Jean Backus - Ellery Queen. The Best of Suspense

“I want it.”

“For what?”

“Evidence, maybe.”

“In your torture-murder case?”

He lost patience. “Look, just get hold of the book for me, Hal. I’ll tell you about it when I pick it up, okay?”

“Okay, Lieutenant. When?”

“Ten minutes.” He sounded eager.

I hung up and called Ellen on the checkout desk. “Listen, sweetheart,” I said to her because it makes her mad to be called sweetheart and she s extremely attractive when she’s mad, “can you find me The Damion Complex, copy number ES4187? I brought it in yesterday among the overdues.”

“The Damion Complex?” She took down the number. “I’ll call you back, Hal.” She didn’t sound a bit mad. Maybe she was softening up at last. I’d asked her to marry me seventeen times in the last six months, but she was still making up her mind.

In two minutes she called me back. “It’s out again,” she reported. “It went out on card number 3888 yesterday after you brought it in.”

Lieutenant Randall was going to love that. “Who is card number 3888?”

“A Miss Oradell Murphy.”

“Address?”

She gave it to me, an apartment on Leigh Street.

“Telephone number?”

“I thought you might be able to look that up yourself.” She was tart. “I’m busy out here.”

“Thank you, sweetheart,” I said. “Will you marry me?”

“Not now. I told you I’m busy.” She hung up. But she did it more gently than usual, it seemed to me. She was softening up. My spirits lifted.

Lieutenant Randall arrived in less than the promised ten minutes. “Where is it?” he asked, fixing me with his cat stare. He seemed too big to fit into my office. “You got it for me?”

I shook my head. “It went out again yesterday. Sorry.”

He grunted in disappointment, took a look at my spindly visitor’s chair, and decided to remain standing. “Who borrowed it?”

I told him Miss Oradell Murphy, Apartment 3A at the Harrington Arms on Leigh Street.

“Thanks.” He tipped a hand and turned to leave.

“Wait a minute. Where you going, Lieutenant?”

“To get the book.”

“Those apartments at Harrington Arms are efficiencies,” I said. “Mostly occupied by single working women. So maybe Miss Murphy won’t be home right now. Why not call first?”

He nodded. I picked up my phone and gave our switchboard girl Miss Murphy’s telephone number. Randall fidgeted nervously.

“No answer,” the switchboard reported.

I grinned at Randall. “See? Nobody home.”

“I need that book.” Randall sank into the spindly visitor’s chair and sighed in frustration.

“You were going to tell me why.”

“Here’s why.” He fished a damp crumpled bit of paper out of an envelope he took from his pocket. I reached for it. He held it away. “Don’t touch it,” he said. “We found it on the kid we pulled from the river this morning. It’s the only damn thing we did find on him. No wallet, no money, no identification, no clothing labels, no nothing. Except for this he was plucked as clean as a chicken. We figure it was overlooked. It was in the bottom of his shirt pocket.”

“What’s it say?” I could see water-smeared writing.

He grinned unexpectedly, although his yellow eyes didn’t seem to realize that the rest of his face was smiling. “It says: PL Damion Complex ES4187.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“Great bit of deduction, Lieutenant,” I said. “You figured the PL for Public Library?”

“All by myself.”

“So what’s it mean?”

“How do I know till I get the damn book?” He sat erect and went on briskly, “Who had the book before Miss Murphy?”

I consulted my overdue list from the day before. “Gregory Hazzard. Desk clerk at the Starlight Motel on City Line. I picked up seven books and fines from him yesterday.”

The Lieutenant was silent for a moment. Then, “Give Miss Murphy another try, will you?”

She still didn’t answer her phone.

Randall stood up. My chair creaked when he removed his weight. “Let’s go see this guy Hazzard.”

“Me, too?”

“You, too.” He gave me the fleeting grin again. “You’re mixed up in this, son.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Your library owns the book. And you belong to the library. So move your tail.”

Gregory Hazzard was surprised to see me again so soon. He was a middle-aged skeleton, with a couple of pounds of skin and gristle fitted over his bones so tightly that he looked like the object of an anatomy lesson. His clothes hung on him — snappy men’s wear on a scarecrow. “You got all my overdue books yesterday,” he greeted me.

”I know, Mr. Hazzard. But my friend here wants to ask you about one of them.”

“Who’s your friend?” He squinted at Randall.

“Lieutenant Randall, City Police.”

Hazzard blinked. “Another cop? We went all through that with the boys from your robbery detail day before yesterday.”

Randall’s eyes flickered. Otherwise he didn’t change expression. “I’m not here about that. I’m interested in one of your library books.”

“Which one?”

“The Damion Complex.”

Hazzard bobbed his skull on his pipestem neck. “That one. Just a so-so yam. You can find better spy stories in your newspaper.”

Randall ignored that. “You live here in the motel, Mr. Hazzard?”

“No. With my sister down the street a ways, in a duplex.”

“This is your address on the library records, I broke in. The Starlight Motel.”

“Sure. Because this is where I read all the books I borrow. And where I work.”

“Don’t you ever take library books home?” Randall asked.

“No. I leave ’em here, right at this end of the desk, out of the way. I read ’em during slack times, you know? When I finish them I take em back to the library and get another batch. I’m a fast reader.”

“But your library books were overdue. If you’re such a fast reader, how come?”

“He was sick for three weeks,” I told Randall. “Only got back to work Saturday.”

The Lieutenant’s lips tightened and I knew from old experience that he wanted me to shut up. “That right?” he asked Hazzard. “You were sick?”

“As a dog. Thought I was dying. So’d my sister. That’s why my books were overdue.”

“They were here on the desk all the time you were sick?”

“Right. Cost me a pretty penny in fines, too, I must say. Hey, Mr. Johnson?” I laughed. “Big deal. Two ninety-four, wasn’t it?”

He chuckled so hard I thought I could hear his bones rattle. “Cheapest pleasure we got left, free books from the public library.” He sobered suddenly. “What’s so important about The Damion Complex, Lieutenant?”

“Wish I knew.” Randall signaled me with his eyes. “Thanks, Mr. Hazzard, you’ve been helpful. We’ll be in touch.” He led the way out to the police car.

On the way back to town he turned aside ten blocks and drove to the Harrington Arms Apartments on Leigh Street. “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” he said as he pulled up at the curb. “If Murphy’s home, get the book from her, Hal, okay? No need to mention the police.”

A comely young lady, half out of a nurse’s white uniform and evidently just home from work, answered my ring at Apartment 3A. “Yes?” she said, hiding her dishabille by standing behind the door and peering around its edge.

“Miss Oradell Murphy?”

“Yes.” She had a fetching way of raising her eyebrows.

I showed her my ID card and gave her a cock-and-bull story about The Damion Complex having been issued to her yesterday by mistake. “The book should have been destroyed,” I said, “because the previous borrower read it while she was ill with an infectious disease.”