The Bookman's Promise (24 page)

I slept nine hours and change, till Koko came pounding on the door at a quarter to ten. I rolled out of bed, sore all over, but I felt rested. My double vision had cleared, I was still alive. I took half a dozen Advils and a shower, and emerged for inspection at ten-thirty.

“You need some dark glasses,” Koko said at breakfast. “That shiner you’re growing matches my own. Together we look like Bonnie and Clyde.”

Her first order of business was to find a department store and get some clothes. “Kerrison’s looks like a good bet. This afternoon I’ll get started in the library.”

“Do you have any idea what you’re looking for?”

“Any document that shows Charlie was here and they did what he said. This is a very old library: it was old even then. They have newspapers from the seventeen hundreds. It’s a private library but I can use it for a small fee.”

“I can’t imagine what you think you’ll find there. The press didn’t exactly cover their arrival or departure.”

“You never know. Sometimes the press then did take note when someone visited from abroad. Maybe just a paragraph, or a line somewhere.”

“I wouldn’t count on it.”

“I’ll try to pin down other things. Whether there was a photographer named Barney Stuyvessant on East Bay in May of 1860. That picture he took of Burton and Charlie is lost now, but just getting a definite yes or no on the photographer would be helpful.”

My own day had begun organizing itself late last night as I lis-tened to the Josephine tape. Like a bad penny, Archer just kept turning up.

“I wondered who he was when we made that tape,” Koko said. “Jo had no idea.”

“So she said. No offense, Koko, but you swallowed that story of hers pretty easily.”

She did take offense. “Why shouldn’t I believe her? I had never heard of Archer then.”

“Well, you’ve heard of him now. Don’t you find Josephine a little suspicious at this point? I know you don’t want to hear this but that sweet old gal may have known more about all these people than she ever let on. Has it ever occurred to you that she may be manipulating us from the grave?”

Her temper erupted. “Oh, go away! God, you’re
such
a cynic!”

“Somebody’s got to ask the hard questions, Koko. Where do you think she got Archer’s name? Did she just pull it out of thin air? Did she pluck it out of the phone book by chance?” I leaned over and stared in her face. “Maybe it
came
to her in a supernatural daze.”

“No, it did not
come
to her and I’ve told you before, there’s nothing supernatural about it. Listen, picklepuss, because I don’t intend to say this again. I do not believe in the supernatural. At all. About anything. Do I have to say that again or did you get it this time?”

“
Pickle
puss?”

She glared. “If the face fits, wear it.”

I countered with deadpan silence. Once in a while our eyes would meet across the table and I’d give her my crushed-dog-in-the-highway look and eventually I got her to laugh.

“That’s better,” I said soothingly. “Now isn’t that better?”

“You mark my words, Cliff, and get ready to eat your own. You’re going to learn there’s a practical answer for everything. Jo heard that name somewhere—she heard it, read it—how and when she got it isn’t important now. But it made an impression and later she dreamed about it. She was describing a
dream
, you fool, you know how mixed-up dreams are. This can’t be
that
hard to under-stand, or are you still such a poopy old cop that you always think the worst of everybody?”

“That’s a great way to leave it for now, Koko. You be the pure-hearted optimist, I’ll be the poopy old cop.”

“Poopy old cynical picklepuss cop,” she said with sour amusement.

And on that note we split up.

At least I had a starting point, something to do with my day while she plowed through dusty archives. I prepared to battle pissant clerks who had never been told that public records belong to the public, but this time it was easy. It helps to know what questions to ask and how to ask them, and by late afternoon I had a growing file on Archer.

God, we have become such a depressing nation of numbers. Get a guy’s number and you can get almost everything about him. From Motor Vehicles I had his address and phone number on Sullivan’s Island. I had his Social Security number and the license plate number on his car. I knew he drove a Pontiac, two-tone blue, bought new in the year of his Pulitzer. But a check of his credit turned up a surprise. He had almost lost the car to repo boys in ‘85 and again last year. If the Pulitzer had put Archer on Easy Street, he wasn’t there long. He needed another book, a big one, and soon.

I bullshat my way from office to office, the good-old boy who made people want to help. If a clerk commented on my battered face, I turned on the charm and yukked him around, concocting tall yarns that made him laugh. In the courthouse I learned that Archer had been sued several times for nonpayment of bills. None of these had gone beyond the filing stage: he always coughed up when the wounded party got serious. He was one of those infuriating stonewallers who will not pay even a bona fide debt until he absolutely must, and now he was considered a bad risk by his plumber, his mechanic, and the man who had painted his house after a near-hurricane a few years ear-lier. He had several ugly defaults and a history of leaving others holding bags of various sizes. Some of them never did collect, and these days nobody loaned the famous Hal Archer money. He had kept up the payments on his beach house, but by then I had a hunch that it was always by the skin of his teeth. He had bought the property in 1983, leaving me to wonder why he had moved here from Virginia, where he had spent his entire life until then.

I stopped at the public library just off Marion Square. As I’d figured, Archer was in the latest
Who’s Who
. Son of Robert Russell Archer and Ann Howard Archer of Alexandria, Virginia, he had married and divorced long ago: a woman named Dorothea Hoskins, who had lived with him only long enough to have a son in 1957. In a vertical file of clippings the library kept on local notables, I learned that Archer had had little to do with his son, and today the boy was a man, living in California with his own family. Archer was a grandfather three times over and he’d never seen his grandchildren. The source of all this was a tabloid tearsheet, not great, but in Archer’s case it had a ring of truth. Suddenly the bitter picture looked tragic: a life wasted, with the big prize little more than a hollow victory. I found it unimaginable that anyone could have a child and not die to be part of that kid’s life.

There were no other marriages cited, no business affiliations, no memberships, and he did not seem to be religious. He had turned fifty-four on his last birthday. He had never served in the military, even though Korea was still causing trouble on his nineteenth birthday. His residence was listed as his business address: the same Sullivan’s Island street number I had gotten from Motor Vehicles. There was a list of his books, unhelpful since I already knew them.

His father, Robert Russell Archer, had been a powerhouse Virginia politician, prominent enough to earn his own entry in past
Who’s Whos
. Born in Alexandria, Virginia, 1905, he was an academic whiz, graduating from high school at sixteen and with honors from Rutgers in 1925. Married Ann Howard of Baltimore, 1926. Two children, the first named Robert Russell after himself and a few years later our boy Hal, William Harold Archer. Admitted to the Virginia bar 1928. Read law and studied under a prominent judge of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Public servant prior to starting own law firm: assistant DA in the mid-thirties; U.S. Attorney just before World War II. Too young to be killed in one generation’s war, too old to be maimed in the next. Never a candidate in his prime but always a power behind the scenes: worked hard for Dewey against FDR, even harder for the same poor loser against Truman. Chairman of his state’s Republican party in the early postwar years; a presidential elector from Virginia in 1948. The firstborn son, the namesake, died in 1945, at fourteen. I made a note to find out how.

Many honors were attached to his name. Slowly as I listed them I began to imagine a powerful patriarch, some Burl Ivesian codger from a Tennessee Williams play. He had come out of his shell to run for the U.S. Senate in the early sixties, but had served only five years of his term, retiring because of illness. He died in 1966, aged sixty-one years.

I read it again and thought, What’s wrong with this picture?

The Archers had been like the Huxleys—money, position, power—but Hal Archer was the exact opposite of all that. Hadn’t Lee Huxley described him as dirt poor when they were kids? Maybe it was the Depression. A lot of people lost a lot of money in those days.

I looked deeper and found an earlier Robert Russell Archer, also a lawyer, who had dominated his state’s Republican party in the First War era, all through Prohibition until his own death in 1939. Grandpa, dead at fifty-three. The Archers had a nasty little gene in their makeup that did them in young. At fifty-four, Hal must be looking over his shoulder.

Born in rural Virginia, 1886, Gramps was a real log-cabin kinda guy. Put himself through the U of Virginia, then law school, and in 1907 married a woman named (I kid you not) Betsy Ross.
Damn, I love that
—
I can almost hear “Stars and Stripes Forever
.” Only one child, the already mentioned Robert Russell Archer. Apparently the family never used “Jr.” or “the third,” so at least their kids didn’t have to battle that all their lives. Like his son he missed the carnage of his day, 1914-18, but you knew he’d have gone in a heartbeat if he’d been a little younger. He was patriotic to the bone: tireless on Liberty Loan drives, a four-minute man always on the stump. Grandpa took a hand in everything that crossed his path. He never saw a civic need that he didn’t just yearn to fill: worked on an impossible number of worthy campaigns, and later, with his law career in full bloom, was involved in trusteeships, arbitration societies, and a debating club. He held retainers from half a dozen major companies in the twenties. And with all this real life going on, the old boy had still found time for a hobby. I took in a long, slow breath as I read it.

The first Robert Russell Archer—Grandpa—had been a noted book collector.

By then it was almost dusk. Koko would be waiting for me at the motel but at the moment I had an urge to see Archer’s natural habitat. I cruised over the newer spire of the Cooper River Bridge, on through Mount Pleasant, and then, pushed by an incredible sunset, headed east across a broad expanse of marsh. I crossed a drawbridge and came onto the long narrow island, yellow in the fading day. The road dead-ended at a continuous stretch of rolling sand dunes. I knew from my map that Fort Moultrie was a mile to the right, the beach lay just ahead, and Archer’s place was two miles north. I turned left and drove up the island.

The island wasn’t complicated—no more than half a dozen streets running north and south and a grid of short crossing streets, numbered from First to Thirty-second. Archer’s house was near the far end, not far from the inlet that separates Sullivan’s from a sister island called the Isle of Palms, and it took me less than ten minutes to find it. It was built on stilts, eight feet above the beach, with a grand wraparound porch, room under it to walk or park cars, and stairs on both the street side and the beachfront. As I drove past I saw a light somewhere inside and a car parked under the porch: couldn’t tell from there if it was Archer’s car, but all this made it look very much like someone was home. I parked my own car a block away, locked it, and walked along a path through the dunes.

In those few minutes the beach had gone from yellow to purple. The sea was rough, with whitecaps and large breaking waves closer in. I was pelted by heavy gusts of wind as I came abreast of the inlet. Far out at sea a light flashed from an incoming ship. The horizon was already dark, but the sky behind me was still showing a last spectacular sun splash through a thin layer of clouds. I went to the edge of the water and tried to look like some tourist out for a stroll.

I thought about what I had learned that afternoon and what it might mean. The editors at
Who’s Who
had a standard for brevity, with no word ever wasted on trivial information. When they said Grandpa had been a
noted
book collector, they weren’t talking about the Little Leather Library or
The Rover Boys Whistle Dixie
. Grandpa had been a
substantial
collector of expensive first editions, his collection worth mentioning to an international readership. Wouldn’t this put Josephine’s dream, if that’s what it was, in a new light? If her reference to Archer had meant Grandpa, not Hal, that could make her dream, recalled under recent hypnosis, more than fifty years old.

I walked up a long stretch of hard, wet sand. Archer’s house was just ahead. I could see only enough of the car to know it wasn’t his blue Pontiac, and in the room facing the sea was a light, in addition to the one I had seen out front. As I stood still on the beach, someone moved past the window. I came closer, skirting the house yet drawn toward it, wishing the dark were a little darker but unwilling to wait for that to happen. I stepped into Archer’s yard and went quickly into the dark place under his porch. From there I could hear the faint ringing of a telephone and someone moving around inside the house. The footsteps stopped: I heard a woman’s voice but she spoke too softly for anything more than that fact to be clear. I had a hunch that whatever was going on in that room was germane, important enough to take a chance, so I moved into the pale light at the bottom of the stairs and started up.

She was standing just above me and a bit to my left; the window was open and I could hear soft music playing in the background. It covered what she was saying and what her voice sounded like saying it, so I moved closer. I took the stairs slowly, making no noise, and at the top I eased across the porch and flattened myself against the house. Whatever was happening, the other party was now doing all the talking. I heard an
uh-uh
and an
uh-huh
and more silence. I stood against the wall just outside the window, close enough to be charged with groping. She said, “Okay,” and that single clear word turned my head around. I knew that voice and knew it well.

She said, “Yeah, right,” and if I’d had any doubt I kissed it good-bye.

“He should be here soon,” she said. “I’ll let you know when there’s something to report.”

Oh, Erin, I thought.