“For a while. But I’ll be in touch.”
“You’d better be. Unless you want to pay a big overdue fine.”
* * * *
It was the following evening before I heard any more from Lieutenant Randall. He telephoned me at home. “Catch any big bad book thieves today, Hal?” he began in a friendly voice.
“No. You catch any murderers?”
“Not yet. But I’m working on it.”
I laughed. “You’re calling to report progress, is that it?”
“That’s it.” He was as bland as milk.
“Proceed,” I said.
“We found out who the murdered kid was.”
“Who?”
“A reporter named Joel Homer from Cedar Falls. Worked for the Cedar Falls Herald. The editor tells me Homer was working on a special assignment the last few weeks. Trying to crack open a story on dope in the Tri-Cities.”
“Oho. Then it is dope in the picture?”
“Reasonable to think so, anyway.”
“How’d you find out about the kid? The Starlight Motel?”
“Yeah. Your friend Hazzard, the desk clerk, identified him for us. Remembered checking him into Room 18 on Saturday morning. His overnight bag was still in the room and his car in the parking lot.”
“Well, it’s nice to know who got killed,” I said, “but you always told me you’d rather know who did the killing. Find out who the guy in the picture is?”
“He runs a ratty cafe on the river in Overbrook, just out of town. Name of Williams.”
“Did you tie up the robbery squeal Hazzard mentioned when we were out there yesterday?”
“Could be. One man, masked, held up the night clerk, got him to open the office safe, and cleaned it out. Nothing much in it, matter of fact—hundred bucks or so.”
“Looking for that little negative, you think?”
“Possibly, yeah.”
“Why don’t you nail this Williams and find out?”
“On the strength of that picture?” Randall said. “Uh-uh. That was enough to put him in a killing mood, maybe, but it’s certainly not enough to convict him of murder. He could be buying a pound of sugar. No, I’m going to be sure of him before I take him.”
“How do you figure to make sure of him, for God’s sake?”
I shouldn’t have asked that, because as a result I found myself, two hours later, sitting across that same desk—the one in the snapshot—from Mr. Williams, suspected murderer. We were in a sizable back room in Williams’ cafe in Overbrook. A window at the side of the room was open, but the cool weed-scented breeze off the river didn’t keep me from sweating.
“You said on the phone you thought I might be interested in a snapshot you found,” Williams said. He was partially bald. Heavy black eyebrows met over his nose. The eyes under them looked like brown agate marbles in milk. He was smoking a fat cigar.
“That’s right,” I said.
“Why?”
“I figured it could get you in trouble in certain quarters, that’s all.”
He blew smoke. “What do you mean by that?”
“It’s actually a picture of you buying heroin across this desk right here. Or maybe selling it.”
“Well, well,” he said, “that’s interesting all right. If true.” He was either calm and cool or trying hard to appear so.
“It’s true,” I said. “You’re very plain in the picture. So’s the heroin.” I gave him the tentative smile of a timid, frightened man. It wasn’t hard to do, because I felt both timid and frightened.
“Where is this picture of yours?” Williams asked.
“Right here.” I handed him the print Lieutenant Randall had given me.
He looked at it without any change of expression I could see. Finally he took another drag on his cigar. “This guy does resemble me a little. But how did you happen to know that?”
I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. “I been in your cafe lots of times. I recognized you.”
He studied the print. “You’re right about one thing. This picture might be misunderstood. So maybe we can deal. What I can’t understand is where you found the damn thing.”
“In a book I borrowed from the public library.”
“A book?” He halted his cigar in midair, startled.
“Yes. A spy novel. I dropped the book accidentally and this picture fell out of the inside card pocket.” I put my hand into my jacket pocket and touched the butt of the pistol that Randall had issued me for the occasion. I needed comfort.
“You found this print in a book?”
“Not this print, no. I made it myself out of curiosity. I’m kind of an amateur photographer, see? When I found what I had, I thought maybe you might be interested, that’s all. Are you?”
“How many prints did you make?”
“Just the one.”
“And where’s the negative?”
“I’ve got it, don’t worry.”
“With you?”
“You think I’m nuts?” I said defensively. I started a hand toward my hip pocket, then jerked it back nervously.
Mr. Williams smiled and blew cigar smoke. “What do you think might be a fair price?” he asked.
I swallowed. “Would twenty thousand dollars be too much?”
His eyes changed from brown marbles to white slits. “That’s pretty steep.”
“But you’ll pay it?” I tried to put a touch of triumph into my expression.
“Fifteen. When you turn over the negative to me.”
“Okay,” I said, sighing with relief. “How long will it take you to get the money?”
“No problem. I’ve got it right here when you’re ready to deal.” His eyes went to a small safe in a corner of the room. Maybe the heroin was there, too, I thought.
“Hey!” I said. “That’s great, Mr. Williams! Because I’ve got the negative here, too. I was only kidding before.” I fitted my right hand around the gun butt in my pocket. With my left I pulled out my wallet and threw it on the desk between us.
“In here?” Williams said, opening the wallet.
“In the little pocket.”
He found the tiny negative at once.
He took a magnifying glass from his desk drawer and used it to look at the negative against the ceiling light. Then he nodded, satisfied. He raised his voice a little and said, “Okay, Otto.”
Otto? I heard a door behind me scrape over the rug as it was thrust open. Turning in my chair, I saw a big man emerge from a closet and step toward me. My eyes went instantly to the gun in his hand. It was fitted with a silencer, and oddly, the man’s right middle finger was curled around the trigger. Then I saw why. The tip of his right index finger was missing. The muzzle of the gun looked as big and dark as Mammoth Cave to me.
“He’s all yours, Otto,” Williams said. “I’ve got the negative. No wonder you couldn’t find it in the motel safe. The crazy kid hid it in a library book.”
“I heard,” Otto said flatly.
I still had my hand in my pocket touching the pistol, but I realized I didn’t have a chance of beating Otto to a shot, even if I shot through my pocket. I stood up very slowly and faced Otto. He stopped far enough away from me to be just out of reach.
Williams said, “No blood in here this time, Otto. Take him out back. Don’t forget his wallet and labels. And it won’t hurt to spoil his face a little before you put him in the river. He’s local.”
Otto kept his eyes on me. They were paler than his skin. He nodded. “I’ll handle it.”
“Right.” Williams started for the door that led to his cafe kitchen, giving me an utterly indifferent look as he went by. “So long, smart boy,” he said. He went through the door and closed it behind him.
Otto cut his eyes to the left to make sure Williams had closed the door tight. I used that split second to dive headfirst over Williams’ desk, my hand still in my pocket on my gun. I lit on the floor behind the desk with a painful thump and Williams’ desk chair, which I’d overturned in my plunge, came c
rashing down on top of me.
From the open window at the side of the room a new voice said conversationally, “Drop the gun, Otto.”
Apparently Otto didn’t drop it fast enough because Lieutenant Randall shot it out of his hand before climbing through the window into the room. Two uniformed cops followed him.
* * * *
Later, over a pizza and beer in the Trocadero All-Night Diner, Randall said, “We could have taken Williams before. The Narc Squad has known for some time he’s a peddler. But we didn’t know who was supplying him.”
I said stiffly, “I thought I was supposed to be trying to hang a murder on him. How did that Otto character get into the act?”
“After we set up your meeting with Williams, he phoned Otto to come over to his cafe and take care of another would-be blackmailer.”
“Are you telling me you didn’t think Williams was the killer?”
Randall shook his head, looking slightly sheepish. “I was pretty sure Williams wouldn’t risk Murder One. Not when he had a headlock on somebody who’d do it for him.”
“Like Otto?”
“Like Otto.”
“Well, just who the hell is Otto?”
“He’s the other man in the snapshot with Williams.”
Something in the way he said it made me ask him, “You mean you knew who he was before you asked me to go through that charade tonight?”
“Sure. I recognized him in the picture.”
I stopped chewing my pizza and stared at him. I was dumfounded, as they say. “Are you nuts?” I said with my mouth full. “The picture just showed part of a silhouette. From behind, at that. Unrecognizable.”
“You didn’t look close enough.” Randall gulped beer. “His right hand showed in the picture plain. With the end of his right index finger gone.”
“But how could you recognize a man from that?”
“Easy. Otto Schmidt of our Narcotics Squad is missing the end of his right index finger. Had it shot off by a junkie in a raid.”
“There are maybe a hundred guys around with fingers like that. You must have had more to go on than that, Lieutenant.”
“I did. The heroin.”
“You recognized that, too?” I was sarcastic.
“Sure. It was the talk of the department a week ago, Hal.”
“What was?”
“The heroin. Somebody stole it right out of the Narc Squad’s own safe at headquarters.” He laughed aloud. “Can you believe it? Two kilos, packaged in four bags, just like in the picture.”
I said, “How come it wasn’t in the news?”
“You know why. It would make us look like fools.”
“Anyway, one bag of heroin looks just like every other,” I said, unconvinced.
“You didn’t see the big blowup I had made of that picture,” the lieutenant said. “A little tag on one of the bags came out real clear. You could read it.”
All at once I felt very tired. “Don’t tell me,” I said.
He told me anyway, smiling. “It said: Confiscated, such and such a date, such and such a raid, by the Grandhaven Police Department. That’s us, Hal. Remember?”
I sighed. “So you’ve turned up another crooked cop,” I said. “Believe me, I’m glad I’m out of the business, Lieutenant.”
“You’re not out of it.” Randall’s voice roughened with some emotion I couldn’t put a name to. “You’re still a cop, Hal.”
“I’m an employee of the Grandhaven Public Library.”
“Library fuzz. But still a cop.”
I shook my head.
“You helped me take a killer tonight, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. Because you fed me a lot of jazz about needing somebody who didn’t smell of cop. Somebody who knew the score but could act the part of a timid greedy citizen trying his hand at blackmail for the first time.”
“Otto Schmidt’s a city cop. If I’d sent another city cop in there tonight, Otto would have recognized him immediately. That’s why I asked you to go.”
“You could have told me the facts.”
He shook his head. “Why? I thought you’d do better without knowing. And you did. The point is, though, that you did it. Helped me nail a killer at considerable risk to yourself. Even if the killer wasn’t the one you thought. You didn’t do it just for kicks, did you? Or because we found the negative in your library book, for God’s sake?”
I shrugged and stood up to leave.
“So you see what I mean?” Lieutenant Randall said. “You’re still a cop.” He grinned at me. “I’ll get the check, Hal. And thanks for the help.”
I left without even saying good night. I could feel his yellow eyes on my back all the way out of the diner.
THE MUTILATED SCHOLAR
Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, April 1976.
I was standing in the rear of a crowded bus when I caught sight of the stolen library book.
It was the wildest coincidence, the sheerest accident. For I don’t ride a bus even twice a year. And normally I can’t tell one copy of a particular library book from another.
I craned my neck to get a clearer view past the fellow hanging to a bus strap beside me. And I knew immediately that I wasn’t making any mistake. That library book tucked under the arm of the neatly dressed girl a few seats forward was, without a doubt, one of the 52 library books which had been in the trunk of my old car when it was stolen six weeks before. The police had recovered my car three days later. The books, however, were missing—until I spotted this one on the bus.
Maybe I’d better explain how I recognized it.
As a library cop, I run down overdue and stolen books for the Public Library. I’d been collecting overdues that day, and about eleven in the morning I’d got back a bunch of books from a wealthy old lady who’d borrowed them from the library to read on a round-the-world cruise. She couldn’t have cared less when I told her how much money in fines she owed the library after ten weeks’ delinquency. And she couldn’t have cared less, either, when I taxed her with defacing one of the books.
It was a novel called The Scholar, and she’d deliberately—in an idle moment on the cruise, no doubt—made three separate burns on the cover with the end of her cigarette, to form two eyes and a nose inside the O of the word scholar. I was pretty irritated with her, because that sort of thing is in the same class with drawing mustaches on subway-poster faces, so I charged her two bucks for defacing the book in addition to the fine for overdue. You can see why I’d remember that particular copy of The Scholar.
I scrutinized the girl now holding it under her arm on the bus. She certainly didn’t look like the kind of girl who goes around stealing old cars and Public Library books. She was maybe 30 years old, well-dressed in a casual way, with a pretty, high-cheekboned face and taffy-colored (dyed?) hair, stylishly coiffured.
A crowded bus wasn’t exactly the best place to brace her about the book, nevertheless I began to squeeze my way toward her between the jammed passengers.
I wanted to know about that book because I still winced every time I recalled the mirth of Lieutenant Randall of the Police Department when I called him that first day to report the theft of my car and books. First he had choked with honest laughter, then he accused me of stealing my own library books so I could make myself look good by finding them again, and finally he offered to bet I had sunk my car in the river somewhere so I could collect the insurance on it. The idea of a book detective being robbed of his own books sent him into paroxysms. It was understandable. I used to work for him and he’s always needled me about quitting the police to become a “sissy” library cop.
The girl with the book was seated near the center doors of the bus. I managed to maneuver my way to a standing position in front of her, leaned over, and in a friendly voice said, “Excuse me, Miss. Would you mind telling me where you got that library book you’re holding?”
Her head tilted back and she looked up at me, startled. “What?” she said in a surp
rised contralto.
“That book,” I said, pointing to The Scholar. “My name is Hal Johnson and I’m from the Public Library and I wonder if you’d mind telling me where—”
That was as far as I got. She glanced out the window, pulled the cord to inform the bus driver of her desire to get off, and as she squeezed by me toward the center doors of the bus she said, “Excuse me, this is my stop. This book is just one I got in the usual—”
The rest of what she said was lost in the sound of the bus doors swishing open. The girl went lithely down the two steps to the sidewalk and made off at a brisk pace. I was too late to follow her out of the bus before the doors closed, but I prevailed on the driver to reopen them with some choice abuse about poor citizens who were carried blocks beyond their stops by insensitive bus drivers who didn’t keep the doors open long enough for a fast cat to slip through them.
While I carried on my dispute with the bus driver, I’d kept my eye on the hurrying figure of the girl with The Scholar under her arm. So when I gained the sidewalk at last, I started out at a rapid trot in the direction she’d gone.
Being considerably longer-legged than she was, I was right behind her when she approached the revolving doors to Perry’s Department Store. Whether or not she realized I was following her I didn’t know. As she waited for an empty slot in the revolving door, a middle-aged, red-haired woman came out. She caught sight of my quarry and said in a hearty tone, loud enough for me to hear quite plainly, “Why, hello, Gloria! You here for the dress sale too?”
Gloria mumbled something and was whisked into the store by the revolving door. I hesitated a moment, then stepped in front of the red-haired woman and said politely, “That girl you just spoke to—the one you called Gloria—I’m sure I know her from somewhere—”
The red-haired woman grinned at me. “I doubt it, buster,” she said, “unless you get your hair styled at Heloise’s Beauty Salon on the South Side. That’s where Gloria works. She does my hair every Tuesday afternoon at three.”
“Oh,” I said. “What’s her last name, do you know?”
“I’ve no idea.” She sailed by me and breasted the waves of pedestrian traffic flowing past the store entrance. I went through the revolving door into Perry’s and looked around anxiously. Gloria, the hairdresser, was nowhere in sight.
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