The Library Fuzz

by James Holding

  “Not much. But I do know how to remember pretty good, you’ll admit that, won’t you?”

  Randall waved a hand. “So you’ve got a photographic memory. What’s it got to do with this?”

  “I remembered something about that hotel bill that fell out of one of Mrs. Radcliffe’s library books. I didn’t think anything about it at the time, but later, when these other things began to hit me—”

  “What about the hotel bill?”

  “It was from a Holiday Inn at Titusville, Florida.”

  “And?”

  “That’s just a hop, skip, and a jump from Cape Kennedy, where that sunken-treasure museum is.”

  Randall began to look thoughtful.

  “Mrs. Radcliffe told me she and her husband spent their vacation on the west coast, near Clearwater. She was lying. Why? And why did she follow me around in her car until I stopped for lunch at Johnny’s Cafeteria? If she did, that is.”

  Randall wasn’t smiling condescendingly at me anymore. “What time did Henderson tell you Shoemaker’s car was reported stolen?”

  “Twelve noon.”

  “And what time did you stop for lunch at Johnny’s?”

  “About quarter of twelve.”

  “Plenty of time for Radcliffe to telephone Shoemaker and tell him you’d seen the ring and the Holiday Inn bill. Plenty of time for him to report his car stolen before he used it to come out to Johnny’s and pick up on you when you left? And maybe follow you to Wolf Hollow Bridge where he saw his chance and pushed you off it? Is that what you mean?” When Randall’s brain started ticking it ticked fast. “And therefore whatever Radcliffe thought you’d learned from her ring and her hotel bill was important enough to be worth killing you for?”

  I said, “I know what they were afraid I’d learned, Lieutenant. I went right from Haas Brothers to The Examiner’s office and went through the back copies of the newspaper for the last two weeks. I found this item that I missed when it came out last week.” I put the copy I’d made of it down on the desk before him. It had an inconspicuous two-column headline followed by a brief block of copy. It had been on page 4 of the first section four days ago.

  GUARD SLAIN IN MILLION-DOLLAR ROBBERY

  Cape Kennedy (UP) Police intensified their search today for the thieves who fatally shot a museum guard while stealing nearly a million dollars’ worth of old coins and jewelry from the Museum of Spanish Treasure here last Friday.

  Cape Kennedy Police Chief George Boniface said he had alerted smelting firms throughout Florida about the theft, hoping to head off any attempt to melt down the irreplaceable artifacts.

  The thieves broke into the Museum early Friday morning, bypassing burglar alarms with apparent ease, smashed plate-glass display cases, and helped themselves to the eighteenth-century Spanish treasure recovered from the sea floor.

  The lone security guard on duty, Lancelot Frederick, was shot by one of the thieves when he attempted to prevent the robbery. He later succumbed after informing police there were two men and a woman involved in the theft, all wearing ski masks to conceal their identity.

  Lieutenant Randall didn’t bother to read the item all the way through. He grabbed the phone and barked into the mouthpiece, “Get me the Police Chief of Cape Kennedy, Florida, Jerry, name of George Boniface—in a hurry!” He turned toward me, slamming the receiver down. “We’ll take it from here, Hal. I’ll be in touch.”

  I stood up. “Go easy on Mrs. Radcliffe,” I said. “I feel like a heel for even suspecting her.”

  * * * *

  A few weeks later the affair had been wrapped up with Randall’s usual neatness and dispatch. Shoemaker and the Radcliffes had been returned to Florida to stand trial for murder, armed robbery, and grand theft, with enough solid evidence to put them away for a long, long time.

  Item: Shoemaker’s Police Positive .38 revolver, which was found to have fired the bullet that ended the life of the museum guard. Item: a penciled diagram of the intricate burglar-alarm system of the Spanish Treasure Museum, obviously made on the spot during preliminary visits to the museum by John Radcliffe, who turned out to be not only an electrical engineer employed by a local firm called Continental Alarms, Inc., but a college classmate and the oldest friend of Frank Shoemaker. Item: a taped confession by Mrs. Radcliffe, recounting the robbery and designating Frank Shoemaker as the guard’s killer. And item: two suitcases full of the Spanish treasure stolen from the Museum, discovered by police in the bedroom closet of Frank Shoemaker at 818 Northway Road.

  I told Ellen all about it over dinner at the Lotus Bud, one of the poshest restaurants around. I was mellow enough from two martinis and a half bottle of Mateus rosé to boast a little. “Aren’t you proud of me, Ellen?” I asked her. “Figuring out the entire plot from a ring they just happened to drop when they were stowing their loot in the back of Radcliffe’s VW for their trip home?”

  She said, “Of course I’m proud of you. But they almost killed you, Hal.”

  “Would you have cared?”

  “Of course.” She flashed me a smile. “It would have been very bad publicity for the library.”

  “Well,” I said, sighing, “that brings me to the reason I’ve told you all this. The Florida authorities were so glad to get their treasure back and catch the thieves, they suggested a small reward might be in order for the alert, honest library fuzz who solved the case for them.”

  “A reward!” Ellen exclaimed. “How exciting! What is it?”

  “I have it right here in my pocket.” I pulled out the antique gold ring I’d found in the back of Mrs. Radcliffe’s car. The dull-gold band looked bright and polished under the restaurant lights; the rough-cut emeralds glistened. I held it out to Ellen.

  She took it and said, “Oh, how lovely,” and turned it this way and that, tilting her head to examine it from different angles. At last she said, “It’s very beautiful, Hal, but what in the world do they think you’re going to do with a fancy thing like this, a man of your simple ascetic tastes?”

  I shrugged. “It would make a nice wedding ring,” I suggested.

  “For me?”

  “For you.”

  She slipped it on her ring finger. “It’s too big for me.”

  “I’ll have it made smaller.”

  She protested. “It would cost us a fortune to waste any of this gold.”

  Cost us? My heart began to hammer. “Does that mean you’ll take it?”

  She said, “Is Mrs. Radcliffe really all that gorgeous?”

  “A knockout,” I said. “A dish. Black hair, blue eyes. With that sexy tan she’s the best-looking woman I’ve seen in my life. Except for you.”

  “I could wear the ring around my neck on a chain,” Ellen said. “Would that be all right with you, Hal?”

  I took a deep breath and my cracked rib responded with a brief stab of pain. “Wear it anywhere you want to,” I said, “just as long as you wear it.”

  She leaned over and kissed me, ignoring the other diners around us. I felt a wave of euphoria wash over me—a blessed mixture of triumph, love, tenderness. “Are you saying we’re engaged?” I said, having trouble with my voice.

  “You better believe it,” said Ellen.

  THE BOOK CLUE

  Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, February 1984.

  It wasn’t one of your ordinary hit-and-run, in-and-out bank robberies.

  It was, in fact, a real work of art, a model from which any earnest young apprentice in the bank-robbing trade could have learned plenty.

  It took place over the frigid New Year’s weekend—a three-day holiday, since New Year’s Day fell on Saturday—so the thieves had three full days and nights to knock a hole through the rear wall of the bank, disarm the bank’s elaborate alarm system, cut open the vault with acetylene torches, and rifle two hundred private safe-deposit boxes of their contents.

  Later, when the owners of the stolen valuables came to the bank and reported the extent of their losses, the bank es
timated that the thieves had made off with roughly three and a half million dollars’ worth of cash, securities, jewelry, antiques, coin collections, and whatnot.

  Not a bad haul for three days’ work—especially since the looters made a clean getaway, leaving behind them, aside from the shambles of empty deposit boxes and a hole in the wall, only a few traces of their three-day visit. A small pile of rubble from the shattered wall. A thin film of plaster dust on the floor of the bank inside the hole, marked with hundreds of indecipherable footprints. Scattered crumbs of crackers and cheese and some coffee splashes on the vault floor. The crusts of several peanut-butter sandwiches on the vault custodian’s desk. And nothing else. Except for embarrassed bankers, puzzled policemen, and rueful insurance adjusters.

  About noon on the fourth of January, I was at my desk at the Central Library working on my next overdue-list, when the girl on the switchboard rang through and said a police officer wanted to talk to me.

  “Lieutenant Randall?” I asked. Randall was Chief of Homicide and had been my boss for five years before I joined the Public Library staff.

  “No, Hal. Somebody named Waslyck.”

  Waslyck, Head of the Robbery Detail. Jake Waslyck. Sure, I remembered him from the old days. “Put him on,” I said.

  “Hal?” His voice came through like gravel on a tin roof. “How you doing, Hal?

  “Can’t complain, Jake. You?”

  “I can complain,” he said. “Plenty.”

  “The First Federal Bank job, right? I read about it in the papers.”

  “Who didn’t? I want to ask a favor of you, Hal.”

  “Any time,” I said. “What?”

  “I need advice. Can you stop in here or shall I come out there?”

  “I’ll be downtown this afternoon. I’ll stop by headquarters. Advice about what?”

  “One of your library books. See you about three?”

  “Two-thirty would suit me better.”

  “See you then.”

  * * * *

  At two-thirty, I was in Jake’s office. The place is cramped, smells strongly of stale cigar smoke, and is furnished in police-station modern: a battered steel desk, worn linoleum on the floor, a scratched filing cabinet in one corner, an old-fashioned hat rack in another, two uncomfortable straightback chairs, and a grimy Venetian blind over the unwashed window.

  Jake sat behind his desk, his squat body overflowing his chair, his bulgy eyes red and puffy. His bushy ginger mustache was badly in need of trimming. And he didn’t seem to have any neck at all.

  Same old Jake. He looked a lot like an oversized bullfrog crouching there. But I remembered there was nothing wrong with his brain.

  I sat down gingerly in one of his straight chairs. It trembled under my weight as I reached across the desk to shake hands. I said, not entirely sincerely, “Nice to see you again, Jake. It’s been a while.”

  In a frog’s croak of a voice he said, “Thanks for coming in, Hal.” He paused.

  “You look shot,” I said. “The First Federal job getting to you?”

  He nodded. “We got nothing to go on. ID’s still comparing fingerprints, trying to find some that aren’t those of safe-deposit-box holders or bank custodians. Absolutely no luck so far.”

  “It’s probably hopeless,” I said sympathetically. “It was below zero that weekend. They needed gloves, for the cold if nothing else.”

  “Yeah. So we got zilch. No leads. No suspects. We’re going around in circles on a three-million-dollar robbery!” He cleared his throat. “It’s a hell of a feeling, believe me.”

  “Frustration,” I said. “I know what you mean, Jake. I’ve been there.”

  “So that’s why I called you. I’m clutching at straws.”

  “Like the library book you mentioned?”

  He gave one sharp nod, up and down.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “It’s a book we found in our search of the bank vault after the heist. You know those little booths where they let you gloat over your treasures in private?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, we found this book from your library under the table in one of those booths.”

  “And you think it’s a clue, maybe?” I underlined the “clue” with my voice. Cops hate the word.

  “Not really. But a million-to-one chance. See, we figured, considering where the book was found and all, that some box-holder had left it in the booth by mistake when he stopped in last week to count his fortune or whatever.”

  “Doesn’t the vault custodian always come in afterward and check out the booth to see you haven’t left anything behind? Mine always does.”

  Jake said, deadpan, “You mean you rent a safe-deposit box?”

  “Sure. But not at First Federal, thank God.”

  “What do you keep in it?” He was needling me.

  “I skim a little off the top of the fines I collect.”

  “That must come to—let’s see, maybe forty cents a week?”

  “In a good week,” I said. We both laughed. My laugh had a little edge in it, I’m afraid. “You’re saying that a vault custodian might not notice a library book under a booth table?”

  “It’s possible. Those guards are only checking the booth to see if you’ve left a thousand shares of IBM or something like that lying around.”

  “So?”

  “So last night when I couldn’t sleep, it suddenly occurred to me that the library book just possibly might be something the thieves took into the vault when they broke in.”

  “You mean so they’d have something to read during coffee breaks?” The idea tickled me.

  “Why not? They’re in there for three days and nights, remember. They bring in cheese and crackers, thermoses of hot coffee, sandwiches—we even found some bits of fabric the lab says could be from a sleeping-bag lining. So why not something to read during their rest periods? Maybe one of them is a book nut. You know, queer for books.”

  “It’s a long shot,” I said, grinning. “But possible, I suppose. Let’s see the book.”

  Jake yelled “Josie!” at the top of his voice and a minute later Detective Second-Class Josie Evans came into his office from the squad room across the hall. I remembered Josie from old times, too. She’s black, slender, and very attractive in her navy-blue skirt and white blouse. To look at her you’d never guess she can toss a two-hundred-pound man over her shoulder without even mussing her hair.

  She recognized me. “Hi, Hal,” she said.

  I said, “Hi, Josie. What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”

  “Defending my virtue most of the time,” she answered tartly. “What is it, Jake?”

  “Bring me the library book we found in the bank vault. He turned to me. “Josie’s a book nut, too. She’s reading the damn thing.”

  “I’ve finished it,” Josie said. “It’s a swell story.” She went out and returned shortly with it. After she left I said to Jake, “You think this book may be evidence in the biggest bank robbery this state ever had, and you’re letting Josie read, it, for God’s sake?”

  “Relax, Hal. Relax. The book’s been put through the works by the lab already and gives us nothing. Except about two hundred sets of smudged latents from former readers. That’s why I asked you to come in. Maybe you can get more from it than we can.”

  I picked up the book. “It’s from our Central Library.”

  “I can read, Hal. I saw the stamp.”

  “There’s no return card in the pocket.”

  “I noticed that, too.”

  I grinned at him. “And furthermore,” I said, not averse to needling him a little, “It’s a hell of a good yarn, like Josie said.” The book was a popular novel by Wilbur Smith called The Eye of the Tiger. “It takes place in Africa,” I said, “just like the old-time goodies by Rider Haggard.”

  Waslyck grunted. “Can you find out who borrowed the book from the library?”

  “Sure. Name, address, and library-card number. Simple. Our com
puter coughs that stuff up on demand. But—” I held up a hand as he started to speak“—wait a minute, Jake.” Another small jab of the needle wouldn’t hurt, I thought. I had it on good authority that Jake Waslyck was one of my many former colleagues in the police department who had been known to refer to me slightingly as Library Fuzz Hal, the sissy ex-homicide cop who now spent his time tracking down library books instead of murderers—and although this was perfectly true, I didn’t like them patronizing me. My work’s a lot quieter than theirs, it pays just as well, and I can sleep better at night. So I said, “Our computer coughs up what you want only if the book happens to be overdue.”

  “Why the hell’s that?”

  “Invasion of privacy,” I said. “Until a book is overdue, it legally belongs to the borrower. Our library is a public library. It’s none of our business who has a book until it goes overdue. Then it belongs to us again.”

  Waslyck swore. “Listen, this is an official request from a police officer—a public servant—for the name and address of a suspect who may have been involved in the commission of a major felony.” He glared at me.

  I smiled. “In that case, our computer might be conned into making an exception. You see, Jake, we have this nifty secret code to bypass our computer’s compunctions about breaking the privacy laws. We feed in the first three letters of the author’s name—his last name—then we feed in the middle two digits of the book’s Zebra patch number. Then comes the middle initial of the city’s current Democratic mayor—”

  “Knock it off, Hal. This is serious. Can you get me the information I want?”

  “I’ll try.” I stood up. “I’ll have to take the book with me, okay?” He made a dismissing gesture.

  I took the book and left.

  I called him back within half an hour. “I’ve got it,” I said. “The book is overdue. You ready?”

  “Shoot.”

  “The address is 1221 Bookbinders Lane.”

  He wrote it down. “What’s the name?”

  “You won’t like this, Jake. The name is Adelaide Westover.”

  Jake swore. “A woman!”