Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 05 - The Maltese Manuscript (5 page)

“Vecchio,” said the tall blonde. “9-A.” Her co-worker came up behind her, a dark stocky woman whose upper-arm muscle definition threatened to split the seams of her uniform shirt.

The doorman shook his head. “Mr. Vecchio didn’t say nothing about no cleaning service.”

The blonde widened her eyes. “He called last night. It was like a real emergency. You sure he didn’t tell you? Heavy-duty work. Had to have it done by dinnertime. Ain’t that what you got in your book, Gloria?”

The dark woman pulled a dog-eared appointment book from her cleaning caddy. “Yeah. Vecchio. Nine a.m. Urgent.”

The blonde spread her hands. “See? And we’re late already. Mr. V.’s gonna go ape-shit if we don’t get the job done on time.”

Raphael was familiar with Mr. V.’s wrath. “Awright. Awright. You got the key?”

“Oh, yeah.” Kit Danger held up the key she’d copied from Vecchio’s. “We’ll just let ourselves in.”

“Professor Pelletier?”

I jumped. The book skidded across the table.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.” My student Peggy Briggs stood by my chair with a dozen archival boxes on a book cart.

“It’s okay, Peggy. I guess I was just engrossed.” I retrieved the book and turned it over so she could see the title.

She yawned.

Work-study
, I thought,
probably on top of another part-time job. No wonder the poor woman is strung out. She must be exhausted
.

Peggy was an enigma to me. Following her departure in hysterics from my seminar the day of Sunnye Hardcastle’s visit, she had waited for me after class and offered an apology, but no explanation. Since then she had attended classes, prepared her assignments, and taken dutiful notes. But she kept a very low profile, half-asleep most of the time, speaking only when called upon, never volunteering an opinion.

“Peggy,” I asked, “how are things going?”

She gave me a wary glance. “I’m fine.”

Pride. “I’m sure you are. It’s just that I know how hard school can be for returning students. I was one myself. If you ever need someone to talk to, you know where my office is.”

“Thanks,” she replied. “Maybe I will…sometime.” She eased the book cart up level with the table, cast me a wan smile and plodded away.

***

The newspapers were yellowing and smelled of the past. I lost myself immediately in the brute violence and lurid sensationalism that constituted much of what the nineteenth-century laboring classes read. Murder. Rape. Infanticide. Kidnapping. Theft. Fraud. Fraud. Fraud. All the stuff we never learned about in the sanitized history I was spoon-fed in college.

By noon I’d had enough of the
Gazette
. I filled out another request form, this time for three of the popular nineteenth-century Beadle’s dime novels. Beadle’s Dime Novel Series ran to 321 volumes, its pocket-size books, a mere hundred pages in length, featuring a distinctive burnt-orange cover and sufficient thrills, spills, and adventures to keep the American working-class reader occupied and out of trouble. It was nineteenth-century dime-detectives such as Old Cap Collier and Nick Carter who became the prototypes for the Sam Spades, Philip Marlowes, and Kit Dangers of the twentieth century. I submitted the request form to Nellie, who accepted it meekly. Then I headed out for lunch.

***

In the baronial hall that served as the library’s foyer, a half-dozen display cases had been set up with mystery exhibits in anticipation of the crime-fiction conference. As I came up the stairs, a book jacket in the glass-topped case nearest to me caught my eye: 1970s hot-pink and chartreuse stylized design of a crouching woman aiming a shiny black revolver directly at the reader. I paused to look it over: a first edition of Sunnye Hardcastle’s
Rough Cut
. Wow! That was it, the book I’d lugged around with me in various moves over the past twenty years. The one I’d mentioned to Charlie, and then forgotten again. Now I stared at the volume displayed like a jewel in its protective case: Was my twenty-five-cent copy a first edition? Had it become valuable over the years? And where was my copy, anyhow? In one of my cluttered bookcases? In a box in the attic? And, really, how much might it be worth? Then I brought myself back to the present. I had a conference paper to write, and I was in the library to do research, not to piss my time away with fantasies of unearned wealth.

When I returned from my hastily consumed tuna-fish-sandwich lunch, Rachel Thompson popped out of her office again and waylaid me before I entered the reading room. Her usually rubicund cheeks had gone pale. “Karen,” she said, “I’m afraid there’s going to be a delay in filling your request for the dime novels.”

“Someone else has the books?”

Rachel hedged. “Not exactly.” Her expression was somber. Through the glass doors behind her I could see Nellie Applegate at the reading-room desk, gazing abstractedly in the direction of the researchers at the long tables. Rachel reached up and fingered the filmy scarf at her throat. She beckoned me to follow her into her office, and then through the door marked “Restricted Entry.” We entered an enormous room. I glanced around, curious. This must be what they called the closed stacks. Empty book carts lined the wall next to me. Book-laden shelves stretched from wall to wall, floor to ceiling, as far as I could see.

“What I’m going to show you has to be kept in strict confidence,” Rachel said.

“Of course.”

She led the way through a set of fireproof doors, then through a maze of corridors and book-filled rooms, around a sharp corner, and into a small annex. Twelve-foot-high shelves were squeezed between narrow aisles. Rachel motioned me down a remote row, then waved her hand in the direction of an empty shelf toward the top. “This is where the Beadle’s Dime Book collection is supposed to be shelved.” She looked completely baffled. “All three hundred and twenty-one volumes of it. Thirty linear feet of books. All gone. Not a single one left. Seems I was wrong when I said the book thief hadn’t gotten anything.”

***

Wednesday afternoon after class, I headed back to the library. As I passed the construction site for the new building, a crane was moving steel beams into place. Watery sun illumined the winter-blasted campus. Two women students strolled by, the blonde wearing a short denim skirt. A worker acknowledged her passing with a long whistle. She froze in place for about five seconds, then pivoted and gave the wolf the finger. His face turned bright pink, convulsing his buddies in guffaws.

In the Special Collections reading room I filled out call cards for a half-dozen 1940s paperbacks. If I couldn’t get the nineteenth-century dime books, I’d jump ahead a century. While I waited for them, I looked around for Rachel. Nowhere. Damn. I’d been silent as the grave all weekend about the stolen books, and was dying to ask her what was happening. And when—if ever—I’d be able to get my research done. I eyed Nellie hopefully, but couldn’t imagine her doing anything as lively and life-affirming as passing on gossip. In any case, she was hardly aware I was in the room. Her eyes were fixed on the potato-faced guy with the laptop. As she gazed, and tapped on the polished oak of her desk with a pencil’s pink eraser, I checked him out, to see what the attraction was. A short, sturdy man with straight dun-colored hair, thinning on top. Small nose and overly large jaw. Heavy five o’clock shadow. Not much to look at, but Nellie seemed mesmerized. She was hardly aware I was in the room.
De gustibus
, I thought.

I pulled
Tough Times
out of my book bag and opened it to the ATM receipt I was using for a bookmark.

Kit eased the apartment door shut behind her. So far, so good. Vecchio would be downtown for the day. She’d made sure of that. The coast was clear. She took a step forward.

Heavy furniture cast dense shadows in a room decorated in homage to wealth. What wasn’t leather was mahogany. Everything was oversize, and the walls were the color of money.

Suddenly a bullet whistled past Kit’s head. Beretta 9mm with silencer, she thought. Dropping to her belly, she slithered behind an ornately carved breakfront and slipped the big Sig Sauer from its holster—

Plop
: Peggy delivered the requested paperbacks to my table. I gave her a smile, closed
Tough Times
and addressed myself to the old novels. I ogled lurid covers, skimmed through two or three titles, settled down with
Dead Men Don’t Love Blondes
(1952), and began to read in earnest.
The dame in the red dress was dead….

What I learned from these books about perceptions of homicide in twentieth-century working-class literature was that hot babes look really good dead on the covers of paperback books. It was depressing as hell.

For most of the afternoon I was alone in the reading room with Nellie Applegate and the little researcher with the laptop. Today his sweater was salmon-pink instead of yellow, but I could have sworn that Potato-face hadn’t moved from his seat at the table across from me since I’d seen him there the previous week. As the minute hand on the big, round clock over the door ticked jerkily to three minutes before the five o’clock closing time, he piled his books up, aligned their edges, set them on a book cart for return to the oblivion of the stacks. I followed suit. He pushed his chair away from the table, and stretched. Squeezing past him in the narrow aisle, I said, companionably, “Seems like you and I are closing the place tonight.”

He gave me a blank look, processed my comment, recognized it as small talk, and responded with a stiff nod. “They say,” he offered, “that precipitation is expected to hold off until well after midnight in our area. Then a band of snow squalls will cause hazardous driving conditions throughout the morning rush hour.”

“Oh.” I gave him a blank look of my own and shouldered my way through the double doors.

“Rachel around?” I asked Nellie, as she came out of the curator’s office with a ring of keys in her hand.

“She took the day off.” Nellie stood fidgeting with the keys, as if waiting for me to leave.

“Oh,” I said. Pretty casual for a librarian whose library had just been plundered. “Will she be back tomorrow?”

She shrugged.

Perversely, I wanted to get something resembling a human reaction from this passive woman. “Who’s the guy in the sweater?” I asked.

Involuntarily she turned her head to glance at him through the glass doors, then her gaze snapped back to me. “Th… that’s Bob—Bob Tooey. From Lake Superior College in Michigan.” The light wasn’t all that great in the Special Collections anteroom, but I could have sworn a slight pink suffused her pallid face. Was Nellie blushing? I don’t know why I was surprised. Even librarians fall in love.

“Lake Superior College,” I responded, trying to draw her out. “Now that’s one I haven’t heard of.”

“It’s a community college. But he’s very dedicated to his work,” she said, with a defensive edge, as if I’d somehow maligned a stellar patron. She jingled her keys. “He’s here every morning when we open the doors, and doesn’t leave until we close them.” More consecutive words than I’d ever heard from the little librarian.

Bob Tooey, dedicated researcher, exited the reading room with a curt nod. He jogged past me and up the stairs. I followed him, but we didn’t engage in further social niceties.

***

I took a couple of minutes to peruse the exhibits in the lobby cases. Bob Tooey was also engrossed by the displays, studying one of the Enfield library’s prizes, the only known manuscript of Dashiell Hammett’s
The Maltese Falcon,
signed and inscribed with his handwritten revisions. Displayed next to the manuscript was a mint-condition first edition of the novel, its acid-yellow dust jacket featuring the falcon statuette and a hand dripping with jewels. In the more than fifty years since Hammett had published his hard-boiled, hyper-masculine private-eye fiction, his books had become highly collectible.

Collectable
, I thought. I’ve really got to find the time to hunt down my twenty-five-cent copy of Hardcastle’s
Rough Cut
. Who knows what it’s worth by now?

***

On the narrow, twisting roads, a cotton wool fog obscured everything more than three feet in front of the car, and the twenty-minute drive home lengthened into thirty. As I turned into my driveway I spotted the big red Jeep backed up to the front door, then the smoke issuing from a newly kindled fire in the wood stove. A sudden flush of contentment suffused me, and I stopped thinking about anything at all other than a long cozy evening with Charlie Piotrowski.

Chapter Five

I still had my mind on murder as I met with my honors seminar the next week. They’d been assigned Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and discussion centered on the grotesque nature of the killings: In a locked room, a mother and daughter are brutally slaughtered, then one is shoved up a chimney, the other thrown from a fourth-floor window. In their prurient focus on the heinous details of the crime, students ignored Poe’s attempts to stress the analytical nature of the solution. At the far corner of the table an indistinct movement caught my eye; a hand attempted to rise, then faltered, then continued its shaky ascent. “Peggy,” I called.