I must have looked and sounded somewhat tense because Randall switched off and grinned at me. “Calm down, Junior, everything’s under control.” He glanced complacently at the library. “We made it in nine minutes flat. That’s not bad for a police department that gets more criticism than the President, is it?”
“Has Satchell showed yet?” I stuttered.
“Not yet. Not a sign of him. I’ve got a man stationed at the entrance of every branch library, just like you wanted. With instructions to hold any white-haired cat in rimless glasses carrying a briefcase or a copy of any of those dirty books you mentioned. Also, I’ve got a man at every entrance to the main library here with ditto instructions. And I’ve got another man in a squad car within sight of each door guard to call it in when your nut shows, so I’ll know it quick. Relax. Wherever he goes, we’ve got him.”
He looked at me narrowly. “You sure you’re not just imagining all this? I notice you weren’t blown up in the nut’s house, after all.”
“The bomb blew a minute after I left, Lieutenant. I heard it.” I asked anxiously, “Couldn’t you get the libraries evacuated?” I was still picturing Ellen in little pieces.
“Not enough time, Hal. We passed a goddam miracle to do what we’ve done! Besides, if your crazy friend shows up and finds a bomb scare going on, he’s going to back off and come back with his bombs some other day when we’re not ready for him. This way, we nail him now.” He looked at his watch again. “He hasn’t shown up yet, Hal. I’m sure of it.”
“But he left his house more than twenty minutes ago! He could have got inside before your men were deployed.”
“No way. How long did it take you drive here from his house?”
“About twelve minutes.”
“See? Satchell wouldn’t have made it in less than twenty. He’d drive slow and careful with a carload of bombs, right? And he’d drive by way of the quiet Park instead of by that traffic madhouse, City Line Avenue. Right?” I nodded doubtfully. “And he’ll have to find a place to park, which is a fifteen minute project around any library unless you’re lucky. Right? So relax. We’ve got him, I tell you.”
I was only half-convinced. “How about the bomb expert?” Lieutenant Randall jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Back there,” he said. “Sergeant Kwalik, bomb squad.”
I hadn’t even noticed the cop in the back seat. I said, “Hi, Sergeant,” and looked up the broad flight of steps to the main entrance of the library. A plainclothes detective named Corrigan was standing beside the door up there, keeping a sharp eye out—I hoped—for white-haired men with rimless glasses, briefcases and dirty books.
I had a sudden hunch. I said to Randall, “Listen, when this nut stole a book from this library yesterday, he left the library through the Technology Department exit on the back street. Maybe he’ll go in that way now.”
“I’ve got a man there, I told you. Every entrance. Shut up and let me listen to this.” A subdued muttering came over the police band on his radio. “He hasn’t shown up anywhere yet,” he reported then.
I was too antsy to stay there doing nothing. I said, “I’m going around back and check that Technology entrance. Okay?”
Randall was talking into his mike again. He nodded to me. I ran up the front steps of the library, tipped a hand in greeting to Corrigan as I went through the door, then walked at a more sedate pace through the main library room past Ellen’s desk, giving her a big smile as I passed. She returned the smile, not suspecting a thing.
I was enormously relieved to see her once again all in one beautiful piece, even if it might be the last time. I gave the library and reading room a hurried scrutiny as I sailed through them. No sign of Satchell. I was tempted to stop and look in the stacks, but my hunch was still driving me.
I went down the corridor to the Technology Department on the run. I didn’t waste time casing the narrow aisles between bookshelves there, either, but went straight to Laura on the desk. I asked her as casually as I could whether her retired professor friend, Dr. Amos Satchell, had been in today. She said no, looking puzzled.
Without stopping to allay her curiosity, I stepped through the rear door by which Satchell had exited yesterday, and found Pete Calloway, an old friend from my days with the police department, standing guard outside.
I said, “Hi, Pete. Any action yet?”
“Nothing,” said Pete.
“Nobody came in this way since you’ve been here?”
“One guy is all. No white hair, though. No briefcase. No rimless glasses. And no dirty books. I looked at them all.”
“He was carrying books?”
“Sure. Six of them. Not the ones we want, though.”
“You sure you looked at them all?” I felt uneasy suddenly.
Pete was hurt. “Hell, yes, Hal. One at a time.”
“Just the covers?”
Pete stared at me. “What else? I wasn’t told to read them all the way through, for God’s sake?”
I discovered I was having trouble breathing. I said, “What color was this guy’s hair?”
“Brown.”
“And no glasses? Think about it, Pete.”
“No glasses.” Pete was positive. Then he gave me a startled look. “He blinked a hell of a lot, though,” he said slowly.
I sucked in a deep breath and let it out again. “How long ago did this guy go in?”
“Couple of minutes. You must have passed him as you came out.”
“I didn’t. But he’s got to be Satchell, Pete. The nut we’re after. Even if he’s nutty, this guy isn’t stupid. The librarians here know him, he comes in all the time. And he knows we’re on to him for stealing books. So he takes off his cheaters and wears a brown wig to disguise himself. And he disguises his dirty books, too.”
“How?”
“Easy. With dust jackets from other library books. Make sense?”
“Could be,” said Pete. He shrugged, then waved both arms over his head.
“What’s that for?”
“Signal. It’ll bring the Lieutenant here on the run with Kwalik.”
“Good,” I said. I was thinking frantically, trying to push down my first impulse, which was to rush into the library and yell for everybody to get out of the building instantly, especially Ellen. Which would no doubt cause a first class panic. And we didn’t want panic now.
What we wanted was Satchell and his armload of books. If Pete’s guy was Satchell, he’d been inside the library for less than two minutes. Had he seen me, perhaps, and ducked behind something as I went by him? I doubted it. He was probably already out of sight in the stacks of the main library when I came through it.
Because if he meant to deploy most of his six bombs in the main library, which seemed reasonable, he’d have gone directly there to start planting them. Especially if he meant to retreat through the Technology Department exit after his bombs were planted.
Now then, it would take a minute or two to arm each bomb before he left it on a shelf, wouldn’t it? I hoped so. And Satchell would set the triggering mechanism far enough ahead so he’d have plenty of time to get safely out of the library himself before the first bomb exploded. Say ten or fifteen minutes, altogether, before he finished the job.
I said to Pete, “Stay here until Randall and Kwalik arrive, will you? Then bring them into the main library stacks. I’ll go ahead now and try to locate Satchell. And when you come into the main room, keep it quiet and calm. This guy is crazy enough to blow his whole batch of bombs at once if he sees we’re after him. Okay?”
“Okay”
I went at a quick walking pace through Technology, then at a run down the corridor to the main library room. There I slowed and turned into the stacks. At the end of each long, narrow book-lined aisle, I paused just long enough to see whether or not there was a brown-wigged, blinking Dr. Satchell in it anywhere before I went on to inspect the next aisle. Luckily I’m pretty tall. I could see over the heads of most of the people browsing in the stacks who might be b
locking out my view of my quarry.
At the fifth aisle, I found him.
CHAPTER VI
He was alone in the aisle, standing perhaps twenty feet away with his back to me, his head bent over a book that was open in his hand. I drew back a couple of aisles, out of his sight if he turned. I was just in time to flag down Randall, Pete and Kwalik as they came quietly into the stacks. I made shushing signs at them. Randall nodded and raised his eyebrows, asking silently if I’d located Satchell.
I didn’t say anything until they were beside me, hidden from Satchell by several aisles of head-high bookshelves. Then I pointed and whispered, “Twenty feet up aisle number five. Setting the timing gimmick on one of his book-bombs. I didn’t see the others.”
That’s all Lieutenant Randall needed. Even speaking in a whisper, his command voice came through. “Go to the other end of that aisle, Hal, around the other cross aisle. Block him there. We’ll go in from this end. Kwalik, you go for the bombs. Pete and I will take care of Satchell. When we’ve got him safe, Kwalik, disarm the bomb he’s placing in that aisle. Ready?”
“Wait!” I whispered urgently. “Suppose he’s already planted other bombs on some of these other shelves? We’ve got to know, if and where, before we take him. Because he sure as hell won’t tell us afterward.”
“How loud do the damn things tick?” Randall growled, momentarily at a loss.
“Not loud enough for Kwalik to find them quick among all these other books!”
Kwalik said, “How many books was the guy carrying?”
“Six,” Pete said.
“That’s it, then,” said Randall, relieved. “Before we take Satchell, we locate and count the books he’s still got with him. If he has five left, we know he’s only planted the one so far. And Hal knows where that one is. All right? Let’s go.”
I walked to the far end of aisle one, where we’d been standing, found the cross-aisle, leading to aisle five, empty, and cautiously took my position just around the corner of aisle five in the cross-aisle. I peered through the gaps in the bookshelves between us and saw Satchell closing very carefully the cover of the book in his hand.
From where I was, I couldn’t see what he’d done with his other books. He pushed the books on a middle shelf beside him tightly together, to make room for another book. Then he slid his armed bomb into the opening thus made, and turned away from me toward the other end of the aisle.
I risked a peek around my corner. Randall and his men were coming slowly down aisle five from the other end, Kwalik, the bomb expert, in the lead. Craning around my corner, I saw why Kwalik was leading instead of Randall. On the floor by Satchell’s feet was a little pile of books with bright covers. I counted them with my heart in my throat. Five.
Satchell was beginning to stoop to pick them up when Kwalik reached him. The timing couldn’t have been better. For Satchell, thinking Kwalik just another library patron browsing through the stacks, turned slightly sideways to allow Kwalik to pass him in the narrow aisle.
Kwalik didn’t pass him. “Excuse me, sir,” he said to Satchell in a polite, help-the-old-lady-across-the-street voice, “can’t I help you with these?” He half knelt at Satchell’s feet, and with a smooth, unhurried, sweeping movement of practiced hands, scooped up Satchell’s five remaining book-bombs and backed quickly away on his knees, allowing Randall and Pete to pass him in the aisle and bracket a bewildered Satchell neatly between them.
By this time, I was approaching the huddle of figures from my end of the aisle. I saw the quick glint of metal and heard the clicks that told me Randall and Pete had each handcuffed himself to one of Satchell’s wrists.
Poor Satchell couldn’t go anywhere now without dragging two burly cops with him. Amazingly, Satchell still used the low tone of voice which old library custom demands when he said to Lieutenant Randall, “What do you think you’re doing, may I ask?”
I didn’t hear what Randall answered, if anything. I was watching Kwalik, the bomb boy, with those chills running up and down my spine again.
Kwalik cleared a space on a handy shelf behind him and gently placed Satchell’s five books on it, flat side down. Then, with his fingertips, he delicately lifted the cover of one of the books a fraction of an inch, held it there with one hand, got out a pencil flashlight with the other, and shone the light into the crack. He peered inside, his head tilted slightly. He looked as though he was ready to run. I know I was.
At length Kwalik nodded to Randall. “Okay,” he said, “these’ll wait. Where’s the live one?”
I said, “Here it is, Sergeant.” I bent over and put my ear to the book Satchell had slipped in among the others on that middle shelf. And by God, it was ticking! Up to that moment, I hadn’t quite been able to believe that Satchell really intended to wipe out five buildings full of books and people.
Six buildings, if you counted his own house with me in it. But that ticking book made a true believer out of me. “Hurry up, Sergeant!” I said to Kwalik, and backed off like a timid school girl to the end of the aisle. Have I mentioned that I’m scared of explosives?
Kwalik had nerves of ice, apparently. He removed the ticking book from the shelf, opened its cover, and disengaged, with a touch like a jeweler’s, a wire somewhere inside the hollowed-out book. “Got it,” he said calmly. Then, to Pete, “You sure he only had six books when he came in?”
“I’m sure,” Pete said. “I may be dumb but I can at least count!” He was disgusted with himself for letting Satchell get by him at the door.
Satchell himself hadn’t said a word since his first weak protest to Randall. Probably because he couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw me coming down the corridor toward him. He thought I was dead. His face paled and his reddish brown eyes, a nice match for his brown wig, now contained more desperation than they had yesterday—and more resignation, too.
Randall said, “Pick up your goddam dirty books, Kwalik, and let’s get the hell out of here. I never have felt comfortable in a library!” He turned to me. “I don’t suppose you know what kind of a car the professor here drives? So we can collect the rest of his dirty books?”
“Sorry, I never saw his car.”
Surprisingly, Dr. Satchell spoke up then. He said meekly, “The rest of the bombs are in my blue Ford sedan, parked on the street behind the library.” He gave Lieutenant Randall the license number. Randall jerked on his handcuff and growled, “Show us where.”
I followed them out of the stacks, down the corridor to Technology, through Technology to the rear exit. It was a regular parade. Kwalik went first with his armload of deadly books. Then came Randall, Satchell and Pete, shoulder to shoulder like old buddies, handcuffs hidden under jacket cuffs. Then me, bringing up the rear, lagging as far behind those bombs in Kwalik’s arms as I respectably could. Laura, on the Technology desk, scarcely lifted her head from her book as we went by.
I looked at my watch. Incredibly, from the moment I’d first realized that Satchell might be inside the library till now, when he and his bomb-books were leaving it under guard, only four and a half minutes had elapsed. They were four and a half of the longest minutes I could remember.
Yet I knew I’d gladly go through a dozen more like them—or a hundred—to keep Ellen Crosby in one piece. Even if she decided not to marry me.
Girls with faces like Botticelli angels and figures like Egyptian belly-dancers aren’t all that easy to find these days. You know what I mean?
THE HENCHMAN CASE
Originally published ed in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, May 1977.
My first stop on Monday morning was at a run-down duplex apartment in the West End, the abode of a Mr. Jefferson Cuyler. I parked my car at the curb under a plane tree that was shedding its bark in shabby strips, dodged through a cluster of pre-schoolers who, with intent faces, were playing some mysterious street game, and mounted the four steps to the door of Mr. Cuyler’s residence.
Our records showed Mr. Cuyler was several weeks late in returning s
ix books he had borrowed from the public library. He had neither renewed them nor heeded our postcard of reminder. So I had come in person to collect them.
That’s part of my job. I’m Hal Johnson, book collector—or, as my former boss, Lieutenant Randall of Homicide, calls me, “library fuzz.” I’m employed by the public library to chase down overdue and stolen library books. That sounds like a simple job, right? Well, it isn’t. Not when you consider that in many public libraries (including ours) more than twenty percent of all the new books placed on the shelves vanish less than a year. Every year. We’re doing everything we can to cut down on this enormous loss. We re installing book detection systems, hiring extra guards, refusing public admission to certain stacks of out-of-print or rare books, and hiring ex-cops like me to shove fingers in the dyke.
Anyway, there I was on Mr. Cuyler’s cramped front porch. I rang the bell. After a minute, the door was opened by one of the handsomest men I’ve ever seen in my life. He was tall and relatively slender, a year or two past sixty at a guess. His iron-grey hair was crisp and inclined to curl although it was cut short. His complexion was fresh and healthy under a moderate suntan. His features were almost classically regular. And his eyes were cobalt blue, their gaze so candid and friendly that you felt you could trust him with your life if need be.
He said, “Yes?”
I introduced myself and showed him my ID card. “Are you Jefferson Cuyler?”
He nodded.
“I’ve come for your overdue library books,” I explained. “You’ve kept them out too long without renewal. So you owe us some fines.”
“I know it,” he said, his friendly eyes not cooling in the slightest. “I’m sorry, I’ve been away for a spell. I meant to bring them back today.” He gave me a half smile. “They’re here. Come on in.”
He led me into his living room and pointed to a battered coffee table. The six library books made a neat stack on one corner of it.
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