The Library Fuzz

by James Holding

  Yondering: The First Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories

  To the Stars—And Beyond! The Second Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories

  Once Upon a Future: The Third Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories

  Whodunit?—The First Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories

  More Whodunits—The Second Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories

  X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries

  LIBRARY FUZZ

  Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, November 1972.

  It was on the north side in a shabby neighborhood six blocks off the interstate highway—one of those yellow-brick apartment houses that 60 years of grime and weather had turned to a dirty taupe.

  The rank of mailboxes inside told me that Hatfield’s apartment was Number 35, on the third floor. I walked up. The stairway was littered with candy wrappers, empty beer cans, and a lot of caked-on dirt. It smelled pretty ripe, too.

  On the third landing I went over to the door of Apartment 35 and put a finger on the buzzer. I could hear it ring inside the apartment, too loud. I looked down and saw that the door was open half an inch, unlatched, the lock twisted out of shape.

  I waited for somebody to answer my ring, but nobody did. So I put an eye to the door crack and looked inside. All I got was a narrow view of a tiny foyer with two doors leading off it, both doors closed. I rang the bell again in case Hatfield hadn’t heard it the first time. Still nothing happened.

  The uneasiness that had driven me all the way out here from the public library was more than uneasiness now. My stomach was churning gently, the way it does when I’m hung over—or scared.

  I pushed the door wide-open and said in a tentative voice, “Hello! Anybody home? Mr. Hatfield?”

  No answer. I looked at my watch and noted that the time was 9:32. Then I did what I shouldn’t have done. I opened the right-hand door that led off Hatfield’s foyer into a small poorly furnished living room, and there was Hatfield in front of me.

  At least, I assumed it was Hatfield. I’d never met him, so I couldn’t be sure. This was a slight balding man with a fringe of gray hair. He was dressed in a neat but shiny blue suit with narrow lapels. I knew the suit’s lapels were narrow because one of them was visible to me from where I stood in the doorway. The other was crushed under Hatfield’s body, which lay sprawled on its side on the threadbare carpet just inside the living-room door.

  I sucked in my breath and held it until my stomach settled down a little. Then I stepped around Hatfield’s outflung arms to get a better look at him.

  There wasn’t any blood that I could see. Looked as though he’d fallen while coming into the living room from the foyer. Maybe a heart attack had hit him at just that instant, I thought. It was a possibility. But not a very good one. For when I knelt beside Hatfield and felt for a pulse in his neck, I saw that the left side of his head, the side pressed against the carpet, had been caved in by a massive blow. There was blood, after all, but not much.

  I stood up, feeling sick, and looked around the living room. I noticed that the toe of one of Hatfield’s black loafers was snagged in a hole in the worn carpet and that a heavy fumed-oak table was perfectly positioned along the left wall of the room to have caught Hatfield’s head squarely on its corner as he tripped and fell forward into the room. A quick queasy look at the corner of the table showed me more blood.

  Linder the edge of the table on the floor, where they must have fallen when Hatfield threw out his arms to catch himself, was a copy of yesterday’s evening newspaper and a book from the public library. I could read the title of the book. The Sound of Singing.

  I thought about that for a moment or two and decided I was pretty much out of my depth here. So I called the police. Which, even to me, seemed a rather odd thing to do—because I’m a cop myself.

  * * * *

  A “sissy kind” of a cop, it’s true, but definitely a cop. And it isn’t a bad job. For one thing, I don’t have to carry a gun. My arrests are usually made without much fuss and never with any violence. I get a fair salary if you consider ten thousand a year a fair salary. And nobody calls me a pig, even though I am fuzz.

  Library fuzz. What I do is chase down stolen and overdue books for the public library. Most of my work is routine and unexciting—but every once in a while I run into something that adds pepper to an otherwise bland diet.

  Like this Hatfield thing.

  The day before I found Hatfield’s body had started off for me like any other Monday. I had a list of names and addresses to call on. Understand, the library sends out notices to book borrowers when their books are overdue; but some people are deadbeats, some are book lovers, and some are so absent-minded that they ignore the notices and hang onto the books. It’s these hard-core overdues that I call on—to get the books back for the library and collect the fines owing on them.

  Yesterday the first name on my list was Mrs. William Conway at an address on Sanford Street. I parked my car in the driveway of the small Cape Cod house that had the name “Conway” on its mailbox and went up to the front door and rang the bell.

  The woman who answered the door wasn’t the maid, because she was dressed in a sexy nightie with a lacy robe of some sort thrown over it, and she gave me a warm, spontaneous, friendly smile before she even knew who I was. She was medium-tall in her pink bedroom slippers and had very dark hair, caught back in a ponytail by a blue ribbon, and china-blue eyes that looked almost startling under her dark eyebrows. I also noticed that she was exceptionally well put together.

  What a nice way to start the day, I thought to myself. I said, “Are you Mrs. Conway?”

  “Yes,” she said, giving me a straight untroubled look with those blue eyes.

  “I’m from the public library. I’ve come about those overdue books you have.” I showed her my identification card.

  “Oh, my goodness!” she said, and her look of inquiry turned to one of stricken guilt. “Oh, yes. Come in, won’t you, Mr. Johnson? I’m really embarrassed about those books. I know I should have returned them a long time ago—I got the notices, of course. But honestly, I’ve been so busy!” She stepped back in mild confusion and I went into her house.

  It turned out to be as unpretentious as it had looked from outside. In fact, the furnishings displayed an almost spectacular lack of taste. Well, nobody is perfect, I reminded myself. I could easily forgive Mrs. Conway’s manifest ignorance of decorating principles, since she was so very decorative herself.

  She switched off a color TV set that was muttering in one corner of the living room and motioned me to a chair. “Won’t you sit down?” she said tentatively. She wasn’t sure just how she ought to treat a library cop.

  I said politely, “No, thanks. If you’ll just give me your overdue books and the fines you owe, I’ll be on my way.”

  She made a little rush for a coffee table across the room, the hem of her robe swishing after her. “I have the books right here.” She scooped up a pile of books from the table. “I have them all ready to bring back to the library, you see?”

  While I checked the book titles against my list I asked, “Why didn’t you bring them back, Mrs. Conway?”

  “My sister’s been in the hospital,” she explained, “and I’ve been spending every free minute with her. I just sort of forgot about my library books. I’m sorry.”

  “No harm done.” I told her how much the fines amounted to and she made another little rush, this time for her purse which hung by its strap from the back of a Windsor chair. “The books seem to be all here,” I went on, “except one.”

  “Oh, is one missing? Which one?”

  “The Sound of Singing.”

  “That was a wonderful story!” Mrs. Conway said enthusiastically. “Did you read it?” She sent her blue eyes around the room, searching for the missing book.

  “No. But everybody seems to like it. Maybe your husband or one of the kids took it to read,” I suggested.
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  She gave a trill of laughter. “I haven’t any children, and my husband”—she gestured toward a photograph of him on her desk, a dapper, youngish-looking man with a mustache and not much chin—“is far too busy practicing law to find time to read light novels.” She paused then, plainly puzzled.

  I said gently, “How about having a look in the other rooms, Mrs. Conway?”

  “Of course.” She counted out the money for her fines and then went rushing away up the carpeted stairs to the second floor. I watched her all the way up. It was a pleasure to look at her.

  In a minute she reappeared with the missing book clutched against her chest. “Ralph did take it!” she said breathlessly. “Imagine! He must have started to read it last night while I was out. It was on his bedside table under the telephone.” She handed me the book.

  “Good,” I said. I took the book by its covers, pages down, and shook it—standard procedure to see if anything had been left between the pages by the borrower. You’d be surprised at what some people use to mark their places.

  “I’m terribly sorry to have caused so much trouble,” Mrs. Conway said. And I knew she meant it.

  I had no excuse to linger, so I took the books under my arm, said goodbye, and left, fixing Mrs. Conway’s lovely face in my memory alongside certain other pretty pictures I keep there to cheer me up on my low days.

  I ticked off the last name on my list about one o’clock. By that time the back seat of my car was full of overdue books and my back pocket full of money for the library. Those few-cents-a-day book fines add up to a tidy sum when you put them all together, you know that? Would you believe that last year, all by myself, I collected $40,000 in fines and in the value of recovered books?

  I went back to the library to turn in my day’s pickings and to grab a quick lunch at the library cafeteria. About two o’clock the telephone in my closet-sized office rang and when I answered, the switchboard girl told me there was a lady in the lobby who was asking to see me.

  That surprised me. I don’t get many lady visitors at the office. And the lady herself surprised me, too. She turned out to be my blue-eyed brunette of the morning, Mrs. William Conway—but a Mrs. Conway who looked as though she’d been hit in the face by a truck since I’d seen her last.

  There was a bruise as big as a half dollar on one cheek, a deep scratch on her forehead; an ugly knotted lump interrupted the smooth line of her jaw on the left side; and the flesh around one of her startling blue eyes was puffed and faintly discolored. Although she had evidently been at pains to disguise these marks with heavy make-up, they still showed. Plainly.

  I suppose she saw from my expression that I’d noticed her bruises because as she sat down in my only office chair, she dropped her eyes and flushed and said with a crooked smile, “Do I look that bad, Mr. Johnson?” It was a singularly beguiling gambit. Actually, battered face and all, I thought she looked just as attractive now in a lemon-colored pants suit as she had in her nightie and robe that morning.

  I said, “You look fine, Mrs. Conway.”

  She tried to sound indignant. “I fell down our stupid stairs! Can you imagine that? Just after you left. I finished making the beds and was coming down for coffee when—zap!—head over heels clear to the bottom!”

  “Bad luck,” I said sympathetically, reflecting that a fall down her thickly carpeted stairs would be most unlikely to result in injuries like hers. But it was none of my business.

  She said, “What I came about, Mr. Johnson, was to see if I could get back The Sound of Singing you took this morning. My husband was furious when he came home for lunch and found I’d given it back to you.”

  “No problem there. We must have a dozen copies of that book in—”

  She interrupted me. “Oh, but I was hoping to get the same copy I had before. You see, my husband says he left a check in it—quite a big one from a client.”

  “Oh. Then I must have missed it when I shook out the book this morning.”

  She nodded. “You must have. Ralph is sure he left it there.” Mrs. Conway put a fingertip to the lump on her jaw and then hastily dropped her hand into her lap when she saw me watching her.

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve already turned the book back to the shelves, Mrs. Conway, but if we’re lucky it’ll still be in. Let me check.” I picked up my phone and asked for the librarian on the checkout desk.

  Consulting my morning list of overdue book numbers, now all safely returned to circulation, I said, “Liz, have you checked out number 15208, The Sound of Singing, to anybody in the last hour?”

  “I’ve checked out that title but I don’t know if it was that copy. Just a second,” Liz said. After half a minute she said, “Yes, here it is, Hal. It went out half an hour ago on card number PC28382.”

  I made a note on my desk pad of that card number, repeating the digits out loud as I did so. Then, thanking Liz, I hung up and told Mrs. Conway, “I’m sorry, your copy’s gone out again.”

  “Oh, dammit anyway!” said Mrs. Conway passionately. I gathered this was pretty strong talk for her because she blushed again and threw me a distressed look before continuing. “Everything seems to be going wrong for me today!” She paused. “What was that number you just took down, Mr. Johnson? Does that tell who’s got the book now?”

  “It tells me,” I answered. “But for a lot of reasons we’re not allowed to tell you. It’s the card number of the person who borrowed the book.”

  “Oh, dear,” she said, chewing miserably on her lower lip, “then that’s more bad luck, isn’t it?”

  I was tempted to break the library’s rigid rule and give her the name and address she wanted. However, there were a couple of things besides the rule that made me restrain my chivalrous impulse. Such as no check dropping out of The Sound of Singing this morning when I shook the book. And such as Mrs. Conway’s bruises, which looked to me more like the work of fists than of carpeted stairs.

  So I said, “I’ll be glad to telephone whoever has the book now and ask him about your husband’s check. Or her. If the check is in the book, they’ll probably be glad to mail it to you.”

  “Oh, would you, Mr. Johnson? That would be wonderful!” Her eyes lit up at once.

  I called the library’s main desk where they issue cards and keep the register of card holders names and addresses. “This is Hal Johnson,” I said. “Look up the holder of card number PC28382 for me, will you, Kathy?”

  I waited until she gave me a name—George Hatfield—and an address on the north side, then hung up, found Hatfield’s telephone number in the directory, and dialed it on an outside line, feeling a little self-conscious under the anxious scrutiny of Mrs. Conway’s beautiful bruised blue eye.

  Nobody answered the Hatfield phone.

  Mrs. Conway sighed when I shook my head. “I’ll try again in an hour or so. Probably not home yet. And when I get him I’ll ask him to mail the check to you. I have your address. Okay?”

  She stood up and gave me a forlorn nod. “I guess that’s the best I can do. I’ll tell Ralph you’re trying to get his check back, anyhow. Thanks very much.” She was still chewing on her lower lip when she left.

  Later in the afternoon she called me to tell me that her husband Ralph had found his missing check in a drawer at home. There was vast relief in her voice when she told me. I wasn’t relieved so much as angry—because it seemed likely to me that my beautiful Mrs. Conway had been slapped around pretty savagely by that little jerk in her photograph for a mistake she hadn’t made.

  Anyway, I forgot about The Sound of Singing and spent the rest of the afternoon shopping for a new set of belted tires for my old car.

  Next morning, a few minutes before 9:00, I stopped by the library to turn in my expense voucher for the new tires and pick up my list of overdues for the day’s calls. As I passed the main desk, Kathy, who was just settling down for her day’s work, said, “Hi, Hal. Stop a minute and let me see if it shows.”

  I paused by the desk. “See if what shows?”
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  “Senility.”

  “Of course it shows, child. I’m almost forty. Why this sudden interest?”

  “Only the onset of senility can account for you forgetting something,” Kathy said. “The man with the famous memory.”

  I was mystified. “What did I forget?”

  “The name and address of card holder PC28382, that’s what. You called me to look it up for you not long after lunch yesterday, remember?”

  “Sure. So what makes you think I forgot it?”

  “You said you had when you called me again at four thirty for the same information.”

  I stared at her. “Me?”

  She nodded. “You.”

  “I didn’t call you at four thirty.”

  “Somebody did. And said he was you.”

  “Did it sound like my voice?”

  “Certainly. An ordinary, uninteresting man’s voice. Just like yours.” She grinned at me.

  “Thanks. Somebody playing a joke, maybe. It wasn’t me.”

  While I was turning in my voucher and picking up my list of overdues I kept thinking about Kathy’s second telephone call. The more I thought about it, the more it bothered me.

  So I decided to make my first call of the day on George Hatfield…

  * * * *

  Well, I didn’t touch anything in Hatfield’s apartment until the law showed up in the persons of a uniformed patrolman and an old friend of mine, Lieutenant Randall of Homicide. I’d worked with Randall when I was in the detective bureau myself a few years back.

  Randall looked at the setup in Hatfield’s living room and growled at me, “Why me, Hal? All you need is an ambulance on this one. The guy’s had a fatal accident, that’s all.”

  So I told him about Mrs. Conway and her husband and The Sound of Singing and the mysterious telephone call to Kathy at the library. When I finished he jerked his head toward the library book lying under Hatfield’s table and said, “Is that it?”

  “I haven’t looked yet. I was waiting for you.”

  “Look now,” Randall said. It was book number 15208, all right—unmistakably the one I’d collected yesterday from Mrs. Conway. Its identification number appeared big and clear in both the usual places—on the front flyleaf and on the margin of page 101. “This is it. No mistake,” I said.