The Cincinnati Red Stalkings by Troy Soos Read Free Book Online Page B

were interesting to me, and they were rich with memories and history, but were they valuable in the sense of being worth stealing—worth killing somebody over? “But I want to see.”
    “And if you find something?”
    “I’ll turn it over to the police. Maybe they can figure out who would have wanted it badly enough to kill for.”
    “Good. Let the police handle it.” Margie relaxed a bit.
    “You know ... it could be that the robber did find what he was looking for in the office. Maybe it just wasn’t one of the things you thought were valuable. Never know what’s important to someone else.”
    “You could be right.”
    “Good. Coming to bed then?”
    “No, I’m going to go through the rest of this stuff.”
    Margie began to point out how stubborn I was, then she emitted a yawn that could have sounded the way for a barge on the Ohio River. “Well, I have to go to the zoo tomorrow to talk to Mr. Stephan about that job. I’m going back to sleep.” She pulled herself up from the sofa and stretched. When she finished, her kimono was partly open.
    I had a brief notion to put off going through the rest of the items until morning. No, it would nag at me all night. As Margie started for the staircase, I reached for the Baseball Magazine.
    She paused on the second step. “You’re not going to get involved in this, right?”
    “No, I promise.”

    Detective Forsch stubbed out his cigarette, adding the butt to an already full ashtray. “Thank you for coming in, Mr. Rawlings.”
    “Glad to,” I said, although I really wasn’t. I’d finally gone to bed shortly before dawn, having found nothing of value in the materials Ollie Perriman had given me. A few hours later, I was awakened by Forsch’s phone call. He asked me to meet with him at police headquarters, and since I could think of no way to refuse, I was soon on a streetcar headed downtown.
    City hall, a towering stone block structure that took up the entire block of Plum Street from Eighth to Ninth, looked more like a cathedral than a municipal building. There were even stained-glass windows depicting scenes of early Cincinnati. Inside, stunning murals covered the lobby walls, and the flooring was of decorative tiles. The opulence didn’t extend to the offices of the Crime Bureau, however. Detective Forsch and I sat in a windowless interview room on the building’s east side, with a plain pine table between us.
    On the table were a green ledger book that I recognized as Ollie Perriman’s, a pack of Murads, and the ashtray, which was made from a brass artillery-shell casing. Forsch pulled a fresh cigarette from the pack, and methodically lit up. The detective was either wearing the same clothes he’d had on in Perriman’s office or an identical suit in the identical shade of drab, perhaps a plainclothes version of a uniform. Standing inside the doorway of the room was a beefy young man in the more recognizable uniform of navy blue flannel and brass buttons.
    Forsch said nothing while enjoying the first few drags on the cigarette. I thought he might be trying to unnerve me by taking so long. He probably didn’t know that this wasn’t my first time in a police interview. “Got to be at the park for batting practice in an hour,” I said.
    The detective’s gray eyes glittered momentarily, as if getting me to speak first was some kind of victory for him. “Wouldn’t want the team to be without your talents,” he said.
    I tried to remember what I might have done to get on this man’s bad side; if I had done anything, it eluded me.
    He opened the ledger. “Mr. Tinsley has completed an inventory of the collection, comparing everything in the office to Perriman’s entries in this book—and it turns out a number of items are missing.”
    Huh. So it was a robbery. I found myself disappointed that Forsch had been right.
    The detective turned the book to me and pointed to one of the lines. “And every item that’s missing has your name written next to