The Library Fuzz

by James Holding

  “One guy,” said O’Neill, barely loud enough to be audible. “Sitting in an easy chair reading the newspaper. The Evening News.”

  “Could you see the whole room? Only one guy? You’re sure?”

  O’Neill nodded. “I’m sure.”

  Randall shook his head. “One doesn’t seem enough.”

  “Maybe there are guards outside,” I suggested.

  “You keep out of this,” Randall told me. Then, to two of the others, “Jim, make a circuit of the house. And you, Lew, take the garage. No noise, you hear? Just see if you can locate any guards around. And if you do, fade out. Come back here. Don’t take any aggressive action of your own. Understood?”

  Jim and Lew slid away without a word. We waited again. I needed a cigarette. But then, so did the others, probably. Twenty minutes crept by. O’Neill was up in the tree again, keeping in view the man reading the newspaper in the garage apartment.

  “No guards that we could see,” Jim reported when he and Lew rejoined us.

  “Huh!” said Randall. He seemed disappointed. “Only one guy. Any other lights visible?”

  “None in the main house,” Jim said.

  “And only in the garage in that front room upstairs,” Lew said. “The back windows are dark. Or back window, rather. There’s only one.”

  Up in the tree O’Neill spoke. “The guy’s getting up from his chair. Going to a door at the back end of the room. Opening it. Going through. It’s a little hallway. He’s gone now.”

  Randall nodded. “Come on down, O’Neill.” He turned to Lew. “Any place behind the garage where we can look through that rear window with the glasses?”

  “Yeah,” Lew answered. “A tree bigger than this one. Except there’s no light.”

  “Come on,” Randall muttered, and we followed him a silently as we could toward the garage, clinging to the shadows. At the foot of the outside staircase that led up to the garage apartment Randall said, “Lew and Jim. Stay here in the angle of the wall until I tell you different. O’Neill, take the garage doors—there might be an inside exit. Shenkin. Under the back window. Nail anybody who tries to get out of that upstairs apartment. Got it? And Hal,” he said, “you come with me.”

  I nodded. Randall took the field glasses from O’Neill and led me quickly around to the back of the garage, Shenkin trailing us and taking position under the back window as instructed.

  “I want to see what’s in that back room,” Randall said to me. He gestured toward the big tree Lew had reported. “Climb up there and give it a try, will you?”

  “I’m no tree climber. I thought you wanted me out of it?”

  “I do. That’s why I’m sending you up the tree.” His yellow eyes glittered in the starlight. “Get going.” He tilted his head to look up at the rear window. “Maybe reflected light from the front room will show you something.”

  “And if I see anything?”

  “If you see enough to show you we’re right about this screwy deal, whistle. We’ll take it from there.”

  I climbed up the tree as silently as I could manage it.

  I sat with the glasses trained on the small rear window of the garage apartment for ten long minutes before I could report anything to Randall below. Then a door opened and a path of light cut into the darkness of the back room I was watching. The shaft of light began at the opening door and ended at a bed on the left side of the room. A girl lay on the bed, sleeping.

  I whistled softly. Immediately I could hear Randall taking off and running hard for tire front of the garage. In another moment the sound of rushing feet on wooden steps thundered in the night, and Randall’s voice, perfectly clear to me up in my tree, shouted, “Open up! This is the police!”

  I kept my glasses trained on the man who had entered the back room. Randall’s shout caught him just as he bent over the sleeping girl. He straightened galvanically. He cast one incredulous look toward the front of the garage, then turned and came charging directly toward me.

  With hands and arms stiffened before him to protect his head, he hit the rear window of the room in a long horizontal dive that carried away window glass, sash, and sticks of frame. It was like watching a TV detective leap through a breakaway window. In the midst of the window explosion the man tumbled out into the night air 15 feet above the unprepared head of Shenkin, dutifully parked under that back window.

  I yelled, “Shenkin! Watch out below!” But it was too late. Shenkin looked up, jerked right, then left, trying to avoid the falling object. He failed. The man’s hurtling body landed feet first on Shenkin’s head and shoulders and drove him to the ground as effectively as a pile driver.

  Transfixed for a few seconds in my tree, I waited for Shenkin to move. He didn’t. He was out cold. And the man who had leaped from the window—Jerry Gates presumably—was in little better condition. He seemed badly shaken by his fall. It took him roughly forty seconds to stagger to his feet, look around him muzzily, and set off again, straight toward my tree.

  By that time I was heedlessly removing square inches of hide from my arms and ankles, shinnying down my tree backward as fast as I could slide without going into free fall. The field glasses hung from my neck on their strap and set up a clatter as they bumped against the tree trunk during my hasty descent.

  A reverberating crash from the front of the garage informed me that Randall and Jim and Lew had broken down the front door of the apartment. I was aware of this only on the fringe of my attention which was centered strongly now on Jerry Gates. He was running toward me unsteadily as I reached the foot of my tree.

  I was in deep shadow there. He didn’t see me. So I did the only thing I could think of to stop him. I swung Randall’s heavy’ field glasses on the end of their carrying strap once around my head for momentum, like a cowboy twirling a rope, and let them fly.

  They caught the fugitive just above the right temple, making a thump of their own to add to the assorted violent sounds of that night. And he went down for the count even more gracefully than poor unlucky Shenkin.

  When Randall burst through into the garage apartment’s back room a moment later, with his gun out, he found that little Callie Benedict had slept peacefully through all the fireworks.

  * * * *

  The next day the police were heroes in the newspapers and on TV. For when little Callie was returned, unharmed and without payment of the ransom, Mrs. Benedict couldn’t say enough nice things about “those marvelous policemen.” I was mentioned in the news reports as a former cop who had inadvertently alerted the police to the kidnapping during a routine report of a car break-in. They didn’t even mention my name.

  Lieutenant Randall called me at the library at noon. “We got the story out of Gates,” he said. “I’ll fill you in. The only solo kidnapping attempt in my experience. Living next door to the kidnap victim made it almost work for him.”

  “How’d Gates grab the girl?” I asked.

  “She’s got a pet rabbit in a hutch by the hedge that forms the boundary line between the Benedicts and the Carsons. Every afternoon at five o’clock the kid goes out to feed her rabbit. So Gates just reached through the hedge from his side, slapped a chloroform pad over the kid’s face, and carried her up to his garage apartment. Then he gave her a shot of drugs to keep her out of it until he collected the ransom from her mother. He swears he was going to turn her loose—unharmed, of course. And he was counting on Mrs. Benedict’s promise not to call us in. Any questions?”

  “Where’d he get the unlisted phone number?”

  “Three weeks ago in a bar after a few drinks with a guy who used to be the Benedicts’ chauffeur.”

  “And ‘Cal’ was a code word to identify the kidnaper to Mrs. Benedict?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” I said. “No more questions. But I’ve got a big fat complaint.”

  “Let me guess. Your feelings are hurt because we didn’t give you a fair share of glory in the public prints, right?”

  “It would have been great
publicity for the library.”

  “And for you, too, hey?”

  “You could have given them my name, at least. It wouldn’t have hurt you any.”

  Randall chuckled. “It wouldn’t have hurt me, no. But it would have hurt the department, Hal.”

  “For God’s sake! How?”

  “Well“—Lieutenant Randall was at his blandest—“don’t you think it might destroy public confidence in the police department if I let it be publicly known that the only real good detective we ever had in the department resigned five years ago?”

  THE ELUSIVE MRS. STOUT

  Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, April 1974.

  It was ten minutes before nine o’clock on a cool September morning when I guided my old Chevy into the parking lot of The Scottish Arms.

  The Scottish Arms is a twenty-story residential tower of stainless steel and marble, a very exclusive address. It stands in lonely grandeur on the eastern outskirts of the city where there’s plenty of room for ground-level parking and no urgent necessity for rich (and usually elderly) tenants to tool in and out of a smelly subterranean garage every time they want to take a drive.

  I left the Chevy angled into the curb at a spot marked GUEST, and headed for the main entrance to the apartment house, thinking with amusement how forlorn my battered car looked in the midst of the shiny Cadillacs, Continentals, and Imperials belonging to the tenants of The Scottish Arms.

  I was glad, though, that my first call that day was at The Scottish Arms. For although I’m only a library cop who specializes, if you can call it that, in recovering stolen and overdue books for the public library, I like to start my day out with a little class as much as anyone.

  The main lobby of The Scottish Arms was classy, all right, if you think fake Neo-Gothic verticality is classy. Everything was tall and narrow, from the entrance doors and tinted windows to the long thin crystal tubes that made up the chandelier hanging from the ceiling.

  Mrs. J. W. Stout, in apartment 18B, was the object of my researches this morning among the well-to-do. Where most women who dwelt in The Scottish Arms, if they read books at all, probably bought them by the carton from their book clubs or booksellers, my Mrs. J. W. Stout was apparently a girl who borrowed books by the bagful from the public library—and forgot to bring them back. According to my list she had 12 books—all new fiction titles—that were now five and one-half weeks overdue and had accumulated fines to the grand total of $18.90—a magnificent fine, even for a resident of The Scottish Arms.

  There are a lot of reasons why people who borrow books from the public library fail to return them on time. Mrs. J. W. Stout’s reason, I was quite sure, was merely forgetfulness: in the flurry and confusion of other interests, Mrs. Stout simply forgot about her library books. That she must have outside interests seemed evident, because she was never at home. I’d come to apartment 18B on three separate occasions in the past two weeks to collect her books and fines and I had yet to find her at home. But this morning she had answered my phone call, and promised to wait for me.

  I crossed the lobby to the elevators, entered an empty car, and pushed the button for the eighteenth floor. When the car whispered to a stop and the doors slid soundlessly open, I stepped out into a circular landing, deeply carpeted. Not counting the elevator doors, there were only three doors opening onto this small lobby. One was the door to the firestairs. One had the gilded inscription 18A on it, just under the round peephole. And the third door was mine—rather, Mrs. Stout’s—18B.

  I walked over to it and pressed the button. I could hear chimes faintly through the door, sending musical notes throughout Mrs. Stout’s apartment to announce my arrival.

  Nothing happened.

  I waited patiently for a minute. Then I thumbed the button again and waited some more. Still nothing. At first I was surprised, next puzzled, and finally, as no response came to my ringing, irritated.

  I leaned close to the door and listened for sounds of movement behind it. I heard nothing. Applying one eye to the peephole, I tried to look inside, but without success. The peephole gave only one-way vision. People inside could see out, but people outside could not see in. All that the people outside could see was a distorted reflection of themselves in the peephole.

  Irritation won out over surprise and puzzlement. I turned away from 18B and tramped through the thick rug to the door of 18A and gave that button a good solid treatment. I suppose my rising temper must have been reflected in the violence with which I pressed the button, because it wasn’t more than thirty seconds until the door opened with a snap and I was facing a middle-aged woman with dyed blonde hair and no eyebrows at all. She was apparently just getting up, because she had on a silk dressing gown of indeterminate color, somewhere between violet and purple, flowered bedroom slippers on her small feet, and held a half-eaten piece of toast in one hand.

  The skin where her eyebrows should have been rose questioningly when she saw me. “Yes?” she asked in a no-nonsense voice, and then, before I could reply, she added fretfully, “I’m not up yet, for heaven’s sake! It’s so early! Who are you?”

  “Hal Johnson,” I said. “From the public library.” I showed her my identification card. “I called to collect some overdue books from your neighbor, Mrs. Stout, but she doesn’t seem to be at home.”

  “She’s never home,” said 18A. “Vera’s busy, busy, busy. So what do you want from me? I haven’t any overdue books. And I’m right in the middle of my breakfast.”

  “I’m sorry to disturb you,” I said. “I thought perhaps you would know if Mrs. Stout has gone out. I telephoned her early this morning that I was coming for her books and she said she’d stick around until I got here.”

  18A laughed. “Vera’s got a memory like a sieve,” she said. “She probably forgot you the minute she put down the phone.”

  “Probably,” I said, sighing. “You didn’t see or hear her leave, did you?”

  “Of course not! Do you think I spy on my neighbors? Especially a dear friend like Vera?” She put the rest of her toast into her mouth and chewed daintily. “Her husband left for work a while ago, that’s all I know. But Vera wasn’t with him. He was talking to some other man in the elevator. I could hear him.” She swallowed. “That was when I opened my door to get my morning newspaper.”

  “Well, thanks,” I said. “I guess I’ll just have to try her again.”

  “Do that; Only next time you can save yourself the trip all the way-up here to the eighteenth floor by checking first to see if Vera’s car is in the parking lot. If it’s not there, you’ll know Vera isn’t here, either.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I said. “What kind of car does she drive?”

  “Green Pontiac,” she said, closing the door. She would be quite an attractive woman, I thought, once she penciled in her eyebrows for the day. I hoped her breakfast coffee was still hot.

  I rang for the elevator, dropped to the lobby, and walked out to the parking lot, still more than a little miffed at Mrs. Stout for standing me up. If you’re rich, you can afford to be forgetful, I suppose.

  I got into my Chevy and was backing out to leave when I noticed that the two parking slots next to mine were marked 18B. One for Mr. Stout, no doubt, and the other for Mrs. Stout. Mr. Stout’s slot was empty. In the other one stood a green.

  I hesitated, then pulled back into my GUEST slot, telling myself I was damned if a scatterbrained, forgetful woman was going to get the better of me in a matter involving 12 library books and a fat fine of $18.90. Mrs. Stout had probably been standing behind her door the whole time I was ringing her chimes, watching me through her peephole!

  I marched myself back into the main lobby of The Scottish Arms and went over to the elevator. The indicator dial showed a car on its way up. The light for the 18th floor came on and stayed red for a few seconds; the elevator had obviously stopped there. All at once I felt certain it had been summoned to bring my elusive Mrs. Stout down to one of her outside activities
, now that the bothersome man from the library had been gotten rid of.

  I grinned at the thought. I would stop her as she stepped out of the elevator. If necessary, I’d make a real nuisance of myself. Unless it was the eyebrow-less lady from 18A who was descending? Hardly likely, I thought; she must still be without her eyebrows and in her dressing gown. However, I’d better be sure before I acted.

  I stepped to one side of the elevator door and took cover behind a large artificial plant in a massive blue pot.

  It wasn’t a woman, however, who stepped from the elevator. It was a man. A man who, from his back view as he crossed the lobby, seemed to be on the youngish side, with medium-long black hair curling over the collar of his plaid sports coat. He moved jauntily, as though very pleased about something.

  I need hardly say that he took the wind right out of my sails. For now it appeared there might be more to Mrs. J. W. Stout than met the eye. Was she not only an embezzler of books from the public library, but also an immoral wife who clandestinely entertained young men in her private apartment only minutes after her husband, poor hardworking fellow, had left for the office? If so, no wonder she had refused to answer her door.

  Yet why did she tell me to come for my books this morning if she expected her young man’s visit to coincide with mine? Simple. She hadn’t expected her boy friend, if that’s what he was, to arrive when he did. But, I asked myself severely, what if the guy was the husband of the lady in 18A? Or her boy friend? Or somebody who just happened to emerge from the firestairs on the 18th floor and take the elevator the rest of-the way down? Or even, perhaps, a door-to-door salesman, canvassing The Scottish Arms in defiance of the sign in the main lobby forbidding it?

  All the while I was mulling this over, I was skulking out to the parking lot behind the young man in question, keeping far enough behind him to interpose several Cadillacs and Continentals between his back and my eyes.

  He went straight to Mrs. Stout’s green Pontiac.

  He climbed behind the wheel and started the engine.