The next day was the third day after Brian McDonald’s murder and I was no closer to finding his murderer than I had been when Captain Wallace had first paired me up with Charlie Grant. That had proved to be a cop partnership created in hell, but I knew I’d have to make the best of it. Worse than that even, I had to make it work, and that meant finding the killer and closing the case. Otherwise I was sure Captain Wallace would take any failure out of my own hide.
When I walked into the squad room that morning I saw Grant was already in with Captain Wallace. The office door was closed and they were talking rather animatedly. I could imagine what the topic was, and it wasn’t the McDonald murder—or perhaps only peripherally. I walked over to the end of the room and when they noticed me approaching the office Grant opened the door and walked out. He came straight over to me.
“I just wanted to tell you, Hollow,” Grant stated with maximum sarcasm dripping from his voice, “I asked Cap to take me off this damn case. You’ve made a mess of it. I told him because of you, it will go cold case by the end of the week. He didn’t like that. Now you’ve got us looking for stolen books? I asked him to split us up as partners. I told him you’re a freakin’ nut case and that I want out.”
We were quiet for a long moment after that, just glaring at each other.
Then I realized something, Grant hadn’t lowered the boom. I smiled, told him with a snicker, “So I guess we’re still partners and you’re still on the case.”
Grant’s face grew beet red and he strode away from me almost apoplectic. When he was a few feet away I heard him shout, “Asshole!”
“Moron!” I barked back loudly.
“Fucking asshole!” Grant screamed out as loud as he could. The entire squad room looked at him and then over to me. Some of the guys laughed. Others clapped. They loved good cop-type entertainment.
I sighed, what the hell could I say to top that? Call him a ‘double-fucking-asshole‘?
I went over to my desk and sat down, tried to calm myself and then placed a call to Al Spears. He was up and waiting for my call, ready with the list and he gave it to me over the phone. I quickly wrote it down. He’d been thorough, not only giving me the names of ten local university libraries and special collections that were excellent prospects, but he also included the name of a contact person at each location and their phone number.
“Thanks, Mr. Spears,” I said, surprised by his length of cooperation, “this is a big help.”
“No problem, you’d be amazed what you can do on Google and the Internet. Good luck, and let me know how it all turns out.”
I thanked him again, then hung up the phone. I cut the list in half and then called over Charlie Grant.
“What the hell you want now, Hollow?”
I gave him his half of Spears list. “Here, make the calls on these five. I’ll call the other five.”
“So what are we looking for?” he grumbled.
“We want to know if Brian McDonald signed-in to get access to any of these special collections.”
“I know that, idiot! I mean, so what does it mean if we find anything? Why are we doing this?”
I looked at Charlie Grant hard, the bastard was really trying my patience. I didn’t want to reach over my desk and bitch slap him into a stupor—I mean, actually I did—but I’d have to cool it with that type of thinking for now. Instead I told him, “Just do it, then we’ll go on from there.”
“Whatever.”
We made the calls.
It took a lot longer than either of us ever thought it would. Going through college and university bureaucracy, even in the library field, turned out to be just unbelievable. I called and spoke to a bunch of overly academic guys and gals, all anal retentive types, dourly officious and ultimately annoying to the point of making me want to scream at their blockheadedness. Over-educated idiots. I mean, did these people take stupid pills? Finally I was able to get them to clue into the fact that I was investigating a murder and asked about the sign-in sheets and Brian McDonald’s name. They gave me endless rigmarole about privacy considerations and rules so I had to take them through the entire process, then go through their supervisors. I got the feeling none of them really liked cops at all. When any info was able to be pried from their cold bureaucratic academician fingers, I came up empty for a lead. That left me dead in the water.
I reluctantly walked around my desk to where Charlie Grant sat at his desk making calls, “Anything on your five with McDonald?”
“No. Nothing,” he said flatly. “They never heard of him.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, none of them ever heard of any Brian McDonald. His name is not on any of their sign-in sheets.”
That just didn’t ring true. I looked at Grant and he looked back at me with a wicked told-you-so sneer, happy my little plan had sunk faster than the Titanic.
“What now, genius?”
What now, indeed.
I stood there a moment thinking, or trying to think. Finally I said, “Look, Brian McDonald was definitely going into these libraries to steal stuff, just like that ex-Clinton official Sandy Berger. Remember him? He was convicted of stealing a lot of top-secret presidential documents from the National Archives, all stashed in his pants and socks.”
“Yeah, Sandy Burglar. I remember him.”
“Anyway, if someone could do it with presidential papers at the National Archives in Washington D.C., it wouldn’t be much of a stretch for Brian McDonald to do it at some understaffed libraries here in the city,” I offered.
“So?” was Grant’s only reply.
I looked at him closely, he was being no help at all. I could see he didn’t give a damn about helping me or working the case—he wanted off it in the worse way. I knew I’d have to play this almost all on my own. So be it. No sweat really, maybe it was better that way.
“Look, I’m going to call my five names again, get their fax number and send them that photo of McDonald we got from his wife. Then we’ll see if anyone remembers him. You call back your five and do the same thing, okay?”
“All right, Hollow, I’ll try that. One more time, then that’s it. Maybe he used an alias or an assumed name.”
“He used something,” I said.
Then we got to work, made the calls again, explained everything all over again, then faxed over the photo to the contacts Spears had given us at the ten libraries.
Then we waited.
An hour later I got the first call back from the Wilson University Library. Director Harold Crowhank whined into my ear, “Yes, I recognize the photo, detective. He has been here on numerous occasions but not under the name you gave us, not under Brian McDonald. Oh no, not under that name at all. We have no listing for him under Brian McDonald.”
“Then what name do you have him listed under?” I asked sharply, impatient now and chomping at the bit for a break. I knew this might be the break we were looking for.
“I’ll have to ask the staff,” Crowhank said thoughtfully, “you see, they do most of the grunt work here.”
“Don’t they check IDs?” I chided.
“Of course they do, but you have to understand these are, for the most part, pimple-faced freshmen trying to earn a few bucks at a scud work job. Or simply volunteers. They don’t run the library or investigate IDs. They look at a driver’s license, see if the photo matches the person with the ID, then take down the name. They’re not the FBI, they can’t tell if an ID is fake or not, and we don’t want them to do that. We don’t want to inconvenience our visitors, many of whom are influential people in the media or scholars doing important research.”
“I see,” I said softy. “No wonder so much stuff is being stolen.”
Crowhank picked up on that at once, I could feel the tension in his voice, “Stolen? Are you telling me the library has been the victim of a theft in one of its rare papers collections?”
“Nothing we can prove yet, sir, so calm down, please,” I said. “Just talk to your staff and get back to me as soon as you can about the name that goes with that photo.”
“I will do that right away,” Crowhank said, then hung up.
I checked with Charlie Grant next. He was having some trouble, waiting for people to get back to him who were slow in responding. It set him off.
It was near noon, Grant was getting antsy and got up from his desk and just walked away towards the large double doors at the end of the squad room.
“Hey?” I shouted. “Where you going?”
“If you must know, I’m going to lunch,” he said coldly.
“You could let me know,” I told him.
“I don’t have to clear anything with you, Hollow, remember that,” he said sharply, then he walked out of the squad room in a huff.
I fell back into my chair with a groan, staring at the phone, willing it to ring, but it was as dead as my chances of any promotion in this department. Some of the guys had ordered in and I had them get me a hero, then I got a coke from the machine in the hallway. It was a quiet meal, I sat alone at my desk, trying to figure this case out and coming up empty.
Then the phone on my desk started ringing. The phone on Grant’s desk also started ringing.
I picked up my phone right away, it was Crowhank, “Detective, Hollow?”
“Yes, sir,” I said trying to keep calm, hoping this might be the break I needed.
“Detective Hollow, we had a match. One of our second year students put the face to a name.”
“Not Brian McDonald?” I asked hopefully.
“Oh no, not at all. Get this, he told me the name used was Alex Spears,” Crowhank said proudly, like he was enjoying being my own personal junior G-Man.
Alex Spears? I shook my head, either Spears had been playing us all along—which I could not believe—or Brian McDonald was a lot more cunning than I’d given him credit for. This didn’t look good. Spears could be a dead end.
I looked up as I saw Charlie Grant come over to his desk and pick up his ringing phone. He started talking to the caller. I tried to hear what was being said, wondering if it was some news we needed.
“Detective?” Crowhank asked, getting my attention back to his call. “Are you still there?”
“Oh…yes, of course, Mr. Crowhank, I’m right here. Just thinking.”
“Well, I hope this has been of help to you. Are you sure there has been no theft in my library?” he asked, which I realized was his main and only concern now.
“Honestly, we don’t know yet.”
“That sounds bad,” he said, his voice tense, nervous.
“I won’t sugar-coat it for you. We’re looking into things but we just started. This is just a sidebar on a murder investigation. I’ll let you know if anything comes of it,” I told him. I wanted to get off the phone and see what Grant had come up with—if anything.
“A sidebar? The Wilson Library is not just a sidebar, detective, even in a murder case. It’s an important institution of higher learning to our city, to our nation, a repository of some of the most priceless collections of letters and papers written by major authors, scientists and politicians—the movers and shakers of our nation for the last one hundred years!”
I sighed, he was certainly correct, but I had nothing to tell him now and I wanted to cut the call. “As soon as I find out anything, Mr. Crowhank, I’ll let you know.”
The other end of the phone went silent for a moment, then Crowhank said, “I‘ll hold you to that, Detective,” then he hung up.
I shook my head in exasperation, put Crowhank and his problems out of my mind and concentrated on Brian McDonald. So McDonald had been using the name of his partner Alex Spears? He had a fake ID, probably a driver’s license with Spears’ name on it but with his own photo, something that looked good enough to get past some college kid with the attention span of a gnat. So, was McDonald just using the fake ID, or was he planning on framing Spears if the thefts were ever discovered? I thought about that and realized it was most likely both. McDonald was a cunning bastard. No wonder he had been murdered.
I got out of my chair and walked around my desk towards Grant. He was off the phone now and I told him what Crowhank had told me.
“Yeah, what I just heard jibes with that, Hollow. The guy at Cornell Library Special Collections, told me the photo definitely matched a man who kept coming in to examine certain author collections. The name was Alex Spears.”
I nodded, “But it wasn’t Spears, it was McDonald.”
“Yeah, so Spears is in the clear, I guess,” Grant admitted reluctantly. “This Brian McDonald was a sharpie all right, using his partner’s name like that, but I can see the smarts behind it. Every time I get a room with a hooker I sign in under the name Bentley Hollow,” he laughed wickedly.
“Nice one,” I said, wondering if he was telling me the truth.
“So now what? I mean, knowing McDonald stole rare books for resale tells us he was a crook and a weasel, but it doesn’t get us one inch closer to his killer,” Grant stated.
I had to admit it, my square head partner had a point there.
I had another plan I’d been formulating while I‘d been on the phone, so I told it to Grant now.
“Listen, I think it’s time we split up. Why don’t you go back and speak to the wife about the books and see who gets them now that McDonald‘s dead. It should be her. If you have time left, maybe run by the ex-maid—McDonald was caught doing her by the wife—then maybe pay the mistress a visit? She might know something.”
Grant smiled, I knew he’d jump at the female bait I was putting out there to get him out of my hair. “Yeah, okay, I been curious about all these women all along—see if they’re as hot as McDonald thought.”
I shrugged, “Whatever.”
“What about you, Hollow?” he asked suspicion suddenly clouding his face.
“I’m going back to talk with Spears again, see if I can find out why McDonald used his name to sign-in and what his reaction is to that. I don’t think he’s the killer but he may know more than he is letting on. I also want to see if he ever did research himself at any of the ten libraries he gave us. He seemed to have a lot of information on them, like he’d been there before. Makes me wonder. Then I’m going to talk to that ex-wife again.”
“The lesbo?” Grant laughed, giving me a throat-cutting gesture.
“Yeah.”
“Well, you won’t get nothing from her, I tried. If I couldn’t melt her you won’t have a ghost of a chance. She probably hates men. They all do.”
I wondered why. “Thanks for your concern.”
“Just trying to set you straight, Hollow. Get it? Straight? You’re barking up the wrong tree.”
“I’m not barking up any tree, Grant, she’s a witness, that’s all.”
“Yeah, sure,” he laughed. “I’ll see you back here tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow morning,” I said as I walked away.
I couldn’t get away from Charlie Grant soon enough. Now I was on my own, Grant was doing his thing and I was doing my own thing, and that’s the way I liked it. It was good to not have to look at his beady little eyes and see that smart-aleck look on his face.