Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 05 - The Maltese Manuscript (16 page)

“Bullied you? I’m surprised. They’re usually so polite.” Well, maybe not Schultz; I’d hardly ever known Felicity Schultz to be polite.

“He didn’t exactly
bully
me, but he made it clear I had no alternative but to give him the information.” Flutter, catch, stare. “‘What about invasion of privacy?’ I told him. ‘What about police harassment? What about fascist oppression of helpless people?’ Plus, I have ethical obligations to my conferees!”

Aiiee!
“Claudia, it’s a homicide investigation. A man has been killed. We have ethical obligations to help find out who killed him.”

***

The four-o’clock panel options were: “Good Cops in Bad Times”; “Gay Cops in Straight Times”; “Black Cops in White Times.” I’d just settled into the back row of the “Black Cops” panel when I felt a firm hand on my shoulder.

“Professor Pelletier?” It was a tall, thin uniformed trooper. I couldn’t tell if he was a good cop or a gay cop, but he was definitely black. “Come with me, please.”

At the sight of a conferee being led out the room by a state trooper, a pale, weedy guy across the aisle almost popped his eyes out. Thank God I hadn’t sat up front where I’d have provided a spectacle for dozens of thrill-deprived academics.

The cop opened the door to an empty classroom and handed me a cell phone. “You’ll have some privacy in here. The lieutenant wants to talk to you.”

“Karen,” Charlie said. “You know where Chesterfield is?”

“West on the Mass Pike,” I replied, “then way the hell up in the mountains. Why do you ask?” I’d been there once, years before, checking out a summer arts-and-crafts camp for Amanda. The isolation of the camp had put Amanda off; the fee schedule had done the same for me.

“Yeah. Can you get yourself out here? There’s something we need you to see.”

“Now?” Then I paused. Chesterfield was where Bob Tooey’s alter ego lived—at least according to the driver’s license on the dead man’s body. What the hell was that name? Munro: Elwood Munro. “This has to do with the body in the library, doesn’t it? I thought you didn’t want me involved.”

“Well, yeah.” His tone said,
that was then, this is now
. “It’s just that Schultz and I have stumbled across something real odd, and we don’t know what to think about it. And seeing as it’s right up your alley…” Charlie wouldn’t give me more details. “I’m not gonna say another word,” he said. “I want you to get the full impact.”

“Jeez, Charlie, this isn’t some grisly shoot-’em-up massacre scene, is it?”

“What? You think I’d subject you to that?”

“I guess not. But you’ve got me so damn curious. Just give me a hint.”

“Curious, huh? Well, believe me, babe, it gets curiouser and curiouser.”

“You’ve read
Alice in Wonderland
?”

“I raised kids, didn’t I?”

I flashed on an image of a younger Charlie Piotrowski sitting between two tow-headed little boys reading about the Mad Hatter’s tea party. For a brief, yearning moment I wished they’d been my little boys, too. Then the good lieutenant brought me back to the moment.

“I’m sending a car for you. Meet it out front at five.”

Chapter Fourteen

The patrol car exited the Mass Pike at Lee, turned right, and began to follow a tortuous route through the Berkshires, first a commercial strip, then a country road past derelict farms, then a hard-pan dirt road snaking through snowbanks alongside a mountain stream and up a steep incline. The higher we went, the deeper the snowbanks got. After a three-mile climb, the headlights picked out a rusty road sign with an arrow pointing to CHESTERFIELD. We turned in at a country lane and pulled to a halt at a barrier of reflective cones and yellow crime scene tape. Charlie’s Jeep was parked next to a state police SUV in front of a small red-shingled farmhouse with a wide porch. Charlie was waiting for me by the door. “Don’t walk on the driveway,” he called. “Tire tracks.”

I followed a footpath in the snow and climbed four sagging steps to the porch. “What’s going on?” I asked.

He gave me a long, level look, then threw open the farmhouse door. “This.”

A narrow hall ran through the center of the house. I peered into it, squinting in the dim light of the single bulb hanging from a ceiling fixture. Charlie flipped on an industrial-strength flashlight and trained it down the hallway.

“Books,” I said, after a minute. “Books. Lots of them.”

“Thanks,” Charlie replied. He was grinning at me. “Just what we needed, the testimony of a trained specialist.”

The hall was jam-packed floor-to-ceiling down its entire length with bookshelves. Their ranks were broken only by two doorways on one side and a simple arch leading to the back of the house. The staircase as far up as I could see was crammed with books, its treads serving as de-facto shelves, with only enough space for a thin person to pass. Sideways.

“What the heck
is
this?” I asked, after a moment’s stunned amazement.

Charlie shrugged. “According to town records, this house belongs to an Elwood Munro. I believe you knew the man as Bob Tooey. The entire house is stuffed with books, basement to attic. Thousands of books.”

“My God!” I peeked through a door into what must have once been a living room: fully loaded bookshelves here, too, arranged in parallel rows with no room for furniture. Old-fashioned cloth blinds were rolled down over tall windows, and the air was thick with the faintly musty smell of old paper. “I’ve never seen anything like this. It looks like some kind of a demented library. It even smells like a library.”

I walked over and reached out to pluck a volume off the staircase’s fifth riser. Then before I touched it I hesitated and glanced at Charlie.

“Go ahead,” he said.

I took down the book. It was a mystery novel,
The Leavenworth Case
, by Anna Katharine Green, a late nineteenth-century American writer. Crossed keys were embossed in red on the green binding. On the title page the seal of the Oberlin College library was impressed into the paper.

“This is a copy of Anna Katharine Green’s first novel,” I reported. “It seems to have belonged at one time to Oberlin College.”

“Uh huh. Now take a gander at the one next to it.”

I pulled the book out. It was another copy of
The Leavenworth Case
, only this one was in a much finer binding, black cloth, with red leather spine and corners.

“Open it,” Charlie directed. I did. On the title page was imprinted the seal of the Smith College Library.

“Another library book,” I said, something gnawing at my consciousness. Something I hadn’t had a chance to tell him earlier. Then, “Oh, my God!” I grabbed another book from the staircase, then another. All early copies of novels by Green. All of them with library ownership clearly indicated in the volume. I pivoted around and yanked a book off another shelf:
The Glass Key
by Dashiell Hammett, seal of Indiana University Library. Another:
The Lady in the Lake
, by Raymond Chandler, no seal, but a New York University Library Special Collections card poking out with the book’s archival call number inked in black. I opened to the publication data on the back of the title page: 1943. A first edition?

“The book thief!” I exclaimed. “Tooey—or Elwood—or Potato Face—or whatever the hell the guy’s name is—was the goddamned book thief! I’ve got to tell Dennis O’Hanlon!”

“Book thief? Dennis O’Hanlon?” Charlie wrinkled his brow in puzzlement. He looked just a little bit like a boxer dog. Then he remembered. “Oh, book thief. You mean the guy who knocked you down that night by the library?”

“Yes,” I said. Impatiently. That was old news. “And the guy who’s relieved said library of a half-million dollars in rare books. And the guy who just this week stole the only extant manuscript of
The Maltese Falcon
from the Enfield College library.” I ran my eyes over the shelves until I spotted a solid line of matching burnt-orange paper bindings: “And, whatd’ya know, here’s the goddamned Beadle’s dime novels I was looking for! All three hundred twenty-one volumes of them, I bet.”

“
Dime
novels? A
half-million dollars
? That doesn’t compute. What the hell are you talking about, Karen?”

I looked around for a chair. “This is going to be a long story.”

Charlie pushed a set of library steps in my direction. “The guy didn’t go in for furniture,” he said. “So, tell me your long story.” He leaned against the living-room doorway, prepared to listen until doomsday, if that’s what it took. “And who’s this Dennis O’Hanlon?”

I could hear footsteps upstairs, at least two sets. “Your officers?”

“Yeah.” His size thirteen boot tapped impatiently against the wide pine floor boards. “Come on, babe, talk!”

Babe
? I narrowed my eyes at him. “‘Talk?’ You mean, as in ‘Spill the beans’? ‘Cough it up’? ‘Spill your guts’? So, tell me, where’s the other cop, the good one? Where’s the bright lights? The rubber hoses?”

“Very funny, babe,” he said. “Just tell me, will you? Please?”

“Well—”

“Wait!” He raised a hand. “Schultz,” he called, “come here. I want you to hear this.”

Felicity Schultz came waddling out from what I assumed was the kitchen, looking for all the world like a pale eggplant. I stood up and offered her my seat on the rolling steps. She sighed and—to my surprise—sat down without protest. She even thanked me.

I told them about the books that had been stolen from the library. I told them about my talk with Avery. I told them about Dennis O’Hanlon and his investigation.

“Christ,” Charlie grumbled. “What the hell was Mitchell thinking? That kind of money, he should have reported it to us. Just what we need, some private bozo snooping around, screwing up the evidence.”

“It wasn’t a murder investigation then,” I said, reasonably. “And, besides, he’s not like that.”

“Who? This private guy? You’ve met him?”

“Well, yes. Avery sent him to talk to me. And, actually…”

“Actually,
what
?”

“Actually…I knew him in high school.”

“You
what
?”

“Remember that class reunion I went to a couple of weeks ago?”

“Yeah, I remember. You didn’t want me along.”

“I never said that.”

“You made it clear.”

“I did not!”

Schultz’s head was swiveling from side to side, as if she were watching the U.S. Open.

“So,” Charlie said, his face devoid of expression, “you went to the reunion to meet this…O’Hanlon.”

“It wasn’t like that. I simply ran into him—”

“You
ran into
him—”

“Ahem,” Schultz said, looking at us with weary eyes, “about these book thefts? A lot of money involved here?”

Grateful for the change of subject, I surveyed the shelves, recalled Avery’s estimate of Enfield’s losses alone. “God, yes. Millions, maybe.”

“Millions!” Schultz’s eyes met Charlie’s. “You know what that means.”

Charlie was all business again. “Yeah. We’ve gotta definitely treat Munro’s death as a possible homicide. What could have been a simple fatal accident, now has major criminal factors—false identity, evidence of grand theft….”

Unconsciously Schultz rubbed her belly. “Possible motives for murder: Might be an accomplice wants to cover up complicity. Might be murder for gain. Lots of money on the hoof here.”

“Millions of dollars worth of stolen books…” Charlie mused. “It complicates everything.” He turned to me abruptly. “And you,” he ordered, “are not to say word one about any of this to that O’Hanlon guy.”

I was sobered by what I was seeing here. Biblio-larceny on a vast scale. And, now, the death of the book thief. “Okay,” I agreed. “Mum’s the word.”

***

Trooper Deirdre Flynn, a slight woman with straight blond hair, pale eyes, and a long thin nose, provided a deluxe guided tour, from basement to attic, of what I’d come to think of as the Book House. My initial impression of chaos was quickly dispelled. What had at first seemed to be disorder on a gargantuan scale was nothing of the sort, merely an attempt to house a multitude of books in a tight space, three floors of the old farmhouse and a finished basement. Everything was surprisingly clean and orderly, even the bathroom, which was stacked with comic books on both sides of the toilet. Trooper Flynn first took me down a narrow set of stairs leading from the kitchen into the basement. The cleanliness of this makeshift library was explained by a big boxy climate-control and air-filtration system worthy of a professional archive. Whoever Elwood Munro was, he certainly had cared about books, not only enough to take the risk of stealing them, but also enough to take good care of them once he had.

“Equipment like this doesn’t come cheap,” I told the young officer. “This climate-control setup alone must have cost a bundle.”