Case File - a Collection of Nameless Detective Stories

by Bill Pronzini

  "Couldn't the thief have simply cleared the items through the sensor when no one was looking and walked out with them later under his clothing?"

  "No. The only sensor strip is located at the cashier's desk, and none of my people had access to it on the days of the thefts except Adam Turner. Adam is the only one of my people I trust implicitly; he's been with me twenty years, and he's loyal and honest to a fault. He'd taken to guarding the sensor since the thefts began, and on at least two of the days he swears he never left the desk for even a moment."

  "Do you deactivate the alarm system when you close up for the day?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, couldn't the thief have stashed the items somewhere in the store and left with them after the alarm was shut off?"

  Rothman shook his head. "I'm the last person to leave nearly every day. And when I'm not, Adam does the locking up. No one but the two of us has a key to the front door. Not only that, but each of the others has to pass through the alarm gateway on his way out, before it's shut off; that is a strict rule and there have been no exceptions."

  I did some ruminating. "Is it possible the thief could have slipped out through another entrance during working hours? He wouldn't have to have been gone more than a couple of minutes; he could even have passed the stolen items to a confederate . . .

  Rothman was shaking his head again. "All the other entrances to the shop—first-floor rear and fire-escape doors on the second and third floor—are kept locked and are protected by separate alarm systems."

  "How many people have keys to those entrances?"

  "Only myself. And even if one of the others managed to get hold of it and have a duplicate made, the alarm would still ring if any of the doors were opened."

  "Where is the control box for those alarms located?"

  "Behind the cashier's desk. But it's also kept locked, and Adam guards it as zealously as he does the sensor strip."

  "What about a window?" I asked. "Are there alarms on those, too?"

  "No, but they are all securely locked and also painted shut. None of them—has been touched."

  I ruminated again. "I can think of one other possibility," I said at length. "Suppose the thief hasn't gotten the stolen items out of the shop? Suppose he hid them somewhere with the idea of making off with them later, because he hasn't figured out a way to beat the alarms?"

  "I'm afraid that's not the answer either," Rothman said. "For one thing, Adam and I have searched the shop on more than one occasion; it's quite large, granted, but I'm sure we would have found the missing pieces if they were there. And for another thing, at least one item—the first Dürer etching—appears to have surfaced in the collection of a man named Martell in Chicago."

  "You've heard rumors, you mean?"

  "More than just rumors. After each theft I notified other antiquarian booksellers throughout the country and in Europe, as well as AB Bookman's Weekly and other publications in the trade; that's standard procedure whenever anything of value is stolen. A dealer in Chicago called me not long after I publicized the theft of the first Dürer, to say that he'd heard Martell had intimated to another collector that he had acquired it. Admittedly, that's secondhand information. But I know of Martell; he's a passionate collector of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century religious etchings, and he had a reputation of being unscrupulous about it. My colleague in Chicago knows Martell personally and says that if he has bragged about having the Dürer etching, he really does have it."

  "Did you try to contact Martell?"

  "1 did. He denies possession, of course."

  "Isn't there anything you can do to prove otherwise?"

  "No. Without proof that he bought it, there is no legal way I can have his premises searched or force him to admit to its current ownership."

  "So the only way to get that proof" I said, "is to find out who stole it from you and sold it Martell."

  "That's correct."

  "Do you suspect any one employee more than the others?"

  "Not really. I've ruled out Adam Turner, as I told you; it could be any of the other three."

  I had been taking notes as we talked; I flipped over to a clean page on my pad. "Tell me about those three."

  "Tom Lennox has been with me the longest, next to Adam. Four years. He's quiet, intense, knowledgeable—a good bookman. He hopes to open his own antiquarian shop someday."

  "So you'd say he's ambitious?"

  "Yes, but not overly so."

  "Is he one of the two who had keys to the Antiquarian Room?"

  "Yes. Adam was the other. They both gave up their keys willingly."

  "Uh-huh. Go ahead, Mr. Rothman."

  "Harmon Boyette," he said, and spelled the last name. "He has worked for me a little more than two years, ever since he moved here from Seattle. He owned a bookstore there for several years, but he went bankrupt when his wife divorced him. He seems quite bitter about it."

  "Do you consider him dependable?"

  "Most of the time. But he does have an alcohol problem. Not that he drinks on the job—I wouldn't stand for that—but he comes in badly hung over on some mornings, and has missed days now and then."

  "Does money seem to be important to him?"

  "If so, he's never said anything about it. Nor has he ever said anything about wanting to go into business for himself again."

  "And the third man?"

  "Neal Vining. A Britisher, born in London. His father is a bookseller there. He married an American girl and came to San Francisco about eighteen months ago. I hired him because he has considerable expertise in English and European books, both antiquarian and modern. He learned the business from his father, and in a remarkably short time; he's only twenty-six."

  "Is he ambitious, would you say?"

  "Yes. He's, eager, always asking questions, gathering more knowledge. His only apparent fault is that he tends to be a bit egotistical at times."

  I took a moment to go back over my notes. "The thefts began how long ago?" I asked.

  "Approximately five months."

  "Were there many valuable items stolen in, say, the year prior to that?"

  "Two books, as I recall." He frowned. "Are you thinking the same person might have stolen those, too?"

  "It's possible," I said. "The man responsible could have started off in a small way at first and then decided to risk stealing items on a more regular basis. Particularly if he feels he has an undetectable method. Impatience, greed, a feeling of power—all those things could be driving him."

  Rothman nodded speculatively. "Now that I think of it," he said, "an inscribed first edition of Henry Miller's Black Spring disappeared about three months after Neal Vining came to work for me."

  "Lennox and Boyette are just as likely to be guilty, from what you've told me. Lennox could have been taking rare books off and on for four years, Boyette off and on for two."

  "Yes, you're right." He ran spread fingers through his silvering hair. "How will you handle your investigation?"

  "Well, first of all I'll run a background check on each of the three suspects. And it would be a good idea if I spent some time in the store, especially since the thief seems to be getting bolder; I might be able to spot something that'll tell us how he's doing it. You could introduce me as a new employee, give me some work to do and let me take it from there."

  "Fine. Can you start right away?"

  "This afternoon, if you like. But I think it would look better if I came in first thing in the morning. That way, I can spend the rest of today making those background checks."

  Rothman agreed. He gave me addresses for Lennox, Boyette and Vining, after which we settled on my fee and I made out one of my standard contract forms and had him sign it. We also settled on what my job would be at the book shop—I would come in as a stock clerk, which entailed shelving books, filing customer orders and the like, and which would allow me to move freely around the shop—and on the name I would be using: Jim Marlowe, in honor of Raymond Chandler. Then we shook han
ds, and he limped out, and I got to work.

  I called a guy I knew in Records and Identification at the Hall of Justice; he promised me he'd run the three names through his computer and the FBI hookup, to see if any of them had a criminal record, and get back to me before five o'clock. The next order of business was to get a credit report on each of the three, so I called another friend who worked for a leasing company and asked him to pull TRW's on the trio. He also said he'd have the information by five.

  I got out my copy of the reverse directory of city addresses and looked up the street numbers I had for Lennox, Boyette and Vining. All three of them lived in apartment buildings, which made things a little easier for me. I made a list of the names and telephone numbers of all the other residents of those buildings; then I called them one by one, telling each person who answered that I was a claims representative for North Coast Insurance and that I was conducting a routine check in connection with a substantial insurance policy. Human nature being what it is, that was a ploy that almost always put people at their ease and got them to open up about their neighbors.

  Two of Lennox's neighbors said that he kept pretty much to himself, had no apparent bad habits and seemed to be more or less happily married. A third person, who knew him a little better, had a somewhat different opinion of Lennox's marital status; this woman said that his wife, Fran, was a complainer who constantly nagged him about money matters. The woman also said that Lennox had a passion for books and that his apartment overflowed with them. She didn't know if any of the books were valuable; she didn't have time for such foolishness as reading, she said, and didn't know anything about books except that they were dust collectors.

  Harmon Boyette's neighbors confirmed that he was a heavy drinker; most of his imbibing was done at home, they said, and he tended to be surly when he was tight. They didn't seem to like him much. Nobody knew if he had money to spend, or what he spent it on if he did. None of them had ever been inside his apartment.

  Neal Vining, on the other hand, was friendly, gregarious, enjoyed having people in for small parties and was well liked. So was his wife, Sara, whose father owned a haberdashery shop in Ghirardelli Square that specialized in British imports; she and Vining had met during one of the father's buying trips to London. I also learned that Vining was the athletic type—jogged regularly, played racquetball—and that he liked to impress people with his knowledge of books and literary matters. As with Lennox and Boyette, he didn't seem to have a great deal of money and he didn't spend what he had indiscriminately.

  There was nothing in any of this, at least so far as I could tell, that offered a clue as to which of the three men might be guilty. I considered running a check on Adam Turner, even though Rothman had seemed certain of Turner's innocence; I like to be thorough. But I decided to let Rothman's judgment stand, at least for the time being.

  The guy at R and I called back at four-thirty, with a pretty much negative report: none of the three suspects had a criminal record, and with the exception of Boyette, none of them had ever been arrested. Boyette had been jailed twice, overnight both times, on drunk-and-disorderly charges.

  Just before five, my friend at the leasing company came through with the credit reports. Not much there either. Vining had a good credit rating, Lennox a not very good one and Boyette none at all. The only potentially interesting fact was that Lennox had defaulted on an automobile loan nine months ago, with the result that the car—a new Mercedes—had been repossessed. Up until then, Lennox's credit rating had been pretty good. It made me wonder why he had decided to buy an expensive care like a Mercedes in the first place; he couldn't have been paid a very hefty salary. But then, it might have been his wife's doing, if what I'd been told about her was true.

  By the time I looked over everything again, reread the notes I'd taken during my talk with Rothman and put it all away in a file folder, it was five-twenty and I was ready to pack it in for the day. I was feeling considerably better than I had been before Rothman's arrival; I had a job, and I would not have to spend tomorrow sitting around this damned office watching it rain and waiting for something to happen and pining away for Kerry.

  The telephone was ringing when I let myself into my flat an hour later. I hustled into the bedroom, where I keep the thing, and hauled up the receiver and said hello.

  "Hi," Kerry's voice said. "You sound out of breath."

  "I just came in. You sound tired."

  "I am. And the way it looks, I'm not going to get out of here until nine o'clock."

  "How's the presentation going?"

  "Pretty good. I'll probably have to work Saturday morning, but I should be finished by noon."

  "We're still on for Saturday night, aren't we?"

  "We are. What did you have in mind?"

  "Well, I've been wondering —"

  "Oh, damn," she said. "Can you hold on a minute? I'm being paged by the boss."

  "Sure."

  There was a clicking noise as she put me on hold. I shrugged out of my damp overcoat, tossed it on the floor and sat down on the rumpled bed. While I waited I occupied myself by visualizing Kerry in my mind. She was something to look at, all right. Not pretty in any classic sense, but strikingly attractive: coppery hair worn shoulder-length; animated face marked with humor lines; generous mouth; greenish eyes that seemed to change color, like a chameleon, according to her moods. And a fine willowy body, with the kind of legs men stared at and most women envied.

  I wondered again, as I had on several occasions, what she saw in me. I was fifty-three to her thirty-eight and not much to look—at, but she thought I was pretty hot stuff just the same. Sexy, she'd said once. Which was all a crock, as far as I was concerned, but I loved her for feeling that way.

  I did love her, that was the thing, even though we'd only known each other a couple of weeks. I'd met her during a pulp-magazine convention, which she'd attended because both her parents—Ivan and Cybil Wade—were ex-pulp writers who had been well known in the forties, Ivan for his fantasy/horror stories in Weird Tales and Dime Mystery, Cybil for a hardboiled detective series under the male pseudonym of Samuel Leatherman. The pulp angle had been part of my attraction to her in the beginning, just as part of hers for me had been the fact that, as a result of her mother's writing, she'd always been intrigued by private detectives. So we'd struck up an immediate friendship, and had become lovers much sooner than I could have hoped for.

  Meanwhile, things had been happening at the convention that culminated in murder, and I had found myself in an investigation that had almost got me killed. When it was finished I had asked her to marry me, surprising myself as well as her. She hadn't said no; in fact, she'd said that she loved me, too, after her fashion. But she'd been married once, a bad marriage, and she just wasn't sure if she wanted to try it again. She needed more time to think things over, she said. And that was where things stood now.

  Not for long, though, I hoped. I had never been as sure of anything as I was that I wanted Ms. Kerry Wade, she of the fine legs and the wonderful chameleon eyes, to be my wife.

  There was another noise as the line reopened, and she said, "You still there?"

  "Would I hang up on a gorgeous lady like you?"

  "Gorgeous," she said. "Hah. What were you saying about Saturday night?"

  "I was just wondering," I said, "how you felt about snuggling up at your apartment in front of a nice hot fire?"

  "Oh ho. So that's it."

  "Yep. So how do you feel about it?"

  "Well, I might be persuaded. Providing, of course, that you take me out first and ply me with good food."

  "Done. How about Oaxaca's, over on Mission?"

  "Mmm, yes. We could spend the afternoon together, too. Drinks in Sausalito, maybe?"

  "Sounds terrific," I said. "Only I think I may be tied up during the afternoon. I picked up a job today." I told her about John Rothman and what he had hired me to do. "So unless I can wrap things up tomorrow, which doesn't seem likely, I'll be at the book shop
all day Saturday. The place closes at six, though. I could pick you up around seven."

  "Fine," she said. "Right now, I'd better get back to work. Call me tomorrow night? I'll be here late again."

  "Okay. And Kerry. . . I love you."

  "Me, too," she said, and she was gone.

  Smiling, feeling chipper, I went out into the kitchen and opened myself a beer and made a couple of salami-and-cheese sandwiches. Kerry wouldn't have approved; she was of the opinion that my eating habits left something to be desired. Well, she could change them when she became my wife. I had been a bachelor too long to want to change them on my own.

  After I finished eating I curled up on the couch in my cluttered living room—another thing Kerry disapproved of, and that she could change if she was of a mind to, was my sloppy housekeeping habits—with Volume One, Number One of Strange Detective Mysteries, dated October 1937. Norville Page's lead novel, "When the Death-Bat Flies," kept me amused for an hour, and stories by Norbert Davis, Wayne Rogers, Paul Ernst and Arthur Leo Zagat took care of the rest of the evening.

  I got down to Rothman's book shop, dressed in a sports shirt and a pair of old slacks instead of my usual suit and tie, at five minutes to nine on Friday morning. The building, a big old structure with a Victorian facade, was sandwiched between an auction gallery and a Chinese restaurant. A pair of wide plate-glass windows flanked the entrance; behind them were display racks of books of various types. Both windows bore the same legends in dark red lettering:

  J. ROTHMAN, BOOKSELLER

  Fine Books—Used, Rare, Antiquarian

  The front door was locked; I rapped on the glass panel. Pretty soon a stooped, elderly guy, coatless but wearing a white dress shirt and a bow tie, appeared inside. When he got to the door he peered out at me through rimless glasses and then threw the bolt lock and opened up.

  "My name is Jim Marlowe," I told him. "I'm the new man Mr. Rothman hired yesterday."

  "Oh, yes." He gave me his hand and I took it. "Turner, Adam Turner. Assistant Manager."