The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2)

by Vin Suprynowicz

  “The Annesleys are a pretty prominent family.”

  “Run it and see what happens. If you’re still getting too much, just pare it back to ‘resonator.’”

  “OK. I’ll talk to Les; maybe he can think of another keyword.”

  “Good. Meantime, there’s something else, Marian.”

  “Yes?”

  “We’ve got too many books piling up, waiting for me to OK your pricing. If there are books where you’re coming up with too wide a range or you just can’t find any comparables and you’re at a loss, fine, jot a note and leave me the book and we can put our heads together.” This could particularly be a problem with hard-to-find non-fiction, which was three-quarters of the stock. Values for fiction were much better documented. “But you’ve got to screen them all to decide which ones to set aside, anyway. Except for those few where you have questions, why don’t you just go ahead and price anything up to two thousand. Would that be a problem?”

  “No, Matthew, not at all.” Marian suppressed a smile. Of course piling books in Matthew’s office that should have been online or on the shelves or both was silly, waiting for a grownup to check her work while Matthew was away for weeks at a time. This would be much more efficient, and it was overdue. It finally put her in complete charge of 98 percent of the stock, leaving Matthew to deal with a manageable number of high-end pieces that usually had to be hand-sold to known collectors, anyway.

  “Good,” said Matthew, settling the matter.

  With the Internet search turned over to Marian, the initial phone work was left to Matthew. There appeared to be a couple of bookstores in DeLand, Florida — an oddity given the modest size of the town. Still, it was a county seat and there was a college there, you never could tell. The first number Matthew tried was disconnected. The second worked.

  “Hi, we’re looking for material related to Robert Hayward Barlow, 1918 to 1951.”

  “He was an author?”

  “He wrote a brief appreciation of his friend H.P. Lovecraft, called ‘The Wind That Is in the Grass.’”

  “Oh, that Barlow. Yes, the University of Tampa published a collection of their letters.”

  “Right.”

  “That book’s not hard to find.”

  “Do you ever see anything else come in that’s related to Barlow or his family? Books or papers that could have belonged to Robert Barlow? He grew up there in DeLand.”

  “Gee, if the man died sixty, seventy years ago …”

  “I know. We’re just covering our bases. Robert Barlow left home there in DeLand before the war, went to college in California, ended up teaching down in Mexico, he was still pretty young when he died. Sometimes in a case like that some papers and magazines get left in the parents’ house, years later the house gets cleared out, no one knows what to do with boxes of old papers.”

  “Don’t I know it. We go to estate sales, we ask ‘Where are the old books and papers?’ People say, ‘Oh, we threw those out, no one would want those.’ Either that, or all they saved are the encyclopedias and the Kennedy assassination newspapers, which they’re convinced should be worth a fortune.”

  “Welcome to my world. Are there still Barlows in DeLand?”

  “Oh, sure. It’s a fairly common name, here.”

  “Well, maybe I could give you our phone number, in case something should turn up. When he was a teen-ager, Barlow was a fan of Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, it’s possible he would have left behind a collection of pulp magazines from the twenties and thirties.”

  “The ‘Weird Tales.’”

  “Exactly.”

  “No, I mean, there was a collection of ‘Weird Tales’ that came through when my dad ran the store. I was just a kid, but I remember the great cover art.”

  “Were they Barlow’s?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Would your dad remember?”

  “Gone these many years, I’m afraid.”

  “If someone was clearing out a house, different things can get jumbled into the same box. Sometimes there are a few magazines that can’t be sold because they got damp, missing pages, whatever, so the box hangs around. We’re looking for pretty much any handwritten material or notebooks that might relate to Barlow or Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard. Even unsigned fragments.”

  “I can look, dad never threw anything away, but we’ve been trying to clear out the clutter.”

  Matthew named a price he’d pay for any box of such material, plus shipping — not exorbitant but enough to be worth a few hours’ looking — and gave the nice lady his name and mailing address.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ONE WEEK LATER …

  Providence Police Sergeant Phil Robichaux had no doubt how it would go. He’d been through it with his union rep and then with Assistant Prosecutor Sturm Wolfson half a dozen times. There would be no cross-examination by any hostile attorney representing the deceased or his family, that was barred, and the judge’s instructions to the carefully screened coroner’s inquest jury would make it a slam dunk.

  Still, it was all a pain in the ass. Weeks of worrying about this, when all he’d done was shoot one lousy nigger.

  Technically, cops weren’t supposed to parade around in full dress uniform when they were off duty. After all, doctors didn’t generally testify in court in their Operating Room scrubs with a stethoscope around their neck; SCUBA divers didn’t flop up to the stand in their wet suits and tanks and swim fins. But that was easily taken care of — the department simply declared cops were on duty when required to testify in court — even if they were testifying about their having shot an unarmed citizen standing in the doorway to his own home. So Sergeant Robichaux was in his full dress parade regalia, complete with gold braid, as he entered Judge Crustio’s courtroom.

  Judge Fidelio Crustio — who normally wouldn’t have pulled this duty — had taken over when the regular hearing officer had declared a conflict of interest. He ordered Phil sworn in. The prosecutor started by having him run through his years on the force, his promotions, commendations for bravery, and so on. No mention was made of his disciplinary problems or the ridiculous “anger management” classes, or the four previous Internal Affairs investigations. Then Wolfson coached him soothingly through the day of the shooting, just like they’d rehearsed.

  Perpetrator Leroy Johnson, who owned a local dry-cleaning business, had been a light-skinned black man. Johnson’s common law wife, who’d been breaking up with him and moving out, called police to report he was angrily throwing her possessions onto his front lawn.

  Asked whether the subject Johnson had weapons, the woman answered yes, but they were legally owned and secured. No, she reported, he hadn’t been drinking.

  Three officers and Sgt. Phil Robichaux responded. Johnson, on seeing them, retreated into his home, refusing to answer questions.

  A few minutes later, Officer Stanley Thibodeau, a trained police negotiator, arrived, and as the four other policemen stood close behind him with weapons drawn, he began trying to coax Johnson out onto his front porch.

  Johnson had been polite, but reluctant to leave his home, saying repeatedly he was frightened of being killed.

  He said “I don’t want anybody to get hurt,” the negotiator told investigators a few months later. “I don’t want to get shot.”

  Thibodeau the negotiator told the subject Johnson no one was going to shoot him. Then he asked the subject Johnson if he owned a pistol. Johnson said yes, and fetched it. He held it up, holstered, for Thibodeau to see and then set it aside, again raising his hands over his head. He offered to let Thibodeau come into the house and retrieve the weapon.

  He asked for permission to scratch his nose, and did it slowly, then raised his hands again. He asked to reach into his pocket for his phone; Thibodeau asked him not to, and he obeyed.

  “He said ‘I know if I reach down or drop my hands I can get shot,’” Thibodeau had told detectives later. “I said, ‘Hey, nobody’s going to shoot you.…’”

  B
ut the subject Johnson pointed to one nearby officer in particular: Sgt. Phil Robichaux, who kept raising his pistol from the “ready” position (pointed at Johnson’s legs) to aim at Johnson’s chest.

  “Please ask him not to point his gun at me,” the subject Johnson had begged Thibodeau the negotiator. Johnson even offered to come out and be handcuffed voluntarily if Robichaux and the patrolmen would agree to move “way back.”

  Then he asked to scratch his nose again. The negotiator Thibodeau consented. Which is when Phil Robichaux shot him in the chest.

  Johnson, grabbing his wound, screamed in pain and stepped back, slamming his door.

  “And I’m like, who the fuck shot him?” Thibodeau told detectives later. “I kinda got a little pissed.”

  But Sturm Wolfson saw no need to present that kind of detail to the coroner’s jury, nor the fact that Sgt. Phil Robichaux at that point had admitted firing the shot and blurted out to negotiator Thibodeau he’d had a fight over the phone with his wife just before arriving on the scene.

  Thibodeau and the three other officers who’d been present told investigators the subject Johnson had never made any move toward his waist, nor toward any weapon. So did two civilian witnesses. But prosecutor Wolfson never brought any of that up; the coroner’s jury would never hear about that. Why confuse them? After all, prosecutors and cops were on the same team.

  “And why did you discharge your service pistol, Sergeant Robichaux?”

  “The subject Johnson made a furtive move toward his waistband, sir. We knew he was in possession of firearms, and he made a sudden move towards his waist.”

  “You felt your life or the lives of the other officers at the scene were in danger?”

  “Yes sir, absolutely.”

  “You’re aware that the subject Johnson bled to death before a tactical team arrived to storm the house — before they broke in his door with their armored vehicle some hours later?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m very sorry that was the outcome from his actions.”

  “You’d never met the subject Johnson before, you had nothing against him?”

  “No sir, absolutely not.”

  And that was it. Judge Crustio reminded the coroner’s jurors that they’d sworn in advance to follow his instructions — anyone who’d refused to take such an oath would have been dismissed and replaced — and he then instructed them the only way they could find Sergeant Phil Robichaux at fault was if they believed he’d gone to the subject Johnson’s home that day “with the express purpose aforethought, that is to say with an express plan and wish,” to kill said negro gentleman.

  With that as their only other option, the hand-picked jury of course unanimously ruled the shooting of local business owner Leroy Johnson on his own doorstep to have been fully justified, Judge Crustio thanked them for their service, and Sgt. Phil Robichaux automatically went back on active duty with full back pay and accrued benefits.

  “Congratulations,” the union rep shook his hand.

  “Fuckin’ waste of time,” Phil Robichaux responded.

  “All in a day’s work, Phil. You got to go through the motions.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  “Second time for you, right?”

  “Yeah. That a problem?”

  “No, no. Just as long as it’s in the line of duty, Phil.”

  “Always.”

  Cops killed thousands of people in America every year — not in shootouts, but unarmed people walking down the sidewalk or standing in the doorways of their own homes. Not one cop in a thousand ever saw the inside of a jail cell, and the FBI didn’t even count those deaths as homicides in their uniform crime statistics. You could ask ’em.

  * * *

  Marian spoke to Matthew as he came in the front door of the shop, jingling the merry little bell.

  “Your note says to plug this thing in with the computers, but Chantal said to double-check with you. Neither of us knows anything about a homing device.”

  “A … homing device?”

  “This thing. Your note. That is your writing, right?”

  The thing was heavy and looked like a glorified steel two-gallon paint can with a plug and wire coming out the side, though obviously it had been finished off with some fine machine work. And yes, the note was in Matthew’s handwriting, simply identifying the gizmo as a long-range homing beacon and recommending it be plugged into the same circuit as the computers.

  “My handwriting, yes, but I don’t remember writing it.”

  “That’s weird. I’m glad I waited.”

  “At least, I don’t think I’ve written this yet.”

  “That’s even weirder, Matthew.”

  “Marian, surely you know quantum physics tells us events today can be impacted by things we’re not going to do till tomorrow. We’re only vibrations in a temporal matrix, after all. Every action launched here has to have a receptor waiting in the future, and vice versa.”

  “In other words, you don’t have any more idea what this thing is than we do.”

  “Chantal, babe?”

  “Yes, dear.” Chantal poked her lovely brunette head around the corner of Science Fiction, which she was putting back in order by author. The customers for some reason insisted on putting Asimov back under “I” and Heinlein under “R” … when they showed any signs of grasping “alphabetical order,” at all.

  “Do we still know some electronics genius down in Newport?”

  “Cory? Yeah. You going to send him the long-range homing beacon?”

  “If you think he’d be willing to check it out.”

  “I’ll call him.”

  “Ask him, if Skeezix can wrap this up and hand it to one of our favorite bus drivers, whether he can meet the bus in Middletown.”

  “Can do.”

  “I wonder if you can help me.” Customers always seemed to sneak up on Matthew when he wasn’t looking.

  “I can try.”

  “It’s my grandson. He wants books about the Titanic, absolutely anything about the Titanic.”

  “You’re in the right section, ma’am. Those are our shelves for ships and trains, but I can see from here the two books I was going to recommend are gone. We had a nice large-format book with cutaway drawings of the various deck plans, and Robert Ballard’s book on the discovery of the wreck, but they’re both large format books, quartos, and I can see from here they’ve both sold. We’ll stock them again if they turn up, but it’s hard to say when.”

  “Oh no.”

  “But I think we have something else that might work. Over here in fiction I think we recently put in — yes, here it is, A Night to Remember, by Walter Lord. This is a novel about the sinking of the Titanic, in fact it was the basis for the film version back in the ’50s, starring Walter Pigeon, no, Kenneth More, I think. Roy Ward Baker directed, and Eric Ambler wrote the screenplay, which a lot of people don’t know. This copy is from the Roy Ward Baker estate, actually.”

  Matthew held out the book — in a nice dust jacket and presumably a first — so the woman could take it from him. She didn’t, even though accepting something that’s held out to you is the more natural thing to do.

  “No,” she said. “No, I don’t think so. I’ll keep looking for something about the Titanic.” And she turned and briskly walked away.

  Matthew stood for a moment, wondering if there were some parallel universe in which encounters like that one — it wasn’t the first — might make some kind of sense. No peace for the wicked, though. A seller had brought Marian a box of books at the front desk, and now here she was at his elbow, telling Matthew in low tones that she’d appreciate his input, which was a little unusual. He crossed over, gave the lady a reassuring smile, opened each book to the title page, and froze.

  Matthew grasped the problem immediately. Marian did the monthly accounts. She knew better than anyone that Books on Benefit managed a modest profit based on their online sales and Matthew’s occasional high-dollar finds. Buying books for $5 or $10 that you hop
ed to sell for $40 might sound like a road to wealth to the uninitiated, but the problem was what the economists called “velocity,” which in the used book business in the Internet age could be glacial. A smaller profit margin was fine for a supermarket that might turn over an entire shelf of tomato sauce in a couple of days, but it wasn’t unusual for the store to sit on a book for years, literally years, before it sold. Years of lighting that book and heating it in winter and keeping the roof repaired and making sure someone was guarding the front desk every minute they were open.

  They already showed red ink in the ice-and-snow months of January and February; no one wanted to be held responsible for spreading red ink over more of the calendar by paying too much for acquisitions, eliciting from Matthew the dreaded Squint of Concern. They both knew the lady would probably be perfectly happy to walk out with $40 or $50 in her hand, which meant what Matthew was about to do he was doing primarily for the benefit of Marian and Les and Chantal, reassuring them of the reputation he wanted the store to have for its treatment of the Lost, the Clueless, and the Befuddled.

  “You’re wanting to sell all these books, ma’am?”

  “Well, yes. I just have no choice but to start thinning things out, now. I’m not getting any younger, I’m afraid. The house will have to be sold eventually. Is there some problem? The young woman seemed upset.”

  “No problem. She wanted to make sure she was right about a value. Did you have an asking price?”

  A high asking price would indicate she knew what she had, which would require a little more caution about the provenance. Even graying matrons could turn out to be book thieves. A medium asking price he could meet, as long as it allowed them to make their four-bagger. They were in business to make a profit, after all. But she gave the most typical response.

  “No, I really have no idea. Whatever you think is right.”

  “You’ve owned these books for some time?”

  “Oh, forty years, I would think. Some were my late husband’s.

  “Charles.”

  “Yes. How did — oh, it’s written in some of the books, isn’t it?”

  “It is, ma’am. Particularly in this one.”