She was dressed in white stretch slacks and a man’s shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and looked very cool indeed on such a hot day. Her long, straight blonde hair framed a blue-eyed, high-cheekboned face that now wore an inquiring smile. It was downright refreshing just to look at her.
“Yes?” she asked me brightly in a cool contralto.
“Miss Linda Halstrom?” I countered.
She nodded.
I showed her my identification card. “I’m from the public library,” I said. “Our records show that you have some library books overdue, Miss Halstrom. I’ve called to collect the books and the fines you owe.”
A lot of book borrowers get quite indignant at me, for some reason, when I appear at their doors to take back the public library’s property. Maybe it’s because they feel the library is questioning their integrity by sending me around. Or maybe it’s because people tend to resent any kind of police these days—even a library cop like me.
Miss Halstrom, however, was hospitality itself. She apologized profusely for keeping the books so long beyond their due dates. “Come in, Mr. Johnson,” she invited. “I have the books right here.”
I followed her into her combination living room-bedroom. The bed, along the far wall, was neatly made up into a day bed, covered with a gaily striped bedspread and strewn with colorful pillows. Everything in the place was as clean and refreshing as Miss Halstrom herself. She pointed to a coffee table by the daybed. “There they are,” she said, “three of them. Right?”
“Three is correct.” I picked up the library books and checked them against my list. “You’ll have to pay the fine.”
She shrugged prettily. “My own fault,” she said. “I lent them to a friend and forgot all about when they were due. How much is the fine?”
I told her the amount. “I’ll get my purse,” she said, and headed for a closet at the other end of the room while I went through my standard procedure of shaking her three books upside down to see if she’d left anything between the pages.
A small slip of white paper fluttered to the floor from the third book, a suspense story called The Hub of the Wheel. The paper landed on the carpet face up, and as I stooped to retrieve it I noted automatically what seemed to be a telephone number written on it in black ink. I picked up the paper and put it on Miss Halstrom’s coffee table.
Miss Halstrom found her purse on the closet shelf, crossed the room to me, and counted out the money for her fine. I took it, gathered up her overdue books, and left. I was reluctant to exchange her cool presence for the stifling heat of the streets. But a job’s a job.
Going down her stairs, between the second and third floors, I brushed past a short swarthy man in a neat gray suit who was going up. Then I was out in the street again, reaching for my damp handkerchief to resume mopping operations.
I negotiated two blocks of steaming sidewalk between Miss Halstrom’s apartment house and my parked car, unlocked the trunk compartment, and fitted her three library books into a big carton. Then I climbed behind the wheel, fired up, and went on about my business.
On my next call I picked up four overdue books from the janitor of a funeral home and came panting back to my car once again, fishing in my pocket for my car keys. I stooped to unlock the trunk and only then realized that this time I wouldn’t need a key. Because the trunk was already unlocked. And the lid gaped open about two inches.
Since I’m often careless about locking my trunk, this wouldn’t have bothered me at all, except that the trunk lock was twisted out of shape, and the lid showed definite evidence that a prying tool had been used to force it.
Well, the rifling of locked car trunks has become a favorite outdoor sport of the “disadvantaged” these days, they tell me, so I wasn’t too surprised at becoming another victim. I lifted the trunk lid and saw that my carton of books was still there. To the casual eye it looked completely undisturbed.
But my eye is not a casual one; I have an extremely good visual memory. And I distinctly remembered that I had fitted Miss Halstrom’s three overdue books into my carton with a novel called Brainstorm on top. Now the top title was The Hub of the Wheel, and Brainstorm had been demoted to the second place in the stack.
I transferred all the books from the trunk to the back seat of the car, tied the trunk lid down with a piece of cord, and got behind the wheel again, reflecting ruefully that my trunk lock had been destroyed to no purpose. For it was obvious that whoever had broken into my trunk, on finding nothing but a box of library books (used) for his trouble, placidly glanced over some of the titles and then departed in disgust to try for richer spoils elsewhere. A nuisance. But my insurance would take care of the damage to the lock.
At noon I went back to the library and turned in the books and the fines I had collected, ate my lunch in the library cafeteria, and had barely got settled at the desk in my tiny office to plan the afternoon’s work when my phone rang. Annie, on the library switchboard, said, “Hal, some girl has been trying to get you for an hour. Where’ve you been?”
“Eating lunch,” I said. “Who was she?”
“A Miss Halstrom. I told her you’d call her back when you came in.”
I felt a small thrill of pleasure. “What are you waiting for then?” I asked Annie.
When Miss Halstrom’s contralto came on the line it sounded different. Not so cool and refreshing now. In fact, it sounded on the edge of panic. It said, “Mr. Johnson?”
“Yes?”
“Are you the man who collected my overdue library books this morning?”
I assured her I was.
“Oh, thank goodness!” she said. “Will you please do me a favor, Mr. Johnson?”
I said gallantly, “Just ask me, Miss Halstrom.”
“Well, there was a bookmark in one of my library books, with a telephone number on it, Mr. Johnson. And I have to get it back, please. It’s very important. It was in the book called The Hub of the Wheel. Do you remember that book?”
“Sure,” I said. “And it did have a bookmark in it. But I left the bookmark on your coffee table this morning.”
“The coffee table!” Her voice held the beginnings of relief. “Are you sure? Please, wait’ll I look, will you please?” In a moment she was back on the line. “It’s there, Mr. Johnson! Oh, how can I thank you? I’m so dumb! I put my purse right down on top of it when I was paying you the money for my fine this morning. No wonder we didn’t see it. My boyfriend was furious with me!”
“Boyfriend?” I tried to keep disappointment out of my voice.
In her relief she chattered exuberantly on. “I told you this morning I’d lent the books to a friend. Well, it was my boyfriend, and the bookmark with the telephone number on it was his, not mine. I didn’t even know it was in the book until he came in this morning right after you left and asked for that book because he’d remembered he’d left an important telephone number in it. And I told him you’d just left with the books, so he ran out after you to see if he could reach you and get his bookmark back, but he couldn’t find you, so he told me to get that telephone number back for him somehow or I’d be sorry.”
She took a deep breath. “And now I’ve got it, and the whole silly thing was just because of my dumbness!” She laughed. “I’m sorry I bothered you, Mr. Johnson. But I’ve never seen Jerry so upset!” She hung up.
I remembered the short swarthy fellow I’d passed on her stairway that morning. He must have been Miss Halstrom’s boyfriend and evidently had an ugly temper. And obviously the man was pitifully unworthy of Miss Linda Halstrom, the Scandinavian goddess who had brightened my morning.
It was late the next afternoon before I got around to calling my insurance man to tell him about the broken lock of my car trunk. He said, “Get it fixed and send the bill to me. You’ve reported it to the police, of course?”
“No. What’s the use? Nothing was taken.”
“Do it anyway,” he told me. “It has to be on the official record before we can pay any claim on it.”
“I’m police,” I said. “Don’t I count?”
“You’re just sissy unofficial fuzz,” he said. “Report it downtown if you want us to pay the bill.”
So on my way home that evening I stopped off at police headquarters and asked to see Lieutenant Randall. I’d worked for several years in the plainclothes division under Randall before I took my library job.
Randall was sitting in his office behind a perfectly clear desk, chewing gently on a stogie and regarding the world sleepily through his yellow cat’s eyes. He greeted me with a wave of his hand. “Hi, Hal,” he said blandly. “You run into some crime at the public library that you can’t handle by yourself?”
Just as blandly I answered, “No, Lieutenant. And if I need help I wouldn’t come here for it. I understand the only good detective you ever had in this department resigned five years ago.
Randall grinned. “So what do you want?”
“To report a break-in.”
“My, my! Whose?”
“Mine. Somebody jimmied the trunk lid of my car between 10:30 and 10:45 yesterday morning while I was parked in the 9200 block of Cook Street on the north side.”
“Anything stolen?” asked Randall placidly.
“No. But my insurance man won’t pay for repairs unless I report the thing officially.”
“Okay,” Randall said. “You’ve reported it. You don’t expect us to find the culprit, do you?”
“No way.”
“Unless,” said Randall, very bland again, “the only good detective we ever had in this department can give us a clue to work on.”
I grinned and started to shake my head. Then I said, “Wait a minute, Lieutenant. Maybe I do have a clue for you.” For echoing in my mind, suddenly and for no reason, was the contralto voice of Miss Linda Halstrom saying to me over the phone: “…so he ran out after you to see if he could catch you and get his bookmark back, but he couldn’t find you…
I told Lieutenant Randall about the bookmark business. “So it’s barely possible, isn’t it,” I asked him when I’d finished, “that Miss Halstrom’s boyfriend didn’t try to catch me at all, but instead followed me in his car until I parked, then jimmied open my trunk, looking for his telephone number? And didn’t find it? For the only books that showed signs of having been moved in my carton were two of Miss Halstrom’s books.”
Randall laughed. “Some clue! Why would this boyfriend do a thing like that? When he could have just asked you for the bookmark?”
“Maybe he didn’t want me to notice the telephone number?”
“Why not?”
“How do I know? But he obviously considered the number important enough to come down hard on poor Miss Halstrom for unknowingly giving it to me.”
“If he couldn’t remember the number, why not look it up again? Or ask Information for it?”
“Maybe it was an unlisted number.”
Randall blew smoke. “Do you remember it? You used to be good at that.”
I closed my eyes and visualized the slip of paper staring up at me from Miss Halstrom’s carpet yesterday. “Yeah,” I said. I tore a sheet off Randall’s desk pad and wrote on it: Cal 928-4791.
Randall looked at what I’d written. “What’s the ‘Cal’?”
“Layman’s shorthand for ‘Call,’ I guess.”
Randall put his stogie on a battered ashtray, asked for an outside line, and dialed the number. He held his telephone receiver a couple of inches away from his ear so I could hear the distant ringing.
After only one ring someone picked up the receiver. A woman’s voice said, “Yes?”
Randall murmured into the phone, “Is this the Peckinpaugh residence, please?”
“No,” said the voice. “Wrong number.” And there was a click as she hung up.
“You’re losing your charm,” I said to Randall.
Unabashed, he waited a moment, then dialed the number again. The same woman’s voice answered immediately. “Yes?” This time the question was asked in a tight controlled tone, highly charged with either anxiety or anger.
Randall said, “Who is this, please?”
“Will you kindly stay off this line?” the woman said sharply. “I’m expecting an important call.” And she hung up again.
“Why didn’t you tell her who you are?” I asked Randall.
“I didn’t get a chance.” Grimly he dialed the number once more, and when the woman answered he said sternly, “Now don’t hang up, lady, this is the police calling.”
This pronouncement was greeted by an exclamation that was part wail, part sob. “The police! But we don’t want the police! Will you please stop tying up this line?” And another click.
Randall’s yellow eyes turned thoughtful. “‘But we don’t want the police,’” he murmured. “An odd turn of phrase, wouldn’t you say, Hal?”
“I would. And she sounded quite upset.”
He pushed his phone across the desk to me. “You try it,” he said. I began to dial. He said, “Wait.” He was looking at the memo sheet with the telephone number on it. “What if this ‘Cal’ doesn’t mean ‘Call’? What if it’s a name? Like short for Calvin, or Calhoun, or something?”
That hadn’t occurred to me. I nodded. “I’ll try it.” I dialed the number.
This time, when the receiver was lifted at the other end, I got in first. “Is Cal there?” I asked brightly.
A sharp intake of breath came clearly over the wire. Then, “Thank God!” The woman’s voice sounded faint and weak. “Is she all right? You haven’t hurt her, have you?” A gulp. Then, with more control, “I’m doing exactly as you said. I’ll have the money ready tomorrow, as soon as the banks open…
Randall was leaning over his desk toward me, listening intently to the small voice at the other end of the wire. I looked into his cat’s eyes and raised my eyebrows. He shook his head violently. I said into the telephone, “Isn’t Calvin Brown there? Isn’t this 928-3791?”—deliberately giving the wrong number.
Her words stopped as though I’d turned off a faucet.
Randall nodded at me and I said hurriedly, “I’m sorry. I must have dialed it wrong. Excuse it, please,” and hung up.
Lieutenant Randall leaned back slowly in his chair. “How do you like that?” he said softly.
I said, “Are you going to barge in on it? She was terrified of police.”
“Not at her end. I want to know who she is, though. And Cal, too.”
An official police demand brought us the information from the telephone company that unlisted number 928-4791 was assigned to a Mrs. Wilson A. Benedict on Waterside Drive.
I whistled. “She can afford to pay the ransom, I guess. She’s the widow of Wilson Benedict, the bank president, isn’t she?”
Randall didn’t answer. He was already calling the Obituary editor of the Evening News who informed us, after he located the clipping in his files, that Wilson A. Benedict, when killed in an auto accident the year before, had been survived by his wife, two college-age sons, and a four-year-old daughter named Callie.
“Callie,” Randall said, picking up his stogie. “She must be our Cal. Let’s go see your Miss Halstrom.”
I was already on my feet. “Right,” I said, just as though I still worked for him.
Five minutes after we found her partaking of a late dinner in her apartment on the north side, Randall had extracted the following information from a distressed but cooperative Miss Halstrom. Item: her boyfriend’s name was Jerry Gates. Item: he was chauffeur-handyman for a wealthy family named Carson on Waterside Drive and lived in their garage apartment. Item: the Carsons were on vacation in the mountains. Item: Jerry Gates was going to marry Linda Halstrom as soon as he got the large legacy he was expecting from an uncle who had died while Jerry was serving as a medic in Vietnam several years ago, before Jerry had even met Linda. And item: the telephone number on his missing bookmark, according to Jerry, was that of the lawyer, name unknown, whom he was supposed to call to find out when he could expec
t his legacy.
Well, that was enough information for Randall. We left Halstrom weeping into her cold TV dinner and took off for Waterside Drive. En route Randall called headquarters and ordered reinforcements to meet us. He wanted to leave me out of it, but he couldn’t waste time arguing, so I went along.
When the reinforcements arrived, there were six of us, counting me, a small army.
As it turned out we didn’t need that many, but we didn’t know that till later. It was full dark by the time we reached Waterside Drive. A promise of coming coolness was faintly detectable in the overheated July air. We drove past the stone entrance pillars twice before we left the cars a block away and drifted back, in shifts of two, trying to look inconspicuous as we ducked inside and melted into the gloom of the trees that lined the drive.
When we were all there, gathered in the dense shadow of a huge sycamore, Randall looked over the setup. The enormous turn-of-the-century house, covered with gingerbread scrollwork that was faintly visible to us in the starlight, squatted at the end of the driveway like an obscene insect. Not a single light shone in it. Off to the right, maybe 30 yards from the house and placed out of sight from the street, was an old-fashioned two-car garage, originally a carriage house in all probability, with the chauffeur’s quarters above it. We could see a light shining from the front windows of the garage apartment.
Randall pointed to the light. “That’s it,” he whispered. He looked up at the gnarled limbs of the sycamore that sheltered us and said, “O’Neill, get up in this tree with your field glasses and see what you can see.”
We waited then in complete silence, broken only by the scrape of shoe leather on rough tree bark, while O’Neill climbed the tree. Every few feet he’d stop and take a look through the field glasses to see if he was high enough to get a view into the lighted windows of the chauffeur’s quarters. Finally he settled on a thick branch about 25 feet up and trained his glasses on the windows for several minutes without moving.
“Well?” asked Randall as O’Neill came sliding down the tree.
The Library Fuzz Page 5