“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Leonidas went on calmly. “That’s exceedingly fortunate for us, because practically nothing whatever can be done about Martin until Monday morning. Hm.” He looked at his watch. “It’s six-thirty now. We have, Dot, approximately forty hours in which to secure the real murderer of Professor North. Apprehend and secure, perhaps I should say.”
“We—forty hours—apprehend—” Dot swallowed. “But—Bill Shakespeare, be sensible! We can’t do anything of the sort! How could we? We couldn’t! Secure the real murderer in forty hours indeed! Who, as Gilroy asked the dowager, who do youse think you are?”
“Why not? I’ve always felt that if I were confronted with a crisis of this sort, I should be able to utilize such powers of reasoning and deduction and concentration as I may have cultivated during forty years of teaching. In fact, I’ve proved that ability to my own satisfaction more than once on my travels. Teaching is not itself particularly active or invigorating, but it does endow one with a certain amount of resourcefulness. And people are always getting into scrapes, it seems to me, which require the hand of a—m’yes, I think, Dot, this can all be attended to in forty hours. I’ve been,” he added irrelevantly, “a bit bored lately.”
He was so firmly self-possessed that Dot decided he wasn’t joking. He meant it. He was serious, after all. And somehow, when this blue-eyed man announced that something could be done, you felt yourself believing that it really could.
“The police,” Leonidas said, “feel that Martin came to the bookstore for the sole purpose of killing North. Actually he came to escape the police and to get warm. Why was North there? Martin said he rarely went to bookstores. Why, therefore, should he have taken this afternoon off to make a systematic pilgrimage to a number of bookstores, as that list would indicate? And why should an eminent anthropologist desire The Collected Sermons and Theological Meditations of Phineas Twitchett, D.D.?”
“Why,” Dot grinned, “when you come right down to it, why should anyone want a book like that? And why just Volume Four? If you were going in for Twitchett, why not embrace him in toto? Why be so choosy? And why should that greasy little Italian have wanted it, too? I think that’s something more than coincidence.”
“And he had the name neatly typed out on a card, too. And North had the title on the tip of his tongue. M’yes. Our store was fourth on the list. North had no books with him when he came in, which makes me think he’d been seeking just that one book. He’d bought nothing else. Dot, finish your rice pudding and consider the infinite possibilities of Volume Four. Why did North want that book?”
“Don’t know. But how do you know he didn’t find it?”
“Possibly he might have, but it was nowhere near him when I went out back with Gilroy and that doctor of his. Nor on him. Nor in his pockets. Hm. As soon as you’re through, we’ll go back to the store and begin investigating on our own hook. I do not feel that any one of Martin’s golf clubs was the weapon used. It’s too foolish. And I want to find out more about the estimable Phineas Twitchett—if he existed and actually wrote this collection of sermons, and what sort of thing they were, and if any record exists of their having been in the store. Sometimes your uncle—er—broke down to the extent of noting a book or two in his ledger.”
Dot watched him furtively as she finished her meal. There was a great deal more to Leonidas than had met her eye at first. More than his spectacular resemblance to Shakespeare and his blue eyes and bland manner. There seemed to be no doubt whatsoever in his mind that forty hours were sufficient in which to find North’s murderer. And it wasn’t an idle boast or a meaningless bluff or simple conceit on his part. He just seemed to be sure.
Outside the bookstore, they found Hanson preparing to depart.
“My orders is,” he said, “that you two ain’t to be annoyed or disturbed. But there’ll be one of the boys hanging around the corner in case you want him for anything, and he’ll keep an eye on you at the same time. You’ll get a good curious crowd around here when this story breaks.”
After he left, Leonidas proceeded to lock the vestibule and turn out the hall lights.
“Somehow,” he said, “I dislike the thought of a good curious crowd. It makes me think of banana peels and gobs of crumpled newspapers and a great many unpleasant sounds and odors. Now, I’ll see what we can find out.”
From the bottom drawer of the desk he pulled out an enormous volume, a magazine, and a thin morocco bound book, all three of which he consulted at some length. Then, from a pile on the floor, he selected a tattered copy of Who’s Who.
“What’s the news?” Dot asked. “Or haven’t you any? Those are the most imposing things that you’re consulting, anyway.”
“The United States Catalogue,” Leonidas told her, “assures me that Twitchett actually existed. He wrote four volumes of sermons and meditations, which were privately printed and published at the author’s expense in Boston, 1809. They were all he ever did write. Vanity, I should say, all vanity. It appears that North wanted the last volume. He wanted it very badly, Dot. He’s been to all the big booksellers in Boston and asked for it, and asked for it with sufficient fire and determination that everyone of them has listed it in this week’s exchange column of the Publishers’ Weekly. And one bookstore adds that the volume wanted must bear the autograph signature of one Lyman North. Who’s Who bore out my suspicion that Lyman was a relative of John North. As a matter of fact, he is, or was, North’s grandfather.”
Dot looked at him with admiration. “Bill, I hand it to you. My hat’s off. So North wanted a particular Volume Four. His own grandfather’s. Was it a valuable book, or anything like that?”
“I’m coming to that part. It’s not included in this check list, which would indicate that it’s not valuable enough to be listed. You know, Dot, under the circumstances, I don’t feel that Quinland had anything to do with this business. Quinland tracks down only very rare and valuable items. Offhand, I’d say that Mr. Twitchett’s entire set probably isn’t worth five dollars, and that Volume Four by itself might bring perhaps a dollar. Quinland, therefore, wouldn’t have found it worth while to take the whole set. Certainly there’d be no reason for his killing North just to get possession of one single volume.”
Dot lighted a cigarette and stared at the clouds of smoke as they floated up towards the ceiling stacks.
“Bill,” she said at last, “in forty hours, you could release all of Sing Sing.”
“Well,” Leonidas said reminiscently, “once in Kenya, I—but that’s not important. I doubt it, Dot. Sing Sing is something else. Now, let’s go back and look about. The police took countless pictures, but they did very little actual looking. Why should one take pictures instead of looking at a scene, I wonder, if the scene is before one to look at?”
The rectangular section where North had been killed looked to Dot exactly as it had the day before when she saw it for the first time. On three sides rose the tall stacks of dusty books, dimly lighted by a single wire-caged bulb on a long extension cord.
Dot shuddered.
“It seems uncanny, doesn’t it, Bill? I mean, here are all these mangy tomes, just the same as they were before all this happened. Gives you a funny feeling of how everlasting books are compared to human beings, doesn’t it? Think of what those books could tell us about this affair if they could only speak up! Think of all the things that have happened around them, anyway! It’s silly, but I never thought about books much until I landed here yesterday, and now—why, I could write one myself with ease!”
Leonidas nodded. “Upstairs in my things I have a volume which belonged to the Borgias. That provides very rich material for speculation. I—Dot!”
He knelt down suddenly and began shifting to one side a pile of books which rose beside the cross stack. Energetically he grubbed while Dot held the light for him to see.
“Bill, what is it?”
“I