Ten. Three were in Jack’s apartment, and Pat had three. That left four unaccounted for. “Hey,” I called up to him, “can you remember what schools they were from?”
He shrugged his skinny shoulders. “I don’t know. They have been here a long time. I didn’t even take them down.
I remember I was busy and showed him where they were and he climbed up and got them.”
This wasn’t getting us anyplace. I shook the ladder and he grabbed the wall for support. “Take ’em all down,” I told him. “Just toss them to me. Come on, we haven’t got all night.”
He pulled the books from the shelves and let them tumble to the floor. I caught a few, but the rest spilled all over. Pat helped me carry them to the wrapping table, then the little guy came over to join us. “Now,” I said to him, “get out your invoices. These must have been signed for when you bought ’em and I want to see the receipts.”
“But that was so long ago, I ...”
“Damn it, shake your tail before I boot it all over the store. Don’t be piddling around with me!” He shot off like a scared rabbit.
Pat laid his hand on my arm. “Slack off, Mike, Remember, I work for the city and this guy is a taxpayer.”
“So am I Pat. We just haven’t got time to fool around, that’s all.”
He was back in a minute with an armful of dusty ledgers. “Some place in here I have the items marked. You want to look for them now?” I could see he was hoping we’d take them along, otherwise it would mean an all-night job. Pat knew that, too, but he used his head. He called headquarters and asked for a dozen men. Ten minutes later they were there. He told them what to look for and passed the ledgers out.
The guy was a hell of a bookkeeper. His handwriting was hardly legible. How he arrived at his balances I didn’t know, but I wasn’t after that. I threw down the ledger I had after a half hour and picked up another. I was in the middle of the second when a patrolman called Pat over.
He pointed to a list of items. “This what you’re looking for, sir?”
Pat squinted at it. “Mike. Come here.”
There it was, the whole list, bought at one time from an auctioneer who had sold the estate of a deceased Ronald Murphy, a book collector.
“That’s it,” I said. We took the list to the table and compared it with the books there while Pat was dismissing the men. I found the four that were missing. One was from the Midwest, the others were from schools in the East. Now all we had to do was to get a copy of the yearbooks from somewhere.
I handed the list to Pat. “Now locate them. I haven’t got an idea where we’ll do it.”
“I have,” Pat said.
“Where?” I asked hopefully.
“Public library.”
“At this time of night?”
He gave me a grin. “Cops do have some privileges,” he told me. Once again he got on the telephone and made a few calls. When he was done he called the bookman over and pointed to the mess we had made of his wrapping desk. “Want us to help you with that?”
The guy shook his head vigorously. “No, no. In the morning is plenty of time. Very glad to help the police. Come again if you want.” The city was full of self-respecting citizens. He’ll probably want a ticket fixed sometime and come knocking on Pat’s door—as if that could help him in this town.
Pat’s calls were very effective. They were waiting for us when we got to the library. An elderly gentleman, looking extremely nervous, and two male secretaries. We passed through the turnstile and a guard locked the door behind us.
The place was worse than a morgue. Its high, vaulted ceilings were never reached by the feeble light that struggled to get out of the bulbs. Our footsteps echoed hollowly through the corridors and came back to us in dull booming sounds. The statues seemed to come alive as our shadows crossed them. The place was a bad spot to be in at night if you had the jitters.
Pat had told him what we were looking for and we wasted no time. The elderly librarian sent his two men somewhere into the bowels of the building and they returned in ten minutes with the four yearbooks.
We sat down there under the light of a table lamp in a reading room and took two books apiece. Four books. Jack had had them and somebody had taken them. He had ten altogether, but the others hadn’t been of any use to the one that stole the rest.
The librarian peered at us intently over our shoulders. We flipped page after page. I was about to turn the last leaf of the sophomore section over when I stopped. I found John Hanson. I couldn’t speak, I just stared. Now I had the whole picture.
Pat reached out and tapped my hand and pointed to a picture. He had found John Hanson, too. I think Pat caught on as quickly as I did. We both reached for another book and went through them, and we both found John Hanson again. I threw the books on the table and yanked Pat to his feet.
“Come on,” I said.
He raced after me, stopping long enough in the main lobby to put through another call for a squad. Then we shot past a startled guard and dashed to the curb and into the police car. Pat really let the siren go full blast and we threaded our way through traffic. Ahead of us we saw the blinking red light of the police truck and pulled up on it Another car came out of a side street and joined us.
The same cars were still there. The police blocked the street
Somebody screamed and others picked it up. The place was a bedlam, but the cops had it under control in a minute. Pat and I didn’t stick around downstairs. He let me lead the way through the modern waiting room, up the stairs and into the room on the landing. It was empty. We took the door off the small foyer into the hall of doors and ran to the next to last one on the left.
The door opened under my touch and a blast of cordite fumes stung my nostrils. Eileen Vickers was dead. Her body was completely nude as she lay there on the bed, eyes staring vacantly at the wall. A bullet hole was directly over the heart, a bullet hole that was made by a .45.
We found John Hanson, all right. He lay at the foot of the bed with his head in a puddle of his own blood and brains, and with a hole squarely between the eyes. On the wall was more of his goo, with the plaster cracked from where the bullet entered.
He was a mess, this John Hanson. At least that’s what he called himself. I called him Hal Kines.
We left the place exactly as it was. Pat whistled for a patrolman and had him stand guard inside the door. All exits to the house had been blocked off, and the crowd milled within the ring of cops on the main floor. Two other captains and an inspector joined us. I threw them a nod and ran for the back of the house.
Those shootings had taken place not two minutes before we came in. If the killer wasn’t in the crowd he was just around the corner. I found the back door in a hurry. It led into an undersized yard that was completely surrounded by an eight-foot-high fence. Someone had taken the trouble to keep the grass cut and the place cleaned out. Even the fence had been whitewashed.
I went around that place looking for prints, but the grass hadn’t been trampled in a week. If anyone had gone over that fence he certainly would have left some sort of a mark. There was none. The cellar opened into the place, but the door was locked from the outside with a padlock; so was the door that led between the building and the one next door. The killer never took the back way.
I jumped the steps into the small kitchen and went through the hall to the showroom. Quite a place. All the restraining partitions had been torn down and a stage set up at one end. The cops had the audience back in the cushioned movie-type seats and the girls of the show herded into a compact group on the stage.
Pat came at me from across the room. “What about the back?” he asked breathlessly.
“Nothing doing. He didn’t go that way.”
“Then the killer is in here. I couldn’t find a place even a mouse could get out. The streets are blocked and I got some men behind the houses.”
“Let’s go over the gang here,” I said.
The both of us went down the rows of seats looking over the faces that didn’t want to be seen. There was
