The Library Fuzz

by James Holding

  After a moment’s survey of the five o’clock crowd jamming the store’s aisles, I turned away. I was due to meet Susan for drinks and dinner at The Chanticleer in half an hour. And I figured Susan, whom I hoped to lure away from the checkout desk at the Public Library into marriage with me, was more important than a stolen copy of The Scholar. Especially since I now knew where to find Gloria and the stolen book.

  Some of my pickups next morning were on the South Side, so it wasn’t out of my way to stop at Heloise’s Beauty Salon. I went in, and, letting my eyes rove uneasily about the shop, feeling self-conscious, I asked at the reception counter if I could speak to Gloria for a minute.

  “Gloria Dexter?” said the pretty black receptionist. “I’m afraid you can’t. She’s not here this morning.”

  “Her day off?”

  “No. Yesterday was her day off.”

  “How come she’s not here today?”

  “We don’t know. She just didn’t show up. She usually calls in if she can’t make it, but this morning she didn’t.”

  “Did you try telephoning her?” I asked.

  She nodded. “No answer.”

  “Well,” I said, “maybe I can stop by her home. All I wanted to ask her about was a library book that’s overdue. Where’s she live?”

  After I’d shown her my ID card, the receptionist told me Gloria Dexter’s address. I thanked her and left.

  The address wasn’t fifteen minutes away. It turned out to be a single efficiency apartment perched on top of what used to be a small gatehouse to a private estate. The private estate was now two fourteen-story highrises set back from the street in shaded grounds. The only way up to Gloria’s apartment was by a rusty outside stairway rather like a fire escape.

  I was just starting up it when somebody behind me yelled, “Hey!”

  I stopped and turned around. The hail had come from a burly man in dirty slacks and a T-shirt, who was clipping a hedge behind the gatehouse. “No use going up there. Mister,” he informed me, strolling over to the foot of Gloria’s staircase. “Miss Dexter isn’t there.”

  I’d been expecting that. I said, “Do you know where she is?”

  “At Memorial Hospital probably,” he replied, “or the morgue. They took her off in an ambulance a couple of hours ago. I was the one who found her.”

  I hadn’t been expecting that. “Did she have an accident or something?”

  “She sure did. Fell all the way down that iron staircase you’re standing on. Caved in her skull, it looked like to me.”

  I assimilated this news in silence. Then, “You found her at the bottom of this staircase?”

  “Yep. Like a ragdoll.”

  “What time?”

  “Eight thirty this morning when I came to work. I’m the yardman here. The ambulance boys said she’d been dead for quite a while, so she musta taken her tumble last night sometime.” Remembering the pretty receptionist at Heloise’s Beauty Salon, I said, “I stopped at the beauty shop where she works before I came here. They’re worrying about her because she didn’t show this morning. Maybe you ought to let them know.”

  “Never thought of that. Who’d you say you were, Mister?”

  I showed him my ID card. “I wanted to see Miss Dexter about an overdue library book,” I said. “Say, could I go up and get the book out of her place now? It’ll save the library a lot of bother later on.”

  “Go ahead,” the yardman said. “On second thought, I’ll come with you, to see you don’t take nothing but your library book.” He grinned, exposing stained teeth. “Besides, you can’t get in her place ’less I let you in. It’s locked.”

  We climbed the rusty iron steps together. He unlocked the door at the top and we went into the Dexter apartment. It was as simple, pretty, and tasteful as Gloria herself. A daybed with a nubby red-and-gold coverlet stood against one wall, and over the bed there was a single hanging shelf filled with books.

  I went straight to the bookshelf. “The book I want should be here somewhere,” I said to the yardman. My eyes went down the row of spines. The Scholar wasn’t there. Neither was any of the other 51 library books that had been stolen with my car.

  “Take a look in her kitchenette and bathroom,” the yardman advised me. “People read books in funny places.”

  A quick search failed to turn up The Scholar anywhere in the apartment.

  The yardman was becoming impatient. “Tough luck,” he said. “I guess you’ll have to wait for the book and get it the hard way.” He looked at the telephone on a dropleaf table near the kitchenette door. “I’ll call her beauty shop from here,” he said. “It’ll be handier.” He opened the telephone book, then hesitated. “What’s the name of the place, anyhow?” he asked me. “Some fancy French name I can’t remember.”

  “I’ll look it up for you,” I said. “Heloise’s Beauty Salon is what it’s called. With an H.” I riffled through the telephone book and found the number for him. Another number on the same page was underlined in red. The yardman thanked me and I thanked him, and as I left, he was dialing the beauty shop.

  * * * *

  My car was stifling when I climbed back into it. I rolled down the windows and sat for a couple of minutes, trying to figure out what to do next. Finally I drove downtown, left my car in the parking lot behind Perry’s Department Store, and went inside.

  At the Lost and Found counter I asked the girl, “Has a Public Library book been turned in recently?”

  She gave me a funny look and said. “Yes, the clean-up crew-found one in a trash basket.”

  “Mine,” I said with relief. “May I have it, please?”

  “Can you describe it?” she said.

  “Sure. The title is The Scholar. There are three cigarette burns inside the O on the cover. Like eyes and a nose.” When she looked prim I added, “Somebody else put them there, not me.”

  She was suddenly businesslike. “That’s the book, all right. But we don’t have it here. You’ll have to claim it at the Security Office.” She dropped her eyes. “I turned it over to them a few minutes ago.”

  “What did you do that for?” I asked curiously.

  “Ask Security,” she said. “Mr. Helmut.”

  “I will. Mr. Helmut. Where can I find him?”

  She pointed toward the balcony that ran along one side of Perry’s street floor. “Up there. Behind the partitions.”

  I mounted to the balcony and pushed open an opaque glass door with the word Security Office stenciled on it. An unattractive girl with dull eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses was sitting at a desk inside the door, typing. She asked me what I wanted in a no-nonsense voice that didn’t go with her bitten fingernails.

  “You the Security Chief?” I asked, giving her my best smile.

  “Don’t be silly!” she answered sharply. “Mr. Helmut is our Security Chief.”

  “Then I’d like to see him for a minute, please.”

  “He’s out in the store making his morning round. Maybe I can help you?”

  “Your Lost and Found desk sent me up here to ask about a book from the Public Library that was found in the store last night.”

  She gave me a blank look. “I’m sorry. I don’t know anything about any library book. Mr. Helmut ought to be back soon if you’d care to wait.” She waved at one of those form-fitting chairs for which I understand the Swedes are responsible. I sat down in it.

  Ten minutes later a burly black-browed man with long sideburns pushed open the Security door and came in. He paused abruptly when he saw me. He had my stolen copy of The Scholar in his hand.

  “Mr. Helmut,” his secretary fluted, “this gentleman is waiting to see you about a library book.”

  He shot me a sharp glance out of quick intelligent brown eyes and said, “Okay. Come on in.” He held the door to his private office open and I preceded him inside. He motioned me to a straight chair and sat down behind a desk bearing a small metal sign that read C. B. HELMUT. He put my library book on the desk top and raised his black e
yebrows at me.

  “A library book?” he inquired. “This one?” He pointed at The Scholar.

  I nodded. “That’s the one. It was stolen from me some time ago, Mr. Helmut. The reason I’m here is that yesterday, on a bus, I saw a girl carrying it under her arm. I recognized it by those burns on the cover. When I tried to ask the girl about it, she ducked into your store—maybe to brush me off in the crowd of shoppers, or maybe to get rid of the stolen book before anybody caught her with it.”

  “The clean-up crew found it in a trash basket here last night,” Helmut said.

  “So your Lost and Found girl told me. She also told me the book was turned over to her first. Then she turned it over to you. Mind telling me why?”

  “Routine security measure, that’s all.” Helmut ran a thick finger over the cigarette burns on the cover of The Scholar. He was enjoying himself, acting the important executive.

  “Security measure?” I said. “How does store security come into it?”

  Idly he opened the cover of The Scholar and leafed through the first 20 pages or so in a leisurely manner, wetting his fingertip to turn the pages. Then suddenly he said, “Look here, Mr. Johnson,” and held out the opened book for my inspection. The Scholar was a 400-page book, more than two inches thick. The copy Helmut held out to me was only a dummy book. The insides had been cut out to within half an inch of each edge, so that the book was now, in effect, an empty box, its covers and the few pages left intact at front and back concealing a cavity about seven inches long, four wide, and an inch and a half deep.

  I said, “So that’s it.”

  “That’s it.” Helmut echoed me. “A shoplifting gimmick. You see how it works? Shoplifter comes into the store, puts down her library book on the counter while she examines merchandise, and when our salesclerk isn’t looking, the shoplifter merely opens the book and pops in a wrist watch or a diamond pin or a couple of lipsticks or whatever and walks out with them, cool as you please.”

  Helmut shook his head in reluctant admiration. “Can you imagine a more innocent-looking hiding place for stolen goods than a Public Library book? Why, it even lends class to the shoplifter, gives her literary respectability.”

  “Shoplifting!” was all I could think of to say.

  “Pilferage ran almost a million bucks in this store last year,” Helmut went on. “Most of it shoplifting. So we’re pretty well onto the usual dodges—shopping bags with false bottoms, loose coats with big inside pockets, girls leaving fitting rooms with three or four sweaters under the one they wore going in, and so on. But this library-book trick is a new one on me. And it’s a beaut!”

  It was a beaut all right. I said, “You better watch out for more of the same, Mr. Helmut. Because that girl stole fifty-one other library books when she stole this one. Out of my car.”

  “Ouch!” he said. Then, “You’re from the Public Library?”

  I nodded and showed him my card.

  “Well,” said Helmut, “since you scared her yesterday, let’s hope she’ll think twice about using the library-book method again.”

  “Let’s hope so. Can I have the book now?”

  “Sure,” he said. He handed me the book.

  “I wish I hadn’t lost the girl last evening,” I said. “I might have got my other books back too.”

  “Wouldn’t do you much good if she’s gutted them all like that one,” Helmut said as I went out.

  * * * *

  At two o’clock I was sitting across his scarred desk from Lieutenant Randall, my old boss. I’d just related to him in detail my adventures in recovering The Scholar, now considerably the worse for wear. The book lay on his desk between us.

  Randall put his cat-yellow eyes on me and said. “I’m very happy for you, Hal, that you managed to recover a stolen book for your little old library. Naturally. But why tell me about it? Petty book theft just doesn’t interest me.” He was bland.

  I gave him a grin and said, “How about first-degree murder, Lieutenant? Could you work up any interest in that?”

  He sat forward in his chair. It creaked under his weight. “You mean the Dexter woman?”

  I nodded. “I think she was killed because I spotted her with my stolen book.”

  “She fell downstairs and fractured her skull. You just said so.”

  “She fell downstairs, all right. But I think she was pushed. After somebody had caved in her skull in her apartment.”

  “Nuts,” Randall said. “You’re dreaming.”

  “Call the coroner,” I suggested. “If the dent in her head was made by hitting one of those rusty iron steps, there could be some rust flakes in the wound. But I’ll bet there aren’t any.”

  “Jake hasn’t looked at her yet. She only came in this morning. I’ve seen the preliminary report—fatal accident, no suspicion of foul play.”

  “Ask him to take a look at her now, then.”

  “Not until you give me something more to go on than rust flakes.” He laced his voice with acid. “You’re a showoff, Hal. So you probably think you know who killed her, right? If she was killed.”

  “Mr. C. B. Helmut,” I said. “The Security Chief at Perry’s Department Store. That’s who killed her.”

  Randall’s unblinking yellow stare didn’t shift. “What makes you think it was Helmut?”

  “Three pieces of what I consider solid evidence.”

  “Such as?”

  “Number One: when I looked up the phone number of Heloise’s Beauty Salon for the yardman in Gloria Dexter’s phone book, there was another number on the same page underlined in red ink.”

  Randall frowned. “Helmut’s?”

  “C. B. Helmut.”

  “If she was a shoplifter,” Randall said, “why the hell did she want to know the phone number of Perry’s Security Chief?”

  “Especially,” I said, “since the underlined phone number was Helmut’s home number, not the extension for Security at Perry’s Department Store.”

  Randall’s knuckles cracked as he curled his hands into fists.

  “What’s evidence Number Two?” he asked in a neutral tone.

  “Helmut called me by name, although I was a perfect stranger to him and he to me.”

  Randall said, “Why not? You showed him your ID card.”

  “He called me Mr. Johnson before he saw my ID card.”

  “The Lost and Found girl or his secretary told him who you were.”

  “I didn’t tell either one of them my name.”

  “Well.” Randall stared past my shoulder in deep thought. “He knew who you were and what your job was before you told him, then?”

  “Yes. And there can be only one explanation for that.”

  “Don’t tell me. Let me guess. You think he stole your car and your books.”

  “Right. I’m sure he recognized me the minute he saw me today.”

  “I don’t see what the hell that has to do with Dexter’s murder.”

  “Dexter was in cahoots with Helmut,” I said. “She told him I followed her and chased her into the store.”

  “Wait a minute,” Randall said. “You’ve lost me.”

  I laid it out for him. “The girl was scared when I braced her about the library book. She ducks into Perry’s to lose me, but has the bad luck to meet one of her hairdressing customers at the entrance. From inside the door she looks back and sees that I have stopped her customer and am obviously asking about her, about Dexter. So she panics. She steps into one of the store telephone booths, gets Helmut on the phone, tells him a Hal Johnson from the Public Library is hot on her trail and by now probably knows who she is on account of the hairdressing customer. What should she do?

  “Helmut tells her not to come near the Security Office, just throw the library book into a trash basket and go on home. And deny she ever had the book if anybody asks her again about it. Helmut hopes the book will be burned in the store incinerator with the other trash, of course. But the book is turned in to the Lost and Found desk this morning, so Hel
mut’s stuck with it. And I show up before he can dispose of it.”

  “You should have been a detective,” Randall said, deadpan. “I still don’t see how that gets Dexter murdered.”

  “Helmut knows I’ll get to Dexter sooner or later, now that I know who she is. He knows I’ll apply pressure about the stolen book and eventually go to the police. So he figures she’ll blow the whole sweet setup he’s got going for him, unless he takes her out of the picture completely.”

  “What setup?”

  “Don’t you get it? The guy’s a modern Fagan,” I said. “He’s got a bunch of girls like Dexter shoplifting for him all over town! Using scooped-out library books—the books he stole from me—as containers. And reporting to him by telephone at home.”

  Randall took that without blinking. “Well, well,” he murmured. He contemplated his folded hands on the desk top. “You said something about a third piece of evidence?”

  I gave him a sheepish look. “I hesitate to tell you about that one. It’s slightly illegal.”

  “So is your friend Helmut, you think. So tell me.”

  “I talked my way past Helmut’s super and got into his apartment at Highland Towers—”

  Randall blinked at last. “And—?” he said.

  “I found twenty-seven of my stolen library books at the back of his clothes closet.”

  “Scooped out?”

  I shook my head. “No, perfectly normal.”

  “So.” Lieutenant Randall leaned back and put his hands behind his head, his elbows spread. “Twenty-seven, you said? You think he’s got people using the other twenty-five books in shoplifting for him?”

  I nodded.

  “That he’s recruited a gang of otherwise respectable people like Dexter to turn shoplifter for him?”

  I nodded again.

  Randall ruminated aloud. “He’s store Security Chief. In the course of his job he runs into a lot of people who are already shoplifters, is that what you mean? So he blackmails some of them into working for him by threatening them with the police?”

  “It could be, couldn’t it?”

  Randall looked at me with the air of a man who suspects his son of cheating on a geography exam. “Hal,” he said, “you recently remarked, and I quote: ‘The guy’s a modern Fagan. He’s got a bunch of girls shoplifting’ et cetera.” He tapped his desk top with a finger like a sausage. “How do you know they’re all girls? You holding out something else?”