Sorrow's Crown

by Tom Piccirilli

  She waved me on with her free hand while she scooped peppers into her mouth. I told her about the shop and she froze in mid-bite. "Tell me it's not bad."

  "It's not bad."

  "Tell me you're not just telling me that."

  "I'm not just telling you that. Almost nothing was touched."

  "Who did it?"

  "Arnie Devington."

  "That bastard, why'd he have to pick on me? Did they catch him?"

  "No, there's no proof it was him. Lowell might go out there to roust him a little, or maybe he won't."

  "Well, how nice for everybody." Her sarcasm didn't have much sharpness to it, maybe because she didn't want to look bad in front of Jesus. "I know this might seem a peculiar time to bring this up, seeing as how I've just been vandalized, but have you thought any more about moving the bookstore?"

  "Yes," I said. "I have."

  She scanned my face, trying to glimpse lies or terror or desperation. I didn't know myself what might be showing in there, but she grinned, apparently appeased, and nibbled on the biscotta. "Okay, so back to last night and you getting attacked by this psycho. You think Theodore Harnes sent him?"

  "I'm not sure," I said. "Maybe Sparky thought he would get in better with the boss if he took some initiative."

  "That's generally not the way to get in better with the boss."

  "That's why it doesn't feel right to me."

  "So what did Anna have to say about all this?"

  I told her what Anna had explained to me back at the house. I tried to keep my voice steady but wound up sounding like a crotchety old man who'd been having trouble with his regularity. Katie took it in stride, and continued eating until the plate was empty. Everyone had a much calmer demeanor than I did, and it was pissing me off.

  "You look surprised," she said.

  "Aren't you?"

  "That she nearly ran him down? Hell no. Don't you know anything at all about your grandmother? It's not like it was a conspiracy to commit murder. Anna was only nineteen or twenty years old, her friend comes to her distraught, wanting to leave Harnes, who, as we've already established, has got some serious issues, and asks for help."

  "She might've killed him."

  "She was trying to help her friend get free from a bad situation, and the son of a bitch wouldn't get out of the way."

  Katie hadn't seen the expression on Anna's face: the self-righteous glint in her eye, but with some doubts surfacing even after all these years. "Still . . ."

  "Still nothing. I think it was wonderfully brave of her, and you should be proud of what she did. You know what it was like back then, women terrified to leave their husbands, the stigma that went along with divorce."

  I could picture the scene clearly, each detail properly placed as my grandmother had told me.

  Diane Cruthers seeking help from Anna, knocking frantically at an embarrassingly early hour when only a milkman like my grandfather wouldn't be in bed sleeping. Anna, a newlywed herself, unsure of almost everything at the sudden shift of her own life, in a new house not yet a home, married to a virtual stranger she'd known only a few months, startled before sunrise as she stood at the sink cleaning breakfast dishes. My grandfather always had five sausages but never ate the tips, leaving the ten crispy black ends lined in the center of his plate. Diane Cruthers, on the verge of enraged hysterics, had come for help . . . but what could Anna do? Only nineteen, Anna understood insecurity well enough.

  Without knowing the reasons behind her friend's panic, she could only think of flight as her distraught friend badgered her for some kind of support, never explaining what had happened. Not a mark on her, and Diane Cruthers wasn't even crying. Perhaps Anna understood Harnes' capabilities already, or merely gave him the benefit of the doubt. Theodore Harnes, only a teenager himself, without much presence even then though not quite as tranquil as today, void of some necessary part of the human essence, but with a potential for reaping so much, was capable of real evil, and they knew it. They got into the car—a lumbering ten-year-old Airflow DeSoto haphazardly washed because my grandfather refused glasses and could never quite get the entire roof or hood done. Where were they going? She had no idea.

  Was she only aiding Diane Cruthers, or had Anna decided her marriage had been a mistake? But they got in, my grandmother a poor driver at best back then, having just learned only a couple of weeks earlier, fumbling with the starter and crowding the clutch, stalling time and again while Diane let out raspy, bitter breaths beside her.

  Harnes had found them, of course, and pulled up carefully to the curb, taking the time to lock his car door before moving up the walk to stand nonchalantly at the end of the driveway. He waited calmly without a word. Finally the DeSoto squealed to life, and Anna worked the clutch correctly to get into first, and they began to slowly roll forward. Harnes didn't move, and didn't seem to mind. Anna wouldn't stomp the gas but she also wouldn't stop. Not even after Diane gripped her by the arm and growled for Anna to step on the brake, she didn't stop.

  So it had all come down to this: Diane caving in at the last moment while Anna, without understanding why, continued the struggle. Harnes smiled as the car barreled toward him.

  No wonder they could talk like old friends. The mutual respect, regard, admiration, and hate they must've felt at that moment would have been memorable for a lifetime, neither altering their course, as the grille loomed closer to him and he stared contentedly ahead. The DeSoto hit him flush and Harnes piled over the hood, bouncing across the front yard as the engine sputtered and died. He hadn't even left a dent.

  Diane Cruthers went to him then, and doomed herself.

  Alice Conway had explained Theodore Harnes simply and efficiently: a man who enjoys a standoff.

  "But after all that," I said, "she went back to him."

  "He had the money and she had nothing. No job, maybe no family. She was pregnant, right?"

  "I don't know about then. She was pregnant when she died." What pregnant woman commits suicide?

  "And Anna thinks Harnes killed her friend?"

  "She said she was certain."

  The phone rang, and Katie answered and handed it to me. "It's Lowell. He sounds displeased."

  "He usually does."

  I took the phone and Lowell said, "Change your battery, that sucker's drained already."

  I checked, and found there was only a static-filled buzz. "My walkie-talkies would have lasted longer."

  "Frost died a couple hours ago," he said.

  "Shit."

  "You remember what the cute EMT mentioned about kids and steroids? Remember how they used to bleed on the field?”

  “Yeah."

  "Besides shriveling your nads and giving you hard-ons in math class that won't settle, there's a risk of heart attack, stroke, and liver disease, among other wonders. This guy was probably strong as a bull but a real mess on the inside."

  "Shanks didn't exactly help him on the road to recovery."

  "I put a little pressure on Dr. Brennan Brent today. He knows I have no legal right, but he's a nervous pissant. Shanks' death has him rattled."

  "Maybe he thinks Harnes will send him into the fray next."

  "Or knows the fray is coming after him."

  The fray came after us all. "I wonder if we look hard enough in Panecraft ... maybe we'll find out what really happened to Teddy."

  "You leave that to me," Lowell said. "You keep looking into things on your own and you're going to wind up without a face too, Jonny Kendrick, and won't that be a damn shame?"

  "I kinda think so."

  He hung up and I racked the phone, knocking aside two books I'd given Katie last month that had been lying open on her nightstand with a paperweight slapped on top, the dust jackets already crumpled. Nobody seemed to care much about the condition of books. I thought again of Teddy having once been in my store, the way he'd worked on the books with his tiny print about paints and colors, and the folded pieces of artwork hidden behind the inner flaps. I tried recalling th
e young man I'd seen in the photo standing between Alice Conway and Brian Frost. Had he come down to the city just on a book-buying excursion or had he led another life that no one had known about, a kid far different from this phantom with no real persona? More likely he'd visited Fifth Avenue's Museum Mile, the Guggenheim, Museum of Natural History, and wandered downtown to the Village to peruse the shops and Soho galleries. Or maybe he was a pervert hooked on the peep shows who ran around with the prostitutes who had gone to the east side after Times Square was taken over by Disney.

  "You don't have to keep going on with this," Katie said.

  "Crummler might be safe from Harnes at the moment, but he's still in an asylum for something he didn't do."

  "We hope. So what happens next?"

  "I need to go back to the city."

  "When? Today?"

  ''Yes.''

  "Why? What do you expect to find there?"

  "I just had a thought."

  "Oh." Her jade eyes filled with that irritated glow again, and I sucked in my breath. The pink in her cheeks faded and the thick drops of sweat formed on her upper lip. "Oh, you had one of those. And no doubt you intend to keep having more of them, too. Well, while you're having your thoughts, I have to go find out what your friend has been doing to my shop. You wouldn't happen to know the number of a good window repairman, would you?" Her lips turned the color of ashes. "Oh God, watch it ... move, let me get to the bathroom."

  THIRTEEN

  The cab ride from JFK to the midtown tunnel took nearly an hour due to a closed center lane, traffic bottlenecking for over a mile at the toll booths. A water main had burst at 33rd and Park Avenue, and the cops had closed both directions. The staccato of blaring horns did nothing to make anybody more pleasant or move any faster through the gridlock. The entire time I had to listen to the Russian immigrant driver badmouthing the Pakistanis for taking over the city, telling me in broken English how they all ought to go the hell back home. I hopped out and took the 6 downtown, and when I came up out of the heat I noticed that another Barnes & Noble had gone up seemingly overnight only four blocks from my place.

  My store smelled of dust and acidifying paper, an oddly agreeable mixture reminiscent of potpourri and dry leaves. It was ten degrees cooler inside, and the sudden change made a chill ripple up my neck.

  There was a nearly desolate sense of vacancy here, I thought, an emptiness in the despondent dark as I snapped on the lights. Again I realized just how much I'd taken my former assistant Debi Kiko Mashima for granted. She not only handled the nearly infinite number of small and irritating daily tasks about the store, but she added a genuine and often blithe liveliness to the place. I wondered if I gave her a twenty-buck raise she'd leave her new husband Bobby Li, the billionaire software writer.

  I had less than five hours before the next flight upstate out of JFK. I checked my online orders and found a great deal more than I'd expected, enough to make up for whatever might have been lost by my closing down for the past few days. A part of me wanted to accept the idea that seventy-five percent of my business had nothing to do with face-to-face customer service, and another part of me didn't want to believe that so few people liked to peruse the stacks and smell the books anymore.

  I thought about that photo of Teddy Harnes. Alice Conway could have lied. It might not have been him, but his amiable countenance, leaning into the camera, one arm around Alice and the other around Brian Frost's shoulders. Pulling his friends to him gave him a certain credence in my mind, as if he'd been born to make up for his father's lack of descriptive character. Alice had said, "He loved to read, and read everything he could get his hands on. He returned all the books for credit or gave them away."

  I checked the art and philosophy shelves, spending a half hour glancing through books and finding nothing. Eventually I realized I had to tackle the storage room, and heartburn started edging through my chest. Dozens of sprawling stacks and a hundred boxes filled with thousands more books stood chest-high, all of it in disarray. My inventory constantly shifted and fluxed, moving in and out of storage with all the order of a lingerie fire sale. Just because some novel sat three feet at the bottom of a box didn't mean it hadn't been brought in only a week ago. Debi had kept on top of changing shelf life, but I'd let it slip into a hopeless snarl of tilting heaps.

  I left the door open in case Nick Crummler had returned to the city after killing Freddy Shanks. He wouldn't abandon his brother, but he might've come back to Manhattan to regroup and figure his next step. I tried to beat him to it, but just kept seeing the vacant look on his face that somehow showed the irrepressible contempt he felt when he brought the blackjack down onto Sparky's forehead.

  If he knew anything about the Grove at all, he'd know that Lowell would never stop searching for him.

  I went to work.

  Two and a half hours later I picked up a copy of E. A. Strehlneek's Chinese Pictorial Art, Commercial Press: Shanghai, 1914—a cloth copy I'd originally purchased at a bargain price from an auctioned lot the family of a bibliophile had let go too cheaply—light-blue silk binding over boards with gilt decoration with its original dust jacket and a seventy-three page supplement. In the same box was Raphael Petrucci's Chinese Painters: A Critical Study, 1920 cloth and boards with twenty-five illustrations in duotone. I'd priced each of the books at $200, and must've been dumbfounded to have discovered them returned for credit. It was something I shouldn't have forgotten, but I had.

  Teddy had made further extensive handwritten notes in that tiny, clear print, and also drawn on the inside back covers. It amazed me he would write so much about painting and not keep the book to reread later. In the center of the Strehlneek book were several more ink drawings Teddy had done of the same woman.

  I looked out at the city I'd tried to make my home despite the jealous and perpetual draw of Felicity Grove. Greenwich Village always had a vigorous disposition, the downtown culture and club kids, students, poets, insane crackheads and homeless crammed to within a few feet of each other. The museum owners, sculptors, and painters keep art in front of your face like soldiers performing a necessary but dangerous duty. Music shops kicked it out into the streets with band names I couldn't even pronounce, and the dogwalkers, Rollerbladers, and professional dominatrixes shopping at the Pink Pussycat kept you busy just making it down the sidewalks.

  I sat at my desk inside a room empty except for ten billion words, and put my head back against the window and listened to the street humming as though everyone were reading aloud. Two kids in NYU sweatshirts walked in and hunted around the back stacks. I watched them grab and scarf comparative theology texts and science fiction, skimming and discussing content the way I usually did myself when I found somebody who cared. They spoke resolutely but with the absorbed manner of people in love. Enamored with each other, and with thought, and perhaps art. I could have spoken at length about C. S. Lewis and Henri Daniel-Rops, Spider Robinson, Alfred Bester, and Roger Zelazny. When they left I locked up and hailed a cab for the airport, carrying Teddy's books under my arm. I thought of the woman he kept sketching.

  Who was she?

  ~ * ~

  The hot breeze blowing across Lake Ontario felt like Santa Ana winds coming off a desert. In winter, the Lake Effect chill added a dozen feet of snow to the area, but in spring there were odd thermal drafts that swooped over the country and brought on stifling heat. I got off the plane already sweating, my mouth dry and thoughts full of Teddy's artwork, knowing I had to return to Panecraft.

  Crummler had been trying to warn me and give up answers, and some of the slippery pieces seemed to be sliding together, if only I could hold on to them long enough.

  I walked into the airport lobby to get a cab and spotted Theodore Harnes' white Mercedes limousine waiting at the curb.

  Jocelyn stood on the sidewalk, facing me resolutely, holding the car door open. Sunlight caught her at just the right angle to make the slant of her hair, cheeks, and chin shimmer. She wore a silver top and black sk
irt slit up the side, and a businessman spun and marched into a SkyCap. Every guy within eyeshot was walking with a staggered step and looking back over his shoulder at her. She motioned for me to get into the car.

  "Not even a please this time?" I asked.

  The dead gaze didn't waver. "Please allow us to drive you home."

  "No," I said. "I don't think so."

  She simply continued staring, those lips flattened with just the right sheen laid on by her tongue, glowing and faultless as though they'd never been kissed or chewed or touched with makeup, not even once turned into a pout. That face like nothing so much as cloth or canvas, smooth and maddeningly beautiful. Her flesh so perfect. I kept searching for a solitary crease in her skin, a mark of violence or lust over the years. Had she fled Hong Kong and been a virgin on the streets of Bangkok or Rangoon or Hanoi, sold into prostitution to the highest bidder? Those hands had never been used to sew or stamp in any of Harms' factories. Did he plan for her to be the mother of more of his children? Had she been mistress of the erotic arts, used to teach Teddy the finest points of pleasure?

  "Please," she repeated without inflection. "Allow us."

  "No. Thanks, anyway." I got a step closer, and another, and one more until we were nearly nose-to-nose. Even her nostrils were alluring. She scratched her thigh lightly along the slit of her skirt, but didn't even leave one of those fine, chalky lines on her skin. The draft from the limo's air conditioning blasted against my legs. I could make out the silhouette of Theodore Harnes in the far corner of the back seat, sitting rigidly with his hands laid across his knees.

  "Get into the limousine you annoying pissant fool," she told me.

  "Well," I said. "Since you asked nicely."

  I got in and she slipped in beside me. I held tightly to Teddy's art books but nobody noticed. Sparky's seat seemed entirely too empty, and I wondered if Harnes would find another malicious guard in Panecraft to act as a replacement in this entourage. The driver appeared even more spectral than before—starved perhaps, the poorly fitting black suit draping off his scrawny frame. He smelled worse, too, and there were scabs on his throat like he'd gone for exploratory surgery. I realized he must have cancer, and the chemo and radiation weren't delaying the inevitable.