found the gown on a dress mannequin in the lingerie department. Before Monday morning he replaced it with an identical gown from the stockroom, took the damaged peignoir and destroyed it, and returned to the store that same morning to buy the identical gown ostensibly for his wife. The following Saturday night he returned his purchase to the stockroom. The damaged gown was paid for and the next inventory would not reflect a missing gown.

The first tour that Saturday night was fairly routine. Even the people in accounting on two had remembered to lock their inner office doors. His first task was to check the alarm controls. The master switch was in a small closet-like room not far from the maintenance and security office in the basement. A glowing red light in the power box told him that the system was on and working. It was an electronic system that covered all of the windows and doors to the outside. If anyone smashed a window on the first floor or jimmied a door or lock in the big store the police would be instantaneously alerted. Harry would also be alerted no matter where he was in the store at the time. Any violation of the alarm system activated a radio transmitter which then signalled to a small battery operated receiver in the maintenance and security office and to another identical receiver that Harry carried clipped to his belt or that Harriet kept in her purse. To break into Thayer and Company without tripping that alarm system you would have to come through the walls. In the year he had worked as night- watchman Harry had never heard that transmitter beep except, during tests which he conducted once a month or so whenever Gregory left a message about it.

Working his way up through the building he arrived eventually on the sixth floor. Harry remembered the cracked skylight. There were only four skylights on the building and the cracked one was in the northwest corner over the home furnishings stockroom. There was a

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