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72 Jack Fritscher

inches of white plaster with the names chiseled into the bases. “Nice,”
he said. “Really nice.” He surveyed the rest of the room.
This was not the first barber shop, waiting room, or bookstore
that Robert Place had cased. In fact, it was a matter of police record
that Robert Steven Vincent Place had been found guilty of at least
one misdemeanor: slicing articles and smuggling magazines from the
Green County Public Library. His mother had paid his hundred-
dollar fine, but his year’s probation was not half up, and he was on
the run.
He had confessed to the judge that he had started with laun-
dromats, that one day he had ripped one article from one magazine
in one laundromat. The judge didn’t bother to ask his motive, and
Robert could hardly have volunteered one. He didn’t know exactly
why he coveted certain pictures like the first ones he had ever sto-
len, photographs of blond bodybuilders on Venice Beach hoisting
even blonder starlets high as the American Dream onto their broad
shoulders in the brilliant California sunshine.
From stray magazines in laundromats and doctors’ offices, he
had moved on to stealing the neighbors’ mailed maga zine subscrip-
tions, and from there on to harder stuff, to the pieces de resistance, the
photo-books on reserve at the public library. He had moved from a
noisy tearing the pages to a quieter slicing them with a single-edge
razor blade, and he had cut out for himself quite a collection of clas-
sical Greek athletes. His most prized theft was from a portfolio of
reproductions of Lumiere’s 1903 photos of the legendary strongman
Eugene Sandow in an appealing variety of masculine, but modest,
figleaf poses.
His satisfaction with his secret addiction had given him a false
confidence that he figured out later had made him greedy and all
too careless. He constantly needed more pictures to satisfy himself.
Sometimes the actual tearing felt better, bolder than slicing.
Pleasant little dangers thrilled him.
It was his own fault when Miss Ollie Thomas, the head librar-
ian, and his mother’s cousin, had herself pinched him red-handed
and called the sheriff. She had caught on to him, because he never
©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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