“Just answer the question, honey.”
“I’ll call you back.”
When she did she said, “Four are out, one is in the return pile.”
“How about the other one?”
“Gone,” she said. “No record.”
“Not on the shelf?”
“No. I looked. You want its catalogue number?”
“Never mind. Is one of your ‘out’ copies on library card XL-392716?” That was Herbert Campbell’s library card number on my overdue list.
“Yes,” she said after a minute. “And incidentally, it’s long overdue.”
“Thanks,” I said.
In turn I telephoned all seven of our branches and checked on their copies of Sexless in Salinas. Out of the 21 copies supposed to be circulating through the branch libraries four had vanished without trace.
I sat back in my chair and thought about that for a while. Then I had another idea. I walked down the corridor to the room where our card-catalogue cabinets are. There I went through the cards under the letter ‘F’ and pretty soon I was looking at a card with the neatly typed book title I was hunting: The Flora of Nevada. I took down its number and shelf position and searched the shelves for the book without success. Then I asked Ellen to see if she could locate it for me. She couldn’t—neither the book itself nor any record of its having been borrowed. Inventory showed the library had bought only one copy of that book, for the main library. None for the branches.
I thought about that, too.
What all this thinking led to, of course, was the conclusion that my friendly bibliophile, Herbert Campbell, was stealing the library blind; and that since I’m a library cop, hired to chase down stolen and overdue books by the public library, I’d better do something about it.
So, after a leisurely lunch at Morris’s Cafeteria, I set out again for Dennison Avenue. It was a lovely spring afternoon. Whipped-cream clouds drifted lazily across a delft-blue sky. I caught the delicate fragrance of lilacs through my open car window as I drove. And I wished Ellen Corby would make up her mind to marry me and save me from a lifetime of dreary cafeterias like Morris’s.
I parked about a hundred yards south of Campbell’s apartment house—the only parking space I could find on the block—got out of my car and started toward the entrance, thinking about what I’d say to him and how tough an act I should put on. Although I’m allowed to carry a gun and make arrests, I didn’t figure to need a gun to handle old Campbell, and I hadn’t decided yet whether to arrest him or not. That depended on how many of the library’s books I could recover and whether he’d be willing to pay the big overdue fines I’d assess on them.
While I was still about fifty yards away, Herbert Campbell came out of the apartment-house entrance carrying a king-size brief case which seemed pretty heavy, to judge from the way he handled it when he unlocked a gray VW at the curb and maneuvered the brief case into the back seat. Then Campbell got into the car himself.
I had to make a quick decision—should I brace him now or let it go until later? His brief case made up my mind. It seemed possible, from its evident weight, that the case contained books. If it did, and the books happened to belong to the public library, I wanted to see where they were going.
So I turned and went back to my car, slid into the driver’s seat, and waited until the VW pulled out from the curb. Then I took out after Campbell’s car, hanging far enough back so that he wouldn’t notice I was trailing him. I hoped.
We played follow-the-leader through light traffic to the South Side. When Campbell pulled up in front of a row of stores on Cameron Way I drove right on by, rounded the next corner, and parked. I ran back to the corner in time to see Campbell and his brief case disappearing into the middle shop of the seven in the row.
I debated with myself for half a minute on what to do next, finally lit a cigarette and sat down on a corner bench meant for the convenience of bus riders. From there I could see the entrance to-the shop and Campbell’s parked car.
In about ten minutes he reappeared on the sidewalk, still carrying his brief case. Now, though, from the effortless way he swung it into the back of his car, I figured the case was empty. He started up, drove toward me, and went rolling past without even a glance in my direction. Then he took a left at the next block and went out of sight. I let him go.
I walked down the sidewalk to the store Campbell had entered. A sign over the door said: The Red Quill, Edwin Worthington, Prop. The merchandise displayed in the store window was books and more books. My friendly bibliophile, Herbert Campbell, had been paying a visit to the secondhand bookshop. I opened the door and went inside. The interior seemed very dim after the bright sunshine outside, but I could make out tables and racks and shelves of books on every side.
The man standing at the counter at the back of the shop talking on the telephone must be Edwin Worthington, Prop., because he nodded at me when he saw me come in and mouthed silently at me above his telephone receiver, “Be right with you,” then went back to his conversation.
I browsed idly through his stock of books, paying no attention to him until he said into the phone, “Octavo, yes, yes, 1719, eh? Good. That’s what I thought it was but I wanted to be sure. Thanks very much, Miss Gilchrist. Thanks very much!”
He hung up and turned on me one of the most radiant smiles I’d seen recently. His full beard tended to hide his mouth, but there was no mistaking the full set of white teeth or the triumphant lilt of his voice when he said, “Now, then, what can I do for you, sir?” He was feeling very good about something.
“Just browsing, thanks,” I answered him.
He waved a hand. “Help yourself.”
I stepped over to the fiction shelves and pulled out a copy of Sexless in Salinas and thumbed through it. Then, carrying it with me, I drifted over to Worthington who was leaning against his counter beside the cash register.
I held up Sexless in Salinas “Isn’t this a best-seller?” I asked.
He nodded. “Second on the list for several months now.”
“Is it available in paperback yet?”
“Not yet.”
“How come you have best-sellers while they’re still so popular?”
He shrugged. “From book club members, estates being settled, people moving away. And of course, from church bazaars, rummage sales, charity book sales of all kinds. Lately I’ve had a part-time man covering the charity things for me. That book you have there was one of a batch he brought in just a few minutes ago.”
I put the book down on the counter beside his cash register. “I’ll take it,” I said. “How much?”
“Dollar and a quarter. It’s a six ninety-five book.” Then he smiled that big smile again. He was still feeling very expansive. “I’ll let you have it for a dollar today, though.”
“How come?”
“Call it a going-out-of-business price. I’m celebrating. I’ve had a lucky break and I’m going to close up my shop.”
“Great,” I said. I gave him a dollar. “Happy retirement, Mr. Worthington.”
Back in my car I examined the second-hand copy of Sexless in Salinas with the help of a good magnifying glass I carried on the end of my key chain. I found what I expected. A slight granulation of the inside front cover’s end paper where a solvent had been used to remove the card pocket pasted in the front of all library books. The front flyleaf, where the library’s name stamp appears, had been cut out. There were barely discernible traces of the library’s name stamp lingering on the closed-page edges after treatment with an ink eradicator. And very faint evidence on some of the page margins that the book’s identification number had been removed.
What I’d got for my dollar at The Red Quill was one of the library’s missing copies of Sexless in Salinas, skillfully doctored by a certain bibliophile named Herbert Campbell.
So now I not only knew that a thief was robbing the library, but I knew the receiver of his stolen goods. An innocent receiver, I was sure, but a receiver, all the s
ame. So I’d know where to find a lot of our library books after I’d taken care of Campbell.
With that information in my possession, my sense of urgency about Campbell subsided. There was no hurry about arresting him now. I decided to finish my overdue calls that afternoon, take Ellen to dinner and the movies, as planned, and get to Campbell first thing in the morning. I felt a little sorry for the old boy, as a matter of fact, even though I knew he was an unmitigated thief.
I was back at the library at quitting time. I walked through the reference department to pick up Ellen for our date and found Annie Gilchrist putting on her jacket to go home. “Annie,” I said, pausing at her desk, “you got a telephone call from a Mr. Worthington of The Red Quill bookshop this afternoon about two o’clock, didn’t you?”
“Nope,” said Annie, “I called him. To answer a question he’d phoned in earlier.”
“Whatever you told him on the phone made him so happy,” I said, “that he gave me a discount on a book I was buying from him at the time.”
“You were buying a book?” Annie exclaimed. “With the whole public library system here to supply you with free reading material?”
“I hate to accept charity,” I said, grinning. “What was the question you had to look up for Worthington?”
“The date of the first edition of Robinson Crusoe.”
“1719?”
“That was it. You must have been eavesdropping.”
“I was. Did Worthington have a first edition?”
“He didn’t say. Just wanted to be sure of the date.”
“Would a first edition of Robinson Crusoe be worth a lot?”
“Depends on what you mean by a lot. And what condition the first edition is in.”
“Enough for Worthington to retire on?”
She shook her head. “I doubt it very much, Hal.”
“How much do you think it would be worth?”
“I’ll look it up for you tomorrow,” Annie said. “Right now, if you don’t mind, I’m going home.” She grabbed her purse and started out.
“Forget it, Annie,” I called after her. “I was just curious.”
* * * *
I was knocking at Herbert Campbell’s door at nine the next morning. He opened at my second knock and recognized me at once. He was in his shirt sleeves, his fringe of white hair tousled, his eyes as innocent of guile as a child’s. Holding the door open a few inches he said, “Why, hello, Mr. Johnson.”
I said, “May I come in for a minute?”
“I haven’t finished that last book yet.”
“I want to read you something,” I said.
He backed up, puzzled, and I followed him in. “I don’t understand,” he said mildly, “but whatever it is, read it to me, by all means.” He went to sit in his favorite chair, the one with the dent in the seat cushion.
I read him my Miranda card, informing him of his legal rights. When I finished he stared at me. “What in heaven’s name does that mean?”
I sat down at one end of the sofa. “It means I’m going to arrest you.”
“Arrest me?” His gaze was incredulous. “What am I supposed to have done?”
“I’ll tell you what you’ve done. You’ve been stealing books from the public library for months. You’ve been using your library card to borrow books legitimately at all our branches and every time you borrowed you walked out with three or four extra books under your coat or in your brief case that you didn’t bother to have the librarian check out. You’ve been bringing these stolen books here to your apartment, removing the library’s identification marks, and peddling the books for whatever you can get.”
Campbell shook his head in bewilderment.
I plowed on. “You keep the stolen books here”—I pointed to his crowded bookshelves—“until you think the heat, if any, has died down, using your apartment as a sort of warehouse for stolen books. And you also use it, I might add, to build up your image of a harmless eccentric who loves books so much he just can’t bear to part with them. That’s why you held those overdue library books until I came to collect them yesterday—so you could impress me with your eccentricity and establish a bibliophile image with the library authorities.”
“Why,” asked Mr. Campbell reasonably, his eyes still mild and puzzled, “would I try to establish an image like that?” He was toying with a thick glass ashtray on the arm of his easy chair.
“Because you know that in the normal case of book theft from the public library by a bona-fide bibliophile type, all we usually do is hit him with a fine and take back our books. You figured if we ever tumbled to your operation you would qualify for the same treatment—a fine instead of prison.”
“The only thing wrong with your theory, Mr. Johnson,” said Campbell with dignity, “is that it happens to be quite untrue. Who, for example, would I sell stolen library books to, for heaven’s sake?”
“The Red Quill bookshop, for one,” I answered. “I talked to Mr. Worthington yesterday.” And that’s when he threw the ashtray at me.
* * * *
As it turned out I was right to call Lieutenant Randall into the case. He sat across from me in Clancy’s Bar and Grill that evening, off duty, and told me about it.
“When we got there,” he said, “The Red Quill had a penciled sign on the door saying the shop was closed. But there was a light on in the living quarters upstairs—a lamp we could see through the front second-floor window. So we tried to raise Worthington. When we couldn’t, we went in and found him at the foot of the flight of steps that leads down from his rooms upstairs. Dead as a mackerel. With a broken neck.”
I murmured, “Did he fall or was he pushed?” I was feeling rotten. If I had gone after Campbell yesterday instead of waiting, I might possibly have saved Worthington’s life.
“He was pushed,” Randall said.
“How do you know?”
“There was a lump the size of an egg on his head and we found a wrought-iron ashtray upstairs with blood and hair to match.”
I sighed. “He likes ashtrays.” My temple was still sore.
“Yeah.” Randall’s gaze was amused. “Campbell admits the killing now. Says Worthington told him about the first edition when he delivered those stolen books to The Red Quill yesterday. The first edition was a lucky break—found among hundreds of old books Worthington bought from an estate. The owners never knew what they had, of course.”
“More than a mere storybook,” I murmured.
“What’s that?”
“Robinson Crusoe. That’s how Edward Everett Hale described it.”
“Well,” Randall went on, refusing to be sidetracked by this literary allusion, “Worthington told Campbell if the Robinson Crusoe first edition turned out to be genuine, he was going to close his bookstore and retire. So Campbell went back to The Red Quill about one o’clock last night, killed Worthington, and swiped the book.” Randall grinned. “Just a harmless, eccentric old book-lover.”
I grunted. “He’s not a real booklover,” I said. “He wanted to be rich, that’s all. Did you notice that signature on the flyleaf of Volume One?”
“Yeah. Some guy’s name,” Randall said. “I can’t remember it.”
“Button Gwinnett.”
“Sounds like the head of the sewing circle. Who was Button Gwinnett, for God’s sake?”
“Only one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.”
Randall refused to be impressed. “Well, well,” he said. “So he owned a copy of Robinson Crusoe. So what?”
“A first edition of Robinson Crusoe,” I said quietly, “with Button Gwinnett’s signature in it would sell at auction for a quarter of a million dollars, Lieutenant, maybe more.”
“What!”
It was my turn to grin. “Button Gwinnett signed the Declaration of Independence, all right, but apparently that’s about all he did sign during his lifetime. Except for Worthington’s first edition of Robinson Crusoe. Button Gwinnett’s signature is one of the rarest—and ther
efore one of the most valuable—in the whole autograph-collecting field. So you see what a beautiful combination Campbell killed Worthington to get? A first edition of Robinson Crusoe autographed by Button Gwinnett. It’s fabulous.”
Randall was impressed at last. “What becomes of the book now?”
“Worthington’s heirs get it, I suppose—if he bought it fair and square from that estate.”
“Some legacy,” Randall breathed, “from a second-hand bookdealer!” He put his opaque stare on me. “What tipped you off to this Campbell in the first place?” he asked.
I told him about the song and dance Campbell had given me yesterday about wanting to finish reading Sexless in Salinas before I took the book away from him.
“I don’t see anything in that,” Randall said.
“You’re not a second-hand book expert, that’s why,” I explained. “But I am. So I noticed that when Campbell was begging to keep the book so he could finish reading it, he had two other copies of Sexless in Salinas right there on his bookshelves in plain view.”
THE BOOKMARK
Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 1974.
Being in the business I’m in—chasing down stolen and overdue books for the public library—I could almost write a book myself on the crazy things people use for bookmarks. Pornographic postcards, hairpins, dog-show ribbons, stalks of celery, marijuana cigarettes. You wouldn’t believe the variety. I even found one teen-ager using the dried skin of a six-inch coral snake. So there was nothing very remarkable about the bookmark I found in Miss Linda Halstrom’s overdue library book. At least, I didn’t think so at the time.
Miss Halstrom was the third on my list of overdues that day. She lived on the north side in a rundown apartment house that was really an old Victorian mansion converted into a dozen efficiencies. The neighborhood had long since lost its pristine elegance, if any.
I walked up three flights of rubber-treaded stairs to her apartment and knocked on her door, wiping my forehead with an already sodden handkerchief. The outdoor temperature that July day must have been over ninety. The third-floor landing was dark and dreary-looking and smelled of stale cooking, which made Miss Linda Halstrom, when she answered my knock, seem all the more entrancing to me.
The Library Fuzz Page 4