“Nope. One of the officers pursued that thought as far as he could take it, but the guy didn’t keep records like that. He kept it all up here.” He tapped his head.
“Somebody took those books and the officer knew that—that’s why he pursued it,” she said. “Look in this shot, you can see a book on the floor, right under that empty place in the bookshelf. When he pulled the books out, this one came out with it. But he didn’t bother to pick it up.”
“What does that tell you?”
“It tells me he didn’t want that book, just the ones that filled about this much shelf space.” She held up her hands about two feet apart. “He didn’t care about any of the others.”
She went book by book with the glass. Some of the titles were unreadable, but there wasn’t a Grayson book that could be identified as such anywhere in the room.
“That’s funny,” she said. “I heard this guy had all the Grayson books.”
The detective said, “Oh,” again, as if he hadn’t quite made up his mind whether he cared enough to ask her who Grayson was. “They tossed the book angle back and forth but it didn’t excite them much. The feeling was, yeah, the perp might’ve taken a few books, but that wasn’t the prime motive.”
“But they never found a motive.”
“Early in the investigation, the feeling was it might’ve been personal.”
“Did Mr. Hockman have any enemies?”
“Looks like he’d had some words with people. He was becoming a crusty old bastard. But, no, they never got anything they could pin on anybody.”
“Did their thinking change later?”
“Like it always does with crimes like this that you can’t solve. Some nutcase.” He flipped a page and went on reading. “Here’s something about a book.”
She looked up.
“They interviewd a woman named Carolyn Bondy, who did secretarial work for Hockman. Once a week she’d come over and take dictation, do his correspondence. The week of the murder he sent a letter to a book publisher. He’d gotten a book with a mistake in it and it seemed to ruin his week.”
“Really?”
“Does that interest you?”
“Yeah, you bet.”
“Too bad they didn’t take it much further than that.”
“They didn’t ask her what the book was or who published it?”
“It just seemed to come up in the course of things.”
“Or what the mistake might’ve been?”
“Just that he was annoyed. He’d been looking forward to this book…something special, I guess. Nobody thought it was much of a motive for murder. The woman did say Hockman was a good deal more annoyed than he let on in his letter. The letter he wrote was pretty soft and that surprised her. It was almost like Hockman was apologizing for telling the guy he’d screwed up.”
“Anything else?”
“Just this. The reason Hockman was annoyed was because it was the same mistake the guy had made before.”
“Is that what she said?…The same mistake…”
“That’s what’s in here.”
“Is there an address or phone number for this woman—what’s her name?”
“Carolyn Bondy.” The detective read off an address and phone number. “Doubt if she still lives there. It’s been twenty years.”
She looked through more evidence. She picked up a clear plastic bag that was full of ashes.
“I’ll have to ask you not to open that,” the detective said. “I mean, we do want to cooperate, but, uh…”
“Hey, I appreciate anything you can do. May I just move it around a little?”
“I don’t guess that’ll hurt anything.”
She took the bag with both hands and made a rotating motion like a miner panning gold. Slowly a fragment of white paper rose through the charred silt on the top.
She peered through the filmy plastic and saw two letters.
“Look at this…looks like a capital
The detective leaned over her shoulder.
