“Hollow!” I heard the harsh voice of Captain Wallace bark from his corner office. “Hollow! Grant! Get in here now!”
I looked up from my desk in the squad room and straight into the face of the man sitting directly opposite me. That man was Detective Charlie Grant, a guy I hated almost as much as he hated me.
Most detective partners had desks in the squad room placed flush front to front, facing each other, so each detective would always be able to see the mug of their closest cop buddy when he looked up from his desk. Until recently, that had been my long-time partner, Don Evans. He was a great guy who had just retired, so I was now flying solo. Charlie Grant’s partner, Ed Morgan, had recently died from a massive and sudden heart attack. So Grant and I were both flying solo now. We both knew that couldn’t last.
Yesterday, Captain Wallace moved Grant across from me into Don’s old desk. I took that as an omen of things to come. A bad omen.
Charlie Grant looked up at me, shook his head, “The old man’s on a tear, we’d better get in there fast.”
I shrugged, I didn’t care about the old man or his problems, I had my own problems to worry about. My wife, Beth, had recently left me for a swanky doctor across town. She’d cleaned out our bank account, and she’d even taken some of the best pieces of Depression Glass that we’d collected over the years. Some of that stuff was now worth a good bit of cash. She’d taken the quality items and had left me with a quantity of second-rate stuff. I was lucky to have that left. I didn’t know which was worse, loosing the wife—who had become a marginal friend and less-than-marginal lover over the last few years anyway—or loosing all that valuable collectible glassware. Being a collector myself, I figured it was a toss up.
“I’ll take my time, if you don’t mind,” I told the guy across from me. I didn’t even want to think of him as my partner yet. So far he wasn‘t, and I hoped that would last for a while longer. “We’re not dogs that jump to our master’s voice.”
“Hollow! Grant! Get the hell in here now!” the old man barked out again. It was loud and full of menace.
Grant and I jumped then, right out of our seats and hurried into the Captain’s small glass-enclosed office at the back of the squad room. Grant closed the door behind him softly.
Captain Tyler Wallace was an ornery old coot at the best of times who was a charter member of the KMA Club—kiss my ass—he being a few years past the retirement age where he was on schedule to get a good pension. He didn’t give a damn about much and didn’t care who knew it. He was seated behind his desk, which he used like a battleship to bully, intimidate and scare the hell out of rookies, and even some old coppers. This morning his face was twisted with concern and worry. “Don’t sit down, gentlemen, you won’t be here that long.”
I looked at Grant and then back to the Captain, hoping and praying that he wasn’t going to do what I thought he might do—that is, team Grant and I up on a case.
“Grant, Hollow, I’m going to team you up on this case,” Wallace said slowly, allowing his words to sink in. My heart sank. I hated Grant, and he hated me. We had our reasons. “Grant, you’re my best detective, and Hollow, you… I hear you collect a lot of old crap, like antiques and stuff, glass and other junk like old books. Well, don’t you?
“A little,” I ventured carefully. The way Captain Wallace described me, it sounded like I was the local junk man, but I only collected Depression glassware, and not much of that. Only select pieces, and at select prices that I could afford. But I was a collector and I did understand the mentality, so maybe he was right, in his own twisted, over-simplified way of thinking, to pick me for a case that involved collectors.
“Great! That’s just what I need, someone who understands these freaks that collect all this old crap. Books in this case.” he said, shaking his head, like it was a mystery why anyone would want to collect books of all things—much less read them!
“I’m not a book collector, Captain,” I corrected him, just to set the record straight. “I don’t know books at all.”
“You’ll learn. Doesn’t matter really, you collect old stuff, so you get the idea,” he looked at me sternly. Some reaction by me was called for.
I nodded.
“Good, then it’s settled. We just got a call from 101 Montrose, home of Brian McDonald. The man is some kind of rare book dealer. The guy was murdered late last night, by all accounts, stabbed in the back. The body is still fresh, uniforms are there now, lab boys on the way. Get there fast and close this case.”
We both nodded, got set to leave. Neither of us was happy.
“Now listen,” Wallace added in a sharp but low tone, “there‘s something else. I just got a follow-up call from the first uniform on the scene. He found McDonald dead but he also found something scribbled on the man’s desk by his body, it was some kind of message. Now keep this quiet. I don’t know if it is a part of this investigation or not, but we can’t ignore it. I just want you to keep it quiet.”
“What’s the message, Captain?” Charlie Grant asked suspiciously, he had taken out a piece of Juicy Fruit gum and was chewing away happily, like he didn’t have a care in the world. If you knew Grant, that’s the way he was.
“Book Collectors, Go to Hell!”
“Book Collectors…?” I stammered.
“Damn!” Grant replied, not chewing any longer.
“Get on it, guys—and you, Hollow, I want to see something from you on this—and not in the papers. Now both of you, get out!”
* * * * * * *
The house at 101 Montrose was a four bedroom Tudor in an upscale part of town that oozed money and class. Grant and I walked through the yellow crime scene tape and passed the cop on duty at the front door who let us in after we flashed him our badges. “All right, Hollow, I’ll take the lead on this one. We’ll clear it up quicker that way,” Grant said with his characteristic bravado and annoying arrogance. “I’ll show you how it’s done.”
“Gee, thanks,” I replied sarcastically. Then I couldn‘t resist adding, “Yeah, that’s rich, you’ll show me?”
He suddenly stopped walking, his gaze searching my face, “You’re not going to give me any trouble on this, are you, boy?”
Boy? I guess I was ‘boy’ now because I was younger than he was. Or maybe not as experienced—like not experienced in taking money, doctoring evidence, framing up perps to get a case closed. That kind of experience that I knew was par for the course for cops like Grant. I remembered now all the reasons that I didn’t like Charlie Grant and realized I’d have to keep an eye on him.
“Take the lead, I don’t care,” I said pulling back, trying to diffuse any argument, at least for the moment. I mean, we hadn’t even entered the murder house yet—and it seemed already things were getting hot between us.
“That’s better,” Grant told me as he walked inside the house. I shook my head as I followed him, but the blockhead just couldn’t leave it all there, he couldn’t resist taking another stab at my apparent weakness being intimidated by his bully words. I wasn’t, but I didn’t want any trouble.
It got me hot when he added, “Good to see you know your place, Hollow.”
Well, that did it for me. My hand flew to his shoulder and I pulled him backwards, twisting him around so we faced each other. I pushed him hard against the wall of the narrow foyer, my face a bare inch from his own. I could see the sweat gleaming on his face now, the fear in his little pig eyes. Grant was just your garden-variety bully, after all. Maybe I was too, because no sooner had I braced him than I realized I had made a terrible mistake. It was so stupid but I couldn’t stop myself. I really disliked this guy.
I‘d totally lost control and barked into his face, “Listen, numbnuts, the old man says we gotta work this case together, so that means together! You screw around with me and I’ll do you double back. Got it!”
I pushed him away from me with disgust and he lost his balance, wobbled into the wall, straightened himself, then glared at me insanely for a long tense moment. Suddenly he smiled at me. It was weird. I had to admit that his smile was even more unnerving than his usual anger and mad glare. Was I wrong about Grant? Maybe he was more dangerous than I had first though?
“You stay away from me, Hollow, you got that!” Grant barked in a low tone filled with the promise of menace to come. “You ever do that again and I’ll fix you up, fix you up good!”
“You threatening me?” I said, ready to check him hard if he made a lunge at me.
I saw him pat the weapon in the holster under his arm, “Come on. Try me, just try me, asshole!”
I backed off, the situation between us was a lot worse than I ever expected and a lot worse than I needed to deal with while beginning a new case. I’d been so stupid, getting hot about his words. I knew a lot of it had been my fault, my anger at his insults, but I just couldn’t keep on holding back. I knew I’d have to cool down, otherwise I’d blow the entire case. Probably my career, as well.
“Look,” I told him, trying for a more conciliatory manner, “we got a murder here, so let’s just solve it and get this done. Then that’ll be the end of it, and of us.”
“You put your hands on me, Hollow. I don’t forget that.”
“Fine. Look, I admit I was out of line, but you provoked me for no reason. If you want to brood about it, brood about it all you want. We still have a job to do. Now, you want to go upstairs and check out the murder scene?”
Charlie Grant looked at me hard. For a moment it looked like he was about to blurt something out, then apparently he had thought better of it and changed his mind. He simply turned his back on me and began walking up the stairs to the murder room. I followed a few steps behind him, slowly, carefully. Expecting something. Ready for anything. This was turning out to be one big stinking morning so far.
Upstairs there were four bedrooms. It was a large house and the rooms were large. One was the master bedroom. We found out that the wife was not home—thank God! I didn’t feel like dealing with some hysterical grieving widow with her dead husband still in the next room just then. We were also informed there was a maid in the house, the uniforms had her waiting in the kitchen downstairs. We’d talk to her later.
Right now we checked out the upstairs rooms. The other three bedrooms weren’t bedrooms at all, I was amazed to discover that each room was ringed on all sides from floor to ceiling with wooden shelving which was loaded to the bursting point with all kinds of books. All over these rooms and even in the hallway were more shelves and more piles of books. There were stacks as tall as I was on the floor. We could hardly move.
“Damn books everywhere!” Grant muttered. “This whole house is full of stinking books.”
“He’s a book dealer,” I reminded Grant.
“Yeah, I got it, Hollow, but, I mean, this is crazy, man.”
I didn’t say anything else. Grant was right for once—talk about obsessive and compulsive collecting—and I was a collector myself so I understood some of this. Still and all, it was just too much for me to deal with. The house was large but all the shelves and piles of books made it seem so much smaller, tighter, so constricted.
“Bet there’s a small fortune here, though,” Grant added rhetorically, and I could see the greed wheels spinning in his crafty head. “I mean, if a guy knew just which ones out of all these damn books were worth the big money…out of all this mess….”
The son-of-a-bitch was already making pilfering plans. That was another thing I didn’t like about Charlie Grant. Guys that go into people’s homes—some cops, firemen and home nurses—some seem to feel they can help themselves and pick up samples of whatever goodies they like—as long as the owner is a corpse, not home, or too old and incapacitated to even know they’re being robbed blind.
I sighed, “Come on, the vic is in this room here.”
Grant and I entered the largest room where there was an ornate wooden desk. This must have been Brian McDonald’s office. Behind the desk, in a old wooden swivel chair, sat a dead man with a knife or letter opener in his back. Brian McDonald, an older looking guy, gray hair, balding, a little overweight but it didn’t look bad on him—and very dead. I looked closer and saw that the weapon was indeed a letter opener, not a knife, and that it protruded from his back, just below the neck. Nicely placed. He died instantly.
Two guys from the crime lab squeezed by us and were taking photos, then started dusting for prints.
“We in your way?” I asked the older of the two, a guy named Ed Jenkins.
“Nah, we’re almost done here. Place looks pretty clean”—then he laughed—“I mean it’s a mess, but I doubt we’ll pick up any prints. First thing, we dusted the handle of the letter opener and it was clean of any prints, even the vic’s, so it was wiped clean before it was used. The killer wasn’t a pro but he knew what he was doing. He wore gloves.”
“I left the letter opener for you guys to see,” Jenkins said. “We already took photos.”
Grant and I nodded and took a gander at the murder wound. It was grim, the letter opener dug deep into the flesh of the upper back.
“That must have hurt,” Grant offered with a wink to Ed Jenkins.
“I’ll bet,” Jenkins laughed with his best graveside humor.
Now that we’d seen the murder weapon undisturbed, Jenkins carefully extracted it from McDonald’s back with a gloved hand and deftly placed it in a clear plastic evidence bag.
“Anything else?” I asked Jenkins.
“Well, there’s the message written on the desktop. I mean, ‘Book Collectors, Go to Hell!,’ what the hell does that mean?
“We don’t know yet,” I said stumped. “Ah, Ed, keep that quite for now, okay?”
Jenkins gave me a twisted grin, “Sure. Good luck with that! Anyway, the message was almost certainly written with one of these black sharpie markers here; we got prints off of them all, except one. I’d bet the other black markers have the prints of the victim, they were his markers after all. Wanna bet the one we found without any prints was used by the killer and was wiped clean? He knew what he was doing.”
I nodded. It all meant we had nothing yet.
“What about the books? Does it look like anything was stolen?” Grant asked.
Ed Jenkins just laughed at that, “In all this mess? You kidding! Who could tell?”
I nodded, the wife might know, once we talked to her. I wondered where she was. What was keeping her from coming home? I told Grant I wanted to speak to the wife, when she came home from wherever she was, and anyone else closely associated with the victim.
“There’s a Mexican maid downstairs,” Ed Jenkins reminded us as he and his partner packed up to leave. “I told her to wait for you guys in the kitchen.”
“Thanks, Ed, we’ll have a talk with her before we leave.”
Once the crime lab guys walked out, I saw them passing the guys from the morgue who were already waiting out in the hall to come in and take Brian McDonald’s body away.
“Give us a few minutes, guys?”
“Yeah, take all the time you need, detectives,” one of the men replied with a wry smile. “We’re on the clock. No problema.”
I looked at Charlie Grant—my partner—damnit! I slowly closed the office door so that we were now alone with the corpse. It was quite in that room full of books, deathly quiet.
“So what do you think?”
So help me, Grant looked at me seriously and said, “The guy’s dead. Murdered.”
“That’s a big help,” I said sarcastically.
“Look, Hollow, what the hell you want? We got nothing yet. Usual suspects, boyo, that’s all. See who matches up, then we get our guy,” he said confidently.
“What do you make of the message written on the desk?”
“Book Collectors, Go to Hell!?”
“Yeah, that message.”
“Who even knows it has anything to do with the murder?” he replied, and damn if he wasn’t serious about it.
I didn’t say anything for a moment, I was exasperated. I tried counting to ten before I replied. Finally I said, “Look, I suppose it is within the realm of possibility that the message had nothing to do with the murder, but I don’t buy it for a second.”
“So don’t buy it, Hollow. What you want me to do about it. I didn’t write it,” Grant replied getting all arrogant on me again.
“‘Book Collector’s, Go to Hell!’ doesn’t fit in with the murder? Are you serious?” I asked incredulously.
“He wasn’t a book collector.”
“What?” I asked astonished now.
“He wasn’t a book collector, he was a book dealer. A bookseller. Well, wasn’t he?”
“Well, yes, technically you’re right, but in the collecting world that’s sometimes a bit of a misnomer. In any field lots of collectors deal to support their collecting habit and a lot of dealers also collect themselves.”
“Whatever,” was Grant’s brilliant reply.
I sighed, this guy was no help, barely even cooperative. “So how do you want to go about this?”
“We talk to the maid downstairs, then the wife,” he said casually.
“Fine. Then we proceed from where they lead us?” I asked.
“That’s it, Hollow, standard police work,” he couldn’t resist jabbing me. “Maybe in ten or twenty years you’ll get the hang of it.”
Once we left the morgue guys came in to take away the body and Brian McDonald was gone forever.