I bid her goodbye, put War and Peace under my arm, and went down the driveway to my car.
* * * *
Three days later, I dropped into police headquarters downtown. Since I’d worked there for five years as a homicide detective before switching to library cop, I knew my way around. I climbed the stairs to the gloomy cramped office of Lieutenant Randall, my former boss, and entered without knocking.
Randall was in the act of lighting one of his vicious black stogies, in blatant disregard of the Surgeon General’s warnings. He held the flaring match in midair and gave me a dirty look out of his sulphur-colored eyes. “Well, look who’s here,” he greeted me without enthusiasm. “The famous book detective himself.”
“Hi, Lieutenant,” I said and sat down without being asked.
Randall puffed on his stogie till it was well alight, then waved out the match. “What do you want? And make it quick, Hal. I’m busy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I can see that.” There wasn’t a paper of any kind on his desk.
“What do you want?
“I’m a public-spirited citizen,” I answered. “And as a public-spirited citizen with the community’s good at heart, I have come here this morning to help you clean up some unsolved crimes.” I gave him my public-spirited grin.
He gave me his you’ve-got-just-one-more-minute grin. “You can help me?” he asked. “How?”
“By bringing to your attention a couple of murders you completely missed last year. And by pointing out the murderer to you.”
Randall snorted, peering unblinkingly at me through a cloud of rank tobacco smoke. “How careless of me to miss a couple of murders,” he said blandly. “What were they?”
“Two derelicts,” I said, “who had sneaked in out of the freezing weather last November to sleep in an empty building. At least that’s what the newspapers called them. Derelicts.”
Randall came to attention. “You mean the bums who were burned to death in that empty Ross Street tenement?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“They weren’t murdered. They were trespassing in a building that happened to catch fire and incinerate them.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think the building happened to catch fife. I believe somebody deliberately put the torch to it.”
“Arson?” He was patronizing.
I nodded. “And murder.” He didn’t say anything so I went on. “Even if the arsonist didn’t know the bums were holed up inside when he set fire to the building, he’s their murderer all the same, isn’t he?
“If there was an arsonist, yes. Nobody has ever suggested that there was one, though,” Randall sighed, “except you.”
“I’m ninety-nine-percent sure that there was, Lieutenant. Do you want to get Sandy Castle up here to hear the rest of this?” Sandy Castle heads up the Department’s arson squad.
In the old days, when I worked for him, if I was ninety-nine-percent sure about anything, that was usually enough to convince Randall, and it still was, I guess. He picked up the phone and called Sandy.
While we were waiting, the Lieutenant smoked in noncommittal silence for about three minutes. Then he asked casually, “And who was this murderer, Hal? You said you knew.”
I replied with equal casualness, “A city fireman named Jack O’Neal.”
That shook him a little. “A fireman? For God s sake!”
“Ironic, isn’t it?
The door opened and Sandy Castle came in and took the other chair. “How are you doing, Hal?” he greeted me. “Back at the old stand?”
“Only temporarily. I’ve got something I think will interest you, Sandy.”
“So I hear. I’m listening.”
I quickly filled him in on what I’d told Randall. “I think that tenement fire was set,” I finished.
“He even claims to know who set it,” Randall murmured. “Don’t ask me how.”
“You want it from the beginning?” I said. “O.K. Last Wednesday I went to collect an overdue library book from a city fireman named Jack O’Neal, who lives with his mother at 1218 King Street. Jack wasn’t home, but his mother found the library book for me—on the floor under the telephone extension beside the bed in Jack’s upstairs bedroom. While she was upstairs looking for the book, I came across a scrapbook in the living room and glanced through it while I waited. The scrapbook had the word ‘FIRES’ on the cover, and contained six illustrated newspaper clippings about local fires. The Ross Street tenement fire was one of them.”
Castle looked puzzled. “Nothing funny about that, Hal. A fireman could keep a scrapbook of fires like a writer keeps a scrapbook of reviews. I’ve personally known a dozen—”
I held up a hand. “Wait a minute, Sandy. I’m not finished.”
“Let him talk,” Randall interjected. “He loves to talk.”
“There were only six clippings in the scrapbook, Sandy. The fires were spread over a period of about three years. And we’ve had a lot more than six newsworthy fires in this town in the last three years, haven’t we?”
“So what?” Castle still looked puzzled. “Your fireman Jack O’Neal just keeps clippings on the fires that he helped to fight. It’s natural.”
I shook my head. “That’s what I thought at first too. Until I found out that Jack O’Neal works at Station 12 and Station 12 wasn’t called for any of the fires in his scrapbook.”
Castle said, “How the hell did you find that out?”
“A telephone call to O’Neal’s mother. Reading O’Neal’s fire clippings in the back issues of the papers. The fire companies involved in fighting each fire were mentioned. No Station 12. Don’t you find that odd?”
“Maybe,” Castle admitted. “You got anything else?”
“Yes. All the fires in O’Neal’s scrapbook happened on a Friday.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Friday is O’Neal’s day off.”
They both looked at me as though I’d lost my mind. “You think that’s significant, I take it,” Castle said.
I shrugged. “When taken in connection with some other suggestive items.”
“Like what?” Randall said.
I said with false humility, “I know how you feel about library cops and library books, Lieutenant, so I hate to bring up the subject. However, I will this time because I think there’s an interesting inference to be drawn from the books Jack O Neal has been reading.”
“Stop with the fancy talk,” Randall grunted. “Just tell us.”
“I’m trying to. The book I collected from O’Neal was War and Peace. Combined with what I saw in O’Neal’s scrapbook, it gave me an idea. I looked up the titles of the books O’Neal has borrowed from the library since he got his card several years ago. There were only five of them, so I guess I have to believe his mother that he’s a slow reader. Can you guess what the five books were?”
Randall said sardonically, “I can’t wait to hear.”
I ticked them off on my fingers. “War and Peace. Gone With the Wind. The Life and Death of Joan of Arc. Slaughterhouse-Five. The Tower. You see what I’m getting at?”
Randall looked blank.
Sandy Castle said, “Let me guess. I saw War and Peace on television. And Gone With the Wind. The books all have one thing in common, right? A big fire scene?”
“You amaze me, Sandy,” I said. “But you’re dead right. For his light reading at home, Jack O’Neal chooses books with graphic fire scenes in them. And his mother told me he’s so nuts about his job that he wishes he could work seven days a week.” I looked at them quizzically. “Wouldn’t you say the man is definitely queer for fires?”
“Maybe,” Castle conceded, “but that doesn’t make him a torch, Hal.”
“Granted.”
“Nor a murderer,” Lieutenant Randall put in. He fixed his yellow eyes on me and said, “Come on, Hal, what hard evidence do you have? You must have something better than this jazz you’ve been feeding us. You wouldn’t have worked your dainty fingers
to the bone reading all those newspaper clippings because of a mere passing suspicion. So what is it?”
“Let me ask you a question first. Didn’t a big hardware store burn to the ground last Friday on the South Side?”
“Sure. Bartlett’s Hardware,” Castle said promptly.
“And what was last Friday’s date?”
“That’s two questions,” Castle said. “Last Friday was the eighteenth. Why?”
“Because I found a penciled note in O’Neal’s overdue library book,” I replied.
Randall pounced. “Saying what?”
“Saying, and I quote, ‘O.K. Bart’s 18th.’ Which meant absolutely nothing to me until I read about the Bartlett fire in Saturday’s paper.”
Randall said brusquely, “Let’s see it.”
“The note? I can’t. I threw it away. But that’s what it said: ‘O.K. Bart’s 18th.’”
“Why didn’t you tell us about this note right off, instead of going through all this other drivel?” Randall demanded testily.
My real reason was just to needle Randall. So I lied a little. “I wanted to give you the sequence and the coincidences just as I got them,” I said sweetly. “So you’d be able to put together just as I finally did, all the little facts that seem to add up to one big fact: namely, that Jack O’Neal is an arsonist and a murderer.” I turned to Sandy Castle. “Is there any suspicion of arson in the Bartlett fire?”
“Not so far. The investigation is still going on, Hal. The fire marshal is certain that the fire originated in a paint storage closet in the store’s basement. Spontaneous combustion. And I’m inclined to think he’s right.”
“Was the owner of the hardware store in town last Friday?” I asked Castle.
“Bartlett?” He gave me a slanting look. “No. He was with his family at the seashore for the weekend. You’re thinking alibi, aren’t you, Hal?”
I shrugged. “Here’s the list of the other fires in O’Neal’s scrapbook.” I handed it to him. “I wonder where the owners of those buildings were when their property burned.”
“I’ll check,” said Castle.
Lieutenant Randall’s mind began to click, smooth and easy and well-oiled as usual. I could almost hear it. He said, “This note was in O’Neal’s library book, you say, which his mother found beside his bed. Did you say there was a telephone extension beside his bed?”
“That’s what his mother told me.”
He nodded. “So you figured somebody phoned O’Neal to torch Bartlett’s store last Friday, and O’Neal wrote down the instructions and put them in his library book.”
“I think that’s what happened. O’Neal’s mother said Jack had such a rotten memory he often wrote notes to himself as reminders.”
Castle said slowly and heavily, “My department runs into a dozen wild-eyed nuts a year who get their jollies out of fires instead of sex or drugs. They usually act on their own, though, and on impulse, setting fires indiscriminately. This O’Neal of yours, if you’re right about him, isn’t like that. He’s torching buildings to order on certain specified dates.”
“Ah,” I said. “Now you’ve got it. But to whose order? That’s the question.”
Randall broke in. “Thanks for the tip, Hal,” he said, rising from his battered swivel chair and crushing out his stogie in his ashtray. “We’ll take it from here.”
“Good,” I said, standing up too. “Don’t be too rough on O’Neal’s mother if you can help it, O.K.? And let me know how you come out, will you? I’m keeping a scrapbook of my own.”
“On what?” asked Castle.
“On the crimes I solve for Lieutenant Randall,” I said.
The newspapers called it the biggest arson racket in the history of the state. Thirteen of our local citizens, including merchants, property owners, a lawyer, a real-estate agent, a fire marshal, and, of course, Mrs. O’Neal’s son Jack, were ultimately tried and convicted on charges of conspiring to burn property with the intent of defrauding insurance companies. When all the figures were in, they indicated that the arson ring cheated insurance companies of some half million dollars over a period of three years by having properties appraised at inflated values, overinsuring them, then burning the buildings down and filing fraudulent insurance claims.
“I’m sorry we have to go light on your boy O’Neal,” Lieutenant Randall told me. “He’s crazy as a bedbug when it comes to fires, Hal, just as you figured. But he’s plenty smart in other ways. Smart enough to plea-bargain himself into a maximum ten-year term for his part in the arsons by agreeing to rat on everybody else in the ring.”
“How did you nail him in the first place?” I asked. “Nothing I gave you was strong enough to prove he’s a torch.
“Well,” said Randall complacently, “we didn’t have too much trouble. On the presumption that his note in your library book meant what you thought it did, we persuaded Judge Filmer to issue us a search warrant, and we went through O’Neal’s home with a fine-tooth comb while he was at work. We turned up a couple of interesting items there.”
“Besides his scrapbook?”
Randall nodded. “Yep. Item one: a diary that he kept locked in the drawer of his bedside telephone stand.”
“How lucky can you get?” I said. “Don’t tell me it mentioned the arson jobs?”
“It did. Twice. Sandrini’s Florist warehouse. And Bartlett’s Hardware. On the exact dates the fires occurred.”
“What did the diary say about them?”
“Handled S job today for TX. And Handled B job today for TX.”
“That’s pretty convincing. But not legal proof. Who’s TX?”
“The lawyer whose fancy house burned down.”
I remembered it now, the name I’d read in the newspaper clipping. “Thomas Xavier! Of course. How many people would have the initials TX?”
“Nobody else connected with this case anyway. Knowing that name gave us a little leverage when we braced O’Neal.”
“Xavier is pretty important people.” I ventured.
“Important enough to be the respectable front for the arson ring. The ringleader, in fact. He arranged the torching dates with the property owners, saw that they all had unshakable alibis, gave O’Neal his orders, and set up the insurance claims.”
“Paymaster too? I asked.
“Yeah. O’Neal says he got five thousand dollars from Xavier for every fire he set. We found his pay for the Bartlett job in O’Neal’s locker at the firehouse.”
“Five thousand a job. Not bad. What else did you find beside the diary?”
“A key.” Randall paused ostentatiously to light a cigar. I sighed and asked the question he wanted.
“A key?”
“Yeah. A key to the rear delivery door of Bartlett’s Hardware Store.”
“Bartlett’s burned to the ground, including that door. How could you tell it was that key?”
“There was a little tag tied to it saying ‘Rear door, Bartlett’s.’” Randall’s smile was smug.
I said, “My God, the guy must have wanted to be caught! Where’d you find the key?”
“In a pocket of the slacks his mother told us he wore on the eighteenth, his day off. The eighteenth, get it?”
“I get it. But it’s still not enough to have made him sing. Everything against him is purely circumstantial.”
“Not quite,” said Randall. “As a matter of fact, we kind of implied that an off-duty fireman who knows O’Neal was smooching with his girlfriend in a parked car behind Bartlett’s store the night it caught fire. And that this fireman saw Jack O’Neal enter the store by the back door, disappear for a few minutes, then emerge and make tracks away from there just a little time before the fire broke out.”
I clicked my tongue and gave the Lieutenant a shocked stare. “You mean you told him you had an eyewitness?”
“We didn’t tell him exactly.” Randall’s tone was as bland as cream. “We merely suggested the possibility in a way that made Jack think it was true. That’s when he brok
e wide open.”
“Well,” I said, “congratulations, Lieutenant. I suppose you’ve got a solid case against each member of the ring?”
“Airtight.” Randall’s cat’s eyes regarded me without blinking for a moment. Then he said, “I told O’Neal about your part in this mess, Hal. About the note you found in his library book that made you suspicious, and so on. And you know what he said?”
“No idea.”
“He said he was sorry we’d caught up to him before he torched just one more building.”
I played straight man again. “What building?”
“The public library,” said Lieutenant Randall, “with you in it.”
THE REWARD
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1980.
I didn’t want to waste my time on another fruitless call at Annabel Corelli’s home, so I telephoned her at eight-thirty Friday morning.
After two rings, I heard the receiver lifted and a voice said, “Hello.” The voice was unmistakably female and it sounded like contralto coffee cream—rich and very, very smooth. It gave me such a jolt of pleasure that for an uneasy moment I felt somehow disloyal to Ellen Corby, one of our librarians, whom I’d been assiduously courting for over a year.
I said, “Is this Miss Annabel Corelli?
“Yes. The way she said it painted an instant image of a tall, Junoesque creature in a string bikini walking along a tropical beach.
“My name is Hal Johnson,” I said, “and I’m calling about your overdue library book, Miss Corelli. I stopped at your house yesterday to collect it, but you weren’t home.”
“I’m almost never home in the daytime, Mr. Johnson. I’m an Argyll Lady. I’m just on my way out to work now.” That figured, I thought, a door-to-door cosmetics lady. With that voice, she ought to be able to sell skin lotion to a porcupine. “I’m sorry about the book, she said. “I’m afraid I let a friend borrow it and then forgot all about it.
“It’s six weeks overdue, I said, “and it’s a one-week book, so it’s costing you a bundle in fines.”
“I’m really sorry, Mr. Johnson.” Her voice caressed me. “How much do I owe on it?”
I told her.
The Library Fuzz Page 21