The Library Fuzz

by James Holding

  As cool as a well-digger’s shirt tail. “I got it,” he said. “Hold on, Hal. Be right back.”

  He went away, presumably to start a little action. While he was gone, I sent comforting upside-down looks at Mrs. Stout, whose sobbing had now subsided to intermittent catches of breath. Four minutes ticked slowly by on the desk clock before I heard Lieutenant Randall’s voice squeaking in the receiver again.

  “I’ve got it started, Hal. We’re checking on the bank and the cashier right now. Patrol car three-o-three has your green van in sight on Murchison. And I’ve got another car on its way to you.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll tell Mrs. Stout that help is on the way.”

  * * * *

  That evening, Lieutenant Randall telephoned me at home. “What happened to you,” he asked, “after my man cut you loose this morning? With everybody waiting to give you the conquering hero treatment.”

  “Hero treatment?” I said. “Then the bank was robbed?”

  “Sure. I been trying to locate you all afternoon to tell you.”

  “What about the cashier, Mr. Stout? Was he hurt?”

  “Not a bit. Locked in the vault with the vault guard after the thieves had cleaned out the cash. Then they just walked out of the bank like two customers when the bank opened at nine.”

  “You nailed them, I hope?”

  “Sure. Your green van led us right to them—and to the loot, too, Hal. Don’t overlook the loot. Two hundred and twelve thousand dollars. That’s why the hero treatment was ready for you, boy. Mrs. Stout told us how you happened to get mixed up in the thing. So why didn’t you stick around to take a bow?”

  “I had a hell of a headache,” I said.

  “Too bad, too bad,” Randall said. I knew his cat-yellow eyes would be as bland and unfeeling as two egg yolks, even as he sympathized. “The fellow who slugged you was Teddy Thurbald, incidentally. A pro. How’s the headache now?”

  “I still have it,” I said.

  “Then why’d you go back to work this afternoon?”

  “I didn’t. I came home to bed.”

  He clicked his tongue. “You always were soft-headed, Hal—especially about broads. You haven’t changed.”

  I didn’t answer that one. “Well, you’ll probably be okay by Monday. Mr. and Mrs. Stout can thank you then.”

  I said, “They’ll have to do more than thank me. They owe me money.”

  Randall sounded scandalized. “You mean you want a reward for helping those nice people and their bank?”

  “Hell, no,” I said, “but since I took the day off today, I won’t get Mrs. Stout’s overdue library books back to the library until Monday. So they owe me three more days’ fines.”

  “They shouldn’t begrudge that,” said Randall, “since you saved the bank two hundred and twelve grand. Matter of fact, this whole thing is going to look good enough on my record so that I might even pay your extra fines myself. How much do they come to?”

  “Eighty-one cents,” I said grouchily and hung up. My head was killing me.

  STILL A COP

  Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1975.

  Lieutenant Randall telephoned me on Tuesday, catching me in my cell-sized office at the public library just after I’d finished lunch.

  “Hal?” he said. “How come you’re not out playing patty-cake with the book borrowers?” Randall still resents my leaving the police department to become a library detective—what he calls a “sissy cop.” Nowadays my assignments involve nothing more dangerous than tracing stolen and overdue books for the public library.

  I said, “Even a library cop has to eat, Lieutenant. What’s on your mind?”

  “Same old thing. Murder.”

  “I haven’t killed anyone for over a week,” I said.

  His voice took on a definite chill. “Somebody killed a young fellow we took out of the river this morning. Shot him through the head. And tortured him beforehand.”

  “Sorry,” I said. I’d forgotten how grim it was to be a Homicide cop. “Tortured, did you say?”

  “Yeah. Cigar burns all over him. I need information, Hal.”

  “About what?”

  “You ever hear of The Damion Complex?”

  “Sure. It’s the title of a spy novel published last year.”

  “I thought it might be a book.” There was satisfaction in Randall’s voice now. “Next question: you have that book in the public library?”

  “Of course. Couple of copies, probably.”

  “Do they have different numbers or something to tell them apart?”

  “Yes, they do. Why?”

  “Find out for me if one of your library copies of The Damion Complex has this number on it, will you?” He paused and I could hear paper rustling. “ES4187.”

  “Right,” I said. “I’ll get back to you in ten minutes.” Then, struck by something familiar about the number, I said, “No, wait, hold it a minute, Lieutenant.”

  I pulled out of my desk drawer the list of overdue library books I’d received the previous morning and checked it hurriedly. “Bingo,” I said into the phone, “I picked up that book with that very number yesterday morning. How about that? Do you want it?”

  “I want it.”

  “For what?”

  “Evidence, maybe.”

  “In your torture-murder case?”

  He lost patience. “Look, just get hold of the book for me, Hal. I’ll tell you about it when I pick it up, okay?”

  “Okay, Lieutenant. When?”

  “Ten minutes.” He sounded eager.

  I hung up and called Ellen on the checkout desk. “Listen, sweetheart,” I said to her because it makes her mad to be called sweetheart and she’s extremely attractive when she’s mad, “can you find me The Damion Complex, copy number ES4187? I brought it in yesterday among the overdues.”

  “The Damion Complex?” She took down the number. “I’ll call you back, Hal.” She didn’t sound a bit mad. Maybe she was softening up at last. I’d asked her to marry me 17 times in the last six months, but she was still making up her mind.

  In two minutes she called me back. “It’s out again,” she reported. “It went out on card number 3888 yesterday after you brought it in.”

  Lieutenant Randall was going to love that. “Who is card number 3888?”

  “A Miss Oradell Murphy.”

  “Address?”

  She gave it to me, an apartment on Leigh Street.

  “Telephone number?”

  “I thought you might be able to look that up yourself.” She was tart. “I’m busy out here.”

  “Thank you, sweetheart,” I said. “Will you marry me?”

  “Not now. I told you I’m busy.” She hung up. But she did it more gently than usual, it seemed to me. She was softening up. My spirits lifted.

  Lieutenant Randall arrived in less than the promised ten minutes. “Where is it?” he asked, fixing me with his cat stare. He seemed too big to fit into my office. “You got it for me?”

  I shook my head. “It went out again yesterday. Sorry.”

  He grunted in disappointment, took a look at my spindly visitor’s chair, and decided to remain standing. “Who borrowed it?”

  I told him Miss Oradell Murphy, Apartment 3A at the Harrington Arms on Leigh Street.

  “Thanks.” He tipped a hand and turned to leave.

  “Wait a minute. Where you going, Lieutenant?”

  “To get the book.”

  “Those apartments at Harrington Arms are efficiencies,” I said. “Mostly occupied by single working women. So maybe Miss Murphy won’t be home right now. Why not call first?”

  He nodded. I picked up my phone and gave our switchboard girl Miss Murphy’s telephone number. Randall fidgeted nervously.

  “No answer,” the switchboard reported.

  I grinned at Randall. “See? Nobody home.”

  “I need that book.” Randall sank into the spindly visitor’s chair and sighed in frust
ration.

  “You were going to tell me why.”

  “Here’s why.” He fished a damp crumpled bit of paper out of an envelope he took from his pocket. I reached for it. He held it away. “Don’t touch it,” he said. “We found it on the kid we pulled from the river this morning. It’s the only damn thing we did find on him. No wallet, no money, no identification, no clothing labels, no nothing. Except for this he was plucked as clean as a chicken. We figure it was overlooked. It was in the bottom of his shirt pocket.”

  “What’s it say?” I could see water-smeared writing.

  He grinned unexpectedly, although his yellow eyes didn’t seem to realize that the rest of his face was smiling. “It says: PL Damion Complex ES4187.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Great bit of deduction, Lieutenant,” I said. “You figured the PL for Public Library?”

  “All by myself.”

  “So what’s it mean?”

  “How do I know till I get the damn book?” He sat erect and went on briskly, “Who had the book before Miss Murphy?”

  I consulted my overdue list from the day before. “Gregory Hazzard. Desk clerk at the Starlight Motel on City Line. I picked up seven books and fines from him yesterday.”

  The Lieutenant was silent for a moment. Then, “Give Miss Murphy another try, will you?”

  She still didn’t answer her phone.

  Randall stood up. My chair creaked when he removed his weight. “Let’s go see this guy Hazzard.”

  “Me, too?”

  “You, too.” He gave me the fleeting grin again. “You’re mixed up in this, son.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “Your library owns the book. And you belong to the library. So move your tail.”

  Gregory Hazzard was surprised to see me again so soon. He was a middle-aged skeleton, with a couple of pounds of skin and gristle fitted over his bones so tightly that he looked like the object of an anatomy lesson. His clothes hung on him—snappy men’s wear on a scarecrow. “You got all my overdue books yesterday,” he greeted me.

  “I know, Mr. Hazzard. But my friend here wants to ask you about one of them.”

  “Who’s your friend?” He squinted at Randall.

  “Lieutenant Randall, City Police.”

  Hazzard blinked. “Another cop? We went all through that with the boys from your robbery detail day before yesterday.”

  Randall’s eyes flickered. Otherwise he didn’t change expression. “I’m not here about that. I’m interested in one of your library books.”

  “Which one?”

  “The Damion Complex.”

  Hazzard bobbed his skull on his pipestem neck. “That one. Just a so-so yarn. You can find better spy stories in your newspaper.”

  Randall ignored that. “You live here in the motel, Mr. Hazzard?”

  “No. With my sister down the street a ways, in a duplex.”

  “This is your address on the library records,” I broke in. “The Starlight Motel.”

  “Sure. Because this is where I read all the books I borrow. And where I work.”

  “Don’t you ever take library books home?” Randall asked.

  “No. I leave ’em here, right at this end of the desk, out of the way. I read ’em during slack times, you know? When I finish them I take ’em back to the library and get another batch. I’m a fast reader.”

  “But your library books were overdue. If you’re such a fast reader, how come?”

  “He was sick for three weeks,” I told Randall. “Only got back to work Saturday.”

  The Lieutenant’s lips tightened and I knew from old experience that he wanted me to shut up. “That right?” he asked Hazzard. “You were sick?”

  “As a dog. Thought I was dying. So’d my sister. That’s why my books were overdue.”

  “They were here on the desk all the time you were sick?”

  “Right. Cost me a pretty penny in fines, too, I must say. Hey, Mr. Johnson?”

  I laughed. “Big deal. Two ninety-four, wasn’t it?”

  He chuckled so hard I thought I could hear his bones rattle. “Cheapest pleasure we got left, free books from the public library.” He sobered suddenly. “What’s so important about The Damion Complex, Lieutenant?”

  “Wish I knew.” Randall signaled me with his eyes. “Thanks, Mr. Hazzard, you’ve been helpful. We’ll be in touch.” He led the way out to the police car.

  On the way back to town he turned aside ten blocks and drove to the Harrington Arms Apartments on Leigh Street. “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” he said as he pulled up at the curb. “If Murphy’s home, get the book from her, Hal, okay? No need to mention the police.”

  A comely young lady, half out of a nurse’s white uniform and evidently just home from work, answered my ring at Apartment 3A. “Yes?” she said, hiding her dishabille by standing behind the door and peering around its edge.

  “Miss Oradell Murphy?”

  “Yes.” She had a fetching way of raising her eyebrows.

  I showed her my ID card and gave her a cock-and-bull story about The Damion Complex having been issued to her yesterday by mistake. “The book should have been destroyed,” I said, “because the previous borrower read it while she was ill with an infectious disease.”

  “Oh,” Miss Murphy said. She gave me the book without further questions.

  When I returned to the police car Lieutenant Randall said, “Gimme,” and took the book from me, handling it with a finicky delicacy that seemed odd in such a big man. By his tightening lips I could follow his growing frustration as he examined The Damion Complex. For it certainly seemed to be just an ordinary copy of another ordinary book from the public library. The library name was stamped on it in the proper places. Identification number ES4187. Card pocket, with regulation date card, inside the front cover. Nothing concealed between its pages, not even a pressed forget-me-not.

  “What the hell?” the Lieutenant grunted.

  “Code message?” I suggested.

  He was contemptuous. “Code message? You mean certain words off certain pages? In that case why was this particular copy specified—number ES4187? Any copy would do.”

  “Unless the message is in the book itself. In invisible ink? Or indicated by pin pricks over certain words?” I showed my teeth at him. “After all, it’s a spy novel.”

  We went over the book carefully twice before we found the negative. And no wonder. It was very small—no more than half an inch or maybe five-eighths—and shoved deep in the pocket inside the front cover, behind the date card.

  Randall held it up to the light. “Too small to make out what it is,” I said. “We need a magnifying glass.”

  “Hell with that.” Randall threw his car into gear. “I’ll get Jerry to make me a blowup.” Jerry is the police photographer. “I’ll drop you off at the library.”

  “Oh, no, Lieutenant. I’m mixed up in this. You said so yourself. I’m sticking until I see what’s on that negative.” He grunted.

  Half an hour later I was in Randall’s office at headquarters when the police photographer came in and threw a black-and-white 3½ by 4½ print on the Lieutenant’s desk. Randall allowed me to look over his shoulder as he examined it.

  Its quality was poor. It was grainy from enlargement, and the images were slightly blurred, as though the camera had been moved just as the picture was snapped. But it was plain enough so that you could make out two men sitting facing each other across a desk. One was facing the camera directly; the other showed only as part of a rear-view silhouette—head, right shoulder, right arm.

  The right arm, however, extended into the light on the desk top and could be seen quite clearly. It was lifting from an open briefcase on the desk a transparent bag of white powder, about the size of a pound of sugar. The briefcase contained three more similar bags. The man who was full face to the camera was reaching out a hand to accept the bag of white powder.

  Lieutenant Randall said nothing for
what seemed a long time. Then all he did was grunt noncommittally.

  I said, “Heroin, Lieutenant?”

  “Could be.”

  “Big delivery. Who’s the guy making the buy? Do you know?”

  He shrugged. “We’ll find out.”

  “When you make him, you’ll have your murderer. Isn’t that what you’re thinking?”

  He shrugged again. “How do you read it, Hal?”

  “Easy. The kid you pulled from the river got this picture somehow, decided to cut himself in by a little blackmail, and got killed for his pains.”

  “And tortured. Why tortured?” Randall was just using me as a sounding board.

  “To force him to tell where the negative was hidden? He wouldn’t have taken the negative with him when he braced the dope peddler.”

  “Hell of a funny place to hide a negative,” Randall said. “You got any ideas about that?”

  I went around Randall’s desk and sat down. “I can guess. The kid sets up his blackmail meeting with the dope peddler, starts out with both the negative and a print of it, like this one, to keep his date. At the last minute he has second thoughts about carrying the negative with him.”

  “Where’s he starting out from?” Randall squeezed his hands together.

  “The Starlight Motel. Where else?”

  “Go on.”

  “So maybe he decides to leave the negative in the motel safe and stops at the desk in the lobby to do so. But Hazzard is in the can, maybe. Or has stepped out to the restaurant for coffee. The kid has no time to waste. So he shoves the little negative into one of Hazzard’s library books temporarily, making a quick note of the book title and library number so he can find it again. You found the note in his shirt pocket. How’s that sound?”

  Randall gave me his half grin and said, “So long, Hal. Thanks for helping.”

  I stood up. “I need a ride to the library. You’ve wasted my whole afternoon. You going to keep my library book?”