The Library Fuzz

by James Holding

  “I found a list of girls’ names in one of the stolen library books in Helmut’s place. Here’s a copy.” I tossed an old envelope on his desk.

  He made no move to touch it. “That isn’t evidence, Hal. It could be a list of his daughter’s friends. Members of his wife’s bridge club. Anything.”

  I said. “I know one of the girls on that list, Lieutenant. Ramona Gomez—she works in the library cafeteria. Couldn’t you go and ask her in a friendly way if she’s been blackmailed into shoplifting for Helmut? With what you know now, it shouldn’t be hard to make her talk.”

  Randall stood up. “Yeah,” he grunted, “I guess I could do that much, Hal. And a couple of other things too. Leave the book, will you?”

  “Let me know how you make out,” I said, “because the books in Helmut’s closet still belong to the library, you know.”

  * * * *

  I was at home having a lonely shot of Scotch after my delicious TV dinner when Lieutenant Randall phoned. Seven hours. He was a fast worker.

  “How’s the stolen library-book business?” he asked by way of greeting.

  “Booming,” I replied. “And how’s it with the brave boys of Homicide?”

  “Also,” he said. “We’ve got your pal Helmut.”

  “For Murder One?”

  “What else? That print we turned up under the dash of your stolen car, remember? It’s Helmut’s.”

  “Good,” I said. “Does it match anything else?”

  “Strange you should ask,” said Randall. “It matches a thumbprint on the metal buckle of Dexter’s dress. I guess Helmut dragged her to the iron stairway by the belt after he conked her.”

  “No rust flakes in her head wound?”

  “None.”

  “What’d he conk her with?”

  “Swedish ashtray. Glass. Hers. Weighs about two pounds. A perfect blunt instrument. His prints are on that too.”

  “Careless, wasn’t he?”

  “You might say so. He failed to reckon with the brilliance of the police is how I’d put it.”

  “You talked to Ramona Gomez?”

  “Yep. We couldn’t turn her off when we hinted that Helmut had knocked off Dexter. She spilled everything. Helmut caught her shoplifting at Perry’s and blackmailed her into working for him, just as you figured. Same with the other girls.”

  “Poor Ramona,” I said. “You’re not going to take any action against her, are you?”

  “Immunity,” said Randall wryly, “in exchange for her memoirs about Helmut. Same with all the girls on the list.”

  I sipped my whiskey and asked, “Did Ramona say anything about fingering me to Helmut?”

  “Yeah. She admitted telling Helmut he could get a whole load of books from the Public Library without any chance of their being traced if he just swiped your car when you had the trunk filled with overdues.” Randall chuckled. “Your Ramona pointed you out to Helmut as a prime source for library books when he got his big idea about using them for shoplifting.”

  “That wasn’t nice of Ramona,” I said. “Maybe you better charge her with conspiracy or something, after all.”

  “We only picked up Helmut half an hour ago,” Randall said. “He was taking a briefcase full of stolen goodies to the fence he’s been using. We trailed him to the fence before we jumped him, and got the fence too. Isn’t that clever?”

  “Brilliant,” I said. “Who’s the fence? Anybody I know?”

  “None of your business. You’re a book detective, remember? Fences are for adult cops, my boy.”

  “As a book detective, then, I’m interested in whether any more of the library’s books will turn up as shoplifters’ tools,” I said. “Bad for the library’s image—you can understand that, Lieutenant.”

  “Don’t fret yourself, Hal. Helmut called all his girls last night after killing Dexter and instructed them to discontinue using library books in their work. At least, that’s what all the girls have told us.”

  “That means the library’s lost twenty-five books, Lieutenant. Who wants to read a scooped-out novel, even for free? But you got the other twenty-seven for me, didn’t you, out of Helmut’s closet?”

  “Evidence,” said Randall. “You’ll get them back after Helmut’s trial.”

  “What!” I yelled. “That’ll be months, maybe years!”

  Randall sounded hurt. “You’ve got nobody but yourself to thank for that,” he said. “If you’re going to solve my murders, you can’t blame me for collecting your library books.”

  THE SAVONAROLA SYNDROME

  Originally published in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, October 1976.

  CHAPTER I

  Monday noon, when I got back to my office at the library, there was a note on my desk. “I’d like to see you when you have a minute,” it said. It was signed “Ellen.”

  Anytime Ellen wants to see me, I have a minute. She’s the girl on the check-out desk at the library. She has a face like a Botticelli angel and a figure like an Egyptian belly-dancer.

  I didn’t even sit down at my desk. I went down the corridor to the main library room, turned in through the double doors, and walked over to Ellen’s desk with what is sometimes referred to as a spring in my stride.

  I waited until Ellen had checked out a dozen books for a lantern-jawed, grizzled old man whose taste, judging from his book titles, seemed to run to the care and feeding of tropical plants. Then I stepped up to her desk and said, “Don’t tell me, Ellen. Let me guess. You’ve decided to marry me.”

  She smiled and shook her head. “Don’t nag me, Hal,” she said. “I’m still thinking it over.”

  “You’ve been thinking it over for four months and eight days now,” I answered. Which was true. “And I’ve only asked for an answer six times. Or is it seven? Do you call that nagging?”

  “Borderline case, I’d say. Anyway, that isn’t what I wanted to see you about. This is a professional matter.”

  Professional. That seemed an odd word to apply to my job. I’m the guy who chases down stolen and overdue books for the public library. Library fuzz. A kind of sissy cop. It’s not exciting work, usually, but it’s steady. And I suppose you could call it a profession of sorts. It pays a fair salary anyway—enough to marry Ellen on if she’d ever make up her mind to say “yes”.

  I said, “What is this professional matter that concerns you?”

  “What it is,” Ellen said, “is that there’s something funny going on around here.”

  “Tell your favorite detective all about it,” I said.

  “Somebody’s stealing books from my current fiction rack.”

  “What gives you that idea?” I asked.

  “Well, a lot of people keep coming in and asking for The Cult of Venus, and complaining to me because they can’t ever find a copy of it on the shelves. It’s that novel by Joel Carstairs…”

  “Whee!” I interrupted her. “That Cult of Venus book is a very warm item, baby. Have you read it?”

  She flushed. “What difference does that make? Until this morning, I’ve just taken it for granted that all our copies of the book are out, and that’s why there aren’t any on the shelves recently. It’s a very popular book, of course, a best seller.”

  “Bound to be,” I teased her, “what with all decency thrown to the winds, explicit scenes of wild sexual abandon every other page and…”

  “Be serious, Hal! I’m trying to tell you that this morning, after three more requests for the book, I decided to check our records on it.”

  “How many copies are we circulating?”

  “Sixteen. Eight here and two each for our branches.” She brushed her hair back from her cheek. “That’s when I found something funny. When I checked the cards. Our records show that seven copies should be on the shelves. But they aren’t. And they haven’t been misfiled, either. I checked that. They’ve just disappeared, Hal. Don’t you think that’s funny?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Hilarious. Seven out of eight? That’s a lot of copies for an
yone to want of the same book. Even a dirty one.”

  “It’s not really dirty so much,” Ellen said primly, “as frank and realistic.”

  “Dirty,” I said. “I read it.” I thought for a moment. An acne-splotched teenager approached Ellen’s desk with an armload of books. I said, “Here comes a customer, Ellen. I’ll see what I can figure and see you later.”

  I went back to my cubby-hole behind the office of the library’s business manager, sat down at my desk, pulled over my telephone and made four quick calls to our branch libraries. In each case, I asked the librarian to check on the two copies of The Cult of Venus her branch was circulating, and get back to me as soon as possible.

  Twenty minutes later I had reports from all four branches. Of the eight copies of The Cult of Venus assigned to the branches, only three were accounted for as out on loan. The other five had been returned by borrowers and should have been on the current fiction shelves waiting to go out again. But they weren’t. They had disappeared without the slightest trace.

  Digesting that little nugget of information, I stood up and prowled around my closet-sized office for a couple of minutes before walking down the hall to visit Ellen again.

  “Listen,” I said to her when she was free for a minute, “is that the dirtiest book we’re circulating right now? The Cult of Venus?”

  She said, “Well, that’s fairly outspoken all right, Hal, but…”

  “We’ve got dirtier ones?”

  She hesitated. “For my money, The Parallel Triangle is about as dirty as you can get—to use your word.”

  “You read that one, too?”

  “Just skimmed it. Part of my job.” She made a moue of distaste.

  “Then check out our copies of The Parallel Triangle for me, will you, Ellen? When you get a few minutes free?”

  She looked at me with raised eyebrows. “You think we’ve got some nutty thief here who loves dirty books?” she asked. “Somebody who’s so enthusiastic that he collects all the copies he can get?”

  “It’s a possibility. Let me know what you find out, anyway. And you might take a look at your records on a few other dirty books, too, while you’re at it. Even any you think are only frank and realistic.”

  Ellen sighed. “Okay, Hal.”

  I descended into the basement and grabbed a quick bite at the library cafeteria before setting out on my afternoon round of calls for overdue books and fines. When I returned to the library again at 5:30, Ellen had left for the day but there was another note on my desk. This one read:

  The Parallel Triangle: Of our twelve copies, seven are missing. Harrigan’s Bag (also very frank and realistic!): four of our eight are missing. How about that, Sherlock?

  How about it, indeed?

  CHAPTER II

  Next morning, I checked our branches on their copies of The Parallel Triangle and Harrigan’s Bag. More than half of the branch library copies were missing. They’d disappeared without a trace. As Ellen had said, something very funny seemed to be going on.

  In my six years at the public library, I’ve had plenty of experience with book thieves. They come in all shapes and sizes. People who steal library books for the few dollars they’ll bring from unscrupulous second-hand book dealers. Poor people who steal library books because they truly love books, feel compelled to own them, and can’t afford to buy them. People who steal books just for the hell of it—sometimes to satisfy the urgings of deep-buried kleptomania, sometimes for no reason at all except the thrill of stealing.

  Then there are the otherwise respectable book collectors who steal out-of-print, rare, hard-to-get books and special editions from the public library just to round out their collections.

  And of course, there’s a small but select group of secret pornography-lovers who steal salacious books from the library because they’re ashamed to be seen openly buying or borrowing them.

  Our current thief seemed to fit nicely into the latter category, judging by the type of books he was stealing. Yet if so, why would he want so many copies of each book? Even the most enthusiastic porno buff could only read one book at a time.

  No, I decided, the thief I was after wasn’t a secret lover of pornography. He had to be a market-wise practical thief who was conforming smartly to the law of supply and demand, interested only in the commercial benefits of his thievery.

  For while our dirty books remained on the best seller lists, it figured that public demand for them would expand constantly. Therefore the second-hand dealers could resell as many copies of these particular titles as they could lay their hands on. And quite probably, they’d pay our thief a considerably higher price for his stolen goods than ordinary books would bring.

  Well, good for you, Johnson, I told myself. You’ve figured out why the books are being stolen. So now figure out who is stealing them and how to get them back. That’s what the library is paying you for, after all. Those books go for anywhere up to eight ninety-five retail, and that adds up to a lot of scarce library dough. So what are you going to do about it?

  Simple, I answered myself. I’ll set a little trap for the rascal.

  I requested that all our remaining copies of The Parallel Triangle be withdrawn from circulation when they were returned by borrowers, and sent to me at the main library. As the lewdest and most popular book of the lot, that title would make the best bait, I figured.

  When I had a reasonable backlog of copies, I would feed one copy at a time onto the current fiction rack at the main library and sit nearby, personally, and watch what happened to it. If a legitimate borrower selected the book and checked it out at Ellen’s desk in the regular way, I would put another copy on the rack and watch that. If anybody smuggled The Parallel Triangle out of the library without checking it out at Ellen’s desk, I figured the chances would be good that I’d caught our thief in the act.

  By Thursday morning enough copies of the book had come in to my office to provide continuing bait for a couple of days, I hoped—at least during the heavy traffic hours in the library when the thief might be expected to operate.

  It might take weeks to land him, I realized. On the other hand, I could get lucky in an hour. With no copies of the book available now at any of our branches, the thief would be forced to patronize the main library if he wanted to snag any more copies of The Parallel Triangle.

  I decided to start the action. Not that I expected much action in the true sense of the word. I foresaw weary hours of sitting on a hard chair in a distant corner of the reading room, watching my bait in the fiction rack. Yet it was a welcome relief from collecting overdue books and fines.

  So about eleven o’clock Thursday morning, I salted the rack with one copy of The Parallel Triangle and took up my vigil. It was really quite pleasant, I discovered, because I could see Ellen’s desk, and Ellen herself, from my spy-chair. And I didn’t know of any better way to rest tired eyes than to look at Ellen.

  As it turned out, the third customer who picked The Parallel Triangle from the rack was my man. Out of the busy noon-hour crowd of library habitués who were browsing through the stacks, scanning the card catalog files, lining up before the checkout and check-in desks, he suddenly appeared at quarter after twelve, sidling up to the current fiction shelf so casually as to make it seem almost accidental.

  Yet there was nothing accidental in the swiftness with which he plucked The Parallel Triangle, along with its nearest neighbor, from the rack, after only half-a-second’s inspection of the shelf’s contents.

  With a nod of satisfaction he came at a brisk, decisive pace toward the reading room, where I was pretending to peruse a month-old issue of National Geographic.

  As he passed me, I got a good look at him over my magazine. He was medium tall, strongly built, stooped a little with age but not much. His abundant shock of carefully-combed hair was pure white. He wore rimless eyeglasses. Deep-graven lines bracketed his thin-lipped mouth. And the reddish brown eyes, under brows which still retained some of the brown his hair coloring lost, h
eld a curious half-desperate, half-resigned expression.

  Altogether he was quite distinguished-looking. I couldn’t easily imagine anyone looking less like a petty book thief. Yet there he was, two library books from the current fiction shelf in one hand, a black leather briefcase in the other. The leather briefcase looked expensive. So did the blue-checked slacks and navy blazer he was wearing.

  He sat down in a vacant chair at one of the long reading-room tables and placed his briefcase on the table in front of him. Then he made a quiet business of reading the jacket-blurbs of The Parallel Triangle and leafing through it as though making up his mind whether he wanted to read it or not.

  After five minutes of this, he raised his eyes without lifting his head, checked the other occupants of the reading room to make sure we were all absorbed in our books or magazines, then quietly lifted the lid of his briefcase three inches and slid The Parallel Triangle inside.

  It was done as skillfully as a prestidigitator palms a card. One second, The Parallel Triangle was there, resting on top of his briefcase; the next, it had disappeared, and the white-haired gentleman was examining the second library book he had selected from the rack.

  At length he rose from his chair, took his briefcase from the table, walked briskly into the main room and returned the second book to the fiction rack as though he had decided not to borrow it after all. He glanced briefly at Ellen’s check-out desk and saw that her attention was fully occupied by the half dozen people waiting in line at her desk. Immediately he swung about and walked confidently out the rear door of the main library room which led down a short corridor to our Technology Department. The Technology Department has an entrance of its own from the street bordering the rear of the library.

  I tossed aside my National Geographic and went right after him.