“Yeah,” I said, “I remember.” And I did. It made me a little homesick for Homicide, but not much.
“When they discovered the stiff about midnight,” Randall went on, “they called me and I went out there. Ghetto room on South Wildflower.”
“And you solved the case instantly?”
“Took about half an hour. Three witnesses in the bar saw the stabbing and could identify the stabber. We’ve got the murderess sewed up tight.”
“Where does a favor for me come into it?” It’s hard for me to tell, even after all these years, when Lieutenant Randall is kidding and when he’s serious.
“That’s the real reason I called you tonight, Hal. Kind of a curious thing, but I saw right away last night that I could do you some good.”
“You going to tell me how?”
“Certainly. But answer a question first. You probably think of me as a tough, unappreciative, demanding type who asks for favors but never returns one, right?” Randall’s unwinking cat’s eyes gleamed in the fluorescent lights of the diner.
“Right.” I agreed heartily, playing along.
“So I go out to where this fellow bleeds to death and look over the scene, and to my utter amazement,” said Randall, grinning like a chimpanzee with a banana in view, “I discover something that makes me think of you immediately.”
“What? Either tell me or shut up.”
He took a long swallow of beer. “You wouldn’t have dared talk to me that way in the old days,” he complained.
“That’s one reason I left you.”
He wiped beer foam off his lips with a paper napkin. Then he said with dignity, “You’ve done me several favors since you left the Department, Hal. I’ll admit it. You’ve helped me solve a couple of my major cases. So now I’m going to help you solve one of your major cases. Tit for tat. And prove that I’m not as unappreciative as you think.”
“Hurry up,” I said, “before I start to cry or sing ‘Hearts and Flowers.’”
He grinned. “What I’m going to do for you, pal, is to save you a lot of time and trouble—and an unnecessary trip to South l Wildflower Street.”
I sat up. Despite himself, Lieutenant Randall was beginning to interest me. “Yeah?” I said.
“Yeah.” He was enjoying himself.
“How come?”
“Well, when I got out there and the M.E. had taken a gander at the stiff, I kind of cased the dead guy’s room a little bit.” Randall made a face. “It was a dump. Filth, stench, a real pigsty, you know?”
I nodded. I remembered that from my cop days, too.
“But the surprise was, I found a book under the guy’s bed,” said Randall, smirking. “The only book in the whole joint. Like he’d thrown it under the bed and forgotten about it. And you know what it was?”
“A library book?” I guessed.
“Right. And I looked at the card in it, and you know something? That book was way overdue, Hal. Think of that! Overdue! That’s a pretty heinous crime in library circles, I said to myself. So what did I generously decide to do? I decided to bring the book in for you, thus saving you the arduous job of tracking the damn thing down and bringing your criminal to justice!” He leaned back and made an expansive gesture.
I said, “You’re all heart, Lieutenant. Where’s the book?”
“I’ve got it. Don’t fret yourself, son. But there’s a couple of funny things about it that probably call for the attention of an expert book detective like yourself.”
“Such as?”
“Such as the fact that it says inside the front cover of the book that it’s intended for kids from ten to fourteen years old. And this murdered man of mine was twenty-seven if he was a day.” Randall snickered into his beer glass.
“A kid’s book? Well.” I paused. “Maybe your murder victim was what we call a reluctant reader. There’s no disgrace in reading kids’ books, you know, even if you’re grown up.”
“I understand that. And you think he may have been one of your reluctant-reader types, is that it?”
“Maybe.”
He shook his head solemnly. “No way, Hal. This guy was a cheap hood with a record as long as your arm. The only reading he ever did was the sports page and the racing form. And what’s more, he was a junkie. Hooked like a mackerel, judging from all the mainline needle marks on him. So what’s with the children’s literature under the bed?”
I shrugged. “Beats me.”
“No solutions from the famous book detective, Hal Johnson?”
“Not tonight,” I said. “Now you’ve pulled your gag, let’s have the book.”
Right then was when I suddenly recalled my eleven-year-old friend Jasper Jones. For the book Randall handed to me over the table was The Robber of Featherbed Lane. I looked at him. “Was the name of your stabbing victim Joseph, by any chance?”
“Yeah. How’d you guess that? Although he was better known as Joe.”
I relaxed a little. “Joe what?”
“Joe Sabatini,” Randall said.
* * * *
More out of curiosity than anything else, I checked the book against our records the next day to see if it could possibly be the copy that Jasper Jones had reported destroyed by Solly Joseph’s drunken father. With four or five copies of most juvenile books circulating through our library system, it was unlikely this could be Jasper Jones’s overdue book.
But it was.
My first thought was that Solly Joseph had told Jasper Jones a big lie about what happened to the book he’d rented. My second thought was that if so, Jasper had probably taken $3.50 out of Solly’s hide by this time. My third thought was that I ought to return Jasper’s money now that our book was recovered. My fourth thought was that the fines on the book almost equaled $3.50 by now, anyway, so why bother? And my fifth thought was, belatedly enough, that maybe Jasper Jones was the one who’d been lying.
I stopped counting at that point and just let my memory of Jasper’s conversation with me slosh around in my head. Right away several curious angles occurred to me that I hadn’t noticed at the time. For one thing, I now found it rather puzzling that when I’d told Jasper I’d come to collect a library book from him, his initial reaction was to ask me a strange question: “I never saw you before, did I?” Then, when I’d explained it was an overdue library book and identified myself, his whole manner had undergone a subtle change. And while claiming not to remember The Robber of Featherbed Lane at first, he’d later remembered exactly what had been done to that particular book by Solly Joseph’s intoxicated father.
I didn’t want to believe that an eleven-year-old ghetto kid had been able to con an old pro like me so easily. But the conviction grew. During my rounds that day doubts about Jasper Jones kept flagging at me.
I got back to the library about three in the afternoon, and after sitting in my office for ten minutes, looking at the wall, I reached for the phone and dialed Gardenia Street Grade School. I explained to the secretary in the principal’s office who I was, telling her the truth. Then I embroidered it a little. “A couple of kids from your school have applied for cards at the public library,” I told her, “and we’re checking them out before we issue the cards.” Nonsense, of course, but the secretary didn’t know that. “Would you be good enough to confirm that they’re bona-fide students in your school?”
“Certainly,” she said. “What are their names?”
“Jasper Jones,” I said. “Probably in the fifth or sixth grade. Maybe seventh. And Solly, or Solomon. Joseph, around the fifth grade, I guess.”
She went off to check their rolls and when she came back on she said, “Jasper Jones is in our sixth grade. But we have no Solly or Solomon Joseph in any grade that I can find. Does that help you?”
“Enormously,” I said. “I had doubts about Joseph myself and you’ve confirmed them.” I thanked her and hung up.
So there was no Solly Joseph in the class behind Jasper Jones at Gardenia Street School. How about that? Solly had been made up out
of whole cloth for my benefit, apparently. And Solly’s drunken father, too.
On my way home that evening I took The Robber of Featherbed Lane with me to Police Headquarters, and without stopping first at Randall’s office I paid a visit to my old side-kick, Jerry Baskin, who heads up the police laboratory. I handed him the book and asked him as a personal favor to give it his best going over, and let me know if he found anything out of the way about it. And not—repeat not—to say anything about it to anyone at the Department until I gave him the word.
He agreed, for old times’ sake. And for the fifth of J & B Scotch which just happened to be peeking out of my carcoat pocket. “What am I supposed to be looking for?” Jerry asked me, uncapping the Scotch and taking a luxurious sniff of its rich aroma.
“Anything,” I said. “Or nothing. I don’t know. But give it your best shot, will you?”
“Okay,” said Jerry. “I’ll call you.”
He called me the following afternoon. “Your library book, Hal,” he said without preamble, “I found something.”
“What?” I asked.
“Traces of heroin in the card pocket.”
“Heroin?” My heart gave a sickening lurch. “You sure?”
“Mexican, I’d guess. Not enough to analyze for quality. But definitely heroin, Hal.”
“I was afraid of that.” I paused, thinking. I wanted to be sure. I said, “Will you give some other books the same treatment for me, Jerry?”
“Why not?” Jerry said. “At a bottle of Scotch per book, what can I lose?”
I went to the children’s library and took from the shelves half a dozen of the books borrowed by Jasper Jones and recently returned. Olive Gaston dug them up for me without comment and I took them over to Jerry Baskin. With only one more bottle of J & B, however, not half a dozen. I can’t afford to be a spendthrift on my anemic library expense account.
Jerry reported his findings on the additional books two days later: three of the six books I’d given him showed traces of heroin in the card pockets. “Anything else?” I asked him.
“A shred of glassine paper in one card pocket, Hal.”
That’s when I went to see Lieutenant Randall. Facing him across his scarred desk, I said, “You remember that library book you found under Joe Sabatini’s bed?”
“What about it?”
I told him the whole story. Throughout my recital he didn’t move, he didn’t blink his cat’s eyes once. I finished up by saying morosely, “I’m sure the kid isn’t on smack himself. So all I can come up with is that he’s a pusher. That he’s not renting library books to his pals, but passing them out to his customers with packets of heroin in the card pockets. What’s more innocent-looking than a kid’s library book? This is an eleven-year-old kid, Lieutenant! I can’t believe it!”
Randall lit a cigarette. “You’ve been out of touch too long, Hal. Messing around with your library books. The Narc boys are arresting kids as young as Jasper Jones every day. Didn’t you know that?”
“No.”
“They are. And even younger. The kids are recruited to the drug trade primarily because they are kids, Hal. Juveniles. If they get caught possessing or selling heroin, they’re treated leniently by the courts as juvenile delinquents. But if adults get caught doing the same thing, they get a mandatory life sentence under state law. See how it works? The kids run all the risks of handling the dope while their bosses, the older pushers, just hang around on the edges, picking up the money and dodging that life sentence. They call the kids their ‘runners’ or ‘holders.’ And half the time the kids don’t even realize what they’re doing.”
I remembered Jasper Jones’s old-young blue eyes and the facility with which he had improvised the story about Solly Joseph. “I’m afraid my kid knows what he’s doing,” I said.
“Well, they all know they’re doing something not quite legal, put it that way. But they usually don’t realize the enormous street value of the stuff they’re handling. Most of them work for peanuts, or a new bike, or for kicks, or because somebody they admire—like an older pusher, say—asks them to.”
I could understand how that would happen. The pusher’s a big man in the neighborhood. He wears fancy clothes, drives luxury automobiles, is always flashing money. The kids look up to him, want to be like him. They gladly do what he asks. I said, “So the kids take the heat? And the adult pushers go free?” I felt very depressed.
Randall nodded. “Usually.”
“Lieutenant,” I said grimly, “will you do me a favor? A real one this time?”
“Another?” Randall smiled tightly. “What did you have in mind?”
“I want you to turn my Jasper Jones information over to the Narcotics Squad downstairs for action. But I’d like you to insist on one thing for me to Lieutenant Logan: that they identify and get the goods—possession, peddling, the works—on Jasper’s adult pusher before they arrest Jasper Jones.”
Randall said, “I guess I can promise you that much, Hal.”
* * * *
A couple of weeks later, after the Narcs had wrapped it up, Randall bought me a pizza and told me how they did it.
“It wasn’t too tough with what you gave them, Hal. To identify and locate the kid’s boss, the Narcs figured their best bet was to put a tail on the kid on Saturday morning, after he’d picked up his weekly load of books at your library. They reasoned that whoever the adult pusher was, he’d certainly want his personal possession of the heroin to be as short a time as possible before handing it over to his holder. So it seemed a good bet that the pusher got his weekly supply of smack from his dealer at about the same time on Saturday morning that the kid would show up with the books to distribute it in. And that’s the way it worked. The kid led them right to the pusher.”
“Great!” I said. “Who was it?”
“A flashy twenty-year-old who lives in the same tenement as Jasper and his mother. On the top floor. Kind of a local idol with the ghetto kids. Turned out later he’s Jasper’s cousin.”
“That’s all there was to it?” I asked incredulously. “Just follow the kid and pick up his cousin?”
“Not quite. The Narcs couldn’t be absolutely sure the cousin was their man. The kid could have stopped to see him for any number of reasons, of course.”
I nodded.
“After about fifteen minutes in his cousin’s place, the kid comes out and goes back downstairs to his own pad. And believe it or not, Hal, the kid sits down and starts to read his new library books right through, one after the other. Outside in the alley, the Narc is watching him through the window. By lunchtime the kid’s finished reading maybe five or six books. He puts them in his book-bag, makes himself a Dagwood sandwich—his mother was out working—and goes off to the playground down the street.”
“With the book-bag?”
“With the book-bag. The Narc trailed along. When Jasper got involved in a basketball game, the tail went back to the tenement and—ah—managed to examine the library books the kid hadn’t taken with him to the playground.”
I said, “He had a warrant, I hope.”
Randall shrugged. “Anyway, he found a glassine envelope of heroin in the pocket of every book—about a ten-dollar packet, he said. So that put the finger on the cousin with no possibility of mistake. You see? No heroin in the books when they left the library. And every book stuffed with it after Jasper’s visit to his cousin.”
I nodded again. “Then what?”
“Then the Narc went back to the playground and kept a cozy eye on Jasper Jones. Three times during the afternoon the kid was called out of the basketball game by men who passed him a coin and some code name, probably, and received, in return, one of Jasper’s library books. The cousin never showed at all.”
“Directing traffic from a distance.”
“Right.” Randall continued placidly. “At six o’clock it’s getting dark. The kid goes home and eats dinner with his mother, who’s now home from work. And that’s what the pattern was like al
l week for Jasper Jones—passing out library books on demand to users at school, at the playground, or at home.”
I shook my head. “An eleven-year-old kid!”
“Listen,” Randall said softly, “don’t feel too bad about Jasper Jones. Lieutenant Logan told me that while his man was staked out at the Gardenia Street playground, he saw a guy take delivery of two bundles of smack from a little girl who was jumping rope on the sidewalk. She couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old. And when this guy called to her, she rolled up the sleeve of her sweater and revealed a lot of packages of heroin taped to her arm. He took what was needed and the little girl rolled down her sleeve and went back to jumping rope.”
I found myself hoping with an almost feral ferocity that somehow, some way, justice would be visited on the depraved animals who recruited little children to do their dirty work for them. I said harshly, “Did they nail Jasper’s cousin?”
“Yeah. Relax.”
“When did they make the arrest?”
“Last Saturday morning. The Narcs hit him after he’d got his supply from his dealer and before Jasper arrived with his library books to take it off his hands. The cousin’s going up for life, Hal.”
I sighed. “I hope to God he gets the whole treatment!” I hesitated. “What about the kid?”
“Jasper?” Randall’s sulphur-yellow eyes held a spark of something that could have been sympathy. “Lieutenant Logan, at my request, released Jasper Jones in the custody of his mother.”
Suddenly I felt fine. “Let me buy you a beer, Lieutenant.”
He gave me a calm cool stare. “Gladly,” he said, “and you can pay for the pizza, too, if you feel all that grateful.”
I paid for the pizza.
THE HONEYCOMB OF SILENCE
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, August 1978.
The Library Fuzz Page 18
