GeraldTomlinson
Miss  Ferguson  Versus  JM
An interesting duel of wits between Elsie Ferguson, a spinster
librarian with a photographic memory for names and faces,
and Joseph Moldavi, a handsome black-bearded borrower with
a curious taste in reading matter . . .
P.S.: Can you deduce from internal evidence in this story the
name of one of Gerald Tomlinson's favorite detective authors?
But don't let this "Rossword Puzzle" distract you from the
main business at handthe battle of the experts. . .

Elsie Ferguson, a spinster with gold-rimmed granny glasses, had
been a library clerk in Elm City for 43 years. She knew the Dewey
Decimal System down to the fourth digit after the period. She knew the
card catalogue from A, A Novel to Zylstra, Henry.
Despite her expertise neither library books nor catalogue
numbers were her true forte. Names and faces were. She had a
photographic memory for people.
Whenever a person brought books to the circulation desk at the
Elm City Library, Miss Ferguson would close her eyes for a mo-
ment, match the face with a name in her files, smile over the top
of the gray book-charging machine, and say, "It's nice to see you
again, Mr., Mrs., or Miss" and fill in the name.
But if the borrowers' names and faces were a challenge to Miss
Ferguson, their reading habits bored her to blasphemy. The aver-
age reader carried away books that to Miss Ferguson seemed as
dull as baseball and as mindless as bowling: mysteries, historical
romances, Gothic novels, celebrity biographies, science fiction.
There was one exception. Miss Ferguson loved books on coin
collecting. She had spent most of her life and most of her small
income in building a collection of United States coins. It was a
tiny collection compared with the great onesthe Smithsonian's
or the American Numismatic Society'sbut it was strong on early
American Large Cents.
Miss Ferguson did not belong to the Tionega Valley Coin Club,
and she avoided coin shows. She seldom exhibited her collection,
but instead kept much of it stored in a. vault of the First Tionega
Canal Bank.
The quality of her collection was well known, however, and she
had recently lent three of her rarest Large Cents, two 1793s and
an 1804, to the Calvert Coin Museum in Baltimore.
Miss Ferguson was both a collector and a student of numismat-
ics. On early American Large Cents she was one of the three or
four living experts. She had written articles on the subject for The
Numismatist, one of which had been published as a book and
stood, to her satisfaction, in section 737.4 of the Elm City Library.
Once every couple of years she and her hobby were the subject of
a feature column and a photograph or two in the local newspaper.
Coins fascinated her. So did books on coins. But she did not mix
business with pleasure. At the library she watched people come
and go, fed cards into the book-charging machine, and thought lit-
tle about either coins or books.
Yet this people-watching was less a sociable exercise than an
intellectual one, as Miss Ferguson knew. She said hello to more
people in a day than most people did in a month, but still she was
a loner, a dedicated loner. She had no close friends, no social life,
and had never tried to have any. She cherished privacy. She had
been followed by neither suitors nor trouble, and not for one mo-
ment in her 65 years had she thought seriously about marriage.
The names-and-faces ritual was simply a game she had made
up to lighten the long leaden hours at the library. It was a .form
of escape. She did not consider it an especially praiseworthy pas-
time. She always tried to be honest with herself about her mo-
tives, not to lie to herself the way some people did.
The memory game had begun, she remembered, 40 years before
when she learned that the then Postmaster General, James Far-
ley, could pair off 50,000 names with 50,000 faces. She was im-
pressed. She knew almost no borrowers by name in those early
days. Now, four decades later, she figured her repertoire at 10,000
names and faces.
Although no one interested her very much personally, some
people interested her more than others. There was one great hulk
of a man in particular: Mr. Joseph Moldavi, a tall swarthy gen-
tleman, black-bearded like Ivan the Terrible, a man whose choice
of books caused Miss Ferguson to look twice at the borrower, and
to. wonder.
He was a strikingly handsome man, this Mr. Moldavi, a point
that Miss Ferguson noted at first with more disdain than delight.
Looks, like books, were suspect. Anyway, the small black mole on
his left cheek marred his appearance; it looked to her like an ugly
embedded insect. But it did give her a mnemonic hook on which
to hang the name Moldavi: mole-Moldavi.
After a while, given her gift for observation, she could not help
noticing  how  his  reading  habits  matchedand  matched
alarminglywhat had been happening in Elm City.
' Side by side with the usual street construction, school-budget
defeats, and political corruption, Elm City was having a series of
big-money burglaries. In the past two years there had been five
spectacular theftsan  Elm  City crime  wave that coincided
exactly, Miss Ferguson noted, with Mr. Moldavi's career as a bor-
rower at the library.
First there  had been three jewelry-store burglaries, clever
nighttime heists with no clues and no suspects. The jewels were
on the premises one day and gone the next. These events had fol-
'lowed hard on the heels of Mr. Moldavi's three-month concentra-
tion on books about gems and minerals.
Next there had been two art thefts. The Blauberg Art Gallery
had lost two Ben Shahns in one night, the only two valuable
paintings in the Blauberg collection. Less than six months later
Langdon College found itself missing a Schneider Esch portrait of
Mark Twain valued at $20,000. These two thefts had coincided
with Mr. Moldavi's persistent enchantment with books on art.
Each of these five thefts had required expert knowledge, accord-
ing to the Elm City Chief of Police, Thomas McEachern, a morose
man with a gray crewcut and five nagging reasons to be morose.
Only the best items in each place had been taken. And all the
thefts had been executed, he said, by the same thoroughgoing pro-
fessionals, men or women who knew jewels, art, locks, alarm sys-
tems, and enough else to stay out of suspicion and prison.
Miss Ferguson did not see herself as a detective. But there it
was: Mr. Moldavi, the self-taught expert, the suave bookish thief.
Black beard, black mole, black money. He had stopped borrowing
books on art after the Esch robbery, and for the past two months
he had been charging out armloads of books about wine.
This new interest puzzled Miss Ferguson. Jewels were under-
standable. So were paintings. But wine?
No one enjoyed a glass of white table wine more than Miss Fer-..
guson. But her Sunday evening sauternes or riesling cost only $2
or $3 a bottle, not much more than the bottled spring water she
drank on weekdays. She had never supposed that.sauternes could
be in a class with sapphires and Shahns.
Miss Ferguson, her suspicions aroused, decided to test her
theory, to research the wine market on her lunch hour. The best
place to investigate, she knew, was Parrish's Wine Cellar, a
downtown landmark for three generations, a small shop on
Charles Street with wide plank flooring and the smell of cheese.
Even a teetotaler with a taste for TV dinners knew that Parrish's
was the finest store in Elm City for wine, liquor, and cheese.
She drove to Parrish's in her rusted-out mauve Dodge, arriving
a little after noon. She dropped a nickel in the meter out front,
paused under the zebra-striped awning, and considered her
strategy.
Inside the store Miss Ferguson addressed herself to a ruddy face
behind a white goatee. "It's nice to see you again, Mr. Parrish,"
she said. She recognized him because he occasionally took out
books on woodworking or some equally dreary subject. "I'd like to
see your most expensive bottle of wine."
Alex Parrish smiled across the counter at hera bit patroniz-
ingly, she thought. Probably he recognized her as a novice at
wines. But he nodded and said, "Certainly. You realize, of course,
that in order to see that particular bottle, we will have to go down
into the cellar."
She looked at him steadily over her bifocals, not quite sure
what he meant.
"Well," he explained, "I really can't afford to disturb a fine old
Bordeaux unless you wish to purchase it." She looked innocent,
questioning. "You usually buy a domestic riesling, don't you,
Miss?"
"Ferguson." She felt herself blushing. "Yes, I do." She was sur-
prised that he remembered her. "But if it's not asking too much,
Mr. Parrish, I would like to see your most expensive bottle today.
A gift-"
"Of course, Miss Ferguson. Please step this way."
She was astonished at the extent of the Parrish wine cellar. A
dozen ceiling-high racks stretched the length of a long room, and
the racks were filled with thousands upon thousands of bottles.
Mr. Parrish led Miss Ferguson to the far side of the cellar
where, under a hanging fluorescent fixture, he pointed toward a
bottle with a slight covering of dust. "There it is." Then, observ-
ing her disappointed expression, he shrugged his narrow shoul-
ders and slowly, carefully, drew out the bottle, using both hands,
and tilted it ever so slightly to show her the label.
She could not read French and did not know the cryptography
of wine labels, but she could see Chateau Lafite-Rothschild and
1945.
He smiled at her. "Eight hundred dollars," he said simply, but
in a reverent tone of voice.
Miss Ferguson gulped. She cleared her throat. "That's a bit
more than I expected. Do you have any bottles forwell, maybe
fifty dollars?"
The proprietor of the Wine Cellar chuckled as if he might have
anticipated this sudden shattering of the dream. "Certainly, Miss
Ferguson. Dozens, perhaps hundreds. In fact, many of them are
Lafites such as this one. But not"he paused and raised his
eyes"not the legendary '45."
"My goodness."
"Would you care to see a less expensive year from that
Chateau? Or perhaps a Latour or a Margaux?"
"Thank you, Mr. Parrish, I do appreciate your courtesy. But
perhaps I'd better think about it some more. May I come back
another day?"
"By all means." 
He returned the bottle to its resting place, and Miss Ferguson,
in a state of mild shock, drove back to the Elm City Library.
That afternoon Mr. Moldavi returned five books on wine, push-
ing them firmly across the polished oak counter. Yes, indeed, he
was a fine figure of a man. He strode down the dark tunnel into
the stacks with that disturbing macho manner of his, a stride that
both enchanted and annoyed her. He returned a few minutes later
with four new books about wine.
Miss Ferguson met him at the book-charging machine, closed
her eyes for an instant so as not to change her mnemonic
routineheavens, she knew him all rightthen smiled nervously
and said, "It's nice to see you again, Mr. Moldavi." She had been
rehearsing a question to ask him about Chateau Lafite. Did she
dare? "May I ask?"
"Yes?" Mr. Moldavi smiled, displaying a costly set of capped
teeth. "What can I do for you?" His voice was warm and ingratiat-
ing, an actor's or a prophet's voice. He made it sound as if he had
been eagerly waiting for the moment he might be allowed to talk
to her.
Miss Ferguson's heart jumped. This was a bit too heady. "Noth-
ing." She bit her lip, steadied her shaking hand, and hurriedly
punched the .date cards. Mr. Moldavi watched her through
colbalt-blue eyes.
As soon as he had left, she chided herself for her silly show of
emotion. After a few minutes she crossed to a file of membership
applications and took out Joseph Moldavi's card. According to the
information on it he lived at 23 Strathmore Drive, West Elm City.
His telephone number was 382-5968. His employer was Consoli-
dated Prefabricated Homes, where he was a supervisor.
His referencea line on the card required of all applicants but
seldom checkedwas Harvey Galton of 19 River Knolls, North-
wood. Telephone 602-1948.
Miss Ferguson hastened to the telephone and dialed 602-1948.
Mr. Galton. Her breath came in short puffs as she waited. Inves-
tigative work was stimulating, but it was not really in her line. A
woman's voice answered. "Yeah?"
"Hello. Mrs. Galton?"
"Right on, dearie." The voice was fuzzy. "Except now I'm remar-
ried. The name is Bowman."
"Oh, I see." Miss Ferguson frowned. "I'm calling from the Elm
City Library, Mrs. Bowman. My name is Elsie Ferguson. We have
received an application for a library card from a Mr. Joseph Mol-
davi. I would like to verify your husband'sthat is, your ex-
husband'sacquaintance with him."
"Hold on. Moldy-who? What are you talking about, hon?"
"Joseph Moldavi. Did your husband know him?"
There was a muffled curse on the other end of the line, aimed
at either a pet or a child underfoot, followed by a noisy swallow.
"Harvey Galton knew zip. Now he knows angleworms. He's dead."
"Oh, I'm sorry."
"I'm not. He was a loser from the word go. You know any los-
ers?"
Miss Ferguson stared into the black holes of the mouthpiece. "I
beg your pardon?"
"Don't beg, dearie. Never beg." A long pause; then Mrs. Bow-
man said, "Marvelous Harv, as I used to call him, was killed in a
bank holdup in Albany two years ago."
"Oh, how terrible."
"Yeah, terrible. You said it, terrible. He had a satchel full of
cash that never got past the State Street curb."
Miss Ferguson gasped. "He was holding up the bank?"
A high laugh rattled across the wire. "You're too much, hon!
Where're you from anyway, the Little Sisters of Mercy, Seven
Miles Outside the City of Jerusalem?"
"No. I mean" Miss Ferguson stopped to think, trying to put
her meager facts in order. Then she gambled for the second or
possibly the third time in her life. "Mrs. Bowman, could you tell
me if one of the other men in the bank holdup was a Mr. Mol-
davi? Joseph Moldavi?"
"Who's this guy Moldy you keep bringing up? I never heard of
him. Wait a minute." Miss Ferguson heard the clink of ice against
glass in the background. A moment later Mrs. Bowman's voice re-
turned. "There was no Moldy in the gang, dearie. How about
Larry Kincaid? Would he do? He got shot along with Harv. Died a
couple of days I-ater at Albany Hospital."
"I'm afraid not. Moldavi is the name."
"Well, call 'em like you see 'em, hon. I'll tell you what I know.
There was one other guy on the bank job. Brad Eaton, who's now
in Dannemora. Oh, yeah, there was also the lamebrain who plan-
ned it. Joe Masseno, the so-called genius of the operation. You get
that? Joe the Genius." She snorted. "Some genius. But he backed
out before they went to Albanysaid the plan still needed work.
It sure did. Hub, I guess maybe Masseno did have more brains
than the rest of them."
"Joe Masseno? He was the one who planned it?"
"You deaf?"
"I'm sorry. And you say he backed out before they went to Al-
bany?"
"Deaf as a fence post."
"Mrs. Bowman, could you tell me what Joe Masseno looked
like?"
"Never saw him, hon. Never saw anybody except Harv. Only
saw him about twice a month. Just heard him talk about the rest
of the meatheads. Joe the Genius. He knew the score, Harv used
to say. Yeah, he knew the score all right. The score was cops
three, crooks nothing." She hiccupped.
"Thank you very much, Mrs. Bowman."
"Don't mention it, hon. A day's work for a day's pay, I always
say. What do you always say?"
Miss Ferguson said nothing.
"Well, cheers then!"
"Yes."
"Roger and out!"
With a scowl Miss Ferguson lowered the receiver to its cradle.
She immediately dialed 382-5968, the Moldavi number. She knew
pretty much what to expect. When the answering voice droned,
"The number you have dialed is not in service" she smiled and
hung up.
Joe Masseno. Initials: JM. She leafed idly through the M's in
the Elm City phone book, not expecting a miracle. People with
aliases were slippery and hard to find, she supposed, this being
her first experience with aliases. There was no Joe Masseno listed
in the directory.
But there was a Joseph Malloy, and suddenly Miss Ferguson's
mnemonic system clicked into gear. JM. Somehow, for some rea-
son, the name Joseph Malloy meant something. For the first
time in 40 years her names-and-faces repertoire came up against
a genuine, practical problem. She leaned back in her chair, ex-
cited by the sudden associations, and thought hard, concentrated,
racked her memory, conjuring up mental images, grasping at
mnemonic hooks.
Mallow,  marshmallow,  white  skin,  toasted  marshmallow,
brown, brown, not a name, brown marks, scars, the double l's,
parallel scars on one cheek. Malloy, Malloy, that was it. Joseph
Malloy. She knew him. She squinted to clear up the haze of time.
Thirty, thirty-five years ago, he had borrowed books at least a
dozen times. The young Joseph Malloy, a high school kid, bas-
ketball injury to his face, bad teeth, tallthat was him.
Joseph Malloy was Joseph Moldavi as a young man. Thirty or
more years ago. No question about it. hy hadn't she seen it be-
fore? .And Joseph Malloyshe supposed that must be his real
namenow lived at 278 Foster Avenue, Elm City. She whistled.
She ignored the phone number. The name and address were
enough. They were like Large Cents from heaven, precious and
hers alone. She had to see Joseph Malloy in person.
That evening after work Miss Ferguson began a new day-by-
day routine. From the Elm City Library she swung her rusted-out
Dodge north on Wycherly Boulevard for two miles, then east on
Foster Avenue, a modest residential street. She drove slowly past
278, a white Cape Cod with dark blue shutters, a tidy and cheer-
ful house. She peered and biinked, like a sparrow hawk hunting
an insect.
For about a month she saw nothing. Just a quiet house and
sometimes a nondescript car. Then, unexpectedly, on a dark
muggy Thursday, with her Dodge clattering and the heat indi-
cator touching red, she saw himJoseph Malloy, Joseph Moldavi,
one and the sameand Joseph Masseno, too, she assumed
mowing the lawn, sweating in a T-shirt, muscles bulging, tall
body leaning into the curved handle of his power mower, glaring
at her Dodge, unaware of the fate closing in on him like gray
storm clouds over the Tionega River.
Miss Ferguson now knew all she needed to know. But what was
she to do with it? Inform the police?
She considered the possibility. Mr. Moldavi-Malloy-Masseno
would be arrested and convicted, she was sure of it. He would be
sentenced to a long prison term.
And if Miss Ferguson gave the police an anonymous telephone
tip, got him arrested that way, which seemed the safest course,
there would be no chance of the trapped man blaming his arrest
on her and perhaps later taking revenge.
But there were two problems. One: Miss Ferguson did not be-
lieve in prisons. She hated the idea of locking up human beings
like cattle. She thought prisons were pestholes, breeding grounds
for more crime, teeming swamps of brutality and nameless per-
versions.
The second problem was more personal. She had come to admire
Joseph Moldavi and had finally come to realize it. Exactly why,
she didn't know, but she admired him a great deal. He was a
suave gentleman, handsome despite the mole, a wide reader, a
man of action, a scholar of sorts, surely not a common thug.
The policeoh, dear, she knew the police by reputation. They
would not treat their captive like a gentleman and a scholar.
They would treat him like a criminal, like a found victim. Chief
of Police McEachern obviously hated Mr. Moldavi already, with-
out even knowing him, to judge by the Chief's comments to
reporters.
No, Mr. Moldavi could not expect justice in Elm City. He would
be demeaned, manhandled, confined, his talents scorned, and then
he would be shunted off to prison, perhaps for the rest of his life.
Miss Ferguson could meet him again, if at all, only behind bars,
or at the morgue, or at the funeral.
No. It must not happen that way.
The next night, in the solitude of her small apartment, with the
air conditioner  whirring  and  the  bright faces of a  Norman
Rockwell print beaming down on her, she sat at her Underwood
portable and typed out a message on plain, untraceable 3x5
notepaper.
Dear Mr. Malloy,
Do not try to rob Parrish's Wine Cellar. The police
have been informed of your plans. Mr. Parrish has been
given your description and is armed. You are in grave
danger in Elm City. You must move away. Please, for
your own safety, leave town.
An Admirer
She typed his name and address on the blank white envelope,
pasted a stamp on it upside down, and made a special trip to the
post office to mail it.
Three nights later, when she had worked up the nerve to drive
past his house, she found it vacant, tidy but cheerless, a For Rent
sign on the lawn.
Mr. Malloy-Moldavi-Masseno had left town, or gone under-
ground. Parrish's Wine Cellar would not be burglarized. Miss
Ferguson had succeeded where the Elm City police had failed.
She felt no sense of triumph. A tear trickled down her cheek. If
she had been a more emotional woman, she would have drowned
her sorrow in a pool of tears, then or later, for that was how she
felt about her recent acts and their consequences.
An end to snooping, she vowed. For weeks afterward she con-
centrated on her coin collection, thankful more than ever for it.
At the bank and in her apartment she studied the many faces of
the ageless and aloof Miss Liberty, the unsleeping beauty of
numismatics, whose copper profile glowed in low relief and whose
eyes stared unblinking, unseeing, toward the edge of her tiny
universe. Almost as penance she lent another of her precious pos-
sessions, a mint 1799 Large Cent, to the Calvert Coin Museum in
Baltimore.
Mr. Moldavi was gone. Out of Elm City and out of her life.
Forever, she supposed.
For three years.
It was late August when he reappeared, and at first Miss Fer-
guson did not recognize him. The mole was gone. The beard was
gone. He had lost weight. His hair was longer and lighter in color.
He wore a pencil-thin mustache, as if trying to impersonate the
devil or Vincent Price.
He was carrying a black overnight bag.
As he entered the library, he glanced sharply around, alert but
calm. He fixed his attention on the circulation desk and walked
toward Miss Ferguson.
At the desk he leaned down, placed his black bag on the floor,
and unzipped it with a flourish. He removed a green corked bot-
tle, which he set on the oak counter in front of her.
Her heart jumped to her throat, and she stammered, "Hello. It's
. nice to see you again, Mr."
"Mohnnann," he said, flashing his ivory grin. "It's nice to see
you again. Miss Ferguson. I brought you a little presenta bottle
of wine from an excellent shop on Charles Street. Chateau Mar-
gaux '47. I hope you enjoy it."
"But"
He leaned an elbow on the desk. Miss Ferguson backed away, a
chill icing her spine. He continued to smile. "How did I learn your
identity? Is that what you're wondering?" He ran a forefinger
along his mustache. "It's elementary, my dear. I have a memory
for carsfor makes and models and colors and years and dents
and licenses. The same kind of memory you must have for names
and faces. It's useful in my line of work."
Miss Ferguson had an intense urge to run away, to get to a
phone, to call the police. Mr. Moldavi was no longer an object of
her concern, he was an instant enemy. She wanted to move but
couldn't. Her heart pierced by betrayal, she stood motionless.
"Now, you, Miss Ferguson, you drive an eleven-year-old Dodge
Charger, unless you've gotten rid of it. It's reddish violet, rusted
out, with a broken left taillightwhich is probably fixed by
nowand license number 398-KLV." He spread his arms wide,
palms up, as if to make light of his talent. Joe the Genius.
She spoke haltingly, her thin voice trilling like a schoolgirl's in
spite of her efforts to control it. "But why me, Mr.? Why are you
bothering with me?"
He pretended patience. "My dear lady, when a car goes creeping
past my house night after night for two or three weeks, I pay at-
tention to it. I find out who's driving it, and why. Your license
number told me who1 have sources for that kind of
informationand your charming note told me why."
She felt frightened and ridiculous at the same time. She sum-
moned up her courage. She wanted him gone. "You were foolish to
come back, Mr. The police"
Mr. Malloy-Moldavi-Masseno-Mohrmann smiled at her with no
trace of humor. "I'm just passing through. I can work in whatever
city I choose. I'm here for a goodbye look at my secret admirer,
nothing more. The museum yesterday was my fourth and last
target in Baltimore. I'm moving west."
Miss Ferguson said nothing. She felt a sinking sensation deep
within her, touching her soul.
"Yes, I've come from there this morning," he said in an even
voice, following her thoughts. His cobalt-blue eyes, the handsome
eyes of doom, stared straight into hers. There was no liking in
them, only mockery. "Since I won't be going back, Miss Ferguson,
could you please mail these books to the Enoch Pratt Free Library
in Baltimore for me? I wouldn't want them to be overdue."
He reached into his overnight bag again, and handed her, one
by one, five books on coin collecting.