Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 05 - The Maltese Manuscript (31 page)

I took a sidelong glance at my daughter’s adamant expression and sighed. “Follow me,” I said.

We climbed the worn marble staircase that led to the literature stacks on the third floor. “Cool,” Amanda said, as we turned a corner into the shadowy, vaulted chamber in which American literature is housed. “This is like the best part of a bad movie. But where’s the gibbering scholar? Where’s his hunchback henchman?”

“The gibbering scholars are all safely tucked into their tenured little beds with volumes of Foucault where they belong,” I retorted. The clanking of a security implement belt caused me to gasp. “Not dodging security guards in libraries. Watch out, here he comes!”

We ducked into a darkened study alcove. The guard strode by us, flicking off light switches as he passed each rank of books. In his wake, the room’s dim illumination assumed an eerie red glow from the EXIT signs.

“He’s getting ready to close the place down,” I whispered. My head was spinning.

“Good,” Sunnye replied. She placed a hand on my arm. “Now, don’t worry, Karen. I know what I’m doing. Trust me. I can get us in and out of the closed stacks without tipping anyone off. Compared to the Paris sewers, this is a piece of cake.”

“Yeah?” I pondered the thought for a moment. In for a penny, in for a pound. “And the Special Collections office, too?”

“No problem. Now, tell me, you said you stumbled across a bad scene between two librarians…?”

“Rachel and Nellie. Rachel’s the professional librarian. Nellie works the desk.”

Sunnye waved the distinction away. “What if one of them committed this homicide?”

“Couldn’t be,” I objected automatically. “They’re
librarians
.” Then I thought about it: Librarians work very hard; they’re poorly paid. It was possible, I supposed, that one of them might have at least colluded with Elwood Munro.

Suddenly Rachel’s BMW came to mind. And all those valuable editions passing through her hands, day after day.

Books are designed for maximum portability, easy to slip into a briefcase—or even a pocket—at the end of a day. Easy to pass on to an obsessed collector for a monetary consideration.

Easy, in Rachel’s position, to leave a door unlocked, keys in full view, the alarm system turned off. Easy.

“Rachel has a new BMW,” I said.

“So do I,” Sunnye replied. “What’s your point?”

“Her salary’s probably not much more than fifty thousand a year, and the cost of living around here is astronomical.”

“Oh. Point taken. Let’s search her office first.”

“I like Rachel,” I protested. But Sunnye was already leading the way to a remote corner of the AmLit stacks and through a short corridor to a narrow arched doorway I’d never even known was there.

“Aha! I thought I’d find a door here. These are the stairs Elly took when we went into the restricted area. It’s some kind of service staircase from before elevators. They’re closed to the general public, but library workers use them all the time. Elly said the doors were alarmed if you opened them from the outside, but not from the inside. Sooo…”

“We’re on the outside,” I said. Not unreasonably, I thought.

“But maybe not for long. Look around. See any heating vents?”

“Here.” Amanda pointed to a large vent at floor level. It was covered with medieval-looking black grille work.

“Hmm,” Sunnye said. “I could probably squeeze in there.”

“Jesus, Sunnye!” That was me.

“Let me do it.” That was Amanda.

“No!” Me again.

“Well, you’re skinnier than I am. You feel up to it?” Sunnye.

“Sure.” Amanda was grinning like a lunatic.

“Please, Amanda, don’t,” I pleaded. “You’ve been so sick.”

“It’s not going to hurt her, Karen. We’ll unscrew this grate from the wall and she’ll go in. I’ve got the tools. I’ve even got a dust mask. All she has to do is slide through until she comes to an opening on the other side of the wall. Then she can push out the grate, and, voila, she’s inside. It’s easy.”

It took a half-hour. It took forever. Sunnye sat at a study carrel. I paced back and forth in the pinkish gloom. Then the doorknob turned, and we were in. Trouble led the way. We crept down the narrow staircase. The steps were stone, and felt slick and worn beneath our feet. Then Sunnye pushed open a door, and we entered directly into the prohibited space of the dimly illuminated closed stacks.

***

Row after row of tall shelves stretched back into the shadows, seemingly into infinity. I had a sudden eerie sense of disconnection from the present, as if we had somehow escaped the confines of time and matter and entered simultaneously into all the worlds pressed in ink and bound into these volumes, as if we had penetrated the collective consciousness of brains long since reduced to scattered molecules of insensate matter.

“Where’s the librarian’s office?” Sunnye asked.

Her voice slammed me back into the present, and I scrutinized the darkness. “I’m disoriented. Where are we? East? West?” It was only the second time I’d been in the closed stacks. The big fluorescent tubes that lit them during the day were turned off, but every twenty feet or so a naked sixty-watt bulb cast a faint illumination. Then my eyes caught the distant red glow of another Exit sign. “If we make our way toward that Exit light, I bet we’ll find it. There’s a door leading from the stacks directly into Rachel’s office.”

We crept through the tortuous aisles of books, then Sunnye opened the door to the curator’s office, turned on a desk lamp, and started issuing orders. “Amanda,” she directed, as she booted up Rachel’s computer, “you take those file cabinets. Karen, the desk. A systematic search should give us some idea if anything fishy is going on with these librarians.”

The desk was set up against the wall and strewn with scrawled-over printouts and pink telephone-message slips. A rank of plastic file holders lined its back edge, stuffed with directories, manuals, catalogs, manila folders and envelopes. How Rachel could function amid such disorder was incomprehensible to me. “What am I looking for?” I asked helplessly.

“A signed confession saying ‘I killed Elwood Munro’ would be good. If that doesn’t jump out at you, just use your brain. Check for something that’s not where it’s supposed to be, something that doesn’t belong where it is. Whatever.” Sunnye was distracted by her futile attempts to access Rachel’s computer files. “Now, what would a librarian’s password be?”

“
Due date
,” I suggested.

Keys clicked. “Nope.”

“
Late fine
?”

More clicking. “Nope.”

“
Book
.” I was reaching now.

She tapped the keys. “Bingo,” she said. “I’m in.”

“You’re kidding?” I stared at her. Sunnye clicked “My Documents” on the virtual desktop and began scrolling.

I shrugged and turned to the actual desktop. A systematic search, huh? I could do that. Beginning at the left, I plucked out tightly wedged folders from the desk racks, sorted through their contents:
acquisitions; deaccessions; cataloging; pre-cataloging; systems management; personnel
. Boring.

Next came rare book and manuscript catalogs. I leafed through them. Whew! The prices! Book collecting had become a high-end business, indeed. An anonymous
Treatise on the Police of London
, By a Magistrate. First American Edition, 1798. $1,000. An perfect American first edition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s
A Study in Scarlet
in original wrappers. $17,500. And, oh my God, a mint copy of the first edition of
The Maltese Falcon
. $35,000! “Lookit this, guys,” I exclaimed. They ooohed and ahhhed.

The computer manuals were next, not nearly so interesting. I opened the closest. Incomprehensible. I shook each one. Nothing hidden between the leaves.

Then I tackled a series of battered interdepartmental mailing envelopes. The nearest and fattest was wedged tightly in its own plastic niche. I eased it out and unwound the string closure: a ream of paper bound by wide rubber bands. The cover sheet identified the document as Systems Management Operational Draft. Great. More computer gobblety-gook. I set it aside and reached for the next envelope. Then my eyes, even in the dim light, noted an anomaly in the thick systems management draft. Whereas the cover sheet was the bright white of standard computer paper, the pages themselves were yellowed at the edges. Hmm. I edged the thick document over closer to the desk lamp and began to remove the rubber bands.

Sunnye glanced up from the computer monitor. “You got something?”

“Probably not.” But even to me the attempt at nonchalance was unconvincing.

Amanda abandoned her file cabinet. “What is it, Mom?” She peered over my shoulder.

I pulled off the second rubber band. The cover sheet fell away. Underneath, a thick old-fashioned typescript tied in off-white cotton ribbon. The yellowed page was densely typed on an old-fashioned manual typewriter, with several cross outs and a few handwritten corrections. The title read “The Maltese Falcon.”

“Jee-zus Christ,” Sunnye whispered. “Will ya look at that!”

“So, it wasn’t Munro, after all,” I exclaimed. “
She’s
the one who took it!”

“Who
took
what?”
Amanda asked.

Neither Sunnye nor Amanda knew the
Maltese Falcon
manuscript had been stolen. Its loss was so potentially embarrassing to the college that it had been hushed up as if it were a state secret. While Elwood Munro’s death had brought the book thefts to public attention, so far, the stolen manuscript had remained a dark administrative secret.

I sat on the rolling desk chair and brought my partners-in-crime-fighting up to date. “I hate to say this,” I concluded, “but it looks as if Rachel may have stolen the Hammett manuscript, then hid it here in plain sight in this…mess. When the brouhaha dies down, she’ll be able to sneak it out of the library.”

“Rachel? I’ve met this woman, right?” Sunnye asked. “She dresses like a milk-maid—all that pale, loose-woven stuff?”

“Sounds like Rachel.”

“But,” Amanda broke in, “if she stole the manuscript, does that mean she’s the killer?”

A shudder ran through me: Just last week I’d spent hours with Rachel, and we’d ended up together in a remote and lonely location. But then I tried to imagine Rachel harming me—or sneaking up behind Elwood Munro and bashing him over the head. “Rachel? Never. She’s such a gentle person. Why, Sunnye, you should have seen her with your dog. Trouble loves her.”

At the sound of his name, the animal lifted his head and scrutinized me with wise brown eyes. I was still focused on the pages in my hand. “I don’t know why the manuscript would be on her desk unless she took it. But I can’t imagine why she would do that.”

“Desperate for money,” Amanda said.

“In cahoots with Elwood Munro,” Sunnye suggested.

“You have any idea how much she could get for this?”

She laughed. “As much as she wanted, I imagine.” The novelist had taken the manuscript from me and was turning pages reverentially. “This is a unique item, especially if these revisions are in Hammett’s own hand. A real rarity.”

I pushed it. “How much is ‘as much as she wanted’?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Fifty, a hundred thousand. Maybe more.” She flicked the price away as if it were inconsequential. “Even a million wouldn’t be too much; a million is nothing to some people. It would all depend on how much some person of means—some obsessed collector—was willing to pay, and pay under the table, too, this being stolen property. He’d have to keep it solely for his private pleasure, but there’d be someone…” She ran a light finger over the page and trailed off dreamily.

I must have given her a sharp glance.

“Not me,” she said. “No way I’d take that kind of risk.”

“Oh, no?” I felt my eyebrows pucker.

“Trespass is one thing,” she continued, soberly. “Receiving stolen goods is altogether something else.”

“You better call Charlie,” Amanda broke in. “If there’s any possibility this Rachel woman is the killer, we’ve got to tell him.”

“Ye-e-es. But, you know, when it comes right down to it, I’m not absolutely convinced she’s the biblioklept.”

“The
what
?” Amanda frowned at me.

“The book thief, at least the one who stole the manuscript. Rachel’s not the only person on campus to have easy access to rare books and manuscripts. There’s Nellie Applegate. She’s in and out of this office every day. So are the work-study students. I hate to say it, but Peggy Briggs is a library runner. She could get her hands on anything she wanted. And if ever anyone needed money…”

“Peggy…” Sunnye said, “hmm…and she disappeared right around the time of the murder.”

“Right after she discovered the body.”

“Really? Then you found her backpack in Munro’s house….”