Talmage Powell
Murder Gets Easier
The morning was clear and warm with the first whisperings of spring echoing northward. The lettering on the windows still looked nice: JOSEPH THOMAS, New and Used Books, Magazines, Collector’s Items. He still loved the pleasant mustiness, the warm gloom of the store with its hundreds of used books and magazines that crowded the shelves. He was young and in good health. But a lump of midwinter lay inside Joey Thomas.
To begin with, he’d about decided that as a business man he was too small a flicker even to term a flash in the pan. His ravening creditors had promised to claw him to pieces and peddle the parts to medical schools.
Then there was his girl, Cora. She had, he thought, a one track mind. She’d fallen right in with his plans, when he’d come out of the army those months ago, to establish his used-book business, live off of it, and make a writer of himself. He’d done one book — Corpse In The House by Joseph J. Thomas — a psychological thriller about a man who murdered his wife and walled her in a tiny alcove upstairs, using quicklime generously, only to believe that he began hearing scratchings on the floor of the alcove. Three scratches, a pause, three scratches, a pause... Like bony fingers trailing across the protagonist’s ceiling, reminding him that he had killed his wife on the third day of the third month of the year.
The royalties off of Corpse In The House had been eaten by the store; the second book hadn’t found a publisher anywhere; and Joey knew he’d never finish the third before bankruptcy and he became bosom friends.
He was ready to chuck the deal, get a job, marry Cora. That’s all he wanted out of life, really, to marry Cora. But he wasn’t having any of this business of two starving as cheaply as one. And she grimly insisted that he stick to his guns. Thus they had reached an impasse. He wouldn’t marry her until he could support her, and she wouldn’t allow him to chuck the dreams overboard.
But at the moment, Joey’s mind was dragged from those worries. Besides himself, there were three people in the store. Leroy Dorrell was thin, tall, well-tailored to have no visible means of support. A ring on his right hand glittered like genuine diamond; his eyes, pale green, glittered too. A star-shaped scar marred the dark tan on one of Mr. Leroy Dorrell’s cheeks.
Beside Dorrell, faintly plump, a silver fox about her shoulders. Marge Krayer stood, her blood red lips curled at wizened old man Arnheit. Marge Krayer had platinum hair that made Joey wish he’d gone in the peroxide business. He knew Dorrell and Marge Krayer only casually, seeing them now and then in Tony’s bar down the block, where Joey occasionally took a short beer.
Joey turned his back on the pair, trying to shush Mr. Arnheit, who was telling the world loudly, “Dorrell, you’re an illiterate punk!”
Mr. Arnheit roomed in the old brownstone down the block. He was wiry, tough, an inveterate talker, a browser in book stores. One of Joey’s steadiest customers, except that Mr. Arnheit never bought anything.
A few moments ago, Leroy Dorrell and Marge Krayer had strolled in the store. Just looking they’d said. Dorrell had picked up a copy of Poe’s collected works — price twenty cents — from the cluttered table near the front of the store, read a few lines of The Raven aloud and promptly laughed with thin sarcasm. Mr. Arnheit, who’d been sitting in the back of the store, had risen to the attack.
“Poe, you young punk, worked with the fine exactitude of an architect,” Mr. Arnheit now shouted, disregarding Joey’s shushing entirely.
Marge Krayer fingered her platinum hair and told Dorrell, “Why don’t you kick the old fool’s teeth in, darling?”
Mr. Arnheit, who read racing forms as well as Poe, who had no visible means of support himself, saw red. “You think I’m afraid to stand up to you? If more people...”
“Listen,” Joey said, “this is a place of business!” Then he hoard the clamping footsteps upstairs and groaned again. Ralph Ballinger’s sleep had been disturbed. Ballinger was a big, strapping man with flaming hair, deep red freckles so thick on his face he seemed constantly on the verge of apoplexy. He occupied the flat over the store; once before when a gang of noisy kids had been in quest of tattered comic magazines, Ralph Ballinger had let Joey know in no uncertain terms that he worked nights and would countenance no undue noise downstairs. Gossip had it that Ballinger worked very hard indeed, at sucker poker, blackjack, and trained dice. Now Mr. Ballinger ignored the front stairs that led down from his flat to the street Joey heard him pounding down the narrow back stairs.
Leroy Dorrell was moving forward, urged by Marge Krayer, and Arnheit was telling Leroy to stand back, when Ballinger’s steps reached the bottom of the narrow back stairs, came across Joey’s store-room. Ballinger appearing in the doorway that opened to the storage room in back of the store. Ballinger’s red hair was tousled. He wore a faded robe, below which showed pajama legs and house shoes. His foghorn voice joined in the fray. “What the hell is all the shouting about, Thomas? I thought I told you...”
“I was insulted,” Dorrell explained, eyeing Ballinger’s hulk.
“I didn’t insult anybody,” wiry Mr. Arnheit howled, “I just spoke the truth! Edgar Allan Poe...”
Ballinger advanced in the store. His eyes were red-rimmed, his freckles pale. He appeared, conceded Joey, to need sleep badly. “If I don’t get some shut-eye,” Ballinger said, “I’m going to take this place apart with my bare hands.”
The Joseph J. Thomas book business at least deserved to die in peace, Joey decided. He walked behind the counter, picked up the phone. “Nobody’s taking anything apart,” he said. “I’m going to call a riot squad if this place isn’t cleared in exactly twenty-five seconds.”
They tossed a last upheaval of choice language at each other; Ralph Ballinger glared with his red-rimmed eyes. Then Dorrell swooshed out with Marge Krayer on his arm, Ballinger clomped back upstairs to his bed, and Mr. Arnheit slammed the door and turned down the sidewalk.
Joey sighed and began straightening magazines. It was fifteen minutes later when he noticed the new copy of Eman’s Political Economy on the showcase near the front of the store. Joey frowned. He knew the contents of the store like the palm of his hand. He didn’t recall purchasing Mr. Eman’s tome. Someone must have laid it on the counter, forgotten it. But it hadn’t been there when he’d opened up this morning. Joey would have noticed it dusting.
He riffled through the book, a habit of his the whole neighborhood knew. He’d found pressed flowers, four leaf clovers, a prized cake recipe once in a travelogue he’d bought from Mrs. McDougle, who’d thanked him profusely when he’d returned it. Now his hand jerked to a stop, riffled back. There between pages fifty seven and fifty eight it was.
A nice, crinkly thousand dollar bill...
Joey’s hands trembled. A thousand bucks could mean a lot to him. Then he jammed the bill in his wallet, muttered to himself, went out, and locked the door behind him.
In the next half hour Joey endured Ralph Ballinger’s blasphemy, a discourse on economic politics from Mr. Arnheit, and cold, abrupt answers from Leroy Dorrell and Marge Krayer, whom he found in Tony’s bar.
None of them had left the book in his store. He’d mentioned only the title to them of course. If those four had known what the book contained, Joey knew he’d have likely been accused of stealing three other copies.
Yet they’d been the only people in the store that morning — unless someone had come in and out while he’d been in back, early, in the stock-room. On the sidewalk before Tony’s bar, be reached a decision. He’d take the bill to the bank, deposit it in his account. If no one called in thirty days, he could legally figure finders keepers. He turned and headed for the bank — and from there it was only a short trip to police headquarters.