The Hours of the Virgin (20 page)

I drained my glass in a lump and filled it again from the cut-glass decanter, not bothering with the soda this time. The Scotch wasn't working as fast as Strangeways' pain pill. I was spending a social afternoon with Lucifer. “You were telling us about the Hours.”

“Boyette didn't tell me much about it,” North said. “Only its complete history back to Richard the Third. He said the other scholars were wrong when they said it disappeared at the time of the Reformation. He had it on good authority a band of rebel monks spirited it away before Henry the Eighth ordered the monasteries destroyed. They smuggled the entire Plymouth Book out under their cassocks, a page at a time, and hid them in the walls of the houses owned by sympathetic noblemen, dividing up the sections among several houses for safety. When the danger had passed, all the sections were retrieved except the Hours of the Virgin; the monk in charge of that section had died without telling anyone where he took it, and whatever nobleman had possession conveniently forgot to come forward. It remained, largely forgotten, in the attic of the ancestral home of a prominent family until an American serviceman helped himself to it in 1944. He brought it home to Detroit as a souvenir.”

“That's where the story crosses with the one Boyette told me,” I said. “Why would he lie about that?”

North went into his liquid chuckle. “He was an egghead. He did his homework after the manuscript worked its way around to him. He was good, probably as good as he said he was. He was going to publish the real story when he announced the find. Then they fired him. Knowing him, I'd guess getting back his reputation became even more important in the end than making a bundle. He wouldn't jeopardize that by spilling it all to a cheap private eye.”

I went to my shirt pocket for my pack of Winstons. I smiled when he shrank away from the sudden movement. My knuckles still ached and I didn't think his jaw felt any better. “If he had the real Hours, why didn't he try to peddle it? He said it was worth a million at auction.”

“He couldn't, legitimately,” Strangeways put in. “It belongs to Great Britain. The World Court doesn't recognize the spoils of war. He would have had to return it.”

North said, “He couldn't sell it under the table, either, if he wanted to make hay out of the discovery. So your idea about me killing him to keep him from going to the police doesn't hold air. Academic fame meant more to him than blood money.”

“Ideas are like cigarettes in a machine. There's always a fresh pack right behind the last.” I lit one and blew smoke at the junior Acropolis along the base of the ceiling. “Like, you waxed him because he refused to fence the Hours and split the take.”

“What would that get me, aside from a moment's satisfaction? Certainly not the Hours.”

“He had a bundle under his arm when he went into the Tomcat. He didn't leave it in the theater and it wasn't found in his car when he was. It wasn't in his house. He had no manuscripts there of any kind. I didn't even think about that until a little while ago. That's when I figured out you had them all.”

“Not all. I don't have the Hours. And I was never in the Tomcat Theater.”

A movement from the chaise hooked my attention. Strangeways had picked up the gun from the scooter. It wasn't pointing at anything, just resting in his hand in his blanket-covered lap. “I remind you both that the purpose of this meeting is to determine what happened to my wife. I shall pay the sum of one million dollars to the man who produces her alive and in good condition. It no longer matters whether that man is the one who took her away in the first place. I wish to have her back. If she's dead, I shall spend that million to bring the person who killed her to justice.”

Something shifted in North's dull gray eyes, a shadow of a suggestion of a glimmer. His hands, which had gone back into his pockets, came partway out. I wasn't paying any attention to them now, they were just hands. It was the glimmer I didn't like. It was equal parts avarice and worry. It should have been one or the other, but not both. It wouldn't have been split if he knew where Laurel Strangeways was, or
if
she was. Then I decided I was trying to get too much out of something that could have been just a reflection of the pale sun going down outside the glass room.

I swirled the liquor in my glass and drank it. “A million to you is a hundred to me. I'll throw it in. She shapes up to be the last person who saw Boyette alive, not counting the passenger in the back seat.”

Strangeways wasn't listening. He'd traded the P38 for his cordless telephone. He punched out a number, waited, and said, “Jillian Raider, please. This is Gordon Strangeways. Good afternoon, Jillian. I want you to draw up a letter of intent for my signature.” He waited again, then repeated his offer word for word. He asked her to read it back, listened, said, “Splendid,” and rang off. He looked at us. “It will be notarized and placed on file in the safe with my will.” Without waiting for a reply from either of us, he pressed another button. “Come in, please, Ben. Your hat and coat.”

That made it last call for the guests. I put on my coat and we went out, North first with the welterweight bringing up the rear. We waited on the front porch while Ben went to fetch our cars.

“You didn't get your letter of reference,” I said.

“Didn't expect one. I came here to find out what happened to Laurel. I still think that son of a bitch killed her. It doesn't cost a cent to offer a million-dollar reward no one will ever collect.”

“So it's love.”

A beige Pontiac was coming up the driveway with Ben at the wheel. North faced me.

“At least I care. You don't give a damn if she's alive or dead or what happened to the Hours of the Virgin. Unless you can use them somehow to nail me for your partner's murder.”

“Any old murder will do. It doesn't have to be Dale.”

“He isn't worth it, you know.”

The Scotch had reached my nervous system at last. My face felt warm in the bracing cold. “You only knew him long enough to take aim.”

“I knew him longer than that.”

I waited. His smile looked as if it had lain on a windowsill for a week.

“I don't like being followed,” he said. “Even when I'm not doing anything, and—hell, it was a long time ago and my ex-wife has remarried—I was doing something. Immoral, yes; illegal, no. Nobody's business but Mr. and Mrs. North's. But every time I glanced up in my rearview mirror, there was that beat-up Fury, as easy to shake as an ulcer. So one day at a stoplight I got out and went back and offered Leopold a thousand dollars to paint me up as Ward Cleaver for my wife. He accepted before the light changed.”

I grinned. “That the best you can do? If Dale had a price it was a lot higher than a grand.”

“I said it was a long time ago. Carter was president. I was living on a clerk's salary.”

The Pontiac slid into the curb and Ben got out, leaving the door open. North stepped down. I said, “Thanks for clearing that up. It explains why he wasn't following you that night on Mullett and why he's home right now clipping coupons.”

“Try this. If he was holding me up for a grand, chances are he was holding somebody else up for ten. See, that's the problem with raising the ante. The kind of person who can afford to cover it didn't get where he is by making a habit of paying off chiselers.”

I took a step toward him. He scrambled to get into the front seat and slammed the door. I gave him a moment to find his spine, then tapped on the window. He cranked it down two inches.

“You're going down,” I said. “If not for Dale, then for Boyette. For Laurel Strangeways too, if she's dead. If I could get you for Star LaJoie, she'd do as well. Death's been too good to you. The bill's on its way.”

There was no life in his eyes. They might have been penciled in. “He was your friend. If I had a friend I'd like to think he'd do the same for me. I don't think he started out crooked, if it means anything. Just burned out. Maybe you feel that way sometimes. God knows I do. That's why I've made the mistakes I've made.”

“Quit kidding. You don't know what it's like to have a friend.”

“If you hit me again I'll kill you.”

He cranked up the window and pulled away.

22

Just another Dagwood

Just another Dagwood Bumstead with a snake

Just another Dagwood Bumstead with a snake in his pants, kid. Don't worry your pretty little head about it
.

The drive back to Detroit from Downriver is always longer than the drive out, especially when it's getting dark. The attenuating shadows always seem to be moving faster than the car. Tonight it was Lindbergh's crossing, Columbus' first voyage, the trek up Everest. I was going ten miles over the limit, but the Cutlass was standing still on the back of an elderly tortoise with bunions. I snapped on the radio and ran the indicator all the way right and left, but everywhere it stopped, Dale Leopold's voice came out of the speaker.
Just another Dagwood Bumstead with a snake in his pants, kid
. As much as I knew about the Earl North divorce case until I got the call to come down to Mullett Street.

A generation reared on the smug politics of
Doonesbury
and the lunkheaded jock humor of
Tank MacNamara
probably skipped right over it on the way to the Ninja Turtles, but my crowd and my father's grew up following the adventures of Dagwood, the quintessential harried husband, through the daily obstacle course of marriage, work, fatherhood, and life in the suburbs. It was his comic strip, even if it was named for his wife. Six times weekly and in four colors on Sunday,
Blondie
pushed this lanky cowlicked Everyman off stepladders, got him in Dutch with his boss, and propelled him into a collision with the equally hapless mailman on his way to catch the morning bus, all in the cause of old-fashioned family values and the Puritan work ethic.

What was less known, and that only to readers ancient enough to remember the strip's debut in the twenties and the odd trivia fanatic like Dale, was that Dagwood had started out rich. Heir to the fabulous Bumstead fortune, he had given up his birthright to marry Blondie, the airheaded flapper beloved of the newspaper junkies of Prohibition, and sentenced himself to life among the proles for the sake of love. Dale had won a couple of hundred dollars from unbelievers by producing a copy of the premiere panels, clipped from a Permabound history of the comics and stashed in his wallet. When it began to grow tattered at the fold, I had told him he was in danger of losing his investment if he didn't have it laminated. I never knew if he took me up on the suggestion or if it had worn out finally and he had thrown it away. It wasn't in his wallet when his body was found.

I thought about it for fourteen or fifteen blocks; then I pressed down the accelerator.

The prosecutor who'd failed to indict North hadn't given it his best shot. He didn't like the motive. A computer clerk with a colorless background made a poor candidate for a murderer. Divorce on grounds of infidelity didn't pack the punch it had during the Victorian era, especially at the height of the sexual revolution of the 1970s. North, mired deep in the low end of the middle class, had stood to lose his small tract house in the suburbs and five-year-old Plymouth two-door, but he was young enough to start over. Double the loss, triple it, and it still didn't add up to three bullets fired from a gun in his hand.

Don't worry your pretty little head about it
.

Reverse psychology.

Dying clue.

To hell with that. Dale never reversed anything. A county survey crew could have plotted a road along the progression of his thoughts, and he'd been just as direct about expressing them. Not the world's most enviable virtue; it had cost him two marriages and more friendships than most people made in a lifetime. But to quote the late CEO of the Midwest's largest vending machine distributor, just before he went to prison for tax evasion, “You knew where you stood with the son of a bitch.” Dale had no use for cryptic codes.

But if North was right. If Dale could be bought. If somebody with a lot more to lose didn't agree to his price. That would be a motive.

Nuts. A handful of snowflakes shaped like tiny cartwheels flattened out against the windshield and turned to water on contact. I flirted the wipers, sweeping away the drops and the doubts along with them.

But assuming what Nesta Spurling Clark had told me held air, what were Dale and North talking about just before Dale died?

He wouldn't leave a clue, not on purpose. But there had to be a reason he had Dagwood on his mind. Why the strip that had won so many bets hadn't shown up among his personal effects.

No wife, Blondie-type or otherwise, greeted me at the door with a drink when I entered my kitchen from the garage. I had thought once or twice about getting a dog, but you never know when a tail job might end in California and I didn't have anyone I'd trust to feed and walk the pooch without helping himself to the TV and VCR; so no big clunky paws muddied my shirt and no sweaty tongue licked my face either. The only greeting I got came from a bulb in the ceiling fixture that jinked and went out when I flipped the switch.

Time enough to replace it later. I went into the living room without taking off my coat and switched on the floor lamp. The little bookcase stood on the edge of the pool of light.

Dale wasn't a book collector except by accident. He could never understand why anyone would pay hundreds of dollars for a first edition when he could buy the same book in paperback for a buck and a half or borrow it from the library and read it for free. But he was a John O'Hara fan most of his adult life. It began with a beat-up edition of
Appointment in Samarra
without a jacket he bought in a used book store to look busy while he was tailing someone and started reading on stakeout. He'd gotten so hooked he almost missed his subject, and had never again read on the job, although he usually had an atlas or a road map spread out in front of him in case anyone wondered what he was doing sitting in his car. But he finished the book at home, then went to the library and checked out
Pal Joey
and read that in one sitting. When he'd exhausted the early titles he started buying each new one as it appeared, in the end amassing an impressive collection of first editions in pristine jackets because he couldn't wait for them to show up at the library or come out in cheaper editions. Something about the writer's plain style and honest presentation of the flawed human creatures with whom Dale shared a planet touched a nerve. When O'Hara died in 1970, he moped around for days, then went back and reread
Appointment in Samarra
, whose fatalistic epigraph, borrowed from Somerset Maugham, was later read aloud at his funeral. At the time he was killed he'd read them all two or three times.