Scenarios

I nodded. 'Maybe we will at that.'

The Pulp Connection

The address Eberhardt had given me on the phone was a corner lot in St. Frances Wood, halfway up the western slope of Mt. Davidson. The house there looked like a baronial Spanish villa-a massive two-story stucco affair with black iron trimming, flanked on two sides by evergreens and eucalyptus. It sat on a notch in the slope forty feet above street level, and it commanded an impressive view of Lake Merced and the Pacific Ocean beyond. Even by St. Francis Wood standards-the area is one of San Francisco's moneyed residential sections-it was some place, probably worth half a million dollars or more.

At four o'clock on an overcast weekday afternoon this kind of neighborhood is usually quiet and semi- deserted; today it was teeming with people and traffic. Cars were parked bumper to bumper on both fronting streets, among them half a dozen police cruisers and unmarked sedans and a television camera truck. Thirty or forty citizens were grouped along the sidewalks, gawking, and I saw four uniformed cops standing watch in front of the gate and on the stairs that led up to the house.

I didn't know what to make of all this as I drove past and tried to find a place to park. Eberhardt had not said much on the phone, just that he wanted to see me immediately on a police matter at this address. The way it looked, a crime of no small consequence had taken place here today-but why summon me to the scene? I had no idea who lived in the house; I had no rich clients or any clients at all except for an appliance outfit that had hired me to do a skip-trace on one of its deadbeat customers.

Frowning, I wedged my car between two others a block away and walked back down to the corner. The uniformed cop on the gate gave me a sharp look as I came up to him, but when I told him my name his manner changed and he said, 'Oh, right, Lieutenant Eberhardt's expecting you. Go on up.'

So I climbed the stairs under a stone arch and past a terraced rock garden to the porch. Another patrolman stationed there took my name and then led me through an archway and inside.

The interior of the house was dark, and quiet except for the muted sound of voices coming from somewhere in the rear. The foyer and the living room and the hallway we went down were each ordinary enough, furnished in a baroque Spanish style, but the large room the cop ushered me into was anything but ordinary for a place like this. It contained an overstuffed leather chair, a reading lamp, an antique trestle desk-and-chair and no other furniture except for floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that covered every available inch of wall space; there were even library-type stacks along one side. And all the shelves were jammed with paperbacks, some new and some which seemed to date back to the 1940s. As far as I could tell, every one of them was genre-mysteries, Westerns and science fiction.

Standing in the middle of the room were two men-Eberhardt and an inspector I recognized named Jordan. Eberhardt was puffing away on one of his battered black briars; the air in the room was blue with smoke. Eighteen months ago, when I owned a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, the smoke would have started me coughing but also made me hungry for a weed. But I'd gone to a doctor about the cough around that time, and he had found what he was afraid might be a malignant lesion on one lung. I'd had a bad scare for a while; if the lesion had turned out to be malignant, which it hadn't, I would probably be dead or dying by now. There's nothing like a cancer scare and facing your own imminent mortality to make you give up cigarettes for good. I hadn't had one in all those eighteen months, and I would never have one again.

Both Eberhardt and Jordan turned when I came in. Eb said something to the inspector, who nodded and started out. He gave me a nod on his way past that conveyed uncertainty about whether or not I ought to be there. Which made two of us.

Eberhardt was wearing a rumpled blue suit and his usual sour look; but the look seemed tempered a little today with something that might have been embarrassment. And that was odd, too, because I had never known him to be embarrassed by anything while he was on the job.

'You took your time getting here, hotshot,' he said.

'Come on, Eb, it's only been half an hour since you called. You can't drive out here from downtown in much less than that.' I glanced around at the bookshelves again. 'What's all this?'

'The Paperback Room,' he said.

'How's that?'

'You heard me. The Paperback Room. There's also a Hardcover Room, a Radio and Television Room, a Movie Room, A Pulp Room, a Comic Art Room and two or three others I can't remember.'

I just looked at him.

'This place belongs to Thomas Murray,' he said. 'Name mean anything to you?'

'Not offhand.'

'Media's done features on him in the past-the King of the Popular Culture Collectors.'

The name clicked then in my memory; I had read an article on Murray in one of the Sunday supplements about a year ago. He was a retired manufacturer of electronic components, worth a couple of million dollars, who spent all his time accumulating popular culture-genre books and magazines, prints of television and theatrical films, old radio shows on tape, comic books and strips, original artwork, Sherlockiana and other such items. He was reputed to be one of the foremost experts in the country on these subjects, and regularly provided material and copies of material to other collectors, students and historians for nominal fees.

I said, 'Okay, I know who he is. But I — '

'Was,' Eberhardt said.

'What?'

'Who he was. He's dead-murdered.'

'So that's it.'

'Yeah, that's it.' His mouth turned down at the corners in a sardonic scowl. 'He was found here by his niece shortly before one o'clock. In a locked room.'

'Locked room?'

'Something the matter with your hearing today?' Eberhardt said irritably. 'Yes, a damned locked room. We had to break down the door because it was locked from the inside, and we found Murray lying in his own blood on the carpet. Stabbed under the breastbone with a razor-sharp piece of thin steel, like a splinter.' He paused, watching me. I kept my expression stoic and attentive. 'We also found what looks like a kind of dying message, if you want to call it that.'

'What sort of message?'

'You'll see for yourself pretty soon.'

'Me? Look, Eb, just why did you get me out here?'

'Because I want your help, damn it. And if you say anything cute about this being a big switch, the cops calling in a private eye for help on a murder case, I won't like it much.'

So that was the reason he seemed a little embarrassed. I said, 'I wasn't going to make any wisecracks; you know me better than that. If I can help you I'll do it gladly-but I don't know how.'

'You collect pulp magazines yourself, don't you?'

'Sure. But what does that have to do with — '

'The homicide took place in the Pulp Room,' he said. 'And the dying message involves pulp magazines. Okay?'

I was surprised, and twice as curious now, but I said only, 'Okay.' Eberhardt is not a man you can prod.

He said, 'Before we go in there, you'd better know a little of the background. Murray lived here alone except for the niece, Paula Thurman, and a housekeeper named Edith Keeler. His wife died a few years ago, and they didn't have any children. Two other people have keys to the house-a cousin, Walter Cox, and Murray's brother David. We managed to round up all four of those people, and we've got them in a room at the rear of the house.

'None of them claims to know anything about the murder. The housekeeper was out all day; this is the day she does her shopping. The niece is a would-be artist, and she was taking a class at San Francisco State. The cousin was having a long lunch with a girlfriend downtown, and the brother was at Tanforan with another horseplayer. In other words, three of them have got alibis for the probable time of Murray's death, but none of the