Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 1974.
Being in the business I’m in—chasing down stolen and overdue books for the public library—I could almost write a book myself on the crazy things people use for bookmarks. Pornographic postcards, hairpins, dog-show ribbons, stalks of celery, marijuana cigarettes. You wouldn’t believe the variety. I even found one teen-ager using the dried skin of a six-inch coral snake. So there was nothing very remarkable about the bookmark I found in Miss Linda Halstrom’s overdue library book. At least, I didn’t think so at the time.
Miss Halstrom was the third on my list of overdues that day. She lived on the north side in a rundown apartment house that was really an old Victorian mansion converted into a dozen efficiencies. The neighborhood had long since lost its pristine elegance, if any.
I walked up three flights of rubber-treaded stairs to her apartment and knocked on her door, wiping my forehead with an already sodden handkerchief. The outdoor temperature that July day must have been over ninety. The third-floor landing was dark and dreary-looking and smelled of stale cooking, which made Miss Linda Halstrom, when she answered my knock, seem all the more entrancing to me.
She was dressed in white stretch slacks and a man’s shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and looked very cool indeed on such a hot day. Her long, straight blonde hair framed a blue-eyed, high-cheekboned face that now wore an inquiring smile. It was downright refreshing just to look at her.
“Yes?” she asked me brightly in a cool contralto.
“Miss Linda Halstrom?” I countered.
She nodded.
I showed her my identification card. “I’m from the public library,” I said. “Our records show that you have some library books overdue, Miss Halstrom. I’ve called to collect the books and the fines you owe.”
A lot of book borrowers get quite indignant at me, for some reason, when I appear at their doors to take back the public library’s property. Maybe it’s because they feel the library is questioning their integrity by sending me around. Or maybe it’s because people tend to resent any kind of police these days—even a library cop like me.
Miss Halstrom, however, was hospitality itself. She apologized profusely for keeping the books so long beyond their due dates. “Come in, Mr. Johnson,” she invited. “I have the books right here.”
I followed her into her combination living room-bedroom. The bed, along the far wall, was neatly made up into a day bed, covered with a gaily striped bedspread and strewn with colorful pillows. Everything in the place was as clean and refreshing as Miss Halstrom herself. She pointed to a coffee table by the daybed. “There they are,” she said, “three of them. Right?”
“Three is correct.” I picked up the library books and checked them against my list. “You’ll have to pay the fine.”
She shrugged prettily. “My own fault,” she said. “I lent them to a friend and forgot all about when they were due. How much is the fine?”
I told her the amount. “I’ll get my purse,” she said, and headed for a closet at the other end of the room while I went through my standard procedure of shaking her three books upside down to see if she’d left anything between the pages.
A small slip of white paper fluttered to the floor from the third book, a suspense story called The Hub of the Wheel. The paper landed on the carpet face up, and as I stooped to retrieve it I noted automatically what seemed to be a telephone number written on it in black ink. I picked up the paper and put it on Miss Halstrom’s coffee table.
Miss Halstrom found her purse on the closet shelf, crossed the room to me, and counted out the money for her fine. I took it, gathered up her overdue books, and left. I was reluctant to exchange her cool presence for the stifling heat of the streets. But a job’s a job.
Going down her stairs, between the second and third floors, I brushed past a short swarthy man in a neat gray suit who was going up. Then I was out in the street again, reaching for my damp handkerchief to resume mopping operations.
I negotiated two blocks of steaming sidewalk between Miss Halstrom’s apartment house and my parked car, unlocked the trunk compartment, and fitted her three library books into a big carton. Then I climbed behind the wheel, fired up, and went on about my business.
On my next call I picked up four overdue books from the janitor of a funeral home and came panting back to my car once again, fishing in my pocket for my car keys. I stooped to unlock the trunk and only then realized that this time I wouldn’t need a key. Because the trunk was already unlocked. And the lid gaped open about two inches.
Since I’m often careless about locking my trunk, this wouldn’t have bothered me at all, except that the trunk lock was twisted out of shape, and the lid showed definite evidence that a prying tool had been used to force it.
Well, the rifling of locked car trunks has become a favorite outdoor sport of the “disadvantaged” these days, they tell me, so I wasn’t too surprised at becoming another victim. I lifted the trunk lid and saw that my carton of books was still there. To the casual eye it looked completely undisturbed.
But my eye is not a casual one; I have an extremely good visual memory. And I distinctly remembered that I had fitted Miss Halstrom’s three overdue books into my carton with a novel called Brainstorm on top. Now the top title was The Hub of the Wheel, and Brainstorm had been demoted to the second place in the stack.
I transferred all the books from the trunk to the back seat of the car, tied the trunk lid down with a piece of cord, and got behind the wheel again, reflecting ruefully that my trunk lock had been destroyed to no purpose. For it was obvious that whoever had broken into my trunk, on finding nothing but a box of library books (used) for his trouble, placidly glanced over some of the titles and then departed in disgust to try for richer spoils elsewhere. A nuisance. But my insurance would take care of the damage to the lock.
At noon I went back to the library and turned in the books and the fines I had collected, ate my lunch in the library cafeteria, and had barely got settled at the desk in my tiny office to plan the afternoon’s work when my phone rang. Annie, on the library switchboard, said, “Hal, some girl has been trying to get you for an hour. Where’ve you been?”
“Eating lunch,” I said. “Who was she?”
“A Miss Halstrom. I told her you’d call her back when you came in.”
I felt a small thrill of pleasure. “What are you waiting for then?” I asked Annie.
When Miss Halstrom’s contralto came on the line it sounded different. Not so cool and refreshing now. In fact, it sounded on the edge of panic. It said, “Mr. Johnson?”
“Yes?”
“Are you the man who collected my overdue library books this morning?”
I assured her I was.
“Oh, thank goodness!” she said. “Will you please do me a favor, Mr. Johnson?”
I said gallantly, “Just ask me, Miss Halstrom.”
“Well, there was a bookmark in one of my library books, with a telephone number on it, Mr. Johnson. And I have to get it back, please. It’s very important. It was in the book called The Hub of the Wheel. Do you remember that book?”
“Sure,” I said. “And it did have a bookmark in it. But I left the bookmark on your coffee table this morning.”
“The coffee table!” Her voice held the beginnings of relief. “Are you sure? Please, wait’ll I look, will you please?” In a moment she was back on the line. “It’s there, Mr. Johnson! Oh, how can I thank you? I’m so dumb! I put my purse right down on top of it when I was paying you the money for my fine this morning. No wonder we didn’t see it. My boyfriend was furious with me!”
“Boyfriend?” I tried to keep disappointment out of my voice.
In her relief she chattered exuberantly on. “I told you this morning I’d lent the books to a friend. Well, it was my boyfriend, and the bookmark with the telephone number on it was his, not mine. I didn’t even know it was in the book until he came in this morning right after you left and asked for that book because he’d remembered he’d left an important telephone number in it. And I told him you’d just left with the books, so he ran out after you to see if he could reach you and get his bookmark back, but he couldn’t find you, so he told me to get that telephone number back for him somehow or I’d be sorry.”
She took a deep breath. “And now I’ve got it, and the whole silly thing was just because of my dumbness!” She laughed. “I’m sorry I bothered you, Mr. Johnson. But I’ve never seen Jerry so upset!” She hung up.
I remembered the short swarthy fellow I’d passed on her stairway that morning. He must have been Miss Halstrom’s boyfriend and evidently had an ugly temper. And obviously the man was pitifully unworthy of Miss Linda Halstrom, the Scandinavian goddess who had brightened my morning.
It was late the next afternoon before I got around to calling my insurance man to tell him about the broken lock of my car trunk. He said, “Get it fixed and send the bill to me. You’ve reported it to the police, of course?”
“No. What’s the use? Nothing was taken.”
“Do it anyway,” he told me. “It has to be on the official record before we can pay any claim on it.”
“I’m police,” I said. “Don’t I count?”
“You’re just sissy unofficial fuzz,” he said. “Report it downtown if you want us to pay the bill.”
So on my way home that evening I stopped off at police headquarters and asked to see Lieutenant Randall. I’d worked for several years in the plainclothes division under Randall before I took my library job.
Randall was sitting in his office behind a perfectly clear desk, chewing gently on a stogie and regarding the world sleepily through his yellow cat’s eyes. He greeted me with a wave of his hand. “Hi, Hal,” he said blandly. “You run into some crime at the public library that you can’t handle by yourself?”
Just as blandly I answered, “No, Lieutenant. And if I need help I wouldn’t come here for it. I understand the only good detective you ever had in this department resigned five years ago.
Randall grinned. “So what do you want?”
“To report a break-in.”
“My, my! Whose?”
“Mine. Somebody jimmied the trunk lid of my car between 10:30 and 10:45 yesterday morning while I was parked in the 9200 block of Cook Street on the north side.”
“Anything stolen?” asked Randall placidly.
“No. But my insurance man won’t pay for repairs unless I report the thing officially.”
“Okay,” Randall said. “You’ve reported it. You don’t expect us to find the culprit, do you?”
“No way.”
“Unless,” said Randall, very bland again, “the only good detective we ever had in this department can give us a clue to work on.”
I grinned and started to shake my head. Then I said, “Wait a minute, Lieutenant. Maybe I do have a clue for you.” For echoing in my mind, suddenly and for no reason, was the contralto voice of Miss Linda Halstrom saying to me over the phone: “…so he ran out after you to see if he could catch you and get his bookmark back, but he couldn’t find you…
I told Lieutenant Randall about the bookmark business. “So it’s barely possible, isn’t it,” I asked him when I’d finished, “that Miss Halstrom’s boyfriend didn’t try to catch me at all, but instead followed me in his car until I parked, then jimmied open my trunk, looking for his telephone number? And didn’t find it? For the only books that showed signs of having been moved in my carton were two of Miss Halstrom’s books.”
Randall laughed. “Some clue! Why would this boyfriend do a thing like that? When he could have just asked you for the bookmark?”
“Maybe he didn’t want me to notice the telephone number?”
“Why not?”
“How do I know? But he obviously considered the number important enough to come down hard on poor Miss Halstrom for unknowingly giving it to me.”
“If he couldn’t remember the number, why not look it up again? Or ask Information for it?”
“Maybe it was an unlisted number.”
Randall blew smoke. “Do you remember it? You used to be good at that.”
I closed my eyes and visualized the slip of paper staring up at me from Miss Halstrom’s carpet yesterday. “Yeah,” I said. I tore a sheet off Randall’s desk pad and wrote on it: Cal 928-4791.
Randall looked at what I’d written. “What’s the ‘Cal’?”
“Layman’s shorthand for ‘Call,’ I guess.”
Randall put his stogie on a battered ashtray, asked for an outside line, and dialed the number. He held his telephone receiver a couple of inches away from his ear so I could hear the distant ringing.
After only one ring someone picked up the receiver. A woman’s voice said, “Yes?”
Randall murmured into the phone, “Is this the Peckinpaugh residence, please?”
“No,” said the voice. “Wrong number.” And there was a click as she hung up.
“You’re losing your charm,” I said to Randall.
Unabashed, he waited a moment, then dialed the number again. The same woman’s voice answered immediately. “Yes?” This time the question was asked in a tight controlled tone, highly charged with either anxiety or anger.
Randall said, “Who is this, please?”
“Will you kindly stay off this line?” the woman said sharply. “I’m expecting an important call.” And she hung up again.
“Why didn’t you tell her who you are?” I asked Randall.
“I didn’t get a chance.” Grimly he dialed the number once more, and when the woman answered he said sternly, “Now don’t hang up, lady, this is the police calling.”
This pronouncement was greeted by an exclamation that was part wail, part sob. “The police! But we don’t want the police! Will you please stop tying up this line?” And another click.
Randall’s yellow eyes turned thoughtful. “‘But we don’t want the police,’” he murmured. “An odd turn of phrase, wouldn’t you say, Hal?”
“I would. And she sounded quite upset.”
He pushed his phone across the desk to me. “You try it,” he said. I began to dial. He said, “Wait.” He was looking at the memo sheet with the telephone number on it. “What if this ‘Cal’ doesn’t mean ‘Call’? What if it’s a name? Like short for Calvin, or Calhoun, or something?”
That hadn’t occurred to me. I nodded. “I’ll try it.” I dialed the number.
This time, when the receiver was lifted at the other end, I got in first. “Is Cal there?” I asked brightly.
A sharp intake of breath came clearly over the wire. Then, “Thank God!” The woman’s voice sounded faint and weak. “Is she all right? You haven’t hurt her, have you?” A gulp. Then, with more control, “I’m doing exactly as you said. I’ll have the money ready tomorrow, as soon as the banks open…
Randall was leaning over his desk toward me, listening intently to the small voice at the other end of the wire. I looked into his cat’s eyes and raised my eyebrows. He shook his head violently. I said into the telephone, “Isn’t Calvin Brown there? Isn’t this 928-3791?”—deliberately giving the wrong number.
Her words stopped as though I’d turned off a faucet.
Randall nodded at me and I said hurriedly, “I’m sorry. I must have dialed it wrong. Excuse it, please,” and hung up.
Lieutenant Randall leaned back slowly in his chair. “How do you like that?” he said softly.
I said, “Are you going to barge in on it? She was terrified of police.”
“Not at her end. I want to know who she is, though. And Cal, too.”
An official police demand brought us the information from the telephone company that unlisted number 928-4791 was assigned to a Mrs. Wilson A. Benedict on Waterside Drive.
I whistled. “She can afford to pay the ransom, I guess. She’s the widow of Wilson Benedict, the bank president, isn’t she?”
Randall didn’t answer. He was already calling the Obituary editor of the Evening News who informed us, after he located the clipping in his files, that Wilson A. Benedict, when killed in an auto accident the year before, had been survived by his wife, two college-age sons, and a four-year-old daughter named Callie.
“Callie,” Randall said, picking up his stogie. “She must be our Cal. Let’s go see your Miss Halstrom.”
I was already on my feet. “Right,” I said, just as though I still worked for him.
Five minutes after we found her partaking of a late dinner in her apartment on the north side, Randall had extracted the following information from a distressed but cooperative Miss Halstrom. Item: her boyfriend’s name was Jerry Gates. Item: he was chauffeur-handyman for a wealthy family named Carson on Waterside Drive and lived in their garage apartment. Item: the Carsons were on vacation in the mountains. Item: Jerry Gates was going to marry Linda Halstrom as soon as he got the large legacy he was expecting from an uncle who had died while Jerry was serving as a medic in Vietnam several years ago, before Jerry had even met Linda. And item: the telephone number on his missing bookmark, according to Jerry, was that of the lawyer, name unknown, whom he was supposed to call to find out when he could expect his legacy.
Well, that was enough information for Randall. We left Halstrom weeping into her cold TV dinner and took off for Waterside Drive. En route Randall called headquarters and ordered reinforcements to meet us. He wanted to leave me out of it, but he couldn’t waste time arguing, so I went along.
When the reinforcements arrived, there were six of us, counting me, a small army.
As it turned out we didn’t need that many, but we didn’t know that till later. It was full dark by the time we reached Waterside Drive. A promise of coming coolness was faintly detectable in the overheated July air. We drove past the stone entrance pillars twice before we left the cars a block away and drifted back, in shifts of two, trying to look inconspicuous as we ducked inside and melted into the gloom of the trees that lined the drive.
When we were all there, gathered in the dense shadow of a huge sycamore, Randall looked over the setup. The enormous turn-of-the-century house, covered with gingerbread scrollwork that was faintly visible to us in the starlight, squatted at the end of the driveway like an obscene insect. Not a single light shone in it. Off to the right, maybe 30 yards from the house and placed out of sight from the street, was an old-fashioned two-car garage, originally a carriage house in all probability, with the chauffeur’s quarters above it. We could see a light shining from the front windows of the garage apartment.
Randall pointed to the light. “That’s it,” he whispered. He looked up at the gnarled limbs of the sycamore that sheltered us and said, “O’Neill, get up in this tree with your field glasses and see what you can see.”
We waited then in complete silence, broken only by the scrape of shoe leather on rough tree bark, while O’Neill climbed the tree. Every few feet he’d stop and take a look through the field glasses to see if he was high enough to get a view into the lighted windows of the chauffeur’s quarters. Finally he settled on a thick branch about 25 feet up and trained his glasses on the windows for several minutes without moving.
“Well?” asked Randall as O’Neill came sliding down the tree.
“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?”