I found a public telephone booth on the apron of a gas station two blocks away from Benton’s house. I pulled into the service station, parked out of the way of possible pump traffic, and entered the stuffy booth, groping in my pocket for change.
It was a hot bright morning in August—a Tuesday, I remember—and I was sweating even before I closed myself into the booth.
Instead of dialing the emergency number, I called Headquarters and asked for Lieutenant Randall of Homicide. He was my former boss. I hadn’t seen him or heard from him in several months, so I figured this was a pretty good chance to say hello.
Randall picked up his phone and said, “Yeah?” in a bored voice. “Lieutenant Randall.”
“Hal Johnson,” I said. “Remember me?”
“Vaguely,” he answered. “Aren’t you that sissy cop from the public library?”
“You do remember me,” I said. “How nice. Are you keeping busy these days, Lieutenant?”
“So-so.” He paused. Then, with an edge of suspicion, “Why?”
“I think I may have stumbled across a job for you, Lieutenant.”
“You always were papa’s little helper,” Randall said. “What kind of job?”
“I think a man’s been murdered at 4321 Eastwood Street.”
“You think a man’s been murdered?”
“Yes. I went there just now to collect an overdue library book, and when nobody answered the doorbell I took a quick look through the living-room curtains, which weren’t drawn quite tight, and I saw a man lying on the floor in front of the TV set. The TV was turned on. I could hear the sound and see the picture through the window.”
“Did you go inside?”
I was shocked. “After all you taught me? Of course not. I didn’t even try the door.”
“So the guy didn’t hear you ring the doorbell on account of the TV noise,” said Randall hopefully. “He’s tired. He’s lying on the floor to relax while he watches his favorite soap opera.”
“Face down? And with all that blood on the back of his shirt?”
Randall sighed. “4321 Eastwood?”
“Right.”
“I’ll send somebody to check it out. What name did you have for that address?”
“Robert Fenton. I hope he’s not the guy on the floor, though.”
“Why?”
“Because if it’s Fenton, he owes the library a fine of two dollars and twenty cents on his overdue library book.”
“You’re breaking my heart,” Randall said. “Where are you calling from?”
“A pay phone two blocks away. Do you want me to go back and wait for your boys?”
“No. Thanks all the same.” His voice became bland. “If it’s a murder, we’ll try to handle it all by ourselves this time, Hal. Aren’t there some kids somewhere with overdue picture books you can track down today?”
* * * *
Randall telephoned me back at home that evening. His call came just as I was taking my first sip of my first cold martini before dinner. I hadn’t even decided yet whether to go out to eat or to finish up the meatloaf left over from the pitiful bachelor Sunday dinner I’d cooked for myself two days before.
Randall said, “The guy wasn’t watching a soap opera, Hal. He was dead.”
“He looked dead,” I said. “Was he murdered?”
“We think so—the lock on the back door had been forced and he’d been shot in the back and there wasn’t any gun around.”
“Oh,” I said. “And was he Robert Fenton?”
“According to the evidence of his landlord, his neighbors, and the bartender at Calhoun’s Bar down the street, he was. The bartender ought to know because she went out with him a few times. It seems he was a bachelor, living alone.”
“A lady bartender?”
“Yeah. Not bad looking, either,” said Randall, “if you go for bottle blondes with false eyelashes.”
I didn’t rise to that. At this point, I’m still waiting for Ellen Crosby, the girl at the library’s check-out desk, to tell me she’ll marry me or else to get lost.
“How about Mr. Fenton’s library book, Randall?” I said. “Can I have it?”
“Which one was it? There were several library books scattered around the living room.”
“I’ll have to look up the title. Fenton probably borrowed the others recently, and they’re not overdue yet. Anyway, can I have them back to clean up his library record?”
“Why not?” Randall agreed. “Stop by tomorrow and I’ll have them for you.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll be there.”
Lieutenant Randall was as good as his word. When I got to his office next morning about eleven, he had a stack of library books waiting for me.
“You have any suspects yet?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “Fenton had only lived there for a year, according to his landlord. And nothing in the house showed where he’d been before. As far as we’ve been able to discover, he has no relatives or friends in town except the blonde bartender in Calhoun’s Bar.”
I said, “Who’s looking for friends? It’s an enemy who killed him, presumably.”
Randall grunted. “We haven’t turned up any of those, either.”
“Funny. No friends, no relatives, no enemies?”
“And no job either.”
“Fenton was unemployed?”
“A gentleman of leisure. With private means. That’s what he told the blonde bartender, anyway.”
“Hell, that’s what I’d tell a blonde bartender too,” I said. “That doesn’t mean it’s true.”
Randall lit a cigar—if you can call those black ropes he smokes cigars. He said, “Exactly what did you see through the crack in Fenton’s draperies yesterday?”
“Just what I told you. Fenton lying on the floor looking very dead, blood all over the place, the TV set going.”
“You didn’t notice anything else?”
“No. I went to call you after one look. Should I have noticed anything else?”
“The joint was a shambles, Hal. Somebody had tossed it. Almost a professional job.”
“The killer?”
“We’re guessing so. Looking very hard for something.”
“A prowler,” I suggested, “looking for dough. Interrupted by Fenton.”
Randall shrugged. “Maybe. Fenton’s wallet was missing. But if so, the prowler overlooked five one-hundred-dollar bills in Fenton’s money belt.”
“You wouldn’t usually hang around long enough after shooting somebody to make a thorough search of his body, would you?”
Randall shrugged again. I stood up. “Well, anyway, Lieutenant, thanks for salvaging my library books.” I gathered them up.
“Do you need any help?” he asked. “You could rupture yourself.”
I ignored that. I said, “Have you looked through these books?”
“Sure.”
“Whoever killed Fenton was searching for something,” I said. “Books make dandy hiding places.”
“We looked. Hal. There’s nothing in them.”
“They haven’t been searched by an expert until I search them,” I said, knowing it would infuriate Randall.
He snorted. “Well, don’t do it here. Get lost, will you?”
I grinned at him and took the books and went on about my business, which is tracing down lost, stolen, and overdue books for the public library. It’s a quiet life after working for Randall in Homicide for five years. But I like it. Almost as much as Randall resents it.
When I got back to the library that afternoon about four. I turned in the fines and the books I’d collected on my rounds—all except the books Randall had found in Fenton’s living room. These I took with me to my minuscule office behind the Director’s spacious one, and began to examine them carefully, one by one.
I examined the card pocket of each book, the space between spine and cover, the paper dust-jackets. I checked each book painstakingly for anything hidden between the pages, either loose or attached.
/> There were eight books in the stack. I was holding the seventh book by its covers, shaking it pages down over my desk to dislodge anything that might possibly have been inserted between the pages, when I struck pay dirt.
Under the fingers of my right hand. I felt a slight irregularity beneath the dust jacket.
We protect the dust jacket of every library book with a transparent jacket cover made of heavy cellophane with a white paper liner. We fit this transparent cover over the book jacket, fold it along the edges to fit the book, and attach the end flaps to the book with paste. It was under one of these end flaps that my fingers encountered a slight ridge that shouldn’t have been there—a suggestion of extra thickness. The book was called Mushroom Culture in Pennsylvania.
Feeling a tingle of excitement. I worked the pasted edge of the fold-over flap loose from its moorings, pulled it clear of the book cover, and found myself staring down at a crisp fresh one-hundred-dollar bill.
I looked at it for a second or two without touching it, surprised and, yes, mildly elated. As an ex-homicide cop, I knew enough not to handle the bill and chance destroying or smearing any recoverable fingerprints. Yet as a curious library cop, I couldn’t resist using a pair of stamp tweezers from my desk drawer to tease the bill aside enough to count the others under it. There were ten of them—all hundreds—crisp, fresh, deliciously spendable-looking. A thousand dollars.
I won’t say I wasn’t tempted. Funny thoughts ran through my head. Nobody knows about this money but me, I thought. This is a library book, so it’s kind of like public property, I told myself, and I’m certainly one of the public. And wasn’t there a section of the criminal code that said something about Finders-keepers? However, after a couple of minutes, I’m proud to say that I picked up my telephone and asked the switchboard operator to get me Lieutenant Randall.
* * * *
I was eating lunch in the library cafeteria the next day when Lieutenant Randall appeared in the cafeteria doorway. He spotted me at once, walked to my table, and slid into a chair.
I said, “Welcome, Lieutenant. You’re just in time to pay my lunch check.”
Randall said, “Why should I? Because you turned that money over to me? You probably figured it was counterfeit, anyway.”
I stopped a spoonful of chocolate ice cream halfway to my mouth. “And was it?”
He shook his head. “Good as gold. So finish up that slop and let’s get out of here where we can talk.”
I went on eating very deliberately. “First things first,” I said. “I should think out of common gratitude the police department would pay my cafeteria tab for the help I’ve given you. It’s only a dollar and twenty-three cents.”
“Subornation of a witness,” Randall said. He ostentatiously got one of his black cigars from his pocket and felt for matches.
I said, “No smoking in here, Lieutenant. Don’t you see that sign?”
He gave me a cold stare. “Who’s going to stop me? I outrank the only other cop I see anywhere around.”
“O.K.,” I said with a sigh, “I’ll go quietly.”
I paid my check and we went upstairs to my office. The Lieutenant sat down in a straight chair facing me across my desk. I said, “All right, Lieutenant, you need more help, is that it?”
Randall gave what for him was a humble nod. “This book business has us talking to ourselves, Hal. We did find out something this morning that has a bearing, we think. Fenton was a man who had a lot of hundred-dollar bills, apparently. His landlord says he always paid his rent with hundred-dollar bills. The bartender at Calhoun’s Bar says he sometimes paid for his drinks by breaking a hundred-dollar bill. And he had five hundred-dollar bills in his money belt when we find him.”
“So the fact that the money in the library book was in hundreds too makes you think they were intended for Fenton?”
“It seems likely. And possibly they were from the same source as the others he had.”
“And also transferred via library book?”
“Could be.” Randall frowned. “But I can’t figure out how whoever hid the money in the book could be sure Fenton got it. Anybody could borrow the damn book once it came back to the library with the money in it…
“Not if Fenton had put in a reserve for it.” I said. “Then, when it came back to the library, we’d send him a postcard and hold the book for him for three days.”
“Well,” said Randall, “that could explain Fenton’s end of it. But how about the guy paying the money? How’d he know what library book Fenton wanted him to put it in?”
I leaned back and thought about that. At length I said, “There’s only one way I can see. Fenton could call the library and put in a reserve on that book in the other guy’s name. Then, when the book was available, we’d automatically notify the other guy that the book he’d reserved was in. And he’d know that was the book Fenton meant for him to put the money in.”
Randall nodded. “And meanwhile Fenton calls in his own reservation on the same book so he’ll be sure to get it when it’s returned to the library?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That could work.”
“It’s pretty complicated. Who knows enough about how a library operates to dope out a system like that?”
“I do, for one,” I answered modestly. “And maybe Fenton did too.”
Randall brooded. “Say you’re right about it. Then how come the money was still in the book? Why didn’t Fenton take it out as soon as he got home from the library’?”
“What time does the M.E. figure he was killed?”
“Sixteen to eighteen hours before you found him.
“O.K. That’s about the time he might have got home from the library with his books, around cocktail time let’s say. So maybe he mixed himself a drink and turned on the TV before he removed the money from the book? And he was killed before he had a chance to retrieve it.”
Randall made a noncommittal gesture with his hands. He fiddled with his unlit cigar. “The whole thing smells more and more like blackmail to me,” he said. “There’s only one reason I can think of for Fenton to devise this crazy pay-off method, Hal. To conceal his identity from whoever he was blackmailing. It’s a more elaborate scheme than the usual trick of renting a post-office box under a false name and having your blackmail payments mailed to you there.”
“You can stake out a post-office box and see who comes to collect mail from it,” I said. “But there’s no way you can tell who’s going to borrow a library book from the public library after you return it. Besides, we circulate more than one copy of most of our books. How are you going to keep track of the particular copy you hid your money in?”
In a deceptively innocent voice, Randall asked, “How many copies of Mushroom Culture in Pennsylvania does the library have in circulation?”
“One,” I admitted, grinning at him. “There are some books we have only a single copy of. And maybe that’s worth noting. For Mushroom Culture in Pennsylvania was the only one of Fenton’s library books that doesn’t have two or more copies going.”
“So what?”
“So by reserving an unpopular one-copy book for his blackmail victim, Fenton made sure there wouldn’t be a long wait before he got his money.”
“The devil with that,” said Randall irritably. “All a guy would have to do to find out who borrowed a certain book is ask your librarian to look it up for him. Right?”
“Wrong. That’s against the rules—as is giving out information about who’s on the waiting list for books that have been reserved. Our system works on card numbers, not names.”
“I know that, but when you issue a library card to somebody you take a record of his name and address, don’t you?”
“Sure,” I said easily. “But matching the names to the numbers is the trick. Once a book you’ve borrowed is returned to the library by its next borrower, you can tell by the date card in its pocket the card renumber of the person who borrowed the book after you did, but not the person’s name.”
I shrugged. “Our master file of cardholders’ names and numbers is kept out at the main desk.”
“Locked up? In a safe?”
“Just a simple file cabinet,” I said, deadpan. “I suppose somebody might gain unauthorized access to it.”
Randall said with contempt, “Child’s play.”
“For example?”
“I could hide in the stacks some evening until the library closes and the staff goes home. Then I’d have all night to locate your damn file and milk it.”
“That’s very good,” I complimented him. “Right off the top of your head too.”
The Lieutenant jumped up. “Let’s stop fooling around, Hal. Lead me to this master file of yours. You have authorized access to it, right? So if we can nail down the name and address of the person who borrowed Mushroom Culture just before Fenton, we may have our killer.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Say we’re right about this being blackmail, and your blackmailee figures out Fenton’s identity through his card number. He goes out to Fenton’s house Monday afternoon, breaks in through the back door, and is turning the joint upside down looking for whatever blackmail evidence Fenton is holding over him. O.K. Fenton comes home from the library unexpectedly, interrupts him, and gets shot for his pains. His killer is sure to see Mushroom Culture among the library’ books Fenton is bringing home. If he’d hidden a thousand bucks of his money in that book just a day or so before, wouldn’t he take his money back? Why did he leave it in the book for me to find afterward?”
Randall said impatiently, “How should I know? Give me his name and I’ll ask him! Come on, Hal. Move!”
I reached into the center drawer of my desk and pulled out a card.
“I just happen to have the information you want right here. Lieutenant. I looked it up this morning.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“I wanted you to ask me, nice and polite,” I said. “Because you assured me last Tuesday morning that you wouldn’t need any help from me this time. Remember?”
Randall didn’t give an inch. “How was I supposed to know the murdered man would turn out to be another damn library expert?” he said.
The Library Fuzz Page 19