Captain Hoberman? No, I decided, after a moment’s reflection. Definitely not Captain Hoberman. But definitely familiar, definitely a voice I’d heard before.
Oh.
I reached for the phone, hesitated, then went ahead and made the call. This time the fellow answered on the first ring, and at first he didn’t say anything, which was almost enough in itself to confirm my hunch. Then he said, “Hello,” and made assurance doubly sure. It was him, all right.
I broke the connection.
“Hell,” I said aloud, and picked up my drink and frowned at it. How had I gotten in this mess? Was this where I deserved to be after fifteen nights in a row of Humphrey Bogart movies?
I should have been watching Laurel and Hardy.
CHAPTER Four
Of all the bookstores in all the towns in all the world, she walked into mine.
She did so exactly two weeks earlier, at three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. I was behind the counter with my nose in a book. The book was Our Oriental Heritage, the first of eleven volumes of Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization. Over the years the Book-of-the-Month Club has been distributing the books as if it were the Gideons and they were the Bible, and it’s a rare personal library that doesn’t include a complete set, usually in pristine condition, the dust jackets intact, the spines uncracked, and the pages untouched by human eyes.
There had been a set in inventory when I acquired Barnegat Books from old Mr. Litzauer, and over the years I had bought a set every now and then, and occasionally sold one.