Ellery Queen's Magicians of Mystery, page 28
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.
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.”
“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 eyes.
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?”
“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 him when I was in the detective bureau 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.
“If Hatfield’s killing is connected with this book, as you seem to think,” Randall said reasonably enough, “there’s got to be something about the book to tell us why.”
I said, “Maybe there was. Before the back flyleaf was torn out.”
“Be damned!” said Randall, squinting where I was pointing. “Torn out is right. Something written on the flyleaf that this Conway wanted kept private maybe?”
“Could be.”
“Thought you said you looked through this book yesterday. You’d have seen any writing.”
“I didn’t look through it. I shook it out, that’s all.”
“Why would a guy write anything private or incriminating on the blank back page of a library book, for God’s sake?”
“His wife found the book under the telephone in their bedroom. He could have been taking down notes during a telephone conversation.”
“In a library book?”
“Why not? If it was the only blank paper he had handy when he got the telephone call?”
“So his wife gave the book back to you before he’d had a chance to erase his notes. Is that what you’re suggesting?”
“Or transcribe them, yes. Or memorize them.”
Lieutenant Randall looked out Hatfield’s grimy window for a moment. Then he said abruptly, “I’m impounding this library book for a few days, Hal, so our lab boys can take a look at it. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Randall glanced pointedly toward the door. “Thanks for calling us,” he said. “Be seeing you.”
I stepped carefully around Hatfield’s sprawled body. “Right.”
“I’ll be in touch if we find anything,” Randall said.
Much to my surprise, he phoned me at the library just about quitting time the next day. “Did you ever see this Mr. Conway?” he asked. “Could you identify him?”
“I never saw him in the flesh. I saw a photo of him on his wife’s desk.”
“That’s good enough. Meet me at the Encore Bar at Stanhope and Cotton in twenty minutes, can you?”
“Sure,” I said. “Why?”
“Tell you when I see you.”
He was waiting for me in a rear booth. There were only half a dozen customers in the place. I sat down facing him and he said, without preamble, “Conway did write something on the back flyleaf of your library book. Or somebody did, anyhow. Because we found traces of crushed paper fibers on the page under the back flyleaf. Not good enough traces to be read except for one notation at the top, which was probably written first on the back flyleaf when the pencil point was sharper and thus made a deeper groove on the page underneath. Are you with me?”
“Yes. What did it say?”
Randall got a slip of paper from his pocket and showed it to me. It contained one line, scribbled by Randall:
Transo 3212/5/13 Mi
Encore Harper 6/12
I studied it silently for a minute. Randall said, faintly smug, “Does that mean anything to you?”
“Sure,” I said, deadpan. “Somebody named Harper off Transoceanic Airlines flight 3212 out of Miami on May 13th—that’s today—is supposed to meet somebody in this bar at twelve minutes after six.”
“A lucky guess,” Randall said, crestfallen. “The Encore and Transo gave it to you, of course. But it took us half an hour to figure the meaning and check it out.”
“Check it out?”
“There really is a Transoceanic flight 3212 out of Miami today—and there really is somebody aboard named Harper, too. A Miss Genevieve Harper, stewardess.”
“Oh,” I said, “and of course there is an Encore Bar—could even be a couple of them in town.”
“Only one that Harper can get to through rush-hour traffic within twenty minutes after she hits the airport,” the lieutenant said triumphantly. “She’s scheduled in at 5:52.”
I glanced at my watch. It was 5:30. “You have time to check whether Conway had any phone calls Sunday night?”
“Not yet. Didn’t even have time to find out what Conway looks like. That’s why you’re here.” He grinned. “What’s your guess about why they’re meeting here?”
I gave it some thought. “Drugs,” I said at last, “since the flight seems to be out of Miami. Most of the heroin processed in France comes to the United States via South America and Miami, right?”
Randall nodded. “We figure Conway for a distributor at this end. Sunday night he got a phone call from somebody in South America or Miami, telling him when and where to take delivery of a shipment. That’s what he wrote on the flyleaf of your library book. So no wonder he was frantic when his wife gave his list of dates and places to a library cop.”
I suddenly felt tired. I called over to the bartender and ordered a dry martini. I said to Randall, “So Hatfield’s accident could have been murder?”
“Sure. We think it went like this: Mrs. Conway gave you the book, got knocked around by her husband when she told him what she’d done, then on hubby’s orders came to you to recover the book for him. When she couldn’t do that, or even get the name of the subsequent borrower, her husband did the best he could with the information she did get—the borrower’s library card number and how you matched it up with his name and address. Conway got the name the same way you did—by phoning what’s-her-name at your main desk.”
“Kathy,” I said.
“Yeah. Conway must have gone right out to Hatfield’s when he learned his identity, prepared to do anything necessary to get that book back—or his list on the flyleaf, anyway. Conway broke the lock on Hatfield’s apartment and was inside looking for the book when Hatfield must have walked in on him.”
“And Conway hid behind the door and clobbered Hatfield when he walked in?”
“Yeah. Probably with a blackjack. And probably, in his panic, hit him too hard. So he faked it to look like an accident. Then he tore the back flyleaf out of your book thinking nobody would ever notice it was missing.”
“You forgot something,” I said.
“What?”
“He made his wife call me off by telling me he’d found his lost check.”
“I didn’t forget it,” Randall grinned.
I said, “Of course you can’t prove any of this.”
“Not yet. But give us time. We get him on a narcotics charge and hold him tighter than hell while we work up the murder case.”
