Case File - a Collection of Nameless Detective Stories (30 page)

"Fine. Can you start right away?"

"This afternoon, if you like. But I think it would look better if I came in first thing in the morning. That way, I can spend the rest of today making those background checks."

Rothman agreed. He gave me addresses for Lennox, Boyette and Vining, after which we settled on my fee and I made out one of my standard contract forms and had him sign it. We also settled on what my job would be at the book shop—I would come in as a stock clerk, which entailed shelving books, filing customer orders and the like, and which would allow me to move freely around the shop—and on the name I would be using: Jim Marlowe, in honor of Raymond Chandler. Then we shook hands, and he limped out, and I got to work.

I called a guy I knew in Records and Identification at the Hall of Justice; he promised me he'd run the three names through his computer and the FBI hookup, to see if any of them had a criminal record, and get back to me before five o'clock. The next order of business was to get a credit report on each of the three, so I called another friend who worked for a leasing company and asked him to pull TRW's on the trio. He also said he'd have the information by five.

I got out my copy of the reverse directory of city addresses and looked up the street numbers I had for Lennox, Boyette and Vining. All three of them lived in apartment buildings, which made things a little easier for me. I made a list of the names and telephone numbers of all the other residents of those buildings; then I called them one by one, telling each person who answered that I was a claims representative for North Coast Insurance and that I was conducting a routine check in connection with a substantial insurance policy. Human nature being what it is, that was a ploy that almost always put people at their ease and got them to open up about their neighbors.

Two of Lennox's neighbors said that he kept pretty much to himself, had no apparent bad habits and seemed to be more or less happily married. A third person, who knew him a little better, had a somewhat different opinion of Lennox's marital status; this woman said that his wife, Fran, was a complainer who constantly nagged him about money matters. The woman also said that Lennox had a passion for books and that his apartment overflowed with them. She didn't know if any of the books were valuable; she didn't have time for such foolishness as reading, she said, and didn't know anything about books except that they were dust collectors.

Harmon Boyette's neighbors confirmed that he was a heavy drinker; most of his imbibing was done at home, they said, and he tended to be surly when he was tight. They didn't seem to like him much. Nobody knew if he had money to spend, or what he spent it on if he did. None of them had ever been inside his apartment.

Neal Vining, on the other hand, was friendly, gregarious, enjoyed having people in for small parties and was well liked. So was his wife, Sara, whose father owned a haberdashery shop in Ghirardelli Square that specialized in British imports; she and Vining had met during one of the father's buying trips to London. I also learned that Vining was the athletic type—jogged regularly, played racquetball—and that he liked to impress people with his knowledge of books and literary matters. As with Lennox and Boyette, he didn't seem to have a great deal of money and he didn't spend what he had indiscriminately.

There was nothing in any of this, at least so far as I could tell, that offered a clue as to which of the three men might be guilty. I considered running a check on Adam Turner, even though Rothman had seemed certain of Turner's innocence; I like to be thorough. But I decided to let Rothman's judgment stand, at least for the time being.

The guy at R and I called back at four-thirty, with a pretty much negative report: none of the three suspects had a criminal record, and with the exception of Boyette, none of them had ever been arrested. Boyette had been jailed twice, overnight both times, on drunk-and-disorderly charges.

Just before five, my friend at the leasing company came through with the credit reports. Not much there either. Vining had a good credit rating, Lennox a not very good one and Boyette none at all. The only potentially interesting fact was that Lennox had defaulted on an automobile loan nine months ago, with the result that the car—a new Mercedes—had been repossessed. Up until then, Lennox's credit rating had been pretty good. It made me wonder why he had decided to buy an expensive care like a Mercedes in the first place; he couldn't have been paid a very hefty salary. But then, it might have been his wife's doing, if what I'd been told about her was true.

By the time I looked over everything again, reread the notes I'd taken during my talk with Rothman and put it all away in a file folder, it was five-twenty and I was ready to pack it in for the day. I was feeling considerably better than I had been before Rothman's arrival; I had a job, and I would not have to spend tomorrow sitting around this damned office watching it rain and waiting for something to happen and pining away for Kerry.

The telephone was ringing when I let myself into my flat an hour later. I hustled into the bedroom, where I keep the thing, and hauled up the receiver and said hello.

"Hi," Kerry's voice said. "You sound out of breath."

"I just came in. You sound tired."

"I am. And the way it looks, I'm not going to get out of here until nine o'clock."

"How's the presentation going?"

"Pretty good. I'll probably have to work Saturday morning, but I should be finished by noon."

"We're still on for Saturday night, aren't we?"

"We are. What did you have in mind?"

"Well, I've been wondering —"

"Oh, damn," she said. "Can you hold on a minute? I'm being paged by the boss."

"Sure."

There was a clicking noise as she put me on hold. I shrugged out of my damp overcoat, tossed it on the floor and sat down on the rumpled bed. While I waited I occupied myself by visualizing Kerry in my mind. She was something to look at, all right. Not pretty in any classic sense, but strikingly attractive: coppery hair worn shoulder-length; animated face marked with humor lines; generous mouth; greenish eyes that seemed to change color, like a chameleon, according to her moods. And a fine willowy body, with the kind of legs men stared at and most women envied.

I wondered again, as I had on several occasions, what she saw in me. I was fifty-three to her thirty-eight and not much to look—at, but she thought I was pretty hot stuff just the same. Sexy, she'd said once. Which was all a crock, as far as I was concerned, but I loved her for feeling that way.

I did love her, that was the thing, even though we'd only known each other a couple of weeks. I'd met her during a pulp-magazine convention, which she'd attended because both her parents—Ivan and Cybil Wade—were ex-pulp writers who had been well known in the forties, Ivan for his fantasy/horror stories in
Weird Tales
and
Dime Mystery
, Cybil for a hardboiled detective series under the male pseudonym of Samuel Leatherman. The pulp angle had been part of my attraction to her in the beginning, just as part of hers for me had been the fact that, as a result of her mother's writing, she'd always been intrigued by private detectives. So we'd struck up an immediate friendship, and had become lovers much sooner than I could have hoped for.

Meanwhile, things had been happening at the convention that culminated in murder, and I had found myself in an investigation that had almost got me killed. When it was finished I had asked her to marry me, surprising myself as well as her. She hadn't said no; in fact, she'd said that she loved me, too, after her fashion. But she'd been married once, a bad marriage, and she just wasn't sure if she wanted to try it again. She needed more time to think things over, she said. And that was where things stood now.

Not for long, though, I hoped. I had never been as sure of anything as I was that I wanted Ms. Kerry Wade, she of the fine legs and the wonderful chameleon eyes, to be my wife.

There was another noise as the line reopened, and she said, "You still there?"

"Would I hang up on a gorgeous lady like you?"

"Gorgeous," she said. "Hah. What were you saying about Saturday night?"

"I was just wondering," I said, "how you felt about snuggling up at your apartment in front of a nice hot fire?"

"Oh ho. So that's it."

"Yep. So how do you feel about it?"

"Well, I might be persuaded. Providing, of course, that you take me out first and ply me with good food."

"Done. How about Oaxaca's, over on Mission?"

"Mmm, yes. We could spend the afternoon together, too. Drinks in Sausalito, maybe?"

"Sounds terrific," I said. "Only I think I may be tied up during the afternoon. I picked up a job today." I told her about John Rothman and what he had hired me to do. "So unless I can wrap things up tomorrow, which doesn't seem likely, I'll be at the book shop all day Saturday. The place closes at six, though. I could pick you up around seven."

"Fine," she said. "Right now, I'd better get back to work. Call me tomorrow night? I'll be here late again."

"Okay. And Kerry. . . I love you."

"Me, too," she said, and she was gone.

Smiling, feeling chipper, I went out into the kitchen and opened myself a beer and made a couple of salami-and-cheese sandwiches. Kerry wouldn't have approved; she was of the opinion that my eating habits left something to be desired. Well, she could change them when she became my wife. I had been a bachelor too long to want to change them on my own.

After I finished eating I curled up on the couch in my cluttered living room—another thing Kerry disapproved of, and that she could change if she was of a mind to, was my sloppy housekeeping habits—with Volume One, Number One of
Strange Detective Mysteries
, dated October 1937. Norville Page's lead novel, "When the Death-Bat Flies," kept me amused for an hour, and stories by Norbert Davis, Wayne Rogers, Paul Ernst and Arthur Leo Zagat took care of the rest of the evening.

I got down to Rothman's book shop, dressed in a sports shirt and a pair of old slacks instead of my usual suit and tie, at five minutes to nine on Friday morning. The building, a big old structure with a Victorian facade, was sandwiched between an auction gallery and a Chinese restaurant. A pair of wide plate-glass windows flanked the entrance; behind them were display racks of books of various types. Both windows bore the same legends in dark red lettering:

J. ROTHMAN, BOOKSELLER
Fine Books—Used, Rare, Antiquarian

The front door was locked; I rapped on the glass panel. Pretty soon a stooped, elderly guy, coatless but wearing a white dress shirt and a bow tie, appeared inside. When he got to the door he peered out at me through rimless glasses and then threw the bolt lock and opened up.

"My name is Jim Marlowe," I told him. "I'm the new man Mr. Rothman hired yesterday."

"Oh, yes." He gave me his hand and I took it. "Turner, Adam Turner. Assistant Manager."

"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Turner."

He nodded, stepped aside to let me come in. While he was relocking the door I glanced around the main floor. The cashier's desk was on the left, flanked by the wide gateway for the sensor alarm; you had to go through the gateway both entering and leaving, because there was a six-foot-high partition on the right-hand side. Beyond, several long display tables filled with sale books and recent arrivals were arranged for easy browsing. Floor-to-ceiling shelves covered the side walls, and stacks with narrow aisle-ways between them took up the rear half of the room. Off to one side toward the back, a flight of stairs led up to the second floor and another down to the basement.

I let Turner precede me through the gateway. He looked to be in his mid-sixties, nondescript and mild, but his rheumy blue eyes were alert and intelligent, and I thought that they would not miss much.

I asked him, "Is Mr. Rothman here?"

"Yes. He's in his office, upstairs on the second floor. He asked me to send you right up; he'll show you around personally."

"Thanks."

Most of the second floor was given over to stacks; according to a number of neatly painted signs, all of the books here were used hardcover fiction—general novels, mysteries, Westerns and science fiction. Another flight of stairs led to the third floor, but there was a chain drawn across the bottom and a sign that said,
No Admittance
. A wider corridor than the aisle-ways between the stacks extended the length of the far wall, and when I got over there I saw three doors, the middle one standing open. I stopped in front of the open one. Inside was a good-sized office—Rothman's, probably, judging from the size of the desk and the big old-fashioned safe in one corner—but nobody was in it.

I was standing there looking in when I heard a toilet flush. Then the third door opened and Rothman appeared. He saw me, caught up his cane from where it was leaning against the wall and limped over to me.

"One of the signs of advancing age is a weak bladder," he said, and gave me a rueful smile. "Have you been waiting long?"

"No, I just came up."

"You spoke to Adam, of course. I didn't tell him you were a detective; I thought it would be best if only you and I know your real purpose here."

I nodded. "Does he always come in this early?"