Inside, a middle-aged fat woman with glasses on a silver chain was holding forth behind the main desk. A youngish blonde, busty and moderately attractive, moved among the stacks to one side, reshelving books from a metal cart; I didn’t see any other employees around. A number of patrons were in attendance, though-half a dozen seated at the reading tables scattered throughout, a couple at the New Books shelf, a girl using the photocopy machine, a guy loading up on paperbacks from a nearby rack.
My footsteps echoed as I crossed to where the fat woman sat behind the desk; except for the whir of the copy machine, the usual reverential library hush prevailed. The fat woman glanced up when I cleared my throat, put on her glasses, put on a smile, and said, “May I help you?”
“Yes, you may. A friend of mine was in here on Monday night and spoke to a young lady about a book she recommended. That young lady over there, maybe”-I gestured toward the stacks-“if she was working on Monday evening.”
“She was, yes.”
“Well, I want to ask her about the book myself,” I said. “My friend told me her name but I’ve forgotten it.”
“Miss Weeks.”
“That’s right, Miss Weeks. Jean Weeks, isn’t it?”
“No. Her first name is Carolyn.”
“Carolyn-sure. Was she the only employee here on Monday night?”
“No, Mr. Benson was on that night as well.”
I was not interested in anybody named Mr. Benson. I said, “Thanks very much,” gave her a bright smile, and made my way over to where the blonde was restacking books.
She was about thirty, hard of eye and thin of mouth, wearing a blouse that showed off her chest and a skirt that showed off her hips. She was also nervous and preoccupied; the section she was in was Archaeology, and the book she was shelving when I came up was called Nude Photography.I said, “Excuse me. You’re Miss Weeks? Carolyn Weeks?”
She gave me a startled look. Then she blinked a couple of times, wet her lips, and said warily, “Yes?”
“I’d like to talk to you,” I said. “About the murder of Lewis Hornback.”
I was after a reaction and I got one, all right. Fear crawled into her expression; she went rigid. “I… I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do. You were Hornback’s girl friend, weren’t you? Among other things?”
I wasn’t prepared for what happened next. I thought she’d offer another denial, after which I intended to tell her the police wanted to see her and then go call Eberhardt on the library phone. But she must have believed I was a cop myself. The fear in her eyes turned wild. And she threw herself at me, jabbed her elbow into my protruding belly, kicked me in the shin, and ran.
The blows staggered me, pitched me off balance into the left-hand stack; books spilled out and thumped on the floor. I caromed off, clawing at the shelf, dislodging more books, and my backside smacked the cart and sent it skittering away at an angle. Then I thumped to the floor, too-so hard that the rest of my breath came out in a whistling grunt. Book spines cracked under my weight; the hard edge of one bit into my hip, made me flop over on my side and bang my head against another shelf.
The rest of the people in there were on their feet making disturbed noises, half of them gawking at me as I scrambled up and half of them gawking at the front entrance doors where Carolyn Weeks was about the plunge through. I sucked in air, used it to say something obscene, and went lumbering after her.
She was gone by the time I dodged around one of the tables. Halfway to the door, a determined-looking guy in a brown sweater tried to grab me; I shoved him out of the way. The fat woman was shouting, “What did you do to her? What did you do to her?” in a voice like a fire siren. The determined guy came after me again and hit me over the ear with enough force to set up a ringing in my head. I brushed him away a second time, and by then I had regained enough presence of mind to yell, “This is police business! You understand? Police business!”
That gave them pause; the fat woman stopped shrieking and the determined guy quit being determined, and I got to the entrance without any more interference. I banged the door open with my shoulder, stumbled down the steps, looked both ways along Leavenworth.
Carolyn Weeks was nowhere in sight.
I stood in the middle of the sidewalk, panting, hurting in several different places. Three or four people were staring at my. I let them stare for ten seconds or so; then I said, “Shit,” to no one in particular and went back into the library to call the police.
FOURTEEN
Eberhardt said, “You’re an idiot, you know that?” We were sitting in his too-hot office at the Hall of Justice, drinking coffee; it was almost three o’clock. His eyes were meeting mine today, but that may have been because he was miffed. I was not very happy, either. I had a bruise on my hip, a boxed ear, and a headache. Eberhardt had a headache, too, he’d informed me-and I was the cause of it.
“Yeah,” I said.
“All you had to do when you had your brainstorm was call us. But no, you had to go running over to the library yourself.”
“I wanted to get a name for you. I wanted to make sure I was on the right track.”
“Uh-huh. Well, you were on the right track, all right, but you went and derailed yourself. We’d have Carolyn Weeks in custody right now if you had the sense Christ gave a peanut.”
“You’ll find her, Eb. She won’t get far.”
“You’d better hope not.” He looked at his watch.
“Thirty-five minutes before we go upstairs and talk to the Chief. If Klein doesn’t call in by then, your tail is back in the sling-but good.”
Klein and another inspector, Jack Logan, were out hunting for Carolyn Weeks. The fat woman at the library had supplied her address-an apartment building on Arguello-and we’d all figured that was where she’d go from Russian Hill; it was the most likely place for her to have Hornback’s money stashed. Eberhardt had put out an APB on her as soon as I called him, and the first patrol units had arrived at her building within fifteen minutes. But she hadn’t shown up, not yet. Either the money was somewhere else, or she was too scared to go after it at the apartment. A search warrant had already been issued; getting that and tossing Weeks’s apartment were part of what Klein and Logan had been sent to do.
I said, “I turned her up, didn’t I? I figured out the disappearance and the murder. That ought to count for plenty.”
“Maybe it does, in my book. The Chief might have other ideas. Not to mention the media.”
He opened up a drawer in his desk and came out with a carved monstrosity of a pipe: the bowl was full of curlicues and shaped like a head with the top of its skull cut off, and the face in front wore a cherubic leer. He began to tamp tobacco into it. While he was doing that I got up and yanked the plug on his portable heater.
When I sat down again he said irritably, “What did you do that for?”
“It’s too hot in here.”
“If you think it’s hot in here, wait until you sit down in the Chief’s office.”
“Stop ragging me, okay? I know I screwed up.”
He made a disgusted noise, set fire to his tobacco, and blew smoke at me across the desk. That hideous pipe stuck in one corner of his mouth gave him a ghoulish look, as if he were smoking somebody’s shrunken and lacquered head.
“All right,” he said, “you want to explain this brainstorm of yours now or wait until we go upstairs?”
“I’d better give it to you first. I want to make sure I’ve got all the details straight.”
“Fine. So how did you tumble to the librarian?”
“I’ll get to that later,” I said. “Let me ask you a few questions first, so I can lay out Hornback’s disappearance.”
“Go ahead.”
“Did you see the body when it was brought in?”