Curiosity Didn't Kill the Cat (22 page)

But then, Marty Hammill wasn’t the run-of-the-mill call girl. She was an independent; attractive, sometimes capable of disarming honesty, and although few of her customers were aware of it, surprisingly well read.

It was Marty who spoke first.

“Hey, Conan, how the hell are you? Heard you had a little trouble up here last night.”

He smiled wryly. “A little. Hello, Joe. Still on vacation?”

Zimmerman cast a heavy-lidded glance at Marty, then winked.

“Sure, Cone. The weather’s been great.”

Marty didn’t miss the wink. Her dark eyes narrowed, then she laughed softly. But the laughter faded as she took in Conan’s bruised forehead and the sling.

“Wow. Looks like you came out on the short end.”

“You should’ve seen the
other
guy.”

She laughed. “Sure, honey, I bet he was a mess.”

Zimmerman leaned across the counter.

“What about the other guy, Cone? I mean, really—you get a look at him?”

“No,” he replied coolly. “In fact, I haven’t the slightest idea what happened. I was hit on the head during the melee, and I’ve drawn a total blank.”

Marty shook her head, frowning.

“Looks like somebody got his licks in. I’m really sorry. I mean, you’d think in a small town you wouldn’t have to worry about getting conked in your own shop.”

“Marty, the world is full of nuts—present company excluded, of course. At least for the sake of courtesy.”

She grinned at that, but the humor was lost on Zimmerman, who was still regarding him earnestly.

“You said a burglary. He get away with anything?”

“No. Apparently, the erstwhile burglar didn’t know I keep nothing in the safe but rare books.”

“Speaking of
nuts
,”
Marty interposed.

“It’s all relative, Marty. Anyway, unless the burglar has sadistic tendencies, it was a total failure from his point of view.” He stubbed out his cigarette and added quickly, “So much for my inept burglar. Now, what can I do for you today?”

Marty gave him a sidelong look and a slow smile.

“Well…” she began, her voice low and inviting, but edged with ironic laughter, “that all depends on what you have in mind, honey.”

Zimmerman’s head snapped around, and he glared at her. That hint of irony had escaped him.

“We were just fooling around town, Cone,” he said slowly, his eyes still fixed on her.

She obviously heard the warning tone underlying his words, but his display of jealousy only amused her. She laughed, her oblique smile for Conan.

“Well, I’m all for…fooling around. Anytime.”

Zimmerman’s face went red, and his effort to mask the charged anger reflected in his eyes was futile. And Conan found himself tense, watching his face, wondering if Marty realized her little game might be dangerous.

“Look, doll,” Joe said tightly. “I’ve just got a week’s vacation—”

“That’s
your
problem, Joey boy.” She gave a quick sigh of disgust and glanced at Conan. “Good Lord, you meet a guy one night, and by the next day, he thinks he
owns
you.”

Then she looked around at Zimmerman and finally seemed to recognize the thinly veiled rage in his features.

She tilted her head back and smiled at him.

“Hey, Joe, I’m just kidding. Come on, don’t get shook.”

“Baby, you got a hell of a lot to learn,” he said, and the chill in his tone made her smile falter. “You better keep that in mind.”

There was a brief, taut silence; then Joe made an abrupt about-face. He grinned and reached for her hand.

“Come on, doll, let’s take a look around.”

Conan was aware of his own sudden release of tension and saw the same reaction in Marty’s smile.

“Okay, Joe, let’s look.”

“You’d never know it from the outside,” Zimmerman went on, his anger apparently forgotten, “but this is really kind of an interesting old dump.”

“Watch your language,” Conan put in. “You’re referring to the dump I love.”

“No offense,” he replied with a sly grin. “But you’ll have to admit—”

“It’s called ‘charm,’ Joe.”

“Yeah. I’ll have to remember that. Come on, doll. You’ll have to see the upstairs; you’ll never believe it.”

Zimmerman and Marty had already left the shop when Miss Dobie returned, bearing a white paper sack which she surrendered to him as he pulled himself to his feet.

“Roast beef,” she explained.

“Thanks. How was lunch?”

“The lunch special was salmon croquettes.”

“Well, it could be worse.”

She sighed. “I know. Tomorrow it’s meatloaf. Oh, I took care of your call. It’s arranged as you specified.”

He smiled tightly. “Thank you, Miss Dobie.”

“Shall I take over at the counter?”

“Yes, please.”

“Okay. And the list? The books…etcetera?”

“You may as well continue with that, but don’t—well, I mean, be discreet.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Flagg. Mine is not to wonder why—”

“Miss Dobie—” He sighed. “Please. Just do,
discreetly, and forget the ‘or die’ part.”

*

Again, he left the office door open a few inches. He poured some coffee, then put a cartridge on the stereo, turning the volume low. He chose the
Brandenburg Concerti
, finding their reasonable forms particularly satisfying.

He sat down at the desk and consumed the sandwich Miss Dobie had brought him, his eyes straying constantly from the counter to his watch. He could feel the tension growing in him like the steady winding of a mainspring.

It was nearly three. Normal closing time was five; if the message in the Dostoevsky had aroused no reaction by then, there was no use staying longer.

Two hours.

Two long hours to wonder if he shouldn’t be somewhere else, doing something else.

He finished the sandwich, wadded the napkins and threw them at the wastebasket; then he lit a cigarette and watched as a pair of middle-aged tourists came into the shop, and a few minutes later, a giggling covey of girls just off the school bus. Finally, as he gazed aimlessly around the room, his eyes rested on the File.

He pulled it toward him, and after a moment realized, even as he leafed through the cards, that it was only habit that motivated him. Whenever he was baffled by a consultation project, he always went to the File.

Almost any subject within the realm of human knowledge was represented here, as well as the recognized experts in every field.

But there was nothing—and no one—to help him now. This wasn’t an ordinary consultation project.

He snapped the File shut abruptly and pushed it aside, then again looked at his watch. When he realized his hands were unconsciously balling into fists, he carefully relaxed them and turned his chair toward the door.

Settle down, he admonished himself. Patience. There was nothing to do but wait—and hope.

*

But at four-thirty, his patience ran out. He’d smoked a full pack of cigarettes during the long afternoon, and in the last hour and a half watched an intermittent procession of people moving in and out the front door. Many were familiar to him; regular customers. More were strangers, obviously tourists, just passing through.

But at no time did he see the small, red-jacketed
Crime and Punishment
crossing the counter. And a call to Charlie had similar negative results: neither Mrs. Leen, Anton Dominic, nor the Major’s partner had made a move.

A call to Steve Travers had been equally fruitless. He was out of his office and couldn’t be reached.

Conan looked at his watch again, then rose and went out to the counter. It was already beginning to get dark outside, and the shop was almost clear of customers. “Well. Quiet day, Miss Dobie.”

She shrugged. “I couldn’t say, since I haven’t the vaguest idea what’s going on around here.”

He ignored her mildly accusing tone.

“May I see that list you’ve been keeping?”

“Of course.” She reached under the counter and handed him the sheet.

He studied it carefully, but found nothing on it that aroused his suspicions. And that was ironic; the name of the third man might be on that list, if he weren’t a total stranger to both Miss Dobie and himself, and he considered that unlikely. Finally, he folded the sheet and put it in his back pocket.

“You may as well start closing up, Miss Dobie. I’ll turn off the lights upstairs.”

“I can do that. You look tired. Why don’t you go on home and let me—?”

“
I’ll
get the lights.”

She shrugged and went to the front door to hang up the CLOSED sign, glancing at him with a little bewilderment as he moved purposefully toward the stairway.

Meg was at the top of the stairs, batting a hapless scrap of paper back and forth across the floor. He stopped long enough to give her a vigorous rub and a few words.

The only customer was a man in the Fiction section;Ds a tourist; California, possibly. He was leaning against the sill of the gable window that overlooked the street, myopically engrossed in a Shellabarger historical novel.

Conan studied him closely for a moment, then sent him on his way with the announcement that it was closing time. Then he went to the Reference room and began turning off the lights as he worked his way back to the stairway.

The lone customer was gone when he returned to the Fiction section. He paused, listening to the scuffling sounds Meg made at her game, then crossed to the Ds.

The Dostoevsky was still in place.

He pulled the book off the shelf and started to open it, then hesitated, feeling a prickling chill. He wondered at that premonitory sensation; wondered at the cause of it. Nerves, perhaps.

Still, he didn’t open the book, but stared at it intently, as if it would provide an answer itself.

And in a sense, it did finally. There was nothing to explain that warning chill in its appearance; no marks, scratches, smudges—nothing.

The weight.

A perception born in his muscles and bones, translating itself into a wordless alarm. The weight. He’d handled this book and its twins too many times; his hands and arms recognized the difference, even if his mind didn’t on a conscious level.

He stood silently, hefting the book. It was far too heavy; perhaps a full pound too heavy. And he wondered what gave this particular book that extra weight.

It wasn’t hard to guess.

*

The office door was closed, but the quiet was more than the soundproofing. He’d sent Miss Dobie on her way fifteen minutes ago; the shop was closed, the silence that of solitude.

He leaned back in his chair, easing his right elbow onto the arm, and took a slow drag on his cigarette, studying the results of ten minutes of nerve-wracking and cautiously painstaking effort.

The book lay on the desk beside him, and he had opened it. But not in the usual sense. He’d opened it in a sort of surgical operation, with a narrow, sharply pointed knife, going through the front cover.

And now he surveyed the results of his surgery with a black rage closing in on him.

An exchange had been made sometime during the long afternoon. This wasn’t the copy of
Crime and Punishment
he’d put on the shelf this morning; this one had been carefully prepared.

The pages had been cut out of the center of the book and the cavity filled with plastic explosive. A spring friction device was attached to it which would be activated by the opening of the book.

The rage was a part of the inevitable reaction, but at the moment it had little to do with the threat to his own life. Perhaps that would come later.

He’d set a mousetrap and had the favor returned—with interest. But this trap shared the deficiency of his own; it was nonspecific, and that was the cause of his rage.

The odds were high that he would be the only one to open this particular book, but there was still a chance that someone else might have inadvertently picked it up. Another innocent bystander might have paid with his life for an interest in Dostoevsky.

But this little bomb might still have achieved its purpose even in that event. The shop was an old building; the resulting explosion might have triggered its collapse, burying everyone inside in a pile of rubble—including its proprietor.

More innocent lives.

The rage dissipated; another luxury. He considered the implications of this particularly lethal mousetrap.

Some were obvious. For one, Mrs. Leen and her cohorts considered Conan Flagg a threat to themselves and their mission. It also implied that they didn’t need what he supposedly had to sell, and this meant they’d found the lost message, or had another source for the information now.

And again, the almost desperate nature of this ploy implied a time limit.

There was another implication that was vague and nearly irrational; another subliminal perception, perhaps. It had to do with the character of a man who could set a trap that might snuff out innocent lives.

Conan knew who had set this trap; knew the identity of the third man—the courier. He could even produce some logical and reasonable facts to back up his conviction when he thought back over the last few days. But the conviction was rooted more in instinct than in logic.

But that wasn’t the question that occupied his mind now. The important question still—the only important one—was Mrs. Leen’s purpose. Why was she here, and what was the mission that drove her and her fellow conspirators to such desperate measures.

That it had been necessary to murder Jeffries and Mills might be attributable in part to bad luck, and to her hired man’s lack of finesse and his tendency to panic.

But Rose hadn’t planted this bomb. This came from the prime movers of the conspiracy, and it was carefully premeditated.

It seemed bitterly ironic that they considered him a threat to their mission. He was helpless to stop it—regarded with suspicion by the FBI, and totally ignorant of the purpose of the conspiracy. He wondered sickly if the FBI was actually aware of the existence of this conspiracy.

But he knew it existed, and perhaps Mrs. Leen and her friends were justified in considering him a threat; he wouldn’t give up until he understood their purpose.